Michael Bates: February 2014 Archives
Edwards Says He's in Top 24 At House Bank | News OK
From 1992: "Rep. Mickey Edwards admitted Sunday that he was one of the 24 worst abusers at the House bank and said he was planning to face his constituents today in Oklahoma City to release some of the details." Since Mr. Edwards is in the news again -- complaining about the Heritage Foundation -- it's worth remembering the congressional check kiting scandal and why he's no longer a congressman. In 1992, he lost the Republican primary, finishing 3rd.
Why do Teenagers Rebel? Thoughts from a 19-Year-Old Who Didn't
Rebecca Gregoire offers five reasons, but I think they can be boiled down to identification rather than alienation. Her parents established a strong family identity under God and cultivated that sense of identity in their children -- this is who were are as a family, and we are all in this together. This is a very convicting post, because it reminds me of family habits that I have failed to build and practice consistently. It's too easy to let everyone in the family focus on their own priorities and to neglect bringing everyone together for worship and prayer, for communication about important issues, and for fun.
Your husband doesn't have to earn your respect | The Matt Walsh Blog
"Often, people will say that a husband should only be respected if he 'earns' it. This attitude is precisely the problem. A wife ought to respect her husband because he is her husband, just as he ought to love and honor her because she is his wife. Your husband might 'deserve' it when you mock him, berate him, belittle him, and nag him, but you don't marry someone in order to give them what they deserve. In marriage, you give them what you've promised them, even when they aren't holding up their end of the bargain."
Daughters of Unloving Mothers: 7 Common Wounds | Psychology Today
"The unloved daughter doesn't know that she is loveable or worthy of attention; she may have grown up feeling ignored or unheard or criticized at every turn. The voice in her head is that of her mother's, telling her what she isn't (smart, beautiful, kind, loving, worthy). Her accomplishments and talents will continue to be undermined by that internalized maternal voice, unless there is some kind of intervention. Daughters sometimes talk about feeling that they are 'fooling people' and express fear that they'll be 'found out' when they enjoy success in the world....
"When I was a child, my mother held me back by focusing on my flaws, never my accomplishments.  After college, I had a number of jobs but, at every one, my bosses complained that I wasn't pushing hard enough to try to grow. It was only then that I realized that I was limiting myself, adopting my mother's view of me in the world."
I'd never heard this term before, but it encompasses western swing, honky-tonk, rockabilly, and outlaw music. I've noticed a lot of fan overlap -- people who like one of the four genres tend to like all of them -- and all four are represented in the music listings on Hicks with Sticks.
You Are What--and How--You Read - The Gospel Coalition Blog
Rosaria Butterfield writes that we need to look back to the past to find sound Christian counsel on indwelling sin and holy living.
"Worldview matters. And if we don't reach back before the 19th century, back to the Bible itself, the Westminster divines, and the Puritans, we will limp along, defeated. Yes, the Holy Spirit gives you a heart of flesh and the mind to understand and love the Lord and his Word. But without good reading practices even this redeemed heart grows flabby, weak, shaky, and ill. You cannot lose your salvation, but you can lose everything else.
"Enter John Owen. Thomas Watson. Richard Baxter. Thomas Brooks. Jeremiah Burroughs. William Gurnall. The Puritans. They didn't live in a world more pure than ours, but they helped create one that valued biblical literacy. Owen's work on indwelling sin is the most liberating balm to someone who feels owned by sexual sin. You are what (and how) you read. J. C. Ryle said it takes the whole Bible to make a whole Christian. Why does sin lurk in the minds of believers as a law, demanding to be obeyed? How do we have victory if sin's tentacles go so deep, if Satan knows our names and addresses? We stand on the ordinary means of grace: Scripture reading, prayer, worship, and the sacraments. We embrace the covenant of church membership for real accountability and community, knowing that left to our own devices we'll either be led astray or become a danger to those we love most. We read our Bibles daily and in great chunks. We surround ourselves with a great cloud of witnesses who don't fall prey to the same worldview snares we and our post-19th century cohorts do.
"In short, we honor God with our reading diligence. We honor God with our reading sacrifice. If you watch two hours of TV and surf the internet for three, what would happen if you abandoned these habits for reading the Bible and the Puritans? For real. Could the best solution to the sin that enslaves us be just that simple and difficult all at the same time? We create Christian communities that are safe places to struggle because we know sin is also "lurking at [our] door." God tells us that sin's "desire is for you, but you shall have mastery over it" (Gen. 4:7). Sin isn't a matter of knowing better, it isn't (only) a series of bad choices--and if it were, we wouldn't need a Savior, just need a new app on our iPhone."
