Will Amazon's Founder Jeff Bezos Control All Words?

To publishers and authors, it sometimes seems the giant on-line retailer Amazon is determined to monopolize the book business. Step by step they have moved inexorably in that direction.

They went from selling books which were provided to them by the usual publishers in the usual way, to selling that recently arrived oddity, eBooks, to building their proprietary Kindle eBook reader, to attempts to set the market prices for traditionally published books, to offering public domain books for free, to an on-line lending library, to actually printing books. Now, incredibly, Amazon has gone full circle to selling books at bricks and mortar retail outlets.

Meanwhile competitors in the publishing world are suddenly fighting for their lives, and in many cases, dying.

These are troubling developments for some. It really does seem like we could end up with a single company in control of every aspect of the written word, from writing to reading. If that happened, could rampant propaganda and censorship be far behind?

It’s tempting to consider alternatives. For the first time in generations, suggestions that socialism might be the way to go have been taken seriously in the mainstream news media.

When faced with an insatiable corporate monster determined to assume complete control of something as essential to human society as the written word, is socialism the answer? At least if publishing were nationalized –as the automotive, home mortgage and health insurance industries have been effectively nationalized — then Americans could rest easy, knowing they control the printed word instead of leaving such a precious resource in the hands of a few greedy men in a board room.

Right?

Actually, not so much. History has shown that the best antidote to greedy men in a board room is usually not the government; it’s more greedy men in another board room. The capitalist system feeds on greed, and it is that greed which causes the Amazons of the world to rise up and monopolize entire markets. But the genius of the capitalist system is the way it uses that the greed of one company to control the greed of another.

Socialism, on the other hand, relies on something for more dangerous: socialism depends on virtue.

Any system which assumes that human beings will do the right thing depends on human virtue to succeed is bound to fail. Remember your American history classes. The Founders had to compromise on slavery just to get a constitution ratified. And remember the Robber Barons during the industrial revolution, putting mom-and-pop companies out of business by the thousands with the invention of the assembly line. We’re seeing an almost exact parallel to the industrial revolution today, with Amazon using new technology to change the basic way goods and services are provided. Meanwhile the old mom-and-pop way of doing business (traditional publishing and bookselling) is being wiped out. But this is no reason to abandon the system America was built upon.

There’s nothing new under the sun.

Whether it’s capitalism, socialism or communism, in a fallen world human power always seeks a monopoly. Any attempt to organize human behavior which fails to allow for the corrosive effect of power on the human spirit is doomed to become a totalitarian system. That’s one reason why capitalism makes more sense than socialism. Capitalism acknowledges greed and depends on the dueling forces of competition to keep it in check, whereas socialism establishes only one power base (government) with no objective and innate restraint on the lust for power of those who most directly control that power base (bureaucrats).

Another advantage of capitalism over socialism is the use of money instead of votes to determine success or failure, since the effect of money is more immediate and objective, while votes are less directly connected to results and more easily manipulated. (This leads to a discussion of the long-term corrosive effects of credit on a capitalistic society, but that’s another column.)

But this is not an argument for unrestrained capitalism.

The same original sin that makes all people inherently greedy also corrupts all human systems, no matter how well they may be designed to deal with greed. That’s why even capitalism sometimes needs external checks and balances.

Remember your junior high American history class again: at one point Rockefeller’s Standard Oil controlled about 90% of the oil in the USA. (Visualize Exxon with nearly complete control over gas prices, and you’ll get the idea.) The U.S. government had to step in with the Sherman Act to outlaw monopolies. Without such an outside force to regulate competition, it’s possible Amazon might indeed one day kill off all competition in its market, and then we would still have a dictatorship in control of all publishing in the USA, except in that case we’d call them a board of directors.

It’s difficult to see how the result would be distinguishable from the Soviet Union’s old “State Committee For Publishing”.

