Okay, as a colleague pointed out, perhaps that was Robert Green’s way of apologizing to the US for the whole BP troubles we’re experiencing. In negating what would have been the first goal of the World Cup, the refs in the first match taught many (to include the announcers) that offsides is based on two players in front, regardless of where the goalie is. South Africa played inspired and their goal should be part of the permanent World Cup highlight reel. The Italians apparently forgot their coffee and were decidely uninspiring in the pouring rain against tiny Paraguay, who tied the reigning Cup champs. Germany practised the soccer Blitzkrieg in demolishing Australia. The most noticeable thing about the Netherlands remains their vibrant orange notwithstanding their high ranking. No one from North Korea has defected from their soccer delegation and with their loved ones held hostage, it’s unlikely any will. Brazil plays today.
Sell
Everything’s made in China? Apparently, not enough babies. At the risk of sounding politically incorrect, it may be more accurate to say that China is very efficient at copying. It appears they’re also copying some of the manifestations of the modern market economies, namely, plummeting birth rates.
USA Today recently reported on the declining birth rates in Asia. A society needs a birth rate of 2.1 to sustain its population levels. Of course, Communist China’s “one child” per family policy and brutal repression of its people don’t help the region’s demographic prognosis.
This pattern of reproductive decline to dangerously low levels is common to most developed economies. It’s also dangerous for the indigenous cultures. The failure to populate leaves the native population vulnerable to being populated by other groups, such as through mass immigration or by war. The problem is that most advanced economies have also adopted increasingly burdensome social welfare mandates that require a large base population to sustain a smaller number of infirm and elderly. Kind of like how families in not-so-long-ago agrarian economies had to have a enough children to tend the farm and care for the parents as they aged.
As shown below, most of Europe, Japan, and the former Soviet Union are each in a demographic death spiral. As also shown, the Islamic countries are “red-hot.” Interestingly, the Muslim fertility rates in Western Europe maintain the same high levels. Between those rates and Europe’s massive immigration of labor to sustain their social welfare states, the Muslim world should be poised to “take” Europe and much of Asia, accomplishing by birth and patience what Muslims have been largely unable to do through centuries of war.
While nose diving demographics is common throughout the developed world, the USA is one of the few advanced economies whose fertility rate does not forecast civilizational suicide. That and other cultural issues led Canadian Mark Steyn to write America Alone, whose thesis is essentially that the West is in a losing, long-term struggle against Islam and that the US is the last best hope for western liberalism. Another commentator, Joel Kotkin, is coming out with a book, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, that is quite bullish on our nation’s future. Real.tv interview here.
A student at Stanford, Michael Shanks, has posted an excellent analysis with the Stanford Humanities Lab online on the aging populations in advanced economies. His section on fertility rates and population aging looks at the data and its implications more closely. The map below shows life expectancy by country. Not surprisingly, the advanced economies lead the world in average life expectancy.
This information further underscores that the 21st Century will be quite interesting and challenging. The advanced economies and most the West, will feature declining and aging native population bases and correspondingly strong pressures for greater immigration. The demographics also suggest further cultural clashes between the advanced liberal democracies and Islamic nations, unless Islam rids itself of radical and violent elements and pursues moderation. Between changing demographics, technology shrinking the globe, artificial intelligence and robotics, and genetic engineering, it will be a century unlike anything we’ve seen yet.
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German Homeschool Project
Want to see what happens when little boys that like to play with Legos and Tonka toys grow up? Watch this.
One of the problems with triathalons is how much weight you drop. The sport ruins wardrobes. They no longer fit! The multisport routine if popularized would be an effective measure in combatting the growing pandemic of childhood obesity. More on kid tris: Accessibility drives popularity of kids triathlons
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Physics Rocks
Interesting article in today’s WSJ regarding who understands (or doesn’t understand) the policies facing our country. Conservatives? Liberals? Who do you think?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703561604575282190930932412.html
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God, The Artist
God, when you thought of a pine tree,
How did you think of a star?
How did you dream of a damson West
Crossed by an inky bar?
How did you think of a clear brown pool
Where flocks of shadows are?
God, when you thought of a cobweb,
How did you think of dew?
How did you know a spider’s house
Had shingles, bright and new?
How did you know we human folk
Would love them as we do?
God, when you patterned a bird song,
Flung on a silver string,
How did you know the ecstasy
That crystal call would bring?
How did you think of a bubbling throat
And a darling speckled wing?
