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Who needs Underdog?
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Ethanol is the ultimate government solution: Special interests get billions of your tax dollars to produce an inefficient fuel, increase grocery prices and harm the environment. Brilliant.
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Farm subsidies – wasteful or practical? I say wasteful and counterproductive. I know we have a couple readers who own farms. Looking forward to your insights!
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The myth that abortion lowers crime rates is wrong on several levels.
- It ignores the homocides of the abortions themselves.
- You could kill lots of people outside the womb and those folks would then commit less crimes – but would that be moral or wise?
- It implies that killing people before they have committed crimes is morally acceptable (yet pro-legalized-abortionists are usually anti-capital punishment).
- The statistics are manipulated.
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Mommy Zabs has a new site called Not China Made. Check it out. Now! I’ll wait here.
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It has been interesting watching the evolutionists squirm over the fossil finds in Kenya.
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If you read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins you may want to follow it up with The Dawkins Delusion.
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Video on the logical consequences of hate crime status for sexual preferences
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Filed under: Weekly roundup
Neil – Thanks for the laugh of the week! The link you provided to the fossil finds in Kenya lead me to Lawrence Selden, a nut job who calls himself a “macroevolution agnostic.”
His current post talks about his belief in “science with philosophical implications.”
umm – What? How is that even possible? Scientific theory does not allow for “philosophical” implications. It does not even allow for implications, unless you want to call an implication a theory. Theories must be proven correct or incorrect, however. What are the implications of these theories? Well, science doesn’t care – not one whit!
If this is an example of “evolutionists squirm[ing],” I don’t think we – evolunitionists – have much to worry about. He’s on is own planet, and the hubble telescope can’t even find him.
I’ll check out the hate crime video when I get the chance. I remember a South Park episode where they talked about hate crimes, and I thought if an episode of South Park can tear down the logic of hate crimes legislation so easily, it’s probably not that good of an idea.
I don’t farm. We all have a dog in the hunt, though, when it comes to farm subsidies. The problem the past 30 years or so is that the rhetoric has been “save the family farm!” Then, when people see that peopel like David Letterman, and giants like Archer Daniels Midland are getting subsidy checks, they freak out — for good reason.
Reform would be good. But the real reason for ag subsidies is national defense. If this country ever loses control of its food production the way it’s allowed foreign countries to decide so much of our fate with oil, we’re in deep trouble. Because we could all go back to horses and buggies. But we all gotta eat.
Then there consumer prices. The reason food is so cheap in this country is because the federal government makes it so, as a matter of national policy.
Bottom line: If you don’t like farm subsidies, don’t talk with your mouth full.
I watched the video and had to post it. To see those two Christians stand up in the face of opposition that way was truly inspiring. How many had already conceded when the police showed up at their door? I hope none did, and I’m glad the Thompsons did not.
Great roundup…
I agree about hate crime legislation. We need to remove existing hate crime protection for religion and racial groups. If someone burns down a church it shouldn’t be punished anymore than burning down a 7-11. All crimes should be treated the same, regardless of the identity of their victims.
Neil,
BTW, I posted the video over at my site and have gotten some interesting conversations from a man who apparently is for the legislation. Interesting.
Blessings
I have to agree about hate crime legislation. It is a clear and unacceptable restriction on freedom of speech. Just look at what existing hate crime protection has done. We can no longer speak negatively about Islam or Hinduism because religion is a protected group, and no one can say anything racist because it’s a “hate crime”. Truly unAmerican.
Hi Neil,
Great video! It’s always nice to see Christians fight for their right to pronounce the Gospel. I also might just have to give “The Dawkins Delusion” a read. Nice Job!
“Just look at what existing hate crime protection has done. We can no longer speak negatively about Islam or Hinduism because religion is a protected group”
I don’t know where I fall on the hate crime issue, but let’s not go overboard. There’s nothing in the law stopping anyone from speaking negatively about Islam, Hinduism, blacks, whites or even Baptists.
Islam sucks and Southern Baptists really suck! See? No police coming to take me away. That’s not against the law.
When we misrepresent reality, we do harm to our position.
Any hate crime laws in the US aren’t about free speech, but rather, deal with actual physical attacks based upon isolating that person especially because he’s gay or she’s Baptist.
I understand slippery slope arguments (”well, it’s only applied in physical assaults NOW, but down the road, they’ll try to shut down churches that speak against homosexuality!!”), but that’s not going to happen, not here.
“Any hate crime laws in the US aren’t about free speech, but rather, deal with actual physical attacks based upon isolating that person especially because he’s gay or she’s Baptist.”
There are campus speech codes that exist apparently. It’s slightly different because it is in a college, but I believe free speech should still be upheld.
