Mark Byron

Frankie Goes to the Opening Ceremonies

I caught a bit of the opening ceremonies last night when they were doing a montage of British pol of the 60s-80s. The one that struck me the oddest was when they were focusing on Relax from Frankie Goes to Hollywood; the black youth playing the suitor in the production had a "Frankie says Relax" t-shirt on under a jacket of sorts. As I recall, the song was risque enough to get banned on British radio when it came out in the early 80s.

Fast forward three decades and they're playing it for the Queen and the world.

Interestingly, the suitor in the skit was clearly of African descent and the object of his affection was a cute gal seemingly of mixed descent. Not your grandpa's UK, to be sure.

Edifier du Jour-Titus 1:6-9(NIV)

⁶ An elder must be blameless, the husband of but one wife, a man whose children believe and are not open to the charge of being wild and disobedient. ⁷ Since an overseer is entrusted with God’s work, he must be blameless—not overbearing, not quick-tempered, not given to drunkenness, not violent, not pursuing dishonest gain. ⁸ Rather he must be hospitable, one who loves what is good, who is self-controlled, upright, holy and disciplined. ⁹ He must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught, so that he can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it.

Note that Paul's list of positive traits in verse 8 starts with hospitable. Verse 9 has the elder fighting for the faith and refuting bad doctrine, but he's supposed to disagree in an agreeable manner. Self controlled and disciplined are also virtues of an elder.

That runs counter to the in-your-face prophet mode many preachers and bloggers get in to, where the more inhospitable they are to their foes, the better. A steady diet of brimstone-slinging scares more folks off than it converts.

Edifier du Jour- Titus 1:1-4(NIV)

Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ for the faith of God’s elect and the knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness — ² a faith and knowledge resting on the hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before the beginning of time, ³ and at his appointed season he brought his word to light through the preaching entrusted to me by the command of God our Savior,

⁴ To Titus, my true son in our common faith:

Grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior.

Paul (or his editors with the NIV) is the king of the run-on sentence; four verses before we hit the first period.

However, it isn't that questionable sentence structure that caught my eye, it was verse 2, were eternal life was "promised before the beginning of time." Who besides God was there to promise anything to before the beginning of time?

That promise was an open question, since in Jesus' day, the Sadducees were lobbying against the idea of a life-after-death. They must have missed that pre-historic promise from God.

Eternal life is thus baked into the fabric of the universe, part of the cosmos' warranty. Even if I can't quite grasp who God was promising it to when only He (or some angles if they pre-dated time as well) was around, it's a very cool and comforting thought.

Midweek Musings

The president is playing the gun control card post-Aurora: "AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals."  I think Kirilenko's not quite ready to coach West Point after signing with Minnesota.

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Interesting piece on Apple's profit-stash overseas; about $74 billion of profits earned overseas have yet to be repatriated. That's a bit bigger thatn UPS and would be the 59th largest company were it to be spun off.

Note that it is perfectly legal and not sleazy. However, since Apple is cool, don't expect liberals to dog on them for their overseas exploits.

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This story hit over the weekend; the IMF's head European economist, Peter Doyle left and dissed his bosses for slowness and timidity.

Mr Doyle, former adviser to the IMF's European Department, which is running the bailout programs for Greece, Portugal and Ireland, said the Fund's delay in warning about the urgency of the global financial crisis was a failure of the "first order".

Big entities tend to run slowly, and the IMF is no exception. Since it's an international consortium that no one country controls, they are functionally independent, so they can take their sweet time to do things; however, doing things slowly is often not a bad thing, since you're rather them screw things up in small doses rather than hose a country with austerity up the five hole.

Interestingly, the Doyle name brought back memories of David Doyle, Charlie's Angels' supervisor. While I was a-Doyleing, I spotted Jerry Doyle, who was the security chief on Babylon 5 and is now a Paulista talk show host. I like this quip about his role as Garibaldi, a "Mick from Brooklyn playing a Wop from Mars."

Talking out of Your A-S

Someone in the Romney campaign, while visting the UK, talked about a shared Anglo-Saxon heritage.

“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the adviser said of Mr Romney, adding: “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have”.

The problem with that is that folks on the left will think it's a racial dig at the half-Kenyan guy in the White House; we don't use WASP much anymore, but that was short for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Since the P part is near-meaningless as a political descriptor, we don't hear it much these days. Whether you go to church is more of an indicator that which one you're affiliated with.

The real problem for Obama is that he's a 21st century liberal; he's half WASP via his mom, but she was an anthropologist. He seems to have absorbed a liberal-intelligentsia questioning of American power and siding with other cultures as a reflex action.

Buying into that "special relationship" runs counter to liberal thinking, since they are more multilateral than bilateral, don't care for the free market meme that even leftists in the US and UK largely accept, and reflexively want to back the former colonies and developing countries from the old colonial power and its hegemonic offspring. Thus, the fans of what has come be called the Anglosphere in conservative blog circles are neoliberal at worst and generally right of center.

Note that this isn't a racial thing per se. Lots of liberal whites don't buy in, while plenty of blacks and Asians are with the program. Eileen's been reading a couple of books from Ramesh Ponnuru, an Indian-American; he's a child of the American heartland even if he's got rather dark skin. Republicans have put two Indian-Americans into governorships and were poised to send Herman Cain to the White House had sex scandals not got in the way. To top it off, Republicans have had two black Secretaries of State, two more than Democrats have had; somewhat moderate Republicans to be sure (Powell might be better described as an independent these days) , but still Anglospherian.

Thankfully, the US press seems not to have ran with this A-S story. I saw the story first in the Globe and Mail and the BBC had it in high rotation, albeit with the Romney trip being the primary lead.

