Mark Byron

Acceleration≠Speed

Here's an untrue headline-"Economy Skids to Near Halt." No it didn't. GDP growth for the fourth quarter of 2007 was a bit anemic, to be sure, at a meager 0.6%, but the economy was still growing and still going on roughly as normal. After 9/11, you could say that the economy came to a near-halt, but even then, business was being done; I recall getting gas on the way home that afternoon just before the price spiked up.

If you're going along the expressway on cruise control, your speed is stable and your acceleration is zero, the change in the rate of movement is zero, yet you are moving at a good clip. You're not slowing to a halt, you're just not speeding up any or slowing down.

Likewise, the economy is still chugging along, producing goods at a slightly faster rate than it did earlier in 2007; it's rate of production is still high and even growing, but the change in the rate of production has decreased. In car speak, you're still accelerating, just not as much as before, going from 60 to 61 rather than from 30 to 60.

However, mathematical illiteracy isn't uncommon in certain circles. For instance, if people are expecting a government program to grow at a 20% clip and is adjusted to grow at only a 5% clip, it's viewed as a cut by the fans of the program. No, it's still growing, but not as fast as you'd like.

The same's true with the economy. We're used to about a 3% yearly growth rate in GDP, and anything less seems like a drop, or is cast as such by the media. The observers feel entitled to a normal growth rate and feel shorted if they don't get it.

We're on the verge of an Orwellian shift in language where a recession becomes where where growth is merely less than average.

Edifier du Jour-Leviticus 26:40-45(NIV)

⁴⁰ " 'But if they will confess their sins and the sins of their fathers—their treachery against me and their hostility toward me, ⁴¹ which made me hostile toward them so that I sent them into the land of their enemies—then when their uncircumcised hearts are humbled and they pay for their sin, ⁴² I will remember my covenant with Jacob and my covenant with Isaac and my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land. ⁴³ For the land will be deserted by them and will enjoy its sabbaths while it lies desolate without them. They will pay for their sins because they rejected my laws and abhorred my decrees. ⁴⁴ Yet in spite of this, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them or abhor them so as to destroy them completely, breaking my covenant with them. I am the LORD their God. ⁴⁵ But for their sake I will remember the covenant with their ancestors whom I brought out of Egypt in the sight of the nations to be their God. I am the LORD.' "

God deals with us in much the same way; we may turn our back on Him, but He never turns His back on us. That's not to say that people who reject Him will get an easy life, but the people who are His will be brought back.

New Approaches to Global Warming

"China to log its worst polluters." It's well-established that trees spew out CO2 every night, so cutting them down would eliminate that nocturnal scourge of climate change ;-).

Factories, farms and other polluters will have to declare how much, and what kind of pollutants, they discharge.

Oh, log... like blog without the b. OK. That changes things a lot.

Edifier du Jour: Leviticus 25:8-17(NIV)

⁸ " 'Count off seven sabbaths of years—seven times seven years—so that the seven sabbaths of years amount to a period of forty-nine years. ⁹ Then have the trumpet sounded everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement sound the trumpet throughout your land. ¹⁰ Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each one of you is to return to his family property and each to his own clan. ¹¹ The fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; do not sow and do not reap what grows of itself or harvest the untended vines. ¹² For it is a jubilee and is to be holy for you; eat only what is taken directly from the fields.

¹³ " 'In this Year of Jubilee everyone is to return to his own property.

¹⁴ " 'If you sell land to one of your countrymen or buy any from him, do not take advantage of each other. ¹⁵ You are to buy from your countryman on the basis of the number of years since the Jubilee. And he is to sell to you on the basis of the number of years left for harvesting crops. ¹⁶ When the years are many, you are to increase the price, and when the years are few, you are to decrease the price, because what he is really selling you is the number of crops. ¹⁷ Do not take advantage of each other, but fear your God. I am the LORD your God.

This is an interesting passage, one that has a problematic hermeneutic; how do we tend to the needy in a post-agrarian culture?

Without land in an agricultural economy, people become hired hands or sharecroppers renting out someone else's land; prospects for advancement are limited and prospects for a better life for one's children were limited as well.

The solution here is to not allow the sale of land in the common-law sense; instead, the land will be leased, reverting back to the owner at the end of the lease. Leasing buildings long-term is common, but leasing land becomes problematic, as the Seneca tribe case that was in the news today shows; I was Googling for stuff on New York Indians and leases just now, not knowing there was breaking news. Our economy assumes ownership of land and permanent dwellings, not easy-to-take-down shelters that may have predominated in Old Testament times.

Our legal system isn't based on a 50-year Jubilee, where property prices fall the closer you get to the deadline, like the trade value of a baseball player declines the closer he gets to free agency. It's also not agrarian. How do we translate that ethic of giving every generation a shot at capital of their own?

Education seems to be the key in our economy; a good education is often worth more than 40 acres and a mule John Deere. Making sure people have access to a good education would seem to be a modern version of a Jubilee ethic.

Help in getting capital for a start-up business might be another tool. Microcredit has been a tool in the developing world go give people the modest amount of capital needed to start up a small business. Our living standards might get in the way of making microcredit functional in the US, since a lot of the modest service-sector or piecework craftsman jobs that flow from microcredit might not appeal to poor Americans, especially with the fairly generous  welfare infrastructure. Don't jump down my throat, Peanut Gallery port-siders; our welfare is better than, say, Bangladesh, and would make some of the very modest small business get sneered at here.

Giving people access to capital, both human and financial, seems to be a good translation; we're already well on our way with education and could use some work on the financial end.

 

Nader and Bourgeois America

Ralph Nader is ready to tilt at windmills coal-fired power plants one more time. He's not well liked for that by more traditional liberals, who may agree with a lot of his critique but saw him costing them the 2000 election, grabbing enough leftists away from Gore to swing the election to Dubya. Given his this is his third reach at the brass ring, he's starting to get into Harold Stassen territory.

Nader rejected such criticism, saying that the two major parties should not have a monopoly on the nation's democracy.

"Let's get over it and try to have a diverse, multiple-choice, multiple-party democracy the way they have in Western Europe and Canada," Nader said.

That's an interesting thought that's worth pondering. If you're up for some serious comparative PoliSci geekery (and I know you are, Peanutster), read on.

The Prime Conservative

Bill Buckley now stands outside of History yelling "Stop!", having died earlier today. He may have been too good and too elite for his cause, since his intellect made it hard to dispute his stances, driving foes to more emotive replies, since they couldn't go toe-to-toe on intellectual argument, with the possible exception of frequent Firing Line sparring partner J. Kenneth Galbraith.

I originally had the title down as "The First Conservative," for he's exemplified modern American conservatism for a half-century as an ideology rather than an attitude. However, there were plenty of good conservative thinkers concurrent with Buckley; Russell Kirk quickly comes to mind, even if I've only read excepts of him over the years.