Because one cannot count on human virtue, it’s never wise to adhere too rigidly to any single human ideology. The Founders’ acknowledgement of that at the start of the American experiment was the stroke of genius that made America successful. They did not demand a pure economic model. Although their personal beliefs were at least as dearly held as ours are today, the Founders allowed for slavery in some cases but not in others, because they knew without such a compromise the states could not have been united.

Since human nature has not changed, the principle still applies. If we continue to allow ourselves to be divided into two camps — conservative and liberal — which fight against each other tooth and claw, flinging insults and refusing to compromise, we risk ending up with a purely capitalistic or a purely socialistic society. Ironically, in that case it would not really matter which set of ideas prevailed. A pure and perfect system managed by Big Business or Big Government would look much the same, with an elite group in control of the necessities of life.

Surely none of us wants that.

New York Harbor Beyond The Empire State Building

It’s a little known part of what happened on 9/11 in lower Manhattan, but nothing better exemplifies the spirit of the American people.

In the shocking immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, while the smoke and dust was so thick in the air it was almost impossible to breathe and every bridge and tunnel off the island of Manhattan was blocked, a call went out on the marine radio:

“All available boats, this is the United States Coastguard aboard the pilot boat New York. Anyone wanting to help with the evacuation of lower Manhattan, report to Governor’s Island.”

What happened then was staggering.

At the famous World War II evacuation of Dunkirk, 339,000 British and French soldiers were rescued by boat over the course of nine days. It was the greatest water evacuation in human history . . . until 9/11. On that day private boats of every size, shape and description — virtually all of them piloted and crewed at great personal risk by untrained civilians operating in violation of dozens of marine regulations — converged on lower Manhattan to rescue nearly half a million people, and they did it in less than nine hours.

Click on the link above to watch the 11 minute documentary, Boatlift, narrated by Tom Hanks, and if you are an American, prepare to take great pride in your neighbors.

Roman Coin Image: Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. www.cngcoins.com

Most people probably agree it’s unfair that ultra wealthy people who are living off of their investments like Mitt Romney are able to pay only 14% of their gross taxable income, while middle class folks sometimes pay twice as much. Some say a flat tax rate for everyone the answer. Others insist the fair answer is to simply reverse that arrangement, so the wealthy pay a greater percentage than the poor.

In a capitalist democracy like America, that latter proposition seems almost heretical, but what about a Christian system?

Polls say about 47% to 48% of Americans pay no tax at all. In some cases that is clearly an abuse of the system, every bit as unfair as a man with a $250 million net worth paying only 14% while according to the 2011 federal income tax schedules, someone with a taxable income of only $8,372 must pay 15%. Imagine you’re the taxman for a moment. It’s your responsibility to explain this system to a single person living on minimum wage. Can you really see yourself in that role?

Surely the “widow’s mite” principle applies here. Her two coins were a much greater sacrifice than the rich man’s offering. They would still be a much greater sacrifice if they went to Caesar. That said, it’s one thing if she chooses to give those coins away herself, and quite another if Caesar demands them from her. So if Caesar does demand it, he should demand a lower percentage from the window than he takes from the rich man, since she must cut back on necessities to pay it, while the rich man pays out of excess.

It’s true that a graduated income tax smacks of socialism just a little, but then so does much of what Jesus had to say. In a righteous world without greed or lust for power, “socialism” would be just another name for how the righteous live. In a righteous world the rich would give a much higher percentage of their income voluntarily. As it says of the early days in the Jerusalem church:

“All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.” (Acts 2:44-45)

But this is not a righteous world, so unrestricted socialism simply is not practical. It’s a lesson the same Jerusalem church learned in later days:

“Now about the collection for God’s people: Do what I told the Galatian churches to do. On the first day of every week, each one of you should set aside a sum of money in keeping with his income, saving it up, so that when I come no collections will have to be made. Then, when I arrive, I will give letters of introduction to the men you approve and send them with your gift to Jerusalem.” (1 Co 16:1-3)

There we see Jerusalem’s initial experiment with socialism drove the whole church to a level of poverty that required them to depend on Christians as far away in Corinth. But also notice this: Paul does not prescribe a fixed amount of charity from “each one of you” but rather tells the Corinthians to give “according to your income.”

