Heavily indebted governments regularly pillage the money of savers. The reason is simple. Savers have spare money and governments don’t. So many governments want to live well beyond the means of their taxpayers. Some rob savers by inflation, eroding the value of their savings. Some do it by special savings taxes. Some do it by controlling interest rates, to ensure the government can borrow cheaply at the expense of the savers return. Some do all three of these things.

Now the EU and Cyprus are simply going to confiscate part  of a person’s savings away for being in a particular banks. That looks like a great way to encourage the mass migration of savings from weak banks in the Euro area to stronger banks somewhere else.

Vezi sursa articolului aici.

The crucifixion of Jesus Christ (33 A.D.) is the most attested historical fact of the ancient world.  In addition to the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, it is also widely attested by Greco-Roman and Jewish writers.  Closely related, history also confirms that the tomb of Jesus Christ on that first Easter morning was indeed empty.  Every vested party knew where Jesus was buried after he died.  Yet on Easter, the tomb was found empty, and nobody has ever been recovered.

In fact, the gospel of Matthew showcases that there was a still a heated debate going on between certain Jewish leaders and the Christians in the apostolic church over whether or not the disciples had stolen the body (Matthew 28:1-15).  As such, both sides knew full well that the tomb was empty.  More surprising, both sides also knew of the presence of Roman guards.

With a plethora of similar historical details connected to the empty tomb, Greco-Roman historian Michael Grant concedes, „The historian cannot justifiably deny the empty tomb … if we apply the same sort of criteria that we would apply to any other ancient sources, then the evidence is firm and plausible enough to necessitate the conclusion that the tomb was indeed found empty.”

Once the reality of the empty tomb sinks in, this stubborn fact substantially narrows down the historical possibilities of what transpired on Easter morning.  Outside the resurrection itself of Jesus Christ, only a handful of other historical scenarios have been propagated in its place – all of which can be routinely dismissed through a quick process of elimination.

One of the most popular answers to explain the empty tomb over the centuries is that the disciples stole Jesus’s body during the night.  The biggest problem with this supposition is it cannot explain the later behavior of the disciples, who became stalwart apostolic pillars in the church founded upon the preaching of the resurrection of Christ.  The apostles lived very difficult lives.  Many of them were martyred.  If they had stolen the body of Christ, they would have known that Jesus was not raised from the dead.  They thus would not have spent the rest of their lives sacrificing themselves for a lie.

Others have tried to implausibly advocate that the women who first visited the tomb Easter morning went to the wrong one.  The very fact that the gospels admit that women were the first ones to visit the empty tomb gives historical authenticity to the entire account.  In such a male-dominated world, no one in his right mind would ever want to acknowledge that women were the first to notice the tomb was empty – especially when a new religion was essentially founded upon such an embarrassing fact.

Some have tried to suggest that Jesus’s death was staged, or that it was a hoax.  This is impossible for the simple reason that no one could have survived the cross.  Jesus was beaten to a pulp and whipped out of his mind before he was crucified.  Once he was nailed to the cross, his fate was sealed.

Others have tried to say that the resurrection appearances of Jesus to his disciples were hallucinations.  Hallucinations, however, are individual occurrences by definition.  Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul wrote that whole groups of people, along with hundreds of eyewitnesses, saw the resurrected Lord.  In 1 Corinthians 15, the apostle Paul tells his followers in Corinth that more than 500 witnesses saw the resurrected Christ at one time, most of whom were still alive at the time of Paul’s writing (1 Corinthians 15:1-8).

Still others have tried to venture the idea the resurrection accounts were based on fictitious folklore.  However, such legends typically require 200-300 years in order to be established – which is precisely what did happen with all of the fanciful apocryphal gospels that have helped spur the modern interest in The Da Vinci Code.  In great contrast, the apostles were preaching the resurrection of Christ from the very outset, and even some of the most radical skeptical scholars of the German Protestant Enlightenment, like Ferdinand Christian Bauer (1792-1860), admitted that Galatians, Romans, and the Corinthian epistles were penned by the apostle Paul – who emphasized the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Bauer believed that much of the New Testament was written much later by pseudo-authors.

However, one of the most eminent ancient church historians of all time, English scholar J.B. Lightfoot (1829-1889), established very early dates for two important church fathers – Clement and Ignatius – both of whom quoted or alluded to most of the New Testament around the turn of the 1st century.  Sir William Ramsay (1851-1939) then established the surprising accuracy of the book of Acts, stating that Luke was one of the greatest historians of the ancient world.  In 1976, John A.T. Robinson (1919-1983) demolished the entire edifice of Protestant Germany’s skepticism by writing a book called Redating the New Testament.  Robinson placed the entire New Testament back to the 1st century because it everywhere presumes that the Jerusalem Temple was still standing.  Since the Romans destroyed the temple in 70 A.D., the New Testament must have been written before that time.