I slid the title over to The Prime Conservative, like the Prime Meridian, for he marks the nexus from which other conservative thinkers are measured. I'm not nearly as conservative on economics and a bit more so on drug policy, so I've not been a huge Buckley fan, but he was on the side of the angels far more than not, but figuratively and literally. As a faithful Catholic, he likely made it past the Pearly Gates unless he's sentenced to five years in a women's studies program as purgatory ;-).

Question to the Peanut Gallery- who is the new Prime Conservative? Rush might well be the leader in the clubhouse, but is well too earthy to fill the Buckley mantle in my mind.

We're All Just Numbers, After All

I'm grading one of my finance exams, and one of the questions revolved around the mythical Wauchula Tech who had a beta of 1.50. In financese, beta measures the sensitivity to the market with the normal stock having a beta of 1; a 1.5 would indicate a stock that's over-sensitive to the economy, or a cyclical stock in finance-speak.

With that background, here's the question and the LOL answer.

2008 is expected to be a down year on the stock market. Would Wauchula Tech be a good choice for your portfolio this year if the forecast is correct?

... it would depend on whether or not we go into a regression.

With all the election polling we have going, there's a good chance that we'll go into a regression analysis sooner or later. However, it would be a recession that we'd be more concerned with in this context.

Edifier du Jour-Leviticus 24:17-22(NIV)

¹⁷ " 'If anyone takes the life of a human being, he must be put to death. ¹⁸ Anyone who takes the life of someone's animal must make restitution—life for life. ¹⁹ If anyone injures his neighbor, whatever he has done must be done to him: ²⁰ fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. As he has injured the other, so he is to be injured. ²¹ Whoever kills an animal must make restitution, but whoever kills a man must be put to death. ²² You are to have the same law for the alien and the native-born. I am the LORD your God.' "

Regular readers of the Peanut Gallery will know that I'm not a fan of the death penalty, even though it's clearly biblical; it just doesn't seem all that biblical as applied in 21st century America.

Verse 22 solves the question of immigrant murderers; if we have a law, it applies to everyone, not just the natives. We have Mexican and Canadian governments wanting to get their folks off of Death Row, but this passage would lead me away from clemency unless we were going to pull a George Ryan and commute everyone's sentence.

One thing to recall is that the Hebrews of that era didn't have jails; things were either civil offenses or capital offenses, save the maimings listed above. That sounds brutal, but quite a few folks would rather have a court-induced concussion than serve a two-year sentence for clobbering someone in the head with a baseball bat.

Of course, we have a different covenant today, one of grace rather than lex talionis. Jesus already died for our sins, so it's questionable whether we need to die for them again.

Edifier du Jour-Leviticus 23:39-43(NIV)

³⁹ " 'So beginning with the fifteenth day of the seventh month, after you have gathered the crops of the land, celebrate the festival to the LORD for seven days; the first day is a day of rest, and the eighth day also is a day of rest. ⁴⁰ On the first day you are to take choice fruit from the trees, and palm fronds, leafy branches and poplars, and rejoice before the LORD your God for seven days. ⁴¹ Celebrate this as a festival to the LORD for seven days each year. This is to be a lasting ordinance for the generations to come; celebrate it in the seventh month. ⁴² Live in booths for seven days: All native-born Israelites are to live in booths ⁴³ so your descendants will know that I had the Israelites live in booths when I brought them out of Egypt. I am the LORD your God.' "

The Feast of Tabernacles isn't my strongest theological suit. It's interesting that people are to live in tents for a week, but not as a camping trip. They get the first and eighth day off, but one would assume that days 2-6 would be work days (7 being a Sabbath). Folks would be doing their normal routine while living out of a tent.

I can't say that I've ever done that. The closest I've come is to work out of a hotel room while starting a new job.

Lent's probably the closest modern Christians get to that kind of ritual "roughing it" and most evangelicals are out of the Lent loop; however, you have quite a few Pentecostals and charismatics who are bringing the art of the fast back, albeit in a ad-hoc way. Some churches will have some sort of family retreat where everyone (or everyone who can get free) heads off to the woods for food, fellowship and a lot of preaching, but that seems to be the exception to the rule.

This is one of those things that we don't do as a New Testament church, nor am I lobbying for doing this today. However, we don't have too many traditions to remember our roots with.

Hit Piece Me!

Interesting tongue in cheek piece on Huckabee from MSNBC-

Asked whether he thought the recent McCain article was a “Makaka” moment, Huckabee said “obviously, that one didn’t seem to make a big difference.”

“In fact, if anything, it's really helped John McCain, and I’m kinda hoping the New York Times will take me on and run a nasty front-page story,” he said. “It’s maybe the best thing that could happen to me; it certainly was to him.”

At this point, it's the Grey Lady who has brown shoes after stepping in the Makaka on that piece. Conservatives had no choice but to reflexively defend McCain on a piece that seemed more at home in a British tabloid than the flagship of the MSM.

I was dealing with other issues when the McCain-NYT story broke, but Huck's campaign seemed to make sense for about six hours, the time it took to go from "what if it's true..." to "nothing to see here, really, move along." Even thoughtful liberals were giving both barrels to the Times over the piece, which means they got both feet in the steaming pile.

However, if you are going to be covering a rock buff presidential candidate, you had better bring more musical game than this-

Huckabee stressed the importance of creative arts education at the school, repeating his initiative to mandate art and music class. He also played a few bars of “Rising Sun” to the class and asked the students to sing along, but no one seemed to know what the song was.

Including the reporter. I think it's called House of the Rising Sun, not Rising Sun. Whether a Baptist pastor should have a song about a Big Easy house of ill repute dog-eared in his fake book is an interesting question, but the reporter should at least double check the title.

Edifier du JOur:Psalm 47:8-9(ESV)

⁸God reigns over the nations;
   God sits on his holy throne.
⁹ The princes of the peoples gather
   as the people of the God of Abraham.
the shields of the earth belong to God;
   he is highly exalted!

There's a generation of young people who are post-Cold War; that's a sobering fact for someone would could equally word-associate MAD into Alfred E. Newman or Mutual Assured Destruction.

However, we're getting a little taste of the bad old days, with Putin's heir apparent, Dmitry Medvedev, visiting Belgrade and voicing disapproval of Kosovo's independence while rattling a little saber towards Washington. Add that to the US and Russia courting India for weapons deals and strategic friendship and we have a flashback to a less serene era.

However, we managed to get through the first Cold War without blowing ourselves to Kingdom Come. Part of that is God having our back and allowing cooler heads to prevail; we didn't miss WWIII by much on more than one occasion.

Give God his props for that. Putin can trash-talk with Hillary only by the grace of God... literally.

Obama the Legend

That's not a slam, like some of the people on both right and left who attribute messianic stuff to the junior senator from Illinois. He's a good speaker and very likable candidate. He's a bit light on elective experience, but his three years as a US senator and two terms as an Illinois state senator aren't all that far behind the five years as governor that President Bush had this time in 2000, especially when you add the law review editor slot in college.

