Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

WHAT BOOK MOST INFLUENCED BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN?

Just learned today that Springsteen was asked:

“If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?”

He replied:

One would be difficult, but the short stories of Flannery O’Connor landed hard on me. You could feel within them the unknowability of God, the intangible mysteries of life that confounded her characters, and which I find by my side every day. They contained the dark Gothicness of my childhood and yet made me feel fortunate to sit at the center of this swirling black puzzle, stars reeling overhead, the earth barely beneath us.

Fascinating.

NETANYAHU VS. OBAMA: WHO BEST GRASPS REALITY?

I apprciated the series of contrasts offered by Jay Nordlinger who writes:

I have just read Ian Tuttle’s piece on the Obama administration’s latest salvos against the Israeli prime minister. A senior official — the president himself? — called Netanyahu a “chickensh**.” Another senior official — the president himself? — called Netanyahu a “coward.”

In the past six years, Obama et al. have often disparaged Netanyahu. They can’t seem to get as worked up about the PLO’s Abbas. Is that because they consider the Palestinian leader a savage of whom nothing can be expected? They can’t seem to get as worked up about the leaders of Hamas.

Or about Turkey’s Erdogan, or Syria’s Assad, or North Korea’s Kim, or Iran’s mullahs, or China’s Communists, or Cuba’s Castros.

No, Bibi is their bête noire.

Early in his administration, Obama offered Israelis some advice: They should “engage in serious self-reflection.” My fingers blistered. I wrote,

WHAT DOES AN INTACT FAMILY HAVE TO DO WITH THE AMERICAN (ECONOMIC) DREAM?

Everything!  This article has convinced me that perhaps the most important focus of our time should be on strengthening the American family.  

In a new report released this week from the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies, we find that about one-third of recent increases in family-income inequality and male joblessness, and a significant share of median family-income stagnation, can be linked to the declining share of Americans who are getting and staying married.

The article has easy-to-read graphs and charts and offers arguments and insights that should make us all try to strengthen families, our own first, and also those around us.  

REQUIREMENTS FOR ECONOMIC FLOURISHING

In a discussion on poverty so prevalent in many African countries, Jay Nordlinger of National Review makes the following observation:

There is such a thing as oversimplifying. There is also such a thing as overcomplicating. What do Africans need? The same things everyone else needs: the rule of law; property rights; an independent judiciary; accountability in government; economic freedom; other freedom. Then they will zoom. They are not born to be poor and desolate. The systems that control them make them that way.

Mankind knows pretty well what leads to prosperity and what leads to the opposite. Our experience has been ample — redundant. The road to prosperity is blocked by collectivists, tyrants, and spoilers.

Have I oversimplified? Probably, but the more common error is overcomplicating, I think.

JOHN COLEMAN, WEATHER CHANNEL CO-FOUNDER: MAN-MADE CLIMATE CHANGE ‘A MYTH’

 

Nat Brown reports:

Appearing on the "Kelly File" last night, Weather Channel co-founder and meteorologist John Coleman discussed an open letter he had recently authored in which he declared that “man-made global climate change is a myth.” The letter was written to UCLA’s Hammer Museum forum and criticized one of its recent panels, entitled “Tackling Climate Change,” for not including any skeptics in the event.

Coleman noted that it has been tough for climate skeptics to voice their opinions in the media “ever since Al Gore made [climate change] a plank of the Democratic party.” When host Megyn Kelly raised the point that even certain Republican political candidates will label such views as “nuts,” Coleman replied, “It’s very difficult to be against it when the media has told the nation that the oceans are rising, the polar bears are dying, the ice is melting, that storms are going to sweep the earth, and that we’re all going to die of a heat wave,” adding, “this is bad, bad science.”

ERIC METAXAS ON MIRACLES

Eric Metaxas,  bestselling author of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy and the acclaimed Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery, today published his latest book:  Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life.  I checked Amazon and read the endorsements --  wow!  Genuinely impressive:

“As a secular reader, I come to such books with a certain resistance. Metaxas won me over instantly by meeting me where I live. His intellectual honesty, coupled with an open-hearted wonder at the sheer breadth of human experience, is irresistible.”
—Christopher Noel, author, Impossible Visits

“If you’re a skeptic, read this book with an open mind and you might just discover that miracles are real. If you’re already a believer, be ready to be inspired.”
—Kirsten Powers, columnist for USA Today and The Daily Beast

“A dense, edgy and awe-inspiring report on the possibility of the impossible.”
—Dr. Markus Spieker, Reporter for German National Television and bestselling author of Hollywood Cinema in Nazi Germany
 
““No Christian thinker today combines reason and wit, argument and imagination, to greater effect.”
—Joseph Loconte, Associate Professor of History at the King's College, NYC and author, God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West.
 