This leaves modern man faced with the startling conclusion that Jesus Christ may have indeed been raised from the dead.  A little more than a century ago, Dr. W.H. Griffith Thomas wrote an outstanding book entitled Christianity is Christ, where he strongly concluded that the resurrection of Jesus was one of the best-attested facts of the ancient world.  Much later in the 20th century, Josh McDowell compiled a vast array of Christian evidences that demand a verdict, and Lee Strobel has an excellent Case for Christ.  In fact, Strobel persuasively contends that the very historical existence of Christianity cannot be explained apart from the historicity of the resurrection of Christ.

Just because the resurrection of Christ cannot be placed in an experimental scientific test tube does not mean that it is an irrational fairy tale.  In 1 Corinthians 15, one of the longest chapters in the New Testament, the apostle Paul strings together a series of arguments for the resurrection of the dead – everything from the authority of the Old Testament to historical eyewitness accounts to his own apostolic authority and personal life – and even for the sake of morality itself.  Paul even points out that nature itself teaches the resurrection of the dead every year a farmer plants his garden anew (1 Corinthians 15:36).

It was Jewish German scholar Karl Lowith (1897-1973) who acutely observed, „The Christian hope is almost rational, for it rests on faith in an accomplished fact.”  However, because the apostolic writers depicted the historical events of the gospels as a decisive once-for-all cosmic salvation event, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ invariably offends, contradicts, and upsets „the normal historical consciousness of both ancient and modern times.”  The Christian faith offended the classical mind because it rendered a onetime historical event with ultimate significance.  The Christian faith offends the modern mind because it exempts its own specific history of salvation from the generalized history of multicultural godlessness.  Such unforgiveable offences are why the resurrection of Christ will often continue to be ignored and attacked in spite of its historicity.

Mark Musser is a missionary/pastor and a contributing writer for the Cornwall Alliance, a coalition of clergy, theologians, religious leaders, scientists, academics, and policy experts committed to bringing a balanced biblical view of stewardship to the critical issues of environment and development.  Mark is also the author of two books, Nazi Oaks: The Green Sacrifice of the Judeo-Christian Worldview in the Holocaust, which has been recently expanded, updated, and republished, and Wrath or Rest: Saints in the Hands of an Angry God, a commentary focusing on the warning passages in the book of Hebrews.

Vezi sursa articolului aici.

Recently Mahmoud Ahmadinejad predicted that Hugo Chávez would return on the clouds with Jesus on Resurrection Day. Then, Venezuela’s left-wing „president in charge” and hopeful successor to Hugo Chávez, Vice President Nicolás Maduro, gave Hugo credit for convincing Christ to influence the papal conclave to choose a South American pope. Immediately following the white smoke puffing from the Vatican chimney, Nicolás did some puffing of his own, only his was emanating from a bodily orifice bearing no resemblance to a chimney.

Based on his comments, Nicolás Maduro apparently thinks the room-temperature despot is sitting at the right hand of God, still fulfilling the calling of dictator. In the mystical eyes of Maduro, a follower of the late Bhagawan guru Śri Sathya Sai Baba, Chávez is also a „spiritual saint and miracle worker.” The late president of Venezuela is proving so potent a force that at his funeral he actually got Mahmoud to lose his head and commit „haram” by hugging his grief-stricken mother, Elena Frias de Chavez.

Nonetheless, Maduro, who must be smoking something other than Venezuelan cigars, said, „We know that our commander has risen up there and is face to face with Christ.” That comment, which wasn’t a joke, prompted laughter in the crowd Nicolás was addressing. In Maduro’s opinion, Hugo was such a great persuader that when the conclave in Rome was having difficulty choosing a pope, Hugo „got to Christ,” pulled Him aside and whispered in His ear, and thus „influenced things so that a South American pope was chosen.”

And that’s not all. According to Maduro, „One of these days [Chávez] is going to call a constitutional congress in heaven to change the church in the world, so that the people, only Christ’s pure people rule in this world.” That sounds more like Mahmoud’s vision for Islam than Jesus’ vision for a fallen planet the Bible says is destined for destruction by fire.

Besides, if Hugo Chávez is so persuasive that he was able to move the hand of God to install Argentine Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis I, how come he couldn’t persuade the Almighty to cure his terminal pelvic cancer and allow him to oppress Venezuela for another 14 years?

Everyone knows how Hugo’s story ended. Therefore, in death as in life, Chávez is so highly esteemed that there were plans to call in a taxidermist – of sorts – to preserve Hugo’s body so that he can be put on exhibition in Caracas. That way, Chávez can lie in state in a manner similar to dead dictators he has admired, such as Kim Jong Il, Hồ Chí Minh, Stalin, Lenin, and Argentine megalomaniac Evita ‘don’t cry for me’ Perón.

Based on Maduro’s assessment of the sainted Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, one would think the nation of Venezuela was in possession of an incorruptible corpse. Now we come to find out that after leaving St. Hugo’s body on display in a military academy like some sweaty salami sandwich that’s been sitting in the sun too long, embalming experts who were called in are of the opinion that Chávez’s carcass may have passed its sale date, so to speak.

