Internet Gambling

A Slate article on gambling by Jacob Weisberg is thought provoking. He writes,

Here in Midtown Manhattan, I have plenty of opportunities to gamble legally. At the newsstand downstairs, I can buy New York lottery tickets for dozens of different instant, daily, and jackpot games. To play the horses, I have only to pick up the phone or walk a few blocks to one of more than 60 convenient off-track betting facilities in the city. From the Port Authority terminal on Eighth Avenue, I can catch a bus to Atlantic City, where I can play blackjack, roulette, and poker. It's an even
shorter ride to Foxwoods in Connecticut, historic home of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation and approximately 7,000 slot machines.

Gambling has become the national pastime, and it is becoming more pervasive. He goes on to say,

Various other forms of gambling are entirely illegal, though prevalent and unlikely to get me in trouble. It is technically against the law to participate in an office pool on the NCAA tournament. Betting on a friendly round of golf, chess, or billiards is also a crime. I break the law when I play poker with my buddies, though if I am ever arrested, I plan to point out that Justice Scalia does it, too. There is some ambiguity about whether it's illegal for individuals to play poker over the Internet, but executives of foreign-based Web sites who allow
Americans to wager may be arrested, as was David Carruthers, the chief executive of the British company BetonSports, who was taken into custody while changing planes in Dallas on his way to Costa Rica. According to his lawyer, Carruthers now faces up to 20 years in prison on federal charges. A bill before Congress, sponsored by Rep. Jim Leach, R-Iowa, (which has over a dozen casinos, a gambling cruise ship, two dog tracks, a horse track, and a lottery), would attempt to curtail Internet gambling by creating criminal penalties for credit card and other companies that process Internet gambling transactions.

What's the difference between the legal forms of gambling and the illegal forms? Some of the legal varieties are less appealing, in part because the "vig" tends to be higher (lotteries return less than 60 percent of their take in prizes). Certain kinds of authorized gambling convey the special grimness of state-sponsored vice, which will be familiar to those who have visited riverboat casinos in desperate Mississippi and Indiana towns. But morally and in terms of their social consequence, it's hard to draw any distinction at all. All kinds of gambling, from bingo to baccarat, are benign entertainment for most people,dangerously addictive to a few, and capable of breeding unwanted side effects for society.

I disagree with his attitude toward internet gambling. I think it is a trend that will breed a great deal of hardship for families in the future. I especially hate the idea that people can charge their internet gambling to credit cards. That is a recipe for disaster.

HT Albert Mohler

Why Evangelicals Support Israel

This short item helps explain why.

Christian Retailing and the Great Commission

This article in the LA Times about a Christian Retailers Convention makes me wonder about what has happened to modern christianity? An excerpt:

Christian Outdoorsman was taking orders for a camouflage baseball cap with a red cross. In Booth 235, Revelation Products of St. Louis was pitching golf balls and flip-flops. Follow the Son flip-flops have patterned soles that leave the message "Follow Jesus" in the sand.Gospel Golf Balls are touted as "a great golf ball with a greater purpose." Manufactured by Top-Flite, the golf balls are printed with well-known verses from the Bible, such as John 3:16 ("For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son…. "). Dave Kruse, president of Revelation, said they were meant as "conversation starters," to help men share
their faith while teeing up.An added bonus: Duffers need no longer feel bad about losing a ball in the rough. "If you're playing great, good," Kruse said. "If you're spraying the ball, well … lose a golf ball, share the gospel."

The article goes on to say:

