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  • Worth Avenue Palm Trees Go to 9/11 Memorial

    While New Yorkers fight over the mosque near Ground Zero, some palm trees that graced Worth Avenue are replanted in a 9/11 memorial in Palm Beach Gardens:

    911 Memorial3.JPGThe Christmas palms that once lined the three-block commercial stretch of Worth Avenue had been offered to any takers willing to pay for their removal by the contractors on the Avenue’s renovation, which began in early April.

    After many calls to Burkhardt Construction from a number of parties, but no serious followups, Boynton Landscape Co. of West Palm Beach stepped in to rescue some of the trees and plant them at Palm Beach Gardens’ soon-to-be-completed 09-11-01 Memorial at the city’s Fire Station No. 3 on Northlake Boulevard.

    About 15 trees were taken off the street and to the site in June, said Noel DelValle, business development manager at Boynton Landscape Co.

  • The Tricky Part in Keeping Western Civilisation Afloat

    Martin Hutchinson is sanguine about the future of Western civilisation, but every silver lining has a cloud:

    Provided Western government spending is kept under control so private sectors have room to flourish, and interest rates are fairly quickly restored to levels that encourage saving, the Western advantages of capital, education, technology and favourable business climate will ensure that growth resumes, so that economic dominance does not pass wholly to the East. Moreover, China and India are not without problems of their own: in China’s case, a banking system with potentially massive bad-loan problems; in India’s case a chronically overspending, corrupt and inefficient government. The chances are that the United States will still be among the most prosperous countries in the world in 2050, as will most of Europe.

    It’s the government spending and interest rates problem that’s the key.  I don’t see either party restoring government spending to the levels of federal or state income (NJ’s Chris Christie is an exception) and the Fed is obsessed with quantitative easing, which will keep interest rates artificially low and encourage deflation (unless they totally lose control of the situation and we have hyperinflation.)  And one should add to this litany our government’s propensity to regulate/outlaw large portions of economic activity is, in its own way, as damaging as our lack of fiscal discipline.

    Our élites have basically made the decision that they don’t want an economic regime that they can’t control no matter how well it works.  And that’s at the source of many of our political conflicts.

  • A Few Words About Tennessee Gubenatorial Candidate Basil Marceaux

    I see that Basil Marceaux has made it big on YouTube:

    I know Basil Marceaux.  What you see is what you get.

    First: he is not the Republican nominee for Governor.  Our primary is Thursday (5 August).  My guess is that he’ll do well to get into the single digits, although with all of the exposure (and perhaps a few crossover Democrats, we have open primaries in Tennessee) one never knows.

    Second: contrary to what many on the left might hope for, he doesn’t have much (if any) standing in the Republican Party in Tennessee, or here in Hamilton County.  He has been booted from the Hamilton County Pachyderm Club at least once (I mean not allowed to attend the meeting.)  He has picketed our club on the street in protest, claiming we have abridged his First Amendment rights.

    He said in one of his campaign videos that he owes anyone who shakes his hand.  I’ve shaken his hand, he owes me.

  • Palm Beach Police Do Their Part to Combat Illegal Immigration

    It may cause controversy in Arizona, but Palm Beach’s finest keep rolling on:

    Palm Beach police captured seven illegal immigrants early Sunday morning near the intersection of South Ocean Boulevard and County Road.

    Police were alerted shortly after 2 a.m., according to Capt. Fred Hess. “They just landed from Haiti. No boat was found,” Hess said.

    The four men and three women were turned over to U.S. Border Patrol officers around 4:30 a.m. Police canvassed the area but did not find others. A sheriff’s helicopter assisted the effort, Hess said.

    The biggest problem, however, is a proper definition of an illegal immigrant.  Palm Beachers believe that just about anyone who come from across the lake is potentially suspect unless they’re coming over as the help.

  • When the Union and the Environmentalists Collide: the Bucyrus International-India Equipment Fiasco

    The fun started when the Export-Import bank nixed Bucyrus International’s sale of mining equipment for an Indian power project:

    On Thursday, the Export-Import Bank denied financing for Reliance Power Ltd., an Indian power plant company, effectively wiping out about $600 million in coal mining equipment sales for Bucyrus, chief executive Tim Sullivan said.

    The fossil fuel project was the first to come before the government-run bank since it adopted a climate-change policy to settle a lawsuit and to meet Obama administration directives.

    “President Obama has made clear his administration’s commitment to transition away from high-carbon investments and toward a cleaner-energy future,” Export-Import Bank Chairman Fred Hochberg said in a statement. “After careful deliberation, the Export-Import Bank board voted not to proceed with this project because of the projected adverse environmental impact.”

