Sense of Events

Only man standing

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Sun, 27 May 2012 23:24:00 +0000

For shame:
Never Yet Melted » America Today

Remembering the fallen

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Sun, 27 May 2012 11:38:00 +0000

The most reasonable thing to do when battle begins is to run away, not stay and fight. Were they truly willing to die for their country? I don't think so. There's an old story that goes back probably to the Civil War of the young soldier whose commander asked him, "Are you willing to die for your country?" The young man answered, "Certainly not. But I am ready to die, unwilling."

Read the rest.

Memorial Sunday

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Sun, 27 May 2012 11:30:00 +0000

Don't "follow your passion"

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Fri, 25 May 2012 20:00:00 +0000

Charlie Ergen, chairman of DISH Network Corporation and EchoStar Communications Corporation:

So many graduation speeches, you’ll hear about following your passion. Well, if I had done that, I would be dealing Blackjack in Vegas right now. So, that is not what worked for me.

Hymn for Memorial Day

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Fri, 25 May 2012 16:30:00 +0000

The traditional hymn of both the Royal Navy and the US Navy was originally penned as, "Eternal Father, Strong to Save." I posted the history of the hymn and its subsequent versions here. Here is the version we will use this Sunday. Verse 2 and 5 are my authorship.

These are Power Point slides saved as JPGs, background image is set at 50 percent transparency.

USS Arizona Memorial, Pearl Harbor, photo by Donald Sensing

Arlington National Cemetery, Memorial Day 2007. A young woman
weeps for her slain fiance.

The U.S. Marine Memorial, Washington D.C.

US Air Force F-15 fighters' "missing man" formation, in which the lead pilot
ascends heavenward rapidly to memorialize comrades who died.

The Gateway Arch, St. Louis, Mo., noontime Memorial Day 2009,
photo by Donald Sensing

Litany for Memorial Sunday

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Fri, 25 May 2012 15:41:00 +0000

These are Power Point slides saved as JPGs. Each background image was set at 50 percent transparency. The text is from The Book of Worship for United States Forces (1974). See more information here.

Arlington National Cemetery

National Cemetery of the Pacific (the Punchbowl), photo by Donald Sensing

Here is a blank slide.

Tomb of the Unknowns, Arlington National Cemetery

Sudden death in the north Atlantic

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Thu, 24 May 2012 18:30:00 +0000

Today is the anniversary of the sinking of HMS Hood, a battleship blown up and sunk in 1941 by the German battleship Bismarck during the brief Battle of Denmark Strait.

So sudden and catastrophic was Hood's sinking that only three men survived, leaving behind 1,415 shipmates who never went home. It was Britain's greatest single loss of the war.

Along with HMS Prince of Wales, Hood engaged Bismarck and its battle-cruiser escort, Prinz Eugen, after a lengthy pursuit. Hood, dating from 1916 and never much modernized, was outclassed by the new and very modern German ship. Bismarck's main battery of 15-inch guns achieved a very high muzzle velocity, essential for its advanced armor-piercing ammunition. Shortly after the battle began, such a shell plunged deep into Hood's interior, detonating internal stores and causing an immediate, catastrophic explosion.

Motion-picture crews aboard both Bismarck and Prinz Eugen captured the moment. The better view was from Prinz Eugen (battle film begins at 1:50, Hood's sinking is soon after the two-minute mark.)

Prince of Wales, heavily damaged, soon retired. However, British shells had struck Bismarck, causing heavy oil leakage. The German task force commander, Adm. Gunther Lutjens, released Prinz Eugen to raid independently and ordered Bismarck to make for France for repairs. However, the Royal Navy mounted an intensive effort to locate Bismarck and finally sank it on May 27. Of its complement of more than 2,200 men, only 114 survived. Many German sailors were left to drown by British vessels, who ceased rescue operations after lookouts spotted a German U-boat nearby.

Wikipedia explains what the Royal Navy's board of inquiry concluded caused Hood to sink:

The Royal Navy conducted two inquiries into the reasons for the ship's quick demise. The first, held very quickly after the ship's loss, concluded that Hood's aft magazine had exploded after one of Bismarck's shells penetrated the ship's armour. A second inquiry was held after complaints were received that the first board had failed to consider alternative explanations, such as an explosion of the ship's torpedoes. While much more thorough than the first board, it concurred with the first board's conclusion. Despite the official explanation, some historians continued to believe that the torpedoes caused the ship's loss while others proposed an accidental explosion inside one of the ship's gun turrets that reached down into the magazine. Other historians have focused on the cause of the magazine explosion. The discovery of the ship's wreck in 2001 confirmed the conclusion of both boards, although the exact reason why the magazines detonated will forever be a mystery as that area of the ship was thoroughly destroyed in the explosion.

