Who is Sam Dodson?

“The camera is the new gun.”

Are There Free Speech Rights in Public Schools?

John Whitehead answers the question with a story from Butte Montana.

One of these is not a “right”, right?

Ron Smith from Farm Press.

“Back in November I exercised one of my most important rights as a citizen of the United States of America. I voted.

Recently, I exercised another of my most important rights as an American citizen. I paid my taxes.“

Mr. Smith, what would have happen if you refused to “exercise” your right to pay taxes? My guess is you would be “forced” to exercise your right. How can something be a right if you don’t have a choice in the matter?

Welcome to the New Total Security State

If you love liberty and freedom this one is a must watch. John C. Whitehead from Rutherford Institute discusses current and future surveillance trends as well as some new expanded govt. powers coming down the pike.

Believing God – 12 Biblical Promises Christians Struggle to Accept

I just finished R.C. Sproul Jr.’ s book Believing God – 12 Biblical Promises Christians Struggle to Accept. Wonderful book, it exposed a number of chinks in my armor. Looking forward to sharing what I learned with my family and believing God more and more.

Client of the state? Donkey? You decide.

I am working my way through Hilaire Belloc’s “The Servile State”. I just read John Medaille’s article “The Economics of Distributism Part 1: Does Capitalism Work?” (Front Porch Republic) which makes reference to the book. Here is a short quote from the article that is well worth thinking about.

“In Keynesian states, people cease to be citizens and become mere clients of the state, where even their most ordinary needs are the subject of one or more governmental bureaucracies, and where even ordinary local problems are pushed up to be the responsibility of the most distant levels of government. But as successful as Keynesianism has been at rescuing capitalism from itself, one wonders if this cycle can continue. Each new business cycle seems to require greater intervention than the last, and this latest crises requires gargantuan efforts. Can this exercise in gigantism continue forever?”

A quote from Belloc’s book (taken from Jan. 1947 edition of American Affairs, downloadable at mises.org).

“how much more easily do you not think the ‘Practical Man’ will be conducted towards that same Servile State, like any donkey to his grazing ground? To those dull and short-sighted eyes the immediate solution which even the beginnings of the Servile State propose are what a declivity is to a piece of brainless matter. The piece of brainless matter rolls down the declivity, and the Practical Man lollops from Capitalism to the Servile State with the same inevitable ease. . . .

He knows nothing of a society in which free men were once owners, nor of the cooperative and instinctive institutions for the protection of ownership which such a society spontaneously breeds. He ‘takes the world as he finds it’—and the consequence is that whereas men of greater capacity may admit with different degrees of reluctance the general principles of the Servile State, he, the Practical Man, positively gloats on every new detail in the building up of that form of society. And the destruction of freedom by inches (though he does not see it to be the destruction of freedom) is the one panacea so obvious that he marvels at the doctrinaires who resist or suspect the process.”

The Schools Are Destroying Freedom of Speech

Obvious but worth watching. Whitehead puts together some good stuff, I would think the number of views would be higher for his YouTube channel.

Technorati Tags: Government, Free Speech, Rutherford Institute, Fascism

Heard today on Paul Harvey…

“How do you make God laugh? Show him your life plan.”

Doom and Gloom: What will the result of the largest credit boom in history be?

This was the largest credit boom in history, and it will be the largest bust, no matter what the “stimulus”.

Souce: Mike Shedlock

No economic recovery in sight.

“We’re talking years – not months – before we see a decent recovery in the jobs market,” predicted Sung Won Sohn, economist at the Martin Smith School of Business at California State University. “It is going to get worse before it gets better.”

Source: Right Mind

Try to imagine if you will that the economy is perfectly fine. Everyone is working, business is booming, and last year the budget was nearly balanced. Get that picture in your mind. Now you hear that congress decides to double the size of every govt. budget. What would our reaction be? Well of course we would think this is utterly stupid. We would all be saying how bad an idea this is. The obvious question is if it is a bad idea when times are good why isn’t it an even worse idea when times are bad?