A fictional news story gives expression to a Chestertonian view of the cult of progress.
"'When it comes to making a case for reordering the social order, we've failed to find any rhetorical strategy more effective or compelling than saying "It's 2014!" and asking why societal change hasn't occurred,' said policy analyst Brad Katz, adding that the argument was even more powerful when immediately followed with the phrases 'I mean, come on!' or 'for crying out loud!'"
G. K. Chesterton's comments: "My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday." - New York Times Magazine, 2/11/1923
John Snell - obituary - Telegraph
A pioneer of railway preservation, Snell was involved in the revival of the narrow-gauge Talyllyn Railway in Wales in 1951 and for 27 years was managing director of the Romney Hythe & Dymchurch Railway in Kent, a 15-in. gauge railway that now serves 100,000 passengers a year. He was a mentor to many other efforts to reopen disused track and to put Really Useful Engines under steam again.
America's Mandarin Problem | First Things
What can America learn from the decline and fall of the great powers of the past?
"Hubbard and Kane explain that our present dysfunction is the product of perverse incentives produced by poorly conceived laws and institutions, but their solution is to institute new laws and amendments. But how are laws and amendments supposed to right a ship operated by a political culture already invested in the present day state of affairs? In Hubbard and Kane's recommendations, we have the equivalent of an economist who solves the problem of opening the can by assuming a can opener.
"The story of Mandarin China ought to give us pause. As our institutions, laws, and governing principles such as the separation of powers, continue to fray, a political class with ever greater powers of discretion over the country is emerging in their place. This reflects a broad cultural problem, against which new institutions and laws will prove useless.
"If our present political state is ruled by a particular class, then any solution ought to begin by investigating our political class and the conditions that brought it about. By focusing on institutions, Hubbard and Kane miss that institutions are also a reflection of the character of the people. Instead of economists, we need a Tacitus: someone willing to offer us an account of the facts that quotes quotes and names names. Then, perhaps, we can begin to understand the nature and magnitude of the challenge."
A GIS Intro: Building an elections results map | The Urban Nomad
How to build your own pretty election-result maps, shaded by county (or by precinct).
Tolkien and the Long Defeat - The Gospel Coalition Blog
"Whether or not we think our world is in decline is up to each one of us. But in application, we see this life principle guarded against pessimism by love and hope. Fighting the long defeat is not meant to protect our hearts from suffering or lead to resignation. I am reminded of a wise counselor's words to me when I complained that, after all this counseling, I seemed to cry more frequently than before: 'What made you think counseling would cause you to cry less?' Fighting the long defeat is meant to push us towards full, unapologetic engagement before a Judge standing outside of time."
Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators - Megan McArdle - The Atlantic
"If you've spent most of your life cruising ahead on natural ability, doing what came easily and quickly, every word you write becomes a test of just how much ability you have, every article a referendum on how good a writer you are....
"Most writers manage to get by because, as the deadline creeps closer, their fears of turning in nothing eventually surpasses their fears of turning in something terrible. But I've watched a surprising number of young journalists wreck, or nearly wreck, their careers by simply failing to hand in articles. These are all college graduates who can write in complete sentences, so it is not that they are lazy incompetents. Rather, they seem to be paralyzed by the prospect of writing something that isn't very good....
"Whether you are more fixed or more of a grower helps determine how you react to anything that tests your intellectual abilities. For growth people, challenges are an opportunity to deepen their talents, but for "fixed" people, they are just a dipstick that measures how high your ability level is. Finding out that you're not as good as you thought is not an opportunity to improve; it's a signal that you should maybe look into a less demanding career, like mopping floors.
"This fear of being unmasked as the incompetent you "really" are is so common that it actually has a clinical name: impostor syndrome. A shocking number of successful people (particularly women), believe that they haven't really earned their spots, and are at risk of being unmasked as frauds at any moment. Many people deliberately seek out easy tests where they can shine, rather than tackling harder material that isn't as comfortable.
"If they're forced into a challenge they don't feel prepared for, they may even engage in what psychologists call "self-handicapping": deliberately doing things that will hamper their performance in order to give themselves an excuse for not doing well."
(Via Joe Carter on Twitter.)