Other notes:

One of Hood's survivor's story is here. An account by the HMS Hood Association is here.

To this day there is dispute whether a U-boat actually was present after Bismarck's sinking, report of which caused Royal Navy vessels to cease taking on German survivors. No subsequent sighting was made. However, a U-boat did shortly rescue three German sailors from the water. Was it the submarine reported by British lookouts? No one can say.

German survivors and some naval historians insisted that not even the Royal Navy's very powerful task force, firing on Bismarck from May 26-27 with heavy cannon and torpedoes, sank the ship. Though Bismarck was rendered a flaming wreck, its surviving sailors insist the ship sank because its captain, who died, ordered it scuttled as part of his order to abandon ship. In 1989 famed sea explorer Robert Ballard found Bismarck sitting upright almost 16,000 feet under water. His explorations showed that much British naval fire was ineffective and that the overall condition of the wreck supported the claim that it was scuttled rather than sunk by British fire.

Prinz Eugen survived the war and was taken as a war prize by the Royal Navy, who handed it over to the US Navy. After serving as a target ship for American atomic-bomb tests in the Pacific's Bikini Atoll, the ship was towed to Kwajelein Atoll where it ultimately turned turtle and sank, where it remains today.

In 1960 a British studio released Sink the Bismarck, a very good film about the pursuit and sinking of the ship, though its representation of Adm. Lutjens seems a bit two-dimensional. Its representation of the Battle of Denmark Strait is well done:

Still photos taken from Bismarck of Hood's sinking overlaid atop the Nazi radio announcement of the victory are here.

One of the most stunning film sequences of World War 2 combat action was taken from an aircraft of the capsizing and detonation of another British battleship, HMS Barham, stricken by torpedoes in the Mediterranean on Nov. 25, 1941. This ship's aft magazine exploded four minutes later. Barham's catastrophic end must have been very similar to that of Hood, though not as lethal; "only" 859 sailors died.

What's left of the Left?

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Thu, 24 May 2012 16:31:00 +0000

The Future of the Left | James Cronin:

When the "great recession" hit in September, 2008, it seemed that an era had ended. Since the 1980s, if not before, a pro-market consensus had governed economic policy-making and constrained political options in the advanced countries. For three decades serious politics had been about relying upon markets rather than the state to generate growth and, to that end, extending the reach and remit of market forces. The "great recession" revealed the costs and consequences of such views and such policies and seemed to prove them wrong, or so many of us concluded. It was the end of "neoliberalism", a moment to rethink the role of government in the economy and to reassert the state's responsibility for growth and welfare; it was an opportunity, in short, for parties and movements of the left to regain the initiative.

It did not happen.

Well, I'd say it did happen to a fairly significant degree in the United States. The author goes on to say, however, that "parties on the left side of the political divide, embattled even before the recent crisis, have languished since its onset."

Essential, need to know information

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Thu, 24 May 2012 15:26:00 +0000

And just who would not want to know everything about the "10 Largest Caliber Weapons Ever"?

Tax break for delinquents just in time for November!

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Thu, 24 May 2012 14:52:00 +0000

Gee, what possibly could be behind the brand-new, White-House-originated directive to the IRS to settle for 25 cents on the dollar for large-scale tax delinquents?

This is a time limited offer! So act before midnight tonight! Okay, not midnight tonight, but a day about two weeks before election day.

As Yogi Berra once, said, "It's too coincidental to be a coincidence."

The story:

You can't cheat an honest man

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:37:00 +0000

Found at AMERICAN DIGEST Essays, News, Notes, and Quotes:

Men, a moment of respectful silence, please

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Tue, 22 May 2012 21:18:00 +0000

The inventor of TV remote control is dead at 96:

Couch potatoes everywhere can pause and thank Eugene Polley for hours of feet-up channel surfing. His invention, the first wireless TV remote, began as a luxury, but with the introduction of hundreds of channels and viewing technologies it has become a necessity.

Just ask anyone who's lost a remote.