However, right now, he is more legend that politician, having gotten to this point without staking too many public claims to policy positions except being against Iraq before it was cool.  That's not to say that he doesn't have any policy positions; he's got a platform lined up on his web site. While he has staked out some fairly liberal positions on the issues of the day, it is his tone, both of speech and of skin, that has marked his campaign.

The meme of the race so far has been the articulate, idealistic, sharp-as-a-tack, straight-shooting young outsider against the cagey insider pol, complicated by the fact that the insider is a former first lady. On one level, it reminds me of Hart-Mondale 1984, except that Hart didn't have Obama's charm or resume.

"Change we can believe in." So far, Obama has yet to flesh out to the swing voter what the change is that we're supposed to believe in. The Obama mama who had the Women for Obama sticker on her van in Louisville yesterday may have read the platform, but most of the people viewing the sticker probably hadn't.

Yes, the web site got the platform there if you want to download it, but I don't think that the 10% or so of the electorate that are poling for McCain in a McCain-Clinton race and for Obama in a McCain-Obama are clicking away on it. Hotline has a 8% gap (48-40 to 40-48), Fox has a 3.5% gap (47-44, 43-47) and Zogby has a 9.5% gap (50-38, 40-37).

A few quick Obama bullet points from the last week while I've been stressed out

• I don't think the sharing of a Deval Patrick speech is going to hurt him; it's a good passage that some words like "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" and "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" do mean something. Playing the plagiarism card makes Hillary look petty; she's envious that she could never pull that line off herself like Muhammad Ali got jealous when Apollo Creed beat him to The Master of Disaster.
• Michelle Obama's relative lack of American pride can flow a bit from black bitterness; that's something that her husband has less of having been raised in a Euro-American household. She's not running for president, her husband is, and she seems like she'd be more Roselyn Carter than Hillary Clinton as a potential First Lady.
• Trying to mine that faux pas or her college thesis on black outsiderness in white culture is a mine field for anyone who wants to try it, for it's going to look like black-bashing, and that kind of ham-handedness may have cost the Clintons a return trip to the White House
• The superdelegates are going to decide it one way of the other. Obama might have a majority of the elected delegates, but the superdelegates are going to decide who will give them the best chance to have invites to an inaugural in January. Many of them may have Clinton ties, but Clinton ties and $3.50 will get you a latte if McCain's in the White House next year.

Right now, Obama looks more electable, but the swing voter knows about Obama the Legend, the articulate hopeful black guy that tugs at the better angels of our nature. The platform he's running leans towards big-government overkill, but that's not being discussed right now.

Once it is, that gap will start to dwindle. The trick will be how to politely do so, to say "he's a nice, earnest man, but he'll be leading us in the wrong direction in a nice and earnest manner."

Edifier du Jour-Philippians 2:1-4(NIV)

¹If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, ²then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose. ³Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. ⁴Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.

Our sermon this morning was on the first half of Philippians 2. I did an Edifier on the broader package of this; the NIV header has "Imitating Christ's Humility" and the NASB header has "Be like Christ." My 2003 Edifier had a riff on His Airness' Be Like Mike ads, commenting on Jesus' "doing a Cross-over move at Golgotha, posterizing the Devil once and for all."

However, it's not the flashy sacrifices that make the believer, it's the ongoing effort to look after God and others before themselves; that's hard, since we're selfish, self-centered critters by nature. A lot of people will do the right things for the wrong reasons and want to be seen doing those right things.

It's having a servant's heart, not a servant's actions, that God's after. If He has the heart, the rest of the body will follow suit. When you do that, love and unity will tend to flow a lot more naturally than when everyone is doing their Finding Nemo seagull imitation and hollering "Mine! Mine!" Too often, the worldly churchgoer wants to holler "My good work! My sacrifice!", when a servant's heart doesn't give a rat's keister who gets the credit other than God.

Edifier du Jour-Matthew 20:1-7(NIV)

¹"For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire men to work in his vineyard. ²He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard.

³"About the third hour he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. ⁴He told them, 'You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.' ⁵So they went

   "He went out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour and did the same thing. ⁶About the eleventh hour he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, 'Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?' ⁷" 'Because no one has hired us,' they answered.

      "He said to them, 'You also go and work in my vineyard.'

The "money graf" in the parable is down in 13-16, where God the landowner's paying everyone a day's wage whether they put in the normal-for-the-day 12 hours or one. The hermeneutic of that is that God grants salvation to all, even if they only came to the Lord late in life. Here's my take on that from 2003-

Heaven (at least admission) is a binary decision; do you know Jesus as your Savior or not? The person who can't remember not knowing the Lord and living a upstanding life gets the same eternal reward as the hell-raiser who confesses Christ on his deathbed. The longstanding believer may get a few extra kudos in Heaven, but to the best of my knowledge, Heaven is general admission; everyone has the same ticket.

However, there's still quite a bit to be gleaned from the parable's first part. People kept coming to the market to find something to do; if you weren't a farmer or a craftsman with chores to do, you'd be looking to hire yourself out. Not everyone gets picked the first time and not everyone was there at the earliest part of the day.

The folks that are still available at 5PM might not be the sharpest knives in the drawer; they may be old, scrawny, lazy, slow, or any number of the above. The vintner could have make some crack about their lack of positive attributes, but He merely asked why they weren't already working.

Are the folks that we pick up for the work crew at that 5PM run the cream of the crop? No. Are they part of the Body of Christ? Yes. They may not be the superstars and may be high maintenance, but they're God's children nonetheless.

 

Shell-Shocked

For the Peanut Gallery regulars; I'm feeling better after my incident on Sunday, although the early part of the week had me too shell-shocked to teach. I can relate to people who have been in combat; even though it was only a one-shot deal and I had my unarmed intruder outweighed 2-1, it still was a jolt to the system.

I was in to see my doctor yesterday and he gave me some anti-anxiety medication to help me calm down; I was too out of it to lecture on Tuesday and did podcasts of my Wednesday night lecture ahead of time in anticipation of being too stressed out to teach. I went back and did podcasts of my Tuesday lecture this afternoon and will turn my attention to my on-line EMBA classes tomorrow; I'm not behind with them, since I normally do their podcasts for the next week on Fridays.

The medication has helped, giving me the best night of sleep I've had in a while without grogging me out too much during the day. I'm not getting those mentally-frozen spots where I can't do anything intellectual, and that's good when I have to be an intellectual for a living as a finance professor.

Here's a message for the Peanut Gallery-don't be afraid to get medical help for stress. God can and does heal, but He often does in mundane ways like medication, as well as through talking things out and prayer. In my case, the medication for the stress is making a difference so far.