Russian embalming specialists had expressed their willingness to drain Chávez’s blood from his tissues, remove his organs, pump him full of embalming fluid and submerge his sorry ass into a bathtub filled with formaldehyde, and then put the lid on it, wrap it in a white cloth, and basically pickle him in a room with „precise temperature and humidity conditions” for six months.

The Russians were even willing to instruct the Venezuelans on the upkeep, temperature and humidity requirements, the „bacterial threats,” the need for a sterile sarcophagus, the twice-weekly inspection, and the need for Hugo to be submerged every year and a half in the embalming solution for one month, then dried off, gussied up, and plopped back out on the display bed.

Now we come to find out that because Chávez was distracted by telling Jesus who His pick for pope should be, he forgot to transmit the directive to the people in charge of his preservation that if his corpse was going to be dressed up and put on permanent display, „precautionary steps would have to have [been] taken much earlier.” In other words, once again, from the smell of things, there’s something rotten in Caracas.

Author’s content: http://www.jeannie-ology.com/

Vezi sursa articolului aici.

Rand Paul, the junior senator from Kentucky, has won this year’s CPAC straw poll. Marco Rubio, the junior senator from Florida, came in second.

„Sen. Rand Paul won the 2013 Washington Times-CPAC presidential preference straw poll Saturday, and Sen. Marco Rubio was a close second, easily outdistancing the rest of the field and signaling the rise of a new generation of conservative leaders who will take the Republican Party into the 2016 election,” reports the Washington Times, a sponsorer of the poll.

„Mr. Paul won 25 percent of the vote, and Mr. Rubio collected 23 percent. Former Sen. Rick Santorum was third with just 8 percent, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie – who was not invited to speak at the three-day Conservative Political Action Conference – was next with 7 percent, and Rep. Paul D. Ryan, the GOP’s vice presidential nominee last year, was fifth with 6 percent.”

Vezi sursa articolului aici.

In the past few weeks, militant jihadism has won two major propaganda coups.

First, Al Gore, the world’s most famous critic of dirty oil, sold his „progressive network” Current Media, LLC, to the oil sheikhs of Qatar for a reported $500 million.

Second, Naomi Wolf, renowned author of Vagina: A New Biography and other top feminist works, sold her soul to the same Islamist patriarchy.

The price of Naomi’s soul (possibly including other appendages) has not yet been named. As one wag put it, Naomi will now be the official „on-air Jihadess” of the biggest Islamist propaganda network on the planet.

Al and Naomi are acting like rational capitalists: they are selling out while the market is good for their personal brands of mass demagogy. They are selling out now, because they don’t see a future for their famous brands.

Al Gore’s future looks bad because of huge shale discoveries all over the world, from Poland to Canada. Shale gas has already turned the United States into a net exporter of natural gas, even with the eco doomsters of the Obama crowd in charge. The doomsters can see the writing on the wall. Natural gas is the cleanest source of energy known.

All the public rants against hydrocarbons are going to disappear, leaving the human race both happier and healthier. Millions of dumb suckers haven’t realized it yet, but Al knows it’s time to sell and get out of town. Gore knows the oil business, because he is heir to a large Occidental Petroleum fortune. He has people who study the oil supply every single day. The Chicago Carbon Exchange crashed four years ago, and they know the jig is up.

So Al is getting out at top dollar.

What about Naomi Wolf? Her business of feminist agit-prop is also on the skids. Naomi has just sold her radical soul to the last murderous patriarchs on earth. The oil sheikhs keep their women pregnant, barefoot, and locked in the harem.

Even Naomi knows that.

Feminists have been screaming themselves silly about America’s „patriarchy” for decades, while American men gave them everything they desired, including abortion on demand, any imaginable use of their genitalia, and most of all, the free speech right to peddle any degree of anti-Western nonsense.

In return, Naomi has written articles for the rad left with titles like „Fascist America, in 10 easy steps,” saying

„From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.”

Alas, George W. Bush is gone, and all the blind Guardianistas can’t see a hint of danger of fascism today in Obama’s Predator assassination policy. The pacifist left is strangely silent, and thank heavens, civil rights are well-protected under Attorney General Eric Holder.

As for the „constitutional freedoms” in Qatar, these come straight from the Holy Koran, a well-known document  protecting the rights of women, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and atheists.

So – why did Naomi sell out to the desert sheikhs of Qatar?

Let’s face it, Ms. Wolf is also facing a declining market. Naomi Wolf is in the feminist propaganda business, where she takes boring dissertations written by feminist „theorists” and turns them into popular best-sellers. When radicals like Eve Ensler make a hit with Vagina Chronicles, Naomi scents big money and writes a popular book like Vagina: A new biography.

The oldest organ in human biology becomes new again.