Polley died of natural causes Sunday at a suburban Chicago hospital, said Zenith Electronics spokesman John Taylor. The former Zenith engineer was 96.

However, as I commented there, I was a kid in the 1960s, my mom's TV had remote control. She could change channels without arising from her seat.

She simply called out, "Hey, Don! C'mere and change the TV to channel 4!"

And that was that.

"Shut up," he explained

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Tue, 22 May 2012 18:32:00 +0000

Harvard Law “journal of the legal left” attempts to silence anti-Holder protest website - Legal Insurrection

Since the Left cannot win a battle of ideas, it resorts to force.

Why no one takes The United Methodist Church seriously

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Tue, 22 May 2012 14:56:00 +0000

I noted in, "Death throes of a Blue Model Church," on the (non-)results of the recently-adjourned General COnference of the UMC,

As [Methodist] Bishop Willimon puts it, "The Methodist Federation for Social Action received new life, the [General] Board of Church and Society went home unscathed by reform" and pretty much every other entity of the church maintained an even strain. (For the record, if I were king I would completely close down the General Board of Church and Society, which is the Marxist wing of the UMC and the religious arm of the Democratic National Committee. But fact is, so non-influential of public life has the UMC become that not even the Democrats pay attention to us anymore.)

Why is the UMC, on the whole, so socially ineffective? Why are its socio-political pronouncements not taken seriously? Very simply because we continue to show that we are not serious people. I bring you, United Methodists: Afghanistan Better Off Under Taliban:

For at least 50 years, the United Methodist Church, America’s third largest denomination, has been unable to effectively apply traditional Christian teachings to issues of war and peace. The resolution called “Seeking Peace in Afghanistan,” originating with the New York-based United Methodist Women’s Division, and approved by the recent governing General Conference of the 12 million member global denomination, continues this sad tradition.

Ostensibly the resolution puts the church on record for peace in war torn Afghanistan. But actually it demonizes the United States, itself a 50 year tradition in United Methodism, while ignoring the evils of the Taliban and al Qaeda. And it materialistically assumes that peace can be purchased with ever more U.S. dollars. It never cites radical Islam, a chief cause for strife in Afghanistan, perhaps because liberal United Methodist elites cannot conceive of anyone taking traditional religion any more seriously than they do. ...

The resolution inevitably rehashes the canard that the U.S. “devotes almost the same amount of resources to military spending as the other 95 percent of the world combined,” as though the world would be safer with less military spending by the U.S. and relatively more by other nations. And it vacuously urges: “May we find the courage to join with Afghans and neighboring Pakistanis and all who seek to transform today’s glut of swords into plowshares.” Who are these elusive partners for peace? They are unnamed.

Of course they are unnamed. The Religious Left always thinks simplistically and always assumes that everyone actually longs for the same things it does. Read the whole thing.

Romney prepares for the last war

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Tue, 22 May 2012 02:29:00 +0000

Mitt Romney on NATO: "Reinforcing alliance's military might is vital"

This piece is hopelessly backward looking. We need to de-link our national security from NATO starting, oh, six years ago. While I find almost nothing to commend Obama on concerning defense, that he has started moving our security concerns' locus toward Asia is exactly right.

The problems is that Europe faces no credible threat for which NATO is the answer.

See my explanation here.

Furthermore, Europe's native birth rate has fallen off a cliff so that many Euro countries are well into what demographers call a demographic death spiral, where the birth rate is so low that it is effectively impossible for it to recover. See here. So the question is begged (and the Europeans have no answer): If Europeans won't have children who will grow up to be soldiers to defend their countries, why should American women bear children to grow up to defend Europe?

NATO is literally pointless militarily and the USA should withdraw from the military alliance, though intelligence sharing and the like will still do us well.

America is floating on oil

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Mon, 21 May 2012 18:07:00 +0000

Did you know that the United States' production of crude oil is the world's third largest? We lag behind only Saudi Arabia and Russia. And this is true even though our domestic production has dropped since 1973's 9 million barrels per day to today's 5.7 (or so) million bpd.

But production has not dropped because we have run out of oil. "Peak oil" was way off target when it came to peaking of recoverable reserves.In fact, the Energy Information Administration forecasts that by 2035, US production of liquid fuel at 10 MBPD will be more than half the world's total, and the US could produce almost 15.5 MBPD if it wanted. (Not all of this liquid fuel will be petroleum based.)

