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Cooking the books on warming

Posted by Mark McConnell on Monday, November 06, 2006 6:29:51 PM
Christopher Monckton writing for the Sunday Telegraph challenges the Stern Report on global climate change, in a copiously annotated article: Climate chaos? Don't believe it

"This week and next, I'll reveal how politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science."

tags: Stern report Climate change

Updates:
  • Christopher Monckton was Margaret Thatcher's science advisor.
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Cynical look at Ted Haggard

Posted by Mark McConnell on Friday, November 03, 2006 5:42:49 PM
Soldiers of Christ  is a cynical look at power churches, that appeared in Harpers Magazine last year. It has been republished online following allegations against Ted Haggard, the pastor upon whom the article is focused.

tags:  Ted Haggard
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Microfinance - the business of charity

Posted by Mark McConnell on Thursday, November 02, 2006 4:00:24 AM
Microfinance does not strictly follow sound business practices, according to MILLIONS FOR MILLIONS, an article from The New Yorker.  Columnist Connie Bruck describes how this is still an immature industry, that resonates with the instincts of the philanthropist more than with those of a businessman.  She quotes Ingrid Munro, whose organization serves the slums of Nairobi:

"You know, when people visit the worst kinds of slums—even worse than anyone can imagine—and they walk around and meet people in their little businesses and little homes, almost always, their first comment is ‘Why are they so happy?’ They are smiling, proud, with dignity, showing what they have achieved. And I say, ‘It’s because they have something today which they didn’t have a month ago, and they have a plan and dream of something they’re going to have in a month’s time that they don’t have today.’ ”

tags: Microcredit Philanthropy
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Christian microcredit projects

Posted by Mark McConnell on Wednesday, November 01, 2006 6:14:30 PM
I would like to have a list of Christian microcredit projects to add to the few that I found earlier.  I particularly like Five Talents, so far.

Five Talents
"The goals of Five Talents – fighting poverty, creating jobs and transforming lives – give substance to my personal goal of serving God. By feeding both the body and the soul, through small loans and Biblically-based business training, we can demonstrate the love of Christ and win disciples for Him.” 

Oikocredit

Oikocredit believes that poor people can build themselves a better life, if only given the chance, if only given credit.  

As a socially responsible investment opportunity, we promote global justice by converting investments into credits. We aim for high social impact and sustainable development.


Opportunity International
Our mission is to provide opportunities for people in chronic poverty to transform their lives. Our strategy is to create jobs, stimulate small businesses, and strengthen communities among the poor.  Our method is to work through indigenous partner organizations that provide small business loans, training, and counsel. Our commitment is motivated by Jesus Christ's call to serve the poor. Our core values are respect, commitment to the poor, integrity, and stewardship.

Updates:
  • I first learned about Five Talents on Chuck Huckaby's blog
  • Chuck also has a blog for the church he leads, called Mission Lawrence. He has an Oct. 19, 2006 post on Microlending and Christian missions there.
  • I like the directness of Kiva.  But this might be the most marked characteristic of its limitatiion.  "Direct to the poor" types of aid typically help the giver (or voter) feel good, but they do not alleviate poverty.  They might smooth over the rough times - get the self-motivated over a bump.  But they do not, typically, "change lives".  Is this model the exception?
  • An interview with Kiva on nextbillion.net
  • A blog description of Kiva, at The Wandering Heretic.
  • On Kiva - Justin, at Radical Congruency
  • BASIX-India  a diversified approach to creating sustainable livelihoods.
Instead of "re-distributing wealth", is it possible to more widely distribute the means of wealth on such a small scale? 

The potential for real impact seems to me to be obviously very limited.   I don't see how this could lift whole populations out of poverty.  But imagine this technological approach being used by the diaconal community of a whole denomination reviewing and managing cases in cooperation with a foreign missionary.  It could have  a very significant impact on both the sending community, and the mission community.
  • Evangelical Social Action Forum (India)
    Evangelical Social Action Forum is a registered charitable society, born out of deep conviction that teaching and preaching should go hand in hand with social action. Launched in 1992 under the patronage of Kerala Evangelical Graduates Fellowship.
  • Conservation Finance  likens microfinance to "payday loans to people without paychecks".
  • The Microfinance Gateway  laments that "hope has bred hype".  This article contains important historical and cultural reflections - addressed to those who see microfinance as the way to "end poverty", and other inflated expectations.
    Since the 1970s, time and again our industry trades-in complex and contextual approaches to development (institutional, legal, governance, and other reforms) for bandaid solutions that produce at best marginal changes, but satisfy the need to be perceived as "doing something for the poor."  Again, the question needs to be asked: Is the goal to ease the pain or to cure the disease?
One downfall seems obvious: what about demand?  Without demand, microfinancing is the same as "payday loans", as the critics say.