So it’s not a matter of abandoning the first instincts of the Jerusalem church altogether. Rather, as in so much of Christian life here in this fallen world, a balance is required.

We see the concept of graduated giving in many other places, including the parable of the talents, where the servants given more must return more, although each of them is just a servant and therefore probably living on the same allotment personally. We also see it in Luke 12:48 where it is applied to spiritual gifts:

“From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”

It’s hypocritical to attack Romney for paying the minimum legal amount. Every law-abiding citizen tries to do that, and rightfully so. Giving more than Caesar demands is foolish.

The problem is not Romney; it’s our tax system.

But there is indeed a problem. In his state of the union address the other day, President Obama spoke of “fairness” in the matter of taxes. He said we need a system where billionaires don’t pay a lower percentage of their income than their secretaries, and he was right. And if the Bible is our guide, imposing the same tax on the wealthy and the poor is not the answer. But neither is socialism.

"Fall of Man" forbidden fruit detail - Cornelis van Haarlem

Washington State is set to become the seventh state to legalize gay marriage. To usher in the event, Rabbi Mark S. Glickman has produced a column in The Seattle Times, entitled, “What the Bible really says about same-sex marriage.”

Rabbi Glickman should have called his piece “What the first five books of the Bible say about same-sex marriage,” because after mentioning that “The Christian Bible, as you may know, is longer than my Bible,” and then going further to explain that “many who invoke the Bible in the same-sex marriage debate begin with quotes from the Torah,” he finally gets to his point: out of the “5,888 verses in the Torah . . . homosexual behavior is mentioned in just two of them. . . . That’s it.”

There you have it folks. Never mind the fact that one verse comes between a command not to indulge in child sacrifice and another command not to have sex with animals. Never mind the fact that the other verse comes with a warning that the penalty for homosexual acts is death. What matters to the rabbi is the simple fact that everything the Bible has to say about same-sex marriage is completely contained in just two verses.

Ahem.

Presumably the rabbi studied the Hebrew Scriptures at some point to earn his professional title. He is surely well aware that the Bible — even those same first five books of “his” Bible — has much more to say on the subject.

“Sodomy,” for example, comes from the Hebrew name of a town which God utterly destroyed because of its citizens’ propensity for homosexual rape. (See Genesis 19 in the rabbi’s Bible.) For thousands of years virtually every Bible scholar, Jew and Christian alike, agreed homosexuality played a central role in God’s decision. Among Christians one reason is because the New Testament book of Jude says Sodom was punished in part because its residents went after “strange flesh.” Modern revisionists like to say this could mean simple adultery, but Genesis specifically says the men of Sodom demanded sex with Lot’s male guests, and that is certainly what Jude has in mind.

Jude mentions only the sexual act, not the rape. Of course no serious scholar would suggest that means Jude wants us to believe rape is okay. It just means what it says: homosexuality is not okay. Jude doesn’t tell us rape is evil, because he assumes it’s obvious.

Similarly, we need to pay attention not only to what the Bible says in some cases, but also to what it does not say. Rabbi Glickman observes that homosexuality is specifically mentioned in “just two” verses in the first five books of the Bible. Depending on who’s counting (Jews, Protestants or Catholics) there are more than 31,000 other verses in the Bible. Also, by some counts there are over 5,000 unique characters in the Bible. Yet none of those verses mentions same-sex marriage, and none of those characters are said to be in one. Homosexual acts are mentioned (and condemned in every case) but homosexual “marriage” is not. If the Bible really means us to assume it’s okay, wouldn’t it be mentioned favorably at least once?