There was a situation in Oakland with hate speech laws, but to be honest, the situation there is a little murky and I don’t know all the details.
I have a personal experience dealing with these types of laws. Our church has been in Southwest Ohio for nearly 150 years. Several years ago a group of Muslims built an “association” (really a mosque) in our local community. Our church gathered together to pray for these poor souls trapped in Islam. We even went to their building and attempted to pass out Biblically-based pamphlets to them as they exited their service. Well, to make a long story short, many of them became upset and accused us of “harassment”. I can just imagine how these situations will get worse when more “groups” are added to hate crime legislation. If we can’t minister to Muslims as they leave their mosque, the government is preventing us from practicing our Christianity.
So, if a bunch of Muslims hover outside your doors each week, and they’re joined by gay folk and atheists and they all hold hands and dance around your church chanting anti-Christian cheers, are you going to want them to go away? Would you feel harassed? And if you were a minority faith system in a country that is already holding you suspect, then would you?
I suspect that most municipalities would have some rules about loitering outside someone’s church, business or school with pamphlets and/or proselytizing. I’d support that.
I wouldn’t support that as a hate crime and, as I said, to my understanding, hate crimes come in to play when violence is done or threatened. So, I don’t believe hate crimes ordinances would have anything to do with your Muslim proselytizing. Were you charged with a hate crime?
Do what?
“We even went to their building and attempted to pass out Biblically-based pamphlets to them as they exited their service. Well, to make a long story short, many of them became upset and accused us of “harassment”. ”
IF YOU WENT ONTO THEIR PROPERTY AND PASSED OUT CHRISTIAN LITERATURE THEN YOU WERE, IN FACT HARRASSING THEM. Go where you think the Gospel leads you — but be ready to answer to the law for it. THAT is biblical.
Hate crime laws have been in effect since the late 1969, with the recent surge in hate crime legislation happening in the early 90’s, I believe. And yet, I don’t think anyone’s free speech has been muddled with in these 15 years. And especially not any churches. Or, at least I couldn’t find any stories to support that.
A google search for “church prosecuted hate crimes” revealed this story about some teens prosecuted under the hate crimes law for vandalism when they spray painted slurs on a church and nothing else in the first few pages that would suggest a church has been prosecuted in the US for a hate crime.
Most of the opposition cited “What might happen here, like it did somewhere else” as the main concern, as in this story. There apparently have been some prosecutions in other countries based on their hate crime laws.
I just don’t see it happening here. For one thing, you have the Religious Right, which is afraid of losing their free speech rights who would fight it. Secondly, you have the Left, which is opposed to free speech limits, in general, and THEY would fight it. Additionally, we have the ACLU out there looking out for our free speech rights. (I mention them just to get a laugh out of some of y’all…)
In other words, I think we’re safe.
I have to disagree with that, Dan. Christianity requires us to offend people sometimes, as Neil has said earlier. Jesus came, not to bring peace, but to divide people. Telling homosexuals, atheists, Jews, Catholics, Muslims, and others that they are going to experience a very violent and terrible afterlife is the Truth of the gospel. Some may say see that as a threat, we Christians see it as sharing the Good News with mankind.
Reading these comment threads makes me wish I had more time to jump in head first. But I will have to limit my comments to stating that as usual your weekly round-up is quite good.
I think the ethanol article was very good, I might disagree with a couple of minor economic points.
I am a farmer, but I have a degree in ag-engineering. In the mid 70’s our farm did quite a bit of research on ethanol (we are not a typical farm). We actually had a special research permit from ATF. Dad had already had experience with operating vehicles on alcohol in Korea during World War II.
We did some testing and were designing a distillation column. But in the end the energy out did not justify the energy in unless we could find a really cheap source of fuel. We also concluded that ethanol production was a good way to turn a non-mobile source of energy into mobile energy.
Now, the process is more efficient today than it was back then, but not that much. My personal feeling is that ethanol subsidies have probably set back more promising alternate energy processes by decades.
Interestingly, due to natural gas prices, nitrogen prices have gone so high that producing corn even at higher prices is barely profitable. Yet the ethanol plant being built nearest to us, as well as many others use natural gas to produce ethanol. If anybody can explain that economics, I would be glad to read it.
That said, I think ethanol does have its place. I watching, with interest, a new facilty being built near here that will use methane gas produced from dairy cow manure to make ethanol. The by-product from ethanol production will be fed to the cows. I have not analyzed the economics of this. But we did look at the theory of this type of process years ago and I am confident that it will work.
I want to comment on farm subsidies too, but that may have to wait a couple of days.