After years of steady growth, the Christian retail market notched $4.3 billion in sales in 2004, the latest year for which figures are available. Sales of Christian books, in particular, are booming, outpacing most sectors of the publishing industry.But except for a handful of top-selling books and albums, Christian merchandise is marketed almost exclusively by believers for believers, through Christian stores, trade shows and websites.There are Christian health clubs, Christian insurance agencies and Christian tree trimmers (who advertise in Christian business directories). There are Christian alternatives for the
most unlikely mainstream products: gangsta rap, shoot-'em-up video games, sweatbands, playing cards, scrapbook supplies, children's pajamas.Even the popular American Girl doll collection — long a favorite of Christian families because it's so wholesome — has inspired an overtly Christian knockoff. A Life of Faith, like American Girl, publishes historical novels featuring spunky girl characters, then turns the heroines into $100 dolls with lavish wardrobes. In the Christian version, the dolls come clutching Bibles; their stories, sprinkled with Scripture, describe how the girls find sustenance in theirfaith."It looks like a bunch of pretty, frilly stuff, but … it will get those Biblical values deep into the girls' hearts. Our culture is a river of mud, and we don't want girls to be swept up in it," said Sandi Shelton, president of Mission City Press in Franklin, Tenn., which produces the Life of Faith line.

Unfortunately, Alan Wolfe, a non-believer understands what is going on better than most believers.

The effect of such products, according to political scientist Alan Wolfe, is to create almost a parallel universe, one that allows Christians to withdraw from the world instead of engaging it as Christ commanded."It's as if they're saying the task of bringing people to Jesus is too hard, so let's retreat into a fortress," said Wolfe, who directs the Boisi Center for Religion and American
Public Life at Boston College."Evangelism is about reaching out and converting the unsaved," Wolfe said. "This is about putting a fence around people who are already saved. It strikes me as if they're giving up.

Is it time to cleanse the temple again?

ht Justin Taylor

Quote of the Day

paleoevangelical's quote of the day is pretty powerful and certainly makes you think. It is from a sermon preached by Stephen Davey, here is an excerpt:

What if homosexuality was made illegal? What if abortion was outlawed? What if sexual relations outside of marriage were unacceptable? What if prayer was back in the classroom and the Ten Commandments back in the courtroom? What then? Are people going to heaven? Has the mission of the church advanced one inch? Suppose we could turn the clock back to the good old days, wherever they were, with shared boundaries of morality, a basic respect for God, a basic underpinning of absolute truth. . . Would we breathe a sigh of relief then? Would we think that we have somehow completed our job?

Read the whole thing.

NPR - Daniel Schorr Please Don't Leave

Maybe if they hired more conservative producers they might not need Daniel Schorr. And you thought people at NPR were edumacated. For my liberal mom's sake, I hope he lives to be 110, that way she can trust the news she gets. HT instapundit

Give Jihad a Chance

I had to post this just to give my liberal friends a tweak.

Stuck with Feinstein and Boxer

This is the kind of campaign ad we need to see more of. I loved it because of the humor and it made me want to learn more about him. Most importantly, he is not a lawyer! Unfortunately, since I live in California I won't get the chance to vote for him.....I am stuck with Di Fi and Barbara Boxer :( HT The Sixers Blog at NRO

Colleges and the SBC

There is a lot to this story that I find interesting. For sixty-three years this school took money and support from the SBC, but when the SBC wanted to see a return to the baptist theology that the school was founded on, the school says, no more!

Though the school says it is about academic freedom, it is really about theological liberalism. It is an old story that has happened to other denominations as well. Princeton, Yale, Harvard were all started as training schools for preachers. Of course they have moved far awau from those roots, and are mostly embarrased by them. My how the mighty have fallen.

What Dan Brown Has Wrought

All I can say to this is......oh brother!

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

You don't have to guess on which side of this issue I fall!

HT Tom Bevan at RCP

Disproportionate Response

This pretty much says it all! Thank God for America, and thank God George Bush is in office right now or there would probably have to be another character added to the cartoon (named Clinton?). Check this out at Cox and Forkum.

Israel and Hezbollah

For the most recent coverage of what's going on in the Middle East check out Pajamas Media.

Is There Hope for Allergy Sufferers?

As a long time allergy sufferer and as someone who has had sinus surgery and allergy shots, I hope this is true. HT Instapundit.com

Moonbat Fasting

Before you watch this hilarious video (I was ROFL), you have to read this and this and this. Michelle never pulls any punches. Ann Coulter gets all the publicity but Michelle is better at communicating the utter ridiculousness of the moonbat left!

Jesus has something to say about fasting, here is what the infinite God /man of peace had to say.

