October 2015

Peter, Peter pumpkin eater,
Had a Mother and didn't love her;
Peter learned to read and spell,
And then he loved her very well.

Read the wish-list Peter Leithart put together for all his fellow Christians in the Roman Catholic Church. He was asked to write a short piece on the subject, "What I Want from Catholics," and he utterly failed.

Start with his claim that the wish list is "terribly old-fashioned," then that it's "terribly assertive." Read on, though, and you'll recognize it's neither. Peter is the master of misdirection. [NOTE: Thinking about this later, it came to me that Peter was likely speaking to Roman Catholics in acknowledging their perceptions of his piece, not Reformed Protestants. To Roman Catholics his piece might well appear "old-fashioned" and "assertive," although any Roman Catholics with even a smattering of knowledge of the Reformation would have been gobsmacked that this "Reformed theologian" failed to be old-fashioned or assertive enough to remind them of the chasm between their false teaching concerning how a man is saved, is declared righteous before God.]

Dr. Leithart is also a master of flattery. Reading his stuff makes men feel...

(CORRECTION: The 32 million was back in 2005. By now it's probable the number is around 45 million.)

The amendment of China's one-child to a two-child policy isn't likely to improve their ratios of old to young or men to women. Stuart Gietel-Basten, Associate Professor of Social Policy at the University of Oxford, writes:

...questions will undoubtedly be asked about the legacy of the one-child policy. While its likely role in driving down fertility has probably been overstated, its role in shaping the highly skewed ratio of boys born compared to girls is widely considered to have been significant. In 2005 there were 32m more men under the age of 20 than women in China.

...What is the likely psychological impact of 35 years of constant messaging extolling the benefits of one-child families? And how is that internalised? We shall see.

Looking elsewhere in Asia, though, the Chinese government may find that it is much easier to “encourage” people to have fewer children than to have more.

Gietel-Basten links to a study exploring the connection between China's one-child policy, its sex ratio, and abortion...

Heartening. Please pray for Pastor Olaf Latzel; but more, for Germany:

Before making a proposal, a sentence or two on how political parties work. As a registered member of a particular party, you have next to no ability to make a difference at the federal level, even if your party is in control of the House, Senate, and White House. This is because individuals are not created equal in a political party. It's a pyramid scheme of power, and you and I, itty-bitty voters, are at the bottom. We hear grand promises of the benefits we'll receive if we join ourselves to this scheme by giving our vote to the ones above us, but if you are a Republican, the promises never pan out. The recent Republican grandstanding at the hearing with Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood, is a perfect example of our political superiors pretending to give us what they promised before they were elected, while doing nothing of the sort. The party has no heart for fighting abortion at the top. 

However, don't dismiss me as a cynic quite yet. In elections at the local level, in your county and city, you have a much bigger influence. And the people at those levels in the pyramid actually have influence with those directly above them, and so on. For the most part, people work their way up from the bottom of the pyramid to the top. The consequences of this fact are diverse, but among the more interesting are these two:

1. The reason you shouldn't vote for a city dog-catcher who isn't truly pro-life is that he will soon be your state representative.
2. If we all refuse to vote for Republican dog catchers, soon there won't be any Republican state representatives. In other words, if the bottom of the pyramid pulls out, the whole party is gone in the blink of an eye. 

The first fact is helpful to remember, but the second one is more useful for dealing with establishment types at the top of the party. You see...

A couple weeks ago, Indiana University started filling the inboxes of Bloomingtonians with urgent notices of crimes in progress. For instance, this one rolled in last night at 3:11 AM...