Guard the Trust

"“For truly, I say to you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name..."

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 10:27:28 -0400

“

“For truly, I say to you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ, will by no means lose his reward.[Do not stop there, for the sentence goes right on in the original language. “And… ] Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung round his neck and he were thrown into the sea.” (Mark 9:40-41 RSV)

Remember that Jesus speaks these words with his arms still around the little child. What he is saying is that the mark of true greatness in his kingdom is that someone takes humanity seriously, and longs to see it develop rightly. The slightest ministry to a young believer is rewarded by God. Even a cup of cold water given in the name of Christ will never lose its reward. Every opportunity taken to help someone develop into fullness of health spiritually, as well as in soul and body, is to be rewarded by God. But on the other hand, any damage, any spiritual injury to a young Christian, is more serious than murder or physical injury: “Better for him that a great millstone be hung round his neck and he be cast into the depths of the sea, than to cause one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble.”

I remember a number of years ago reading a short story by O. Henry, in which he told of a little girl whose mother had died. When the father would come home from work, he would fix their meal, then he would sit down with his paper and pipe, put his feet up on the mantle, and read. The little girl would come and say, “Father, would you play with me?” And he would say, “No, I’m too tired, I’m too busy. Go out in the street and play.” This went on for so long that finally the little girl grew up on the streets, and became what we would call a “streetwalker,” a prostitute. Eventually she died, and when, in the story, her soul appeared at the gates of heaven, Peter said to Jesus, “Here’s this prostitute. Shall we send her to hell?” Jesus said, “No, no; let her in. But go find the man who refused to play with his little girl, and send him to hell.”

Here in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is saying that neglect is sometimes the greatest injury done to children, and to young believers, and that we must recognize this as a serious matter.

”

- Ray Stedman Sermon, The Child in Our Midst

Human Tower Competition 2012 photojojo: The mind-boggling images...

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 20:25:40 -0400

Human Tower Competition 2012

photojojo:

The mind-boggling images above were captured by David Oliete at the 2012 Human Tower Competition held in Tarragona, Spain.

The 2012 Human Tower Competition Yields Intriguing Photos

Hey Aaron, Let’s Get This photojojo: The one camera we...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 22:02:47 -0400

Hey Aaron, Let’s Get This

photojojo:

The one camera we *don’t* have on our shelf — this LEGO camera that has moving parts. It was made by LEGO Suzuki!

A LEGO Camera That Has Moving Parts

President Obama’s Elusive Budgetary Goal of ‘Fiscal Responsibility’

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 19:04:48 -0400

By Michael Scherer of Time Magazine

President Obama will release a “fiscally responsible” budget for the country today, his aides say. This is not news. It happened last year. And the year before. And the year before. In Obama’s first year, he was so confident, he called his budget “A New Era of Responsibility.”

Except, it wasn’t. And never really has been. Because the fiscally responsible part is always projected to begin a few years in the future, and each year, as a new budget comes out, White House aides have also revised their projections. What they believed to be responsible before was not so responsible after all. The deficits were larger than they expected. The economy grew slower. The debt was bigger.

There is some disagreement over just what “fiscally responsible” means. Some liberals believe there is no real risk of running up too much debt, given the demonstrated willingness of the world to buy our bonds, so it is responsible to accept our high deficits. Some conservatives believe that any deficits are a moral outrage that will turn our children into chattel or preface armageddon, so it is responsible to embrace austerity. For the purposes of this post, I am defining “fiscally responsible” as it is most often meant by the White House: charting a path to deficit levels that roughly stabilizes the size of the debt as a percentage of GDP.

In 2009, Obama’s propeller heads predicted the deficits in 2012 would be about 4.6% of GDP, or just slightly higher than the growth of the economy. Three years later, Obama’s number crunchers were saying that the 2012 deficit would be 7.2% of GDP, which means the original prediction was off by about 50%. Why? The biggest reason is that the financial crisis was worse than predicted, and the recovery has been slower, lowering tax revenue. It’s also true that Congress never puts a White House budget into law, but as this chart by The Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews shows, had Obama had his way, the deficits would likely have been worse, not better. The budget that Congress passed in 2009 was 3% smaller that Obama wanted; it was 7% smaller in 2010.

But the pattern in the Obama administration has been remarkably consistent: Presidential budgets are a terrible source for predicting the fiscal responsibility of the U.S. government. Here is a line chart I made showing the deficit projections Obama made in each of his first four budgets, as a percentage of GDP. As you can see, each year the short-term projections tend to get a little worse.

