L

The Kuyper corrective: even as a flawed and complicated human being, he united "the warm heart at which evangelicalism excels" with "the furnished mind that public engagement requires."

Remaining hopeful among the mess and the muck of politics is easier when you're on the inside, seeing good people working hard every day, even in a miserable system.

How have institutions changed in the modern era, and why? Douglas Allen takes us on a fascinating historical journey.

Richard Mouw remembers and reflects on when he first realized that he needed to "get involved," and what has happened since.

If power can be good and creative, then we might need to entertain a question that will make us uneasy: Should we seek power?

As we think about a revitalization of a Neo-, maybe even a Neo-Neo-Calvinism, in the twenty-first century, we're not just trying to spread Calvinism, but we're also trying to learn from other traditions.

Nikkei just released some info about the 2014 Panasonic camera strategy:

- Panasonic will launch five new (fixed lens) compact cameras. That’s exactly the half amount of the cameras released in 2013
- These compact cameras will cost around $300 or more. Focus is on high-magnification zoom cameras
- Main focus of the company will be on the mirrorless interchangeable market.
- Panasonic will also launch a device capable of capturing 4K ultra-high-definition video  (it’s now in development).
- Panasonic is working to increase the sales of lenses (also for surveillance cameras)
- Panasonic anticipates a second consecutive year of losses for its digital camera business in fiscal 2013 on the back of weak sales of compact offerings. Global digital camera sales are expected to shrink by over 2 million units this fiscal year to about 4 million.

Mirrorless strategy summary: In short this means Panasonic will now focus on making a breakthrough in the more profitable high-end amateur or pro market. A 2.500 Euro “cheap” GH4 with 4K recording and modular design is the one camera that should allow this. On the other side the focus goes on the supertiny GM mirrorless camera and lens development. Overall it’s going to be a challenging time for all digital camera makers. The economic crisis and the “natural” slow down of the digital camera market are hitting hard on all companies balance.

-

link found via Photorumors.

An anonymous reader writes "TechRepublic has the story behind Munich City Council's decision to ditch Microsoft Windows and Office in favor of open source software. The project leader talks about why the shift was primarily about freedom, in this case freeing itself from being tied into Microsoft's infrastructure and having control over the software it uses. He talks about how the council managed to keep such a large project on track, despite affecting 15,000 people and spanning nine years. He also warns against organizations justifying the shift to open source software on the grounds that it will save money, arguing this approach is always likely to fail."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

langelgjm writes "As /. reported, last Thursday Wikileaks released a draft text of the intellectual property chapter in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. Since then, many commentators have raised alarm about its contents. But what happens when you mix the leaked text together with Perl regular expressions and R's network analysis packages? You get some neat visualizations showing just how isolated the United States is in pushing for extreme copyright and patent laws."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A lambança liderada nesta quarta por Teori Zavascki, segundo quem quaisquer embargos infringentes, motivados ou não, obstam o trânsito em julgado de condenações, permite que as respectivas defesas façam o que lhes der na telha, com ou sem justificativa técnica.

Marthius Sávio Cavalcante Lobato, advogado de Henrique Pizzolato, informa Marco Antônio Martins na Folha, anunciou que vai recorrer aos embargos para tentar impedir a prisão de seu cliente. Qual é o busílis? Ele não fez isso antes porque, segundo o que estabelece o Regimento Interno do Supremo, Pizzolato não tinha direito a embargos infringentes, já que não contava com ao menos quatro votos favoráveis.

Ocorre que outros que igualmente não tinham esse direito o fizeram. E foram, na prática, bem-sucedidos — aos menos na manobra procrastinatória. Segundo a fabulosa tese de Teori Zavascki, que contou com a concordância de cinco outros ministros, se os embargos existem, ainda que imotivados, ainda que em desacordo com a lei, eles têm o poder de paralisar o trâmite do processo.

Ele explica: “Eh uma tentativa. O fim da sessão de ontem não deixou as coisas claras, e tentaremos esse expediente para nova análise sobre o Pizzolato”. Ué, ele está na dele, né? Afinal, segundo a maioria do Supremo, bestas foram aqueles que não recorreram à chicana. O que o STF fez, nesta quarta, foi premiar aqueles que, mesmo sabendo que seus respectivos clientes não tinham o direito aos embargos infringentes, tentaram ainda assim.