Matt 6:16-18 "And whenever you fast, do not put on a gloomy face as the hypocrites do, for they neglect their appearance in order to be seen fasting by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. 17 "But you, when you fast, anoint your head, and wash your face 18 so that you may not be seen fasting by men, but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will repay you. NAS

Language or Principles?

My mom sent me this article from NPR. It is an excerpt from a book by Geoff Nunberg called Talk Right and it is subtitled:

"How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show."

Nunberg teaches at the University of California-Berkeley, and is a researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University.

The whole point of the book seems to be that the democrats are loosing in politics because of how they frame things linguistically. Nunberg writes,

Are the Democrats simply tone deaf? That impression was hard to escape when the party floated a new slogan in the fall of 2005 that was aimed at the 2006 midterm elections: "Together, America can do better." Or more accurately, a newly augmented slogan in 2004, John Kerry had used "America can do better," without the "together" part. According to the congressional newspaper The Hill, Democrats had chosen the slogan to address the party's "messaging problems" after testing it in focus groups along with a number of alternatives. "We know
the majority of people agree with us on the issues," one Democrat was quoted as saying, "but this effort is an acknowledgment that we need to communicate better."

This is not the first time we have seen criticism of democrats when it comes to the language of politics. The problem is, and sadly, I don't think the dems and their wordsmiths get, is that the language of the right is a language of principles. In other words, what we speak is what we believe. Nunberg comes close when he says,

It's only when you look at those patterns of usage that you discover how deep the Democrats' linguistic problems go. Over recent decades, the left has lost the battle for the language itself. When we talk about politics nowadays and by "we" I mean progressives and liberals as well as conservatives and people in the center we can't help using language that embodies the worldview of the right. (emphasis mine)

The reason the right wins the language or framing issue is because we are not afraid to speak from a point of principle, from the perspective of our worldview. We know what we think and we communicate it confidently. The dems on the other hand are still trying to figure out what they stand for and what they believe (I suspect that they know what they believe but they are unwilling to say it clearly because it would be very unpopular).

How can you frame the content of the national conversation when you can't have an honest and principled point of view. If you think I am being too harsh remember this? "I voted for the 87 billion before I voted against it." How many new slogans have the dems come out with over the last few years? When your sole goal is to win elections, rather than govern for the common good, this is what you get.

So, forget linguistic experts and bring on the leaders that can articulate a worldview that is real and honest, and then let the debate begin!

You've Got Mail

While doing some work online Tuesday, my computer said, "you've got mail." Since it was my home account and I rarely use it I almost ignored the message, but I decided to check it out anyway. I was glad I did. It was a message from Classmates.com, a site I signed up for a few years ago, and rarely visited since. Because I am such a cheap skate, I wouldn't spring for the regular subscription and registered for the free part instead. Because I am on the "free plan" the only thing I can do at classmates is basically look to see who else has registered. The downside is those awful e-mail messages telling me that a certain amount of people have looked at my bio and that I really should sign up for a subscription so I can find out who!

On Tuesday however, the message was different. It said someone from my class had sent me an e-mail and that I could go to the website and read it (I didn't even know we could send e-mail to classmates through, well Classmates.com). More importantly, the e-mail said that it was from D. Phillips.

D. Phillips! That would be Doug Phillips, my best friend throughout Jr. High and High School. Needles to say, I immediately opened the e-mail and read it. What a blessing it was to hear from Doug. After High School, we both went our separate ways, he went to WSU (go Cougs) and I went to P.C.B.B.C. (don't ask. Well okay - Pacific Coast Baptist Bible College). Over the years we basically lost touch.

A few years back we e-mailed each other a couple of times but lost track again. This time, I hope we can remain in touch. I rejoice and gives thanks to the Lord that he and his family are well. It does my heart good!

Good friends don't come along often and Doug was, and I think I can still say, is a good friend.