Pat Delany's open-source designs for human-powered machine tools that can be built with inexpensive scrap for about $200. The Multimachine, built out of an auto engine block, serves as a grinder, mill, lathe, and saw. The 16" swing screw-cutting lathe is made of concrete and scrap steel, using techniques that date back to World War I. A hand-powered drill can be built with scrap wood and parts for $1. A treadle-powered generator uses a car's alternator to turn human power into electricity that can charge batteries and mobile phones. (A commenter suggests "a flywheel on the bottom horizontal shaft, at the opposite end of the shaft to the large driving wheel. Firstly, this would stop the frame from toppling over if the ground was uneven. Secondly, once the mechanism was up to speed, the effort required would be much less than the initial start-up; it would simply be a case of keeping the flywheel up to speed.")
Delany and his open-source designs are featured in the latest issue of Makezine. opensourcemachinetools.org has even more information on these projects and historical do-it-yourself machine building.
MORE: The Open Source Machine site also has how-to articles for building an air compressor, hydraulic press, and screw press, for blacksmithing, and farm shop work from the early 20th century and U. S. Army courses on drafting, welding, machine tools, lathes, milling machines, and band saws.
You can follow Pat Delany on Twitter.
The Gothard Files: A Case for Disqualification | Recovering Grace
"With [Matthew 18] in mind, the Recovering Grace team has decided that over the next couple of months we are going to release a large volume of information concerning the life and ministry of Bill Gothard. This information will come in the form of personal accounts, never-before-published documents and correspondence, and factual reports of events that were swept under the rug years ago. Additionally, many of the coming articles will clearly show how individuals attempted to reconcile with Bill Gothard and/or follow the Matthew 18 process but were met with persistent refusal to acknowledge the issues, distortion of the truth, and a resistance to follow biblical steps towards humble repentance.
"Guiding our release of this information will be one singular resolution that we hope will put an end to this malevolence once and for all:
"Whereas Bill Gothard has exhibited a 40-year pattern of moral failure, abuse of spiritual authority, and mishandling of Scripture, and is therefore disqualified from Christian ministry according to Titus 1 and I Timothy 3, we believe that the only biblical course of action is for Bill Gothard to step down from all ministry and leadership positions, publicly repent of the above sins, and exhibit fruit in keeping with repentance (Matt. 3:8)."
Ace of Spades HQ: Say's Law of Markets, And Why Money and Wealth Are Not the Same Thing
"So what is "wealth", really? (I could write a whole book on the difference between "wealth" and "money", but I'll try to boil it down.) Wealth is options. Wealth is choice. Wealth is variety. Wealth is agency - being able to do what you want to do when you want to do it. Wealth is surfeit - having more than the essentials of life. It is comfort, leisure, ease - or at least the agency and option (those words again) to avail oneself of leisure. Simply put, wealth is stored value that can be drawn down in various ways, only some of which involve the exchange of money for goods and services. And how is wealth created? Through production, because production must necessarily precede consumption."
A Tale of Two Droughts - Victor Davis Hanson
"Instead of an adult state with millions of acre-feet stored in new reservoirs, California is still an adolescent culture that believes that it has the right to live as if it were the age of the romantic 19th-century naturalist John Muir -- amid a teeming 40-million-person 21st-century megalopolis.
"The California disease is characteristic of comfortable postmodern societies that forget the sources of their original wealth. The state may have the most extensive reserves of gas and oil in the nation, the largest number of cars on the road -- and the greatest resistance to drilling for fuel beneath its collective feet. After last summer's forest fires wiped out a billion board feet of timber, we are still arguing over whether loggers will be allowed to salvage such precious lumber, or instead should let it rot to enhance beetle and woodpecker populations.
"In 2014, nature yet again reminded California just how fragile -- and often pretentious -- a place it has become."
A Martian Odyssey by Stanley G. Weinbaum: Project Gutenberg Australia
"We are v-r-r-riends! Ouch!" A classic sci-fi short story from 1934: On the first expedition to Mars, an astronaut gets stranded hundreds of miles from his colleagues when his auxiliary rocket's engine quits. During the long walk back he encounters incredible forms of life and makes a faithful friend. I read this in an anthology (Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume 1) as a pre-teen, when I was just starting to get into science fiction. I'm happy to find it online. Although it's still under copyright in the US's Disney-fied IP laws, it has passed into the public domain in Australia, which is why Project Gutenberg's Australian branch can republish it. They've got many other classics that are in the same legal limbo, including Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, The Great Gatsby, and Gone with the Wind.