The number crunchers across the street from the White House are not fudging the numbers. The problem is that lawmakers do not have complete control over deficits. The economy matters, and the official numbers have not been good at predicting what will happen.

The other thing worth mentioning here is that in discussions of fiscal responsibility, the President’s budget is often a distraction. The real problems with spending and taxation have little to do with what Obama likes most to talk about: new bridges, pre-K education, tax loopholes for the very wealthy. They have to do with long term trends—a decrease in tax rates and revenue over the last decades, and an increase in the cost of health care. The graphic designers at the U.S. Treasury clearly illustrate this point:

Larger copy of the chart HERE.

Any long term solution to the high deficits will most certainly arise from addressing these areas. And that deal, if it happens anytime soon, will not be found in the Obama budget document, though his recent embrace of cuts to Social Security and Medicare may be a step in that direction.

UPDATE: I have added below another line (in teal) to my chart, showing the deficit projections as a percentage of GDP from the most recent budget, fiscal year 2014, which was released Wednesday afternoon. You will see that the deficit estimates for the most immediate year are once again higher than they were predicted to be last year, the year before, the year before that, etc. Not exactly the kind of projections you want to take to the bank, or bond market. To read the whole budget, see here.

God the Artist: Fireflies odditiesoflife: Long Term Exposure of...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 16:01:31 -0400

God the Artist: Fireflies

odditiesoflife:

Long Term Exposure of Mating Gold Fireflies

Japanese photographer Yuki Karo goes to various places around Maniwa and Okayama Prefectures in Japan and uses long exposure to capture some stunning shots of mating gold fireflies.

theatlantic: The Jobs Crisis at Our Best Law Schools Is Much,...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:43:50 -0400

theatlantic:

The Jobs Crisis at Our Best Law Schools Is Much, Much Worse Than You Think

Could this just be a sign the U.S. News rankings are way off and don’t really reflect the job market? In part, yes. The magazine’s annual list does incorporate employment outcomes as part of its formula, and some law firms pay an absurd amount of attention to it. But after going back through the data and ranking the 25 schools with the lowest underemployment, I found that only 15 of them could be found in the U.S. News Top 25. The other 10 included schools like number #76 LSU and number #126 Campbell University.

Read more. [Data: Law School Transparency]

"The victorious Christian neither exalts nor downgrades himself. His interests have shifted from self..."

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 04:44:24 -0400

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The victorious Christian neither exalts nor downgrades himself. His interests have shifted from self to Christ. What he is or is not no longer concerns him. He believes that he has been crucified with Christ and he is not willing either to praise or deprecate such a man.

Yet the knowledge that he has been crucified is only half the victory. “Nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” Christ is now where the man’s ego was formerly. The man is now Christ-centered instead of self-centered, and he forgets himself in his delighted preoccupation with Christ.

Candor compels me to acknowledge that it is a lot easier to write about this than it is to live it. Self is one of the toughest plants that grows in the garden of life. It is, in fact, indestructible by any human means. Just when we are sure it is dead it turns up somewhere as robust as ever to trouble our peace and poison the fruit of our lives.

Yet there is deliverance. When our judicial crucifixion becomes actual the victory is near; and when our faith rises to claim the risen life of Christ as our own the triumph is complete. The trouble is that we do not receive the benefits of all this until something radical has happened in our own experience, something which in its psychological effects approaches actual crucifixion. What Christ went through we also must go through. Rejection, surrender, loss, a violent detachment from the world, the pain of social ostracism - all must be felt in our actual experience.

Where we have failed is in the practical application of the teaching concerning the crucified life. Too many have been content to be armchair Christians, satisfied with the theology of the cross. Plainly Christ never intended that we should rest in a mere theory of self-denial. His teaching identified His disciples with Himself so intimately that they would have had to be extremely dull not to have understood that they were expected to experience very much the same pain and loss as He Himself did.

The healthy soul is the victorious soul and victory never comes while self is permitted to remain unjudged and uncrucified. While we boast or belittle we may be perfectly sure that the cross has not yet done its work within us. Faith and obedience will bring the cross into the life and cure both habits.

