Category: Public square

We now know that on 9 August 2007 central bankers and regulators finally woke up to the scale of bad debts on the balance-sheets of banks and other financial institutions. On that day blindfolds were removed and scales fell from the eyes – of at least some of the key players in the finance sector. The “guardians of the nation’s and the world’s finances” finally began to emerge from a long period of stupid and unforgivable denial of the havoc wrought on the international economy by the privatised, deregulated and globally integrated finance sector.

But it has taken more than a year for the wider public to realise that “debtonation day” was but the prelude to a terrifying prospect: large-scale and prolonged economic failure of a globalised, highly integrated economy, built on a financial house of cards… The demand is that losses be socialised or nationalised. The alternative, they warn, is global financial armageddon.

Until recently the vast bubble of debt these private institutions created was regarded by orthodox economists, regulators, politicians and investors as representing real, and possibly eternal wealth. Their delusions fed on the economic mantra that asset prices (such as property, commodities, works of art, racehorses, or commercial brands) were rising because of a shortage of supply and an excess of demand for assets: not because they were being powered upwards by the availability of “easy money” or credit.

Ann Pettifor Global financial mess: blaming the victims

The UK now has a de facto blasphemy law which protects Allah, Mohammed and mosques more than it did in during the modern era the names of Jesus and YHWH or the Church of England. It is ironic that whilst Parliament was legislating to abolish the crimes of blasphemy and blasphemous libel as they related to Christianity, that the vacuum was being filled by politicians, police and the judiciary increasingly taking the view that Islam had to be treated with kid gloves, and blind eyes had to be turned to those professing Muslims who threatened murder and called for ‘Jihad’ against the apostate and the infidel.

But this UN resolution is now becoming a global blasphemy law by stealth. It is titled ‘Combating Defamation of Religion’, and is sponsored by the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and has been approved by the world body annually since 2005. It comes up for renewal again later this year. Whilst it lacks the force of law, it has been used to provide diplomatic cover for Islamic regimes that wish to deny speech that is critical of them.

Cranmer Global Blasphemy Law

All of our faith-based respondents reported ‘?immense religious illiteracy’ on the part of local government officials, politicians and throughout the policy-making community as a whole. As we have said, the view most consistently expressed was that all faiths were ‘?˜private ideas’ or ‘?˜private practices’ with relevance only on one day of the week. This contrasted with a ‘gut feeling’ expressed in other quarters that the Church ‘?is doing a lot around the place’?. Prevalent also was a misinformed belief that across the board ‘Christian churches are declining and relying on ageing white women for their numbers’. Dioceses such as London and Southwark, which have enjoyed an increase in Church attendance and an internationalisation of congregations, would seem to refute such a claim. It is also a statistically contested area of forecasting. Notwithstanding these comments, we were astonished to be told by civil servants that there is no evidence base in government circles on Christian institutions. Indeed, in some quarters the very idea that such an evidence base may be relevant to a modern social or policy agenda seemed fantastic.

Based on our interviews with politicians, government officials and people in the faith communities themselves, we can only conclude that the absence of a ‘churches’ evidence base is grounded in a judgement that churches are not worthy to have even a modest role in government schemes. Such a judgement contrasts strongly with public declarations by Ministers that all of civil society is welcome to the public service reform table and that the government’s agenda is for all faiths rather than for a few. Yet if what we were told is correct, the churches simply do not register on the policy-making radar in serious terms.

Von Hügel Institute report – Moral but no Compass

As a matter of course, BBC writers have blamed crimes against humanity perpetrated by the enemies of the West on the â??root causeâ?? of Western provocation. Occasionally, but more frequently than the casual viewer might appreciate, they have gone a step further and presented the atrocities of totalitarianism as the atrocities of the West.
Maybe they were frightened that they would upset their employers or friends if they wrote honestly. More probably, contemporary liberal ideology has so enveloped them, they cannot understand the implications of their own work.
For whatever reason, the BBC still had the brass neck to show fanatically racist white Christian sectarians beheading a moderate Muslim, when nowhere in the world are white Christians, fanatically racist or otherwise, beheading Muslims.
Subconsciously, the executives of BBC Drama must have registered the terrors of our time. The dogma of their social set, however, has imprisoned them in a looking-glass world where Left becomes Right, Right becomes Left and the crimes of one side become the crimes of the other.

Nick Cohen

One week after the beginning of the violence in Orissa, thousands of people, most of them Christian, are still hiding in the forests or have found refuge in the shelter camps set up by the government. According to the latest figures, there are at least 6,000 people in the refugee camps, and 5,000 hiding in the forests around Kandhamal, but the number of refugees could soon reach 10,000. Today, in Bhubaneswar, a protest demonstration is planned in front of the state government headquarters in Orissa, organized by the activists of the Global Council of Indian Christians (GCIC), following the closing of Catholic schools yesterday all over India. About 25,000 institutes closed their doors, while the students and teachers marched peacefully through the streets of the country calling for an end to the violence against Christians.

Asia News.
And see the All India Christian Council and Mission India for more news.

What is economics about?
Jesus once made the empirical observation that since the days of Noah and Lot, people have been doing, and until the end of the world presumably will be doing, four kinds of things. He gave these examples: “planting and building,” “buying and selling,” “marrying and being given in marriage,” and “eating and drinking” (Luke 17:26-8). In other words, we humans produce, exchange, give, and use our human and nonhuman goods.