God, when you chiseled a raindrop,
How did you think of a stem
Bearing a lovely satin leaf
To hold the tiny gem?
How did you know a million drops
Would deck a morning’s hem?
Why did you make the moonlit night
With the honeysuckle vines?
How did you know Madeira bloom
Distilled ecstatic wines?
How did you weave the velvet dusk
Where tangled perfumes are?
God, when you thought of a pine tree,
How did you think of a star?
by Angela Morgan
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Fever Blister in the Sun
This weekend opened triathlon season for the rest of our family that cares to do tris. The kids had a blast on Saturday competing in a KIT (Kids in Training) triathlon — a great organization that teaches kids how to do triathlons and has fun in the process. Our six-year-old completed his first and was ear-to-ear grins every time he passed by. It was pretty hot though. Afterward we ate at Brigs and discovered for the first time their strawberry shortcake … there was nothing short about it. A delicious mountain … and our 3-year-old had ordered it for dessert. It was bigger than he was. He needed some help, a lot of help … Delicious. We’ll be going back for some similar “carb loading” in the future I’m sure.
Help is also what I needed today in completing my first tri of the season with fellow blogger Steve. Aside from being redirected by a kayaking referee to a buoy on the swim course about a hundred yards away that I had apparently missed, the most notable part of the race was the scorching heat. I felt more like a snail on the run than a human, let alone a triathlete. I had a snail’s pace during the run and left a moisture path behind most the way … After the race, we immediately departed for the mandatory post-race cheeseburger. When we returned to the car an hour later (big cheeseburgers), the car thermometer read 103 degrees.
Perfect for baking eggs and triathletes on the pavement …
To nuke the BP hole shut or not to nuke it, that may be the question. What a mess, and forecasting models predict the Gulf Stream could bring the black mess to the Carolina shores just in time for summer …
How quickly we go from chanting “drill baby drill” to “cap baby cap.” This recent spill in the Gulf of Mexico has suddenly given much more weight in my mind to the environmentalist concerns regarding drilling in environmentally sensitive areas. It’s easy to view eco-objections with a cynical eye, suspecting the latest sky-is-falling claim is the latest subterfuge to handicap market capitalism in favor of socialism and centralized planning or something even less coherent. That’s easy to believe since so often that’s exactly what’s going on – the inconvenient truth is that the environmental claims are too often simply wrong or divorced of context. Nonetheless, creation is from God and entrusted to us. Environmentalism should not be a disputed issue amongst Christians — it’s required of us to manage and care for what God has entrusted to humanity. We owe it to our Creator as well as to future generations to preserve and protect the environment in reasonable and sustainable ways.
The threatening pollution of our local shores, reminds me of the only poetry contest my wife and I entered together … of course B.C. (Before Children). We didn’t win any prize but enjoyed working on it together …
Ocean calling
Lift your head, come and see,
God’s fingerprints reflected in me.
Both of us are filled with life –
a delicate, magnificent gift.
Come to the shore, stand with me,
where miracles are plain to see.
Gulls, surf and sand crab frolic
together, in one of life’s dances.
Gentle waves’ music
wash away
time and burdens.
Come friend,
my shores are open
and share with me
in the beauty of life.
If the availability of healthcare entails or creates a “right” to other people’s wealth and labor, shouldn’t also housing and food and nutrition? Of course, the popular and accepted belief is that the Constitution authorizes the “regulation” of all facets of industry (as written and originally intended it doesn’t). Liberal constitutional jurisprudence has allowed over the past 60 years or so a nearly unlimited power grab by Congress under its Constitutional authority to ” As the Supreme Court noted ages ago, the power to regulate includes the power to destroy something. If Congress has the power to regulate anything that has an impact on commerce, it may also authorize total control or nationalization of the very same thing. Good logic, but bad Constitutional law … . The judicial branch really dropped the historical and constitutional ball in limiting Congressional power grabs.
In a moment of unscripted candor, Congresswoman Waters expressed her belief that fuel is also within the federal government’s scope of appropriation. If controlling healthcare services is within Congressional power, why not control or nationalization of the fuel industry?
One can only imagine Ms. Waters’ take on socializing/nationalizing the oil industry after BP Oil’s ongoing fiasco …
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Not Very Healthy …
Over at The City: The Fix Is In, Why Britain’s National Health Service spends so much and does so little
and this: Soaring costs force Canada to reassess health model
NRO reports that a recent survey of human resource and benefit specialists indicates Obamacare is going to adversely affect quality and cost of care in the U.S. Among the findings:
● 90 percent believe that Obamacare “will increase their organization’s health care benefit costs”;
● 88 percent intend to pass the increases onto employees by increasing employee premium contributions or other cost-sharing measures;
● 74 percent intend to “reduce health benefits and programs” by using stingier health plans, restricting eligibility for health coverage, and using spousal waivers or surcharges.