”

- The Dwelling Place of God-A.W. Tozer

Minimal Mac: I Declare April 1st: Digital Sabbatical Day

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 10:34:30 -0400

Minimal Mac: I Declare April 1st: Digital Sabbatical Day:

minimalmac:

As the first day of April has largely come to be the day where nothing but jokes, fake press releases, preposterous rumors (or, at least, more preposterous than they are normally), expensively produced videos for products that will never exist by companies that kill real products to “focus”, and the infinite re-sharing-blogging-tweeting-plussing of such, I think it is high time that those who reject such foolishness and need to get real work done take this day back.

I say we make this first of April, and every first of April to come, the day where we take a digital sabbatical (at the very least, an online one). We use this day to take a break. Perhaps get an honest day’s work in. Maybe brush off that old notebook and sharpen that pencil and write out the things you’re going to get done tomorrow. If you are at work, perhaps this is a good day to clean your office. If at home, take the kids out to a museum. Perhaps this is the day to put on your favorite road songs, get in the car, pick a direction, and drive for a few hours and see where you end up. Because that place, no matter where it is, will be better than just about anything else you will see online today. I think you get the idea.

Because, well, it is already pretty difficult to sift the meaning from the noise from the constant connection. It is even more so when you have to question almost everything you see on it for a day. Life is short. There are better things to do. Ignore it today. It’ll still be here (and, hopefully, back to normal) tomorrow.

Who’s with me?

Women of Steel: LIFE With Female Factory Workers in World War...

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 15:07:22 -0400

Women of Steel: LIFE With Female Factory Workers in World War II

From Life magazine; full story HERE.

The character of “Rosie the Riveter” — as feminist symbol, World War II icon and mid-century heroine — is so ingrained in the American psyche that it’s sometimes difficult to remember that there was a time when Rosie didn’t, in fact, exist. In the early 1940s, though, as American women flooded the labor force in order to replace the millions of men who had gone off to war, a wide variety of songwriters, illustrators — like the Saturday Evening Post‘s Norman Rockwell — and photographers effectively invented the archetype on which all subsequent Rosies were based.

(Pittsburgh artist J. Howard Miller’s famous 1942 “We Can Do It!” poster, created for Westinghouse House and featuring easily the most famous and recognizable “Rosie” of them all, was not widely known during the war years, and only assumed its current, iconic status decades later.)

Among the photographers who documented this massive and, in a very real sense, revolutionary influx of female workers into traditionally male factory jobs — as welders, lathe operators, machinists and, of course, riveters — was LIFE’s Margaret Bourke-White.

A pioneer herself (one of LIFE magazine’s original four staff photographers, America’s first accredited woman photographer during WWII, the first authorized to fly on a combat mission, etc.), Bourke-White spent time in 1943 in Gary, Indiana, chronicling “women … handling an amazing variety of jobs” in steel factories — “some completely unskilled, some semiskilled and some requiring great technical knowledge, precision and facility,” as LIFE told its readers in its August 9, 1943, issue. The magazine went on to note:

In 1941 only 1% of aviation employees were women, while this year they will comprise an estimated 65% of the total. Of the 16,000,000 women now employed in the U.S., over a quarter are in war industries. Although the concept of the weaker sex [sic] sweating near blast furnaces, directing giant ladles of molten iron or pouring red-hot ingots is accepted in England and Russia, it has always been foreign to American tradition. Only the rising need for labor and the diminishing supply of manpower has forced this revolutionary adjustment.

The women are recruited from Gary and nearby East Chicago. A minority has drifted in from agricultural areas. They are black and white, Polish and Croat, Mexican and Scottish… The women steel workers at Gary are not freaks or novelties. They have been accepted by management, by the union, by the rough, iron-muscled men they work with day after day. In time of peace they may return once more to home and family, but they have proved that in time of crisis no job is too tough for American women.

In celebration of Women’s History Month, LIFE.com presents a series of pictures from the Gary mills in 1943, in the very midst of the Second World War. Here are portraits of individual women, pride shining from their faces, as well as characteristically marvelous Bourke-White shots of enormous machines, grease-lathered gears, powerful tools — photographs that capture the grit, grime and rugged, unexpected beauty of a factory and its workers in full production mode.

sesamestreet: HAPPY EASTER from Sesame Street. Cool

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 17:09:17 -0400

sesamestreet:

HAPPY EASTER from Sesame Street. Cool

"The new cross does not slay the sinner, it redirects him. It gears him into a cleaner anal jollier..."

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 17:01:01 -0400

“

The new cross does not slay the sinner, it redirects him. It gears him into a cleaner anal jollier way of living and saves his self-respect. To the self-assertive it says, “Come and assert yourself for Christ.” To the egotist it says, “Come and do your boasting in the Lord.” To the thrill seeker it says, “Come and enjoy the thrill of Christian fellowship.” The Christian message is slanted in the direction of the current vogue in order to make it acceptable to the public.