Here is the thing I have learned about the subject of economics…it is complicated. Yes the feds can hand out a billion here and a billion there and “create” jobs. However, what you don’t see are the jobs not created or loss in the private sector as a result of the federal spending. Here is something I am willing to bet on, there is no economic recovery in sight until market interventions stop. Things will get much worse before they get better and better is not going to look like it use to.

Creative Memories: Girls Bike, No Doubt About It

Tonight I went back through the chapter on Head Coverings in “Rediscovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood”. You can find the chapter here if you want to read it. I figure this is the best laymen’s defense from a complimentarian point of view that head coverings are a cultural artifact. I found it less convincing than ever. I will be writing more on this when I have time and commenting on the chapter. I have written about the topic before here. I am 99% convinced that Paul’s inspired commands are still relevant, perhaps more relevant than ever. I was really hoping that the chapter would give me reason to maintain greater doubt.

Creative Memories: Lincoln Indoctrination Camp

This is my sweetie (a most glorious woman). She use to work for a now bankrupt state.  Found this photo tonight and it is quite funny considering my views of Lincoln.

Voddie Baucham’s New Book

Voddie has a new book shipping next week. The title is “What He Must Be…if he wants to marry my daughter“.

I love the title because you immediately understand in no uncertain terms that Voddie believes he has the authority to reject a suitor. You can bet if Voddie believes it, he gets it from the Bible. His exegesis will be compelling, I am looking forward reading it.

This brings me to a thought I had last week. It is still common in Christian circles for a suitor to seek the approval of a woman’s Father before asking for her hand in marriage.  However, most of the time this is just a tip of the hat to an outdated custom. Most couples don’t actually believe that the father has any real authority to reject a suitor, and if he did they would think him to be a bygone barbarian. They are nice enough to carry on the tradition however. My guess is that this custom is now more about seeking the father’s finances for the wedding rather than seeking the father’s approval of the suitor.

If you agree that a father has any real authority whatsoever  you will need to ask yourself some questions.

• How much authority do I have?
• What can I do with my authority?
• What is the purpose of my authority?
• When does it begin and end?
• Are my answers in accordance with God’s Word?

Here is my point. Any Father who thinks a man ought to ask permission to marry his daughter believes he has some measure of authority no matter how small. If this man works through the questions above he will logically come to the conclusion that courtship is the most appropriate method of exercising that authority.

008 – Men Without Chests (Basement Tape – Notes)

Download the conversation here.

Click an image below to enlarge.

007 – Government (Basement Tape – Notes)

Download the conversion here.

Another very important conversation from the Highlands Study Center. Many thoughts to share but I post this stuff so late at night that by this time I am ready to crawl into bed! Anyway, buy the conversion, $3 and well worth it. Even though I have listened to this particular tape a few times now I always find I missed one or two small but important points.  A few parting shots…

• 4 spheres/institutions (you, family, church, state) with distinct tools for enforcement (conscience, rod, keys to Kingdom, and the sword).
• We are a nation of statists, many of you have no idea what that means, good indication that you are a statist. Go figure, most of us have been educated by the state.
• Most Christians have a far greater fear of the state then the church.
• The nature of every institution is to to encroach on the responsibilities of the other institutions.
• Any law we vote for is an expression of our desire to enforce that law ultimately under penalty of the sword.
• Govt. is FORCE.

Higher resolution images for the notes below can be viewed here.

006 – Reading Good Books (Basement Tape – Notes)

Download the conversion here.

An important conversion regarding the need to read…a lot. Numerous book recommends and I concur on those I am familiar with and trust the ones I am not are also worth reading. Plenty of thoughts but I will save them for another time. I did learn one important thing about myself. I realized that my opinion of other men is frequently tied to the books they read and their opinion of those books. Sometimes just knowing a man’s views on  something like pop-culture is enough to know he has either not read a certain book or read it and rejected it’s thesis and as a result there is a tension. If the matter is important enough (and not all are) that tension may eventually have to surface.