Mais: segundo aquela gloriosa maioria de seis (Zavascki, Rosa Weber, Cármen Lúcia, Ricardo Lewandowski, Marco Aurélio e Celso de Mello), tanto faz como tanto fez haver ou não os quatro votos divergentes.

Se o STF convida à chicana, as defesas não têm como recusar.

Maria do Rosário, Ministra dos Direitos Humanos, e José Eduardo Cardozo, da Justiça, acompanharam a exumação dos restos mortais de João Goulart. Que bom! Deveriam, sei lá, comparecer a 10 enterros por mês — cinco para cada um — para homenagear as vítimas dos mais de 50 mil homicídios que acontecem a cada ano no país. Já que o governo federal corta a verba destinada à segurança púbica, ao invés de aumentá-la, seria, assim, um apoio simbólico ao menos… 

mahiskali writes with this interesting news via the EFF's Deep Links "The new Renault Zoe comes with a 'feature' that absolutely nobody wants. Instead of selling consumers a complete car that they can use, repair, and upgrade as they see fit, Renault has opted to lock purchasers into a rental contract with a battery manufacturer and enforce that contract with digital rights management (DRM) restrictions that can remotely prevent the battery from charging at all. This coming on the heels of the recent Trans-Pacific Partnership IP Rights Chapter leak certainly makes you wonder how much of that device (car?) you really own. Perhaps Merriam-Webster can simply change the definition of ownership."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Em Roots of Western Culture [Raízes da cultura ocidental], Herman Dooyeweerd declara a necessidade de uma consciência aguçada da antítese.

Avalie os custos devidos à seriedade com que se deve levar o cristianismo radicalmente [no sentido de "raiz"] escriturístico. Questione-se sobre que lado você deve assumir nessa tensa batalha espiritual de nossos dias. Um "acordo de cavalheiros" não é uma opção válida. Ficar "em cima do muro" não é possível. Ou o motivo básico da religião cristã [criação-queda-redenção] trabalha em nossas vidas, ou servimos a outros deuses. Se a antítese lhe parece radical demais, reflita se um cristianismo menos radical não seria como o sal que perdeu o sabor. Eu afirmo a antítese de um modo tão radical para que experimentemos de novo o poder e os afiados dois gumes da Palavra de Deus. Você deve experimentar a antítese como uma tempestade espiritual que se abate sobre você, iluminando tudo, e em seguida purifica o ar abafado. Se você não experimenta esse fato como um poder espiritual que requer o render-se de todo o seu coração, não haverá frutos na sua vida. E então você ficará à parte de toda a grande batalha que a antítese sempre instiga. Por si só, você não pode empreender essa batalha, mas sim a dinâmica espiritual da Palavra de Deus, que se lança à batalha em nós, e nos impele, embora sejamos "carne e sangue".

Que Deus nos ajude a viver essa consciência, porque muitas vezes preferimos estar "em paz" (paz forjada) com nosso pecado e com o mal no mundo. Ou então, tomamos armas carnais para lidar com ambos. Que, sobretudo, possamos depor as armas carnais e assumir armas verdadeiramente espirituais - algo que só é possível quando nosso coração é depositado todos os dias aos pés de Cristo.

Server tuning is a topic that consumes many books, blog posts and wiki pages.

Below is some practical advice for getting low-hanging fruit out of the way if you’re new to tuning Postgres and just want something that will likely work well-enough on low volume systems. I’d say looking at this list and making changes on a new system should take 10 minutes or less.

Run pgtune

Greg Smith open sourced a utility for making a first pass at tuning Postgres for a local system with pgtune. This tool is easy to run – just copy it to a target system and then point it at your existing Postgres config. It puts its changes into a new file at the very bottom.