The philosophy back of this kind of thing may be sincere but its sincerity does not save it from being false. It is false because it is blind. It misses completely the whole meaning of the cross.

The old cross is a symbol of death. It stands for the abrupt, violent end of a human being. The man in Roman times who took up his cross and started down the road had already said good-by to his friends. He was not coming back. He was going out to have it ended. The cross made no compromise, modified nothing, spared nothing; it slew all of the man, completely and for good. It did not try to keep on good terms with its victim. It struck cruel and hard, and when it had finished its work, the man was no more.

The race of Adam is under death sentence. There is no commutation and no escape. God cannot approve any of the fruits of sin, however innocent they may appear or beautiful to the eyes of men. God salvages the individual by liquidating him and then raising him again to newness of life.

That evangelism which draws friendly parallels between the ways of God and the ways of men is false to the Bible and cruel to the souls of its hearers. The faith of Christ does not parallel the world, it intersects it. In coming to Christ we do not bring our old life up onto a higher plane; we leave it at the cross. The corn of wheat must fall into the ground and die.

”

- Man-The Dwelling Place of God-Chapter 10: The Old Cross and the New-by A. W. Tozer

Taking Delight in the Simple Things nprmusic: The members...

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:01:11 -0500

Taking Delight in the Simple Things

nprmusic:

The members Spinto Band find cause for celebration in life’s smallest moments. In a new video for the song “What I Love,” a tiny paper cut-out dancer tumbles through the beginning of her day, propelled by the unfettered joy of simply drinking coffee and eating cereal.

Watch “What I Love” now.

The Most Important Chart in American Politics

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 13:36:34 -0500

From Michael Scherer at Time Magazine

There is a single chart — three colored lines on a grid — that shapes the political reality of this country. During the 2012 campaign, one of President Obama’s senior strategists called it “the North Star” and started his internal PowerPoint presentations with it. When Republican majority leader Eric Cantor speaks on Tuesday about his vision for the future of the Republican Party, the chart’s central message will bind together his words.

The chart tracks three economic trends in the U.S. over the last two decades, between 1992 and 2009. The first two lines — productivity and per capita gross domestic product — are rising. This is the unmistakable American success story, the one reflected in record corporate profits, growing wealth accumulation and the unmatched efficiency of this country’s economy. The third line tracks median household income, as measured by the U.S. Census. It shows the story of frustration and stagnation that so many Americans long ago accepted as a reality.

Shortly after 2000, the lines diverged. The economy hummed along, but many Americans, the ones politicians typically refer to as the middle class, stopped feeling the benefits. There are many reasons for the change, and some of them are open to economic debate. (The Congressional Research Service issued a paper [PDF] on the divergence in 2006 so that politicians could make sense of it.) Part of the shift can be attributed to increased income inequality owing to globalization and new technology — the wealthy becoming much wealthier, while the rest stayed the same. Part of it can be attributed to increased corporate profits, as new markets opened overseas and new technology lowered costs. Some of it has to do with how the figures are calculated. But the most important political takeaway of the chart is that at the turn of a new century, much of the U.S. stopped feeling the benefits of a growing national economy.

The chart (above) was originally created by NDN and the New Policy Institute, and it helped Democrats change the way they talked about the frustration of the American people. Shortly after the 2010 election, Simon Rosenberg, who runs those left-leaning think tanks, showed the chart to David Axelrod and David Simas, two of Obama’s top political advisers. The point of his presentation was that the emergency of the first two years of the Obama presidency — the Great Recession, brought on by financial collapse — did not explain the economic suffering and resulting anger felt by so many voters. Instead it was a more recent manifestation of a trend that had begun nearly a decade earlier.

“The reason this is happening is because of rising global competition, the defining new economic challenge of our time,” Rosenberg said in a recent interview with TIME. “In the actual experience of the American economy, there has become an enormous gap between the upper one-third and everyone else.”

Simas led the opinion-research effort for the 2012 Obama campaign, and he told me after the election that the chart hung in his Chicago office, along with a caption he derived from a focus-group participant: “I’m working harder and falling behind.” (That same line became a fixture of the President’s stump speech.) The Obama campaign built its strategy to attack Mitt Romney by focusing on the flat red line of median household income. Romney struggled to focus the country’s attention on the suffering and was never able to escape the Obama campaign’s characterization of him as the candidate who didn’t understand. By the end of the campaign, Romney became the candidate who understood GDP and productivity, a corporate turnaround artist out of touch with reality. As polls showed, Obama was the one who better understood the struggles of the middle class.