Since Rabbi Glickman seems to believe God approves of same-sex marriage because the Torah contains “just two” verses specifically prohibiting homosexual acts, one wonders how the rabbi feels about Judaism’s famous Ten Commandments. After all, they are also only specifically mentioned twice in the rabbi’s Bible. (See Exodus 20, and Deuteronomy 5.)

And isn’t twice enough? If one does actually believe in a God capable of destroying entire cities because of disobedience — as presumably a rabbi does believe, although these days one never knows about the clergy — then isn’t it a little dangerous to suggest disregarding a direct command given by the Master of the Universe not just once, but twice? Especially when one of those commands came with a warning that the penalty is death? Imagine a criminal on trial for his life: “Your honor, you have no right to apply the death sentence in my case because the legal code only mentions my offense two times.”

Good luck with that.

The rabbi’s position isn’t even Jewish, or at least it doesn’t agree with rabbinic tradition. His is a religion based not only on the Torah, but also on the Talmud, a massive collection of volumes containing thousands and thousands of rulings and judgments which observant Jews try hard to follow. All of those thousands of rules can be traced back to just 613 commands, or mitzvot, found in the first five books of the rabbi’s Bible. If one assumes a similar ratio of Torah laws to Talmud traditions, those two commands the Rabbi Glickman mentioned should expand into dozens of additional rules against same-sex acts. (In fact that is the case, as Rabbi Dr. Nachum Amsel explains in his excellent essay on the subject of Judaism and homosexuality.)

Although Seattle’s Rabbi Glickman didn’t go there, it has become popular to bring up a few of those 613 mitzvot in arguments for same-sex marriage. If one relies on the Bible as one’s guide in a matter (goes this argument) then consistency requires it to determine every matter. This means anyone opposed to same-sex marriage on Biblical grounds should also never touch a football because they’re made of “unclean” pigskin, for example.

Our Orthodox Jewish readers are no doubt nodding at this point, because they do believe the laws of kashrut — keeping kosher — still apply, just like the prohibition of homosexual acts. But it’s true Orthodox Jews make exceptions in some cases but not in others. For example, while the Bible does prescribe the death penalty for homosexual acts, no sane Jew today would apply that penalty.

We cannot speak to the Jewish reasons for such exemptions, (or “inconsistencies” as same-sex marriage fans would say) but we can explain why Christians don’t apply some Torah laws to modern life, while retaining others.

Christians believe the laws of Torah are meant to be divided into two categories. Some are universal and eternal, applying to everyone for all time. Others were local and temporary, intended to apply to Israel until the Messiah came. The first category is about how people were designed to live on earth. The second category illustrated how people would one day live with God. The first group of laws will remain in force until evil is removed from earth and they become irrelevant. The second group of laws has become irrelevant already, because the Messiah came and took their place in human hearts forever.

Space precludes a complete explanation of how Christianity distinguishes between these two kinds of laws. Here it is enough to say homosexual acts remain prohibited in part because they are explicitly forbidden in both the Hebrew Scriptures and in the New Testament, while the laws surrounding kosher foods were explicitly lifted in the New Testament.

Although the Bible doesn’t specifically forbid same-sex marriage, we know God is opposed to it because the Bible does specifically forbid homosexual acts. But notice throughout this column we have been careful to focus on homosexual acts, and not on homosexuals. We draw that vital distinction because the Bible teaches us that God is very clearly in favor of homosexuals.

Indeed, God is in favor of all sinners, regardless of what sin tempts us most. Gay and straight, drunk and sober, violent and peaceful, greedy and generous, adulterous and faithful, selfish and selfless; God loves all of his people no matter what tempts us, and what does not. God doesn’t demand perfection from us to earn his love. His love is ever-present and always available to us, no matter what we do. But it is a fact of life directly connected to basic logic that we cannot fully accept God’s love, while simultaneously defying him. Common sense insists that if we really do love and respect God, we will at least try to do what he says.

Since all of us are sinners of some kind, there are only three possible responses to this problem. We can acknowledge our sinfulness and approach God on his own terms without excuse. We can ignore our sinfulness and ignore God. Or we can deny that what we do is sinful and demand that God approach us on our own terms.

