May Day

It thrills my soul that thousands of people are taking part of the May Day : A Cry to God for a Nation in Distress. I would really love to be there!

They are spending the day praying prayers of repentance over the 7 areas of culture: business, government, arts and entertainment, education, family, and religion.

There are busses leaving from Wisconsin, Tennessee, and other areas of the country. If you can go, I would recommend it.

Kay Granger Explains IRS Expansion via Health Care Bill

Rep. Kay Granger's explanation of how the IRS will expand under this health care bill is rather frightening. Here is a quote from an e-mail she sent to her constituents.

• IRS agents verify if you have “acceptable” health care coverage;
  
• IRS has the authority to fine you up to $2,250 or 2.5 percent of your income (whichever is greater) for failure to prove that you have purchased “minimum essential coverage;”
  
• IRS can confiscate your tax refund;
  
• IRS audits are likely to increase;
  
• IRS will need up to $10 billion to administer the new health care program this decade;
  
• IRS may need to hire as many as 16,500 additional auditors, agents and other employees to investigate and collect billions in new taxes from Americans; and
  
• Nearly half of all these new individual mandate taxes will be paid by Americans earning less than 300 percent of poverty ($66,150 for a family of four.)

This is just sickening. If your Representative is on board with this monstrous bill, please call them and firmly tell them to vote against it.

Ann Coulter's Health Bill

I usually don't read Ann Coulter, but I did find this article interesting. It is about her ideas on free-market health insurance. Here are the highlights.

In the first sentence, Congress will amend the McCarran-Ferguson Act to allow interstate competition in health insurance.

The very next sentence of my bill provides that the exclusive regulator of insurance companies will be the state where the company's home office is. Every insurance company in the country would incorporate in the state with the fewest government mandates, just as most corporations are based in Delaware today.

The third sentence of my bill would prohibit the federal government from regulating insurance companies, except for normal laws and regulations that apply to all companies.

My bill will solve nearly every problem allegedly addressed by ObamaCare -- and mine entails zero cost to the taxpayer. Indeed, a free market in health insurance would produce major tax savings as layers of government bureaucrats, unnecessary to medical service in America, get fired.

The market is a more powerful enforcement mechanism than indolent government bureaucrats. If you don't believe me, ask Toyota about six months from now.

Right now, insurance companies are protected by government regulations from having to honor their contracts. Violating contracts isn't so easy when competitors are lurking, ready to steal your customers.

You can read the whole thing here.

This makes sense to me. So why is Ann Coulter coming up with it instead of the Republicans?

Some Pro-life Stuff

I haven't really been following 40 Days for Life this spring because they are not doing it here. But as usual if your town is participating, I recommend that you participate. So far, there have been 261 confirmed babies saved from a horrible death and the parents have been saved from a lifetime of regret.

I was e-mailed a link to Live Action that shows a scan of a 1952 Planned Parenthood brochure. The brochure is about birth control. The key quote is highlighted in the image below.


The quote is slightly cut off by my blog template. It says, "Abortion requires an operation. It kills the life of a baby after it has begun."

LifeSiteNews alerted me to the fact that a huge campaign is going in the NY subways called Abortion Changes You. Their website offers a place for people to begin healing emotionally after abortion.

Fair

At the beginning of February, Thomas Sowell wrote three articles called the "Fallacy of Fairness parts I,II, III". I was interested in these articles (and have kept them in my stuff to post about pile for all this time) because of what some mean by social justice. When some people say this, I think that they mean that life should be fair. But as Mr. Sowell says, "If by 'fair' you mean everyone having the same odds for achieving success, then life has never been anywhere close to being fair, anywhere or at any time. If you stop and think about it (however old-fashioned that may seem), it is hard even to conceive of how life could possibly be fair in that sense." I quite agree. Everyone has different advantages and disadvantages from the start of life and throughout it. Even in Heaven some will be given 10 "cities" to rule and some will have only one. Whatever you think the "cities" in the parable are, there is still varying levels of reward/responsibility.

Now if by fair you mean that people shouldn't be discriminated against, then I completely agree. Here are some of Mr. Sowell's thoughts on the subject:

Many people fail to see the fundamental difference between saying that a particular thing-- whether a mental test or an institution-- is conveying a difference that already exists or is creating a difference that would not exist otherwise.

Creating a difference that would not exist otherwise is discrimination, and something can be done about that. But, in recent times, virtually any disparity in outcomes is almost automatically blamed on discrimination, despite the incredible range of other reasons for disparities between individuals and groups.

In Part II, Mr. Sowell continues this theme with a discussion of a school district in Berkley.

The point is to close educational gaps among groups, or at least go on record as trying. As with most equalization crusades, whether in education or in the economy, it is about equalizing downward, by lowering those at the top.