So far in history, the US has produced 194 billion barrels of oil. There are 22 billion barrels of reserves, plus an estimated 135 billion barrels of undiscovered but technically recoverable reserves. Estimates of both known and undiscovered "sub-economic" resources are 800 billion barrels.

This country is simply floating on oil, especially when you include its continental shelves. The Gulf of Mexico alone has an estimated 48 billion barrels of oil yet to be located.

And so chart number one, showing where the oil is and how much:

And this explains why so little oil is being pumped from the continental shelf areas:

So what is wrong with this picture? The answer presents itself.

All data from:

Catholics push back

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:29:00 +0000

Never would have seen this political ad from Catholics before this year.

Google: You can sail but you can't hide

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Sun, 20 May 2012 19:28:00 +0000

Google says it can track every seagoing vessel in the world in real time:

Like its nascent project to map the ocean floor, Google's new technology to track ships on the surface takes advantage of prior investments by others. In this case, it's the Maritime Automatic Identification System, known as AIS, a system of transponders installed in all legitimate seagoing vessels that periodically transmit their position to avoid collisions even when the crews can't physically see each other due to darkness or heavy weather.

AIS signals are only designed to be detectable up to 20 nautical miles away, but researchers led by Greece's University of the Aegean developed larger, land-based antenna that can pick up the signal over greater distances -- but that still only picks up vessels relatively close to shore. From overhead, however, the two satellites Google is using can detect ships anywhere on the ocean.

But AIS can be turned off aboard ships, so this is not really the security threat it might appear to be.

The fiction of the unemployment rate

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Sun, 20 May 2012 16:30:00 +0000

Mortimer Zuckerman of USNews peels away the fictions built into the Dept. of Labor's announcement of an 8.1 percent unemployment rate.

There is a little-known category of job creation called the birth/death model, a seasonal adjustment in which the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) arbitrarily adds jobs for net new companies it thinks are starting up and creating positions. Last month, the BLS made the assumption that 206,000 jobs were created in this category based on the companies that it thinks, but really can't prove, have just started up and essentially are invisible to government labor surveys. This is an imprecise, controversial guesstimate based on historical extrapolation. One must be skeptical, since this figure of 206,000 rose from 172,000 in April 2011 despite the obvious decline in economic activity this spring and the general lack of financing for start-up companies.

I doubt that this imaginary computation started under the present administration. Read the whole thing.

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Cherokee land crabs!

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Sat, 19 May 2012 19:12:00 +0000

Oh, this just cracked me up over at American Digest:

Steyn's piece is here. One wonders whether Oklahoma Plain Crabs are similar to Prairie Oysters.

Speaking of ancestry, I have never before revealed online that I am a Mayflower descendant. Someday I will post here one of the recipes handed down from my forebear William Bradford - the traditional Plymouth Colony recipe for Chicken Fried Rice with Water Chestnuts and Bamboo Shoots.

No indicators are good

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Sat, 19 May 2012 19:00:00 +0000

If I started excerpting from "John Williams: The Recovery Is An Illusion," I would hardly know where to start. It's not a short piece, but since it's crammed with extremely informative charts you can get through it fairly quickly. It is as comprehensive an overview of what is happening economically and what it portends as any I have seen for quite awhile.

I'm embedding it below, but it may not work. The frame should be wide enough to center all the post's text.

A narrower view of what all this might mean for the markets is here.

Death throes of the Blue Model church

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Fri, 18 May 2012 22:53:00 +0000

If you want to see a microcosm of the decaying and death of Blue Model organizations, California is a good example for government and The United Methodist Church for religious bodies.

Every four years the United Methodist Church convenes its General Conference, the only body that can set the denomination's doctrines and denomination-wide legislation. The GC meets for two weeks and adjourned last week in Tampa, Fla. Methodist Bishop Will Willimon, who attended, sums up the two-week fiasco rather well:

General Conference in Tampa made history as the most expensive ($1,500 per minute!), least productive, most fatuous assemblage in the history of Methodism. Sunday evening’s “A Celebration of Ministry” fiasco was a metaphor for our nearly two weeks at church expense: four hours of belabored supplication by the General Commission on Status and Role of Women, five Ethnic National Plans, Strengthening the Black Church for the 21st Century, United Methodist Men, Girl Scouts, Africa University and a number of other agencies I can’t remember. A subtheme of that long night: even though we can’t cite specific fruit, please don’t force us to change or to expend less on ourselves.