That last option is popular with “religious” people who want God’s love on their own terms, instead of on his. It is both the modern response to homosexual temptation, and the ancient response to the first temptation ever. We see it in the Garden of Eden when the serpent asks, “Did God really say, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?” Of course, technically, God didn’t put it just that way. So Eve, rather than responding in the spirit of God’s love, relied on that technicality to justify defiance, exactly as the serpent hoped she would. And heaven help us, we’re still doing that today.

Just one more thing in parting:

According to the rabbi’s Bible, when God warned that first couple not to eat from that particular tree or they would die, he did not warn them twice.

Polygamists In A Utah Prison, Back When It Was Bad

We’ve heard the warnings: after same-sex marriage becomes “normal,” polygamy is next. That concern was initially dismissed by same-sex marriage advocates as alarmist, but now we’re hearing, “Yeah, go for it.”

And along comes this article at the BBC, inspired by the recent charges (which have been denied) that Newt Gingrich asked his ex wife for an open marriage. The BBC article is accompanied by photographs of smiling women who are totally okay with multiple partners; in fact they’re positively glowing.

Also in the article we are instructed that “The preferred term is polyamory, a word coined in the early 1990s in the US in part to distinguish from swinging, in which couples approach sex with other people as a joint endeavour, or arrangements in which partners are allowed to have sex with other people without romantic attachments.”

See? It’s not like this is adulterous sex or anything. These are happy, well balanced adults making mature choices among themselves. They simply want what everybody wants, really. And by the way, let’s not call it “polygamy” anymore. This is so much more than that. These folks are in love.

Where have we seen this before? And what comes next?

Now, (with apologies to ourselve for going there) we are compelled to observe that this kind of doublespeak, this kind of Big Lie should sound familiar to we the people who have been sufficiently brainwashed to accept that “gay” no longer means “happy,” and rainbows no longer symbolize a promise from the Lord. And speaking of promises, here’s a whopper:

“. . . it is absolutely possible for adults to be in committed, emotionally satisfying relationships with more than one person at a time.”

Really? If it’s absolutely possible, why is it so difficult to explain? Three people. One bed. It’s not like the math requires a solid grasp of quantum physics or anything. Yet there is this:

“Block struggles to explain how she can be satisfied with her husband, yet still want another person in her life – and her bed.”

Indeed. Now we see the problem. It is a little difficult to explain how one could be “satisfied” with one’s spouse, and yet want another person, what with the inconvenient fact that words like “satisfied” have actual meaning. But here’s a tip for Ms. Block, straight out of the same-sex marriage playbook: Just keep telling us over and over that “satisfied” means “you’re not enough,” and whatever you do, don’t call what you’re doing “polygamy” anymore.

Do that often enough, and long enough, and loud enough, and sooner or later everyone will understand.

Creating Visions With Vision

Here’s a trailer for an inspiring new documentary called “Getting Up,” about the L.A. graffiti artist “Tempt1,” who was laid low with Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS). That horrific disease left him fully conscious in a body that will not move.

Imagine a life where only your eyes are under your control. We’re reminded of the chilling 1938 novel, Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo, in which the character “Joe” is wounded on the last day of World Ward I. “Joe” is left a quadriplegic, without the ability to see or speak, because of war. But in Tempt1′s case, the violence to his body was done by his own genes.

How ironic that Tony Quan chose the pseudonym “Tempt1″ before this happened. If anyone was ever tempted to suicide, surely it must have been him. Yet like “Joe” in Trumbo’s novel, Tony couldn’t do it even if he tried.

That’s a good thing. Because hope has come to Tony in the form of Mick Ebeling and a team of artists, engineers and open source programmers. Inspired by a common desire to help Tony get back to work, they created a device called “Eye Writer.”  Now Tempt1 is doing art again. And although this story if full of delightful synergies, one aspect of it really gives us pause: the visual art that Tony does is more connected now than ever to his vision.