    The bank’s decision is puzzling, Sullivan said, because the power plant will meet international standards and the bank’s environmental criteria.

    The plant is under construction in Sasan, central India, and is scheduled to be up and running in 2012. Coal mining will take place for the plant whether it’s done with Bucyrus machines or equipment from China and Belarus, Sullivan said.

    But criteria don’t matter to fanatics.  Capitalist roaders such as Bucyrus International are of no account to this administration.

    Bucyrus International’s union, however, which does matter to this administration, had another opinion of this altogether:

    Under growing pressure from Wisconsin leaders and union workers, the U.S. Export-Import Bank may reconsider its decision to deny loan guarantees for mining equipment that would be made in the Milwaukee area for supplying coal to a power plant in India, a bank official said Monday…

    The president of the United Steelworkers of America called for a letter-writing campaign protesting the bank’s refusal to finance mining equipment that would be made by union members.

    Union President Leo Gerard said he would ask that his union’s leaders and members write to their congressional delegations and the Export-Import Bank, urging the government-backed lender to reverse its decision.

    He also urged Steelworkers to attend the town hall meeting Wednesday.

    “At a time when we are losing good-paying jobs, and at a time when President Obama wants to double U.S. exports, how can the Export-Import Bank deny a loan that would create and protect jobs at Bucyrus International? It was a dumb decision,” Gerard told the Journal Sentinel.

    It’s also noteworthy that most of Wisconsin’s political leaders, right at the moment, are Democrats.

    I hope the union can make the right people in our government see daylight on this issue.  If not, the “Reagan Democrats” will ride again, and will have plenty of time for political activism, because they’ll be on the dole.

    Bucyrus, for its part, obviously has a Plan B:

    Bucyrus International, Inc., Wisconsin-based company with an annual turnover of around $2 billion, engaged in the design and manufacture of mining equipment, is setting up its India operations headquarters at Kolkata. The company is also actively considering setting up a manufacturing unit in the state. The company is on the lookout for an abandoned facility in West Bengal to set up a $5 million manufacturing unit. Over the next 5 years they plan to scale up the India operations and make it a 500-employee company.

    Bucyrus plans to design and source parts and components from Kolkata that are required for the Indian mining industry as well as for their global requirements.  Bucyrus India Ltd, a 100 percent Indian subsidiary of Bucyrus International, Inc. already has a facility at Singrauli in Madhya Pradesh & Bangalore. According to  Timothy W. Sullivan, president and CEO of Bucyrus International, by the end of 2007 the company will have 3 other offices in India in Singareni (Andhra Pradesh), Singrauli (MP) and Southeastern Coalfields (Chhattisgarh).

    The blunt truth is that our government has, for the most part, disdained heavy industry for most of my lifetime, which is why much of it has decamped for happier places.

  • Some Thoughts on the Vote re Women Ordained Bishops at the Church of God 2010 General Assembly

    With this post I resume with a topic that generated the most heated debate at the Church of God 2010 General Assembly: the admission of women to the rank of Ordained Bishops.  (For my Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox friends, the term “Ordained Bishop” has a different meaning than a diocesan: in addition to including those and above, it includes a large number of our pastors and other ministers.  It is simply the highest rank of minister in our denomination.)

    I have openly supported this idea since 2006, although I doubt that this support carried much weight.  Evidently the support of others didn’t either; it was defeated by a large margin in the General Council of ordained bishops, not once but twice during the same General Council.

    In the wake of these votes, I’d like to make two comments.  (The entire General Assembly was live streamed, something I hope we see in the Anglican/Episcopal world; hopefully it will be archived at the GA site in the near future.)

    1. Honestly, the speeches on both sides (or at least the ones I heard; I had many duties away from the sessions) may have been the “best shot” of both sides, but I found the overall calibre of the debate wanting.  Those against reminded me of some of the trade union grievance sessions and contract negotiations I went through in my family business.  The proponents were more eloquent, but some of them drifted into the same kind of  “soft” arguments that have gotten their Episcopal counterparts in trouble.  Such are, in a true Pentecostal context, unnecessary.  The Church of God, in common with most Pentecostal denominations, has a long and illustrious history of women in ministry free from the secular context that bedevils most liberal churches and based on a church life led by the Spirit.  If we believe and are convinced that this is God’s intent for the church, we should follow this to its conclusion.
    2. This debate has driven home something I’ve come to realise but have never really wanted to admit: the ministers of the Church of God struggle with a really clear, straightforward debate on the important issues.  That’s a legacy of the aintellectual tradition we have, reinforced by the usual Evangelical fear that putting the Scriptures in a consistent philosophical context would lead to unBiblical results.  That affects even procedural issues, such as the Council voting down quadrennial assemblies because they would reduce the opportunities to vote on our leadership and then turning around and granting Executive Committee members four year terms!  And I’m not sure our institutions of higher learning have really addressed the problem effectively.