Thanks, SST. I was hoping you’d weigh in on that one. Always good to hear from people who are actually living in the midst of these topics.
Patty said:
I have to disagree with that, Dan. Christianity requires us to offend people sometimes
Oh, I agree. But what I was indicating was that the church is in no danger of losing its free speech. There’s no evidence (that I see) that the US is currently, or is likely to in the future, start limiting free speech because of hate crime laws.
I agree, though, that if we were to follow in the steps of Christ more closely, we would upset folk – especially the powers that be, the wealthy, the oppressors.
I agree with Kierkegaard’s quote:
Christianity has been made so completely devoid of character that there is really nothing to persecute. The chief trouble with Christians, therefore, is that no one wants to kill them any more!
Dan, I was reading Acts 6:2 (”So the Twelve gathered all the disciples together and said, “It would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on tables.”) last night and thought of you.
Of course Christians should help the poor and such. But lots of non-Christian organizations can feed the poor and “stick it to the man.” Much of the church in the U.S. either doesn’t like or doesn’t know the primary reason it exists.
In defense of ethanol, I should clear up one point.
I think the government subsidies of ethanol production are a big mistake.
However, food grade corn is NOT USED in the production of ethanol. Except for a few small indepentents, food grade corn is grown under contract. Those contracts are very lucrative and corn for ethanol does not compete with them.
The corn supply you buy at the store is controlled by processors who decide how many acres will be planted.
Also, making ethanol does not eliminate the corn from the food supply. A by-product of ethanol production is a high quality livestock feed.
As for commodity prices, they are headed up anyway. the govenrment reports will tell you that we had a record farm income last year. What they don’t tell you is that we had record expenses due to high energy costs.
Personally, I had the lowest net income I have had in 30 years and my wife had to get a job. If prices stay higher due to ethanol production it will only put us barely back into profitablility. One of our friends was forced into bankruptcy and another had to sell his farm.
1. SST – I am so sorry to hear about your friends’ farms and your current challenges. I prayed for all of you and for wise legislation to ensure the fairest process possible.
2. I would have to learn more about Edwina’s church and just how the evangelism exercise with the Muslims occurred before expressing an opinion. Based on comments here and at other blogs I think people filled in the blanks a bit much before whaling on what she described.
Perhaps they were overzealous, but perhaps they are taking their time, energy and money to help save lost Muslim souls while others are doing nothing.
When I teach on evangelism and world religions I always emphasize the importance of being an ambassador for Christ and not adding to the offense of the Gospel.
Hey Neil!
Can you believe I’m just getting around to reading my favorite blogs this week? Agh. Anyway, I miss this blog you have here. Always full of great stuff!
Thanks for plugging my new site
Farm Subsidies
The government should never have started farm subsidies and they should have stopped when they had a good opportunity in the mid-70’s.
USDA believes that farm subsidies keep food values low, well that is why they were started. They encouraged farmers to raise livestock in confinement to free land for crop production and to place marginal land and even less than marginal land (land that should never have been disturbed) into crop production. But once this production increase took place, with borrowed money; often with governement sponsored loans, farmers and lending institutions were committed to farming this land even if subsidies were stopped.
Today, I submit that farmers don’t even get farm subsidies. Supplies of farm inputs, equipment, fertilizer, chemicals, seed, etc. don’t base the price of their products on the cost of production, instead they are based on what the farmer can pay. So farm subsidies are just passed on, usually to multi-national corporations.
If you don’t believe this, consider that these same companies also sell to farmers in other countries without subsidies at prices those farmers can afford to pay.
Now I know I am over-simplifiying here, there are factors such as enviromental regulations and product litigation that companies in this country have to consider, but still you should get the idea.
Additionally, competition between farmers has caused any remainging subsidy money to be used to inflate land prices and rents.
Farms subsidies are basically an addiction. The problem is if they are stopped suddenly, it will be a disaster for many family farms. Suppliers and landlords will not lower prices willingly and each will think that the other should be the one to do so. Falling land prices will cause lenders to foreclose as property values fall. Large corporate farms with deeper pockets will be able to take over many smaller farms. So USDA needs to commit itself to a plan of gradually weaning the ag economy from subsidies.
As to the large corporate farms, I am sure you have read stories about multi-million dollar payments being made to some of those. I read a story recently, I don’t know where I read and I don’t know if it is true. The reporter claimed that a former USDA employee who had helped write the payment limitation rules was charging mega-farms a $600.00 per hour consulting fee to help them take adavantage of loopholes he had left in the rules.
The government is also making large payments to subsidise crop insurance companies.
If I were a cynical person I would say the problem is that small farmers don’t make many contributions to PAC’s but large farm corporations and insurance companies do.