Check out the trailer at the link above, and prepare to be inspired.

"Years" by Bartholomäus Traubeck

Bartholomäus Traubeck, a German artist working in Rotterdam, has produced a work of ethereal beauty. Using “modified turntable, computer, vvvv, camera, acrylic glass, veneer” his creation translates tree rings into piano music.

The turntable uses light to read the rings, then transfers the data to software which interprets it according to a predetermined relationship between “the overall appearance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture).”

What emerges then is strangely moving.

How ironic, that trees must perish to bring such a thing of beauty to life. Yet that irony is omnipresent. Every wood-framed masterpiece of architecture requires the death of trees. The flowing lines of furniture, the grace of wooden boats, the nostalgic crack of bat on ball and the dance of fire within an inglenook all rise from the death of trees. But beauty from the ugliness of death should surprise no Christian; for as it is with trees, so it is with us. After all:

“I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies.”

When you click on the link above to enjoy the songs of trees, consider what it truly means to be born again. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. And then . . .

Music in the heavens, forevermore.

A Revolutionary Motto

Yesterday over 7,000 websites went dark to protest two bills under consideration by the U.S. Congress. Google put a black box over its logo on its search page. Wikipedia denied user access for most of the day. Many other major websites found ways to protest. We pray it was not too little, too late.

The “Protect IP Act” (PIPA) in the Senate and the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) in the House of Representatives were both conceived as ways to put a stop to the theft of intellectual property on the Internet. It is a laudable goal.

Incredibly, we live in a world where many citizens claim they ought to have the right to download copyrighted material for free, insisting that those who labored to create the material have no right of ownership. But of course the fact remains that Americans own the products they produce, and nobody has a moral, ethical or legal right to take their work without paying for it.

Songs, movies and books do not produce themselves, and musicians, movie makers, and authors are not slaves. Artists have the same rights as, say, a farmer raising crops. To download intellectual property without paying for it simply because new technology makes it possible is morally identical to backing a truck up to a field and helping oneself to crops grown by the sweat of the farmer’s brow simply because the farmer isn’t there to stop it.

That said, the SOPA and PIPA bills are not the answer. On the contrary, they are nothing less that an assault on American civil rights.

The bills would place the responsibility to police the Internet for copyright infringing material on those who own websites where such material might be uploaded by third parties. That’s a huge legal problem and financial burden for sites like Facebook, Youtube and Wikipedia, for example, where millions of pages of information are added daily by users. It’s like holding the U.S. Postal Service accountable for the content of the letters they deliver.

The bills would also have a chilling effect on Internet innovation, because venture capital investors have already said they would no longer be interested in financially supporting startups that have such a high level of liability.

They would obliterate Internet privacy, since the laws would require new levels of transparency into the sources of all content.

Most importantly, SOPA and PIPA would strip domestic website owners of their constitutional right to due process. Say some nutcase decides to claim these very words you’re reading right now were originally written by him. He sends a letter to DailyCristo’s internet service provider (ISP) stating that he intends to sue us for infringing on his copyrighted material. Under SOPA and PIPA, our ISP would be protected from liability for any harm done to us if they immediately shut down our website pending a court decision on the matter. But they would be exposed to liability if they allowed us to keep running until a court made a decision on the matter, if the court decided we were guilty. So our ISP would have every incentive to shut us down, merely on the basis of a letter from a nutcase — not based on a court order, mind you, but merely on that nutcase’s say-so — and no incentive to wait until a court got to the bottom of the nutcase’s allegation.

In other words, under these new bills websites like ours (or yours, if you have one) could be shut down without a trial by a jury of our peers, and we would be presumed guilty until proven innocent, and there’s nothing we could do about it.

Clearly, these provisions of the SOPA and PIPA bills violate the Fourteenth Amendment right to due process. But they are merely the latest attempt by members of Congress to violate their oath of office and betray their fellow Americans’ constitutional rights.