Edifier du Jour-Psalm 42:8-11(NIV)

⁸ By day the LORD directs his love,
       at night his song is with me—
       a prayer to the God of my life.

⁹ I say to God my Rock,
       "Why have you forgotten me?
       Why must I go about mourning,
       oppressed by the enemy?"

¹⁰ My bones suffer mortal agony
       as my foes taunt me,
       saying to me all day long,
       "Where is your God?"

¹¹ Why are you downcast, O my soul?
       Why so disturbed within me?
       Put your hope in God,
       for I will yet praise him,
       my Savior and my God.

This is a good passage to go along with today's Pearls Before Swine, where Rat is sitting on a wall. Pig asks "What are you doing here, Rat?" Rat's reply-

People are always letting me down. So I wanted to find a place where I could be around people who never disappoint me, never lie to me, never let me down.

Pan out to a longer shot; it's the wall to a cemetery.

I know I've been where Rat's at, where I didn't give a Rat's at about the world and holed up in my bedroom, or my apartment when I was old enough to have my own space. If you're by yourself, no one can disappoint you, lie to you or let you down; that was an appealing idea for someone who was a teasing magnet in his middle-school years and still had that antennae up well into his adulthood.

The one person who won't let us down is God. When everyone else seems cruel and heartless, God is still there, with his endless tank of agape. It's sometimes hard to feel Him when things are bad, but He hasn't gone anywhere.

Retreating to be one-on-one with God is good and healthy; even Jesus had to get away to refill His tanks and commune with His father. So, there is a place in our walk to retreat and experience God in ways that are harder to do in a crowd.

However, you can't live in Rat's Eternal Acres; we have to get back in and interact with the jerks once we get recharged.

 

Edifier du Jour-Psalm 41:1-3(NIV)

¹ Blessed is he who has regard for the weak;
       the LORD delivers him in times of trouble.

² The LORD will protect him and preserve his life;
       he will bless him in the land
       and not surrender him to the desire of his foes.

³ The LORD will sustain him on his sickbed
       and restore him from his bed of illness.

That's an interesting phrasing on verse 3;" sustain him on his sickbed." The NASB and ESV agree on the translation. The patient isn't getting better overnight; instead, he's getting restored. While he's on his sickbed, God is sustaining the weak person.

That's a comforting thought for someone who's on the weak side this week.

 

Around the World in 15 Minutes

The world news is actually encouraging for a change.

The Pakistani elections seem to have gone off well, with Musharraf's party finishing third.

Benazir Bhutto's PPP party got a plurality of seats, with the party of the last freely-elected PM, Nawaz Sharif (a.k.a. the guy Musharraf kicked out), coming in second. Those two parties are talking coalition.

It's encouraging that Musharraf allowed his butt to get kicked in the election rather than try to steal it in some way.

___________

I'm a bit late to this news, but Kosovo declared its independence over the weekend. It seemed to be inevitable, given the enmity between the Serbs and the Albanian majority in Kosovo and the US-led military invasion to keep the Serbs from crapping on the Albanians. The problem becomes that (1) the Albanians are crapping on the Kosovar Serbs and (2) there's a lot of Serb history in Kosovo that predates the Albanians moving in later in the second millennium.

Kosovo goes the way of Panama a century ago in getting US muscle to back up an independence claim; it's not going to happen otherwise. However, we're merely working on humanitarian grounds in Kosovo rather than clearing the deck for the Panama Canal.

The Russians don't like it, partly out of Orthodox Slavic solidarity with the Serbs and partly  in fear that the world might do to them in Chechnya and other minority regions of Russia what they did to Serbia here.

The Kosovar Serbs don't like it either, as they tried to take out border crossings into Serbia.

OK, what's "Get over it" in Russian and Serbo-Croatian?

____________

Thirdly, Fidel finally hung it up as Cuban president. It won't change much, since brother Raul Castro has been in charge since Fidel's health went south in 2006; however, Raul will be officially be elected president later this week.

Pinning the Intruder

I'm not sure how to start blogging on this, but I wound up subduing an intruder to our apartment early this morning. No, that's not a metaphor for a cockroach or a stray dog, but an approximately 5'9", 150lb "stoner" who wandered in through an unlocked front door; hold the lecture about locking the doors, for we've heard it more than once already today.

It was a smidge before 7AM, and I had awaken from a bad dream a bit before, in which I had a troublingly-angry response to teasing within the dream. Eileen and I are talking in bed, and I hear some noises coming from the living room. Given that we're the only people in the apartment, it's not natural to hear movement in one room when we're both in the other.

I get out to find a young man seated at the kitchen table, handling a bottle of one of Eileen's prescriptions; his back was to the bedroom door. I reach over to get the drugs out of his hands, and he literally threatens to kill me as the first words out of his mouth. Eileen heard that threat as well, as she ducked behind the bed in case any bullets started to fly.

Saying "I'm going to kill you" isn't a cool introductory line when you have a guy twice your size right behind you; I'm 6'5" and about 300 pounds. I wrestle him to the floor, making sure he has no weapons to back up that threat. He starts apologizing very quickly once I get at least three points for a near-fall; I'm not sure I got the pin, but I think I did have both shoulders to the floor for about five seconds.

It turns out that I just tackled a very confused young man, closer to 20 than 30 I would guess, wearing no shirt, jeans and socks without shoes. Mind you, this is February in Kentucky where the temperature outside at that time was in the low 50s. 

He was about 5'9 and 150, a white guy with dark brown hair, a lip piercing, and a goatee; a young Johnny Depp gets to play him in the movie. He starts rambling about knowing me and having permission to crash here; he's clearly under the influence of something, for he seems to be a few fries and a toy short of a Happy Meal. He's too zoned to be a good Jack Sparrow, this is the Pirate That Doesn't Do Anything... except do unlawful entries into third floor apartments.

I call 911 and have the police sent out, keeping myself between Mr. Stoner and the front door; the 911 operator stays on the line until the police got there. The police seem to have seen this young man before; he gets cuffed, I tell my story, and Eileen, who's been praying up a storm back in the bedroom, comes out to confirm my story. When asked by the lead police officer, he admits to smoking "the usual stuff."

I opted not to press any charges, since he seems to be in enough trouble as is.

I didn't harm the guy; a lot of folks would have been tempted to rough him up once they had him pinned, especially after being threatened. However, once I sensed he was no threat to me, I let him up and called 911. I didn't even make fun of his inebriated state, just kept him around until the police came.

I feel a bit bad about not thinking any God thoughts, but other than tackling the guy when initially threatened, I didn't show any hostility and acted fairly calmly. I'd like to say that "I prayed and then did X", but I just did stuff.

A lot of the things that I've learned managed to get applied in the heat of the moment about being merciful and gentle; not a total pacifist, mind you, for I responded with appropriate but minimal force, but much more gentle than the average guy would have been when faced with an intruder.

