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  • China Pulls the Plug on U.S. Loans

    Or at least it looks that way:

    China, wary of the troubled US economy, has already “canceled America’s credit card” by cutting down purchases of debt, a US congressman said Thursday.

    China has the world’s largest foreign reserves, believed to be mostly in dollars, along with around 800 billion dollars in US Treasury bonds, more than any other country.

    But Treasury Department data shows that investors in China have sharply curtailed their purchases of bonds in January and February.

    Representative Mark Kirk, a member of the House Appropriations Committee and co-chair of a group of lawmakers promoting relations with Beijing, said China had “very legitimate” concerns about its investments.

    “It would appear, quietly and with deference and politeness, that China has canceled America’s credit card,” Kirk told the Committee of 100, a Chinese-American group.

    For an economy addicted to credit like ours, that’s a serious problem.  And it’s one that the Obama Administration doesn’t have a good comeback for.

    Why?  Because, in spite of the fact that we have an Imitation European as President, we still have a very American mentality towards our situation.  For a long list of reasons, some of long standing and some more recent, we can only operate effectively under ideal conditions, where everything’s going our way.  But China’s withdrawal of ongoing credit is something that we can’t make them reverse, no matter how big of a fit we throw.

    As Mark Kirk (R, IL) observes, “I’m not sure too many people on Capitol Hill realize that this is now happening.”  They just can’t handle the truth.

  • The Non-Issue of Torture in the Bush Administration

    I’ve about had enough of the blather (especially from my Christian colleagues) about the whole business of torture during the last administration.

    There are two reasons for this.

    The first is that the Obama Administration’s reasons for shying away from prosecution are entirely practical.  They are as follows:

    1. Prosecuting one’s predecessors makes it easier to prosecute you and your officials when the political winds change.  (Those in Congress calling for prosecutions don’t have that problem.)
    2. Punishing those who commit torture makes it harder for you to torture your opponents.

    And that leads to the second point: any country which has the conditions we have in our prisons and will not deal with that has no business focusing on this kind of activity.

    A couple of years ago, I quoted the following from Lord Rees-Mogg of the Times:

    British businessmen do not trust American criminal law because of plea bargaining, in which the horrors of some American prisons are used as a threat to impel people to plead guilty in return for an agreed sentence.  The difference between a possible fifty years in a violent prison and two years in a country camp can be a very compelling argument.

    The U.S. is put at a disadvantage, since this makes businessmen reluctant to trade with the United States when there is the faintest chance of any party to a negotiation – such as Enron was in the Natwest case – being accused of illegal conduct, under the very wide U.S. laws which cover conspiracy.  Counter terrorist laws, and laws against organised crime can apply to ordinary businessmen, and frame the judgment of business transactions.

    One British businessman committed suicide on this very point.

    Message: the Bush Administration could have evaded the whole torture discussion if it could have found a way to threaten dumping these prisoners into the general prison population of, say, Huntsville or Brushy Mountain.

    We spent too much time in this country straining the gnat and swallowing the camel.

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  • The Downside to the Anglican Covenant

    Well, the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) is kicking off its quadrennial meeting in Kingston, Jamaica. (I wish my church would have the good sense to have its General Assembly in Jamaica, but I digress…) One of the items on the agenda is the decision to send the latest draft of the proposed Anglican Communion Covenant to the provinces:

    The 14th meeting of the ACC will consider the Ridley Draft of the Anglican Communion Covenant, and make comments on it, but is not expected to make any alterations to the text. “The text is mature enough to send on to the provinces who will make the decisions,” said Secretary General Kenneth Kearon at the opening press conference. Canon Kearon confirmed that the covenant will only be operative for those churches which decide to sign on to it. However, he admitted that ACC-14 will need to decide whether it will be individual dioceses or provinces that will sign up to the Covenant. So it appears that ACC 14 needs to decide whether individual dioceses can sign up to the Covenant even if their province does not.

    Although most conservatives (or “reasserters,” to use Kendall Harmon’s terminology) have supported the idea as insurance against the blatant revisionism they see in TEC, I’ve never been sold on the idea.

    If you take the long view of this, the erosion of substantive Christianity in TEC should have never happened in the first place.  That’s a long and complicated business, and I think part of the problem on the reasserter side is that many of those who experienced it to start with bailed on the church long ago, leaving a kind of amnesia for other reasserters who woke up in 2003 and groaned to find their church in the hands of the LGBT community.  (That’s one reason why I plug away at commentary on the Anglican/Episcopal world.)