Even after suffering this abuse, General Conference succumbed to the agencies’ pleadings. In a post-GC blog, Mike Slaughter (who with Adam Hamilton eloquently—and futilely—warned GC that we must change or face certain death) told the truth: “Our denominational systems continue to resist change by protecting archaic structures. From our seminaries to boards and agencies, institutional preservation was a strong resistant influence throughout GC. Entrenched organizational bureaucracies resist accountability …”

I did not attend myself, but one delegate, whom I know, said that more than anything else, this General Conference was about money. That is practically the hallmark of the death paroxysms of Blue Model organizations: who gets how much of a shrinking monetary base. And whatever else it may be, the UMC is one of the bluest of the Blue Model organizations out there.

Probably a review of what the Blue Model is would be useful here. Scholar Walter Russell Mead describes the Blue Model as "The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal." The problem is that these things,

... don’t work anymore, and the gaps between the social system we’ve inherited and the system we need today are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper them over or ignore them.

In the old system, both blue collar and white collar workers hold stable jobs, a professional career civil service administers a growing state, with living standards for all social classes steadily rising while the gaps between the classes remain fairly stable, and with an increasing ‘social dividend’ being paid out in various forms: longer vacations, more and cheaper state-supported education, earlier retirement, shorter work weeks and so on. Graduate from high school and you were pretty much guaranteed lifetime employment in a job that gave you a comfortable lower middle class lifestyle; graduate from college and you would be better paid and equally secure.

Life would just go on getting better. From generation to generation we would live a life of incremental improvements — the details of life would keep getting better but the broad outlines of our society would stay the same. The advanced industrial democracies of had in fact reached the ‘end of history’: this is what ‘developed’ human society looked like and there would be no more radical changes because the picture had fully developed.

The blue model rested on the post-Second World War industrial and economic system. The ‘commanding heights’ of American business were controlled by a small number of monopolistic and oligopolistic firms. ...

The stable economic structure allowed a stable division of the pie. Workers (much more heavily unionized then than now) got steady raises and stable jobs. The government got a stable flow of tax revenues. Shareholders got reasonably steady dividends.

Peter Skurkiss of The Buckeye Institute assesses that the Blue Model is in its death throes:

Simply put, the blue model is unsustainable. The compensation, the benefits, and privileges that were afforded to government workers was possible only with an unusually healthy and robust private sector which itself was made possible by the lack of serious foreign competition. That world no longer exists, nor is it ever likely to again. Governors like John Kasich (Ohio) and Scott Walker (Wisconsin) recognize this fact faster than others, but in the end, all states will have to conform to the new reality.

And not just states and governments or corporations at every level. Blue Model institutional churches are going to be swept away by the new reality as well. And so with the United Methodist Church. Here are the portents that bode ill for the UMC, but these portents are true for most any Blue Model organization.

One
The focal point of dissension within Blue Model organizations is money - who gets it and how much. Beside this question, all others pale. The problem for the UMC is that the General Conference is delegated by a huge majority by men and women who grew up under the Blue Model in its heyday and whose personal influence is derived from expertise in navigating Blue Model sub-institutions.

More than anything else, what brings down Blue Model organizations is that the money stream starts drying up. This is what has happened in the UMC. Personal giving among Methodist church members has declined markedly. Much of the decline can be attributed to the ongoing recession, yes, but not all. Besides, charitable giving is as much a matter of habit as devotion. Even households that have recuperated from the recession have not, on the whole, returned to the prior level of giving, mainly because it is no longer a habit.

And so it was that the General Conference was a two-week scramble by the countless special-interest groups of the church to protect their slice of the pie, without, apparently, much caring that the pie is getting ever smaller. If it is true, as Charles de Gaulle observed, that graveyards are full of indispensable men, it is truer that the UMC is more full of boards and agencies whose special-interest constituents would count it as the Apocalypse come in power if they were more than token downsized. As Bishop Willimon puts it, "The Methodist Federation for Social Action received new life, the [General] Board of Church and Society went home unscathed by reform" and pretty much every other entity of the church maintained an even strain. (For the record, if I were king I would completely close down the General Board of Church and Society, which is the Marxist wing of the UMC and the religious arm of the Democratic National Committee. But fact is, so non-influential of public life has the UMC become that not even the Democrats pay attention to us anymore.)

