Post-traumatic psycho-babble

Interesting:

Post-traumatic psycho-babble | Embassy - Canada's Foreign Policy Newspaper: "American and British soldiers have been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for about the same length of time, and their casualty rates have been about the same.

More than 30 percent of the American troops subsequently suffer Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a condition that involves memory suppression and uncontrollable anxiety. Only four per cent of British troops do. It’s a statistic that suddenly undermines long-held assumptions."

The Embarrassed Superpower

Isn't this the truth:

The Embarrassed Superpower - Rich Lowry - National Review Online: "When Barack Obama said he’d conduct our affairs with more humility, little did we know he meant he’d humiliate us.

He is allowing a vicious little tin-pot dictator to fight us to a standstill in Libya without bestirring himself to do much of anything about it. His latest initiative is to fly two unmanned drones over Libya to send a signal to Moammar Qaddafi about our seriousness. He must have thought sending three unmanned drones — strong letter to follow — would have been unduly harsh."

MSNBC’s Martin Bashir on The Paul Edwards Program

Very enlightening, listen to the whole thing:

MSNBC’s Martin Bashir on The Paul Edwards Program

God Is Still Holy and What You Learned in Sunday School Is Still True: A Review of “Love Wins” – Kevin DeYoung

I like Bell but his methodology in this book is very questionable and ultimately I reject his premise. With that being said, we as the church need to critique from an attitude of love and not some of cruel hateful comments I have read:

God Is Still Holy and What You Learned in Sunday School Is Still True: A Review of “Love Wins” – Kevin DeYoung
Love Wins, by megachurch pastor Rob Bell, is, as the subtitle suggests, “a book about heaven, hell, and the fate of every person who ever lived.” Here’s the gist: Hell is what we create for ourselves when we reject God’s love. Hell is both a present reality for those who resist God and a future reality for those who die unready for God’s love. Hell is what we make of heaven when we cannot accept the good news of God’s forgiveness and mercy. But hell is not forever. God will have his way. How can his good purposes fail? Every sinner will turn to God and realize he has already been reconciled to God, in this life or in the next. There will be no eternal conscious torment. God says no to injustice in the age to come, but he does not pour out wrath (we bring the temporary suffering upon ourselves), and he certainly does not punish for eternity. In the end, love wins.

Morning Jay: The Obama Campaign: From the 'Macarena' to 'Give 'em Hell!'

How true:

Morning Jay: The Obama Campaign: From the 'Macarena' to 'Give 'em Hell!' | The Weekly Standard: "Picture yourself, for a moment, in a version of John Rawls’s original position. You’ve been tasked with selecting the next president of the United States, only you have no idea what political party he/she is from, or his/her ideological beliefs. You only have knowledge of his/her background and résumé. One of the candidates is a former, undistinguished state senator who spent just two, also undistinguished years, in the United States Senate before announcing a candidacy for the White House. Of the 100 or so million people constitutionally eligible to be commander in chief, is this the person you would choose?"

The Man Who Defeated Adolf Hitler

Read the whole thing:

The Man Who Defeated Adolf Hitler - FoxNews.com: "How is it that one man slunk to his death defeated and is today despised by the whole world, while another man went to his death with God's peace, and is today everywhere hailed as a hero, as one of the few Germans with the courage to see what was happening and to speak against it and act against it, even at the cost of his own life?"

My Perspective on the Budget Fight

Interesting point:

My Perspective on the Budget Fight, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty I don't think of the long-term budget fight as being between Democrats and Republicans or between rich and poor. I look at it as a fight between people with funded retirements and unfunded retirements.

If I have saved enough to support my lifestyle in retirement, then I have a funded retirement. If my neighbor who teaches in public school wants to support a similar lifestyle based on her pension, then she has a retirement that is somewhat unfunded. That is, as of now, her pension plan has only about fifty cents for every dollar of promised benefits.

The 30-Cent Tax Premium

Good grief:

Arthur B. Laffer: The 30-Cent Tax Premium - WSJ.com: "According to his research, as of 2009 the income-tax industry employed 'more workers than are employed at the five biggest employers among Fortune 500 companies—more than all the workers at Wal-Mart Stores, United Parcel Service, McDonald's, International Business Machines, and Citigroup combined.' Without diminishing in any way the professionalism of tax attorneys, accountants and financial planners, all of these efforts produce nothing other than, well, tax compliance."