PS. One funny story: On graduation night, our class rented out the YMCA for an all night grad party. After a fun night of dancing and games and reminiscing, a group of us decided to go to breakfast since it was now about 4:00 am. After breakfast I talked Doug into going with me to Selah to see my then girlfriend. I was just going to knock on her window and say hello. Arriving at the girlfriend's house I parked out front and walked around to the side of the house to knock on her window. Doug stayed out front and waited by the car. After knocking on the window, the girlfriend and her sister invited me to come in through the window and then to go out through the front door (it now sounds very inappropriate, but there was nothing untoward that happened). Anyway, after saying hi and goodbye I quietly walked out the front door to return to the car and what did I see? Doug was being questioned by the Selah police. Evidently, they were driving by while I was going through the window and thought a crime might be in progress. After much explaining, they determined that it was what it was and we were free to go, although my friend was none too happy with me. Still, he let it go and moved on. That's what friends do.

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

Here is the answer (or I should say, here are the answers).

An Inconvenient Truth

This is a great article sifting through the hype of global warming, seeking to get to the truth (inconvenient or not). The article is written by Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.

According to Al Gore, when it comes to the issue of global warming, "the debate in the scientific community is over." But is that correct? Dr. Lindzen writes,

That statement, which Mr. Gore made in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, ought to have been followed by an asterisk. What exactly is this debate that Mr. Gore is referring to? Is there really a scientific community that is debating all these issues and then somehow agreeing in unison? Far from such a thing being over, it has never been clear to me what this
"debate" actually is in the first place.

The media rarely help, of course. When Newsweek featured global warming in a 1988 issue, it was claimed that all scientists agreed. Periodically thereafter it was revealed that although there had been lingering doubts beforehand, now all scientists did indeed agree. Even Mr. Gore qualified his statement on ABC only a few minutes after he made it, clarifying things in an important way. When Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted Mr. Gore with the fact that the best estimates of
rising sea levels are far less dire than he suggests in his movie, Mr. Gore defended his claims by noting that scientists "don't have any models that give them a high level of confidence" one way or the other and went on to claim--in his defense--that scientists "don't know. . . . They just don't
know."

So, presumably, those scientists do not belong to the "consensus." Yet their research is forced, whether the evidence supports it or not, into Mr. Gore's preferred global-warming template--namely, shrill alarmism. To believe it requires that one ignore the truly inconvenient facts. To take the issue of rising sea levels, these include: that the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940;
that icebergs have been known since time immemorial; that the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average. A likely result of all this is increased pressure pushing ice off the coastal perimeter of that country, which is depicted so ominously in Mr. Gore's movie. In the absence of factual context, these images are perhaps dire or alarming.

They are less so otherwise. Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why.

He concludes his article by stating,

So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate? I would suggest at least three points.

First, nonscientists generally do not want to bother with understanding the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types, environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also serve to intimidate the public and even scientists--especially those outside the
area of climate dynamics. Secondly, given that the question of human attribution largely cannot be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster constitutes nothing so much as a bait-and-switch scam. That is an inauspicious beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not a political issue but a "moral" crusade.

Lastly, there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition. An earlier attempt at this was accompanied by tragedy. Perhaps Marx was right. This time around we may have farce--if we're lucky.

I encourage you to the whole thing. HT realclearpolitics

John Stossel has a great article dealing with the same subject but from a slightly different perspective. His conclusion, it is all about the money.

The scary claims about heat waves and droughts are based on computer models. But computer models are lousy at predicting climate because water vapor and cloud effects cause changes that computers fail to predict. They were unable to anticipate the massive amounts of heat energy that escaped the tropics over the past 15 years, forcing modelers back to the drawing board. In the mid-1970s, computer models told us we should prepare for global cooling.

The fundamentalist doom-mongers ignore scientists who say the effects of global warming may be benign. Harvard astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas says added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may actually benefit the world because more CO2 helps plants grow. Warmer winters would give farmers a longer harvest season. Why don't we hear about this part of the global warming argument?

"It's the money!" says Dr. Baliunas. "Twenty-five billion dollars in government funding has been spent since 1990 to research global warming. If scientists and researchers were coming out releasing reports that global warming has little to do with man, and most to do with just how the planet works, there wouldn't be as much money to study it."

And the politicians would have one less excuse to take control of our lives.