“Schaeffer Sunday” Debating Kermit Gosnell Trial, Abortion and infanticide with Ark Times Bloggers Part 15 Murray Vasser: “Despite the efforts of Barack Obama and Planned Parenthood, abortion doctors are not supposed to kill babies outside of their mothers”

Francis Schaeffer
Francis Schaeffer.jpg

Founder of the L’Abri community
Born Francis August Schaeffer
January 30, 1912

Died May 15, 1984 (aged 72)

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 video below. It is very valuable information for Christians to have.  Actually I have included a video below that includes comments from him on this subject.

Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR

Dr. Francis Schaeffer: Whatever Happened to the Human Race Episode 1 ABORTION

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 – The Biblical Flow of Truth & History (part 2)

I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortionhuman rightswelfarepovertygun control  and issues dealing with popular culture . This time around I have discussed morality with the Ark Times Bloggers and particularly the trial of the abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell and through that we discuss infanticide, abortion and even partial birth abortion. Here are some of my favorite past posts on the subject of Gosnell: ,Abby Johnson comments on Dr. Gosnell’s guilty verdict, Does President Obama care about Kermit Gosnell verdict?,  Dr. Gosnell Trial mostly ignored by media,  Kermit Gosnell is guilty of same crimes of abortion clinics are says Jennifer Mason,  Denny Burk: Is Dr. Gosnell the usual case or not?Pro-life Groups thrilled with Kermit Gosnell guilty verdict,  Reactions to Dr. Gosnell guilty verdict from pro-life leaders,  Kermit Gosnell and Planned Parenthood supporting infanticide?, Owen Strachan on Dr. Gosnell Trial, Al Mohler on Kermit Gosnell’s abortion practice, Finally we get justice for Dr. Kermit Gosnell .

In July of 2013 I went back and forth with several bloggers from the Ark Times Blog concerning Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s abortion practice and his trial which had finished up in the middle of May:

Olphart asserted, “You, obviously, have an intense hatred for Obama, comparing him to slave traders and murderers.”

I personally have good relationships with some of the most liberal people in the USA. We enjoy each others’ company and have always respected each other. I don’t know of anyone that I hate. I would like to sit down and have a meal with you Olphart. You have always struck me as a very learned person and have made some of the best points I have read for the liberal view.

Now do I disagree with President Obama? Yes, and I disagreed with President Clinton when he came out in favor of partial birth abortion. I deeply respect Clinton for being wise enough to realize that in order to get things accomplished the last 6 years he had to meant Newt halfway. President Obama does not share that same view.

Let’s see if Obama can be linked to Dr. Gosnell’s views in any way.

Murray Vasser noted:

Now it is true that what Gosnell did was technically illegal in America. Despite the efforts of Barack Obama and Planned Parenthood, abortion doctors are not supposed to kill babies outside of their mothers. However, there is absolutely nothing illegal or unusual about decapitating babies or cutting off their hands and feet. Furthermore, while the nurses and doctors cannot usually hear them screaming, there is nothing unusual about babies writhing and struggling during these procedures.

http://murrayvasser.blogspot.com/2013/04/w…

A Twin Lives Through an Abortion – CBN.com

Uploaded on Jan 7, 2011

My name is Claire Culwell, and I am an abortion survivor…

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“Everyone needs to hear Claire’s story! Often times at pro-life events or banquets we can forget who is at stake in abortion. Claire’s passion reminds the audience that every life lost due to abortion cannot be taken back but every life saved from abortion is a profound witness of God’s hope and love for every human life. Having seen her speak multiple times, I know that Claire’s story captures an audience at a pregnancy center event like no other story because she is living proof of what we stand for, life!” –Shawn Carney, Co-founder 40 Days for Life, Host of Being Human on EWTN

Claire’s Story:

I found out I was affected by abortion about 3 years ago. This changed my life. I had walked into the Coalition For Life wondering what their organization provided and 5 months later I met my birth mother who told me my life is a miracle.

My birth mother was 13 years old at the time she became pregnant with me. Her mother took her straight to an abortion clinic where she had a surgical abortion. After thinking she had “fixed the problem,” a few weeks later she realized her belly was still growing. Her mother took her back to the abortion clinic where she learned that she had been pregnant with twins…One was aborted; One survived.

My life is a miracle and I would be selfish to keep this GIFT of life to myself. I want to tell everyone what a gift I and even they have been given!! I want to encourage them to seek alternatives to abortion because I would never want any woman/man to go through the grief and the pain that my birth mother went through simply because she didn’t know she had any other option. I also want to be a vessel to offer God’s forgiveness to the men and women who have previously had abortions. I know healing is possible and I have been given the gift of surviving an abortion so that I can tell these men and women that they are forgiven…coming from an aborted child, I hope they know the power of forgiveness and healing through meeting me. My involvement in Coalition For Life transformed me, taught me how to stand up for life on the front lines, and how to share my story in a meaningful way. I have the staff at Coalition For Life to thank for encouraging me to get involved and to share my story not only on the sidewalk but in public (my biggest fear) because God is glorified when I publically proclaim that “I am here not because of anything I did, but ONLY because of God’s mercy and love for me.”

My life is a testimony that there are wonderful alternatives to abortion (such as adoption in my case) and an accident/unwanted child still deserves life…even a child with disabilities. I was born 2 1/2 months early, weighed 3 lbs 2 oz, had dislocated hips and club feet. I had to wear casts on my feet, a harness and eventually a body cast. The abortion still affects me today. All that to say, LIFE IS STILL WORTH IT.If my life can touch just one person who has had an abortion or considering an abortion or adoption, then I am fulfilling my purpose in the pro-life movement.

I will not be silent because each mother and child are in the same place my biological mother, my twin and I were in 22 years ago and I am here to say THERE IS HOPE and there are options!

Traveling and sharing my story was not something that I had planned for myself, but God proved to have better plans for me than I had for myself. Sharing my story is as much of a gift to MYSELF as it is to others.

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Kermit Gosnell and the irony of the coat hanger back alley argument

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Evangelical Blogger Lists Eight Reasons the Media Are Ignoring the Gosnell Murder Trial

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FRIEDMAN FRIDAY Whining Harvard Professors Discover Obamacare 3225 JAN 5, 2015 4:29 PM EST By Megan McArdle

Milton Friedman on Medical Care (Full Lecture)

Published on Feb 2, 2014

I have written about Obamacare over and over again on this blog. Dan Mitchell has shared many funny cartoons about Obamacare too. Milton Friedman has spoken out about government healthcare many times in the past and his film series FREE TO CHOOSE is on You Tube and I encourage you to watch it. It is clear that the federal government debt is growing so much that it is endangering us because if things keep going like they are now we will not have any money left for the national defense because we are so far in debt as a nation.

We have been spending so much on our welfare state through food stamps and other programs that I am worrying that many of our citizens are becoming more dependent on government and in many cases they are losing their incentive to work hard because of the welfare trap the government has put in place. Other nations in Europe have gone down this road and we see what mess this has gotten them in. People really are losing their faith in big government and they want more liberty back. It seems to me we have to get back to the founding  principles that made our country great.  We also need to realize that a big government will encourage waste and corruption. Also raising taxes on the job creators is a very bad idea too. The Laffer Curve clearly demonstrates that when the tax rates are raised many individuals will move their investments to places where they will not get taxed as much.

In 1980 I read the book FREE TO CHOOSE by Milton Friedman and it really enlightened me a tremendous amount.  I suggest checking out these episodes and transcripts of Milton Friedman’s film series FREE TO CHOOSE: “The Failure of Socialism” and “The Anatomy of a Crisis” and “What is wrong with our schools?”  and “Created Equal”  and  From Cradle to Grave, and – Power of the Market.

“Deplorable, deeply regressive, a sign of the corporatization of the university.”  That’s what Harvard Classics professor Richard F. Thomas calls the changes in Harvard’s health plan, which have a large number of the faculty up in arms.

Are Harvard professors being forced onto Medicaid? Has their employer denied coverage for cancer treatment? Do they need to sign a corporate loyalty oath in order to access health insurance? Not exactly. But copayments are being raised and deductibles altered, making their plan … well, actually, their plan is still extraordinarily generous by any standard:

The university is adopting standard features of most employer-sponsored health plans: Employees will now pay deductibles and a share of the costs, known as coinsurance, for hospitalization, surgery and certain advanced diagnostic tests. The plan has an annual deductible of $250 per individual and $750 for a family. For a doctor’s office visit, the charge is $20. For most other services, patients will pay 10 percent of the cost until they reach the out-of-pocket limit of $1,500 for an individual and $4,500 for a family.

The deepest irony is, of course, that Harvard professors helped to design Obamacare. And Obamacare is the reason that these changes are probably necessary.

The culprit is the “Cadillac Tax,” the hefty excise tax on high-cost plans.  The purpose of that tax is to hold down health-care costs, by making it much more expensive for employers to offer the kind of gold-plated benefit plans that shield consumers from virtually all the costs of their health-care decisions.

The economic logic is impeccable. Milton Friedman famously divided spending into four kinds, which P.J. O’Rourke once summarized as follows:

1. You spend your money on yourself. You’re motivated to get the thing you want most at the best price. This is the way middle-aged men haggle with Porsche dealers.

2. You spend your money on other people. You still want a bargain, but you’re less interested in pleasing the recipient of your largesse. This is why children get underwear at Christmas.

3. You spend other people’s money on yourself. You get what you want but price no longer matters. The second wives who ride around with the middle-aged men in the Porsches do this kind of spending at Neiman Marcus.

4. You spend other people’s money on other people. And in this case, who gives a [damn]?

Most health-care spending in the U.S. falls into category three. In theory, the people who are funding our expenses–the proverbial middle-aged men in Porsches, except that they’re actually insurance executives and government bureaucrats–have every incentive to step in, cut up the charge cards, and substitute a gift-wrapped box of Hanes briefs with the comfort-soft waistband. In practice, legislators frequently intervene to stop them from exercising much cost-control. The managed care revolution of the 1990s died when patients complained to their representatives, and the representatives ran down to their offices to pass laws making it very hard to deny coverage for anything anyone wanted. Medicare cost-controls, such as the famed Sustainable Growth Rate, fell prey to similar maneuvers. The only system that exhibits sustained cost control is Medicaid, because poor people don’t vote, or exit the system for better insurance.

The result is a system where everyone complains that we spend much too much on health care–and the very same people get indignant if anyone suggests that they, personally, should maybe spend a little bit less.  Everyone wants to go to heaven–but nobody wants to die.

Unfortunately, this is what cost-control actually looks like, which is to say, like people not being able to spend as much on health care. Oh, to be sure, we could achieve this end differently–instead of asking patients to pay a modest share of their own costs (the article suggests that this amount is less than 10 percent, in the case of Harvard professors)–we could simply set a schedule of covered treatment, and deny patients access to off-schedule treatments, or even better, not even tell them that those treatments exist. But people don’t like that solution either, which is why medical dramas are filled with rants about insurers who won’t cover procedures, and the law books are filled with regulations that sharply curtail the ability of insurers to ration care. And the third option, refusing to pay top-dollar for care, would be a bit tricky for Harvard to implement, given that they run exactly the sort of high-cost research facilities that help drive health-care costs skyward. Nor do I really think that the angry professors would be mollified by being given a cheap insurance package that wouldn’t let them go see the top-flight specialists their elite status now entitles them to access.

Instead, they persist in our mass delusion: that there is some magic pot of money in the health-care system, which can be painlessly tapped to provide universal coverage without dislocating any of the generous arrangements that insured people currently enjoy. Just as there are no leprechauns, there is no free money at the end of the rainbow; there are patients demanding services, and health-care workers making comfortable livings, who have built their financial lives around the expectation that those incomes will continue. Until we shed this delusion, you can expect a lot of ranting and raving about the hard truths of the real world.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg View’s editorial board or Bloomberg LP, its owners and investors.

To contact the author on this story:
Megan McArdle at mmcardle3@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor on this story:
James Gibney at jgibney5@bloomberg.net

_____________________

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5 myths that conceal reality by Milton Friedman

A great speech below: Here are the myths:Robber Baron Myth, The Cause of Great Depression Myth, The Demand for Government Service Myth, The Free Lunch Smith, and The Robin Hood Myth. 1) the Robber Baron Myth, 2) the Great Depression Myth, 3) the Demand for Government Service Myth, 4) the Free Lunch Myth, and 5) […]

FRIEDMAN FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 4, 2006 An Interview with Milton Friedman

_______________ FEATURED ARTICLE | SEPTEMBER 4, 2006 An Interview with Milton Friedman Milton Friedman* I recently sat down with Milton Friedman, a few days before his 94th birthday, to discuss the impact of two of his most important contributions to economics and liberty: A Monetary History of the United States, 1870-1960 [co-written] with Anna Schwartz, […]

FRIEDMAN FRIDAY The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits by Milton Friedman The New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970.