Ms. Wolf’s real job is to promise her readers thrilling orgasms forever and ever, a Paradise on Earth for millions of sex-starved women. Add a constant stream of complaints about hubby, whose imaginary „patriarchy” keeps two billion woman in abject frustration, and you have the two biggest selling points of pop feminism.

Ms. Wolf delivers a satisfying enemy and a promise of pleasure eternal, all packed in that provocative organ Down There.

She makes out like a bandit.

But why is pop feminism declining? Naomi’s problem is not like Al Gore’s technological revolution of vast new hydrocarbon discoveries.

But Ms. Wolf is a creature of PR, and her publishers keep constant track of book sales. If sales of her Vagina are declining, she needs a new schtick. (Pardon the phallic pun).

Al Jazeera provides the schtick. Naomi is getting middle-aged and fat, and part of her PR magic has been to look eternally young, to fit the fantasies of her readers. The news photo that appeared with the announcement of her surrender to the patriarchs made her look like that Worker Woman of the Thirties, straight Soviet Realism, with the wind in her face and talking heroically into (you should pardon us) a big microphone.

The sheikhs get what they want, a famous and popular „radical feminist” to prove to millions of suckered viewers how modern and „progressive” those Islamic fascists really are. Naomi is our Tokyo Rose.

Naomi gets what she wants, which is much more than thirty pieces of silver. The exact amount hasn’t been publicized, because that would be in bad taste.

As for half-billion Muslim women who have just been pushed back into the 7th century by the „Arab Spring,” they get exactly nothing. They are once again jailed in their homes, forbidden to walk outside without a male relative. Women are routinely threatened, beaten, and murdered to protect the „honor” of the family, wherever Islam takes over. That’s a real patriarchy.

It’s very sad, but it can’t get in the way of real money.

Like Al Gore, Naomi plays a mass media sucker game. She has simply turned her declining brand into a fat contract from those oil sheikhs. A couple of trillion dollars come out of those oil fields every week. That kind of money buys a lot of demagogues.

But what about liberating two billion women?

What about saving the Earth from all that nasty, dirty oil?

Well may you ask.

Vezi sursa articolului aici.

It was not long ago that the zeitgeist of America was the Horatio Alger story, a patchwork of tales serving as the reigning motivational compass pointing towards individual success. It was the time of the Bootstrap Ethic: the notion that a man was limited only by his own zeal and perseverance in service to his lofty goal. How many magnificent ideas were mulled over and refined while cleaning offices or flipping hamburgers? How countless are the fledgling businesses that found their genesis in a garage or kitchen; and by virtue of investing the hard-won nest egg, these gamblers wagered all for the sake of a far-off vision? How many industrious hands have spun straw into gold?

It is in light of this individualist ethic that the current administration stands in diametrical juxtaposition to the American Dream. To be sure, the Democratic Party has made common cause with the fundamental premises of a foreign statist ideology that somehow the savory fruit of the private sector’s accumulated risks and exertions are the moral property of the system that suckled the Golden Goose. Viewed through this lens, the blood, sweat, and tears of individual success are only a self-interested mirage by which a lucky draw of the cards made one a winner in a zero-sum game. Government, which built the roads and bridges that facilitated your financial bankroll, therefore, reserves a significant claim on your winnings: to a tune far exceeding the paltry sum that you have begrudgingly allotted your patient Masters. And as we speak, that pound of flesh is accruing interest and rapidly metastasizing into a dark Socialist reality.

But the conservative spirit begs to differ. The template of America’s Dream is perhaps more owing to our own unique understanding underlying the philosophic relations between the City and Man. The construction of Negative Liberty – that we might do that which is not forbidden by law, stands in contradistinction to the collectivist idea that what we may do must be sanctioned with permission by the regime: which is the sole arbiter of private action by virtue of authority. The American experiment, with its original laissez-faire firewall separating the public and private spheres of life, had been to entrepreneurship what gasoline is to fire. It unleashed self-interest in a way that optimized human excellence and efficiency and allowed the resulting public coffers to be filled and in turn utilized for the common weal. Therefore, contrary to the Progressive’s deconstructed narrative of political economy, it is the undirected genius of the private sphere which is primary for the Good Life. Free Markets providentially contributed the finances for government programs and institutions that have arisen only as a consequence of a second-order redistribution through moderate taxation and altruistic private largesse.

Of itself, government can do nothing, and the notion that somehow it is the proverbial tail that wags the dog is both philosophically and economically poisonous. The progressive analysis of the State’s inordinate primacy has placed us suspended beneath the Socialist Gordian Knot while dangling over the Abyss of Insolvency. Those who would cast man in the collectivist mold would have us imbibe the weltanschauung of Hegel, which holds that humanity is the evolving construct of history and society in synthesis and that we possess no antecedent natures or morality. Viewed in this light, what we term as rights and duties proceed en utero from the emergence of the state. In America, the Founding Fathers claimed that we were endowed with natural rights and that the genius of our regime lay in distilling them from our thickly drawn ontologies that existed prior to government in an incalculably valuable essence. In the European model, our value is derived from our utility to the State and the collective. Thus, we are the children of such a collective and it is by necessity of the emergent regime that we obtain our identities.