You always wonder, after seeing news reports or TV shows involving intruders, how you would handle things. As it turns out, far better than I would have thought; I was too pumped with adrenaline to be scared and had enough of the Gospel internalized to be merciful once out of danger.

Also, the anger that manifested itself in my dream didn't transfer to real life, and that's a blessing.

[Update 7:15PM-Prayers for the young man are in order; he was lost in multiple ways and needs to both get sober and find his Savior.]

Edifier du Jour-Exodus 38:21-28(NIV)

²¹These are the amounts of the materials used for the tabernacle, the tabernacle of the Testimony, which were recorded at Moses' command by the Levites under the direction of Ithamar son of Aaron, the priest. ²²(Bezalel son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, made everything the LORD commanded Moses; ²³with him was Oholiab son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan—a craftsman and designer, and an embroiderer in blue, purple and scarlet yarn and fine linen.) ²⁴The total amount of the gold from the wave offering used for all the work on the sanctuary was 29 talents and 730 shekels,  according to the sanctuary shekel.

²⁵The silver obtained from those of the community who were counted in the census was 100 talents and 1,775 shekels, according to the sanctuary shekel- ²⁶one beka per person, that is, half a shekel,  according to the sanctuary shekel, from everyone who had crossed over to those counted, twenty years old or more, a total of 603,550 men. ²⁷The 100 talents of silver were used to cast the bases for the sanctuary and for the curtain—100 bases from the 100 talents, one talent for each base. ²⁸They used the 1,775 shekels to make the hooks for the posts, to overlay the tops of the posts, and to make their bands.

The New Testament isn't overly numerical, so I usually don't have the problem I have with this passage. I wrote a simple MS Word macro that does the HTML coding to do the verse numbers as superscript; it slaps  around any number it finds in the text. However, it doesn't differentiate between verse numbers and numbers in the text; which isn't a problem in most passage, where they'll spell out small numbers.

Here, we are dealing with big money. The NIV notes have the silver coming in at 3.75 tons. The finance prof wants to know what the price tag was; at the current market price of $17.45 a troy ounce (14 7/12 troy ounces per standard pound rather than 16) a pound of silver comes in at $254.48, a ton comes in at the high side of a half-million dollars and 3.75 tons would give us a cost of $1,908,594 in 2008 dollars. That's just for the curtain-holding items for the Tent of Meeting.

That's a lot of money. However, this is where the presence of God is camping out on a yearly basis. Modern churches have much pricier digs, but this isn't a converted basketball stadium, it is a tent. A Herald-Leader op-ed yesterday had a writer having a hissy-fit over Kenneth Copeland's $20m jet (more over his word-of-faith theology than the plane, which is a not-unfair shot); I can imagine what he'd think of Moses' $2M tent that is only used to do sacrifices in.

Jewish leaders are building one of the most expensive tents in history, used only for sacrifices to their deity; the Jewish sect is devoted to a single god that goes by "I Am", whom they credit for rescuing them from bondage in Egypt.

A press release from the Philistine Baalian Council was critical of the extravagant camping gear; "The Hebrews are way too overzealous about their Yahweh, giving him credit for a series of natural disasters that afflicted the Egyptians but not them. Now, they start charging a $3.20 poll tax on every Hebrew, even the poor ones, in order to build this fancy tent that only a few elite priests will get to see the inside of."

One advantage of a theocracy; Moses didn't have senators subpoenaing his financial records, and you know they would when this piece got e-mailed to them ;-).

If you have a God who asks to be worshiped and gives the specs for the joint, $3.20/person (my best modern estimate of a half-shekel) isn't too much to ask. In a more subsistence economy, it was probably a much bigger chunk of someone's budget than a half-an-hour at minimum wage.

If you don't think God is worth worshiping, it seems pricey. If he's the Creator of the Universe and our Savior, pony up the $32 or $320 if needed.

Mission, Omission, and Commission

My morning Edifier had me reflecting on a Matt Brown post from earlier this week, where his alma mater Cedarville University canceled under pressure a visit from emergent-flavored speaker Shane Claiborne. Cedarville's been torn between being an old-school Baptist/Reformed college and a more generically evangelical college, moving more towards the latter as of late, which displeases the more old-school stakeholders of Cedarville.

Much of the critique of Claiborne comes from who his friends are; Claiborne hangs his hat on the Sojourners' group blog which includes a who's who of the emergent/evangelical left like Brian McLaren, Tony Campolo and Jim Wallis.  Claibourne's bio shows a degree from Campolo's Eastern College and has a ministry that focused on helping the poor with more than a bit of a radical edge; his current book is subtitled "Living as an Ordinary Radical."

Is he a bit too far to the theological left for Cedarville, even the new Cedarville? I haven't read his book or his theology as of yet, but many of the people he hangs with are less than orthodox, as is his college background. The Princeton Seminary he went to is mainline Presbyterian (PC-USA) and Eastern is mainline American Baptist; the two denominations have seminaries in Richmond, VA that have strong links. It's not the pedigree of someone who I'd invite to a conservative evangelical college, especially if I wanted to keep my job for an extended period of time.

However, that message of a radical missional approach to the Gospel may well be a message that Cedarville needs to hear, even if the speaker's theology might be to the left of the Cedarville norm.

Conservative Baptists, like the Southern Baptists I've been hanging out with since moving to Lexington and the old-school GARBC Baptists who make up Cedarville's core constituency (I was baptized at a GARBC church, and many of that church's kids went to Cedarville) tend to focus on sins of commission, like bad language, improper sexual behavior, lying, and other capital-s Sins. The focus is often on avoiding what God doesn't want you to do.

However, focusing on those sins of commission will often leave folks with a tin ear towards sins of omission, or not doing the things God would want us to do. That's not to say that you don't have missional Southern Baptists who are actively looking to minister to the needy; my pastor is one who has missional in his working vocabulary and is trying to move things in that direction.

One of the things that the emergent-church folks have focused on is being more proactive in ministering to the needy. They're correct in pointing out that modern evangelical churches have a tendency to be insular clubs that create programs for their members but don't do a good job of reaching out to the spiritually, emotionally and economically needy. That's doubly true of suburban churches, whose members often don't really want to get their hands or minds dirty trying to minister to the folks in the grimier neighborhoods.

The emergent folks point out the need for better orthopraxy, doing the right things in ministry, rather than mere orthodoxy, or believing the right things. Of course, you need both; many emergent folks are falling into the Social Gospel trap of focusing so heavily on orthopraxy that they chuck their orthodoxy and the power of the Word with it.

Such ministry to the poor sounds a bit too much like the Social Gospel to many theological conservatives. However, a lot of the critique has political overtones as well beyond any theological differences. For instance, I was thumbing through the academic help wanteds (no, I'm not going anywhere, but I was curious) and found this job posting for Cedarville for a "endowed Berry Family Chair in Free Enterprise"-

Responsibilities include promoting the principles of global free market economics in the context of biblical perspectives on economics and economic issues. The mission of the Chair shall be to engage in activities that facilitate the spread of and reinforce the foundation of free enterprise principles to students and other university constituents who will influence their culture, organizations, and professions through service anchored in biblical truth.