Milton Friedman on Self-Interest and the Profit Motive 1of2 Milton Friedman on Self-Interest and the Profit Motive 2of2 The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits by Milton FriedmanThe New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970. Copyright @ 1970 by The New York Times Company. When I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the […]

FRIEDMAN FRIDAY Levin on Milton Friedman: ‘One Thing to Have Free Immigration to Jobs, Another for Welfare’ By Michael Morris | January 16, 2015

____________ Levin on Milton Friedman: ‘One Thing to Have Free Immigration to Jobs, Another for Welfare’ By Michael Morris | January 16, 2015 | 5:12 PM EST During his show on January 15, 2015, Nationally syndicated radio host Mark Levin recalled the famed economist Milton Friedman and explored an important reason why open immigration, despite […]

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 89 THE BEATLES, Breaking down the song “BLACKBIRD” Part B (Featured Photographer is Jürgen Vollmer)

Since racial tensions were extremely high in the 1960’s I am adding a part two to my last post. I grew up in Memphis and was a resident when MLK Jr. was unfortunately assassinated. Just two months later Paul McCartney wrote the song BLACKBIRD because of this assassination. Francis Schaeffer also spoke out strongly against racial segregation.

Francis Schaeffer: The Man and His Message
Jerram Barrs 

Professor of Christian Studies and Contemporary Culture and
Resident Scholar of the Francis A. Schaeffer Institute 

Introduction 

Francis Schaeffer never presented himself as an academic apologist, as a philosopher, as a theologian, or as a scholar. Instead, he spoke of himself as an evangelist and a pastor, and this truly is how he thought about the ministry that God had graciously given him.

Racial Equality 

This sense of the unique dignity of all human persons also filled Schaeffer with a deep passion for racial equality and reconciliation, both in his own personal life and in his teaching. We can readily see this in examples from his college days when, as a very young believer, he would walk across the fields from the college to teach a class of African-American children each Sunday afternoon; and when he regularly visited the African-American janitor from the college when he became ill—Schaeffer would go to the man’s home to read the Scriptures and to pray with him.

This valuing of all men and women showed too in the way people of all races were welcomed to the Schaeffers’ home at L’Abri in Switzerland. He was happy to take the wedding service of Interracial couples, despite, in the case of two special friends of ours, the anger of the white parents (a minister in Britain and his wife) at Schaeffer’s “aiding and abetting marriage between blacks and whites.” I well remember how disturbed some white Christians were by his words in Whatever Happened to the Human Race?—at his speaking with such passion about the injustice and wickedness of slavery and the slave trade. These views on race may have seemed, particularly at that time, unusual for someone of Schaeffer’s strongly conservative views about the Bible and about moral and social issues. But he never felt constrained by a “system,” whether it was some particular detail of a theological system that seemed imposed on Scripture rather than drawn from it,15 or a political system of thought that had undermined evangelical concern for those who were discriminated against or downtrodden.

Human Life 

This approach of always going back to biblical foundations enabled Schaeffer to have the freedom to think about subjects that were not normally matters of discussion or concern among evangelical Christians. This is true with regard to human life issues. He began to address the problems of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia long before most other evangelicals. The reason for this was his deep sense that human persons are made in the image of God and are therefore to be treasured by us.

Just two years before his death, Schaeffer said in a lecture entitled “Priorities”: “We must understand that human life stands at a unique place. Human life stands at a crucial place because there is an unbreakable link between the existence of the infinite personal God and the unique dignity, intrinsic dignity of people. If God does not exist and he has not made people in his own image, there is no basis for an intrinsic, unique dignity of human life.”13 For Schaeffer, his conviction that Scripture teaches that we are God’s image-bearers continually fed his passion to help alienated young people see that they had dignity and value, and also challenged him to speak up for the unborn, for the newborn, for the handicapped, and for the elderly.

© 2006 Jerram Barrs. This article originally appeared in the November 2006 edition of Reformation 21: The Online Magazine of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. It is used by permission. For more information or permission to reprint, contact covenantseminary@covenantseminary.edu. 

The Seminary of the Presbyterian Church in America 

12330 Conway Road, Saint Louis, MO 63141 

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The Beatles – In my Life

Published on Feb 25, 2011

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Here Comes The Sun – The Beatles Tribute

Not sung by George but good nonetheless!!

Francis Schaeffer’s favorite album was SGT. PEPPER”S and he said of the album “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.”  (at the 14 minute point in episode 7 of HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? ) 

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How Should We Then Live – Episode Seven – 07 – Portuguese Subtitles

Francis Schaeffer

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The Beatles – Revolution

Published on Oct 20, 2015

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The Beatles – Blackbird (official video)

Lyrics-
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise

Black bird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
all your life
you were only waiting for this moment to be free

Blackbird fly, Blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.

Blackbird fly, Blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise,
You were only waiting for this moment to arise,
You were only waiting for this moment to arise

THE SCHAEFFER LEGACY PROJECT – INTERVEW WITH SYLVESTER JACOBS

L’Abri 1974 (England) – Sylvester & Simone Jacobs

THE GOOD SOCIETY AND THE MORAL LAW

Rating: 5.00

I’m Eric Metaxas. Today on BreakPoint we re-present Chuck Colson’s commentary on Martin Luther King Day and Dr. King’s dramatic defense of the moral law.

Chuck Colson

More than forty years ago, on August 28, 1963, a quarter million people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial. They marched here for the cause of civil rights. And that day they heard Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, a speech in which he challenged America to fulfill her promise.

“I have a dream,” he said, “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.’ ”

While we know of the speech, most people are unaware that King also penned one of the most eloquent defenses of the moral law: the law that formed the basis for his speech, for the civil rights movement, and for all of the law, for that matter.

In the spring of 1963, King was arrested for leading a series of massive non-violent protests against the segregated lunch counters and discriminatory hiring practices rampant in Birmingham, Alabama. While in jail, King received a letter from eight Alabama ministers. They agreed with his goals, but they thought that he should call off the demonstrations and obey the law.

King explained why he disagreed in his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail. “One might well ask,” he wrote, “how can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer “is found in the fact that there are two kinds of laws: just laws … and unjust laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws,” King said, “but conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobeyunjust laws.”

How does one determine whether the law is just or unjust? A just law, King wrote, “squares with the moral law of the law of God. An unjust law … is out of harmony with the moral law.”

Then King quoted Saint Augustine: “An unjust law is no law at all.” He quoted Thomas Aquinas: “An unjust law is a human law not rooted in eternal or natural law.”

This is the great issue today in the public square: Is the law rooted in truth? Is it transcendent, immutable, and morally binding? Or is it, as liberal interpreters argue, simply whatever courts say it is? Do we discover the law, or do we create it?

Many think of King as a liberal firebrand, waging war on traditional values. Nothing could be further from the truth. King was a great conservative on this central issue, and he stood on the shoulders of Augustine and Aquinas, striving to restore our heritage of justice rooted in the law of God.

Were he alive today, I believe he’d be in the vanguard of the pro-life movement. I also believe that he would be horrified at the way in which out of control courts have trampled down the moral truths he advocated.

From the time of Emperor Nero, who declared Christianity illegal, to the days of the American slave trade, from the civil rights struggle of the sixties to our current battles against abortion, euthanasia, cloning, and same-sex “marriage,” Christians have always maintained exactly what King maintained.

King’s dream was to live in harmony with the moral law as God established it. So this Martin Luther King Day, reflect on that dream—for it is worthy of our aspirations, our hard work, and the same commitment Dr. King showed.

The original commentary first aired on August 28, 2003.

How Christians Ended Slavery

Dinesh D’Souza | Jan 14, 2008

Isn’t it remarkable that atheists, who did virtually nothing to oppose slavery, condemn Christians, who are the ones who abolished it?

Consider atheist Sam Harris, who blames Christianity for supporting slavery. Harris is right that slavery existed among the Old Testament Jews, and Paul even instructs slaves to obey their masters. During the civil war both sides quoted the Bible. We know all this. (Yawn, yawn.)

But slavery pre-dated Christianity by centuries and even millennia. As we read from sociologist Orlando Patterson’s work, all known cultures had slavery. For centuries, slavery needed no defenders because it had no critics. Atheists who champion ancient Greece and pre-Christian Rome somehow seem to forget that those empires were based on large-scale enslavement.

Atheist Michael Shermer says Christians are “late comers” to the movement against slavery. Shermer advanced this argument in our Cal Tech debate in December. That debate is now online, and you can watch it at michaelshermer.com.

But if what Shermer says is true, who were the early opponents of slavery who got there before the Christians did? Actually, there weren’t any. Shermer probably thinks the Christians only got around to opposing slavery in the modern era.

Wrong. Slavery was mostly eradicated from Western civilization–then called Christendom–between the fourth and the tenth century. The Greco-Roman institution of slavery gave way to serfdom. Now serfdom has its problems but at least the serf is not a “human tool” and cannot be bought and sold like property. So slavery was ended twice in Western civilization, first in the medieval era and then again in the modern era.

In the American South, Christianity proved to be the solace of the oppressed. As historian Eugene Genovese documents in Roll, Jordan, Roll, when black slaves sought to find dignity during the dark night of slavery, they didn’t turn to Marcus Aurelius or David Hume; they turned to the Bible. When they sought hope and inspiration for liberation, they found it not in Voltaire or D’Holbach but in the Book of Exodus.

The anti-slavery movements led by Wilberforce in England and abolitionists in America were dominated by Christians. These believers reasoned that since we are all created equal in the eyes of God, no one has the right to rule another without consent. This is the moral basis not only of anti-slavery but also of democracy.

Jefferson was in some ways the least orthodox and the most skeptical of the founders. Yet when he condemned slavery he found himself using biblical language. In Notes on the State of Virginia Jefferson warned that those who would enslave people should reflect that “the Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.” Jefferson famously added, “And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that His justice cannot sleep for ever.”

But wasn’t Jefferson also a man of science? Yes he was, and it was on the basis of the latest science of his day that Jefferson expressed his convictions about black inferiority. Citing the discoveries of modern science, Jefferson noted that “there are varieties in the race of man, distinguished by their powers both of body and of mind…as I see to be the case with races of other animals.” Blacks, Jefferson continued, lack the powers of reason that are evident in whites and even in native Indians. While atheists today like to portray themselves as paragons of equal dignity, Jefferson’s scientific and skeptical outlook contributed not to his anti-slavery sentiments but to his racism. Somehow Harris and Shermer neglect to point this out.

In the end the fact remains that the only movements that opposed slavery in principle were mobilized in the West, and they were overwhelmingly led and populated by Christians. Sadly the West had to use force to stop slavery in other cultures, such as the Muslim slave trade off the coast of Africa. In some quarters the campaign to eradicate slavery still goes on.

So who killed slavery? The Christians did, while everyone else generally stood by and watched.

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The Inspirations Behind “I Have a Dream”

Aerial view of the 1963 March on Washington, looking north from the Washington Monument. (Martin S. Trikosko/Library …

On Aug. 28, 1963, a quarter of a million people peaceably gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Attendant celebrities lent their Hollywood credentials. The media coverage was international. More than 22,000 police officers, guards, soldiers, and paratroopers were placed on alert.

Yet all this has been submerged into the backdrop to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words in “I Have a Dream.” The speech was an afterthought, one that King crafted in the final hours before the momentous convocation, working its rhythms like a poem. It is one of the finest speeches delivered on American soil — the distillation of Old Testament wisdom, Shakespearean drama, the Founding Fathers’ vision, and King’s own sermons and his emergent understanding of what it meant to be free, equal, and American.

With the help of Stanford University’s King Papers Project, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, and “Voice of Deliverance” author Keith Miller, the following is an examination of key passages in “I Have a Dream” and a look at the historic origins that shaped them.

The “greatest demonstration in history

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom still ranks as the largest civil rights assembly in the country’s history. Before then, America’s largest demonstration had been in 1925, when an estimated 35,000 Ku Klux Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. King’s powerful oration was the “first of its kind” broadcast live on all three networks and around the world via the Telstar satellite.

“Five score years ago”: Abraham Lincoln and Psalms

King noted the Emancipation Proclamation’s centennial but referenced the first line — and its ideals — from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: “Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” King linked democratic values to biblical imagery of hellfires and then salvation, notably Psalms 30:5: “For his anger is but for a moment; his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.”

The “chains of discrimination”: Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, John Donne, and Exodus

This passage packs in several key literary influences. Abolitionists long evoked the images of chains to depict slavery’s dehumanizing nature. Frederick Douglass did so in his oft-repeated historic speech “The Meaning of of July Fourth for the Negro.” King’s link to Douglass is even more fundamental, points out Arizona State University English professor Keith Miller, author of “Voices of Deliverance.” Douglass “basically uses the Bible and the Declaration of Independence to indict slavery.” Other speakers who linked the Bible with America’s founding documents included journalist and suffragist Ida B. Wells, who also alluded to the lyrics of the patriotic song “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” (“America”).