"Metaxas has done it again....he presents hope for the tone deaf who cannot hear the splendor of the music of the spheres, and he brings in sunlight for modern cave dwellers who have become accustomed to only shadows on the wall of our increasingly windowless world."
—Os Guinness, author Long Journey Home

Metaxas produced a Breakpoint commentary today titled "Existence Itself Is a Miracle" which is well worth reading.  He writes (or speaks, if you click the audio below):

NOW | DOWNLOAD

In my new book “Miracles” I point out that possibly the greatest evidence for the existence of miracles is the fact that we exist.

The universe as we know it requires such a careful calibration of variables as to render its mere existence—never mind the presence of intelligent life—a miracle in itself. The British astronomer and atheist Fred Hoyle, who coined the phrase “the Big Bang,” summed up the sheer improbability of existence by saying “The universe looks like a put-up job."

For instance, if the earth were slightly larger, it would of course have slightly more gravity. As a result, methane and ammonia gas, which have molecular weights of sixteen and seventeen respectively, would remain close to the surface of the earth. Since we can’t breathe methane or ammonia because of their toxicity, we would die.

If Earth were slightly smaller, water vapor would not stay close to the planet’s surface, but would instead dissipate into the atmosphere. Obviously, without water we couldn’t exist.

What’s true of Earth is true of the Universe as a whole. What physicists called the four fundamental forces—gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces—are so finely-tuned that if any of them were in the slightest degree different, our universe would not exist.

What’s more, each of these crucially precise values was established once and for all within one millionth of a second after the Big Bang. In other words, immediately.

ELLEN HARMON WHITE - FOUNDER OF SEVENTH DAY ADVENTISM

LaVonne Neff reviews Ellen Harmon White: American Prophet and writes 

Adventists are everywhere: there are 18 million of them worldwide (and only 15 million Mormons). They have made major contributions to American culture: corn flakes, veggie burgers, so-called creation scientists. More important, at least to history buffs, White's story is the story of 19th-century America in microcosm.

 Me:  I was shocked to read there are more Adventists than Mormons, and that by quite a lot.  I wonder if that figure is accurate.  Read more of Neff's review...

SHARYL ATKISSON BLOWS THE WHISTLE ON CBS

The corrupt CBS News gets exposed by ex-investigator reporter Sharyl Atkisson in her new book, Stonewalled, an overview of which can be read here.  If you read the article, your anger will rise and your respect for major news organizations like CBS will fall.  Unless, of course, you approve the suppression of news, think cover-ups are fine, and regard news-managed propaganda to shore up your ideological bias perfectly acceptable.

CITY OF HOUSTON DEMANDS PASTORS TURN OVER THEIR SERMONS

I find this demand totally unconstitutional and utterly disturbing.  Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council says,

A church should not be required to have the government sign off on their pastor's sermons.

Yet, that's just what's happening in Houston, Texas. Mayor Annise Parker has issued an unprecedented legal demand that several key pastors turn over sermons, emails, and text messages, even communications with members of their congregations, under the threat of fines imprisonment or both.  [emphasis in original]  The pastors that have been targeted are pastors who have spoken out against Parker's LGBT special rights ordinance.

Mayor Parker has breached the wall of separation between the state and the church. This attack on religious freedom and the freedom of speech should be universally repudiated by all Americans who value our constitutional freedoms.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote that "religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions." The pulpit is to be governed only by the Word of God, and the chilling effect of government scrutiny of our pastors is unconstitutional, and unconscionable. Mayor Parker's use of her bully pulpit to silence pulpit freedom must be stopped in its tracks.

Please sign our petition to stand unapologetically with the Houston pastors and their churches, and call for the City of Houston to retract their demands and issue a clear statement in support of the free speech of all people.

** For more see

      - Fox News' Todd Starnes' initial report.

      - "The Blaze" has an extensive report.

      - The Faith & Freedom report, which concludes:  Contact Houston Mayor Annise Parker and demand that she stop bullying pastors and infringing on their religious liberties!