As the mocking refrain: „You didn’t build that” has travelled like lightning throughout the land as a testament to the people’s realization that our overlords have lost touch with the Founders’ vision, how quickly the progressives claim the bounty of an economic powerhouse they did not labor to build. One sees them salivating like vampires over their prey, whom they care for only as a parasite contemplates its host. The progressive construct, in service only to utopian abstraction, has no power of its own to create the wealth it requires to give flesh to its Egalitarian City. Therefore, it must, as a consequence, pander and buy off its political support through the redistributed wealth of others – convincing the equation’s recipients that they are powerless without their black hand of corruption. It is here that we fully understand what instruments government has built of its own necessity; and that what perhaps began its germination in altruism has matured through cynicism into a noxious choking weed of venal compulsion.

The liberal edifice has spared no expense in indoctrinating us to its catechism that the American Dream stands as a direct consequence of pro-active governmental economic manipulations. This is an unqualified lie. If anything, the bulk of its interventionist regulatory powers have of late served only to stifle and warp the economic engine – to strangle prosperity in its cradle by incessant and persistent instrumentalities that are more owing to the patronage of special interests. And so often, these interests fly under the altruistic colors of environmental concerns or the insipid charade of social justice egalitarianism. In the name of compassion, the redistributionist machine has transmogrified their high-minded ideals into a protection and extortion racket with its political operatives serving as „Bag Men:” Princes of the Rake-Off. No, neither Obama and his choreographed cacophony of progressive intellectualoids, nor any of his spiritual forefathers, can claim credit for either the germination or the cultivation of the American Dream and its consequential virtues. But in all fairness, there is something without equivocation that we can lie at their gilded doorsteps: the Crises of the Broken Family and the Bastard Child.

The unqualified disaster of the Great Society in ameliorating poverty is by now a tonic wisdom to be wielded in narratives reserved for those who will in the future study our decline and click their tongues. The lessons they will uncover will be how a society, steeped in unreflective compassion, believed that by shoveling money at what are largely moral problems, they could constrain the source of poverty. Instead, the foolish assumptions of academic altruism served only to institutionalize poverty generationally and to destroy the primary human institution for the rearing of children; and in the bargain, corrupt and taint the moral psychology of its hapless recipients. Having denied the reality of a fixed human nature, Social Science and its skewed understanding of psychology and economics failed to consider one of the most persistent iron laws of economics: what you subsidize you will get more of and what you penalize you will inhibit. Having provided the perverse incentives for economic failure by throwing redistributed cash at the young and foolish, the liberal monstrosity effectively turned nature on its head.

In the dynamics of such a convoluted system, men were reduced to economic fifth wheels: useful only in their capacity as cultural roosters and diminished in their contingent status within female dominated households. The entire unsavory enterprise can be laid at the doorstep of Uncle Sam, who bankrolls this subsidization of upturned nature wherein children became the de facto economic fulcrum by which money comes to the savvy mother. That the explosion of African American illegitimacy in a span of fifty years  surged from the high teens to nearly 75% nationwide and over 90% in urban housing projects is unquestionably a consequence of the crooked incentives of misbegotten compassion. Moreover, the lack of structure and commitment that flows like a draining boil from these broken families has led to the moral indolence and the learned helplessness of men and women who have bought into the wretchedness of psychological servility fostered by a crooked view of existence near the bottom rung. Boys have learned that they are more accoutrements than men: lashing out at their environment’s masqueraded hopelessness in a structure designed to perpetuate need – effectively feeding into a loop where the stunted human horizon yields a self-fulfilling prophecy of quashed potential and dismal outcomes.

What began as the golden gleam in a liberal’s eye has become a chain that has tied generations to the political plantation. Moreover, and more nauseating, is the knowledge that the liberal edifice, knowing the ramifications of its error, has cynically traded altruism for the calculated understanding that a dependant client is a valuable and sure vote. And thus the wheel spins full circle – government becomes complicit in the moral corruption of its citizenry via the desire for the aggregation of political power in perpetuating its own ignoble interests.

It is said that „Success has many fathers, and failure is an orphan.” Obama’s ill-advised comment: „You didn’t build that” carries with it all the statist arrogance and ideological narcissism that has ruined the Social Democracies of Europe, just as they are now drawing America inexorably into a position where we are circling the drain. Human excellence, in economic and human terms throughout history, has always owed its impetus to self-sufficiency, relentless perseverance, fortitude, genius, and the ability to translate initial failures into eventual successes.