King, who wrote of the “paralyzing chains of conformity” in his pivotal “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” also referred to “twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty” in that letter. In this speech, though, the single man on the “lonely island of poverty” harks back to John Donne’s renowned poem, “No Man Is An Island.”

The notion of the exile points to Exodus — when the Jews lived in exile — and an allegory that King evokes throughout “I Have a Dream.”

To “cash a check”: The Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and Clarence B. Jones

Besides the two documents that laid out America’s foundation, this passage includes a more contemporary metaphor about check-cashing and a promissory note. This decidedly mundane metaphor was suggested by his counsel and speechwriter, Clarence B. Jones. The religious link, however, reinforces the principles of equality not just as a contract but, as many scholars point out, as a covenant — a moral right, as much as a civil one.

The “Negro’s legitimate discontent”: Shakespeare, Gospel, and blunt words

“Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York.” The homage to William Shakespeare’s play “Richard III” is clear. Scholars have dug for more comparisons — the troubled relationship between brothers Richard and Edward is echoed in the troubled relationships between black and white brothers.

In the midst of Shakespearean allusions and Gospel-tinged language (“whirlwinds of revolt”), King plunks a cliché-laden sentence smack in the middle (“blow off steam,” “rude awakening,” “business as usual”). It’s as though he has stepped off the trail to the mountaintop for a moment for some blunt talk.

“[U]ntil justice rolls down like water”: Old Testament prophets

The audience of 1963 would have been far more versed in the Bible then today’s secular audiences.  The next few passages dip heavily into the Old Testament, from Jeremiah to Amos. King’s talk about suffering finally gets to a New Testament reference, one he touched on his 1959 sermon “Unfulfilled Hopes” on the Apostle Paul. And in his repeated urgings to “go back” lay the sorrowful hope of Exodus — the dream of home.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident”: Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson wrote those key words in the Declaration of Independence, which King cited here. Of course, Jefferson was an active slave owner. But here, King is following the precedent that Abraham Lincoln established with the Gettysburg Address: He extended the Declaration and transformed it into an accountability doctrine to amend the Constitution.

The Constitution permitted slavery and the slave trade. There’s nothing explicit about privacy, sexual orientation, nor racial equality. The Constitution even rewarded the South’s political power by counting slaves as a fraction of one person, which greased census numbers.

“[It] had no legal power as a source to justify the moral imperative of blocking the expansion of slavery, and later, for emancipation,” said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.

“I have a dream”: Sermon on the Mount and the Declaration of Independence

King told an interviewer that he ad-libbed the speech’s most famous repetition.

“I started out reading the speech, and I read it down to a point…the audience response was wonderful that day … And all of a sudden this thing came to me that … I’d used many times before … ‘I have a dream.’ And I just felt that I wanted to use it here … I used it, and at that point I just turned aside from the manuscript altogether. I didn’t come back to it.”

Of course, by the time King turned away from his scripted speech, he had spoken about this dream many times before. History professor Clayborne Carson, who oversees Stanford’s collection of King’s papers, said the phrase riffs on the song “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” (“America”), a device that other speakers (see above) used, as did King’s family friend Archibald Carey. The Chicago lawyer, minister, and diplomat also referenced the lyrics while speaking in support of Dwight Eisenhower at the 1952 Republican Convention.

It is the emphasis on basic and universal appeals that makes the speech so memorable. Historians say that had King spoken of specifics — the March on Washington had been a rally for jobs and freedom, focusing on wages, among other issues — historical memory would be different.

“It’s about a direction, but it doesn’t have the same specific bite that some of his other speeches have, which makes it a lot more acceptable for a lot of people who don’t want to do anything specific or feel like we’ve already done it,” Orfield said.

The “dream” moves the speech’s movement from fiery Old Testament prophets to the New Testament. Its repetition echoes the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus instructs his followers: Blessed are those who hunger and search after justice; blessed are those who suffer persecution for justice’s sake for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Let freedom ring”: Samuel Francis Smith’s “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” (“America”)

These words have their origins in Samuel Francis Smith’s “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”

Freedom is “probably the most fundamental American value,” Orfield said. “Even as the opponents of civil rights were fighting for ‘freedom’ from government, King wanted Americans to understand that government had to act and that civil rights law and the social and cultural changes that would come with it would bring a great expansion of freedom.”

King’s geographic references, such as the mention of Stone Mountain in Georgia, were intended to take topological high ground away from resurgent antagonists, such as the KKK.

“Free at last, free at last:” Negro spirituals and the Book of Exodus

Some of King’s thinking can be traced back to the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament. King sometimes began his Sunday sermons reading from the book. Listeners recognized the symbolism in Pharaoh, hardship going through Egypt, and the arrival at the Promised Land.

“It’s very congruent with King’s speeches,” he said. “When you were listening to Dr. King, you would hear about how we were making the path to freedom and we’re going to take down the walls of Jericho. All of this had an incredibly powerful resonance in the black churches where he was organizing people, where it was in their hearts and their souls and it became redemptive politically.”

King’s speech had a powerful inflection point at its end. After his martyrdom, King became associated with street names, public schools and more widespread honors. Lost amid the celebrations, Orfield said, was the recognition, which King held, that the work is never finished.

“The arc [of history] doesn’t bend automatically toward justice,” he said. “Plessy v. Ferguson was the law of the land for 60 years. It took a long struggle to get to Brown v. Board of Education. Every generation has to win its own rights. Anyone who thinks it ends with a big speech 50 years ago is saying something Dr. King would’ve never believed for a second.”

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September 19, 2011

By Elvis Costello

My absolute favorite albums are Rubber Soul and Revolver. On both records you can hear references to other music — R&B, Dylan, psychedelia — but it’s not done in a way that is obvious or dates the records. When you picked up Revolver, you knew it was something different. Heck, they are wearing sunglasses indoors in the picture on the back of the cover and not even looking at the camera . . . and the music was so strange and yet so vivid. If I had to pick a favorite song from those albums, it would be “And Your Bird Can Sing” . . . no, “Girl” . . . no, “For No One” . . . and so on, and so on. . . .

Their breakup album, Let It Be, contains songs both gorgeous and jagged. I suppose ambition and human frailty creeps into every group, but they delivered some incredible performances. I remember going to Leicester Square and seeing the film of Let It Be in 1970. I left with a melancholy feeling.

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‘Day Tripper’

the beatles 100 greatest songs
SSPL/Getty Images

Main Writer: Lennon
Recorded: October 16, 1965
Released: December 6, 1965
10 weeks; no. 5

“Day Tripper” was “a drug song,” Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970. “I’ve always needed a drug to survive. The [other Beatles], too, but I always had more, I always took more pills and more of everything, ’cause I’m more crazy.”

The song was Lennon’s indictment of poseurs. “Day trippers are people who go on a day trip, right? Usually on a ferryboat or something,” he said. “But [the song] was kind of ‘you’re just a weekend hippie.'” In contrast, “We saw ourselves as full-time trippers,” McCartney said, “fully committed drivers.”

The in-jokes didn’t stop with that bit of wordplay. The Beatles put in “references that we knew our friends would get but that the Great British Public might not,” McCartney said. “So ‘she’s a big teaser’ was ‘she’s a prick teaser.’ . . . We thought that’d be fun to put in.”

Lennon and McCartney conceded that “Day Tripper” had been a “forced” song, written on deadline for a scheduled December single. While Lennon’s blues-based guitar hook may have been his answer to the Rolling Stones’ recent Number One hit, “Satisfaction,” “Day Tripper” was more complex, a gleaming combination of muscle and intricate arranging.

Lennon’s riff builds to a midsong rave-up that climaxes with soaring harmonies and Harrison climbing a scale behind Lennon’s solo, until Starr’s tambourine roll brings back the original groove. Lennon’s half sister, Julia Baird, was perplexed by the complicated nature of the song when she attended the recording session. “It seemed like bits and pieces were being put together,” she said. “I can’t understand how they got the final version.”

“Day Tripper” was planned as a single, but just a few days later, the Beatles recorded “We Can Work It Out,” which was generally thought to be a more commercial song. Lennon objected to losing the spot, though, so the two songs were marketed as the first-ever double-A-side single.

Though “We Can Work It Out” charted higher, “Day Tripper” was the more popular live number. The Beatles played it every night on their final concert tour, up to the last show, at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park on August 29th, 1966.

Appears On: Past Masters

The Beatles – Blackbird (official video)

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‘Blackbird’

the beatles 100 greatest songs
Jan Persson/Redferns

Main Writer: McCartney
Recorded: June 11, 1968
Released: November 25, 1968
Not released as a single

“Blackbird” was really about the struggle over civil rights: “I had in mind a black woman, rather than a bird,” McCartney said. “Those were the days of the civil rights movement, which all of us cared passionately about, so this was really a song from me to a black woman, experiencing these problems in the States: ‘Let me encourage you to keep trying, to keep your faith, there is hope.'”

In one sense, the song was an oblique response to Lennon’s “Revolution,” the other big political song on the White Album. “As is often the case with my things, a veiling took place,” said McCartney, “so, rather than say, ‘Black woman living in Little Rock,’ and be very specific, she became a bird, became symbolic.”

McCartney recorded “Blackbird” on his own. Harrison and Starr were in California (where Harrison was being filmed for Ravi Shankar’s movie Raga), and Lennon was in a different studio working on “Revolution 9.” McCartney has said that the fingerpicked guitar lines of “Blackbird,” written at his Scotland farm soon after he returned from India, were loosely based on Bach’s “Bourrée in E minor,” which he and Harrison used to practice in their early years. The blackbird heard on the track was from a sound-effects collection. “He did a very good job, I thought,” McCartney joked. “He sings very well on that.”

After he’d run through the song a number of times, McCartney told engineer Geoff Emerick that he wanted the song to sound as if he were singing it outdoors. “Fine,” Emerick said, “then let’s do it outdoors” — and they relocated to tape “Blackbird” outside Abbey Road Studios’ echo chamber.

McCartney gave the first semipublic performance of “Blackbird” to a group of fans outside his Cavendish Avenue home. “Paul opened the window and called out to us, ‘Are you still down there?'” one of them recalled. “Then he sat on the windowsill with his acoustic guitar and sang ‘Blackbird’ to us, standing down there in the dark.”

Appears On:The Beatles

 

Featured Photographer is  Jürgen Vollmer

 

October 15, 2011 by The Belated Nerd

It was fifty years ago today, Jürgen Vollmer taught the band how to do their hair.

The traditional story has it that former Beatle bassist Stu Sutcliffe (living in Germany) was the first to wear the mop-top style haircut  thanks to the barbering skills of his artist-girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr. The myth continues that while performing in Hamburg, Stu’s look was copied by George Harrison and soon after by John Lennon and Paul McCartney (Drummer Pete Best kept his D.A .)  The problem with this story is that when the Beatles returned to Liverpool from Germany in July 1961, they all still sported  “duck-arse” haircuts.

The true story was confirmed by both John and Paul in the Sixties and since then has been mostly ignored. In late September and early October, John and Paul decided to celebrate John’s 21st birthday by hitchhiking to Spain. They only made it as far as Paris where they met up with a friend from their frequent sojourns in Hamburg, Jürgen Vollmer (top-left with Paul McCartney). By this time Vollmer had been wearing the style for years since he apparently stumbled upon the look after going swimming.  During a visit to Vollmer’s Left Bank hotel room, the two Beatles convinced him to cut their hair in a similar fashion.  Vollmer wrote that after the haircuts, the trio visited a Paris flea market where John and Paul were tempted to abandon their old look completely for the mod French style of attire (collarless jackets, bell bottoms, etc.) . The two eventually decided that the haircut was about as much novelty as their home town of Liverpool and their rapidly expanding fan base was ready for. On their return to Liverpool they stopped off in London where they bought some Chelsea boots, which were later to become fashionable as ‘Beatle boots.’ During the trip, John and Paul also tried to incorporate bowler hats into their new look but abandoned them before returning to Liverpool.

Vollmer took several photographs of the two during their stay in Paris:

When they saw their bandmates’ new look, George was quick to adopt the hairstyle and, always the outsider, Pete Best kept his old haircut. The three haircuts grew a little longer until Brian Epstein took over management of the group near the end of the year and arranged for the Beatles to have their hair cut by a salon called Horne Brothers in Liverpool where the mop-top look was finally standardized. Pete Best insisted that his hair continue to be cut in a DA. When Pete Best was fired the following year, Ringo Starr dutifully showed up for his first day of work properly coiffed.

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Jürgen Vollmer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jürgen Vollmer, with Astrid Kirchherr and Klaus Voormann (the “Exis“), befriended the Beatles during the band’s time in Hamburg in the early 1960s. The son of a professional army officer who died during World War II, Vollmer attended Hamburg’s Institute of Fashion at the time he met the Beatles, who at the time included drummer Pete Best and bassist Stu Sutcliffe. Vollmer quickly became one of the group’s photographers, and was responsible for some of their most iconic images in their leather-clad days prior to Brian Epstein. John Lennon was particularly impressed with Vollmer’s photos, and used one of his favourites on the cover of his 1975 album Rock ‘n’ Roll. During the time Vollmer lived in the US, he worked as a set photographer in several Hollywood film productions.