Mayor Annise D. Parker
City of Houston 
P.O. Box 1562 Houston, TX 77251 
Phone (713) 837-0311 
Email: [email protected]

GRANDPARENTS AS DEFINED BY CHILDREN

From an email:

~ Grandparents are a lady and a man who have no little children of her own.
They like other people's.

~ A grandfather is a man grandmother.

~ Grandparents don't have to do anything except be there when we come to see
them. They are so old they shouldn't play hard or run. It is good if they
drive us to the store and have lots of quarters for us.

~ They don't say, "Hurry up."

~ Usually grandmothers are fat, but not too fat to tie your shoes.

~ Everybody should try to have a grandmother, especially if you don't have
television, because they are the only grown-ups who like to spend time with
us.

~ They know we should have snack-time before bedtime.

QUICK TAKES

I consider all of the follow worthwhile -- indeed, important -- reading:

** Michelle Malkin - The Centers for Everything but Disease Control  (A real eye-opener)

** Thomas Sowell - Anti-American educational elites need a dose of reality  (Comments about slavery hardly anybody knows)

** Ross Douthat - Pagans and Christians  (Douthat reflects on a secularist who is mad that missionaries are doing charitable deeds in Africa when it should be done by secularists who aren't doing it)

** Victor Davis Hanson - Ruins of the Middle East: Obama shuns our friends and courts our enemies  The last paragraph offers a prophecy:

The present chaos of the Middle East was caused by our withdrawal from Iraq and a widespread sense that the U.S. had forfeited its old responsibilities and interests, and was either on the side of the Arab Spring Islamists or indifferent to those who opposed them. Tragically, while order may soon return, it is likely to be as a sort of Cold War standoff between a pro-Russian, pro-Chinese — and very nuclear – Iranian bloc, and a Sunni Mesopotamian wasteland masquerading as a caliphate, run by beheaders and fueled by petrodollars, with assistance from Turkey and freelancing Wahhabi royals from the Gulf.

VIDEOS AND PHOTOS VINDICATE HOROWITZ AND OTHER CONSERVATIVES

 

Barbaric beheadings by ISIS should bring forth profuse apologies from liberals/letist who consistently turned their eyes away  from reality and accused alert, vocal conservaties of Islamophobia.   As David Horowitz writes:

Beheadings of innocent human beings are unspeakable acts reflecting the barbaric savagery of the Islamic “holy war” against the West — against us. Yet despite the intentions of their perpetrators, they have had an unexpected utility. Their gruesome images have entered the living rooms and consciousness of ordinary Americans and waked them up.

The barbarity of the Islamic movement for world domination has actually been evident for decades: in the suicide bombing of the Marine compound in Lebanon in 1982, in the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, in the suicide attacks on Jews — men, women, and children — during the second Palestinian Intifada in 2000, in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, and in the beheadings perpetrated in Iraq by al-Qaeda’s Abu al-Zarqawi and the Salafist group known as Ansar al-Islam during the Iraq War.  

He writes further:

For more than a decade, a handful of conservatives, of whom I was one, tried to sound the alarm about the Islamist threat. For our efforts, we were ridiculed, smeared as bigots, and marginalized as Islamophobes. In 2004 I published a book called Unholy Alliance about the Islamist movement and the support it was receiving from the American Left. For my concern, Harvard professor and Islam expert Noah Feldman dismissed me as a “relic” in the New York Times Book Review. It was the last time the Times mentioned one of my books.

In 2006 and 2007, I organized nearly 200 “teach-ins” on American campuses, which I called “Islamo-Fascism Awareness” weeks. The idea was to legitimize the term “Islamo-fascist” as a description of the enemy confronting us. These demonstrations were attacked by the Muslim Students Association, which is a recruiting organization for the Muslim Brotherhood, and by Students for Justice in Palestine, a front for the terrorist party Hamas. They also inspired the contempt of the liberal Left. Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo devoted two YouTube videos to ridiculing me for holding the demonstrations. Campus leftists called the students who organized them racists, bigots, and Islamophobes.   

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON - OBAMA FOLLOWING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION MODEL MORE THAN THE AMERICAN

VDH, an esteemed historian whose work I have cited numerous times on this blog,  offers a clear analysis of the type of revolution taking place under Obama's guiding hand.  He subtitles his piece, "America’s current revolutionary inspiration seems to derive more from Robespierre than Madison. "  Hanson writes:

At the end of the 18th century, there were two great Western revolutions — the American and the French. Americans opted for the freedom of the individual, and divinely endowed absolute rights and values.