    I think that, eventually, the Church of God will come around on this issue.  The tragedy of the whole thing, however, is that in the energy of the debate over women ordained bishops, the less than satisfactory role of the laity remains unresolved.  If our view of the role of the laity was in line with the New Testament, this debate would be much simpler, because the opportunity for ministry would be more open to everyone without the complexities of the ministerial ranking system (which, as one opponent of the motion admitted, itself has nothing to do with the New Testament.)  It would be a tragedy that we would end up with men and women ordained bishops in our pulpits and empty pews.

  • The Class Struggle Comes Back, Part II

    There are some on the left (like Kevin Drum at Mother Jones) who are having second thoughts on the American obsession of racial racial equality over class equalisation:

    Class/income-based affirmative action has long struck me as an alternative that ought to get more attention than it does…Class-based program programs might, in the end, provide modestly less help for ethnic minorities than current policies — though well-designed ones might not. But they have some advantages too. For one thing, they help poor people. That’s worthwhile all by itself.

    I commented a little over a week ago that class equalisation is something that, for a number of reasons, the left’s elitist leadership isn’t well positioned to deal with.  But at least there’s some “out of the box” thinking going on about this problem.  Americans have traditionally let their civil rights struggles be driven by just about anything else than class–race, gender, sexual orientation, you name it.  (The LGBT’s struggle for “equality” would take a serious hit in a class-based equalisation effort, but that’s another post.)

    But, in a parenthesis to Drum’s article, James Joyner shows that the left’s new thinking about this has his limits:

    But, surely, we don’t want to create new categories, such as “Scotch-Irish Sons of Confederate Veterans,” for special treatment.

    Ah, now we’re getting to where the rubber meets the road: the Scots-Irish are at the very core as to why this country has struggled with class-based equalisation.  Their sociological system poses some unique challenges because a class-struggle paradigm is based on workers being exploited, and if there’s one thing that Scots-Irish are masters at getting around, it’s work, which is why exploiting them is a real trick.

    P.S. I did read Sen. Webb’s piece that Drum refers to.  It’s an interesting piece with some good observations, but his idea that Southern upper classes set the whites and blacks against each other is absurd.  The War Between the States effectively decapitated Southern society and ruined its upper classes, which put the poor Scots-Irish in the driver’s seat for a century.  In many ways postbellum Southern society was one of the most “bottom-up” driven societies in history, but the blacks bore the brunt of that “egalitarian” result.

  • Muslim, Christian or Citizen of Your Country First?

    Take a look at the interesting graph on the right that appears in Chan Akya’s article on why European countries want to ban the burqa and the US is in no hurry to do so.

    I have a few observations about this:

    • It’s ironic that France, where a larger proportion of Muslims consider themselves a citizen of France (or Europe?) first than in the neighbouring countries, was the first to ban the burqa.  That’s due to France’s long tradition of dirigisme (a hangover of the ancien régime) and some of the factors Akya mentioned in this piece: stronger position of women in European politics, stronger secularistic idea, etc.
    • There’s no surprise in the attitudes of Muslims in Middle Eastern countries, or Nigeria.  The graph is striking in the exception that Indonesia is.
    • It’s interesting how Christians in the US are far stronger in identifying themselves as Christians over Americans, even with the high level of patriotism we have in the US.  That’s helped by the fact that, leftist sneers about the religious right notwithstanding, Christians in the US viscerally understand that their faith is not fundamentally a political philosophy, and that there’s more to life than politics.
    • It will be especially interesting for my Anglican readers to note Nigeria’s “Christian first” majority.
    • I think that European Christians fervour for state vs. faith is due mostly to the notional nature of much of European Christianity, even in the face of the ease one has in being a secularist.
    • One missing graph is the attitude of American Muslims, which I think would have tracked their Christian counterparts.

    I don’t think that France’s ban on the burqa is a human rights move.  If that were the case, the ban wouldn’t be under consideration.  I think it’s the beginning of a major pushback of European (and Australian, under the new PM) secularism against a real religious threat to their idea.  It’s what I would call a “Ministry of Culture” kind of solution: use the government to impose what the leaders think is the nation’s culture by the coercive powers of the state (I had some fun with this idea here.)   How well it will work will depend on the vigour they pursue it with and what kind of reaction they get out of the Islamic world (both within and without their countries.)