External links[edit]

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Image result for sergent peppers album cover

Francis Schaeffer’s favorite album was SGT. PEPPER”S and he said of the album “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.”  (at the 14 minute point in episode 7 of HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? ) 

Image result for francis schaeffer how should we then live

How Should We Then Live – Episode Seven – 07 – Portuguese Subtitles

Francis Schaeffer

Image result for francis schaeffer

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FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE PART 202 the BEATLES’ last song FREE AS A BIRD (Featured artist is Susan Weil )

February 15, 2018 – 1:45 am

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 200 George Harrison song HERE ME LORD (Featured artist is Karl Schmidt-Rottluff )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE PART 184 the BEATLES’ song REAL LOVE (Featured artist is David Hammonds )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 170 George Harrison and his song MY SWEET LORD (Featured artist is Bruce Herman )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 168 George Harrison’s song AWAITING ON YOU ALL Part B (Featured artist is Michelle Mackey )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 167 George Harrison’s song AWAITING ON YOU Part A (Artist featured is Paul Martin)

RESPONDING TO HARRY KROTO’S BRILLIANT RENOWNED ACADEMICS!! Part 133 Louise Antony is UMass, Phil Dept, “Atheists if they commit themselves to justice, peace and the relief of suffering can only be doing so out of love for the good. Atheist have the opportunity to practice perfect piety”

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 166 George Harrison’s song ART OF DYING (Featured artist is Joel Sheesley )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 165 George Harrison’s view that many roads lead to Heaven (Featured artist is Tim Lowly)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 164 THE BEATLES Edgar Allan Poe (Featured artist is Christopher Wool)

PART 163 BEATLES Breaking down the song LONG AND WINDING ROAD (Featured artist is Charles Lutyens )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE PART 162 A look at the BEATLES Breaking down the song ALL WE NEED IS LOVE Part C (Featured artist is Grace Slick)

PART 161 A look at the BEATLES Breaking down the song ALL WE NEED IS LOVE Part B (Featured artist is Francis Hoyland )

 

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE PART 160 A look at the BEATLES Breaking down the song ALL WE NEED IS LOVE Part A (Featured artist is Shirazeh Houshiary)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 159 BEATLES, Soccer player Albert Stubbins made it on SGT. PEP’S because he was sport hero (Artist featured is Richard Land)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 158 THE BEATLES (breaking down the song WHY DON’T WE DO IT IN THE ROAD?) Photographer Bob Gomel featured today!

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 118 THE BEATLES (Why was Tony Curtis on cover of SGT PEP?) (Feature on artist Jeffrey Gibson )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 117 THE BEATLES, Breaking down the song WITHIN YOU WITHOUT YOU Part B (Featured artist is Emma Amos )

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Milton Friedman on the Energy Crisis (and ObamaCare to come) By Robert Bradley Jr. — July 31, 2013

Milton Friedman – Health Care Reform (1992) pt 1/4

Milton Friedman – Health Care Reform (1992) pt 2/4

Milton Friedman on the Energy Crisis (and ObamaCare to come)

By Robert Bradley Jr. — July 31, 2013

July 31st is the birth date of one of the great intellectuals of the freedom philosophy. Milton Friedman (1912–2006) would have been 101 today.

Friedman Legacy Day is being celebrated at 144 events: 90 in 44 states and Washington,D.C., and 54 events in 25 countries abroad. Here in Houston, a “Milton Friedman Rocks” party is tonight.

Friedman was more than a technical economist and early Nobel Laureate in this field; he was a popularizer of the case for free markets. His shorter tracts and biweekly column for Newsweek covered a variety of in-the-news issues, including energy. And he became more libertarian and appreciative of Austrian School economics (market-process economics), the rival to his Chicago School of economics, as time went on.

Friedman’s insight into the distortions from government intervention shortages are timeless. Consider this from Milton and Rose Friedmans’ classic, Free to Choose (1979: p. 219):

Economists may not know much. But we know one thing very well: how to produce surpluses and shortages. Do you want a surplus? Have the government legislate a minimum price that is above the price that would otherwise prevail…. Do you want a shortage? Have the government legislate a maximum price that is below the price that would otherwise prevail.

Still the major example of our time is the 1970s energy crisis in the United States–the result of price and allocation controls by the Department of Energy. But get ready for a new chamber of economic horrors.

With ObamaCare’s use of price and allocation controls–and the growing problem of Medicare today–shortages and strife are upon us in the all-important health care field. The Wall Street Journal article, More Doctors Steer Clear of Medicare, said as much this week:

Fewer American doctors are treating patients enrolled in the Medicare health program for seniors, reflecting frustration with its payment rates and pushback against mounting rules, according to health experts…. [T[he number [of doctors] who don’t participate in private insurance contracts, while smaller, is growing—just as millions of Americans are poised to gain access to such coverage under the new health law next year.

All said, health experts say the number of doctors going “off grid” isn’t enough to undermine the Affordable Care Act, but they say some Americans may have difficulty finding doctors who will take their new benefits or face long waits for appointments with those who do.

Rationing by time and inconvenience instead of dollars–just like those old gasoline lines! Anger, arguments, violence, waste, gaming–it will happen in waiting rooms just as it happened in the car queues.

Here is Friedman on the 1970s energy crisis:

“It is a mark of how far we have gone on the road to serfdom that government allocation and rationing of oil is the automatic response to the oil crisis.”

– Milton Friedman, “Why Some Prices Should Rise,” Newsweek, November 19, 1973.

“The present oil crisis has not been produced by the oil companies. It is a result of government mismanagement exacerbated by the Mideast war.”

– Milton Friedman, “Why Some Prices Should Rise,” Newsweek, November 19, 1973.

“Lines are forming at those gas stations that are open. The exasperated motorists are cursing; the service-station attendants are fuming; the politicians are promising. The one thing few people seem to be doing is thinking….

How can thinking people believe that a government that cannot deliver the mail can deliver gas better than Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Gulf, and the rest?”

– Milton Friedman, “FEO and the Gas Lines,” Newsweek, Marc 4, 1974.

“The long gasoline lines that suddenly emerged in 1974 after the OPEC oil embargo … and again in the spring and summer of 1979 after the revolution in Iran, [came after] a sharp disturbance in the supply of crude oil from abroad.

But that did not lead to gasoline lines in Germany or Japan, which are wholly dependent on imported oil. It lead to long gasoline lines in the United States, even though … for one reason and one reason only: because legislation, administered by a government agency, did not permit the price system to function.”

– Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 14.

“There is one simple way to end the energy crisis and gasoline shortages tomorrow—and we mean tomorrow and not six months from now, nor six years from now. Eliminate all controls on the prices of crude oil and other petroleum products.”

– Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), pp. 219.

“There has been an energy crisis because government created one. Of course, government has not done so deliberately. Presidents Nixon, Ford, or Carter never sent a message to Congress asking it to legislate an energy crisis and long gasoline lines. But he who says A must say B. Ever since President Nixon froze wages and prices on August 15, 1971, the government has imposed maximum prices on crude oil, gasoline at retail, and other petroleum products.”

– Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), pp. 219.

Appendix: Nixon’s Price Control Order (August 1971)

Richard Nixon is the father of the energy crisis–and the resulting politicization of energy. His price control order of August 15, 1971, one of the more infamous and devastating economic interventions in American peacetime history, caused oil shortages before the Arab Embargo of October 1973.

Here is what Milton Friedman said in ‘real time’ on Nixon’s surprise decision.

“I regret exceedingly that he decided to impose a ninety-day freeze on prices and wages. That is one of those ‘very plausible schemes … with very pleasing commencements, [that] have often shameful and lamentable conclusions’.”

– Milton Friedman, “Why the Freeze is a Mistake,” Newsweek, August 30, 1971.

“Individual price and wage changes will not be prevented. In the main, price changes will simply be concealed by taking the form of changes in discounts, service, and quality, and wage changes, in overtime, perquisites and so on…. But to whatever extent the freeze is enforced, it will do harm by distorting relative prices.”

– Milton Friedman, “Why the Freeze is a Mistake,” Newsweek, August 30, 1971

“By encouraging men to spy and report on one another, by making it in the private interest of large numbers of citizens to evade the controls, and by making actions illegal that are in the public interest, the controls undermine individual morality.”

– Milton Friedman, “Morality and Controls,” Newsweek, October 28, 1971.

Milton Friedman – Health Care Reform (1992) pt 3/4

Milton Friedman – Health Care Reform (1992) pt 4/4

Milton Friedman on Medical Care (Full Lecture)

Published on Feb 2, 2014

I have written about Obamacare over and over again on this blog. Dan Mitchell has shared many funny cartoons about Obamacare too. Milton Friedman has spoken out about government healthcare many times in the past and his film series FREE TO CHOOSE is on You Tube and I encourage you to watch it. It is clear that the federal government debt is growing so much that it is endangering us because if things keep going like they are now we will not have any money left for the national defense because we are so far in debt as a nation.

We have been spending so much on our welfare state through food stamps and other programs that I am worrying that many of our citizens are becoming more dependent on government and in many cases they are losing their incentive to work hard because of the welfare trap the government has put in place. Other nations in Europe have gone down this road and we see what mess this has gotten them in. People really are losing their faith in big government and they want more liberty back. It seems to me we have to get back to the founding  principles that made our country great.  We also need to realize that a big government will encourage waste and corruption. Also raising taxes on the job creators is a very bad idea too. The Laffer Curve clearly demonstrates that when the tax rates are raised many individuals will move their investments to places where they will not get taxed as much.

In 1980 I read the book FREE TO CHOOSE by Milton Friedman and it really enlightened me a tremendous amount.  I suggest checking out these episodes and transcripts of Milton Friedman’s film series FREE TO CHOOSE: “The Failure of Socialism” and “The Anatomy of a Crisis” and “What is wrong with our schools?”  and “Created Equal”  and  From Cradle to Grave, and – Power of the Market.

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In MIDNIGHT IN PARIS Gil Pender ponders the advice he gets from his literary heroes from the 1920’s.

King Solomon in Ecclesiastes painted a dismal situation for modern man in life UNDER THE SUN  and many modern artists, poets, and philosophers have agreed. In the 1920’s T.S.Eliot and his  house guest Bertrand Russell were two of them. Russell remained a pessimistic atheist the rest of his life but T.S. Eliot  found a solution to his pessimism  and put his faith in Christ. Later Kerry Livgren of the rock group KANSAS wrote the  hit song DUST IN THE WIND in 1978 and like T.S.Eliot Livgren put his faith in Christ.

(Kerry Livgren)

In 2006 in the publication CROSSWALK Livgren noted:

Dust In the Wind” was certainly the most well-known song, and the message was out of Ecclesiastes. I never ceased to be amazed at how the message resonates with people, from the time it came out through now. The message is true and we have to deal with it, plus the melody is memorable and very powerful. It disturbs me that there’s only part of the [Christian] story told in that song. It’s about someone yearning for some solution, but if you look at the entire body of my work, there’s a solution to the dilemma.

From the book ART AND THE BIBLE by Francis Schaeffer:

In our own day, men like Picasso and T. S. Eliot developed new styles in order to speak a new message…. Think, for example, of T. S. Eliot’s form of poetry in The Waste Land. The fragmented form matches the vision of fragmented man. But it is intriguing that after T. S. Eliot became a Christian — for example, in The Journey of the Magi — he did not use quite this same form. Rather, he adapted it for the message he was now giving — a message with a Christian character. But he didn’t entirely give up the form; he didn’t go back to Tennyson. Rather, he adapted the form that he used in The Waste Land, changing it to fit the message that he was now giving. In other words, T. S. Eliot the Christian wrote somewhat differently than T. S. Eliot the “modern man.” Therefore, while we must use twentieth-century styles, we must not use them in such a way as to be dominated by the world-views out of which they have arisen.

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Torrey Common Room discussion with Joe Henderson, Matt Jenson, and Melissa Schubert

Actor David Lowe and poet T.S. Eliot.

In the film MIDNIGHT IN PARIS the main character has this short encounter with T.S. Eliot and he tells Eliot of his admiration for the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

GIL PENDER WHILE GETTING INTO CAR: Gil Pender.-

T.S.EILIOT: Tom Eliot.

GIL PENDER: Tom Eliot? Tom Stearns Eliot? T.S Eliot?  T.S. Eliot?

T.S.EILIOT: – Pender.-

GIL PENDER: PRUFROCK’S like my mantra! OK. Sorry. Sorry. Listen. Where I come from,people measure out their lives with coke spoons.-

July 27, 2011

 

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Milton Friedman And ObamaCare November 4, 2013

Milton Friedman – Health Care Reform (1992) pt 1/4

Milton Friedman – Health Care Reform (1992) pt 2/4

Milton Friedman – Health Care Reform (1992) pt 3/4

Milton Friedman – Health Care Reform (1992) pt 4/4

 

Milton Friedman And ObamaCare

Milton Friedman

friedmandonahuees (2)Where is Milton Friedman when we need him most? His ability to explain complex subjects in simple terms is needed, especially with regard to the fiasco we know as the “Affordable Care Act.”