    But it did.  From a marketing standpoint, it started with a relatively small group of people, at seminaries, in liberal parishes, and of course bishops such as James Pike.  But it came to take over the church anyway.  Now of course the process is more insidious because liberals have shifted from straight-up scepticism (such as you see in, say, D.C. Toedt) to this post-modern idea that God and the Scriptures are true enough to say what we want them to.  (I know that’s an oversimplification, but I don’t have the tenacity to write long diatribes like A.S. Haley, so bear with me.)  That shift actually simplifies the liberals’ job, because they can continue to push the church further away from Biblical Christianity while at the same time flushing people like Thew Forrester and Ann Holmes Redding down the ecclesiastical commode because they aren’t “Christian.”  (In Forrester’s case, it’s amazing how many bishops and standing committees have rejected him on the basis of liturgical defect rather than doctrinal or theological one, but that’s not new in TEC either.)

    There’s no reason why, over time, the masters of process and elite takeover can’t repeat what they did within provices on a Communion level, and the Anglican Covenant would give them the perfect weapon to do that.  And that’s why I wish the conservatives would stick with their ecclesiastical version of the Normandy invasion on this continent and elsewhere and skip the Covenant thing altogether.

    In some ways, it’s like what Abraham told the rich man regarding Lazarus:

    ‘Then, Father,’ he said, ‘I beg you to send Lazarus to my father’s house– For I have five brothers to warn them, so that they may not come to this place of torture also.’ ‘They have the writings of Moses and the Prophets,’ replied Abraham; ‘let them listen to them.’ ‘But, Father Abraham,’ he urged, ‘if some one from the dead were to go to them, they would repent.’ ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets,’ answered Abraham, ‘they will not be persuaded, even if some one were to rise from the dead.’” Luke 16:27-31, TCNT.

    If a group which professes and calls itself Christian can’t figure out the truth with the information they have, what do they think adding a Covenant will do?

  • The IRS Rewards Corporations For Not Being American

    Abu Daoud challenged me on the whole business of people and businesses fleeing the UK on account of rising taxation.  I answered that, but now on this side of the pond we have this:

    Code Section 162(m) limits the deduction for compensation paid to certain highly paid employees of publicly held corporations to $1 million per year. A recent Private Letter Ruling addressed the application of this limitation to a foreign corporation whose American Depository Shares are publicly traded.

    The Code Section 162(m) limitations only apply to corporations issuing a class of common equity shares required to be registered under section 12 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. In the Private Letter Ruling, the corporation paying the excess compensation was a foreign corporation that was qualified as a “foreign private issuer” under 17 CFR Section 240.3b-4(c) and as such was not required to be registered under section 12 of the Exchange Act…

    Therefore, foreign corporations with limited U.S. shareholders or that appropriately limit certain U.S. connections have some confirmation from the IRS that they are outside the $1 million compensation limits.

    If you see a rash of one-way plane tickets to the Cayman Islands, don’t be surprised.

  • Capital Flight: The UK Leads the Way

    Being the darling of America’s elites will probably not be much of a warning to us about this:

    The British budget last Wednesday did very little to rectify that country’s yawning fiscal deficit, but what little it did was almost entirely at the expense of the country’s high-income earners, those making over 150,000 pounds (US$210,000). The fascinating question is: if British governments return to their pre-1979 high-tax ways, as seems likely, what will happen to London’s financial services business?

    Not content with raising the top marginal income tax rate to 45% from 40% last November, Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling raised it again to 50%. Two tax increases in one year will certainly start to convince affluent Brits that this has become a habit, as it was with previous Labor governments. Indeed, yawning future budget deficits, and the accompanying financing difficulties, are likely to lead to further such increases. Now the European Union wants to impose a Europe-wide statutory limit on bankers’ bonuses.

    The Europeans (and this includes the Brits) are taking a cue from Rahm Emanuel and using this crisis to both revert to higher tax regimes and to eliminate tax shelters.  Their idea is that people will just sit around and allow their incomes to be taken away by the Taxman.

    But this is not the case, as Martin Hutchinson points out:

    Since the destruction of almost all the historic British financial institutions in 1986-2000, the picture is very different. A high proportion of the participants in the London market are foreigners, and even British participants are much more securely members of the international moneyed elite than of the decayed British aristocracy or impoverished middle class. The significant London financial institutions are almost all headquartered outside Britain, and their London staff have caused the head offices endless cost and risk over the last few years by their careless attitude to the parent institution’s risks and insatiable appetite for their own rewards.

    Potential clients are themselves global, with corporations manufacturing worldwide and run by rootless MBA management, while the wealthy are almost entirely from non-UK cultures, possibly effectively without any domicile at all if their home country has been taken over by crooks, thugs or Marxists. In any international business, London is no longer without serious competition; for one thing, most owners of London financial houses have taken good care to install equivalent capabilities in their home country headquarters.