Use XFS

Filesystem choice matters. Greg Smith goes into some detail on why ext3 is a terrible performance choice for a database filesystem in his talk Righting Your Writes. At this point, XFS is the filesystem that should be your default choice. If you want to explore ext4 or zfs (if that’s an option for you), that may be worth looking at. It is “safe” however to choose XFS. Depending on your disk situation, recreating your filesystem might take a bit longer than 10 minutes, but hopefully this will save you time and bad performance in the future!

Increase your readahead buffer

On Linux, the readahead buffer (brief explanation) is set way to small for most database systems. Increase this to about 1 MB with blockdev -setra 2048 [device].

For further performance analysis

I wrote this performance checklist a while back for assessing a system’s health. I’d say a review of all the things on that list would take probably half a day. Following up and making the changes could take a day or more. These kinds of analysis are worth exploring periodically to ensure you haven’t missed important changes in your environment or your application over time.

Jah-Wren Ryel writes "Every smartphone or other device with mobile communications capability (e.g. 3G or LTE) actually runs not one, but two operating systems. Aside from the operating system that we as end-users see (Android, iOS, PalmOS), it also runs a small operating system that manages everything related to radio. So, we have a complete operating system, running on an ARM processor, without any exploit mitigation (or only very little of it), which automatically trusts every instruction, piece of code, or data it receives from the base station you're connected to. What could possibly go wrong?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sproketboy writes "WikiLeaks releases the secret negotiated draft text for the entire TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) Intellectual Property Rights Chapter." The Syndney Morning Herald took a look at the leaked documents, from their article: "An expert in intellectual property law, Matthew Rimmer, said the draft was 'very prescriptive' and strongly reflected U.S. trade objectives and multinational corporate interests 'with little focus on the rights and interests of consumers, let alone broader community interests.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In this series of posts about using Postgres every day. The last post was about \ commands in psql.

I’m now going to share in a series of posts my workflow for writing queries, and some of the things about working with Postgres that I take for granted in writing queries.

Shortcuts I can’t live without

Three important shortcuts you should learn are:

• \df+ [function]: This displays [function] information, and the + dumps the function itself to STDOUT
• \ef [function]: This pulls [function] into a buffer in your favorite editor. This is the most convenient way to grab a copy of an individual function for me.
• \ef: This opens your favorite editor and puts a template for a function (in any supported procedural language) in a buffer

Thinking in CTEs

In searching through my recent psql history, I found quite a few WITH queries. These are Common Table Expressions, a useful SQL feature that allows you to embed subqueries in your SQL in a very readable format. CTEs have a lot more interesting features and properties, like RECURSIVE.

However, I tend to just use CTEs as a more convenient form of a subquery. This allows me to break apart long queries into smaller, testable chunks. I usually will write a subquery so that it’s in my command history, generate some fake data for testing, and go back to that query in my history to test edge cases.

I iterate on the smaller tables until I have a set of understandable “paragraphs” of SQL. This makes it easier for me to explain the logic of the query with others, and makes testing each piece easier in the event that something breaks. Usually, when a CTE breaks, I’ve made an assumption about incoming data that’s incorrect.

The composability of SQL is often terrible. CTEs help break apart the complexity visually. There’s some warnings about CTEs not performing well under certain circumstances. My approach is to design with CTEs and optimize for performance only if needed.

An example of the kinds of queries I write

Something you’d see a lot in my command history are queries that look like this:

WITH crashes AS (                                                               
    SELECT uptime_string AS category                                                      
        , sum(report_count) AS report_count                                     
    FROM signature_summary_uptime                                               
        JOIN signatures USING (signature_id)                                       
    WHERE                                                                           
        signatures.signature = 'Fake Signature #1'                                             
        AND report_date >= '2013-08-05T00:00:00+00:00'::timestamptz             
        AND report_date < '2013-08-12T00:00:00+00:00'::timestamptz              
        AND product_name IN ('Firefox')  AND version_string IN ('1')            
    GROUP BY category                                                           
),                                                                              
totals AS (                                                                     
    SELECT                                                                      
        category                                                                
        , report_count                                                          
        , sum(report_count) OVER () as total_count                              
    FROM crashes                                                                
)                                                                               
SELECT category                                                                 
    , report_count                                                              
    , round((report_count * 100::numeric)/total_count,3)::TEXT                  
as percentage                                                                   
FROM totals                                                                     
ORDER BY report_count DESC                                                      
;

You’ll see that I have one or more WITH clauses, and then a query that performs a final summary query using the data from the CTEs.