This is why Cantor’s speech on Tuesday is worth watching. It will be a full-throated effort to reclaim the median-household-income line for the Republican Party. He will mention the stagnation. He will describe Republican solutions aimed at addressing decade-old frustrations: new federal help for paying for school, tax code simplification and a renewed focus on R&D investment. His rhetoric will strongly echo Obama’s campaign stump speech. “Lately it has become all too common in our country to hear parents fear whether their children will indeed have it better than they,” Cantor will say, according to early excerpts of his speech. “Our goal: to ensure every American has a fair shot at earning their success and achieving their dreams.”

For much of the 2012 campaign, Republicans contented themselves with a message focused on decreased federal spending and debt, two policies that addressed the aftermath of the Great Recession but offered no solutions to the economic struggles that had begun a decade earlier. With Cantor’s speech, there is the beginnings of a shift. Like Obama after the 2010 election, Republicans are now directly addressing the fears and frustrations that have been at the heart of each federal election since 2006, a feeling of the country in decline as manifested by stagnant take-home pay. If the 2012 election has any lasting import, it is that fiscally conservative austerity politics alone will not win the day. It must be paired with a broader message. The most important chart in American politics can no longer be ignored.

NOTES about this piece:

This economic analysis about the weakening of the historic relationship between GDP growth, productivity gains and jobs and wages was developed by NDN/NPI Globalization Chair Dr. Rob Shapiro. This analysis was initially developed for Shapiro’s prescient book, “Futurecast: How Superpowers, Populations, and Globalization Will Change the Way You Live and Work.” It was also featured in this 2005 essay, “Crafting A Better CAFTA”, this 2007 paper, “The New Landscape of Globalization: How America Can Reap Its Rewards and Reduce Its Costs.” The chart referenced by Scherer was developed for and first released in a 2009 NDN paper, “A Lost Decade for Everyday Americans,” and can also be found here.

For recent essays by Shapiro on this topic, please review the following:

The Lessons of Today’s Troubling Report on GDP, January 30, 2013.

What Actually Happened to the Earnings of Working Americans, And What The Next President Can Do About It, October 31, 2012.

GOP Revisionism: Rewriting Economic History Against Obama, August 17, 2012.

How Much Credit Can Obama Claim on the Economy?, June 21, 2012.

An Economic Program for the Fall Campaign and the Next Four Years, June 4, 2012.

Stay Smart, America.

My VIVID Memories of the Very First Super Bowl--(starting to feel like a really old guy)

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 15:43:09 -0500

As an “older guy” getting ready to watch Super Bowl 47 (Yipes; no Roman Numerals), it has occurred to me how vividly I recall watching the very first “Supergame.” It was 1967, I was 12 years old, and my neighbor had just purchased some new technology—a color television set. The neighbor was not a sports fan, but the Supergame represented one of the first ever live sports broadcasts in something called “living color.” I’d seem football games before, in black and white, but when I had a chance to see the green and gold of the Packers and the bright red and white of the Chiefs, I was stunned. It looked unreal and it was almost impossible to watch the game because of the color.

Many, many years later we now have the Super Bowl. But for some of us, we can and always will remember the first game and the day football changed forever in America. It was a simpler game, and America was definitely not as addicted to football as it is today. My buddies and I spoke more of the color television idea than we ever did of the game. What a difference 47 years can make.

Below is a little history on the first game ever to crown a world champion in football.

The First AFL-NFL World Championship Game in professional American football, later known as Super Bowl I and referred to in some contemporary reports as the Supergame, was played on January 15, 1967 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, California. The National Football League (NFL) champion Green Bay Packers defeated the American Football League (AFL) champion Kansas City Chiefs by the score of 35–10.

Coming into this game, there was still considerable animosity between the two rival leagues, and both teams felt pressure to win. The Chiefs posted an 11-2-1 record during the 1966 AFL season, and defeated the Buffalo Bills, 31-7, in 1966 AFL Championship Game. The Packers finished the 1966 NFL season at 12-2, and defeated the Dallas Cowboys, 34-27, in the 1966 NFL Championship Game. Still, many sports writers and fans believed that any team in the older NFL was vastly superior to any club in the upstart AFL, and thus expected that Green Bay would blow out Kansas City.

