Please Pray for This Weekend’s Bible Bee.

Please be in prayer for the Bible Bee http://www.biblebee.org, which is taking place this Saturday at 128 locations across the country. There will be more than 5000 children working on Bible knowledge and memory. These kids have spent their summer in study for this day.

We pray that the participants (and their parents and the spectators and those supporting those efforts) will be blessed. I know that our Youth have been working diligently this summer. No matter how they do on Saturday, I’m exceedingly proud of them.

As for me, once again I’ll be toiling away in the Nerdery at our local Bee. Oh, the Bible Bee will call it Command Central, or the Operations Center, or whatever name they come up with. It’ll always be the Nerdery to me.

May I suggest that your family be similarly blessed by partipating in next year’s Bible Bee.

Don’t Tell Me That Minneapolis Doesn’t Have Enough Money

The Boy Mayor of the Mill City is at it again:
http://www.startribune.com/local/minneapolis/128358623.html

While those at City Hall are bleating and whining about how they don’t have enough money, to the point where they just laid off more fire fighters, the powers-that-be are now looking for something called a “Bicycle and Pedestrian Coordinator”.

Really? Does the idea of riding a bike or walking, for that matter, require the services of a city hall functionary? At a salary of $61,000-84,000 per, with all of the attendant benefits?

I suggest that until the voters and taxpayers of Minneapolis figure it out, you’ll see more of this nonsense. Of course, it’s an article of faith that a City Planner worth his/her salt loathes the car, and must come up with new ways to make travel, traffic, and parking as miserable as can be for any motorist.

Fund Our Agency Or We Shoot The Dog

<span style="font-family:garamond;"><span style="font-size:medium;">

Once again, Walter Russell Mead has hit the bullesye with this piece, http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/08/24/fund-our-agency-or-we-shoot-the-dog/, lampooning the Government’s bluster and threat any time any of their funding is threatened or cut.

<span style="font-family:garamond;"><span style="font-size:medium;">
It’s an age-old technique. Whenever a school district loses a referendum, they start making noises about cutting sports or music programs. Let’s not think of trying to cull some of the deadwood in the administration, or the numerous other programs that are tributes to precious groupthink and academic vanity.

The Nanny State Run Amok, Installment 8646

This was last month, but well-worth posting:

While smoking has been a reliable target for those in the nanny state
(and those in the health establishment in league with them), Obesity,
especially childhood obesity, is of course their new frontier.
This Story in the Wall Street Journal is but the latest example.

Just what we need: more bureaucratic functionaries interposing
themselves between the parents and their kids. "But it’s for the
children" is of course now the latest refuge of political scoundrels.

British Degeneracy On Parade

Here’s a brief but powerful essay on the thuggery that’s setting the UK afire: http://www.city-journal.org/2011/eon0810td.html Money quotes: "The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice. It believes itself deprived (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class), even though each member of it has received an education costing $80,000, toward which neither he nor—quite likely—any member of his family has made much of a contribution; indeed, he may well have lived his entire life at others’ expense, such that every mouthful of food he has ever eaten, every shirt he has ever worn, every television he has ever watched, has been provided by others. Even if he were to recognize this, he would not be grateful, for dependency does not promote gratitude. On the contrary, he would simply feel that the subventions were not sufficient to allow him to live as he would have liked. "At the same time, his expensive education will have equipped him for nothing. His labor, even supposing that he were inclined to work, would not be worth its cost to any employer—partly because of the social charges necessary to keep others such as he in a state of permanent idleness, and partly because of his own characteristics. And so unskilled labor is performed in England by foreigners, while an indigenous class of permanently unemployed is subsidized. "Finally, long experience of impunity has taught the rioters that they have nothing to fear from the law, which in England has become almost comically lax—except, that is, for the victims of crime. For the rioters, crime has become the default setting of their behavior; the surprising thing about the riots is not that they have occurred, but that they did not occur sooner and did not become chronic." ****** Any time that we as a society condone or wink at bad behavior because of whatever the circumstances the malefactors find themselves in (be it poverty, poor or absent parenting, racism, what have you), it’s terribly corrosive to our society and the rule of law. Cameron, the UK PM, should put the hammer down. When the rioters tore up Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention, old Boss Daley gave the orders to shoot to kill, or shoot to maim. If the Brits had any backbone (they’re virtually bereft of a functioning military), Cameron ought to do much the same. We certainly know that Thatcher wouldn’t hesitate to bring the full measure down on these ne’er-do-wells.