This query probably was asked for something like this:

Please provide counts of crashes with the same uptime, for Firefox version 1, and the signature ‘Fake Signature #1′ for the last week, including a percentage of all of the sampled crashes.

While I’m sure there are better ways to write the query above, I wanted to show how I have made a pattern for myself to speed up query writing. I’m not always interested in the best possible query. Hopefully, the Postgres planner makes up for many of my sins as a developer!

What I am interested in is finding answers to problems quickly for my coworkers.

In answering the question I was asked, I first dig out an appropriate summary table (we have quite a few in Socorro). I found the signature_summary_uptime table, and fortunately it has product_name and version_string available in the table. I only need to join signatures to fulfill the request. (Yay for denormalized data that supports the kinds of queries we often run!)

Next, I see that I’m being asked for a total percentage, so I need to calculate a sum across all the rows that I retrieve. That can be very slow, so I create a second CTE that uses data from the first CTE (rather than doing two full table scans to calculate the total). I use a window function instead of SUM() here because I’ve done experiments to see which tends to be faster.

And, finally once I have all the data together, I run my final query using my two CTE tables.

How CTEs and breaking down this process have helped me

So, I’ve had about a year to practice. A query like this today takes me 10-15 minutes to assemble and test. They are typically slightly more complex — with more dependencies, and maybe 2-3 more tables involved in JOINs. But they follow the same basic pattern.

Most queries on my data sets conform to recognizable patterns.

After a few months, we recognized that moving JSON for crash data into Postgres also would be a win, and was easy to process using very similar queries.

That’s all helped make finding answers about Firefox crashes easier and faster!

As presented at the PostgreSQL Conference Europe the new version of pgloader is now able to fully migrate a MySQL database, including discovering the schema, casting data types, transforming data and default values. Sakila is the traditional MySQL example database, in this article we're going to fully migrate it over to PostgreSQL.

What about switching to PostgreSQL, it's easier than ever.

Without further ado, here's what happens when you ask pgloader to please migrate the whole thing over to PostgreSQL:

2013-11-12T11:34:37.000000+01:00 LOG Starting pgloader, log system is ready.
2013-11-12T11:34:37.001000+01:00 LOG Parsing commands from file "/Users/dim/dev/pgloader/test/sakila.load"
                    table name       read   imported     errors            time
------------------------------  ---------  ---------  ---------  --------------
                   before load          0          0          0          0.006s
                  create, drop          0          0          0          0.149s
------------------------------  ---------  ---------  ---------  --------------
                         store          2          2          0          0.013s
                         staff          2          2          0          0.082s
                        rental      16044      16044          0          0.614s
                       payment      16049      16049          0          0.529s
                      language          6          6          0          0.071s
                     inventory       4581       4581          0          0.107s
                     film_text       1000       1000          0          0.077s
                 film_category       1000       1000          0          0.031s
                    film_actor       5462       5462          0          0.079s
                          film       1000       1000          0          0.094s
                      customer        599        599          0          0.069s
                       country        109        109          0          0.029s
                          city        600        600          0          0.038s
                      category         16         16          0          0.021s
                       address        603        603          0          0.041s
                         actor        200        200          0          0.024s
        Index Build Completion          0          0          0          0.000s
------------------------------  ---------  ---------  ---------  --------------
                Create Indexes          0         41          0          1.014s
               Reset Sequences          0          1          0          0.033s
                  Foreign Keys          0         22          0          0.303s
------------------------------  ---------  ---------  ---------  --------------
             Total import time      47273      47273          0          2.410s

In those 2 and a half seconds, the whole dataset has been converted. Note that the indexes are being built in parallel with the data loading, and all indexes against the same relation are built in parallel to each other, too.