The Super Bowl Game was established as part of the June 8, 1966 merger agreement between the NFL and the AFL. However, Los Angeles was not awarded the game until six weeks prior to the kickoff.

This game is the only Super Bowl to have been broadcast in the United States by two television networks simultaneously (no other NFL game was subsequently carried nationally on more than one network until December 29, 2007, when the New England Patriots faced the New York Giants on NBC, CBS, and the NFL Network). At the time, NBC held the rights to nationally televise AFL games while CBS had the rights to broadcast NFL games. It was decided to have both of them cover the game.

Each network used its own announcers: Ray Scott (doing play-by-play for the first half), Jack Whitaker (doing play-by-play for the second half), and Frank Gifford provided commentary on CBS; while Curt Gowdy and Paul Christman were on NBC.

Super Bowl I was the only Super Bowl in history that was not a sellout in terms of attendance, despite a TV blackout in the Los Angeles area (at the time, NFL games were required to be blacked out in the market of origin, even if it was a neutral site game and if it sold out). Of the 94,000 seat capacity in the Coliseum, 33,000 went unsold. Days before the game, local newspapers printed editorials about what they viewed as a then-exorbitant $12 price for tickets, and wrote stories about how to pirate the signal from TV stations outside the Los Angeles area.

Much to the dismay of television historians, all known broadcast tapes which recorded the game in its entirety were subsequently destroyed in a process of wiping, the reusing of videotape by taping over previous content, by both networks. This was due to the idea that the game wasn’t going to become what it did, no one knew yet about VCRs and the idea of re-broadcastsplus the fact that videotapes were extremely expensive back then.

Calling All Students: Summer 2013 Mission Trip to New Beginnings Village in Nakasangola District, Uganda

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 16:48:46 -0500

For the past two summers, students and adults from in and around Lexington and Central Kentucky have answered God’s call and traveled thousands of miles to Uganda for work with orphans. And our lives have never been the same. God is calling us back for a third year, and we need your help. Please read the following and begin to dream of what God can do through you this summer. Brenda and John Sawyer

During the last two weeks of June 2013 (final dates are still to be decided) we have an opportunity for a mission trip to the New Beginnings Village in Uganda. We need between 8 to12 people at least college age or any age north of that—Brenda and I still think we are college age—to join us for an amazing “only God” experience. There will be an application and interview process, and details of next steps will be forthcoming. This post is a “God appointment” intended to give you just a brief overview of the trip, plant a seed, put you in God-mode and provide you with a link to the Village we will be working in in Uganda.

Uganda has a population of approximately 30,000,000 people and there are an estimated 2,300,000 orphans below the age of seventeen. Sadly, there is at best limited government help for these orphans, and only pockets of help provided by NGOs and church-sponsored groups.

New Beginnings Village was founded five years ago in a rural district three hours north of Kampala. The founder, Roger Annett from Kilkeel, County Down, Northern Ireland, felt God’s call on his life after many visits to Uganda on building teams. Roger was touched by the children he met and with God’s help, he made a life-changing decision to buy land, build a village and begin to care for what is now nearly 90 orphans and underprivileged children

Roger now lives and works on site overseeing all aspects of the work there, providing a full caring service devoted to children. Ugandan men and women selected by Roger serve as house parents and act as a mother/father figure to approximately eight children accommodated in a traditional African style village. The development consists of guest homes, cooking areas, toilet facilities and a number of smaller traditional homes.

Children ages three to 16 are encouraged in academic, vocational and basic life skills, with the goal of the Village to enable them to become productive and self sustainable members of the community.

All of the children and house parents are involved in Bible training and shown the love of Jesus. Teams provide that needed connection between child and parent—you offer hands, love, laughter and affirmation to so many children who have never know the embrace or encouragement of a parent figure. All to show these amazing children that there is a Heavenly father who loves them and that there is a hope for their life in Jesus.

The trip will last two weeks and with travel will take 17 days. The cost is estimated to be between $2,500 and $2,750 per person although final figures will be driven by air fares. The cost will cover all expenses other than incidentals. We will as a team help all of you with fund raising. Travel will be from Lexington to Amsterdam, and then from Amsterdam to Entebbe.

You will need a set of shots for tropical diseases that need to be completed well before we travel, and those will be an added expense. In addition, you’ll need a passport. A Ugandan visa can be obtained on arrival in the country.