Scientists Discover Children's Cells Living in Mothers' Brains - Scientific American
"The physical connection between mother and fetus is provided by the placenta, an organ, built of cells from both the mother and fetus, which serves as a conduit for the exchange of nutrients, gasses, and wastes. Cells may migrate through the placenta between the mother and the fetus, taking up residence in many organs of the body including the lung, thyroid muscle, liver, heart, kidney and skin. These may have a broad range of impacts, from tissue repair and cancer prevention to sparking immune disorders....
"Microchimerism most commonly results from the exchange of cells across the placenta during pregnancy, however there is also evidence that cells may be transferred from mother to infant through nursing. In addition to exchange between mother and fetus, there may be exchange of cells between twins in utero, and there is also the possibility that cells from an older sibling residing in the mother may find their way back across the placenta to a younger sibling during the latter's gestation. Women may have microchimeric cells both from their mother as well as from their own pregnancies, and there is even evidence for competition between cells from grandmother and infant within the mother."
The Bill Nye-Ken Ham Debate Was a Nightmare for Science - The Daily Beast
I've heard it claimed, by people who aren't engineers or scientists, that evolution must be taught and believed because it is the foundation of all other sciences. That's nonsense, and it's nice to see it confirmed as such by Michael Schulson's opinion piece on the Bill Nye - Ken Ham debate over creation and evolution.
"Creationism in public schools may be a social disaster, but it's hard to prove that it's a financial one, too. And [Ken] Ham was ready. He had a recorded statement in which Raymond Damadian, who helped invent MRI, expressed his firm belief that the world was created in six days, six thousand years ago, as outlined in Genesis. Ham's message was clear--and accurate: you can be a creationist and invent economically useful stuff."
MORE: Evolution News and Views wishes someone had been on the stage to argue the case for intelligent design from scientific evidence.
Saturday Night Live: "We Don't Make Fun of Democrats, They Take It Personally" | FrontPage Magazine
Daniel Greenfield shares video of a classic SNL sketch: "Dukakis After Dark" with Jon Lovitz as Michael Dukakis and Phil Hartman as Teddy Kennedy. And this quote from producer Lorne Michaels: "Republicans are easier for us than Democrats. Democrats tend to take it personally; Republicans think it's funny."
How to Grow Tomatoes in Oklahoma | eHow
"Oklahoma's long, warm summers are ideal for growing tomatoes. Many tomato varieties are suitable for Oklahoma; consider growing cherry tomatoes for fresh eating, beefsteak tomatoes for sandwiches and roma types for sauces and salsas. According to Oklahoma State University, plant three to five plants per person if you want tomatoes solely for fresh eating. If you plan to can tomatoes, plant five to 10 plants per person."
County-by-county, a map showing which NFL team has the most "likes." (Question: How do they know what county you live in?) The Dallas Cowboys truly are America's Team, with significant outposts in Nevada, Idaho, Virginia, and the Carolinas. The Packers and Steelers also have widespread support. Noah Veltman analyzes the results, noting teams with more or less territory than you might expect.
Gizmodo: How Much Snow It Takes to Cancel School Across the US
Fascinating map. Tulsa is listed as 1", but just to the southeast of us, the mere prediction of snow is sufficient for the superintendent to call the radio stations. The map's author notes, "In much of the Midwest and Great Plains, school closing often depends more on wind chill and temperature than on snow accumulation ("cold days"). Thus, this map may be misleading in those areas."
So You Want to be a Jesus Mythicist? | Hope's Reason
What you have to believe, the facts you have to fudge, the history you have to whitewash, in order to believe that Jesus is nothing but a mythical figure, a pastiche of older myths.
"Insist that the only valid textual evidence would be a completely unbiased, philosophically and religious free secular document that lists the facts according to modern standards of historiography. Of course, there are no ancient documents like that for any historical figure. That just means you need not worry that some Christian apologist is going to pull out some new document. You have already disqualified any potential historical text. One of the things that you need to do, is make sure to keep a different standard for historical investigation for Jesus than one would use for some other historical figure....
"The second part of the Jesus myth theory is that Jesus is based on pagan myths. This can be tricky because if someone picked up Egyptian or Greek myths, it would not be obvious that they are reading the story of Jesus. It is better to keep them away from the original myths so that they do not get confused. The best way to make your point is to summarize the myths using Christian language and summarize the Gospels using pagan language. The similarities will be much more obvious."