In politics, there is little truth. The denizens of this netherworld are not our best and brightest. Most do not consider ethics or truth as boundaries. As a result, it is difficult to differentiate between stupidity, disingenuous and downright lying when examining their positions. Truth, when it meets their desired ends, is not avoided, although it is rarely convenient.

The following exchange represents a typical example of the nonsense that passes for news. This one involves a confrontation between Megyn Kelly (Fox News) and Democratic Rep (NJ) Frank Pallone over ObamaCare. It was reported by the Daily Caller and is of note because of the absurd politician’s answers and the inept handling of them by the host:

PALLONE: They tell them where to get insurance. Look the bottom line is, if you are selling a lousy policy at a price that’s too high, nobody is going to buy it.

KELLY: That’s not true.

PALLONE: And so they are canceling these policies because they know people won’t buy them. It’s a competitive marketplace. That’s the problem.

KELLY: But they were buying them.

[CROSSTALK]

PALLONE: But they won’t buy them anymore when they have a better alternative.

KELLY: There were 15 million people who bought them and said “I like them.”

PALLONE: They’re not going to buy them anymore when they have a better alternative.

KELLY: Thanks to you.

PALLONE: Well, I can’t go out as an insurance company and sell a lousy policy anymore at a high price.

KELLY: People like — why do you get to decide what’s lousy? Why can’t the American people say ‘it’s lousy for you. For me, I like it.’

PALLONE: It’s capitalism. You can go out and buy whatever you want, but the insurance company realizes they can’t sell this lousy insurance policy anymore.

KELLY: They were selling it, sir. You are ignoring my point. They were selling it. Some 15 million Americans thought it was great. You didn’t like it, but they liked it. And then you and the president –

PALLONE: Now there are better alternatives.

I didn’t see the encounter. I rarely watch television news. It is safer for me and more so for my television that way.

Rep. Pallone attempts to use, of all things, free markets as a defense. His responses are laced with direct and indirect references:

  • “It’s a competitive marketplace.”
  • “… they [citizens] have better alternatives.”
  •  “It’s capitalism. You can go out and buy whatever you want …”
  • “Now there are better alternatives.”

His terminology is reminiscent of the late Milton Friedman who must be spinning in his grave if he heard the segment.

Frank Pallone is no Milton Friedman. Unfortunately, neither is Megyn Kelly. A defense of ObamaCare on free markets or competitive markets is an outrage. So too was the host’s inability or unwillingness to recognize that. “It’s a competitive marketplace” would have been, politely and effectively, the point at which Dr. Friedman would have obliterated Rep. Pallone’s position.

A competitive marketplace requires freedom on the part of both buyers and sellers. ObamaCare is a lot of things, but it is not a competitive marketplace. It reduce/eliminates freedom from both parties to a transaction. It is government coercion. What little competition and competitive markets existed in healthcare (as a result of prior governmental interventions) was eliminated with the passage of the ACA.

ObamaCare is classic central planning run amuck. It reduces choice, mandating by law what is “acceptable.” Regardless of what you prefer, you must buy what has been deemed acceptable by some unknown, pointy-headed bureaucrat. The threat of force backs up the “must.”

Neither buyer or seller gains from this legislation. Both have their freedoms restricted and are harmed. Government power and control is the only winner, again.

Consumer sovereignty no longer controls the insurance producers. Nor will it guide the service, delivery and quality of medical care forthcoming. These are now determined by a Politburo, indistinguishable in power and control from the old Soviet Union. “Death Panels” represent the extreme of a series of decisions that have nothing to do with buyer or seller.

Freedom and economics need not be complex. Anyone who saw Milton Friedman on television found his presentation simple and understandable. The classic video with Phil Donahue (provided below) illustrates his unique ability. A more relevant one about Socialized  medicine, which Mr. Friedman  presented at the Mayo Clinic 35 years ago, is also provided.

Few have Friedman’s capabilities. Yet how difficult would it have been to respond to Rep. Pallone with some simple analogy along the following lines?

I have always driven a Ford pickup because I like it, it meets my needs and it fits my budget. Now you have made it illegal for Ford to produce pickups or any car but a Lincoln. My “choice” is now limited to buying a Lincoln or a Cadillac. While they may be better cars, neither fits my needs or budget. Forcing me to accept your preferences has not made me better off.

Or, what about the obvious issue of coercion versus choice?

If the ObamaCare program is so good, then the legislation of penalties, fines and coercion would be unnecessary. People would flock to it out of choice, not compulsion. The reality is that it is not good and that is why you needed the force of law to make it work.

Enjoy the following clips and pray that someone with Friedman’s common sense and communicative skills steps forward to address the nonsense that passes for policy in Washington.

Milton Friedman on Medical Care (Full Lecture)

Published on Feb 2, 2014

I have written about Obamacare over and over again on this blog. Dan Mitchell has shared many funny cartoons about Obamacare too. Milton Friedman has spoken out about government healthcare many times in the past and his film series FREE TO CHOOSE is on You Tube and I encourage you to watch it. It is clear that the federal government debt is growing so much that it is endangering us because if things keep going like they are now we will not have any money left for the national defense because we are so far in debt as a nation.

We have been spending so much on our welfare state through food stamps and other programs that I am worrying that many of our citizens are becoming more dependent on government and in many cases they are losing their incentive to work hard because of the welfare trap the government has put in place. Other nations in Europe have gone down this road and we see what mess this has gotten them in. People really are losing their faith in big government and they want more liberty back. It seems to me we have to get back to the founding  principles that made our country great.  We also need to realize that a big government will encourage waste and corruption. Also raising taxes on the job creators is a very bad idea too. The Laffer Curve clearly demonstrates that when the tax rates are raised many individuals will move their investments to places where they will not get taxed as much.

In 1980 I read the book FREE TO CHOOSE by Milton Friedman and it really enlightened me a tremendous amount.  I suggest checking out these episodes and transcripts of Milton Friedman’s film series FREE TO CHOOSE: “The Failure of Socialism” and “The Anatomy of a Crisis” and “What is wrong with our schools?”  and “Created Equal”  and  From Cradle to Grave, and – Power of the Market.

_____________________

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______ Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose (1980), episode 3 – Anatomy of a Crisis. part 1 The Region – Banking and Policy Issues Magazine – Interview with Milton Friedman June 1992 In his new book, Money Mischief, economist Milton Friedman compares inflation to alcoholism; blames the rise of Chinese communism, in large part, on an […]

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_______ José Niño José Niño is a graduate student based in Santiago, Chile. A citizen of the world, he has lived in Venezuela, Colombia, and the United States. He is currently an international research analyst with the Acton Circle of Chile. Follow@JoseAlNino. 40 Years Later: Milton Friedman’s Legacy in Chile “Chilean Miracle” Struck a Blow […]

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____ Milton Friedman – The Negative Income Tax The Conservative Case for a Guaranteed Basic Income NOAH GORDON AUG 6, 2014 Creating a wage floor is an effective way to fight poverty—and it would reduce government spending and intrusion. Swiss backers of a minimum income spread out coins in Bern. Denis Balibouse/Reuters Last week, my […]

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RESPONDING TO HARRY KROTO’S BRILLIANT RENOWNED ACADEMICS!! Part 55 Baroness Susan Greenfield “. Everything is rooted finally in our brain, if anything exists in a physical sense beyond that then I myself can not buy into that new kind of physics!”

On November 21, 2014 I received a letter from Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto and it said:

…Please click on this URL http://vimeo.com/26991975

and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.

Harry Kroto

_________________

Fig 9. The Sussex team from left: (back) Ala’a Abdul Sada and Jon Hare (front) HK, Roger Taylor and David Walton and Dr. Harry Kroto is the 1996 Chemistry Nobel Prize Winner and he is seen the photo below on the left seated:

________________

Susan Greenfield, Baroness Greenfield

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Baroness Greenfield
Baronesssusangre1.jpeg
Born 1 October 1950 (age 65)
Hammersmith, London, England, UK
Nationality British
Institutions
Alma mater St Hilda’s College, Oxford
Thesis Origins of acetylcholinesterase in cerebrospinal fluid (1977)
Doctoral advisor Anthony David Smith[1]
Notable awards CBE

Chevalier Légion d’honneur

Spouse Peter Atkins (m. 1991–2005)
Website
www.susangreenfield.com
Susan Greenfield’s voice
MENU
0:00
Recorded February 2011 from the BBC Radio 4 programme Four Thought

Susan Adele Greenfield, Baroness Greenfield, CBE,[2] HonFRCP (born 1 October 1950) is a British scientist, writer, broadcaster, and member of the House of Lords. Her research has focused on the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. She is also interested in the neuroscience of consciousness [3] and the impact of technology on the brain.[4]

Greenfield is Senior Research Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford University [5] and was Professor of Synaptic Pharmacology.[citation needed] From 2005 to 2012, she was also Chancellor of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh between 2005 and 2013.[6] From 1998 to 2010, she was director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.[7] In September 2013, she co-founded the biotech company Neuro-bio Ltd, where she is Chief Executive Officer.[8][9]

Education[edit]

Susan Adele Greenfield was born to a Jewish father[10] and a Christian mother in Hammersmith, London. Her mother, Doris (née Thorp), was a dancer, and her father, Reginald Myer Greenfield, was an electrician.[11]

She attended the Godolphin and Latymer School, where she took A levels in Latin, Greek and ancient history, and maths. The first member of her immediate family to go on to university, she was initially admitted to St Hilda’s College to read Philosophy, Psychology and Psychiatry, graduated with a first degree in experimental psychology.[11][12] As a Senior Scholar at St Hugh’s College, Oxford,[13] she completed her DPhil degree in 1977 under the supervision of Anthony David Smith on the Origins of acetylcholinesterase incerebrospinal fluid.[1] She then held a junior research fellowship at Green College, Oxford between 1981 – 1984.[14]

Career[edit]

Greenfield’s research is focused on brain physiology, particularly on the brain mechanisms of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, but she is also known as a populariser of science. Greenfield has written a range of books about the brain, regularly gives public lectures, and appears on radio and television.[15]

Since 1976, Greenfield has published some 200 papers in peer-reviewed journals, including studies on the basic brain mechanisms involved in addiction and reward,[16][17][18][19][20]i.e. relating to dopamine systems and related neurochemicals.[21][22] She investigated the brain mechanisms underlying ADHD[22][23] as well as the impact of environmental enrichment.[24]

In 1994, she was invited to be the first woman to give the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture, then sponsored by the BBC. Her lecture was titled “Journey to the centre of the brain”.[25] She was appointed Director of the Royal Institution in 1998,.[26] The post was abolished in 2010.[27] The Royal Institution had found itself in a financial crisis following a £22m development programme led by Greenfield and the Board. The project ended £3 million in debt.[28][29] Greenfield subsequently announced that she would be taking her employers to an employment tribunal and her claim would include discrimination,[30] but the case was settled out of court.[31]

Greenfield’s two main posts at Oxford were as Tutorial Fellow in Medicine at Lincoln College Oxford,[5] and Professor of Synaptic Pharmacology.[citation needed] From 1995 to 1999, she gave public lectures as Gresham Professor of Physic in London. Greenfield was Adelaide‘s Thinker in Residence for 2004 and 2005.[32] As a result of her recommendations, South Australian Premier Mike Rann made a major funding commitment, backed by the State and Federal Governments and the private sector, to establish the Royal Institution of Australia and the Australian Science Media Centre in Adelaide.[33]

She has explored the relevance of neuroscience knowledge to education[34] and has introduced the concept of “mind change”,[35] an umbrella term comparable to “climate change”, encompassing the diverse issues involved in the impact of the 21st-century environment on the brain.[36]

Politics[edit]

Baroness Greenfield sits in the Parliament of the United Kingdom in the House of Lords as a crossbencher, having no formal political affiliation.[37] Records of Baroness Greenfield’s activity in the House of Lords indicate abstention on a range of issues.[38] She has spoken on a variety of topics,[39] including education, drugs, and economic empowerment for women.[40]

Books[edit]

In 1995 Greenfield published her own theory of consciousness in Journey to the Centres of the Mind (1995), which was developed substantially in The Private Life of the Brain (2000). Her book The Human Brain: A Guided Tour (1997) was followed byTomorrow’s People (2003), which explored human nature and its potential vulnerability in an age of technology. These ideas were expanded in her later book, ID (2009). The theme of unprecedented changes to contemporary human cognition was briefly explored in a monograph You and Me (2011), and has was later developed further in an in-depth exploration of the impact of technology on the brain inMind Change published in 2014 by Random House. A further book A Day in the Life of the Brain is due to be published by Penguin in early 2016.[citation needed]

In 2013 Greenfield published a dystopian science-fiction novel, 2121: A Tale from the Next Century, telling the story of videogame-playing hedonists and their conflict with “Neo-Puritans”.[41]

Impact of digital technology controversy[edit]

In press interviews, at public speaking events,[42] as well as in her writing,[43] Greenfield has expressed concerns that modern technology, and in particular social networking sites and video games,[42] may have a significant impact on child development as a factor in autistic-like behaviour.[42][44][45][46] She noted[citation needed] that Public Health England had related social networking and multiplayer online games to “lower levels of wellbeing”, and believed that evidence pointed to a “dose-response” relationship, “where each additional hour of viewing increases the likelihood of experiencing socio-emotional problems”.[47] She believed this raised questions about where to draw the boundaries between beneficial and harmful use of such technology, saying that “it would be surprising if many hours per day of screen activity did not influence this neuroplasticity”.[48]

Greenfield has been criticised for explicitly linking the increase in internet usage to a rise in autism. In an 2015 article in the BMJ, clinical psychologist Vaughan Bell, developmental psychologist Dorothy Bishop and psychologist Andrew Przybylski took Greenfield to task for her statements, writing that Greenfield’s notion had “no basis in scientific evidence” and was “entirely implausible in light of what we know of autism as a neurodevelopmental condition”. They expressed concern that her work could be misleading to parents.[49]

Greenfield had already been criticised for failing to publish any research into her theories of technology’s impact on child development. Ben Goldacre suggested that “A scientist with enduring concerns about a serious widespread risk would normally set out their concerns clearly, to other scientists, in a scientific paper.”[42]

Honours[edit]

Greenfield has 32 honorary degrees,[50] and has received awards including the Royal Society‘s Michael Faraday Prize. She has been elected to an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians[51] and the LondonScience Museum.[52] In 2006 she was made an Honorary Fellow of the British Science Association[53] and was the Honorary Australian of the Year.