A Brief, Remedial History of Economics
Scholastic economics (1250-1776) began when Thomas Aquinas integrated these four elements (production, exchange, distribution and consumption), all drawn from Aristotle and Augustine, in an outline integrated at the individual, domestic and political levels. This scholastic outline was taught by Catholics and Protestants (after the Reformation) for more than five centuries. Classical economics (1776-1871) began when Adam Smith cut these four elements to two, trying to explain “division of labor” by production and exchange alone, eliminating distribution and consumption. Today’s “neoclassical” economics (1871-c.2000) began when three economists independently reinvented Augustine’s theory of utility, reintegrating consumption with production and exchange, but not distribution. I think “neoscholastic” economics will revolutionize the field again by restoring the missing element of distribution.

The three worldviews
When Paul preached in the marketplace of Athens, he prefaced the Gospel with a Biblically orthodox adaptation of Greco-Roman natural law. The evangelist Luke tells us that “some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers argued with him” (Acts 17:18). The same dispute continues among (neo)scholastic, classical and neoclassical economists. In (neo)scholastic natural law, economics is a theory of rational providence, describing how we choose both persons as “ends” (expressed by our personal and collective gifts) and the scarce means used (consumed) by or for those persons, which we make real through production and exchange. By dropping both distribution and consumption, Smith expressed the Stoic pantheism that viewed the universe “to be itself a Divinity, an Animal” with God as its immanent soul, while sentimental humans choose neither ends nor means rationally. By restoring consumption but not distribution, neoclassical economics expresses the Epicurean materialism that claims humans somehow evolved as clever animals, adept at calculating means but not ends, since “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.”

John D Mueller Three worldviews in economics

‘The London Bombers’ is a TV film the BBC made but then dropped.

It makes no sense until you understand the moral contortions of the postmodern liberal establishment. In the past few years, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, the West Midlands Police, the liberal press, the Liberal Democrats, the Metropolitan Police, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Lord Chief Justice and the Archbishop of Canterbury have all either supported ultra-reactionary doctrines or made libellous accusations against the critics of radical Islam. All have sought to prove their liberal tolerance by supporting the most illiberal and intolerant wing of British Islam, and by blocking out the voices of its Muslim and non-Muslim critics as they do it.

As the sorry history of ‘The London Bombers’ shows, they have left us a country that cannot tell its own stories; a land so debilitated by anxiety and stupefied by relativism that it dare not meet the eyes of the face that stares back at it from the mirror.

Nick Cohen Self-censorship and the BBC

In June, Christian registrar Lillian Ladele won a case for religious discrimination against her employers, Islington Council in London, after she was ‘discriminated, bullied and harrassed’ for refusing to conduct civil partnership ceremonies for gay couples…
Since the CEHR has a statutory responsibility to oppose all forms of discrimination, one might have expected it to have applauded, rather than criticised, a victory for a victim of religious discrimination. But the reaction of the CEHR and other ‘liberal’ commentators to the Ladele case has shown up the nasty, intolerant underside of the modern diversity and equality establishment, and its double standards concerning the interrelationship of Christianity, law and society. In addition, the reactions demonstrate an increasing inability to understand the concept of conscientious moral objection…. two employees at Islington, who described themselves as ‘members of the gay community’, complained about Ladele. In consequence, Lillian was bullied by her manager and details of her personal situation and a ‘confidential’ management letter about her was revealed to the local Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) Forum. What her complainants ultimately objected to was not what Lillian did or how she acted, but what she thought and what she believed. She could not be allowed to continue her work in peace, she had to be challenged and her views had to be changed because, in the mind of the heresy hunters of the modern diversity industry, she was guilty of ‘thought crime’

Neil Addison

Labour’s appeasement of Islamism in the UK

1 Immediately after the 2005 election, which saw Labour share of the Muslim vote collapse – the government announced the incitement to religious hatred legislation. This was widely seen by Islamic organisations as the ‘Muslim blasphemy law’ they had campaigned 18 long years for since the Rushdie affair. Blasphemy against Muhammad is THE most serious offence in sharia – and carries the automatic death penalty in countries such as Pakistan.

2 August 2006 Ruth Kelly (Communities Secretary) and John Prescott (deputy Prime Minister) met Islamic leaders immediately after the Heathrow terrorist arrests. They were asked for a partial implementation of sharia for family law in the UK and Muslim festival to become bank holidays. Ruth Kelly then set up a commission to look into implementing the first.

3 June 2007 (Brown now Labour leader and as PM in waiting making joint decisions with Blair) – a government sponsored report on the teaching of Islam in British universities was published. One may well ask exactly what the Labour government was doing asking a senior member of the Islamic Foundation – the UK’s largest overtly Islamist group – to write this government sponsored report ON HIS OWN? The report recommended that non Muslims should be banned from teaching the main Islamic subjects in British universities! The PM publicly welcomed this report!

Cranmer

The human-rights tribunals are a censorâ??s dream. Under Canadaâ??s human-rights act, commissioners can convict if they believe any published material is â??likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.â?? Since they are â??remedialâ?? institutions and not real courts, they need not follow strict legal procedures or grant traditional rights of the accused. No one goes to prison, but the panels can fine and silence people at will â?? and run up the lawyer bills for years. Truth is no defense, and commissioners are authorized to confiscate a computer without a warrant.

John Leo Canadian Kangaroos

The Canadian Human Rights Commission, which enforces the act, has a record of conviction that recalls the awful efficiency of Soviet courts: In over three decades of existence, the commission has yet to find someone innocent.

Jacob Laksin Free Speech on trial

both from Melanie Phillips Jihad of the Word