Our progressive Princelings, in seeking to whet our appetites for the bounty of another’s toil, are only now discerning the crescendo of unvarnished ire directed at the dark core of their managerial tyranny – whose „benevolent mask” is even now slipping away. What Obama and the Progressives have built is the blueprint for human failure and a descent into national subservience and mediocrity. It is a legacy that not even a blind mother could love, and the sooner we realize that the narcotic that crawls through our veins is a terminal Progressive poison, the sooner we can crush the head of the serpent and his brood that we have so foolishly allowed inside our House. The antidote, however painful or unpalatable, yet lies within our grasp.

Vezi sursa articolului aici.

Meet Eustace Conway, 51, the owner of Turtle Camp near Boone, North Carolina. He’s a back-to-the-land guy who bathes in a creek, grows his own food, and welcomes others to learn some survival skills at his place (which he runs as an educational nonprofit) for a small fee.

He’s been doing this for 30 years, but he was recently featured on a reality TV show. That bought local planning officials sniffing around his campfire.

Want to guess  what happened next?

A team of health, construction and fire officials showed up for an unannounced inspection of the preserve, acting on an anonymous tip. Escorted by two sheriffs’ deputies they executed what Mr. Conway describes as a „SWAT-team raid”-peering into outhouses, stomping around log cabins, and climbing hand-hewn ladders.

Their findings are compiled in a 78-page report with a bullet-point list of violations. Mr. Conway’s sawdust urinal and outhouses? Unpermitted, according to the officials. The wood he used to erect two dozen buildings? Built with lumber that isn’t „grade-marked,” meaning it doesn’t specify the mill where it was produced.

The open-air kitchen, with its crates of potatoes and stacks of pots? „Not protected from insects and animals,” according to the report. „It is, in fact, outdoors.”

Conway’s response is a much more politely worded
Duh.

The county says Mr. Conway must rebuild or tear down his cabins, barn, kitchen, blacksmith shop and sawmill, and create a septic system before hosting any more classes and camps.

„These buildings aren’t fit for public use,” says Joseph A. Furman, county planning director.

Mr. Conway says primitive facilities are precisely the point….

„Codes don’t apply to what we’re doing,” he says.

Vezi sursa articolului aici.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, defies easy categorization. Neither liberals nor conservatives quite know what they are getting.

The left has immediately pounced on him for his reported opposition to gay adoption, gay marriage, abortion, and euthanasia, even as they approve of his name, which they interpret as a sign that he is oriented towards “Social Justice” and eschews “pomp.”

Meanwhile, traditionalists, while praising his humility and happy to see his past pro-life, pro-marriage statements, aren’t uniformly thrilled either, with some seeing him as an elliptical Jesuit who will arrest the Church’s orthodox trajectory and liturgical tightening under Benedict XVI.

It has been reported that Bergoglio came in second at the last conclave, suggesting that he appealed to those who found Joseph Ratzinger too retrograde (though it has been reported that Bergoglio threw his support behind Benedict). Bergoglio apparently emerged from this one as a fusionist candidate between the two camps in a field without frontrunners.

Still, a 76-year-old “slow-moving” prelate “with one lung,” as a reporter for Atlantic Monthly described him, is an enigmatic choice, particularly since Benedict resigned to make way for a pope with more “vigor” and “stamina.” The choice may raise more questions than answers about Benedict’s resignation.

At one time, the Jesuits would have hailed the first Jesuit pope as a crowning moment for an order founded out of papal zeal. They would have quoted St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. Francis Xavier on the need for a strong papacy. Instead, they seemed pleased that Bergoglio named himself after a Franciscan. Like the secular media, the modern Jesuits see St. Franci of Assisi as the patron saint of community organizing, even though by today’s standards his actual views would be regarded as militantly orthodox and he would have seen the conflation of the corporal works of mercy with specific left-wing political programs as mystifying.

Pope Francis makes history as the first pope from Latin America, where the faith is strong in numbers if receding. But perhaps more remarkable is that he is a Jesuit: Who would hav thought a conclave, ostensibly searching for a reformer, would pluck him from one of the most troubled orders in the Church?

Some liberal Jesuits have apparently criticized Bergoglio, which is a good sign. But that may not mean much, since the order has grown so radical that even centrists within the order receive flak. Informed reports on where he stands on the theological spectrum within the order will likely appear in the next few days and fill out the picture.

If he is an orthodox reformer in the mold of St. Francis of Assisi and a missionary in the spirit of St. Francis Xavier, he will need to start close to home. The Jesuits have grown so worldly and heterodox that if St. Ignatius of Loyola were alive today he wouldn’t even be ordained into it. The Jesuit system of colleges and universities has gone from defending the faith t defaming it.

The focus on curial corruption seems to have deflected attention from this larger disease of bad theology, liturgy, education, and discipline, of which corruption and chaos at the Vatican are mere symptoms. Benedict took a stab at healing it, but the job remains largely undone.