In January 2000, Greenfield received the CBE[54] for her contribution to the public understanding of science.[2] Later that year, she was named Woman of the Year by The Observer. In 2001, she became a Life Peer under the via the House of Lords Appointments Commission system,[55] as Baroness Greenfield, of Ot Moor in the County of Oxfordshire.[2][56]

In 2003, she was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur by the French Government.[51] In 2010 she was awarded the Australian Society for Medical Research Medal.[57] She also received the British Inspiration award for Science and Technology in 2010.[58]

Patronage[edit]

She is a patron of the Alzheimer’s Research UK[59] and of Dignity in Dying.[60] She is a founder and trustee of the charity Science for Humanity, a network of scientists, researchers and technologists that collaborates with non-profits to create practical solutions to the everyday problems of developing communities.[61]

Personal life[edit]

Greenfield was married to University of Oxford Professor Peter Atkins from 1991 until their divorce in 2003.[62]

_____________________________

In  the third video below in the 129th clip in this series are her words and  my response is below them. 

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)

I grew up at Bellevue Baptist Church under the leadership of our pastor Adrian Rogers and I read many books by the Evangelical Philosopher Francis Schaeffer and have had the opportunity to contact many of the evolutionists or humanistic academics that they have mentioned in their works. Many of these scholars have taken the time to respond back to me in the last 20 years and some of the names  included are  Ernest Mayr (1904-2005), George Wald (1906-1997), Carl Sagan (1934-1996),  Robert Shapiro (1935-2011), Nicolaas Bloembergen (1920-),  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) , Milton Friedman (1912-2006), John Hospers (1918-2011), Michael Martin (1932-), John R. Cole  (1942-),   Wolf Roder,  Susan Blackmore (1951-),  Christopher C. French (1956-)  Walter R. Rowe Thomas Gilovich (1954-), Paul QuinceyHarry Kroto (1939-), Marty E. Martin (1928-), Richard Rubenstein (1924-), James Terry McCollum (1936-), Edward O. WIlson (1929-), Lewis Wolpert (1929), Gerald Holton (1922-), Martin Rees (1942-), Alan Macfarlane (1941-),  Roald Hoffmann (1937-), Herbert Kroemer (1928-), Thomas H. Jukes (1906-1999), Glenn BranchGeoff Harcourt (1931-), and  Ray T. Cragun (1976-).

___________

In the popular You Tube video “Renowned Academics Speaking About God” Dr. Greenfield made the following statement:

“I think what is more important is to realize we are individuals. Everything is rooted finally in our brain. My own view is that. If anything exists in a physical sense beyond that then I myself can not buy into that new kind of physics. If people believe that and it comforts them then who am I to say…”

Let me respond first by saying that Dr. Greenfield’s assertion is that when the brain dies we die too, but is there evidence that there is a life after death as the Bible claims? WHAT IF THERE WAS EVIDENCE THAT THE BIBLE IS TRUE HISTORICALLY? IF THAT COULD BE SHOWN THEN WOULD DR. GREENFIELD BELIEVE WHAT IT SAYS ABOUT THE AFTERLIFE? 

Let me further respond with the words of Francis Schaeffer from his book HE IS THERE AND HE IS NOT SILENT (the chapter is entitled, “Is Propositional Revelation Nonsense?”

Of course, if the infinite uncreated Personal communicated to the finite created personal, he would not exhaust himself in his communication; but two things are clear here:
 
1. Even communication between once created person and another is not exhaustive, but that does not mean that for that reason it is not true. 
 
2. If the uncreated Personal really cared for the created personal, it could not be thought unexpected for him to tell the created personal things of a propositional nature; otherwise as a finite being the created personal would have numerous things he could not know if he just began with himself as a limited, finite reference point. In such a case, there is no intrinsic reason why the uncreated Personal could communicate some vaguely true things, but could not communicate propositional truth concerning the world surrounding the created personal – for fun, let’s call that science. Or why he could not communicate propositional truth to the created personal concerning the sequence that followed the uncreated Personal making everything he made – let’s call that history. There is no reason we could think of why he could not tell these two types of propositional things truly. They would not be exhaustive; but could we think of any reason why they would not be true? The above is, of course, what the Bible claims for itself in regard to propositional revelation.
DOES THE BIBLE ERR IN THE AREA OF SCIENCE AND HISTORY? The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted. Charles Darwin himself longed for evidence to come forward from the area of  Biblical Archaeology  but so much has  advanced  since Darwin wrote these words in the 19th century! Here are some of the posts I have done in the past on the subject and if you like you could just google these subjects: 1. The Babylonian Chronicleof Nebuchadnezzars Siege of Jerusalem, 2. Hezekiah’s Siloam Tunnel Inscription.13. The Pilate Inscription14. Caiaphas Ossuary14 B Pontius Pilate Part 214c. Three greatest American Archaeologists moved to accept Bible’s accuracy through archaeology.
Here is a letter I sent to Dr. Greenfield below:

October 5, 2015

Professor Susan Greenfield
Director
Institute for the Future of the Mind

Dear Dr. Greenfield,

I really enjoyed your TED TALK and I also got to hear another TED TALK the other day by Nobel Prize Winner John Polanyi whose father I am writing you about later in this letter. You might want to check that out on You Tube too.

I read in Wikipedia concerning you:

Baroness Greenfield sits in the Parliament of the United Kingdom in the House of Lords as a crossbencher, having no formal political affiliation.[35] Records of Baroness Greenfield’s activity in the House of Lords indicate abstention on a range of issues.[36]

That intrigued me because I recently got involved in politics too and was elected Justice of the Peace in the 4th largest county in Arkansas and my wife Jill has served several years on the City Council in Shannon Hills.

It has been many years since I first visited Parliament but I have been watching many of their sessions on television and reading about them. Recently I read about the amazing career of Dominick Geoffrey Edward Browne. I wonder if you ever got to know him and did you know that he was mentioned indirectly in what I think is the most famous Beatles song of all-time.

What is the best Beatles song of all time? It is my opinion that is the song A DAY IN THE LIFE, and that is also the conclusion of Elvis Costello in his article “100 Greatest Beatles Songs,” September 19, 2011.

It is a song that takes a long look at the issue of death. It starts off telling the story of Tara Browne who “had made the grade” but then gets blow up in a car. Browne’s father was Dominick Geoffrey Edward Browne and that is why the Beatles noted,Nobody was really sure
If he was from the House of Lords.” 

It is true that Tara Browne was a very wealthy friend of the Beatles and unfortunately he sped through a red-light in London going 100 miles per hour and ended his life.King Solomon noted, “No one knows when their hour will come: As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in a snare, so people are trapped by evil times  that fall unexpectedly upon them.”

Beatles – A Day In The Life Lyrics

I read the news today, oh boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
And though the news was rather sad
Well I just had to laugh
I saw the photograph.He blew his mind out in a car
He didn’t notice that the lights had changed
A crowd of people stood and stared
They’d seen his face before
Nobody was really sure
If he was from the House of Lords.I saw a film today, oh boy
The English army had just won the war
A crowd of people turned away
But I just had to look
Having read the book
I’d love to turn you on.Woke up, fell out of bed,
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup,
And looking up I noticed I was late.Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
Found my way upstairs and had a smoke,
Somebody spoke and I went into a dream.I read the news today oh boy
Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.
I’d love to turn you on.
Songwriters: LENNON, JOHN WINSTON / MCCARTNEY, PAUL JAMES
____________________________
The article below explains the meaning of these words from the song:
“They’d seen his face before
Nobody was really sure
If he was from the House of Lords.”
12:03AM BST 10 Aug 2002

The 4th Lord Oranmore and Browne, who has died aged 100, is believed to hold the record as the longest-serving member of the House of Lords, having taken his seat in 1927 and been evicted under the Government’s reforms of 1999.

He earned the unspoken admiration of many by never speaking in the chamber, and was better known for his three marriages, particularly to the heiress Oonagh Guinness and to the actress Sally Gray.

It was also his misfortune to be associated in the public memory with the tragic deaths in traffic accidents of first his parents in 1927, and then of his son Tara Browne, an icon of the Swinging Sixties, almost 40 years later.

Dominick Geoffrey Edward Browne was born in Dublin on October 21 1901, heir to the Irish peerages of Oranmore and Browne of Carrabrowne Castle, Co Galway, and Castle Mac Garrett, Co Mayo.

Oranmore and Browne married three times, first Mildred Helen, daughter of Thomas Egerton, a cousin of the Duke of Sutherland; they had two sons and three daughters (one of whom died aged 13). They divorced in 1936, so he could marry Oonagh Guinness, one of the “Golden Guinness girls”; she was a considerable heiress in her own right and the owner of Luggala, a fairytale Gothic lodge in the Wicklow mountains.

They had three sons, the eldest of whom is Garech Browne, the pony-tailed squire of Luggala, a guardian of Irish lore and founder of The Chieftains. The second son died after a week. The third was Tara Browne, a friend of John Lennon who drove his Lotus Elan into a lamp-post in Redcliffe Square, London, in 1966. Tara was the subject of the Beatles’ song A Day in the Life, which contained the verse:

He blew his mind out in a car
He didn’t notice that the lights had changed
A crowd of people stood and stared
They’d seen his face before,
Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords.

A Day in the Life

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 “A Day in the Life” is the final song on the BeatlesSgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Credited to Lennon–McCartney, the song comprises distinct sections written independently by John Lennonand Paul McCartney, with orchestral additions. While Lennon’s lyrics were inspired by contemporary newspaper articles, McCartney’s were reminiscent of his youth. The decisions to link sections of the song with orchestral glissandos and to end the song with a sustained piano chord were made only after the rest of the song had been recorded.

The supposed drug reference in the line “I’d love to turn you on” resulted in the song initially being banned from broadcast by the BBC. Since its original album release, “A Day in the Life” has been released as aB-side, and also on variouscompilation albums. It has been covered by other artists, and since 2008, by McCartney in his live performances. It was ranked the 28th greatest song of all time by Rolling Stonemagazine.[5] The magazine also ranked it as the greatest Beatles song.[6]

Composition[edit]

According to Lennon, the inspiration for the first two verses was the death of Tara Browne, the 21-year-old heir to the Guinness fortune who had crashed his Lotus Elan on 18 December 1966 in Redcliffe Gardens, Earls Court. Browne had been a friend of Lennon and McCartney,[7] and had, earlier in 1966, instigated McCartney’s first experience with LSD.[8] Lennon’s verses were adapted from a story in the 17 January 1967 edition of the Daily Mail, which reported the ruling on a custody action over Browne’s two young children:

Guinness heir Tara Browne’s two children will be brought up by their 56-year-old grandmother, the High Court ruled yesterday. It turned down a plea by their mother, Mrs. Nicky Browne, 24, that she should have them …This, she said, happened after Mr. Browne, 21, from whom she was estranged, had taken them for a holiday in County Wicklow [Ireland] with his mother.

