Michael Bates: November 2017 Archives

ACLU Threatens to Stamp Out Diversity by Shuttering Faith-Based Adoption Agencies

"Specifically, the American Civil Liberties Union is suing the state of Michigan over a 2015 law that allows religious adoption agencies to decline placing children with same-sex parents, in accordance with their religious convictions.

"If the ACLU prevails in court, it would overturn the Michigan law and force numerous faith-based adoption agencies to choose between following their beliefs about marriage and family, or going out of business, leaving thousands of foster children out in the cold without families.

"Despite the ACLU's attacks, Michigan's law is neither unconventional nor unprecedented. It simply preserves the status quo in which religious adoption agencies and foster families can serve children on equal terms with secular adoption agencies and foster families."

Alice's Oxford | Peter Hitchens | First Things

Peter Hitchens writes (beautifully)of the Oxford of the past, the Oxford of the imagination, and the Oxford of today.

"So as I walk along the riverside pathways, or slip into the college gardens at dusk, as autumn turns to winter, I am seldom free of the fictional Oxford, or of the small part of its immense, intricate past that I myself have seen. Here I watched England change from being one sort of country to another. That parking lot was a cattle market, fragrant with the smell of damp livestock, herded by suspicious, terse men in brown tweeds, with boiled red faces, for whom the market pubs stayed open all the day. That apartment block was a brewery, whose yeasty stink perfumed the whole city every Wednesday, as that week's mild and bitter, brown and pale ales were made by the methods of the middle ages. That tourist café was a used bookshop, room after room of tottering piles of aged volumes, its uneven staircase climbing upwards almost to the rafters, classics read, sold, reread, and resold over decades by forgotten students. That university building was a grammar school where girls from housing project estates were introduced to Shakespeare and the sciences. Now only money can buy you that, and the children of the poor know nothing of these things. That pretentious hotel was a prison, where men had been hanged for murder and buried in the precincts, within living memory. Now we have none of that sort of thing, but we have more murder, and if our trauma surgeons were not as brilliant as they are, we would have even more of it, for the knife is now a horribly common weapon.  And these colleges, now so modern, gender-fluid, multicultural and progressive, were stern all-male institutions, whose doors were barred at night against the opposite sex and whose walls were savagely spiked to stop adventurers climbing in (and out) on feline expeditions."

Musician Cindy Cashdollar injured in Marbletown accident

Wishing the immensely talented Ms. Cashdollar, formerly with the western swing band Asleep at the Wheel, a speedy (west) recovery.

"Grammy Award-winning musician Cindy Cashdollar was injured Thursday when she fell asleep at the wheel on U.S. Route 209 and crashed into a tree, according to the Ulster County Sheriff's Office....

"Cashdollar suffered numerous cuts and complained of head and neck pain and was taken to the HealthAlliance Hospital's Broadway Campus in Kingston by Marbletown Rescue, the Sheriff's Office said."

Against Princeton | R. R. Reno | First Things

R. R. Reno writes:

"Not only have Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and other elite universities become decadent, they have failed in their self-appointed task. The leaders they proffer our society are increasingly incapable of leading. Our academic leaders oversee a campus culture often riven by conflict. These schools have become hotbeds for identity politics, and administrators kowtow to student extremists. Meanwhile, graduates too often condescend to ordinary citizens, thinking them ignorant bigots or 'takers.'...

"The culture of our time is not overseen by old-fashioned Methodist matrons in the Midwest, nor do today's opinion-leaders emerge from ag schools. Charles Blow is the only regular columnist for the New York Times under sixty years old who did not go to an elite university. For the last half-century, graduates from places like Princeton have been in charge. They are making a wreck of things--not for themselves, of course, but for the rest of society.