This is not justice (social or otherwise). These sorts of actions rob those who can/are doing well to achieve their full potential. Do we really want everyone to be equally poorly educated? Mr. Sowell then continues:

Those with that vision do not want to even discuss evidence that students from different groups spend different amounts of time on homework and different amounts of time on social activities. To admit that inputs affect outputs, whether in education, in the economy or in other areas, would be to undermine the vision and agenda of the left, and deprive those who believe in that vision of a moral melodrama, starring themselves as defenders of the oppressed and crusaders against the forces of evil.

Redistribution of material resources has a very poor track record when it comes to actually helping those who are lagging, whether in education, in the economy or elsewhere. What they need are the attitudes, priorities and behavior which produce the outcomes desired.

Justice is allowing the legal or natural rewards/consequences of ones actions to come to rest. The just thing is to reward those who excel in school. Mercy allows for helping those behind change their study habits, etc. But it is injustice to truncate the learning of those who are excelling or pass people who are failing.

Then in Part III, Mr. Sowell continues:

Society may lavish thousands of dollars [in the US about $9700 per student] per year on schooling for a youngster who does not bother to study, and yet when he or she emerges as a semi-literate adult, it is considered to be society's fault if such youngsters cannot get the same kinds of jobs and incomes as other youngsters who studied conscientiously during their years in school.

It is certainly a great misfortune to be born into families or communities whose values make educational or economic success less likely. But to have intellectuals and others come along and misstate the problem does not help to produce better results, even if it produces a better image.

I feel like I must say it again. Education of children is the responsibility of the parents not "society" or the government. If a child comes out of school semi-literate, it is because of the failed responsibility of the parents. An awesome example of a parent taking responsibility is the mother of Dr. Ben Carson (pioneering pediatric brain surgeon). She was a poor, illiterate, black woman raising her sons alone. She also suffered from extreme depression. Yet she encouraged her sons to learn and do well in school and set high standards for them. I highly encourage you to watch the move Gifted Hands to learn more about this amazing woman and her amazing son.

Mr. Sowell continues,

But criteria exist precisely to have a disparate impact on those who do not have what these criteria exist to measure. Track meets discriminate against those who are slow afoot. Tests in school discriminate against students who did not study.

Disregarding criteria in the interest of "fairness"-- in the sense of outcomes independent of inputs-- adds to the handicaps of those who already have other handicaps, by lying to them about the reasons for their situation and the things they need to do to make their situation better.

Not allowing people to experience the consequences of their actions is often an injustice. If everyone won the race, the slower people would not be motivated to train harder and do better. If everyone passes and your parents don't care, where is the motivation to learn to read? Justice allows natural consequences to take place.

Swats

According to this article in the Telegraph, a study in the US has shown that swats (or as the British say "smacks") produce better citizens. The study was based on the answers of 179 teens.

Those who had been smacked up to the age of six performed better in almost all the positive categories and no worse in the negatives than those never punished physically.

I can't say that I am really surprised. Yet liberals and those who would shrink parental rights are only likely to be angered that the study didn't show what they wanted instead of rethinking their beliefs.

This is one of the reasons that I do not support the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and encourage you to look at ParentalRights.org.

Take a look at what is going on in Malta because of the UNCRC. According to the article, "Any provisions in the Maltese statute book that allowed corporal punishment and that could endorse child abuse had to be removed in order to come in line with international law, according to a British expert." Notice how (in the minds of these folks) international law takes precedence over the will and law of the Maltese people.

In Europe, there is a growing movement pushing for a ban in all countries. Nineteen European states have legally barred physical punishment in the home and another four are committed to doing so. Malta is one of the remaining four that has not taken any such steps.

Two Dissimilar Items of Interest

The first item I would like to bring to your attention is this article on the biblical illiteracy of the general "Christian" population especially the youth. I don't understand how people can claim to be God seeking people and not have read what he wrote. I think that part of the problem is that people don't seek truth about anything anymore. If something can't be learned without really trying, it appears that most people don't really think they should learn it. This quote from the article sums it up pretty well.

In general we spend far less time reading anything at all in this culture, much less dense and demanding books like the Bible. Not long ago I met with a student who was struggling in one of my courses. When I asked her what she thought the trouble was, she replied, in a tone suggesting ever so slightly that the fault was mine, "Reading a lot is not a part of my learning style." She went on to inform me that students today learned more by "watching videos, listening to music, and talking to one another." She spoke of the great growth she experienced in youth group (where she no doubt spent a lot of time watching videos, listening to music, and talking with people), but her ignorance of the Bible clearly betrayed the fact that the Christian formation she experienced in her faith community afforded her little to no training in the actual reading of Scripture.

The next is a video by a scientist that did experiments to see what happens to plant when exposed to ever increasing amounts of carbon dioxide. It is definitely worth the watch.