Mrs. Browne began an action for their return in October [1966], naming Mr. Browne and his mother as defendants. The action, held in private, was part way through when Mr. Browne died in a crash in his Lotus Elan car in South Kensington a week before Christmas.[9]

“I didn’t copy the accident,” Lennon said. “Tara didn’t blow his mind out, but it was in my mind when I was writing that verse. The details of the accident in the song—not noticing traffic lights and a crowd forming at the scene—were similarly part of the fiction.”[10]

____

Tara Browne in 1966

Suki Poitier (centre) and Tara Browne (right), 1966

_________________

keith suki brian and mick. suki would later survive a car(Lotus Elan) crash driven by Tara Browne- heir to the Guinness fortune. The driver perished(blew his mind out in a car, he didn’t notice that the lights had changed) made famous by a Beatles song.

_____________________

In the popular You Tube video “Renowned Academics Speaking About God” you made the following statement:

“I think what is more important is to realize we are individuals. Everything is rooted finally in our brain. My own view is that. If anything exists in a physical sense beyond that then I myself can not buy into that new kind of physics. If people believe that and it comforts them then who am I to say…”

WHAT IF THERE WAS EVIDENCE THAT THE BIBLE IS TRUE HISTORICALLY? IF THAT COULD BE SHOWN THEN WOULD YOU BELIEVE WHAT IT SAYS ABOUT THE AFTERLIFE? 

Let me further respond with the words of Francis Schaeffer from his book HE IS THERE AND HE IS NOT SILENT (the chapter is entitled, “Is Propositional Revelation Nonsense?”

Of course, if the infinite uncreated Personal communicated to the finite created personal, he would not exhaust himself in his communication; but two things are clear here:
 
1. Even communication between once created person and another is not exhaustive, but that does not mean that for that reason it is not true. 
 
2. If the uncreated Personal really cared for the created personal, it could not be thought unexpected for him to tell the created personal things of a propositional nature; otherwise as a finite being the created personal would have numerous things he could not know if he just began with himself as a limited, finite reference point. In such a case, there is no intrinsic reason why the uncreated Personal could communicate some vaguely true things, but could not communicate propositional truth concerning the world surrounding the created personal – for fun, let’s call that science. Or why he could not communicate propositional truth to the created personal concerning the sequence that followed the uncreated Personal making everything he made – let’s call that history. There is no reason we could think of why he could not tell these two types of propositional things truly. They would not be exhaustive; but could we think of any reason why they would not be true? The above is, of course, what the Bible claims for itself in regard to propositional revelation.
DOES THE BIBLE ERR IN THE AREA OF SCIENCE AND HISTORY? The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted. Charles Darwin himself longed for evidence to come forward from the area of  Biblical Archaeology  but so much has  advanced  since Darwin wrote these words in the 19th century! Here are some of the posts I have done in the past on the subject and if you like you could just google these subjects: 1. The Babylonian Chronicleof Nebuchadnezzars Siege of Jerusalem, 2. Hezekiah’s Siloam Tunnel Inscription.13. The Pilate Inscription14. Caiaphas Ossuary14 B Pontius Pilate Part 214c. Three greatest American Archaeologists moved to accept Bible’s accuracy through archaeology.

Recently I had the opportunity to come across a very interesting article by Michael Polanyi, LIFE TRANSCENDING PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY, in the magazine CHEMICAL AND ENGINEERING NEWS, August 21, 1967, and I also got hold of a 1968 talk by Francis Schaeffer based on this article. Polanyi’s son John actually won the 1986 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. This article by Michael Polanyi concerns Francis Crick and James Watson and their discovery of DNA in 1953. Polanyi noted:

Mechanisms, whether man-made or morphological, are boundary conditions harnessing the laws of in
animate nature, being themselves irreducible to those laws. The pattern of organic bases in DNA which functions as a genetic code is a boundary condition irreducible to physics and chemistry. Further controlling principles of life may be represented as a hierarchy of boundary conditions extending, in the case of man, to consciousness and responsibility.

I would like to send you a CD copy of this talk because I thought you may find it very interesting. It includes references to not only James D. Watson, and Francis Crick but also  Maurice Wilkins, Erwin Schrodinger, J.S. Haldane (his son was the famous J.B.S. Haldane), Peter Medawar, and Barry Commoner. I WONDER IF YOU EVER HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO RUN ACROSS THESE MEN OR ANY OF THEIR FORMER STUDENTS?

Below is a portion of the transcript from the CD and Michael Polanyi’s words are in italics while Francis Schaeffer’s words are not:

During the past 15 years, I have worked on these questions, achieving gradually stages of the argument presented in this paper. These are:

  1. Machines are not formed by physical and chemical equilibration. 
  2. The functional terms needed for characterizing a machine cannot for defined in terms of physics and chemistry. 

Polanyi is talking about specific machines but I would include the great cause and effect machine of the external universe that functions on a cause and effect basis. So if this is true of the watch,  then you have to ask the same question about the total machine that Sartre points out that is there, and that is the cause and effect universe. Polanyi doesn’t touch on this and he doesn’t have an answer, and I know people who know him. Yet nevertheless he sees the situation exactly as it is. And I would point out what  Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) and J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) said and that it needed a Christian consensus to produce modern science because it was the Christian consensus that gave the concept that the world being created by a reasonable God and that it could be found out and discovered by reason. So the modern science when it began with Copernicus and Galileo and all these men conceived that the cause and effect system of the universe would be there on the basis that it was created by a reasonable God, and that is Einstein’s big dilemma and that is why he became a mystic at the end of life…What Polanyi says here can be extended to the watch, and the bridge and the automobile but also to the big cause and effect universe. You have to give some kind of answer to this too and I would say this to Michael Polanyi if I ever have a chance to talk to him. You need another explanation too Polanyi.

3. No physical chemical topography will tell us that we have a machine before us and what its functions are. 

In other words, if you only know the chemicals and the physics you don’t know if you have a machine. It may just be junk. So nobody in the world could tell if it was a machine from merely the “physical chemical-topography.” You have to look at the machineness of the machine to say it is a machine. You could take an automobile and smash it into a small piece of metal with a giant press and it would have the same properties of the automobile, but the automobile would have disappeared. The automobile-ness of the automobile is something else than the physical chemical-topography.

4. Such a topography can completely identify one particular specimen of a machine, but can tell us nothing about a class of machines. 

5. And if we are asked how the same solid system can be subject to control by two independent principles, the answer is: The boundary conditions of the system are free of control by physics and can be controlled therefore by nonphysical, purely technical, principles. 

In other words you have to explain the engineering by something other than merely physical principles and of course it is. You can’t explain the watchness of the watch merely by this. You can explain it on the basis of engineering principles in which the human mind conceives of a use for the machine and produces the machine. But notice where Polanyi is and that is in our argument of a need of personality in the universe though Polanyi doesn’t draw this final conclusion, though I thought that is the only explanation.

If you look at the watch a man has made it for the purpose of telling time. When you see the automobile a man has made it for the purpose of locomotion and the explanation of the difference is not in the chemical and physical properties but in the personality of a man to make these two different machines for two different purposes out of the same material. So what you are left here is the need of personality in the universe.

____

Thank you for your time. I know how busy you are and I want to thank you for taking the time to read this letter.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher,

P.O. Box 23416, Little Rock, AR 72221, United States, cell ph 501-920-5733, everettehatcher@gmail.com

 

 

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FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 47 Woody Allen and Professor Levy and the death of “Optimistic Humanism” from the movie CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS Plus Charles Darwin’s comments too!!! (Feature on artist Rodney Graham)

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There Is A Difference Between Absolute and Objective Moral Values

Published on Dec 6, 2012

For more resources visit: http://www.reasonablefaith.org

The Bethinking National Apologetics Day Conference: “Countering the New Atheism” took place during the UK Reasonable Faith Tour in October 2011. Christian academics William Lane Craig, John Lennox, Peter J Williams and Gary Habermas lead 600 people in training on how to defend and proclaim the credibility of Christianity against the growing tide of secularism and New Atheist popular thought in western society.

In this session, William Lane Craig delivers his critique of Richard Dawkins’ objections to arguments for the existence of God, followed by questions and answers from the audience. In this clip, Dr Craig addresses a question about objective moral values and distinguishes them from absolute moral values.

Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of Truth & History (part 2)

Francis Schaeffer pictured below:

______________________________

_________________

Life without God in the picture is absurdity!!!. That was the view of King Solomon when he wrote the Book of Ecclesiastes 3000 years ago and it is the view of many of the modern philosophers todayModern man has tried to come up with a lasting meaning for life without God in the picture (life under the sun), but it is not possible. Without the infinite-personal God of the Bible to reveal moral absolutes then man is left to embrace moral relativism. In a time plus chance universe man is reduced to a machine and can not find a place for values such as love. Both of Francis Schaeffer’s film series have tackled these subjects and he shows how this is reflected in the arts.

Here are some posts I have done on the series “HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? : 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 “The Age of Fragmentation”episode 7 “The Age of Non-Reason” episode 6 “The Scientific Age”  episode 5 “The Revolutionary Age” episode 4 “The Reformation” episode 3 “The Renaissance”episode 2 “The Middle Ages,”, and  episode 1 “The Roman Age,” .

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 look at the truth claims of the Bible.

I have discussed many subjects with my liberal friends over at the Ark Times Blog in the past and I have taken them on now on the subject of the absurdity of life without God in the picture. Most of my responses included quotes from William Lane Craig’s book THE ABSURDITY OF LIFE WITHOUT GOD.  Here is the result of one of those encounters from June of 2013:

I wrote:

Vanessa, thank you for your thoughts. You wrote, “The afterlife: there’s good and there’s evil. Most people fall on one side or the other. The part of you that’s left when your earthly body turns to dust, or begins to turn to dust, becomes one with good or one with evil. The force. The force has nothing to do with the bible, which is still a decent history book and an outline for living a good life if you don’t get too literal with it.”
___________

Your view of the afterlife is a very popular view that is spreading to more parts of the world than ever before, but is it right? I have defended the truthfulness of the Bible and have given evidence to show that it is the revealed word of God. On what basis do you make your claims? WHAT IS EVIL AND WHAT IS GOOD ACCORDING TO YOU AND ON WHAT BASIS CAN YOU MAKE THOSE CLAIMS?

Evidently you do not believe in the infinite-personal God of the Bible. It sounds like to me that you are similar in your religious views to Steve Jobs. His views were based on evolution and he did not believe in a personal God. I have written about his views many times in the past.

https://thedailyhatch.org/2011/10/31/steve-…

The sad fact is that without a moral lawgiver then you can not base your moral views on anything but moral relativism. An atheistic religion just doesn’t cut it.

William Lane Craig noted:

The dilemma of modern man is thus truly terrible. The atheistic worldview is insufficient to maintain a happy and consistent life. Man cannot live consistently and happily as though life were ultimately without meaning, value, or purpose. If we try to live consistently within the framework of the atheistic worldview, we shall find ourselves profoundly unhappy. If instead we manage to live happily, it is only by giving the lie to our worldview.

Confronted with this dilemma, modern man flounders pathetically for some means of escape. In a remarkable address to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science in 1991, Dr. L. D. Rue, confronted with the predicament of modern man, boldly advocated that we deceive ourselves by means of some “Noble Lie” into thinking that we and the universe still have value.28 Claiming that “the lesson of the past two centuries is that intellectual and moral relativism is profoundly the case,” Dr. Rue muses that the consequence of such a realization is that one’s quest for personal wholeness (or self-fulfillment) and the quest for social coherence become independent from one another. This is because on the view of relativism the search for self-fulfillment becomes radically privatized: each person chooses his own set of values and meaning. “There is no final, objective reading on the world or the self. There is no universal vocabulary for integrating cosmology and morality.” If we are to avoid “the madhouse option,” where self-fulfillment is pursued regardless of social coherence, and “the totalitarian option,” where social coherence is imposed at the expense of personal wholeness, then we have no choice but to embrace some Noble Lie that will inspire us to live beyond selfish interests and so achieve social coherence. A Noble Lie “is one that deceives us, tricks us, compels us beyond self-interest, beyond ego, beyond family, nation, [and] race.” It is a lie, because it tells us that the universe is infused with value (which is a great fiction), because it makes a claim to universal truth (when there is none), and because it tells me not to live for self-interest (which is evidently false). “But without such lies, we cannot live.”

This is the dreadful verdict pronounced over modern man. In order to survive, he must live in self-deception. But even the Noble Lie option is in the end unworkable. For if what I have said thus far is correct, belief in a Noble Lie would not only be necessary to achieve social coherence and personal wholeness for the masses, but it would also be necessary to achieve one’s own personal wholeness. For one cannot live happily and consistently on an atheistic worldview. In order to be happy, one must believe in objective meaning, value, and purpose. But how can one believe in those Noble Lies while at the same time believing in atheism and relativism? The more convinced you are of the necessity of a Noble Lie, the less you are able to believe in it. Like a placebo, a Noble Lie works only on those who believe it is the truth. Once we have seen through the fiction, then the Lie has lost its power over us. Thus, ironically, the Noble Lie cannot solve the human predicament for anyone who has come to see that predicament.