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Microinvesting

Posted by Mark McConnell on Wednesday, November 01, 2006 12:16:32 PM
Frontline last night had a segment on the microinvestment project, called Kiva.  Entrepeneurs living in third world countries advertize their ideas on the internet, seeking loans from as low as $25 to around $1000.   The story was very eye-opening and inspiring.

Kiva's servers have been crushed under the response.  Bookmark the site and return.  Deacons, put your heads together around this idea.

updates:
  • Kiva's first year press release appeared on Marketwire, On Oct. 16, 2006,
  •  The idea has had the attention of the lefty blogs since the beginning.
  • Global Microcredit Summit
  • The thirty year-old strategy of Nobel Laureate, Bangladeshi economist Mohammad Yunus.
  • Wikipedia's article: Microcredit - read the "Criticism" section
  • Kiva's approach is uniquely person-to-person.
  •  Martin Bello at The Nation thinks this is a fad, and warns of the danger posed by false hopes that this idea offers the same kind of panacea for global poverty that socialism does.  Only a socialist could think that there is such a thing as a panacea.
  • Alexander Cockburn, another writer who often appears in The Nation, has all kinds of horror stories to take the wind out of your sails about microloans.
  • Hebrew Free Loan Association (since 1897): " We provide interest-free loans to Jewish residents of Northern California for education, small businesses, adoptions, first-time home purchases, as well as personal and emergency needs."
  • FiveTalents.Org  "Microenterprise development (MED) has proven to be an efficient and effective method for fighting poverty and raising up entrepreneurs in developing countries. Where grants and giveaway programs have failed"
  • Connie Evans speech: The power of community investing.
  • Oikocredit: Netherlands-based church supported microfinancial institution.
  • Blog, Nothing but the rain:   "Unfortunately, rigorously derived evidence that microcredit helps people in this way is surprisingly thin." - more anxieties about the shortcomings of microfinance, from Salon.  - fixed link
  • Frontline - not Nightline
  • M.S. Sriram  writes about Yunu's experiment.
  • MicroCreditCapital is another internet-driven plan, in Haiti.  Kiva's appeal is in  connecting you directly to the people and their plans.

Mohammad Yunu's idea of "microcredit" is centered on the notion of "credit as a civil right" - whatever that might mean.

Technorati is only mildly abuzz with talk about the idea, some of which is about the Frontline segment.

Microlending has potential for profit, which is a cause of controversy.  You can see the potential for abuse in our "pay day loan" pay advance monstrosities in this country.  When interest is introduced, a different dynamic materializes - as Chuck Huckaby points out.

tags:  Kiva Microcredit

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Iraq: now, we have hope

Posted by Mark McConnell on Wednesday, November 01, 2006 11:20:09 AM
In the Opinion Journal this morning,  Heather Robinson pleads with the US not to give up on Iraq, appealing to the case of Mithal Al-Alusi.
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Hacking Diebold

Posted by Mark McConnell on Tuesday, October 31, 2006 7:15:39 PM
Princeton made a video in September 2006, that shows how demonstration software they wrote can steal votes, evade detection, and potentially infect other voting machines, if given less than one minute access.

Their policy recommendation site is at http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting

I remember when a company I worked for switched to electronic time-clocks.  The experience taught me that electronic voting machines are a crazy idea.  George Will will remind you of how this nonsense began, for those who've forgotten.
Then came 2000 and Florida and the 36-day lawyers' scrum about George W. Bush's 537-vote margin of victory. In response to which, Congress passed HAVA, which in 2006 may produce fresh confirmation of the prudential axiom that the pursuit of the perfect is the enemy of the good.

update: John "Hannibal" Stokes, writing for Ars Technica, has a seven-part story  about these and other vulnerabilities, explaining the threat in impossible-to-ignore clarity.  The bibliography is outstanding.

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British global warming report demands urgent global response

Posted by Mark McConnell on Monday, October 30, 2006 1:46:27 PM
This story is growing fast, on Google News.
Summary of Economics of Climate Change

"The scientific evidence is now overwhelming: climate change is a serious global threat, and it demands an urgent global response."

Full text at www.sternreview.org.uk.



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Kingdom come

Posted by Mark McConnell on Saturday, October 28, 2006 8:19:53 PM
"Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven".