Tuesday Musings

Yesterday's Tigers-Marlins trade had a first in baseball history; the first time draft picks changed hands in a trade. Until the current CBA, teams couldn't trade draft picks, and minor leaguers were the next best loose change item to throw into deals. The Tigers got to move up a round next year, swapping a third-rounder for a Miami second rounder.

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The vultures are circling Happy Valley looking for transfers; PSU top running back is being lusted after by USC. It seems a bit tacky to see schools courting players when the ink's still a bit damp on the NCAA decree, but when we have less than a month window before practice starts in August, if a kid's going to transfer, the logistics need to start now.

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Chad Johnson is back. Being Ochocinco is one thing, having a wife (and kids down the line) have that is another, so he's back to his birth certificate name.

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Self-defense demand spiking gun sales in CO. At least that's the theory; had someone been packin' in the theater that night, Carrot Top 2.0 might have been stopped sooner.

Poor shooter reminds me of Zuckerberg on acid.

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Speaking of acid, we went out to dinner with another couple last night; the husband ordered a lemonade-Mountain Dew mix; I called it an Arnold Palmer on Acid.

 

Edifier du Jour- Micah 7:18-20(NIV)

¹⁸ Who is a God like you,
    who pardons sin and forgives the transgression
    of the remnant of his inheritance?
    You do not stay angry forever
    but delight to show mercy.
¹⁹ You will again have compassion on us;
    you will tread our sins underfoot
    and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea.
²⁰ You will be true to Jacob,
    and show mercy to Abraham,
    as you pledged on oath to our fathers
    in days long ago.

Forgiveness is God's strongest suit. I'm getting a eyewig of a Hancock trailer where the antihero chucks a beached whale about a half mile offshore... right into a sailboat. Oops.

God does that with our sins, and He's does far less collateral damage.

Monday Moanin'

I'm going to skip Penn State or the dark night at The Dark Knight Returns. Other than that the shooter looks like Carrot Top, all I can say is "there but the grace of God go I" on the Aurora case and that the punishment seems about right in the PSU case.

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Interesting news for the Tigers; they solved their 2B problem and their back-end-of-the-rotation problem by getting Omar Infante and Anibal Sanchez from Miami. Infante left Detroit as a utility infielder and has settled in as an everyday second baseman, while Sanchez has settled in with a sub-four ERA over the last few years that would mark him a servicable fourth or fifth starter.

However, the Tigers paid a steep price. Both Jacob Turner, a promising pitcher who won for the Tigers Sunday, and AAA catcher Rob Brantley will be taking their skills to South Beach, as LeBron would say. Brantley looked very solid in a brief call-up earler this year, but with Alex Avila being planted there, the Tigers weren't in the market for a second starter-quality catcher.

Somehow, I got the feeling that Brantley might well be the Marlin's catcher of the future, reminding me of the trade that sent Sandy Alomar Jr. from San Diego to Cleveland. The Padres had a good young catcher, Benito Santiago, so a second catcher was redundant; Alomar was sent east as a tack-on to a Joe Carter trade. Alomar proceeded to be the Tribe's catcher of the 90s.

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The Yankees went rent-a-player today, grabbing Ichiro Suzuki from the Marriners for a couple of prospects; that saves Seattle about $5M in salary for the rest of the year. Ichiro looked like a Marriner for life, but that is exceedingly rare these days. That gilds a pretty neat lily, as the Pinstripes have two sure-fire HoFers in ARod (if they forgive his 'roiding) and Jeter, a close-call in Texeria and a possible Cooperstown denizen in Granderson.

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Here's an interesting bit on the impact of the Dark Night at The Dark Knight; $13 million was the level of underperforming at the box office (173 expected-160 actual). That's still good for #3 all time for best opening weekend.

Edifier du Jour- Micah 7:7(NIV)

⁷ But as for me, I watch in hope for the Lord,
    I wait for God my Savior;
    my God will hear me.

The first bit of Micah 7 has Israel going to hell in a handbasket, but the writer is trusting in God even amid the chaos. That's worth remembering when our present day starts to look crazy.

Edifier du Jour- Micah 6:9-13(NIV)

⁹ Listen! The Lord is calling to the city—
    and to fear your name is wisdom—
    “Heed the rod and the One who appointed it.
¹⁰ Am I still to forget, O wicked house,
    your ill-gotten treasures
    and the short ephah, which is accursed?
¹¹ Shall I acquit a man with dishonest scales,
    with a bag of false weights?
¹² Her rich men are violent;
    her people are liars
    and their tongues speak deceitfully.
¹³ Therefore, I have begun to destroy you,
    to ruin you because of your sins.

This passage always seems to have a modern scoundrel or two that fits it, and the current Barclay's LIBOR scandal seems to fit all too well, especially if we capitalized city in verse one, since "the City" is shorthand for Britain's Wall Street. They were shorting not ephahs but interest rates, by citing a fudged-down number on the the international equivalent of the Fed Funds rate to their lenders.

As it turns out, Barclay's is at least catching the wrath of the British authorities; other banks might follow shortly, since other banks were seemingly fudging downward as well. Whether they're getting God's wrath yet remains to be seen, but God does generally work through temporal means rather than flat-out miracles.

However, before we take too much comfort in seeing the 1% get theirs, let's check our own weights. If you're sneaking in an Internet break at work on Monday morning to read this, you might be shorting your boss if this isn't an agreed-up break and the company Internet policy is cool with a limited amount of chipmunk-friendly personal surfing. Proving 7.36 hours of honest work for 8 hours pay is shorting just like offering 0.46% on short-term CDs when it should have been 0.49%.