Point well taken.....

I was going to write a post pointing out how Joel Osteen's prosperity theology hardly qualifies him as a minister of the Gospel, and that if your best life is now, you're on the highway to Hell, but then he up and tells us that we shouldn't debate people who aren't Christian.

Well, there you go.  You're off the hook, Joel.   With me, if not with God.

Musing on immigration detainers....

In a recent article in the local paper, a number of local sheriffs noted that they are refusing to honor detainers issued by ICE because it would require them to detain them longer than their given sentence, and that would be a violation of their rights.

And you know, as much as I want our government to show the door to criminal immigrants (legal or illegal), I've got to respect that.  It is in effect an unlawful extension of their sentence.  But that said, let's ask a simple question.

With only 340 sanctuary cities (about ten of them within 30 miles of my home and probably another dozen within 100 miles of my home), exactly what prevents ICE from, say, showing up to apprehend them on the scheduled day of their release?  A quick look at the locations of sanctuary cities seems to indicate that about a dozen teams of ICE agents with a van of bus could apprehend almost all of the 9000 or so criminal illegal immigrants that sanctuary cities release each year and make sanctuary cities, counties, and states really a moot point.

Do we have an immigration crisis, a sanctuary city crisis, or simply a lack of clear thinking in Washington, DC?

We're Number One!

The United States apparently tops the world for obesity, according to the OECD.   Booyah!

Sad to say, my kids are not doing their part to help their native land in this vitally important statistic, and they've even been known to favor broccoli over donuts, and have even been known to tell this highly insensitive joke their father taught them:

Q.  What's the difference between a Wal-Mart and a Target shopper?

A.  About 50 pounds.

Seriously, as one who struggles a touch with weight myself, I get how hard things can be in this country--corn subsidies make high calorie foods cheaper, and even without those, too much of our food is made palatable not by skill, but rather by the insertion of large amounts of fat, sugar, and salt.  Want a cure?  I can't recommend anything more highly than the Mayo Clinic Diet.  Here are some of the results for me--it's certainly not easy, but suffice it to say that its results for me are that my lipids and weight have improved to a point generally achieved by statins.  If you pay attention to your numbers--weight, fat %, lipids, blood pressure, etc.--you can take the steps to avoid or mitigate heart disease, diabetes, back/hip/knee problems, and other things associated with excessive weight and poor diet.

Speaking of lumberjacks.....

.....apparently "Jihadi John" likes to do the tango with captive men.  Not that there's anything wrong or weird about that, of course, but somehow it brings this to mind.

Now this is interesting

Captain Capitalism does a little bit of digging, and has apparently found some Census Bureau data which indicates that there are about 17 million more mothers in our country than fathers.  Let's assume that the data are relatively correct (not a given, but let's go with it), and do a little bit of math. 

Given an overall rate of about 30-40% for single parenting, this would indicate that the average single mom has children by two different fathers.  Now I would guess this means that a good portion (let's say half) have children by one father, maybe a quarter by two, and the rest have children by three or more fathers, and it is interesting that the same Census reports indicate that about half of single mothers report that the fathers of their children are delinquent on child support payments.

I am going to walk this one back a bit.  This data merely means that some portion of men are fathering children by more than one woman.  While I know a fair number of single moms with children by more than one father, I can't demonstrate this statistically from the numbers here.  So I retract that part.  What is striking here is that, minus women left widowed and such, a fair number of women are in effect sharing the affections of their men with other women.

We could still infer, however, that with many women in effect "sharing" men, that those men would have difficulty making child support payments to multiple women, if they were even requested, and that as such it is no surprise that about half of single mothers report the fathers of their children are delinquent on child support payments.

I would also guess that they're more likely to receive welfare benefits, and fatherless children are also far more likely to commit crimes.  At a cost of over a trillion dollars annually, maybe it's time to tell guys making child support payments to multiple women to learn what a bag of frozen peas is for. 

Protesting the obvious....

...are a group of vocal parents in Fort Mill, South Carolina, who are apparently unaware that it is generally the young ladies who bare large portions of their torsos during school dances and at other functions.  Perhaps they've never gone to the mall, or church, or a school function, or elsewhere where teens are to be found?