This petition of the Lord's prayer does not describe heaven as a destination; it describes heaven as a standard for the kingdom. It is in heaven that God's will is done. 

The kingdom is not the destination, either.  Rather, the earth is the destination to which the kingdom comes. 

We are not taught here to pray to go to heaven. Rather, we are to pray that heaven would come here, where we are now.
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First Things about New Jersey

Posted by Mark McConnell on Friday, October 27, 2006 6:50:37 PM
Ryan T. Anderson, writing at First Things, gets my vote for the best comments on the New Jersey court's sophistry.

"First Amendment implications—on the free exercise of religion—are even more worrisome. "

Sexual liberals will say that civilization will not entirely end, where same-gender sexual unions are endorsed by law.  True, they will say, these unions are not identical to marriage in a traditional sense, but the difference should make no difference.  They are able to say this, because they do not care at all about any of those aspects of civilization (or at least, that little piece of civilization: the individual child) that are founded upon the difference ("father and mother"). 

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City of God

Posted by Mark McConnell on Friday, October 27, 2006 1:22:57 PM
A loose adaptation of a relevant portion of Augustine's City of God.

While the theocracy, the city of God sojourns on earth, it calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers a society of pilgrims together out of all languages.  The heavenly city does not have any interest in differences in the customs, laws, or institutions by which earthly peace is secured and maintained: because, no matter how different they are they all tend toward one and the same end of earthly peace.

For this reason, the heavenly city does not rescind or abolish these diversities; and on the contrary, it even preserves and adopts them, so long as no hindrance to the worship of the one supreme and true God is introduced by this adoption.  Therefore, while a pilgrim, the city of God avails itself of earthly peace.  And as far as it can, without injuring faith and godliness, the city desires and maintains a common agreement among men regarding the acquisition of the necessaries of life.  

Indeed, the heavenly city sees the earthly peace as having a bearing upon its pilgrimage toward the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God, and of one another in God.   For the life that the heavenly city lives by faith is a social life.  This society lives righteously when it refers by faith to the attainment of peace among men, through peace with God (which it has now, but only in hope).  I say again, the life of the city of God is not a private matter; it is a social life.

It has come to pass that the two cities could not have common laws of religion.  The heavenly city has been compelled in this matter to dissent, and to become obnoxious to those who think differently, and to stand the brunt of their anger and hatred and persecutions.  The only restraint upon the earthly city's hostility toward the city of God has been fear of the multitude of the Christians and, they hesitate to act because of what seems even to them to be God's protection accorded to them.  Yet, they are certain that the Christians covet their city, and mean to possess it, and they are alarmed.

However, the supreme good of the city of God is perfect and eternal peace - not of that kind which mortals pass into and out of by birth and death, but the peace of freedom from all evil forever.  Who can deny that the future life is more blessed than this, or that in comparison with it this life is wretched, however richly abundantly blessed?    For the true blessings of the soul are not now enjoyed; and it is therefore not true wisdom which does not direct ALL of its prudent observations, ALL of its manly actions, ALL of its virtuous self-restraint, and just arrangements, to that end alone in which God shall be ALL, and all shall be in a secure eternity and perfect peace. 

We do not seek your wretched city.  We seek the peace of God: and this is to your benefit.


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Same-gender sexual unions season

Posted by Mark McConnell on Thursday, October 26, 2006 3:48:12 PM
I immediately thought I was being paranoid in 2004, when I allowed myself to wonder about the timing of the aggressively legislative court's "equal protection" decisions, and the bizarre over-reaches of local jurisdictions that occurred in several places at the same time. It struck me how so many actions appeared so closely together, and seemed deliberately coordinated to coincide with the campaign season.

But if the New Jersey decision is followed closely with another rash of "gay marriage" actions - like those we saw from mayors, governors, city councils and petty courts two years ago, I will be less doubtful and more curious about the long-term aim of this "strategy" (if that's what it is). 

Update: Jay Sekulow provides a sober interpretation of the New Jersey action: New Jersey Supreme Court Says No Fundamental Right to Same-Sex Marriage.
Update: changed the title
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Secularism vs secularity

Posted by Mark McConnell on Thursday, October 26, 2006 1:30:14 PM
The idea of a distinction between state and church is a deeply embedded religious commitment of the Western Christian tradition. Augustine's concept of the City of God was not invented by him: it is the effect of Christian belief that focuses upon the king of all men ascended to the right hand of God to reign from heaven.

The very idea of secularity is a Christian concept. The state, being human, is made in God's image and therefore is subject to God, but it is not a primary instrument by which God's rule is evidenced and explained, as is the Christian family and the Church.  The state, even if Christian, is destructive, not redemptive: although ordained by God, it is an institution founded upon the sinfulness and mortality of man, and is therefore only "of the age" (secular).