"Over the same period of time, these institutions have become fully owned subsidiaries of the Democratic Party. This hyper-partisanship has contributed to the polarization of our politics. Instead of engaging the range of political and moral thinking that has shaped and continues to shape public life, our talented future leaders are fed a party line. Young people are not trained at these schools to be judicious, generous partisans in our political battles. The ideological homogeneity makes liberal students smug and insular--and conservative students radical and combative. There's no denying a simple fact: Elite universities, subsidized by gigantic endowments, have failed as civic institutions."

Christianity Is Just A Better Religion Than I | The Daily Caller

Allan Fimister writes: "This is the West's problem: in itself Christendom, armed with truth and right and freedom, has more than enough resources to resist and overcome any rival civilization. But the 'renaissance' injected into western man an absurd inferiority complex in regard to pagan antiquity and then the 'Enlightenment' insisted on eliminating from public policy and public law the very Christian revelation which defined and ennobled western man. The 'Enlightenment' is a parasite, it will not survive the death of its host. But it is strong enough to weaken the West to the point where its traditional external enemy the Islamic Ummah can strike the killer blow. Deep down the liberals know this is case, as they contracept and abort and legislate our civilisation into extinction, but in the end they don't care. Their ultimate motive was always less the love of 'liberty' and more the hatred of Christ."

Self-driving shuttle crashes in Las Vegas hours after launch | Fox News

Human driver of a semi is being blamed for bumping into a self-driving shuttle that drew too close to the back of the truck and failed to allow it room to back up. The reaction of the authorities suggests that human drivers will be expected to make accommodation for the limitations of automated vehicles and be blamed for accidents that are due to those limitations. This is the slippery slope: Allowing autonomous vehicles on the road creates a safety justification for banning vehicles with human drivers. At that point, the automobile will cease to be a tool of personal autonomy, taking you and your stuff where you want to go, and will become a limited-purpose utility, moving you only to those places where the Powers That Be allow you to go. The only defense against that outcome is to ban autonomous vehicles from public thoroughfares.

What is a sheepdog? -- Sheepdog Seminars

This is an organization devoted to making churches aware of the need to take active measures to protect their congregations from predators and to provide the training to do so effectively.

"When we refer to a 'Sheepdog Seminar for Churches,' we are appealing to churches to form Eyes and Ears Teams at their houses of worship: men and women (sheepdogs) who's assignment on that particular day is to watch out for anyone and anything that threatens the safety of the congregation."

You Know You're from Tulsa If: Homes lost to the Inner Dispersal Loop

Mike Lins has posted photos of a Craftsman-era home that stood at 1233 S. Norfolk Ave. His grandparents owned it, but it was bought under eminent domain to make way for the eastern leg of the Inner Dispersal Loop, which damaged inner-city neighborhoods and their connections to downtown for the sake of facilitating suburban commuters. Lins prompted reminiscences and photos from other Tulsans whose families owned property taken for the expressway. For example, Jim Murray mentions his grandparents' home near 14th and Owasso, and their corner store, Rowan Market, at 14th Place and Rockford.

7 totally mean things women do to men - Grumpy Sloth

"Scolding him in public, telling him what he ought to be doing, complaining about him on social media like he's a naughty dog -- these are all ways of infantilizing and invalidating a person's agency, and you would be livid if he did it to you. Adults speak TO each other. Can you imagine if he said at a party or posted online, 'She was crying over a dog food commercial like a little baby'? That's how he feels when you say, 'Who puts dirty dishes on the counter when there's a dishwasher right there? Five year olds. That's who.'

"The conversation should be happening at home, in private, at the moment of infraction. 'HONEY. Dishes. Come on. We're a team here.' And if he says the same thing to you about your stuff all over the bathroom counter, respond the way you'd want him to respond to the dish issue."

Something is wrong on the internet - James Bridle - Medium

"Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level. Much of what I am going to describe next has been covered elsewhere, although none of the mainstream coverage I've seen has really grasped the implications of what seems to be occurring.