    One thing Americans have had the luxury of is the whole “God and Country” concept.  It’s even embodied in the Army chaplains’ motto.  As secuarlists advance here and “God or Country” becomes a more common choice, it will be interesting to see how that plays out.  On a practical level, the success in weaning Americans off of their reliance on God will depend, as it has in Europe, on the state’s ability to provide a secular source of temporal sustenance.  Given the wobbly state of our national finances, that’s not a given; the godless aren’t as brilliant as they think they are.

    ,

  • The Democrats Don't Need the Climate Bill to Achieve Their Objectives

    There will be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over this one:

    Conceding they can’t find enough votes for the measure, Senate Democrats on Thursday abandoned efforts to put together a comprehensive energy bill that would seek to limit greenhouse gas emissions, delivering a potentially fatal blow to a proposal Democrats have long touted and President Obama campaigned on.

    Instead, Democrats will push for a more limited bill that would seek to increase liability costs that oil companies would pay following spills such as the one in the Gulf of Mexico and would create additional incentives for the development of natural gas vehicles and provide rebates to people who buy products that reduce home energy use. They did not release details of the proposal, but Senate Democrats said they expected to find GOP support and pass it in the next two weeks.

    They shouldn’t bother with any of it.

    The simple truth is that the key to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is to reduce Americans’ standard of living (smaller housing, smaller cars, fewer kilometres driven, less consumption, etc.)  It’s that simple.  It’s disingenuous for liberals to tell you otherwise.

    Fortunately for them (if not for us,) all of this is being achieved with the current regime’s tax and economic policies: the ineffectual stimulus, the sluggish economy, rising taxes, health care reform, and the new proliferation of regulatory restrictions on business (including but not limited to the EPA’s classification of carbon monoxide as a regulatable pollutant) guarantee that meaningful economic growth is a mirage and will be for some time to come.  That will cut down on energy consumption.

    A simpler strategy for Barack Obama would have been to trash the economy and let the rest take care of itself, instead of putting his Democrat majority in harm’s way with another controversial legislative package.  It will also solve the immigration impasse too, as a country which can’t meaningfully create jobs won’t be a magnet for people sneaking across the border (barring complete collapse in Mexico.)

    It’s just amazing how simple things become when we look at them objectively.  Now if Obama could get past national insolvency and the loss of Congress, he would be in great shape.

  • The Digital Age Underscores the Need for Grace

    As the New York Times observes, in the digital world it’s the end of forgetting, and in the midst of this Jeffrey Rosen draws from the Jewish world:

    In addition to exposing less for the Web to forget, it might be helpful for us to explore new ways of living in a world that is slow to forgive. It’s sobering, now that we live in a world misleadingly called a “global village,” to think about privacy in actual, small villages long ago. In the villages described in the Babylonian Talmud, for example, any kind of gossip or tale-bearing about other people — oral or written, true or false, friendly or mean — was considered a terrible sin because small communities have long memories and every word spoken about other people was thought to ascend to the heavenly cloud. (The digital cloud has made this metaphor literal.) But the Talmudic villages were, in fact, far more humane and forgiving than our brutal global village, where much of the content on the Internet would meet the Talmudic definition of gossip: although the Talmudic sages believed that God reads our thoughts and records them in the book of life, they also believed that God erases the book for those who atone for their sins by asking forgiveness of those they have wronged. In the Talmud, people have an obligation not to remind others of their past misdeeds, on the assumption they may have atoned and grown spiritually from their mistakes. “If a man was a repentant [sinner],” the Talmud says, “one must not say to him, ‘Remember your former deeds.’ ”

    Unlike God, however, the digital cloud rarely wipes our slates clean, and the keepers of the cloud today are sometimes less forgiving than their all-powerful divine predecessor. In an interview with Charlie Rose on PBS, Eric Schmidt, the C.E.O. of Google, said that “the next generation is infinitely more social online” — and less private — “as evidenced by their Facebook pictures,” which “will be around when they’re running for president years from now.” Schmidt added: “As long as the answer is that I chose to make a mess of myself with this picture, then it’s fine. The issue is when somebody else does it.” If people chose to expose themselves for 15 minutes of fame, Schmidt says, “that’s their choice, and they have to live with it.”

    I think it’s fair to say that God will be around long after our digital cloud is gone.  But much of the problem here is that we are trying to force people into a perfect construct, something that human beings are simply not built for.  And that problem is going to get worse as we not only compete with each other for jobs and advancement but also with digital intelligence.

    Christians know but don’t always understand that we are saved by grace, which we define as God’s unmerited favour.  The imperfections screamed out in cyberspace–be they by ourselves or others–underscore “unmerited.”  The reason why Jesus Christ came to give us eternal life by his work and not ours is because we could not meet God’s standard of perfection, and the problems people face by stuff getting out on the Internet only underscores our need for grace from God, who has by his own Son furnished the means to obtain it.

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