What all this means is that the main activity of the two weeks of Conferencing was lobbying by countless entities large and small to protect their share of the general budget. This is exactly why Southern Methodist University Prof. Maria Dixon Hall, a delegate to the Conference, wrote that the UMC is "facing slow, agonizing, organizational death."

Again, winning the battle and losing the war became the strategy of the day. The minority point was clear: if we don’t like what you do or we don’t feel like you gave us enough deference, we will shut it down regardless of whom it hurts. Funny, whether it’s Grover Norquist and the Tea Party or the Methodist Federation for Social Action, the rhetoric of organizational hostage-taking has the same effect—polarization, distrust and, in the end, slow, agonizing, organizational death.

One of my students in Organizational Communication could look at this mess called GC2012 and diagnose the problem immediately: An 18th Century structure cannot sustain a 21st century global organization. We must be willing to let go of the non-essentials to get back to the first fruits and ideals of why we are a People called Methodist.

Two
A second mark of a Blue Model organization in its death throes is that the Old Guard tries to tighten its grip on its power while the Young Turks demand they relinquish.

In the UMC, the Old Guard are the boards and agencies and the spin-off movements and various constituencies of the church. These are 100 percent American and almost all white. The Young Turks are non-U.S. Methodists, mainly Africans, whose numbers are growing rapidly at the same time that domestic American Methodists continue to dwindle. In 2008, 30 percent of delegates came from outside the United States; this year it was 41 percent. No one doubts that in 2020, foreign Methodist delegates will be the majority and that may well happen only four years from now.

Yet U.S. Methodists paid for 99 percent of the Conference's costs despite insistence from foreign delegations that they pay a larger share. To these requests, the US-based UMC said no, even to the Norwegian delegation!

Money is power, they say, and here we see the real meaning of the Golden Rule:

The American wing of the UMC has passed its peak of influence. Money will not buy it back. As Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, puts it, "United Methodists Transition from Liberal to Global."

Unlike the other traditionally liberal-led Mainline denominations, United Methodism is fully global in membership. ... There are 7.5 million United Methodists in the U.S. and 4.5 million overseas, almost all in Africa, mostly in the Congo. With the U.S. church losing about 100,000 members a year (down from 11 million 44 years ago) and the African church gaining over 200,000 a year, the denomination likely will become a majority non-U.S. church in about 10 years or less. ...

With over 4 million and soon to be 5 million members, the African churches are now too large to ignore. A few liberal activists, in their blogs, complained about Africans from impoverished countries who don't contribute dollars into the denomination now having so much power. But disenfranchising the poor is not a successful battle cry for progressives. Some U.S. liberals quietly try to paint the Africans as primitives who reject enlightened Western liberalism. ...

Inevitably the growing African membership will alter these preoccupations with American leftist themes. They believe the church's role is primarily evangelistic, not political.

This is the same type of competition and foreign pressure that led to the decay of the political Blue Model. Back to Prof. Mead:

The blue model began to decay in the seventies. Foreign producers began to erode the market share of lazy, sclerotic American firms – like the Big Three automakers. The growth of offshore financial markets forced the financial services industry to become more flexible as both borrowers and lenders were increasingly able to work around the regulations and the oligopolies of the domestic market. ...

These days, private sector blue companies can only survive with vast and continuing government support.

But there is no such equivalent entity to prop up the Blue Model UMC. And so the structure will crash. As economist Herbert Stein said 40-plus years ago, "When something can't go on forever, it won't."

I do not mean that the UMC will disappear, although there is still significant shrinkage of the domestic American church yet to come. I mean that the main indicator of the Blue Model Church's demise is plain: The inability of existing organization to help the UMC prosper. Yet it is unremarkable to say this. Except for the "bitter clingers" of the UMC's Old Guard, it is hard to find even traditionally-minded Methodists who don't understand that basic fact.

What is hard to find is substantial numbers of UMs who understand what Prof. Hall came to see. Writing of a day she talked with her gardener about the sorry condition of her wooden deck, she explains,

As we looked at the deck, I told him that I saw some nails popping out and that he should get the carpenter to fix them and then get the deck painted. He said, “My friend, the earth around the deck has changed. The sun and rain have taken their toll. It is warped and nailing it won’t fix the problem—the structure is bad. You must tear it down if you want it to do any good.” A gardener had become a prophet right before my eyes and ears. ...