    Although it will take more abuse to achieve this result in the U.S., it certainly can be done.  And will almost have to be, given the a) high tax rates necessary to service the enormous debt our government is running up and b) the anti-growth policies (such as cap and trade) which will make repayment of this debt even harder.  When this transpires, there will be much movement of the world’s financial system.

  • Islam vs. the Atheists: The New Competition

    The juxtaposition of two posts deserves note.

    First, this one from Abu Daoud about Our Islamic Future (it’s the YouTube video below):

    The second comes from the New York Times (HT to Titusonenine):

    More than ever, America’s atheists are linking up and speaking out — even here in South Carolina, home to Bob Jones University, blue laws and a legislature that last year unanimously approved a Christian license plate embossed with a cross, a stained glass window and the words “I Believe” (a move blocked by a judge and now headed for trial).

    They are connecting on the Internet, holding meet-ups in bars, advertising on billboards and buses, volunteering at food pantries and picking up roadside trash, earning atheist groups recognition on adopt-a-highway signs.

    They liken their strategy to that of the gay-rights movement, which lifted off when closeted members of a scorned minority decided to go public.

    The analogy to the gay rights movement is fruitful, not only because they’re “coming out of the closet” but also because the LGBT community is more secular than people like V. Gene Robinson and Susan Russell want to admit.  So there’s a considerable overlap between the two.

    Generally speaking, on both sides of the Atlantic the usual target of atheists has been Christianity.  But a more agressive–and demographically growing–group are the Muslims.  If and when Islam decides to focus on atheists–and that focus depends upon whether the atheists are stupid enough to target them legally, something they haven’t done much of yet–the resulting firestorm will not be nice.  And the atheists will wish they had stuck with making the Christians’ life miserable.

    Will this happen?  If Allah wills it…

  • Forrest Mims, Creationist, Featured in True Maroon

    The current edition of True Maroon, an online magazine for and about Aggies, features a piece (in video and text) on Forrest Mims III ’66, science writer and researcher. In November 2008, Discover magazine named him one of the “50 Best Brains in Science.”

    But all was not so rosy for Mims.  As the text portion explains:

    In 1990, Mims was denied a writing spot as the editor of Scientific American’s “The Amateur Science” column after revealing his belief in creationism. The controversy and his claim of religious discrimination launched Mims into an international media storm. Reporters showed up on his doorstep, his phone rang constantly for interviews and television news set up cameras in the pasture.

    When the hard questions came and the opposition got loud, he did what he still does. “I revert right back to being a freshman at Texas A&M with that sophomore yelling at me and screaming at me, telling me to do pushups,” he said. “So I can tolerate things that I might not have been able to tolerate otherwise.”

    Texas A&M taught him that resistance makes you stronger—and what he thought was a roadblock in his career turned out to be an opportunity. In taking a break from writing, Mims focused on science.

    I’m proud to be a fellow Aggie with Forrest Mims.

  • Book Review:J.I. Packer’s Affirming the Apostles’ Creed

    J.I. Packer is one of the most eminent writers and theologians in the Anglican world.  His claim to fame was sealed by his being defrocked by Michael Ingham, the revisionist Bishop of New Westminster whose sanctioning of same-sex blessings predates the American’s ordination of V. Gene Robinson.   It’s one of those things that, if he never did anything else, it’s enough for one life.

    But he has done many other things, and one of those is the little book Affirming the Apostles’ Creed.  It’s a step-by-step voyage through the Creed, a statement of faith that on the surface seems universal but in fact has suffered from some neglect, and not only from the revisionist part of the Anglican/Episcopal world, either.

    To begin with, the Apostles’ Creed isn’t recited as much as one would think for such a basic statement of faith.  In the traditional Anglican prayer books, it was featured in Morning and Evening Prayer, with the longer and more detailed Nicene Creed (which was not, in reality, formulated at either Council of Nicea) taking pride of place in the Holy Communion, as it does in the Roman Catholic Novus Ordo Missae.  Although that division is not set in stone, making Holy Communion the “default” celebration in TEC didn’t do this Creed’s currency any benefit.

    Beyond that is a more yawning chasm: most Evangelical churches don’t even include the Apostles’ Creed as part of their basic declaration of faith.  It’s not technically necessary for millions of Christians to know it, let alone believe it.

    Packer–who is definitely from Anglicanism’s Evangelical wing–has furnished an interesting resource to remedy the latter problem.  Affirming the Apostles’ Creed begins with an overview of how the creed came into being, and from there addresses and illuminates each point of the Creed.  His approach is deliberately simple; he tries (with considerable success) to detail the background of the various parts of the Creed.  There’s a fine line between simplification and insulting the reader’s intelligence, and Packer does an admirable job in walking that line.  His exposition of the theology/doctrine behind each phrase actually clarifies what the Creed expresses.  Each chapter has at the end verse references for further Bible study and questions for thought and discussion, so the book is aimed not only for personal reading but group study, either for new converts (more about that later,) or even a confirmation class.