No, folks, it's not sexism, but rather reality.  Young ladies know that putting themselves on display will get attention from young men; young men know that doing the same know that they will tend to get the disdain of both sexes. 

Maybe that will change over time, but I've got the crazy idea that we ought to design our policies around reality.

Brilliant example of appeal to authority fallacy...

......in this brilliant bit of cross examination by Senator Ted Cruz of Aaron Mair, the head of the Sierra Club, who repeatedly responds to questions of whether the Sierra Club would retract his testimony upon presentation of contrary evidence (like satellite temperature measurements of the last 18 years) by noting that he "agrees with 97% of scientists."

Sorry, Sierra Club, and sorry, Mr. Mair, but we have a phrase in my profession:  "In God we Trust; all others must provide data."  If you appeal to authority, you are ipso facto not appealing to science.  The weakness of climatology research is demonstrated in tactics like this.

Please, please, please don't do this

It appears that a growing number of marriage therapists are bent on introducing one of Deming's seven deadly diseases of management--number three to be specific--to the marriage relationship.  Yes, they are really advocating that couples have an annual performance review.

One would think that they were paid off by divorce lawyers to recommend this, as in work life, the performance review is at best a nonissue--the manager has communicated his views and feedback to the employee already, so it introduces no new information besides the size of the raise, if that.

At worst, the manager does introduce new information to the employee, and since the manager has waited an average of nine months to give this feedback, it is outdated and invariably negative.  Who waits to give positive feedback, after all?  Attaboys and Attagirls do not cause confrontations.  And in many cases, since the manager has waited a long time to give feedback, the information is false--there have been a couple of cases where I felt downright slanderous.

It also strikes me that, while I do hold to the Biblical doctrine of headship, even the most submissive wives are going to get a touch grouchy (to put it mildly) at being treated as an employee. 

So if you want to have a better marriage, don't do this, but rather simply make a practice of routine self-evaluation and asking your spouse how things are going.  Waiting months to give negative feedback is simply a great way of getting divorce papers served.

But on the bright side, the psychologists are choosing only one deadly disease, which is better than the city of New York can say.  They're encouraging promiscuous Gothamites to get IUDs, which of course exposes them to far more than seven deadly diseases.  #50 Shades of Stupid.

Sigh

Apparently, Doug Wilson has gotten himself into (yet another) kerfuffle by making the horrible observation that Christian women are prettier, and then defending that wild claim.  Because, of course, it must be a sin to notice that a woman (or man) is attractive, which is why Christ explicitly condemns the Holy Spirit for noticing that Rachel and David (and a bunch of others) were attractive.

Um, wait, not in my Bible.  No, our Lord does not do this.  So wait a minute on this one; if God Himself can notice that a person is attractive without sinning (and of course that's the case), exactly why would we say that a person cannot do the same?  It is as if we've forgotten the difference between a smile and a leer. 

Now there may be great reason not to verbalize the fact that many of our sisters in church are very pretty in some cases--our current culture being about 100 of those reasons--but if we outright say there's something wrong with noticing, we're really coming close to saying something about our Counselor that we really ought not say.  And the Bible does say something about that.

And what's even more humiliating?

Easy.  The debate team from Harvard, a fine private university, were caught off guard by the argument that private schools might do a better job than public schools in educating students.  Um, and you were going to Harvard and not the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople exactly why?  Because you wanted to throw away enough to buy a nice new SUV each year?

Apparently they did, for all the good paying all that tuition appears to be doing them.

What's more humiliating....

....than finding out your nation's national women's soccer team is half men, as Iranian fans appear to be learning now?

Finding out your nation's women's soccer team is half men, and still couldn't  get any medals at the Olympics or even get into the women's World Cup.  But who can blame them?  They really wanted to be....lumberjacks, of course.

What happens when you intimidate the police?

Just ask the residents of St. Louis, which this year overtook Detroit as the nation's murder capital. 

Yes, let's change the gun laws....

Predictably, President Obama has responded to the atrocity in Oregon by asking for a change in gun laws.  Now this may come as a surprise to readers here, but I'm all for it.  Let's change the gun laws.

