harmonicminer

YES, it’s time to panic

According to the Washington Post, Nebraska’s Senator Ben Nelson has caved to Democratic pressure and will provide the 60th vote Harry Reid needs to pass the Senate’s American-medicine-and-Medicare-destroying version of Obamacare. There is still a chance some other Senate Democrat will refuse to take American medicine over the cliff, but at this point it looks like Obamacare passes the Senate on Christmas eve.

The only good thing this does is demonstrate the D.C. Democrats’ contempt for their “netroots” which are as against the bill as the center and the right. This is a Chicago-machine political bailout, the least common denominator bill that can provide President Obama with a ridiculous claim to having accomplished something, anything, in his first, greatly disappointing year in office.

Still, the Senate may spit in the eye of the country. Whether House Democrats decide to go along over the cliff remains to be seen. Passage of the Senate bill will doom Blanche Lincoln and maybe Evan Bayh, but too many Democrats are too far away from re-election days. When the next vote comes to the House, it will be about 42 weeks before November 2. Between now and then those House members have to hear from their voters and have to see the cash piling up in the GOP coffers.

As I said before the election, they Left only has to win once, and stay in office just long enough to create a new entitlement program.  It appears they are going to succeed.

YOU will pay for it. 

In the meantime, the medical insurance you have today is going to become more expensive (if you can manage to keep it), but it is also going to be worth less.  Not quite worthless for awhile…  though that time may come.

My former colleague of long ago, Bill Mounce, has a nice post on the Greek word ψαλλω, and Musical Instruments in worship:

Someone asked me the other day about the precise meaning of the Greek word ψαλλω and any relationships it has, if any, to the ancient debate of musical instruments in worship.

I hesitate to blog on this because I am sure there has been much discussion in the Worship Wars literature about this and I am not aware of the pitfalls lying in wait for me. (Can pitfalls “lie in wait” or am I mixing my metaphors? Oh well, you understand.) My books on worship are at school and I can’t get to them. So much for disclaimers.

But the person mentioned that some lexicons support one position, and others lexicons support the other. Let’s see.

The latest version of BDAG gives this meaning to ψαλλω: “to sing songs of praise, with or without instrumental accompaniment.” The suggested glosses are “sing, sing praise.” The cognate noun ψαλμος is defined as “song of praise, psalm and is used in the NT as a reference to the Psalms or more generally to a hymn of praise.”

It is interesting that Liddell and Scott give these meanings for classical Greek: “to play a stringed instrument with the fingers; later, to sing to a harp, sing, N.T. Louw and Nida agree. “to sing songs of praise, with the possible implication of instrumental accompaniment.”

Both words are used in the LXX to refer to the Psalms, which were often sung with musical accompaniment. However, the word can be used just of singing apart from mention of an instrument (Ps 33:2).

……………………
The New Testament inherits the culture of the Old Testament, and the later was full of instrumentation. The burden of proof would lie on the person assuming that instruments were not used in New Testament worship, and then it would have to be proven that the absence is normative for all worship of all time.

Good ‘ole Jubal, of course, is the first musician mentioned in the Bible… and he was an instrumentalist, it seems.  

Class envy in our country has been planted, cultivated, and sadly, continued to grow almost unchecked.  In my opinion it is a useful tool to many of our current crop of politicians who wish to impose government-enforced equality of outcome rather than the more traditional view in this country of equal opportunity. This is apparent to no greater degree than with the subject of taxes and wealth.

Neal Boortz has written a brilliant piece about this subject.  It is about a fictitious company and a speech given by it’s fictitious president.  But I assure you the subject matter is altogether quite real.  Please read it all!

This is a repost from about nine months ago.  However, having recently mid-wifed the birth of a new academic policy at my university (the gestation period was MUCH longer than nine months), this seemed a good time to repost it.