Well, at least nationalized healthcare systems provide equally bad and ineffecient care to everyone, at least in theory. In reality, there are always “preferred” routes for those with means, see, e.g. the Canadian premier flying to the USA and the UK’s private insurance add-ons.
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My love/hate relationship with biking
Top 10 things I hate about biking
- Cars
- My seat, somewhere beyond 40 miles
- Hitting anything
- Sore calves and thighs and glutes and neck muscles and AT bands and …
- The fear of asphalt rashes
- Spin class with a sadistic monster named Deshaun
- The up side of big hills
- Getting passed
- The Bonk Monster
- Flat tires
Top 10 things I love about biking
- Speed
- The adventures of zoom zooming through new places
- It doesn’t involve running
- Carbon fiber
- Espresso Love and it’s ability to ward off the bonk monster
- Spin class with a sadistic monster named Deshaun
- Going faster
- Chasing friends and being chased
- Cruising with my kids
- The freedom to just go
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Kippling’s If, by Hopper
Dennis Hopper – RIP
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Testimony
God calls us to be witnesses of what he’s done in our lives. In February this year, I had the privilege of sharing my testimony with the staff at Answers in Genesis. What a fantastic group of people. Of course my testimony is rather lengthy (I am a lawyer), but this rendition covers the major points of my salvation story and the beginnings of my journey to becoming a young Earth creationist: Tony’s testimony at AiG
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Childhood Connections
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you rise. Dt. 6:4-7
Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Eph. 6:4
The pathologies of Godless living are undeniable and undeniably negative. Humanism, post-modern thought, and institutionalized secularism produce wrecked lives, broken families, and crushed hearts. Lifelong relationships are increasingly rare. The post-modern culture seems inherently hostile to whatever is good and lasting. Relationships with the living God of creation seem increasingly rare and certainly not appropriate for public discourse in “well educated” circles. God is now deemed personal and subjective, and better done in isolation. We’re a mobile, fractured society. We’re easily fractured from each other and ever increasingly fractured from our creator and sustainer God. People from “less developed” areas of the world comment on how we retreat into our closed garages and live inside, isolated from our neighbors and rarely in contact with our families. The body of Christ is thriving and growing most outside “developed” nations.
As people increasingly accept the post-modern paradigm that truth is a subjective experience, the institution of the church suffers. Churches that try to stay “relevant” to the culture and liberalize their theology become irrelevant and die or simply become moral social action clubs. The intellectual elites increasingly view the Bible with hostility. The church in Western Europe approaches extinction.
The family also suffers. Divorce is now accepted as normal. Increasingly, young people decide against marrying and opt instead for co-habitation and increasing numbers of children are born out of wedlock and increasing percentages of children are raised without fathers in the home. Earlier terms had pejorative terms for what we now accept as normal. Reproduction rates across most of Western Europe have fallen below replacement levels. The same was recently reported for the native US population. Within our hermetically sealed suburban homes, family connections are also suffering as we spend more time each year plugged into the latest electronic stimulation and less time each year plugged into each other.
There is an ever increasing body of evidence that these pathologies, particularly the breakdown of the family, have very negative effects on our children, and as a result, on society. Another recent commission of experts has drawn the same conclusion. Of note, this analysis also demonstrated the critical importance of a father’s involvement in the lives of his children.
LARGE AND GROWING numbers of U.S. children and young people are suffering from depression, anxiety, attention deficit, conduct disorders, thoughts of suicide, and other serious mental and behavioral problems. Why? What can be done to reverse this trend? In this pioneering report, the Commission on Children at Risk, a panel of 33 leading children’s doctors, neuroscientists, research scholars and youth service professionals, draw upon a large body of recent research showing that children are biologically primed (“hardwired”) for enduring connections to others and for moral and spiritual meaning.
Hardwired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities, order here.
DadsWorld.com reports:
Children with involved Fathers are more confident, better able to deal with frustration, better able to gain independence and their own identity, more likely to mature into compassionate adults, more likely to have a high self esteem, more sociable, more secure as infants, less likely to show signs of depression, less likely to commit suicide, more empathetic, boys have been shown to be less aggressive and adolescent girls are less likely to engage in sex.