Enron Writ Large

Interesting:

Enron Writ Large - By Kevin D. Williamson - Exchequer - National Review Online: "Standard & Poor’s decision to downgrade the long-term outlook for U.S. sovereign debt came as a shock. It shouldn’t have. Credit-rating agencies (CRAs) such as S&P are a government-chartered cartel, with constraints on competition and a customer base guaranteed by statute. They are the sleepy backwaters of the financial world — and they are always the last to know. As one investment strategist put it to me this morning: We’ve been watching this train go by for a while now, and this is the caboose"

Unearthing Matriarchy

Interesting:

Unearthing Matriarchy - Innovations - The Chronicle of Higher Education
Ten years ago, Cynthia Eller offered a useful and long-overdue demolition of a mistaken idea that gained widespread currency in women’s studies and in some sectors of popular culture. In The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why An Invented Past Will Not Give Women a Future (Beacon Press 2001), Eller, who is an associate professor of women’s studies and religious studies at Montclair State University, reviewed the archaeological evidence in favor of the idea that human society had, in a remote epoch, gone through a period when women ruled and showed that this proposition was a tissue of wishful thinking, wild surmise, and aggressive misreading of the available facts.

Imaginary job numbers could lead to real trouble

Scary:

Imaginary job numbers could lead to real trouble - NYPOST.com: "Early this month Labor reported that 216,000 new jobs were created in March. It was better than Wall Street expected.

But the figure included 117,000 jobs that the department thinks, but can't prove, were created by newly formed companies that might not even exist. In fact, the department is getting so optimistic about the labor market that it increased this imaginary job count from just 81,000 in March, 2010"

President Boring

Yep:

Roger L. Simon » President Boring
But what is it about Obama that makes him so boring? I submit it is something quite simple — he has nothing to say. He is a boring person, the quintessential “hollow man” in the T.S. Eliot sense. He is kind of a socialist, kind of a liberal, kind of a multi-culturalist, kind of an environmentalist, kind of globalist, kind of a budget cutter — but none of them with any real commitment. Basically, he’s a vague and uncommitted person pretending to be otherwise. He is the man that voted “present,” now in the presidency. The fact that he never specified the targets of “hope” and “change” during his election was far from a campaign ploy and more typical than we ever dreamed. There never was a there there. And now, I strongly suspect, there never will be.

Obama deficit reduction plan leaves deficits

Change:

Obama deficit reduction plan leaves deficits - Political Hotsheet - CBS News: "Even if every provision of President Obama's deficit reduction plan is enacted - and he concedes it won't be - there still won't be a balanced budget on the horizon. And the National Debt will continue to expand by trillions of dollars."

Works and Days » The Razor’s Edge

Works and Days » The Razor’s Edge: "California in the Balance." Read it!

What liberal deficit reduction would look like

Ah, the workers paradise:

What liberal deficit reduction would look like | Philip Klein | Opinion | Washington Examiner: "The assault has not abated. Liberals and Democratic lawmakers have continued to tee off on Ryan, arguing that his GOP budget would cut the deficit on the backs of the poor and elderly, while doling out benefits to the rich.

Yet conspicuously absent from most liberal criticisms is any comparable attempt to confront the nation's unsustainable long-term debt crisis.

This is no accident.

It's much easier to attack a plan when the comparison is an imaginary world in which Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security can remain intact with little action from Washington, than it is to present a counterproposal that itself could become a target."

Bethany University faces financial challenges - San Jose Mercury News

This could be the end of my alma mater:

Bethany University faces financial challenges - San Jose Mercury News: "Bethany University is facing financial difficulties that could, in a worst-case scenario, lead to the end of one of the oldest institutions in Scotts Valley, the small Christian school’s president acknowledged Tuesday.

The fate of the school, established in 1919 as a training center for an urban San Francisco ministry, will be discussed next week in Sacramento by the Northern California and Nevada District of the Assemblies of God, which owns and manages the school, said the Rev. Lew Shelton, who’s served as university president since October 2009."

PauThe Republican's plan is brave, radical, and smart. - By Jacob Weisberg - Slate Magazine

Compliments from strange places:

Paul Ryan's budget proposal and Medicare: The Republican's plan is brave, radical, and smart. - By Jacob Weisberg - Slate Magazine: "This dynamic of political evasion and reality-denial may have undergone a fundamental shift today with the release of Rep. Paul Ryan's 2012 budget resolution. The Wisconsin Republican's genuinely radical plan goes where Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich never did by terminating the entitlement status of Medicare and Medicaid."