Endowed Chair will be expected to develop upper division economics course(s) within the Department of Business Administration, work with university faculty to revise a core curriculum course to include free enterprise principles, explore the feasibility of proposing an Economics major at Cedarville University with special emphasis on free enterprise and governmental policy analysis, and develop a proposal for a Center for Free Enterprise at Cedarville University of which the Chair would assume directorship.

As Director of the Center for Free Enterprise the Chair will: conduct and/or collaborate on research leading to publication and presentation, develop conferences and seminars, assist in finding additional funds needed to support the Center, recruit Center Fellows, explore the possibility of inviting visiting scholars to the Center, assist in developing expertise among faculty and students in free market responses to various business related issues, establish an advisory council that meets annually, and attract world class free enterprise academics and practitioners to the Center.

They're looking for a Ph.D. in Econ, so I'm not the guy I'm looking for; my Ph.D. is in Finance.

Cedarville seems to have fully bought into what is being called "full spectrum conservatism" in the presidential primaries, accepting economic as well as social conservatism in the package. For me, the hermeneutic of economic conservatism is a bit shakier than social conservatism; I accept the free-market take, but my acceptance flows more from common sense than from applying Scripture.

Such a economically conservative school might not appreciate an politically liberal speaker, even if the message of radically living out one's faith and doing the stuff Jesus would do if He were around in the flesh fits in nicely with the Gospel. Economic conservatives hate it often squirm when you talk about Jesus' "Jewish liberal" side; Mike Huckabee has found that out the hard way the last few months.

Cedarville would be more comfortable with Josh Claybourn's Christian libertarian take than Shane Claybourne progressive take. However, when it comes to living out your faith, both Cedarville and I could use some of Shane's radicalism, even if I'd vote for Josh for Congress (he's about a decade away from being eligible for president) over Shane.

We need both orthodoxy and orthopraxy, avoiding both sins of omission and commission. We need the compassion of a bleeding-heart liberal for the poor; having the political worldview of one is another matter.

Edifier du Jour-Psalm 37:3-6(NIV)

³ Trust in the LORD and do good;
       dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.
⁴ Delight yourself in the LORD
       and he will give you the desires of your heart.
⁵ Commit your way to the LORD;
       trust in him and he will do this:
⁶ He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn,
       the justice of your cause like the noonday sun.

Verse 6 has Margaret Becker echoes and verse 4 is one of those Top 40 Verses that verges on evangelical cliche, but it's verse 3 that hit me this morning.

Safe pasture. That's the job of the Good Shepherd, to take you to a place where we are both well fed and secure. The problem with good pastures is that the predators know where the herbivores like to graze and will be there to take advantage of the buffet.

There are some predators who set up shop where their prey is struggling, like bears setting up shop at a waterfall, waiting for salmon to make the jump up the falls on their trip back to spawn; the talking bear on the card game on my computer will compare a good hand to "a 20-pound salmon, airborne and incoming" [thanks to Mr. Mates for the poster link]. We can see those demons, both real and figurative, preying on the poor and dysfunctional, catching them where they're struggling.

We also have demons of materialism and fear of discomfort that inhabit the suburban meadows. They don't look as destructive as the demons who prowl the inner city, but they don't have to leave a mark; they just have to draw people away from God. The well-off secular person isn't looking for God, since they can handle things themselves. The well-off believer is tempted to rejoice in his creature comforts, often following a theology that translates wealth with God's favor.

Not that wealth is bad, but it's not the ultimate metric; doing good, as the first half of verse 3 points out, is the metric. Too many of us are conditioned not to do evil, not to do those sinful things that are no-nos. The suburban demon wants the cushy Christian to be too comfy in his cul-du-sac to be doing good; he'll even pat us on the back and point out the worldly things that we aren't partaking in and call us good little believers.

We need to be looking at what we can do for God, not what we can avoid doing against Him. We want to have critics calling us do-gooders, for that's about the best complement we can get.

Edifier du Jour: Psalm 36:5-9(NIV)

⁵ Your love, O LORD, reaches to the heavens,
       your faithfulness to the skies.

⁶ Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains,
       your justice like the great deep.
       O LORD, you preserve both man and beast.

⁷ How priceless is your unfailing love!
       Both high and low among men
       find refuge in the shadow of your wings.

⁸ They feast on the abundance of your house;
       you give them drink from your river of delights.

⁹ For with you is the fountain of life;
       in your light we see light.

In this stretch of the Psalms, David is in "please nuke my enemies, LORD" mode. I have a hard time identifying with that, for I've had a bit to much of love-and-pray-for-your-enemies New Testament thought that seems to run counter to that. If I go that route, the thoughts get more than a bit too nasty to be edifying, so I don't go there.

However, David takes a break from that to dwell upon the benefits of being on God's good side. The CCM-literate will be hard-pressed not to hear Mac Powell's cut-and-paste from this passage.

One of the things that didn't make the cut into the song is that everyone, regardless of their stature, finds refuge under God's poncho.

Most of that refuge is provide in joy and peace that money can't buy; money can buy your way out of some problems ("Life's a crap sandwich; the more bread you have, the less crap you have to eat") but it doesn't solve a lot of inner demons. Only God ultimately fills that slot in the soul, and the folks who are looking for drugs, sex and parties to fill it will come away empty at the end.

 

A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to St. Paul

It's early, but Huckabee's up 51-42 in Virginia with 7% in. That will change the equation a little bit if it holds up, for it takes 60 delegates out of McCain's column.

Not enough to stop him yet, but enough to make it a race still.

[Update 8:15-McCain's pulled ahead, but only by a fraction of a percent, 46-46 with 34% in. 1200 votes up when they're 68K-67K. That gap had been bigger]

Egalitarian America

If the polls are correct, the Democrats are on the verge of nominating a black presidential candidate... and if not, they're on the verge of nominating a woman presidential candidate. That's something that we've been aware of for months, but it's still bracing.

Even if I'm not thrilled at either of their platforms, it is refreshing that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have a shot at the White House, something that would have been impossible two generations ago and unlikely one generation ago.

Sexism and racism? As Pastor Steverson would of said, "we're past that." For the most part at least; we still have rednecks and misogynists, but they're a distinct minority.

There was an interesting Leonard Pitts column in the Herald Leader last Friday, where he's dealing with that other F-word, feminism.

Feminist, it seems, has ended up in the same syntactical purgatory as another once-useful, now-reviled term: liberal. Most people endorse what that word has historically stood for -- integration, child labor laws, product safety -- yet they treat the word itself like anthrax. Similarly, while it's hard to imagine any young woman really wants to return to the days of barefoot, pregnant and making meatloaf, many now disdain the banner under which their gender fought for freedom. They scorn feminism even as they feast at a table feminism prepared.