I recently had a talk with someone who was reading a book to scientifically explain Genesis and how the first days of creation were not literal days. One of the arguments was that the sun wasn’t created until the fourth day so there really couldn’t be morning and night. Later as I tried to find useful information to send him, I found that the commentary in my Bible wasn’t exactly good either. If I remember right, the commentary said that of course there had to be a sun for there to be morning and night, but it was too hazy to really see much light. Hmmmmmm. That still didn’t sit well with me. What kept coming to my mind were all the references of Light (capital “L”). God is Light – both spiritually and physically. No one could look upon His face because of the sheer brightness. But what really hit me was in studying Revelation 22:5, “And there will no longer be any night; and they will not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illumine them, and they will reign forever and ever.” Don’t you think that the God who can create life from nothing can also create light without a sun?
I have a confession to make…in an ever-growing culture of sound bites and video clips, I find that my life reveals “clips” that show a side of me I prefer not be known. In my role as pastor and missionary, I want people to see nothing but a courageous, faith-filled follower of Christ. My hope is that no one can see my occasionally faltering faith. Perhaps I have done a good job so far… or have I? So whether those clips have been observed or not, I have a confession I must reveal.
Before I make my transparent admission, let me tell you about the last 24 hours. Here’s the gist – I have been pursued by a loving God to face a weakness in my walk with Him. Yesterday, after a 40-day ordeal with our aging mini-van, the car broke down again. (What’s sad is that I merely drove it away from the auto shop that just finished repairing the problem. Just 10 miles down the road…viola! ) Trust God is all things? At that moment to any observer the “clip” of my life would reveal anything but a man of faith. I’m amazed to realize how God gets most of the blame for a car not running. Been there and definitely done that!
Then it happened…a long time friend drove up, offered help. However, I politely dismissed his help due to the tow truck on its way (and partly out of embarrassment). He drove away and I sat back down in the van waiting for the tow truck. (I think the driver and I are on first name basis now!) After a few minutes I decided to text the would-be Good Samaritan to thank him for stopping and offering help. But at that moment, he drove up again, jumped out of his car and declared he was not going to leave me stranded. There in the pouring rain, he assessed the problem and sought to make the minor repair to get me back on the road.
After some elbow grease and finding the right tools, the van’s engine purred back to its rustic self. My friend had accomplished what he set out to do. He even followed back me to the auto shop to drop off the car. (I felt this was my only option since the gun shop was closed!) And then he offered me a ride home. Later that night I reflected on the fact that while I was playing the blame game with God, He Himself was already in motion to show His power and care for me. My friend embodied Christ’s love in the flesh for which I am very grateful.
This morning I listened to another long time friend teach from Matthew 6:25-34 about trusting God in all matters rather than worry. This was a timely encounter with God on the subject. As I reflected on this truth I discovered that the last 24 hours revealed a great weakness in my walk with Christ.
So I have a confession (actually two):
First – there are times in my walk with Christ that I act like a Practicing Atheist. Yes, really! I view God as if He does not have control of anything in this world. He might as well be powerless to work on my behalf. Then He sends a Good Samaritan by to prove His power. But that’s not all…
Second – there are times in my Christian experience that I become a Brooding Agnostic. I see God as if He doesn’t care about my circumstances. “Hey, Lord, we’re having a crisis here, jump in anytime you desire…preferably now!” Have I dropped down on His list of priorities? Was I ever on it? Then He sends a Good Samaritan by to show how deeply He cares for me.
There – I confessed it. Now what? Train my heart to trust God: trust Him more, trust Him deeply. In Matthew 6:26 we read the words of Christ “Look at the birds, free and unfettered, not tied down to a job description, careless in the care of God. And you count far more to him than birds.” (The Message)
Today, I’m just learning to be a trusting follower of Christ and be “careless in the care of God.” How about you?
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My love/hate relationship with running
Top things I hate about running
- Speed work in the severe cold
- Tempo runs in the sweltering heat
- Hitting the wall miles from home
- The pain of minor injuries
- The fear of major injuries
- Running out of water
- Pushing too hard and paying for it
- Answering detractors (No, it won’t kill me!)
Top ten things I love about running
- The solitude of a solo run
- Deep talks on a run with family or a patient friend
- Being faster than my brothers
- Trying to keep up with my sisters
- The adventures of long runs
- The goodies given out at races
- Eating what I want, as much as I want
- Being in shape and having more energy
- Accomplishing goals; finding my limits
- The support of my family
Sapphire Sky 