Consider the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This blatant violation of our civil rights, which President Obama signed into law on the last day of 2011, contains provisions which allow the government to detain American citizens, on American soil, and hold us indefinitely without due process.

This is not some possibility to worry about later; this is currently the law of the land: If you are an American, you no longer have a guaranteed right to face your accusers. You no longer have a guaranteed right to trial by a jury of your peers. You can be arrested and detained for as long as the government desires (or until the “cessation of hostilities” in the “war on terror”) based only on the suspicion that you might be associated with a terrorist organisation.

People on the political left and right alike protested that travesty of justice, just as they protested SOPA and PIPA yesterday. They were correct to do so. Indeed, it was nothing less than our duty as American patriots.

But we failed. The Congressional and Presidential assault on our basic freedoms became law.

Will we fail again and lose still more of our God-given rights with the passage of SOPA or PIPA? Will we continue to stand together as we did yesterday, in defense of basic civil liberties? Or will we allow our disagreements on lesser matters to distract us again, as they did with the draconian NDAA?

There is a dynamic to these issues that transcends the threats our politicians use to justify themselves, threats such as terrorism and piracy. (Interesting, that two such similar concepts have been used to excuse the erosion of our civil rights. Too often in human history fear has been used by tyrants to justify the death of liberty.) Simply put, that larger dynamic is this:

Our Congress and our President have abandoned eternal truths to manage temporary problems.

A hundred years from now, Al-Qaeda and Internet piracy will be footnotes in American history books, but if we allow our government to withhold our civil rights in order to defend us from such things, a hundred years from now America as we know it will not exist.

The founders of this nation framed ideas like freedom of speech and due process in cosmic terms, as fundamental laws of nature, as if they are non-negotiable, irrefutable, and irresistible, like gravity. They were right. The freedoms our Congress and President seem to be intent upon trading away for mere security are nothing less than the essential prerequisites for those certain “truths” which the founders considered “self evident.” Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are impossible without free speech and a just legal system.

Unfortunately, we the people did not rise up in protest when Congress and the Obama Administration removed our right to a trial by a jury of our peers with the NDAA. The day when the President signed that bill into law was as dark as the days when Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center were attacked. It should be marked with December 7 and September 11 as one of the blackest days on the American calendar.

Yesterday the American people said, “Enough.” And we did it in such numbers that all but the most arrogant elected officials in Washington understood there is a limit to our patience. Even most of the bills’ sponsors have backed down.

But the battle is not over. SOPA’s main sponsor in the House of Representatives, Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX) continues to insist the bill is no threat to liberty. It is a common ploy of tyrants to deny that they are doing what they’re doing, of course. In his chilling novel about the total loss of liberty, Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell wrote about “the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.”

Faced with such a policy, we can only pray that yesterday’s awakening was not momentary; that it will lead to a prolonged willingness to pay whatever price may be required to protect our nation’s hard won freedoms. If we do not stop the corruption creeping through our nation’s capital today with protests and with votes, the dreadful day may come when we face a much more costly choice.

Ours is a nation divided, and there are scoundrels in high places — in big media, in big government, in big business — who desire it so. They see our divisions as diversions, a smoke screen of confusion behind which they can take for themselves the rights and powers which God intended should belong to we, the people. Even now these evil men and women seek to strip away two and a half centuries of freedom as we fight among ourselves. We pray those on the left and on the right and every American between them on the wide spectrum of political opinion will wake up, abandon less important disagreements, and stand together against the creeping tyranny which seeks to take our nation and our liberty.

“Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” (Patrick Henry, Speech to the Virginia Convention, March 23, 1775)

Not This Guy

As those who’ve read our mission statement know, DailyCristo hopes to provide a sanctuary from the rampant hyperbole and childish name calling that seems to define the national debate on pretty much everything these days.