A quite different French version sought equality of result. French firebrands saw laws less as absolute, but instead as useful to the degree that they contributed to supposed social justice and coerced redistribution. They ended up not with a Bill of Rights and separation of powers, but instead with mass executions and Napoleonic tyranny.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration is following more the French model than the American.  [more . . .]

GEORGE WILL - "WE HAVE MUCH MORE TO FEAR FROM EXCESSIVE FAITH IN GOVERNMENT, THAN FROM TOO LITTLE FAITH IN GOVERNMENT"

 

Text summary from NRO:

Can we trust the government to do its job? On Fox News Sunday columnist George Will parried: “What isn’t its job nowadays?” Will offered a quick run-through of governmental prerogatives in the early twenty-first century: “It’s fine tuning the curriculum of our students K-12. It’s monitoring sex on campuses. It’s deciding how much ethanol we should put in our gas tanks. It has designed our light bulbs. And it’s worried sick over the name of the Washington football team. This is a government that doesn’t know when to stop.”

Overreaching government is the natural consequence of progressivism, said Will, the “distilled essence” of which is that government is “a a) benign, that is, disinterested force — that’s false — and b) it is stocked with experts who are really gifted at doing things.”

Can we have faith in government? “I think we have much more to fear from excessive faith in government than from too little faith in government.”

- To which I completely agree.  Government cannot sustain the faith people place in it.  Simply cannot.

NETANYAHU: ‘THE MALIGNANCY OF MILITANT ISLAM IS GROWING AND SPREADING

Netanyahu, an adult on the world's stage, states obvious truths, usually denied or suppressed by the West.   From NRO:

 

“Between the United States and the West, and the rising powers in the East,” says Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “there is a malignancy of militant islam . . . [that] is growing and spreading. It’s sending its tentacles to the West.”

“I wrote 20 years ago that you will see domestic international terrorists, because you will see them send people — jihadists — to live in the West to raise jihad against the West,” said Netanyahu on Face the Nation, “and unfortunately that has come about.”

But an even greater danger exists, he says: “that they will marry their mad ideologies to weapons of mass death. That is a threat not only to my people — the Jewish people and the Jewish state of Israel — but to your people.”

“They view us as one because of our tolerant societies. They think us weak and corrupt. We understand the value of diversity and human freedom and choice. They abhor it. They want to wipe us away. If they had the weapons to wipe us away, they will try. They will fail, ultimately, as did the Nazis, but they took down tens of millions of people with them, and that should not happen again.”  

KRAUTHAMMER: CRISIS OF COMPETENCE; SENSE OF A PRESIDENCY FALLING APART

  

I take no pleasure in putting up this post.  I do so to provide an historical record;  some years from now it will bear witness to one columnist's take on current prevailing conditions.  For what it's worth, I completely agree with Krauthammer's perspective and seriously wonder if America will ever be able to recover from its current downward spiral.  The prospect looks bleak to me.  The following summary of Krauthammer's perspective is from National Review Online:

There “is a sense in the country,” says Charles Krauthammer, “that we have a presidency that is falling apart” — call it a “crisis of competence.” On Special Report, the panelist explained how chaos abroad and at home — much of it caused by the decisions of the current administration — is giving Americans reason to worry.

“Abroad, in the vacuum that we created by Obama’s retreat, more aggressive, more wicked, in fact some of the worst people on earth have filled it in Libya, in Syria, in Iraq. Putin’s on the march in eastern Europe. Everybody senses America is not there. Our allies are very worried about the kind of support they’re going to get. That’s a consequence of [Obama’s] policy.”

And at home? “Domestically, the great idea of expansion of government and new entitlements and all this — this is a crisis of competence. The IRS, the VA, the Secret Service . . . all of these agencies that we had trust in, under this administration are showing how badly government is run.”

“You combine them,” says Krauthammer, “and you get a sense that things are out of control.”

QUOTES OF THE DAY

"For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver."  - Martin Luther

"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well"   - Ralph Waldo Emerson 

 "Young man, what we meant in going for those Redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves and we always meant to. They didn't mean we should."  - (Captain Levi Preston, of the Danvers militia, at age 91)

 “Little by little the look of the country changes because of the men we admire.” – Melvyn Douglas, (1963)