Our work in the village will be focused mostly on activities and teaching for the children. Fun days, crafts„ Bible lessons, singing, games and crafts will be the primary focus. Our goal is to help the children have a special “summer vacation” including days out from the Village where they are affirmed and made to be special. We’ll also do cooking, help with sports, work on the Village farm and simply love on the children and staff. We’ll be a sweet offering of encouragement and affection from our Heavenly Father.

Watch this space, Twitter and Facebook for an announcement concerning the time, date and location of an informational meeting where you can pick up a trip packet and have questions answered. Information is also available at Tuesday Night Dinner. Start praying, start talking and start dreaming about where God can use you. He will confirm whether you are headed to Africa to show the love of Jesus to some amazing children. You will be blessed beyond belief by joining this team.

Feel free to contact Brenda Sawyer if you have any questions or simply want to hear more before the upcoming trip meeting.

“And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here am I! Send me.” Isaiah 6:8

The Hidden Prosperity of the Poor A concept promulgated by the...

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 16:46:35 -0500

The Hidden Prosperity of the Poor

A concept promulgated by the right — the notion of the hidden prosperity of the poor — underpins the conservative take on the ongoing debate over rising inequality.

The political right uses this concept to undermine the argument made by liberals that the increasingly unequal distribution of income poses a danger to the social fabric as well as to the American economy.

President Obama forcefully articulated the case from the left in an address on Dec. 6, 2011 at Osawatomie High School in Kansas:

This kind of gaping inequality gives lie to the promise that’s at the very heart of America: that this is a place where you can make it if you try. We tell people — we tell our kids — that in this country, even if you’re born with nothing, work hard and you can get into the middle class. We tell them that your children will have a chance to do even better than you do. That’s why immigrants from around the world historically have flocked to our shores.

The conservative counterargument – that life for the poor and the middle class is better than it seems – goes like this: Even with stagnant or modestly growing incomes, the poor and middle class benefit from the fact that a stable or declining share of income is now required for basic necessities, leaving more money for discretionary spending. According to this theory, consumption inequality – the disparity between the amount of money spent on goods and services by the rich, the middle class and the poor — remains relatively unchanged, even while income inequality worsens.

In its definition of consumption, the Bureau of Labor Statistics includes “expenditures for food, housing, transportation, apparel, medical care, entertainment, and miscellaneous items.” In an e-mail to The Times, Mark Perry, an economist at the University of Michigan-Flint, goes further to make the conservative case:

For the consumer products, goods, and services primarily produced/provided by the private sector in competitive markets: air travel, foreign travel, food and beverages, restaurant meals, housing, clothing, footwear, household appliances and utensils, furniture, electronics (TVs, iPods, DVDs, BlueRay, Tivo, home theater systems), cameras, GPS, computers, cars and trucks, recreational vehicles, motorcycles, sporting goods, household tools and equipment, cell phones and cell phone service, LASIK surgery, cosmetic surgery, musical instruments, jewelry and watches, luggage, toys, books, information (Wikipedia, Internet, etc.), Cable TV, Internet service, car wash, oil changes, etc. those products and services keep getting cheaper and cheaper, and better and better, and with greater variety, relative to: a) the general price level, and b) average income, and in other words, keep getting more and more affordable over time to the average person. And the average consumer benefits the most, and is most satisfied, with those products/services provided by the market.

Perry and Donald Boudreaux, an economist at George Mason University, elaborated on this theme in a Jan. 23 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “The Myth of a Stagnant Middle Class.” The two economists contend that the “favorite progressive trope” of middle and lower class stagnation “is spectacularly wrong” – that American families today have substantially more discretionary income than ever before because the cost of basic necessities has been steadily falling as a proportion of income:

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, spending by households on many of modern life’s “basics” — food at home, automobiles, clothing and footwear, household furnishings and equipment, and housing and utilities — fell from 53% of disposable income in 1950 to 44% in 1970 to 32% today.

The polarized conflict over the measurement of inequality goes to the heart of a much larger debate in terms of public policy – a debate that has raged for almost a century. Boudreaux puts the conservative case with verve:

Even if we were to grant that both income and consumption inequality has risen over the past few decades, that fact alone says nothing about the absolute economic well-being of middle-income and poor Americans. While we believe that consumption inequality has in fact declined, our larger, more central, and most important point is that middle-class Americans are today far better off economically than they were 30 or 40 years ago, regardless of how their well-being today compares to that of rich Americans.