Here's the pgloader command that we used:

LOAD DATABASE
     FROM      mysql://root@localhost/sakila
     INTO postgresql://localhost:54393/sakila

 WITH include drop, create tables, no truncate,
      create indexes, reset sequences, foreign keys

  SET maintenance_work_mem to '128MB', work_mem to '12MB',
      search_path to 'sakila' /* migrate to a specific schema */

 CAST type datetime to timestamptz
           drop default drop not null using zero-dates-to-null,
      type date drop not null drop default using zero-dates-to-null,
      type year to integer

 BEFORE LOAD DO
      $$ create schema if not exists sakila; $$;

Here's an example of how the casting rules work in that very case, where we've been using mostly default rules:

sakila# \d sakila.film
                                   Table "sakila.film"
        Column        |              Type              |            Modifiers            
----------------------+--------------------------------+---------------------------------
 film_id              | smallint                       | not null
 title                | text                           | not null
 description          | text                           | 
 release_year         | integer                        | 
 language_id          | smallint                       | not null
 original_language_id | smallint                       | 
 rental_duration      | smallint                       | not null default 3::smallint
 rental_rate          | numeric(4,2)                   | not null default 4.99
 length               | smallint                       | 
 replacement_cost     | numeric(5,2)                   | not null default 19.99
 rating               | sakila.film_rating             | default 'G'::sakila.film_rating
 special_features     | sakila.film_special_features[] | 
 last_update          | timestamp with time zone       | not null default now()
Indexes:
    "film_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (film_id)
    "idx_17589_idx_fk_language_id" btree (language_id)
    "idx_17589_idx_fk_original_language_id" btree (original_language_id)
    "idx_17589_idx_title" btree (title)
Foreign-key constraints:
    "fk_film_language" FOREIGN KEY (language_id) REFERENCES sakila.language(language_id)
    "fk_film_language_original" FOREIGN KEY (original_language_id) REFERENCES sakila.language(language_id)
Referenced by:
    TABLE "sakila.film_actor" CONSTRAINT "fk_film_actor_film" FOREIGN KEY (film_id) REFERENCES sakila.film(film_id)
    TABLE "sakila.film_category" CONSTRAINT "fk_film_category_film" FOREIGN KEY (film_id) REFERENCES sakila.film(film_id)
    TABLE "sakila.inventory" CONSTRAINT "fk_inventory_film" FOREIGN KEY (film_id) REFERENCES sakila.film(film_id)

We can see that we're using a couple for custom data types in PostgreSQL, those are the conversion from the ENUM and SET datatypes that MySQL database is using here. The SET datatype is simply converted to an array of ENUM values in PostgreSQL.

At this point, you're left with reviewing the queries in your code and adapting those. Also unhandled, the triggers and stored procedures and views.

Your turn!

First time accepted submitter billcarson writes "Even though for most of us the recession is far from over, analysts are worried the technology sector might be near the end of a bubble. Technology stocks are at records highs at the moment. Companies that have no sound business plan have no difficulty in raising capital to fund their crazy dreams. Even Yahoo is again buying companies without real profit (Tumblr). Andreessen Horowitz, a major venture capitalist in Silicon Valley is already pulling up the ladder. Might this be an indicator for more woe to come?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

EXPLAIN output rarely yields an audience reaction, but today at PostgreSQL Conference Europe it generated enthusiastic applause.

How did it happen? Yesterday, Alexander Korotkov and Oleg Bartunov gave a talk about their upcoming GIN index improvements. Someone asked a question, and that got them thinking about a further improvement — they developed a prototype that night. During their talk today, they showed the EXPLAIN plan with their new feature. The new index type was now faster and more useful than a similar MongoDB index (see slide 62). That's fast work!

All these improvements are planned for Postgres 9.4, thanks to funding from Engine Yard.

Continue Reading »

rtoz writes "Chemical weapons watchdog OPCW has declared that Syria has rendered inoperable chemical weapons production facilities and mixing/filling plants. This operation has been completed just one day before the deadline (1 November 2013) set by the OPCW Executive Council. The Joint OPCW-UN Mission has inspected 21 of the 23 sites declared by Syria, and 39 of the 41 facilities located at those sites. The two remaining sites were not visited due to safety and security concerns. But Syria declared those sites as abandoned and that the chemical weapons program items they contained were moved to other declared sites, which were inspected."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Americans are disengaging from communities, at least if the evidence proffered by scholars like Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone is to be believed. This may have a class dimension as well. Charles Murray and First Things own editor, R.R. Reno, suggest that community is disintegrating more rapidly, and with harsher consequences, among folks in the lower socioeconomic strata in the U.S.