We can start by requiring public colleges to allow carry permit holders to carry on campus, so that there is at least a chance of someone shooting back.  This is yet another atrocity that has occurred in a so-called "gun free zone". 

(probably not what the President was thinking of, but it would be a great start)

Along these lines, when I was in carry permit class, I wondered whether a victim of such a crime (or his estate) might someday sue because he was compelled to be unarmed in such a situation.  Now for the private sector, this kind of lawsuit probably won't fly because it can be assumed that the person has consented to that arrangement and has other reasonable options.

For colleges, however, public colleges are more or less the main gateway to a better life for a majority of the middle class and poor, and one can argue that one is more or less compelled to either take the deal or work retail or basic labor for all of one's life.  Hence I think that in the right setting, a good lawyer might be able to make that case.

And I hope one does.  Too many people have died because they and their neighbors were denied the right to self-defense.

Georgia and Denmark

Update; the 103 year old woman who was forced out of the church her family helped to found is now going back, as the "Holiness" pastor with whom she disagreed has left.  Regrettably, he's leaving to found a new church and does not appear to have even seriously discussed the issue of whether holiness methods are appropriate in a Baptist church.  My take--as a person who is convinced of Baptist distinctives but who shudders at a lot of the externally imposed rules we like (a trait shared with many holiness churches)--is that while I and my Baptist brethren often could use a shock from the cattle prod to get our hands out of our pockets and our feet un-nailed to the floor, there is yet another way to get there besides the holiness movement.

I've been, and remain, interested in the pietist movement and is founder, Philip Jakob Spener (and even own the Torah and History of the Berlenburger Bibel), but I think that things have gone to a point that neither Spener nor Scripture recommend.  And I grieve for the situation this woman finds herself in.  All too often, we seem to think that an acrimonious church split is our signal that we have the character and wisdom it takes to found a new church.  (Hello?  Is anyone in there?)

In other news, a Danish travel agency is offering would-be grandmothers the chance to buy a vacation for their childless children on the idea that if they can only get them on a beach with their loved one, that nature will take its course and grandchildren will result--making grandmothers joyful and Denmark prosperous.

But yes, party-pooper that I am, I have to be reminded that I seem to remember that Scandinavians seem to have had higher birth rates prior to the time they really started infesting Mediterranean beaches en masse,  so it does not seem that sun and sand and a bikini (bottom at least, they're European of course) is truly a recipe for making babies.  Rather, I'd have to suggest that when we live for our own pleasures--something that is at least compatible with the notion of spending a month on the beach in France or Greece every year--then sharing that pleasure with a demanding infant isn't going to be high on the "to do" list.

Never mind the absurdity of thinking that sand you-know-where, sunburn, and the general tiredness of travel are going to help a couple that's open to God's command to "be fruitful and multiply", if you catch my drift.  I like vacations and the beach, but let's be serious here.

Update on tiny houses/RVs

Yes, it's time to promote the Airstream company again at the expense of Tumbleweed.  Why so?

Well, one of the Tumblewood company's "poster couples" for their product has learned that after towing their RV or "tiny home" less than 20,000 miles, the tow vehicle is on its last legs and needs serious repair or replacement.

I don't think it's the vehicle's fault; it's an F250 Powerstroke 4x4 is said to have been capable of towing 12,500 lbs, and the "tiny home" only weighs in at 10,100 lbs.  My aunt, who works at renaissance festivals, puts tens of thousands of miles on her Chevy one ton each year and has few problems.   The neat thing, for comparison's sake, is that my aunt's home is much larger (it's a25' or so with slide outs and all) and nicer, and she's getting better mileage even with the gasoline engine.  So what gives?

Well, the Tumbleweed is close to the weight limit and has all the aerodynamics of a cardboard box.  Hence a truck that should be getting about 12mpg or more with a 150 square foot camper is getting about eight, and the transmission, engine, and suspension are begging for mercy. 

Lesson learned, again; if you really value the environment, skip the Tumbleweed and look at a well designed trailer like the Airstream.  Depending on the model, you can tow it with a half ton pickup or even an SUV like the GMC Acadia, and it will cost less, have more room for living, and you won't have that wonderful composting toilet smell all the time.  Wins all around.