In contrast, David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., wrote in an e-mail to The Times:

My concern is not about inequality at a point in time per se but about the effect of rising inequality on disequalizing the life chances of kids born into affluent versus non-affluent households. There’s a real danger that the U.S. — which is not an economically mobile society by western standards — is going to become more dynastic. Already the gradient between household income and college attendance has steepened substantially between cohorts born in the early 1960s and those born in the early 1980s. Since educational attainment is the key predictor of lifetime earnings, this suggests that the link between circumstances at birth and lifetime incomes will be magnified in the current generation relative to the earlier one.

Autor goes on to concede the positive incentives that inequality can generate, but stresses that, in excess, inequality becomes dangerously destructive:

If the U.S. has a civic religion, it is our belief that society should be meritocratic — everyone should have a fair chance at success based on their smarts and their hard work. As the inequality of household resources becomes more skewed, the likelihood that kids starting at the bottom get a decent shot at the top gets more remote. Of course, there are and will be exceptionally successful people from every possible background. But if you walk the campuses of most top colleges in the U.S., you will discover that the vast majority are from upper income households. You don’t have to take a moral stance on inequality per se to be deeply worried that this may ultimately inhibit the American ideals that bind us together. Inequality within reason is a good thing; it creates incentives so that people work hard to reap rewards. But if more inequality today reduces the equality of opportunity for the next generation by skewing the playing field and disequalizing opportunities faced by kids from low v. high income households, that’s a tradeoff that many people would not want to make.

Janis Joplin: Take Another Piece of My Heart Janis Joplin would...

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 15:01:12 -0500

Janis Joplin: Take Another Piece of My Heart

Janis Joplin would have been 70 years-old on January 19, 2013. Enjoy the entire piece from NPR HERE on one of the amazing women of rock and roll.

Joplin struggled with growing up in Texas. She didn’t conform to the mold of the typical young woman of the 1950s. She was a painter, she was chubby, she had bad skin, and she wasn’t conventionally beautiful. In an appearance in 1970 on The Dick Cavett Show, she spoke bitterly about her adolescence — of her classmates who laughed her out of class, and ultimately, out of the state. Not surprisingly, Joplin found her outlet in the blues — especially in artists like Bessie Smith, Lead Belly and Big Mama Thornton. As she told Cavett, singing was the only way she could express how she felt.

“Playing is just about feeling,” Joplin said. “It isn’t necessarily about misery, it isn’t about happiness. It’s just about letting yourself feel all those things you already have inside of you but are trying to push aside because they don’t make for polite conversation or something. But if you just get up there — that’s the only reason I can sing. Because I get up there and just let all those things come out.”

Janis singing Take Another Piece of My Heart—Enjoy.

"(We are) being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus whom God..."

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 08:19:55 -0500

“

(We are) being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness. Romans 3:24-26.

There is no such thing as cheap grace. The gospel is not simply an announcement of pardon. In justification God does not
merely decide unilaterally to forgive us our sins. That is the prevailing idea, that what happens in the gospel is that God freely forgives us of sin because he is such a loving, dear, wonderful God, and it does not disturb him that we violate everything that is holy.

God never negotiates his righteousness. God will never lay aside his holiness to save us. God demands and requires that sin be punished. That is why the cross is the universal symbol of Christianity. Christ had to die because, according to God, the propitiation had to be made; sin had to be punished. Our sin has to be punished.

In the drama of justification, God remains just. He does not set aside his justice. He does not waive his righteousness; he insists upon it. We cannot be justified without righteousness, but the glory of his grace is that his justice is served vicariously by a substitute that he appointed. God’s mercy is shown in that what saves us is not our righteousness. It is someone else’s. We get in on someone else’s coattails—that is grace.

”

- Romans: St. Andrews Expositional Commentary, R.C. Sproul

The impact of tax increases on taxpayers Although the deal...

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 14:01:01 -0500

The impact of tax increases on taxpayers

Although the deal approved by the Senate early Tuesday would prevent income tax rates from increasing for all but the wealthiest Americans, most households would see a higher tax bill in 2013 because of the expiration of the payroll tax holiday. See related article.

Science! Why We Can Ice Skate. skeptv: I Didn’t Know...

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 09:03:31 -0500

Science! Why We Can Ice Skate.

skeptv:

I Didn’t Know That : The Science Behind Ice Skating

Do you know why you can skate across ice? It’s not because ice is slippery. Richard Ambrose and Jonny Phillips demonstrate the science behind ice skating while trying to maintain their balance!

by National Geographic.