... We are warped and cosmetic changes won’t help—we must dare to tear down to our foundations if we ever hope to be any good to the world.

Don’t get me wrong. There are dozens if not hundreds of local churches, annual conferences and general agencies who are doing the work of Christ in wonderful ways; but that’s not the issue. That’s like saying all of my boards in my deck aren’t bad and that many of them are working just fine. Because the good boards are attached to a bad structure, in the end they can only do so much good.

Vertical living in a horizontal world:

Like other Blue Model entities, the UMC is organized vertically, itself a consequence of America's victory in World War II, which taught the country that defined organization is the key to success. The defining characteristic of Blue Model organizations is a vertical chain of command and layers of supervision. And so the UMC is organized to the hilt: Bishops preside over Conferences (which is what Methodists call dioceses; each year every Conference has a convention, called an Annual Conference, and every four years the general church holds the General Conference. It took me years to understand all this.) Geographical conferences are further divided into districts, each with a superintendent, who exercises supervision of individual pastors. In turn, Conferences (dioceses) are organized into several Jurisdictions, each with its own set of jurisdictional agencies, and the denomination operates 13 general (churchwide) boards and agencies.

The result is practically a textbook example of a vertically-integrated organization, "An organization whose members look up to bosses instead of out to customers. Loyalty and commitment is given to functional fiefdoms, not the overall corporation and its goals." The Old Guard's loyalty, as Mr. Tooley, Bishop Willimon and Prof. Hall point out, is mainly to the "functional fiefdoms" of the Blue Model church and not to either the structures or goals of the emerging UMC in Africa and elsewhere. Yet, once again, the emerging UMC is really emerging while the Blue Model UMC is declining.

This situation is aggravated by an ecclesial equivalent of the dysfunction of government's Blue Model. Prof. Mead puts it thus: "they are poorly equipped to respond nimbly to the fast-changing conditions of America today." And so with the vertical, Blue Model structure of the UMC. American society is rapidly moving to a new model (of sorts) that values horizontal organizations, often of self-organized networks that arise as needed as can pass away just as quickly. This is multi-modal and multi-nodal - flexible of purpose and structure and oriented toward purpose and process more than place or personnel. This is 180 degrees out from the way the UMC works now.

Conclusion

Yogi Berra is supposed to have said, "It's easy for forecast the future, especially in retrospect." One thing is for sure: there are many more tears to be shed and agonies to be endured before the nature of UMC of the 21st century is evident. For the next three or maybe four General Conferences (extending to 2028), the Blue Model devotees will try to hang on. Mead:

[C]ulturally and intellectually, bureaucrats and politicians [read: the UMC's general boards and agencies] often remain blue. That is, they think instinctively in the old ways, come up with blue solutions to non-blue problems, and often fail to grasp either the constraints or the opportunities of the new era.

But this will fail because the Blue Model's center is the American branch of the church. And the center cannot hold. Here are some consequences of the breakdown of the Blue Model UMC that are already evident and will become stronger in the coming years:

The great majority of the shrinking domestic base of Methodist lay people are not personally invested in propping up the Blue Model Methodist Establishment -- and so they won't. Their own Blue Model organizations (unions, job security and guaranteed pensions, etc.) have already gone a-glimmering. Lay people increasingly will see no benefit to themselves from for maintaining a Blue Model church. Their concerns are almost exclusively related to the local church and its mission and ministries and not to the activities of general boards, denominational ministries or even the connectional system.
Lay people and pastors more and more will not accept the bureaucratic inertia and plodding deliberatism of the Blue Model -- and again, will not pay for it. The hierarchical structures of the church must rediscover what servant ministry means and devote themselves to helping local churches and pastors succeed rather than, in usual Blue Model style, issue edicts from Sinai's peak that must be obeyed. Flexibility and responsiveness by church leaders and agencies to the needs of local churches will be key. From bishops down through Conference offices and superintendents, it must become an embedded value that their purpose is to empower, assist and support local churches. The line of support's direction must run down, not up the chain of command, but this is, frankly, exactly opposite of what we have today.
Church leaders at all levels will become increasingly frustrated by the glacial inability of the General Conference to accomplish anything meaningful regarding to structure and revisions of UMC's Book of Discipline (the canon law of the church). This will strengthen the already-evident movement among lay people toward congregationalism in the church instead of traditional Methodist connectionalism. Churches will increasingly see themselves as franchise operators rather than subordinate offices, and will begin to take increasing liberties with the directive documents of the Church.
We are long past the day when Methodism as a “brand” was uniquely attractive. It is very naive to expect that the laity or pastors will somehow become more devoted to the Church's connectional system and the work of general boards and agencies than they are now. The great majority of our people attend our churches because of personal relationships and the particular church’s programs and internal ministries, not because the sign says Methodist.
The growing influence of the foreign Methodists will become the focal point of dissent among American Methodists over the future of the general church. Largely because of Africa's delegations, the routine quadrennial attempt by the gay lobby (eleventh in a row) at the General Conference to liberalize the church's stance on homosexuality was crushed by 61-39 percent, a larger margin than four years ago. Already there is a move by the liberal wing of the church to form a domestic-church-only Conference, but this would essentially schism the Church and leave the General Conference even more directionless than it is now.