Says [Jessica] Valenti, "The word has been so effectively misused and so effectively mischaracterized by conservatives for so long that women are afraid to identify with it. They'll say everything under the sun that's feminist, but they won't identify with it because they've been taught feminists are anti-men, feminists are ugly."

At least that's what the academic breed of feminists get caricatured as. Most women don't want to fight the battle of the sexes and want to negotiate a peace treaty with the males of the planet. Not terms of surrender, but terms of interaction.

A lot of modern women are post-feminists, assuming the gains that were won in the 60s and 70s and moving forward. That's not to say that they want to go back to "barefoot and pregnant," but society's not forcing them to anymore and hasn't for quite a while. They're not looking at women as a separate identity group at odds with men.

Here's more from Pitts-

With apologies to Malcolm X, they've been had, they've been hoodwinked, they've been bamboozled. And it's sad. I've lost track of how many times, visiting high schools or teaching college classes, I have met bright girls juggling options and freedoms that would've been unthinkable a generation ago, smart young women preparing for lives and careers their foremothers could not have dreamt, yet if you use the "F" word, they recoil.

We have, I think, lost collective memory of how things were before the F-word. Of the casual beatings. Of casual rape. Of terms like "old maid" and "spinster." Of abortion by coat hanger. Of going to school to find a man. Of getting an allowance and needing a husband's permission. Of taking all your spirit, all your dreams, all your ambition, aspiration, creativity and pounding them down until they fit a space no larger than a casserole dish.

"I'm not a feminist, but ...?"

That's a fraud. It's intellectually dishonest. And it's a slap to the feminists who prepared the table at which today's young women sup.

Sorry, but it isn't quite a fraud or dishonest. Dictionary.com has two main definitions of feminism.

1. the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men.
2. (sometimes initial capital letter) an organized movement for the attainment of such rights for women.

Other than some very limited exceptions regarding combat and pastoral position in some churches, the entire American political spectrum signs off on #1. However, it's the attitude of those who are spokeswomen for #2 that give the breed a bad name in modern parlance; they're often unhappy, humorless and shrill, and modern women would not like to be associated with them.

While it isn't in too many people's working vocabulary, I'd like to posit the word egalitarian-"belief in the equality of all people." That defines what most people believe these days.

No one I know wants to go back to the way women were treated in the 50s, as Pitts lays out in that last except. Also, no one I know wants to go back to Jim Crow, for Pitts could have a good paragraph or two about the bad-old-days of segregation and institutionalized discrimination that we wouldn't want to go back to, either.

Believing in everyone's equality before God and the law is the norm these days. We don't always live up to it as well as we should and there are still your share of bigots, but they aren't the norm.

Last night had a controversy at the Rutgers-Tennessee women's basketball game courtesy of a conveniently-stalled clock in Knoxville; that brought to mind their championship game from last year and Don Imus' crass comments at the Rutgers ladies' expense the next day. Such crassness cost him his job in 2007, while a similar crack in 1957 wouldn't have had the weight of public opinion crash down on him.

The conservative stance these days is that people should be treated equally and not given any special treatment; the liberal stand these days is to give folks who would have been discriminated against in the past an edge to make up for those past slights. The conservative stance of today was the liberal one of the 50s and 60s.

The same can be said of women's rights; a conservative in 2008 would be a liberal in the 50s and 60s. Even the most conservative person in the race would be on the left side of the aisle by 1960s standards on woman's rights; Mike Huckabee's mutual servanthood of married couples still falls into type-one feminism.

We're not going back to barefoot-and-pregnant, nor are we going back to Jim Crow. We may scuffle over affirmative action and abortion, but the feminists have won the major battle to get equal treatment under the law. One evidence of that is how the Archbishop of Canterbury got into so much flak about saying accommodating things about sharia; it's substandard treatment of women make sharia a no-go zone for most modern Anglospherians.

To borrow from Tricky Dick, we're all egalitarians now. We're not all feminists or civil-rights activists, but we're egalitarians. That means we can accept what those groups fought for in the 60s without taking on their current stands that are tertiary to what they fought and won in my youth.

Edifier du Jour-Acts 21:3-14(NIV)

³After sighting Cyprus and passing to the south of it, we sailed on to Syria. We landed at Tyre, where our ship was to unload its cargo. ⁴Finding the disciples there, we stayed with them seven days. Through the Spirit they urged Paul not to go on to Jerusalem. ⁵But when our time was up, we left and continued on our way. All the disciples and their wives and children accompanied us out of the city, and there on the beach we knelt to pray. ⁶After saying good-by to each other, we went aboard the ship, and they returned home.

⁷We continued our voyage from Tyre and landed at Ptolemais, where we greeted the brothers and stayed with them for a day. ⁸Leaving the next day, we reached Caesarea and stayed at the house of Philip the evangelist, one of the Seven. ⁹He had four unmarried daughters who prophesied.

¹⁰After we had been there a number of days, a prophet named Agabus came down from Judea. ¹¹Coming over to us, he took Paul's belt, tied his own hands and feet with it and said, "The Holy Spirit says, 'In this way the Jews of Jerusalem will bind the owner of this belt and will hand him over to the Gentiles.' "

¹²When we heard this, we and the people there pleaded with Paul not to go up to Jerusalem. ¹³Then Paul answered, "Why are you weeping and breaking my heart? I am ready not only to be bound, but also to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus." ¹⁴When he would not be dissuaded, we gave up and said, "The Lord's will be done."

This is a very interesting passage. Various people working with varying degrees of prompting were telling Paul not to go to Jerusalem, even though it seemed to be in God's bigger plan to have him go there and hence to Rome as a prisoner.

The folks in Tyre were telling him not to go, getting information "through the Spirit." Agabus laid out the details, but Paul kept on going. Agabus didn't tell him not to go, but told him what would happen if he did.

Were the folks in Tyre getting a vision of doom for Paul and passed that along, not knowing that it wasn't a bad thing in God's plan. Sometimes you don't have an option but to deal with the bad times, or aren't supposed to try to avoid them.

For instance, in early 2004, I got a foreboding that something very bad was about to happen to Warner Southern College where I was teaching, something that would devastate the campus during the fall semester of 2004. However, I was also not led to avoid that, being let to stay put and not start sending out resumes to avoid being there; I was supposed to not look to leave Warner at that time.

Shortly thereafter, I got pink-slipped; my contract wasn't renewed and I finished out the spring 2004 term, moving away in June. In August, Hurricane Charley ripped through the campus, all but totaling the gym building and doing major damage to the library building where my office was. Two more hurricanes ripped through Polk County within the next month.

Our natural reaction if we see bad times ahead is to try to steer people away from it. However, sometimes, God wants us to go through some storms, or at least make someone else be the cause of you not staying. Paul seemed to know that trouble was ahead, but was led to go anyways.