Secularism, in contrast, is the modern notion that there are arenas of life where religion has no relevance and no authority. This is an aggressive attack upon the Christian faith.

The critics of the "Christian right" know the difference between secularism and secularity. But they pretend that the two are identical. They sound the alarm ignorantly, or rather, deceitfully, that if secularism is abandoned the only alternative is some sort of Christian shari'a - which they know full well doesn't exist.

Secularity is a long Christian tradition, by which the institutions of men gradually learn a just patience with sin, through trial and tragic error.

Secularism is a fantasy indulged by men weary of the slow process of history. It is an impossible institution, founded upon the idea that man is his own god.  It is an establishment of the fantastic religion of human autonomy, and to the extent that it has ever wielded the reins of government it has a perfect record of horror.

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Conservatism is anti-revolution

Posted by Mark McConnell on Thursday, October 26, 2006 1:38:38 AM
The Encyclopedia Britannica says that conservatism is "a preference for the historically inherited rather than the abstract and ideal" This defines both, the word and the movement.

History interpreted in light of piety, reason, tradition and conscience teaches me that the government cannot save from poverty, hatred, or any other kind of self-destruction.  I know this from our own Christian history, as well as from the monumental failures of every secularist experiment in salvation.  It is evident, and it is dogma, that the power of the state is limited, by God, to the enforcement of law. It can only destroy and reward.  The state is not a savior.

It's my religion and the hard-earned heritage of my civilization that teaches me not to look to government for the creation of a wise or righteous people.  At the same time that a respectful attention to the lessons of history teaches me not to be cynically distrustful of power, it also sternly cautions me not to be naively trusting of it.  Nothing human transcends humanness, with all its flaws, including government.  All that comes of the human heart is the product of a factory of idols.

But this attention to the lessons of history does not at all describe the secularist wing of the conservative movement.  This is made plain by the hostility of secularist "conservatives" Heather MacDonald, John Dean and Andrew Sullivan, to religious people acting politically in defense of their historically inherited values and societal institutions.

Their comments illustrate that secularism, even in its libertarian form, does not ultimately tend toward constitutional, democratic republicanism. Its inclination is always toward rebellion against tradition and proper authority. Secularism's impulse is oppression: the ancient delusion that men can be forced to be free.  Secularism in every form is an experiment in over-simplification, disconnected from real society and real history in its full complexity: a narrow box no bigger than a man's head, into which it hopes, always disastrously, to squeeze the world.

Christians can learn from secularists, as well as benefit them.  We should eagerly work with them, so far as we are able: as we are also commanded to be at peace with all men.  But we must not actually TRUST them.

Update: Hugh needs no props from me, but his summary assessment of Andrew Sullivan's status as a "conservative" since his book came out is exactly right.  His interview and other relevant links also look very tasty.
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Christian theocracy

Posted by Mark McConnell on Wednesday, October 25, 2006 8:50:34 PM
People use that word "theocracy" as though they know what it means. 

Some people, usually not Christians, worry a lot about a Christian theocracy.  At least, if they are Christians they are worried about a takeover by Christians of some other stripe than their own.  People like Kevin Phillips, who looks at the rise of radical Christian sects in America, and worries about the implications.  After the 2004 election, Garry Wills compared the Christians to jihadists in a New York Times Op Ed.  Michelle Goldberg warns that we are approaching "the high tide of theocratic fever", which will culminate in "Christian nationalism" - making all sorts of unsubtle linkages to national socialism.  Rabbi James Rudin worries about a monstrous danger that dwarfs any enemy that presently threatens reason and democracy, "A specter is haunting America, and it is not socialism and certainly not communism...".  Wikipedia features a frantically overblown analysis of an ideology ominously called "Dominionism".

Some of this noise comes from people who, afraid that discourse will leave them short, are hoping that anti-christian fear and bigotry will catch fire and sweep away the argument.  Another few, afraid that democracy is not sufficient for getting their way in elections, are looking for anti-democratic means to stop their opponents.  But, most of this hysteria comes from  ignorance of the people they are worried about, and perhaps a deliberate forgetfulness of the fact that. for these people, the Kingdom of God is "not of this world (else his servants would fight)".

However, there is another type, usually Christians, who think that because Christ's rule is not "of this world", and its fullness awaits the last Day, that it therefore isn't "in this world".  That's perhaps more worrisome than either "Christian theocracy" or the people who are worried about it.

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