logos redux

…and suddenly realized she was being watched. This is the peeping Tom (or Queen as it were).

Many of you may know that my wife and I are going with a group from our church, Providence Reformed Presbyterian, to plant a new church in Carondelet, which is one of the older neighborhoods in the South of St. Louis City. Well, here is the building that we have just gotten confirmation we will be worshiping in. A 150-year-old Lutheran (LCMS) congregation has been extremely gracious to us and is sharing this sanctuary with us along with a parish building next to it. Please pray for our core group (we have 67 as of right now) as we prepare to move into this new location and begin worshiping and ministering as Resurrection Presbyterian Church.

In 1450, Johann Gutenberg perfected moveable type, the basis for the printing press, an innovation that single-handedly revolutionized communications for the world. It allowed thousands of copies …

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Please, please read this. This is an important statement demonstrating the illegality of what the current administration is doing, and the bullying tactics they are using to avoid being called on it.

Unafraid In Greenwich Connecticut Clifford S. Asness

Managing and Founding Principal

AQR Capital Management, LLC

The President has just harshly castigated hedge fund managers for being unwilling to take his administration’s bid for their Chrysler bonds. He called them “speculators” who were “refusing to sacrifice like everyone else” and who wanted “to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout.”

The responses of hedge fund managers have been, appropriately, outrage, but generally have been anonymous for fear of going on the record against a powerful President (an exception, though still in the form of a “group letter,” was the superb note from “The Committee of Chrysler Non-TARP Lenders,” some of the points of which I echo here, and a relatively few firms, like Oppenheimer, that have publicly defended themselves). Furthermore, one by one the managers and banks are said to be caving to the President’s wishes out of justifiable fear.

I run an approximately twenty billion dollar money management firm that offers hedge funds as well as public mutual funds and unhedged traditional investments. My company is not involved in the Chrysler situation, but I am still aghast at the President’s comments (of course, these are my own views, not those of my company). Furthermore, for some reason I was not born with the common sense to keep it to myself, though my title should more accurately be called “Not Afraid Enough” as I am indeed fearful writing this… It’s really a bad idea to speak out. Continue Reading…

Thanks to a very felicitous trade with my in-laws Alicia and I now have a Kodak EasyShare, Z712 IS. It’s a 7.1 MP camera with a 12x zoom and a good number of manual features. It’s not a DSLR, but it’s about as close as you can get.

I’m pretty excited. I’ll post some pictures soon. I took some shots of Alicia’s parents’ dog in mid-air catching a Frisbee in West Virginia last weekend that I may put up.

Also, I’m going to take some shots of Alicia’s belly and if I can convince her they may appear around here sometime soon.

It turns out our little Rice Krispy is actually a baby girl!!! We just had our second ultrasound at 20.4 weeks and found out that we are going to have a daughter. I saw the heart beating (including all four valves clearly visible), arms and legs, fingers, feet, a tiny little stomach, a bottom and even a little nose. It was pretty amazing. I have to say that finding out that it was a girl was a little surprising. Alicia and I no longer trust our “intuition.”

This one shows her profile and her little nose. Amazing.

This one shows her spinal column clearly and I think that may be an arm coming up over from the left.

Another profile with her abdomen and chest clear.

And here the baby is turned over and she’s got her hands up in front of her face like a boxer- she kept doing this all through the ultrasound.

Also, I should note that the nickname status accorded by the ultrasound tech has been upgraded from Rice Krispy to Pipsqueak.

I travel to a large construction site and clean out port-a-potties. That’s right. We drive small tanker trucks with a hose and a tube on the end and stop at about 80 or 90 units a day, suck out the stuff, refill them with water and a sanitizer tablet, scrub down the inside, replace the tp and move on. Not glamorous. But it pays well, and that’s the key right now, with bills to pay and a baby on the way.

What struck, me however, as I rode along with one of my co-workers today, learning the ropes, was that this is an important job that someone needs to do and do well. This construction site is like a small city, and sanitation and health concerns are a big factor, not to mention the simple fact that people working on a job site for several years need to be able to use the toilet in relatively decent environment.

The guy that was training me was kind of amazing. I’ll call him John. He was a middle-aged man who married a few years ago, has a couple of step-kids and a step-grandson and a wife with some psychological difficulties. As he told me his story I realized that he had lots of reasons to be bitter. Things had been hard for him. He had been treated poorly by his last employer. His wife’s condition was preventing him from getting health insurance. And he’s in late middle age working the job that everybody on the site doesn’t want for less money than 90% of the guys out there (almost all of whom are union).