Higher resolution images for the notes below can be viewed here.

005- Building The Kingdom (Basement Tape – Notes)

Download the conversion here.

Here are my notes on Basement Tape #5. I decided to jot them down on paper tonight. They are less useful for you but they are more useful for me. I also enjoy the process of taking notes this way better than doing it on the computer.  Besides you need to listen for yourself.

Certainly a lot to think about. R.C. puts a high priority on the Kingdom of God and I concur. It isn’t as if I haven’t heard a dozen or more sermons with a strong emphasis on Kingdom but I seem to always walk away feeling like I have only been told part of the story, perhaps this tape tells us the rest.

A few takeaways.

• What is my family doing now? Later? Tomorrow? Next week? Next month? Can we “walk”  from these activities to the Kingdom of God and fulfillment of the Dominion Mandate?
• We pursue living simply, separately and deliberately in order to remove things that hinder us from our pursuit of the Kingdom.
• Stepping Heavenward is suppose to be a good book. You can buy it for a penny plus shipping.
• There are many questions regarding the Kingdom of God which I can think of. It is important that we think very carefully about what we believe the answers to be. Here are a few, I am sure there are many more. Is the Kingdom of God visible or invisible or both? To what extent? Is it progressing? Will it be made known? What is our responsibility to make it known? How are we to make it known? Is that the only way? Is the Kingdom limited to individuals? Families? Cities? States? Nations? Could a history of Christ’s Kingdom be written? If so would it include actual historical events? Is Satan’s Kingdom more apparent than Christ’s?
• Some of these questions are a result of thoughts I have had while reading Christian Reconstruction – What It Is, What It Isn’t, you can download it for free here. It is an easy and concise read.

Higher resolution images for the notes below can be viewed here.

Why You Can’t Start a Moving Company in Oregon

Short video.

Must Watch TV: Ron Paul

A lot of Ron Paul videos out there, but every 10 minutes of this one is priceless.

Source: LRC

Covenant

Funny.

“Everyone talks about the covenant, but nobody does anything about it.” – Source

Monday Morning Headlines

Caterpillar Moves to Cut 20,000 Jobs

Sprint job cuts to total 8,000

Philips Halts Buyback, Slashes 6,000 Jobs After Loss

Home Depot Says It Will Exit Expo Unit, Cut 7,000 Jobs

More layoffs expected at Starbucks

Update:
I recieved an email at work to inform me that some cuts were being made within our group. TIt seemed to suggest there are more to come.

Putting the economic blow up back together.

We live in interesting times. We are in the midst of quite a blow up at the moment.

“when things blow up politically, new people pick up the pieces, and then other bright new people start rethinking the proper arrangement of the theoretical puzzle of politics and government. The theoretical puzzle gets put back together very differently, just as the various institutional puzzles get put back together differently, and new words and concepts are developed that help justify (and even actively promote) the new arrangements. In short, some groups win, while others lose.” – Christian Reconstruction – What It Is, What It Isn’t by Gary North and Gary DeMar

A series of triumphs disguised as disasters.

In that last post I noted that Jamie Soles has a blog. Well I read his latest entry and he has a few remarks worth repeating here because they really hit home.

If we go thru any particular day and ask ourselves at the end of it what we accomplished in terms of character development today, our usual answer may range from “Not much…” down to “Nothing”. But I read a saying a couple weeks ago that stuck in my mind, and it is worth thinking about… “People overestimate what they can accomplish in a day, and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade.”

Someone once described the development of the kingdom of God as “A series of triumphs disguised as disasters.” It may appear that we are failing, but we keep on doing what we know God wants us to do, plugging away believing in His promises, and it seems to me that God will honor this kind of faith with children who are obedient to Jesus.

Here is a video of Jamie on youtube.