Much of the literature celebrates the importance of voluntary associations." The Church is almost always listed as among these salutary associations. This, however, does a disservice to the Church, and that many Christians, and non-Christians, accept the moniker is actually a part of the problem. Christians on the political right often accept Putnams analysis uncritically, and Tocquevilles, and others before him. Indeed, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (my own communion) invited Putnam to speak at its largest seminary in St. Louis a few years back.

But Id suggest that the Church is not a community, it is the community. By that I mean that there is an ontological reality to the community of the Church that does not exist for any other type of human community. Indeed, Id suggest that all other communities are, at best, images of the union that people share in the Church. As a result, it is important that the Church get it right in order for other communities to get it right as well.

We could enter into the topic from several vantage points. My own inclination is that the Church needs to live out the fullness of her sacramental theology. The vertical dimension of baptism and the Supper are foundational: The grace that we receive from Christ by being united with him baptism and the Supper is critically important. The nature of this vertical dimension is worth arguing over.

But the almost exclusive focus of many Christians on the vertical dimension of the sacraments, however important, has led to a practical neglect of the horizontal dimension of sacramental reality: that in our union with Christ we are also united with one another. Our union with one another in the Church is as ontologically real as our union with Christ. In his high priestly prayer" in John 17, Jesus repeatedly prays that the unity of the disciples reflect their union with him and his union with the Father. In Romans, Paul writes that we who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another."

It is this unity of the disciples-this communion of the saints in and with one another-and the consequential love shown for one another, that Jesus tells his disciples numerous times is the means by which the world will know that God sent him and that they are his disciples. The point of drawing this out is to underscore that the Church is not simply one among many voluntary organizations" that brings humans together. The Church is not merely a community, it is the community. This is not to deny the reality of other communities, it only gives pride of place to the one reality that other communities reflect.

So what are some implications? First, we can ask whether the tendency to rank the Church as just one of many voluntary associations" has an impact on the way that Christians think about the Church. If the Church is no more than a spiritual version of the Rotary Club, then it is no more than another avenue for our self-expression and self-interest. This way of understanding the Church, to draw on sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies phrasing, is to turn the Church from an organ of gemeinschaft (roughly translated as organic community") into an expression of gesellschaf (roughly translated as "civil society). This self-understanding implicitly limits Christians aspiration for the Church and for their experience of it.

To be sure, we should not idealize or romanticize what our experience of Church should be on this side of the eschaton. We know from Acts and from the Epistles that conflict arose in the Church almost from the time of its first expression after Pentecost. At the same time, if we conceive of relationships in the Body of Christ as no more than associations to be used for our own personal flourishing, then we will never be able to press beyond it. (And, of course, relationships in the Body are a means to profound personal flourishing. But as is often the case, we receive the outcome only when we aim at something else.)

So, initially, our churches need to challenge us to live out the reality that Christ enacts in us through baptism and in the Supper. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." Expressing this type of love is often uncomfortable, at least at the beginning. But when the unchurched come into our churches, do they see much more than worldly relationships in religious garb?

Churches also need to take back some of the responsibility that they shifted onto American culture. Because of the (largely Protestant) religious public consensus in early and 19th Century America, social pressure effectively substituted for ecclesiastical discipline. We can debate whether this cultural arrangement ever worked all that well (as well as what prompted it), but whatever moral consensus ever existed has been strained by the upheavals of post-War American culture. Because of the earlier reliance on social consensus, and the consequent blurring of lines between society and Church, this cultural shift created an ecclesiastical challenge. American churches must now get into the business of distinguishing between themselves and the broader culture in ways that they didnt in early American history.