"To begin: Kid's YouTube is definitely and markedly weird. I've been aware of its weirdness for some time. Last year, there were a number of articles posted about the Surprise Egg craze. Surprise Eggs videos depict, often at excruciating length, the process of unwrapping Kinder and other egg toys. That's it, but kids are captivated by them. There are thousands and thousands of these videos and thousands and thousands, if not millions, of children watching them....

"The above video is entitled Wrong Heads Disney Wrong Ears Wrong Legs Kids Learn Colors Finger Family 2017 Nursery Rhymes. The title alone confirms its automated provenance. I have no idea where the 'Wrong Heads' trope originates, but I can imagine, as with the Finger Family Song, that somewhere there is a totally original and harmless version that made enough kids laugh that it started to climb the algorithmic rankings until it made it onto the word salad lists, combining with Learn Colors, Finger Family, and Nursery Rhymes, and all of these tropes -- not merely as words but as images, processes, and actions -- to be mixed into what we see here."

Making the Garden by Christopher Alexander | Articles | First Things

The architect who developed a humane approach to architecture and city planning based on observed patterns of health and flourishing writes on the connection between an apprehension of God and beauty in our built environment:

"We will only see God in the world around us if the quality of the architecture is right--an almost unattainable condition in today's world. Why is it almost impossible? Because in an epoch when God was not acknowledged, it became virtually impossible for people to build the kinds of buildings where God appears. The whole purpose of the work I have done is to show that the presence of God in a matter-­configuration is an objectively existing condition, and that there are specific paths and methods and habits of thought through which we may create buildings where the presence of God can be seen and felt. ..."

"That new vision can become a new source of inspiration and motivation. I call it new not because it is at root genuinely new. Of course it is not--it is ancient. But it is entirely new in our era to take such a thing with full seriousness, and to be able to derive from it well-fashioned, scientifically endowed conceptions of what is needed to heal a given place. It will not be governed by money or profit; it will not be governed by social politics; it will be governed simply by the desire and firm intention to make beauty (which is to say, true life) around us.

"Perhaps that sounds as though it is not solid enough for sober and enlightened action. Quite the opposite is true. The vision of God we hold in our inner eye, which we draw from the hills and mountains, from the cities, towers, and bridges, from the great oak trees, and the small and tender arbors, from the stones and tiles that have been carefully laid, it is that which is God, and which we encounter as we try to find a vision of God in the world. It guides us, as if with a certain hand, towards a future which is yet more beautiful.

"The capacity to make each brick, each path, each baluster, each windowsill a reflection of God lies in the heart of every man and every woman. It is stark in its simplicity. A world so shaped will lead us back to a sense of right and wrong and a feeling of well-being. This vision of the world--a real, solid physical world--will restore a vision of God. Future generations will be grateful to us if we do this work properly."

If love wins, we all lose | The Spectator Australia

"I was recently reading C.S. Lewis' classic, The Four Loves. In his introduction, he quotes M. Denis de Rougemont as saying, 'Love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god.' To clarify what that statement means Lewis re-states it by saying love 'begins to be a demon the moment he begins to be a god.'...

"For a community that identifies itself as being centred on 'love,' this is why their attitudes and actions are characterised by hatred to anyone who will not worship their god with them. The greatest irony of all is that as much as they champion a separation of church and state, they are seeking to impose their very own LGBTIQ theocracy. And if they win, then as we have already started to see, theirs will be a totalitarian regime of compliance."

Miranda Devine: Same-sex marriage debate ending with Christians vilified | Daily Telegraph

What does it take to get an event kicked out of a pub's beer garden? Speaking about the necessity of grace when vilified.

"The event which so antagonised Rose Hotel patrons was a talk last month by American nun Sister Mary Patrice Ahearn titled, ironically enough, Resilient Faith: How to Survive When Under Attack.

"The talk, organised by the University of Notre Dame's Catholic chaplaincy, was not about gay marriage, but how to cope with being attacked for your faith.

"Sister Patrice quoted the Gospels: 'If the world hates you know that it has hated me before it hated you.'