But he wasn’t bitter. He took pride in his job, and not because he was simple or naive. He knew it wasn’t glamorous, that sometimes it sucks. He knew that when the site shuts down because of rain (like today) and all the union guys go home and still get a full day’s pay we stay out there and keep cleaning port-a-potties. But that wasn’t really the point. He understood that his job was his job and that’s what he’s paid for and that’s what he does… and he does it well. He was respectful, not just to the boss or the foreman, but to me, the new guy, and to everyone we met. He wasn’t too proud to be satisfied with the work he had to do, and he wasn’t too much of a hard-ass to be patient and teach me the ropes, explaining the details of a port-a-potty detail. At the end of the day he even bought me a soda.

This impressed me. And it made me think. Sometimes as Christians we act like ‘building the kingdom’ is an automatic ticket to truth and beauty, which we conceive of in Utopian fashion, as a world in which ’sh*t don’t stink.’ But it does. I don’t know how this works out with an optimistic view of what God is making this world to be, but I think that perhaps there’s something important about the idea that it’s our conception of what is worthwhile and meaningful that will change as much is it is that nothing hard or smelly will be required of us. I think contentment can be an overused word in Christian circles implying that lack of ambition or dreams is a virtue. But at the same time contentment is a virtue. I have a choice between being bitter that right now my calling seems to be cleaning up construction workers’ toilets, or being content and thankful that God has given me a better paying job than I’ve had through seminary and a way to provide for my family. May I be like John.

So here it is, the comment that has galvanized the debate thus far: “Um, all of the legal defense funds out there, um, they’re looking for people out there with court of appeals experience, because court of appeals is where policy is made. And I know, I know this is on tape and I should never say that because we don’t make law, I know. Um, um — [laughter] — I know. I’m not promoting it, I’m not advocating it, and, I’m … you know. [laughter]” Obviously, my first reaction is disgust. Such a crass statement of the knowing failure of the judiciary in America to limit themselves to what they are charged with doing is disgusting. At the same time, there are those who will say, look, the law isn’t clear on every eventuality so in clarifying gray areas of course appellate courts make policy. In a sense this is true. Judicial precedent is in a sense policy making in that it sets the policy (in the broad sense of what is to be done) that will be followed in the future in similar situations. I get it. There is a sense in which authoritative interpretation is policy making. But that is not what Sotomayor meant and it is not what she has done.

Sotomayor simply is an activist judge. Consider this example quoted from the New York Times:

“Her most high-profile case involved New Haven’s decision to toss out tests used to evaluate candidates for promotion in the fire department because there were no minority candidates at the top of the list.

She was part of a panel that rejected the challenge brought by white firefighters who scored high but were denied promotion. Frank Ricci, the lead plaintiff, argued that it was unfair he was denied promotion after he had studied intensively for the exam and even paid for special coaching to overcome his dyslexia.”

Many of you no doubt remember this. It was a flagrant example of a judge deciding that her conception of “fairness” (defined as equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity) trumped the law. This is not simply interpreting a gray area and thus setting precedent. This is making up policy according to one’s own ideology. Further, it could be argued that it is a racist ideology.

If you think that is over the top consider this quote: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” — Judge Sonia Sotomayor, in her Judge Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity Lecture at the University of California (Berkeley) School of Law in 2001. Or this: ““Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences,” she said, for jurists who are women and nonwhite, “our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.”

The foundation of our political system is the rule of law. This goes all the way back to early Puritans such as Samuel Rutherford who wrote the famous treatise Lex Rex (Law is King). When we decide that one’s credentials for a judicial seat have more to do with ethnic identity, personal experiences or potential for empathy than commitment to reading, understanding and applying the law as it is established we have forgone the rule of law and established an oligarchy. What is worse, however, is that we have established an oligarchy masquerading as a Liberal democracy. Far be it from me to assume unquestioningly that Liberal democracy is the end-all-be-all for political ills, but a government that pretends to be operating on principles of freedom and the rule of law, while at the same time subverting the law and confiscating power to themselves is surely to be despised.

After a 20+ page paper on the History of the PCA, a 30 page paper on narrative theology, drama, improvisation and Christian ethics, an annotated translation and analysis of Nehemiah 1 and 3 finals I’m back. Another year down and one more to go.

Alicia and I heard Michael Pollan speak last night. I think she’ll be publishing something over at the Examiner on it later. (She published this before we went talking about the importance of food and how we think about it.) I’ve got some thoughts, but right now they’re half baked and I need a shower and a bite to eat.

I don’t know what to do with myself. It’s Saturday and I don’t have to work because of Memorial Day and I don’t have 6 books and a paper that need read and written for class. It’s a beautiful but strangely disorienting sensation. I keep feeling guilty like there’s something wrong with me if I’m not busy and frantic all the time. Ah, the American way.