For Christians who have been used to thinking of themselves as sitting in the mainstream of American society and culture, this can be a disturbing and disorienting shift. The upshot is that the self-identity of church communities in the U.S. must now be drawn much more sharply than it was in the past, or else they will simply evaporate with the evaporating (or evaporated) consensus. All this is to say that the Church and Christians in America can no longer free ride on the diffuse pseudo-Christianity of American culture. We must express the ontological reality that Jesus created his Church to be through baptism and the Supper: One with him, and one with one another.

James R. Rogers is associate professor of political science at Texas A&M University. His previous On the Square" articles can be found here.

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In his 1934 book, The Kingdom of God in America, H. Richard Niebuhr depicted the creed of liberal Protestant theology, which was called modernism" in those days, in these famous words: "A God without wrath brought man without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." Niebuhr was no fundamentalist, but he knew what he was talking about. So did Dietrich Bonhoeffer when he named the kind of mainline religion he encountered in 1930s America: Protestantismus ohne Reformation, Protestantism without the Reformation."

Sin , judgment, cross, even Christ have become problematic terms in much contemporary theological discourse, but nothing so irritates and confounds as the idea of divine wrath. Recently, the wrath of God became a point of controversy in the decision of the Presbyterian Committee on Congregational Song to exclude from its new hymnal the much-loved song "In Christ Alone" by Keith Getty and Stuart Townend.  The Committee wanted to include this song because it is being sung in many churches, Presbyterian and otherwise, but they could not abide this line from the third stanza: "Till on that cross as Jesus died/the wrath of God was satisfied." For this they wanted to substitute: "...as Jesus died/the love of God was magnified." The authors of the hymn insisted on the original wording, and the Committee voted nine to six that "In Christ Alone" would not be among the eight hundred or so items in their new hymnal.

Modifying hymn lyrics to suit one's taste, of course, is nothing new. The Nestorians in the early church refused to sing Theotokos, preferring the less offensive Christotokos, in their Marian liturgy. More recently, the Universalist leader Kenneth L. Patton kept the "Ein Feste Burg" tune by Martin Luther but replaced "A mighty fortress is our God" with "Man is the earth upright and proud." And then there is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir which sings-and quite beautifully I might add-the Reginald Heber hymn "Holy, Holy, Holy" to the tune of "Nicaea" (!!) but in the first and last stanza changes "God in three persons, blessed Trinity" to "God in thy glory through eternity." 

Those who treat the wrath of God as taboo, whether in sermons or hymns, stand in a long lineage too, one that includes Albrecht Ritschl, Faustus Socinus, and the unnamed revisionists in the second century who followed the heretic Marcion.  According to Tertullian, they said that "a better god has been discovered, one who is neither offended nor angry nor inflicts punishment, who has no fire warming up in hell, and no outer darkness wherein there is shuddering and gnashing of teeth: he is merely kind."  The lure of such a gospel is unmistakable-it explains why neo-Marcionism (Gods wrath in the Old Testament, his love in the New) is still flourishing today not only in popular piety but also among guilded scholars of religion.

Why do many Christians shrink from any thought of the wrath of God?  R.P.C. Hanson has said that many preachers today deal with God's wrath the way the Victorians handled sex, treating it as something a bit shameful, embarrassing, and best left in the closet. The result is a less than fully biblical construal of who God is and what he has done, especially in the redemptive mission of Jesus Christ.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, just prior to his election as pope, seems to have had this concern in mind in his 2005 Good Friday meditations.  One of his texts was Lamentations 3:1-2, "I am a man sorely afflicted under the rod of his wrath." The future pope applied this prophecy to Christ and his sufferings on the cross, which reveals both the gravity of sin and the seriousness of judgment. "Can it be," asked Ratzinger, "that, despite all of our expressions of consternation in the face of evil and innocent suffering, we are all too prepared to trivialize the mystery of evil? Have we accepted only the gentleness and love of God and quietly set aside the word of judgment?  Yet as we contemplate the suffering of the Son, we see more clearly the seriousness of sin, and how it needs to be fully atoned if it is to be overcome."