You can purchase mp3’s here, we own The Way My Story Goes, it is superb.

One more link, Jamie did an interview about some of his music at St. Annes Pub.

Kids love Nathan Clark George too.

Ditto on Kids Love Him, Too.

This morning my five year old grabbed one of our Nathan Clark George CD’s and took it into her room to listen to. Tonight one of our pastors lamented that his wife was very sad that it was time to return a Nathan Clark George CD he had borrowed.

Another favorite for us and the kids is Jamie Soles (looks like Jamie has a blog)

Good stuff. Buy some.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard Address

Here are my notes on Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s well known 1978 Harvard Address. My shortened summaries of each point are highlighted below in blue text. Many of the problems below in my mind can only be redressed through proper discipleship and an important step in that direction is to reject the state’s educational system. Please see this recent post quoting Eugen Rosenstock-Heuessy regarding the modern notion of polytheistic eduction.

1. Contemporary Worlds (There are cultures which are not understood by Western thinking.)
   1. “Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking.”
2. Convergence (Our arrogance leads us on the path of imperialism and empire.)
   
   1. “But the blindness of superiority continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present day Western systems which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive. There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction. However, it is a conception which developed out of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development is quite different.”
3. A Decline in Courage (We are in large part a nation of cowards.)
   
   1. Particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and intellectual elite.
   2. Policies are created based on weakness and cowardice.
   3. Courageous individuals have no determining influence on public life.
   4. Is a decline in courage the beginning of the end?
4. Well Being (Our emphasis on well being weakens us.)
   
   1. Our concern for well being has lead us to empty materialism and the welfare state.
   2. Guarantees of safety and well being are not always advantageous.
5. Legalistic Life (Our concepts of justice and law are in fact very low.)
   
   1. Western society worships the letter of the law. Law makes right.
   2. “a society without objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but a legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”
6. The Direction of Freedom (We are failing at the task of reconciling law and liberty.)
   
   1. Humanistic thinking has lead to a type of “freedom” which rewards mediocrity and promotes evil.
   2. “The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.”
7. The Direction of the Press (The press can not be trusted to reliably report the truth and inform us.)
   
   1. “Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20′th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press. It stops at sensational formulas.”
   2. The press bears no moral responsibility for deformation or disproportion.
8. A Fashion in Thinking (Our thoughts and ideas are censored by passive means.)
   1. “Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day.”
9. Socialism (We are Socialistic, whether we like to admit it or not.)
   1. Western society is leaning towards socialism, a false an dangerous current.
   2. Socialism leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.
10. Not a Model (There are ample reason to think we are not the model for the rest of the world that we think we are.)
    1. The Western way of life is not a good model for the rest of the world.
    1. “But it is also demeaning for it to elect such mechanical legalistic smoothness as you have. After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor and by intolerable music.”
    1. “There are meaningful warnings that history gives a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art, or a lack of great statesmen. There are open and evident warnings, too. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.”
11. Shortsightedness (We have been shortsighted in dealing with foreign threats.)
    1. “On the contrary, only moral criteria can help the West against communism’s well planned world strategy. There are no other criteria.”
12. Loss of Willpower (We are a nation without will power.)
    1. “And yet — no weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being.”
13. Humanism and Its Consequences (Man is at the center of everything.)
    1. “This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. Merely freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones.”
14. An Unexpected Kinship (Materialism, socialism, and communism all have roots in humanism.)
    1. “Humanism without its Christian heritage cannot resist such competition. We watch this process in the past centuries and especially in the past decades, on a world scale as the situation becomes increasingly dramatic. Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism and socialism could never resist communism.”
15. Before the Turn (We must reject humanism, materialism, show restraint and recognize the impact of the enlightenment and modernism.)
    
    1. “There is a disaster, however, which has already been under way for quite some time. I am referring to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.”
    2. “We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.”
    3. “Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.”
    4. “If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.”