Speaking of name calling, one of the favorite insults Americans seem to love to toss at each other is comparisons to Nazis, of course. With that in mind, here are the opening lines to a little song we all should learn:

If you didn’t cause a global war,

You’re not Hitler.

If you’re not a brilliant orator,

You’re not Hitler.

Didn’t perpetrate a genocide,

Didn’t shoot your brand new wife,

Didn’t have your body burned outside?

You’re not Hitler.

We could go on, but why spoil the rest of the fun? So with apologies in advance to progressives for the location of the piece and to conservatives for the final point (hey, at least it shows Glenn Beck has a sense of humor) may we respectfully suggest you click the link right here or the big red one up at the top? And you independents might consider passing it along to your more, shall we say, “excitable” friends on the left and right so they can sing along.

The brave new world of information technology.

Iris scanning technology is apparently nearing a tipping point. Soon it will be possible to automatically monitor thousands of people moving through public places in order to pick out individuals for, shall we say, special consideration.

Jeff Carter, chief business development officer at one of the world’s leaders in the technology, Global Rainmakers, Inc. (GRI), believes the day is near when sensors “the size of a dime in the ceiling” will be able to scan (or “acquire” in the chilling lexicon of his industry) the eyes of hundreds of people at a time as they move through a room. In fact, Carter believe this will be possible on “probably thousands [of people at a time] as computer power continues to increase.” What happens after that technology is perfected?

According to Carter, “Every person, place, and thing on this planet will be connected [to the iris system] within the next 10 years.”

If this sounds like just another case of media alarmism, consider: Carter’s company already makes a machine which can scan the irises of up to 50 people per minute . . . in motion. GRI also sells a smaller model which can be retrofitted to work with existing card actuated security systems, and scans up to 20 people per minute while they move at one meter per second.

The technology is available right now. And governments have big plans for it.

According to one report, the Mexican city of Leon plans to install “miles of fiber optic cable, creating a central database that will contain of all convicted criminals (as well as any good citizens who wish to ‘opt in’), and a network of iris scanners.” Leon’s population is about 1,000,000.

India is in the midst of a similar program which dwarfs the Mexican effort. They are already scanning their citizen’s eyes, face and hands, and intend to add 600 million people to their database in the next four years, all of whom the government will be able to identify with iris scans. India has, of course, the second largest population on earth, at about 1,184,600,000 people. At this rate, they should be able to put all those people in their database by 2020.

When combined with existing biometric technology capable of recording palm and fingerprints and matching the scans with “databases of up to tens of millions of records,” this technology sounds eerily like the prophecy in Revelation 13:16-17:

“He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name.”

For nearly 2,000 years skeptics pointed to these words as proof that John’s Revelation on Patmos was merely a hallucinogenic dream. It was simply inconceivable that everyone on earth could be identified this way.

Welcome to the inconceivable.

Similarly, they said the many Biblical prophecies that Israel would be restored as an independent Jewish nation could never happen, but of course nearly 2,000 years after Rome destroyed it, Israel came back. And they said it would never be possible for the entire earth to see a single event simultaneously, such as the martyrdom of the two “witnesses” in Revelation 11, where it says “men from every people, tribe, language and nation will gaze on their bodies.” Yet because of television, estimates of the number of people around the world who simultaneously observed the opening of the last Olympic games are in the billions.

There are several ways to think about this coming universal invasion of our privacy via iris scanning technology. For many people the ramifications range from bad to catastrophic. But for a Christian it is a sign of hope, because “such things must happen” before the end, when Jesus comes. They are yet another recent proof that the glorious day is approaching when . . .

The wolf will live with the lamb,

the leopard will lie down with the goat,

the calf and the lion and the yearling together;

and a little child will lead them.

The cow will feed with the bear,

their young will lie down together,

and the lion will eat straw like the ox.

The infant will play near the hole of the cobra,

and the young child put his hand into the viper’s nest.

They will neither harm nor destroy

on all my holy mountain,

for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord

as the waters cover the sea.

(Isaiah 11:6-9)