One suspects the Catholic left is breathing a sigh of relief that his successor may have even less stomach for that task. On the finer theological and liturgical points, where the most consequential struggles within the Church are fought, Pope Francis is probably seen as an improvement over Benedict. A few spirit-of-Vatican II types have identified what they consider heartening quotes from past interviews, such as, “One does not remain faithful, like the traditionalists or fundamentalists, to the letter,” and, “It is true that going out onto the street implies the risk of accidents happening, as they would to any ordinary man or woman. But if the Church stays wrapped up in itself, it will age. And if I had to choose between a wounded Church that goes out onto the streets and a sick withdrawn Church, I would definitely choose the first one.”

The choice may prove even trickier than that, as the Church is both wounded and withdrawn and cries out for a St. Francis of Assisi and St. Francis Xavier.

Photo: UPI

Vezi sursa articolului aici.

How can we tell that the conclave made a good decision in elevating Jorge Mario Bergoglio to the papacy?  Exhibit A (through at least D): liberals are annoyed.  But leftists’ problems with Pope Francis, well-emblazoned as they were within hours of the announcement, reveal some crucial truths about the Church that even many Catholics are loath to confront.

When it came to Benedict XVI, the willfully uninformed chattering class had a field day – rather, a field eight years – with the thoroughly discredited „Nazi pope” meme.  (We might call noted luminary and theologian Susan Sarandon the „Nazi ambassadrix” in this effort.)  In the same vein, media outlets in all corners are itching to label the new Holy Father, and despisers of the office may find purchase in Francis’s hard-line – or, to put it more accurately, quite Catholic – stance on „gay rights” and homosexual acts.

The caviling has already started.  Indeed, as Saint Peter’s Square erupted with applause, and as the newly elected Pope Francis gave his first address to the Catholic faithful, Cavan Sieczkowski of the Huffington Post was already flexing his fingers for the first of a procession of disappointed jeremiads.  „Pope Francis Against Gay Marriage, Gay Adoption,” Sieczkowski’s headline blared, with the new pontiff’s vestments still settling on his shoulders.  He quotes GLAAD President Herndon Graddick, who decries a „Catholic hierarchy … in need of desperate reform.”

There’s more to this lashing out than just „Francis the Homophobe.”  From the parade of hand-wringing gay activists in Sieczkowski’s piece to the aggrieved commentators at Mother Jones, what really dismays the dismayed is the inflexibility not just of Francis, but of the Church herself.  At MJ, we read, „I think this is a missed opportunity to bring the papacy closer to where the people are,” and even at Forbes, John Baldoni, an ardent admirer of the Jesuits (Francis’s order), writes of „a Catholic Church that is resistant to change but one that must certainly adapt (and rather radically) if it is going to continue to attract well-intentioned men and women who adhere to its faith but also are willing to devote themselves to its perpetuation.”

As for leftists from the likes of HuffPo, these are the same people who were disappointed when Vatican II didn’t result in female priests and an ecclesiastical shrug of the shoulders on marriage.  What they share with Baldoni and other beaters of the „resistant to change” drum is a fundamental misunderstanding of Catholicism.

Granted: in a representative republic like the United States, where a dedicated force can use public opinion to effect sweeping social change, it can be hard not to project a similar democratic system onto the Catholic Church.  The same temptation proliferates when professedly Catholic politicians wave around misleading polls about the number of Catholic women who use contraception – implying that, as in a democracy, a majority of people wanting something should be grounds for rewriting policy.  And when other professed Catholics aggressively seek to cement their state’s position as the abortion capital of the world, it’s hard to blame outsiders looking into the Church when they throw their hands up in plain bafflement.

But of course, all these people are seeking to define the Church policy based on the opinions or actions of a single (albeit highly visible) Catholic, or from a group of Catholics.  This can’t work, because we all sin.  Catholics acknowledge that we all fall short of the glory of God.  So how could any individual Catholic indicate in full the tenets of the Church?  (And no, not even the pope does this.  He knows – probably better than most of us – better than to try.)  How could any group of Catholics, with their discrete sins, do any better?

In short, here’s the thing about the Catholic Church that cannot be repeated enough: she is not a democracy.  There is no veto power against the Word of God; as the cliché goes, God does not change to accommodate the Catholic.  The Catholic changes to accommodate Him.  (When even avowed atheist Penn Jillette is strongly defending this point – against a Catholic, no less! – we know we’re approaching objective truth.)

Catholics acknowledge that Jesus Christ gave his flock a pope and the Magisterium – the former to lead, and the latter to teach.  (By the way, both of these precede the Bible – and, it bears repeating, they came directly from Jesus.)  So we Catholics count on the Holy Spirit to guide the Magisterium, and we count on the Magisterium to guide us.  Even if 98% of American women use birth control (preposterous), that doesn’t entitle Catholics to vote on whether the Pill is no longer sinful.  No matter how much activists like Herndon Gladdick clamor for an ex-cathedra embrace of homosexual behavior, Catholics are not entitled to rewrite the Catechism (nor Romans 1, for that matter, nor Matthew 19).