"She mentioned gay marriage as one issue, along with euthanasia, for which Christians would be persecuted.

"'Most of us are feeling... tension, conflict, disruption in relationships, because of these issues,' she said.

"She urged her audience to find 'common ground between the two sides... I'm sure most of us in this room know or love someone who's gay. Persons with same-sex attraction desire love, friendship and intimacy as much as you or I do.'"

Is Yale Elite If Its English Majors Don't Read Shakespeare? - The Federalist - Joy Pullman

"Yes, something is definitely wrong when students are so racist that they will not listen to the ideas of someone who had the misfortune to be born with a currently non-politically favored skin color. It's also prima facie preposterous to assert that someone can be considered well-educated if he has actively shunned reading Shakespeare. Instead of rebuking their students for this shocking display of ignorance, however, Yale administrators and faculty encouraged it and complied with their demands....

"The fact that a core curriculum of any real substance no longer exists at the United States' so-called prestige universities, and is neither desired by many so-called elite students nor professors, suggests it's time we stop venerating and sending our kids and tax dollars to these institutions whose main function seems to be rotting students' brains and American society from its leadership down."

On the Day They Shoot Me Down in My Pew | Lori Stanley Roeleveld . . . Disturber of Hobbits

"If you add anything to your day, days already filled with the work God has put before you as you follow Him in faith, if you add anything that day - pray for our young men. Check in with one you know. Get to know one you don't. Support a ministry reaching this struggling, searching, agonizing generation.

"If they reject you, pray and redouble your efforts. Try again. These young men are worth our love and every attempt to reach them in the moments of their pain and anger and sorrow.

"And then, on the day I am shot down in God's house in my hometown, I want you to gather in yours.

"Turn up the lights, throw open the windows and doors.

"Let the enemy know that where one is fallen more will rise. Where one light is sent on to glory, another will be set aglow.

"Where one heart that beats for Christ now sees Him face-to-face, another will begin to beat for Him anew."

Judgment According to Works- Reformed Style - The Calvinist InternationalThe Calvinist International

Important, Biblical distinctions in the current discussion about justification and final judgment. "God justifies apart from works, but he also will 'go demonstratively to work' and clearly distinguish between a true believer versus a spurious believer. God will 'justify his own acts of justification.' Or, to put the matter another way, God will justify the faith of the believer who has been justified - the judgment will prove we had a lively faith that worked through love. God is going to vindicate his people."

MORE: John Piper on justification and final judgment:

"Essential to the Christian life and necessary for final salvation is the killing of sin (Romans 8:13) and the pursuit of holiness (Hebrews 12:14). Mortification of sin, sanctification in holiness. But what makes that possible and pleasing to God? We put sin to death and we pursue holiness from a justified position where God is one hundred percent for us -- already -- by faith alone.

"Because if we try to put sin to death and to pursue holiness from a position where we are not fully accepted, not fully forgiven, not fully righteous in Christ, and where God is not one hundred percent for us, then we will be putting sin to death and pursuing holiness as a means of getting into a position where God is one hundred percent for us. And that is the Galatian heresy. "

Lands administrative divisions of Queensland - Wikipedia

Queensland was divided into 109 counties in the mid-19th century (map), then further divided into 322 counties by 1901 (map). Although no longer (if ever?) used for local government, these old county divisions are called cadastral counties, which provide a consistent basis for tracing property ownership, even as local government boundaries shift to reflect population growth and interconnections. The arrangement suggests an approach to local government in Oklahoma that would maintain the current county boundaries for land record purposes but would allow consolidation of local government functions like law enforcemen and road maintenance.

When I had to notarize a document in Brisbane, the notary public wrote that it was signed and notarized in the County of Stanley.

MORE: 1895 cadastral maps of Brisbane and surrounding towns, part of a collection of historical cadastral maps of Queensland. 1908 atlas map showing the 108 counties.