The Noble Lie option therefore leads at best to a society in which an elitist group of illuminati deceive the masses for their own good by perpetuating the Noble Lie. But then why should those of us who are enlightened follow the masses in their deception? Why should we sacrifice self-interest for a fiction? If the great lesson of the past two centuries is moral and intellectual relativism, then why (if we could) pretend that we do not know this truth and live a lie instead? If one answers, “for the sake of social coherence,” one may legitimately ask why I should sacrifice my self-interest for the sake of social coherence. The only answer the relativist can give is that social coherence is in my self-interest—but the problem with this answer is that self-interest and the interest of the herd do not always coincide. Besides, if (out of self-interest) I do care about social coherence, the totalitarian option is always open to me: forget the Noble Lie and maintain social coherence (as well as my self-fulfillment) at the expense of the personal wholeness of the masses. Generations of Soviet leaders who extolled proletarian virtues while they rode in limousines and dined on caviar in their country dachas found this alternative quite workable. Rue would undoubtedly regard such an option as repugnant. But therein lies the rub. Rue’s dilemma is that he obviously values deeply both social coherence and personal wholeness for their own sakes; in other words, they are objective values, which according to his philosophy do not exist. He has already leapt to the upper story. The Noble Lie option thus affirms what it denies and so refutes itself.

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The Null Space Blog Milton Friedman on Health Care

Milton Friedman on Medical Care (Full Lecture)

Published on Feb 2, 2014

I have written about Obamacare over and over again on this blog. Dan Mitchell has shared many funny cartoons about Obamacare too. Milton Friedman has spoken out about government healthcare many times in the past and his film series FREE TO CHOOSE is on You Tube and I encourage you to watch it. It is clear that the federal government debt is growing so much that it is endangering us because if things keep going like they are now we will not have any money left for the national defense because we are so far in debt as a nation.

We have been spending so much on our welfare state through food stamps and other programs that I am worrying that many of our citizens are becoming more dependent on government and in many cases they are losing their incentive to work hard because of the welfare trap the government has put in place. Other nations in Europe have gone down this road and we see what mess this has gotten them in. People really are losing their faith in big government and they want more liberty back. It seems to me we have to get back to the founding  principles that made our country great.  We also need to realize that a big government will encourage waste and corruption. Also raising taxes on the job creators is a very bad idea too. The Laffer Curve clearly demonstrates that when the tax rates are raised many individuals will move their investments to places where they will not get taxed as much.

In 1980 I read the book FREE TO CHOOSE by Milton Friedman and it really enlightened me a tremendous amount.  I suggest checking out these episodes and transcripts of Milton Friedman’s film series FREE TO CHOOSE: “The Failure of Socialism” and “The Anatomy of a Crisis” and “What is wrong with our schools?”  and “Created Equal”  and  From Cradle to Grave, and – Power of the Market.

 The Null Space Blog

Milton Friedman on Health Care

The other day I came across a superb article by economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman on how to cure health care (H/TSwiss Economist who originally linked to the article, and who posted a comment about it on Enjoyment and Contemplation). The article is somewhat long but definitely worth reading, especially in light of the recent Supreme Court ruling on the Patient Neglect and Unaffordable Care Act (known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in Newspeak, or as “Obamacare”). The government naturally ignored all of Friedman’s advice in the Patient Neglect and Unaffordable Care Act, and Friedman hints at why the government’s health care reform will fail (despite the fact that Friedman died even before “Obamacare” was written).

First, Friedman explains why health insurance — unlike many other forms of insurance — is bought through one’s employer:

We have become so accustomed to employer-provided medical care that we regard it as part of the natural order. Yet it is thoroughly illogical. Why single out medical care? Food is more essential to life than medical care. Why not exempt the cost of food from taxes if provided by the employer? Why not return to the much-reviled company store when workers were in effect paid in kind rather than in cash?

The revival of the company store for medicine has less to do with logic than pure chance. It is a wonderful example of how one bad government policy leads to another. During World War II, the government financed much wartime spending by printing money while, at the same time, imposing wage and price controls. The resulting repressed inflation produced shortages of many goods and services, including labor. Firms competing to acquire labor at government-controlled wages started to offer medical care as a fringe benefit. That benefit proved particularly attractive to workers and spread rapidly.

Initially, employers did not report the value of the fringe benefit to the Internal Revenue Service as part of their workers’ wages. It took some time before the IRS realized what was going on. When it did, it issued regulations requiring employers to include the value of medical care as part of reported employees’ wages. By this time, workers had become accustomed to the tax exemption of that particular fringe benefit and made a big fuss. Congress responded by legislating that medical care provided by employers should be tax-exempt.

I had always wondered why health insurance was bought through one’s employer. It is indeed “thoroughly illogical”. Next, Friedman explains that the meaning of insurance has undergone a drastic change in the context of health insurance:

Employer financing of medical care has caused the term insurance to acquire a rather different meaning in medicine than in most other contexts. We generally rely on insurance to protect us against events that are highly unlikely to occur but that involve large losses if they do occur—major catastrophes, not minor, regularly recurring expenses. We insure our houses against loss from fire, not against the cost of having to cut the lawn. We insure our cars against liability to others or major damage, not against having to pay for gasoline. Yet in medicine, it has become common to rely on insurance to pay for regular medical examinations and often for prescriptions.

This is exactly what I was explaining in my argument against health insurance mandates. The problem with using insurance to cover regular medical expenses like examinations is that a third party (the insurance company or government) needlessly interferes with normal economic transactions between caregiver and patient, and the patient has no incentive to pay attention to costs since the insurance company is paying for the care (i.e. the costs are hidden from the patient). As Friedman puts it:

Third-party payment has required the bureaucratization of medical care and, in the process, has changed the character of the relation between physicians (or other caregivers) and patients. A medical transaction is not simply between a caregiver and a patient; it has to be approved as “covered” by a bureaucrat and the appropriate payment authorized. The patient—the recipient of the medical care—has little or no incentive to be concerned about the cost since it’s somebody else’s money. The caregiver has become, in effect, an employee of the insurance company or, in the case of Medicare and Medicaid, of the government. The patient is no longer the one, and the only one, the caregiver has to serve. An inescapable result is that the interest of the patient is often in direct conflict with the interest of the caregiver’s ultimate employer. That has been manifest in public dissatisfaction with the increasingly impersonal character of medical care.

This system results in high costs for health care due to the fact that

nobody spends somebody else’s money as wisely or as frugally as he spends his own.

This principle is the ultimate basis for conservative arguments against such heavy government involvement as created and perpetuated in the most recent health care reform — government cannot and does not spend money as wisely or frugally on health care as patients themselves, who are also most familiar with their health care needs.

Friedman gives a solution to reducing the high cost of health care:

A cure requires reversing course, reprivatizing medical care by eliminating most third-party payment, and restoring the role of insurance to providing protection against major medical catastrophes.

The ideal way to do that would be to reverse past actions: repeal the tax exemption of employer-provided medical care; terminate Medicare and Medicaid; deregulate most insurance; and restrict the role of the government, preferably state and local rather than federal, to financing care for the hard cases. However, the vested interests that have grown up around the existing system, and the tyranny of the status quo, clearly make that solution not feasible politically.

Note that Friedman’s solution does call for some government involvement, particularly for the “hard cases” (individuals with pre-existing conditions, the poor, etc.). The conservative approach to health care does not mean the poor and unhealthy must be neglected or that government has no role in health care — despite what many leftists think and would have you believe — but it does limit the government to its proper role.

A politically feasible approach to Friedman’s solution (that actually exists to some degree already) is a medical savings account:

A medical savings account enables individuals to deposit tax-free funds in an account usable only for medical expense, provided they have a high-deductible insurance policy that limits the maximum out-of-pocket expense…it eliminates third-party payment except for major medical expenses and is thus a movement very much in the right direction. By extending tax exemption to all medical expenses whether paid by the employer or not, it eliminates the present bias in favor of employer-provided medical care.

This solution not only restores the true meaning of health insurance as insurance against major, unexpected, and catastrophic health expenses, but it weakens the current model of employer-based health insurance. With employers paying less for high deductible health insurance plans than for low deductible plans, employees can receive more of their compensation in the form of wages rather than health insurance. Cash is more flexible than insurance, so employees can choose to either spend their extra wages on health care (their out-of-pocket expenses would be higher) or on whatever else they want to spend it on (for example, if they are healthy and don’t need much health care).

Given the clear benefits of medical savings accounts, can you guess what the Patient Neglect and Unaffordable Care Act does? Although the law does allow such accounts, it restricts what they can be used to purchase (non-prescription medications cannot be paid for with funds from such accounts) and limits the amount of tax-free contributions that can be made to the accounts.

For completeness, Friedman does briefly mention the leftist approach to health care and its benefits and drawbacks:

In terms of holding down cost, one-payer directly administered government systems, such as exist in Canada and Great Britain, have a real advantage over our mixed system. As the direct purchaser of all or nearly all medical services, they are in a monopoly position in hiring physicians and can hold down their remuneration, so that physicians earn much less in those countries than in the United States. In addition, they can ration care more directly—at the cost of long waiting lists and much dissatisfaction.

The reason why this government approach to health care leads to rationing and long wait times is, of course, explained by basic economics:

Legislation cannot repeal the nonlegislated law of demand and supply: the lower the price, the greater the quantity demanded; at a zero price, the quantity demanded becomes infinite. Some method of rationing must be substituted for price, which invariably means administrative rationing.

With artificially low prices due to insurance mandates (like the “free contraceptives” mandate) demand rises and the low or zero price product is over-utilized. Furthermore, although the government can use its monopoly position to hold down physicians’ compensation, doing so reduces supply in a system of rising demand so that even more rationing is required. There are obvious reasons why monopolies should be avoided, so the leftist desire for a government monopoly (which, unlike a private monopoly, also has the authority of law and armed force to coerce) is “thoroughly illogical”.

Developing a good system of health care is certainly a difficult problem that requires much serious thought and debate, especially when dealing with the “hard cases” like the poor and individuals with pre-existing medical conditions. Both the left and the right have solutions to this problem, although as Milton Friedman has shown the left’s solution has serious logical and practical conflicts with the laws of economics. The conservative approach outlined by Friedman, on the other hand, takes into account the laws of economics and gives patients the power to choose how best to spend their money — on health care as well as other expenses — rather than impose an “individual mandate” tax.

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MUSIC MONDAY Reviews of Coldplay’s new album

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plastered in smiley faces

3/5stars

‘Business as usual’: Coldplay at the American music awards in Los Angeles, November 2015.
‘Business as usual’: Coldplay at the American music awards in Los Angeles, November 2015. Photograph: Kevin Mazur/AMA2015/WireImage

If smiley faces weren’t already taken as a signifier in pop, this album would be plastered in them. Coldplay’s last album, Ghost Stories (2014), was a sombre affair dealing with the fallout from Chris Martin’s conscious uncoupling. A Head Full of Dreams, by contrast, splats the band in primary hues, accentuating the positive with dance moves, ape costumes, high-profile guest spots – Beyoncé, Noel Gallagher – and Norwegian pop producers Stargate.

Instead of emoticons, Coldplay have illustrated this feeling with the spectrum of colours – à la Jamie xx, or Radiohead’s In Rainbows – and their newfound equanimity with “the flower of life”, a geometric doodle also used by emo bandBring Me the Horizon, the latter almost certainly a coincidence.

Coldplay have tended to absorb their influences more transparently than most. And for all the novelties here – electronic touches, chiefly – many echoes of U2 and Arcade Fire remain. As this album wends its way through departures and retrenchments, it feels very much like a transitional work, with the foursome dipping a toe into unfamiliar waters, keeping the other foot firmly on the shore.

On the one hand, you have lead single Adventure of a Lifetime, all flute loop and easy funk, a Hawaiian-shirted holiday from the earnest piano rock. “We are diamonds/Taking shape” is one of Martin’s better lyrics. It’s brand-busting, but hardly groundbreaking. Halfway through Army of One, Martin goes a little R&B (his heart goes “bu-boom-bu-boom-boom”) and you get a sense of what this album might have been.

Coldplay – Adventure Of A Lifetime (Official video)

Mostly, it’s business as usual, with more programming. Just two minutes and 20 seconds into the opening, title track, we find the first anthemic “oh-woah”, something of a Coldplay trademark; the kind of thing that has helped sell them in non-anglophone markets. Coldplay’s USP has always been epic consolation, and so it proves here once again on the final track, Up & Up, a singalong that’s hard to resist.

The reinventions just aren’t brave enough. A promised pop takeover by Stargate never quite materialises on Everglow – another Coldplay piano ballad, remarkable for being about the split and featuring Gwyneth Paltrow on backing vocals. If you are the kind of person who shares Facebook posts of inspirational quotes, there’s Kaleidoscope – an interlude featuring a Rumi poem about mindful acceptance, followed up by a snippet of President Obama singing Amazing Grace at the funeral of South Carolina state senator Clementa Pinckney. A poignant touch, but hardly the stuff of dreams.

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