 

Monday Moanin'

I lost Wednesday night's class to a storm system; Sullivan U's Lexington campus was without power all day Wednesday and most of Thursday last week. At least I didn't lose all my belongings, like my pastor's son did when a tornado shredded Union University in TN a week ago.

We've got something more Michiganish coming to Lexington, a good old-school winter storm, complete with snow and ice. We've had just a couple of inch-or-two dustings so far, but this looks a bit nastier. Methinks the K-12ers will get the day off tomorrow, as might day classes at Sullivan (they don't need a third day canceled), but it should warm up enough to get my Tuesday night class in.

_______________

Shaq the role-player? "I'm no idiot. I'm not going to come in here trying to take over and take 30 shots. I'm going to fit in very nicely -- rebound, outlet to Steve [Nash], get some easy buckets, play some defense. That's all we need to do."

When Shaq starts saying nice things about the Showtime Lakers Kareem, he's getting old.

_______________

Driving While Libertarian rather than driving while Republican. As a small-l libertarian, you may think you have the right to drive with a big Paul sticker blotting out the rear window, but the local constabulary will disagree. A big-mama Obama sign would likely get you pulled over, too.

_________

Speaking of B.O., he now has the lead in elected delegates while still trailing Clinton when superdelegates are factored in. He leads McCain in polls, but the polls largely reflect St. Barack, not the arch-liberal that has yet to make it into swing voters' minds.

Edifier du Jour-Psalm 33:1-3(NIV)

¹Sing joyfully to the LORD, you righteous;
       it is fitting for the upright to praise him.

²Praise the LORD with the harp;
       make music to him on the ten-stringed lyre.

³ Sing to him a new song;
       play skillfully, and shout for joy.

If it's "fitting for the upright to praise him," what about those on all fours? They had the Grammys last night, and I wasn't watching; however, that above thought brought to mind some of the less-than-upright performers who often give God glory in things that He wouldn't approve of, like the star pro athlete who thanks God for the win before going home to his girlfriend and their two kids.

As usual, I'm out of the pop music loop almost entirely and will pass on commentary beyond noting that Rehab is both Song of the Year and where the songwriter is at present. I'm not sure what statement that makes of our Anglospherian culture (winner Amy Winehouse is British), but it isn't a pretty one. I'm speaking out of partial ignorance, since I don't think I've heard the song to date; sometimes songs that would seem tacky (like Kayne West's Jesus Walks) prove not to be. However, the lyrics don't look all that promising.

Meanwhile, back to our regularly scheduled passage...

Now that I'd dissed the unupright, what about those of us who can pass for upright? We're supposed to praise him with whatever instruments we have handy, including our voice.

You have a lousy voice? Well, more than once, we're instructed to "make a joyful noise" unto the Lord.

The mandate is praise. The players are asked to "play skillfully", but our first job is to praise Him.

Almost a Miracle

A funny thing happened on the way to the coronation; the Republican electorate has thrown a bit of a monkey wrench into things this weekend. Mike Huckabee won the Louisiana primary and the Kansas caucus, while McCain had a very meager 26%-24% win in the Washington caucuses.

Huckabee has a very uphill fight to keep the nomination away from McCain.

But even with Romney out, Huckabee faces a daunting challenge. McCain has a significant lead in the delegate count after Super Tuesday. If Huckabee wins every remaining state with 50 percent of the vote to McCain's 40 percent, McCain would still be the nominee, according to CNN calculations.

"I know the pundits, and I know what they say: The math doesn't work out," Huckabee said Saturday morning at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. "Well, I didn't major in math; I majored in miracles. And I still believe in those, too."

It will take more than a miracle, it will take conservatives to rally around Huckabee in an ABM Treaty; Anybody but McCain, that is.

Here's my take of the road ahead; I may be off on some of the numbers, but I went state by state the rest of the way, snagging the delegate selection details from the Green Papers web site. McCain has an estimated 721 delegates, 470 away from the 1191 needed for the nomination. I assume that McCain will get 5 of the 19 caucus-based delegates in Washington for starters, given his 26% of the delegates.

Date	Delegates		McCain Delegates	To Go	Statewide	Per Distict	Superdel	Comments
2/9/2008	19	Washington	5	465
2/12/2008	37	Maryland	37	428	13	24
2/12/2008	63	Virginia	63	365	63
2/12/2008	19	DC	19	346	16		3
2/19/2008	40	Wisconsin	34	312	16	24		2C to Huck
3/4/2008	140	Texas	48	264	41	96	3	1 per district, 1/3 of statewide
3/4/2008	88	Ohio	73	191	31	54	3	4C to Huck
3/4/2008	20	Rhode Island	11	180		17	3	0.6
3/4/2008	17	Vermont	17	163	17
3/10/2008	39	Mississippi	8	155	24	12		1/3 statewide
4/22/2008	74	Pennsylvania	0	155			74	Beauty Contest Only
5/6/2008	69	North Carolina	23	132	69			1/3 statewide
5/6/2008	57	Indiana	9	123	27	27	3	1/3 of the CDs
5/13/2008	33	Nebraska	0	123	21	9		State Convention
5/16/2008	20	Hawaii	17	106	11	6	3	State Convention
5/20/2008	42	Kentucky	17	89	42		3	0.4
5/20/2008	22	Oregon	15	74	30	3		0.5
5/27/2008	32	Idaho	13	61	26		6	0.5
6/3/2008	32	New Mexico	15	46	29		3	0.5
6/3/2008	27	South Dakota	11	35				0.4

The table here assumes that McCain wins Virginia and Maryland and most of the delegates from Ohio and Wisconsin. It assumes that McCain gets 50% of the vote in Oregon, Idaho and New Mexico, 40% in South Dakota and Kentucky and a third of the vote in Mississippi, Texas and North Carolina.

I assume that Huckabee wins statewide in Indiana with McCain winning three congressional districts there.

Even with those optimistic but doable projections, McCain pulls to within  35 delegates of the nomination. That's close enough for superdelegates or unpledged delegates to put him over the top.

For Huckabee to keep McCain well enough away from the finish line, he'll have to win a few more states than listed here. A 50% majority win in Texas will deprive McCain of proportional delegates. However, that still leaves McCain only about 80 delegates short.

Huckabee would have to win a couple more states the rest of the way to have the unpledged delegates think twice about McCain. If Huckabee can win Virginia Tuesday, that would go a long way to changing the dynamic. Wins in Virginia, Ohio and Wisconsin can start to derail the Straight Talk Express; that would leave McCain about 200 or more votes short, and leave room for an alternative to develop, especially if Huckabee is beating McCain across the country.

The door is barely ajar right now. If McCain wins both Virginia on Tuesday and Wisconsin a week from Tuesday, the route to block him is slammed tight.

LOLCain at CPAC