The original post:

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While I generally try to avoid making too many “inside references,” I recently witnessed a health professional trying to get a feel for how much pain someone was in, and they brought out the Universal Pain Assessment Tool. It didn’t take long to realize the universal applicability of such an assessment instrument, and so, herewith:

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The particular meeting that inspired me to repost this chart, and at which the new (and, honestly, better) policy was approved, took THREE HOURS!!! It was on a day I don’t normally have to come to campus.  There were numerous references to the parliamentarian to make judgments about how we should proceed.   And it included curriculum, assessment, accreditation AND diversity, which means that, as meetings go, the pain scale was way, way off the chart…. maybe about a 25.  It made miss my uncle, a past master of faculty meeting survival strategies.

Uncle Fred was just enough of a politician to survive in the world of academia. (Remember Henry Kissinger’s comment: “University politics make me long for the simplicity of the Middle East.”) …..

He was pretty interesting to watch in faculty meetings. He’d sit and listen for a time, while the various perspectives on the trivial issues of the day were aired.  Then he’d clear his throat, an utterly characteristic gesture, a sort of announcement of pronouncements to come, and as the room fell silent (they knew what was coming), in a very few incisive sentences he’d explain what was wrong with all previous statements, all the while appearing to compliment the wisdom of those who’d made them.  Besides singing, this rhetorical tactic was the other thing he failed to teach me.  Not for lack of trying.   But for me, it was like a person with a club foot watching a ballerina on a high wire.   If I was fast, sometimes I could knock him off the wire, but I could never do the dance.  I saw him literally end a few faculty meetings, working without a net, with no one having anything much left to say.

(I’ve ended a few faculty meetings in my time, too, but somehow it isn’t the same when the paramedics have to come and save people who’ve slit their wrists.)

My Uncle Fred was a man of words, who seemed often to be searching for the exactly right phrasing to say what he meant.  He clearly believed that how a thing was said was important.  (He once referred to me as “a man of words,” but I think he had something else in mind.)  He loved clarity, and concision.

At least all the pain of the recent meeting led to a good outcome.   Would that it were always so.

The ancient Chines curse should be rewritten: “May you attend really, really interesting faculty meetings.”

Are Evangelical Churches Drifting Left?

Did you wake up one Sunday morning and finally realize that you could no longer support or attend a church that has gradually embraced an anti-American, anti-Capitalistic gospel in the name of Christ? Did it suddenly dawn upon you that the ever-present term “social justice” is merely a code word for a Marxist view of redistributive justice wrapped in a thinly disguised Christian veneer? Have you visited church after church after church only to discover that something decidedly unchristian has crept into the gospel teachings replacing, by redefinition, all that has been sacred to Christianity for centuries?

We live in the Age of Heresy and what we have to fear is not the old cults that Christians have traditionally warned against for years. What we have to fear today is the steady drift to the political left that has distorted our many venerable institutions and well-known Christian denominations.

Today 100,000 local congregations and 45 million Christians are supporting leftist goals yet most of the members are still blissfully unaware.

Read it all.

Those nasty, discriminatory Israeli checkpoints are in the news again.  How dare Israelis protect themselves?

Border Guard forces arrest Palestinian carrying pipe bombs

A 20-year-old Palestinian man was arrested Wednesday at the Qalandiya checkpoint after he was caught carrying six improvised pipe bombs.

The young man arrived at the north Jerusalem checkpoint at around 3 pm. He aroused the suspicion of Border Guard forces stationed there that upon a search of his possessions found six small pipe bombs, and proceeded to arrest him. A sapper was called in to dismantle the devices.

Earlier this month a video documenting a stabbing attack at the Qalandiya checkpoint on October 25 was posted online on the Youtube video sharing website. A female terrorist in her 20s pulled out a knife she had been hiding in her clothes and stabbed one of the security guards at the checkpoint in his lower abdomen.

The two-minute video shows the guards checking the woman’s items in an x-ray machine. When they shift their gaze from her for a moment, she seizes the opportunity to quickly pull out a knife and attack.

A Magen David Adom paramedic told Ynet on the day of the incident, “The guard was lying on the ground with a stab wound to his lower abdomen, and the young female terrorist was apprehended. The guard was in great pain; he was in a state of shock.”