    Let me make some observations about some points he makes that may be of more interest to those outside the Anglican world than inside.

    First, many Evangelicals have been bothered by the phrase, “the Holy Catholic Church.”  While reviewing both sides of the issue, Packer gives the classic Protestant Anglican reply to this, namely that this phrase refers to “the one worldwide fellowship of believing people whose Head is Christ.”  This has been standard Anglican issue for a long time, although it’s not to the Anglo-Catholics’ taste.

    Second, his attitude towards the Charismatic Renewal is, to say the least, ambivalent.  One the one hand, he tells us the following:

    The only sure signs are that the Christ of the Bible is acknowledged, trusted, loved for his grace, and served for his glory and that believers actually turn form sin to the life of holiness that is Christ’s image in his people…These are the criteria by which we must judge, for instance, the modern “charismatic renewal” and Christian Science (reaching, perhaps, different verdicts in the two cases.)

    On the other hand he has this statement which deserves wider currency:

    The evangelical theology of revival, first spelled out in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the present-day emergence of “charismatic renewal” on a worldwide scale remind us of something that Roman Catholic and Protestant disputers, in their concentration on doctrinal truth, tended to miss–namely, that the church must always be open to the immediacy fo the Spirit’s Lordship and that disorderly vigor in a congregation is infinitely preferable to a correct and tidy deadness.

    Third, at the start of the book he depreciates evangelistic approaches such as the “Roman Road” type (which is similar but not identical to this)  and presents the Apostles’ Creed as superior for this purpose.  That deserves a better treatment than he gives it.

    It’s true that the “Roman Road” approach (and the more elaborate approach such as one sees in Evangelism Explosion) work best in a society where most people have a Christian background.  It’s worth noting, however, the only people who think that this method of presenting the Gospel to be the “end all” for the Christian are those who have a theology of conversion and perseverance of, say, the Southern Baptists.  That’s a distinction that Packer fails to make; he criticises the method without really exploring the theology underlying the idea.

    Beyond that, it’s becoming evident that, in a non-Christian society–be it a secular one or dominated by another religion such as Islam–that follow-up and discipleship are as critical a part of the process as basic evangelism.  Packer admits as much by evoking the history of Roman Empire Christianity with its cathecumenate.  The discipleship process is integral to the evangelistic one, and it is here that the Apostles’ Creed, because of its simplicity and conciseness, is potentially a useful part of the process.

    With all this and more, Affirming the Apostles’ Creed is an excellent introduction and elucidation of this, Christianity’s most foundation declaration of faith.

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  • Barack Obama: Let the Show Trials Begin

    This speaks for itself:

    (You’ll need to get about 4 1/2 minutes into the video to get to that particular question and response.)

    I’ve been predicting this kind of thing since before the election.  I’ve also observed that, as President, Barack Obama is caught in the middle on this.  As a liberal, putting these people on trial in effect moves forward the criminalisation of his political opponents, which is an ideal situation for him.  As chief executive,  he knows that such proceedings could be used against him and his officials if and only if the political winds reverse themselves.  To guarantee the latter won’t happen, he must make the former work completely, and that’s a big gamble, even in this current, one-sided political climate.

    Note: make no mistake, proceedings such as this are very much “victor’s justice,” as has been the case since the end of World War II (see this piece on that subject.)

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  • A Fistful of Yuan Takes a Step Closer to Reality for Everyone

    In putting together my series on doing business in China in the early 1980’s, I adopted the title A Fistful of Yuan, turning a business tale into a spaghetti Western (or, more properly, an Eastern.)

    Well, it looks like the Chinese are working up towards making the yuan a real hard currency, as this indicates:

    The Chinese government’s decision this month to let exporters in a small number of cities settle their overseas trade in yuan rather than in US dollars has far-reaching implications, according to economists, even though the immediate impact is minimal.

    The trading hubs of Shanghai at the mouth of the Yangtze River and Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Dongguan in the Pearl River Delta further south can use the yuan in overseas trade settlement, a State Council, or cabinet, meeting chaired by Premier Wen Jiabao said. The two deltas are the base for most of China’s export-oriented industry.

    The settlement scheme is voluntary and of benefit to relatively small groups, said Pauline Loong, senior vice president in charge of China policy and risk research at CIMB-GK Securities (HK) Ltd, but “the implication is far-reaching. The scheme extends the use of the Chinese currency outside of the mainland. We see this as the first step on the road to full liberalization of China’s capital account and full convertibility for the renminbi,” one term for the Chinese currency, also known as the yuan.

    And so we, in the not too distant future, may need a “fistful of yuan” (or perhaps a few yuan more) to get along.

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