Beyond that my crystal ball is cloudy. One thing is for sure - Bob Dylan had it right:

Comments on.

Stock pickers and fortune tellers

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Mon, 14 May 2012 20:16:00 +0000

Warren Buffett is credited with saying that stock pickers are the only people that can make fortune tellers look good. I wrote Thursday about why oil prices have been tanking lately. So this piece caught my eye today:
Tuesday’s ETF To Watch: Ultra DJ-UBS Crude Oil UCO ETF DAILY NEWS:

In light of crude’s recent behaviors, today’s ETF to watch will be the Ultra DJ-UBS Crude Oil (NYSEARCA:UCO). This fund employs a 2X leverage on crude oil futures, making it one of the most volatile but potentially rewarding funds to play this commodity. Though the fund does not have much in the way of assets ($234 million), it is a popular trading instrument, as it currently has an average daily volume of 1.1 million shares.

ETF means electronically traded fund, analogous to a mutual fund, but with a very narrow market focus and that can be traded throughout the day, rather than at only the closing price as an ordinary mutual fund. UCO is a long fund, meaning its price rises when oil's price rises. "2X leverage" means that the price of the fund should double the price moves of the underlying commodity. If oil goes up one percent, then the fund price should go up two percent. If oil falls X percent, then UCO's price will fall 2X percent.

So at the end of this little piece we find this sage advice:

If crude continues to slide into tomorrow’s trading session, UCO will get crushed, but if the commodity were to see some relief, this ETF will profit handsomely

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call a BGOO - a Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious. Once again, I am reminded of Will Rogers' advice on how to make money trading stocks: "Buy a stock when the price is low and sell it after it goes up. If it doesn't go up, don't buy it."

BTW, UCO dropped more than 3.5 percent today.

'via Blog this'

Unemployment rate drops by pro-rata 230,000

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:51:00 +0000

Report says 230,000 unemployed losing benefits over weekend - The Hill's On The Money:

Because of the way the Obama administration measure unemployment, when unemployed people exhaust their eligibility to receive unemployment-insurance checks, they drop out of being counted as unemployed. See here.

But they are still not working.

As goes Japan so may go the world

noreply@blogger.com (Donald Sensing) — Sun, 13 May 2012 15:16:00 +0000

The Asian Tiger ― Japan ― is in danger of extinction

May 7, 2012 (HLIWorldWatch.org) - Do you know any Japanese people? If you do, you had better look fast, because they’re an endangered species.

According to the United Nations, every hour of the day and night there are thirty less Japanese in the world. By the end of this year, there will be 200,000 less, and by the year 2050, Japan will have lost nearly a quarter of its population.

Such is the legacy of a country which has so eagerly embraced materialism and the Culture of Death.

Japan is invaluable as a demographic laboratory because it is practically a closed system, with almost no emigration or immigration. Its 99 percent ethnically homogenous population gives us a rare glimpse of what the future holds for the entire world.

The problem is simple: Japanese women have virtually stopped having babies. ...

What may we learn from the ongoing slow-motion Japanese disaster?

Just as Japan is a closed system, so is the world. Just as Japan’s population leveled out and began to plunge, so will the world’s, and very soon. This will lead to gigantic economic consequences and human suffering on a scale never before known.

Yet the population control cartel continues to abort, sterilize and contracept the people of the world just as fast as they can,

Worldwide demographic trends have the momentum of a supertanker. The world’s total fertility rate will hit replacement in just two years. Its population will peak in only three decades and then begin to decline.

The time to end population control programs and promote larger families is now.