And if we’re talking about laws revealed to us by an everlasting, all-powerful, all-knowing God, what could make more sense than that?

So those who blast Pope Francis for his „doctrinaire” stand on marriage, family, and homosexuality need to remember that the leader of the Catholic Church is always going to be pretty solid on Catholic doctrine.  And those who furrow their brows over a Church „resistant to change” should recall that (according to Catholics, at least), the Word of God is eternal, therefore resistance to change sounds not half-bad.

So what’s the best that Catholics can hope for from Pope Francis?  Namely, that he keep doing what he’s been doing.  The man who forsook a mansion and a chauffeured limousine in favor of „a simple bed in a downtown room heated by a small stove” can teach us a lot about holy living, if we’ll listen.  And if he has strong words against the dissolution of marriage or against homosexual couples adopting children, dissenters must remember that, like it or not, the Catholic Church does condemn homosexual acts as sinful – but as Pope Francis knows, Jesus enjoins us to love the sinner even more strongly than we hate the sin.  So we should have little patience for accusations of homophobia or cruelty against the man who kisses and washes the feet of AIDS victims and drug addicts.

We have a new pontiff who has made his lifestyle a breathtaking example of humility and poverty – who has eschewed sensual pleasures and bodily ease to better turn his thoughts and his will toward Christ.  Catholics can look on our Holy Father as an exemplar of how to show boundless love and compassion for people from all walks of life, all the while holding fast to the God-given principles that spur the functioning of our society.

This is a beautiful thing.  Catholics should cherish Pope Francis for as long as we have him, and it won’t hurt for those outside the faith to see what he can teach them.

…In fact, best start learning from our Holy Father immediately.  „Little patience”?  On second thought, we should have a lot of patience.  With all we’ve got on the horizon, we’ll need it.

Drew Belsky is American Thinker‘s deputy editor.  You can reach him at drew@americanthinker.com.

Vezi sursa articolului aici.

Earth is experiencing an unprecedented warming period, according to a report published in the March 8 issue of Science Magazine. Researchers from Harvard University and Oregon State University studied 73 land-based and marine fossil and ice samples to construct a record of global surface temperatures for the last 11,300 years, concluding that today’s temperatures are higher than most of that time period. Based on current trends, the report’s authors predict potential record-breaking levels by the end of this century.

The article is making headlines, especially since it attributes the heat spike to human-caused global warming. The Wall Street Journal reported, „The study points to human activity as the cause, because the suddenness of the shift in temperature appears to be out of whack with long-term trends. CNN‘s Ben Brumfield opined, „It is a good indicator of just how fast man-made climate change has progressed.” In comments on the research, The New York Times quoted Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael Mann saying, „We and other living things can adapt to slower changes. It’s the unprecedented speed with which we’re changing the climate that is so worrisome.”

However, these and other media sources ignore evidence to the contrary. Dr. David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation points out holes in this latest research and its conclusions. Whitehouse, former BBC Science Correspondent and former Science Editor of BBC News Online, disagrees that warming of the past few decades is unusual. „There are many studies that suggest that the Medieval Warm period of about 1,000 years ago was comparable to today’s temperatures,” he said. In fact, the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change conducts an ongoing Medieval Warm Period Project, compiling peer-reviewed papers in an effort to determine the degree and extent of warming from about 950 to 1250 A.D. So far more than 1,200 scientists representing some 500 institutions in 46 countries agree that the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent and warmer than the present.

Whitehouse criticizes the researchers for using such a small data set „with very poor sensitivity to temperature events that take place on the scale of centuries” and comparing it to much more precise temperature records of the past 150 years, especially considering the data is meant to account for the entire globe. A study published on March 4 in Quaternary Science Reviews drives this point home. A review of sediment cores in an area of Russia north of the Arctic Circle finds the highest temperatures at that location in the past 4,500 years occurred between 2,800 and 3,700 years ago and were roughly 3.8 degrees Celsius warmer than modern temperatures.

Though press reports emphasize the conclusion that current temperatures are higher than 90 percent of the Holocene period, the time span covered in the Harvard/Oregon State study, Whitehouse found discussion buried deep in the research paper revealed more reasonable figures. Accounting for possible errors, the scientists actually concluded temperatures in the decade 2000-2009 were warmer than 72 percent of the Holocene. Whitehouse says theirs is a very glass-is-half-empty approach to reporting. “Another way to put this is that current temperatures are colder than 28 percent of the Holocene,” he wrote. “According to this research the temperatures seen in the 20th century were about average for the Holocene.”

The study’s authors blame so-called greenhouse gases, but Whitehouse notes industrial emissions prior to 1950 were insignificant and do not account for the current global temperature rise that began in the 19th century. In fact, Earth has been warming gradually since the end of the Little Ice Age in the 17th century. However, he credits the paper for “casting doubt on the statements often made that it is currently warmer than it has been for thousands of years.”

Vezi sursa articolului aici.