However we account for the work of Christ on the cross-and none of our atonement theories is adequate to explain fully so profound a reality-it surely means this:  that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, and that this event involved his purposeful handing over" and delivering up" of his Son to a cursed-filled death at the Skull Place outside the gates of Jerusalem (2 Cor. 5:19; Rom. 8:32; Acts 2:23).  As the early Christians understood Isaiah 53:4-5, Christ was pierced there for our transgressions, smitten by God and afflicted.  But far from being a tragic bystander, Christ made there what the Book of Common Prayer calls a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world."  To quote another hymn, not so much in vogue these days, Bearing shame and scoffing rude/In my place condemned he stood."  The full New Testament teaching about the cross involves both expiation, which means providing a covering for sin, and propitiation, which means averting divine judgment.  The semantic range of the Greek words hilasmos/hilasterion includes both meanings.  That is why the wrath of God cannot be brushed out of the story without remainder.

The problem comes when we use an anthropopathic term like "wrath" and apply it univocally to the God of eternity. Before long, we have constructed "a god who looks like me," to use the title of a recent book of feminist theology.  Then caricatures of divine wrath proliferate:  God having a temper tantrum or acting like a big bully who needs to be appeased" before he can forgive or, as is often alleged with reference to the atonement, practicing cosmic child abuse. 

But Gods ways are not our ways, and Gods wrath is not like our wrath. Indeed, in his brilliant essay, The Wrath of God as an Aspect of the Love of God ," British scholar Tony Lane explains that "the love of God implies his wrath. Without his wrath God simply does not love in the sense that the Bible portrays his love." God's love is not sentimental; it is holy. It is tender, but not squishy.  It involves not only compassion, kindness, and mercy beyond measure (what the New Testament calls grace) but also indignation against injustice and unremitting opposition to all that is evil.

Even though you can't find "In Christ Alone" in the new Presbyterian hymnal, you won't have any trouble hearing it sung in numerous churches all over the world. In fact, you can listen to it right now by clicking this link. Keith Getty and his wife Kristyn belong to a new breed of contemporary hymnists who want their music to reflect the reality of a full-sized God, the awesome God of holiness and love.

Robert Murray McCheyne must have also had this in mind when he wrote the great hymn, When This Passing World Is Done," in 1837:

       Chosen not for good in me,

          Wakened up from wrath to flee,

       Hidden in the Savior's side,

           By the Spirit sanctified,

        Teach me Lord on earth to show,

            By my love how much I owe.

Timothy George is dean of Beeson Divinity School of Samford University and general editor of the Reformation Commentary on Scripture. His email address is tfgeorge@samford.edu.

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Abortion advocates and population planners eagerly promote the idea that preventing births saves money. 

To the contrary and as was already demonstrated in a recent First Things article , the birth of anyone, poor or not, will yield substantial economic benefit. Specifically, in Texas the $11,000 Medicaid-birth cost will on average return $430,000, or thirty-nine times the investment, in the form of income, property, and sales taxes collected over a forty-five-year working life.

Although state-funded population planners find the cost savings claim self-affirming and program-justifying, it is bad math.  My prior article explored the short-sighted approach of an expense-only focus and highlighted that the programs cost federal, state, and local governments significant amounts of foregone revenue. A new article , recently published in full in the Linacre Quarterly, critically explores the question of expense savings.

The methodology by which the Texas Womens Health Program (TWHP) assesses and reports cost savings requires that the actual birth rate of TWHP enrollees be compared to an earlier, base year birth rate for all women with Medicaid-paid births, in order to calculate births averted" for TWHP enrollees (which averted births are presumably the result of TWHP participation). These theoretically averted births are then multiplied by the average cost of a Medicaid-paid birth to derive Savings Due to Births Averted."

A TWHP report claims, The program is considered cost neutral because Total WHP Expenditures are less than the Target Expenditure (i.e., Savings due to Births Averted.)" This is a critical conclusion for TWHP because Savings Due to Births Averted" must exceed the cost of the program.  TWHP claims that the program meets this test; but the method used to arrive at these results is misleading.

The flaw lies in the comparison used to calculate savings. The problem is that a group comprised only of women who intend to prevent pregnancy (TWHP enrollees) is compared to a base year group comprised both of women open to pregnancy and those who seek to avoid it. As a group, women seeking to avoid pregnancy should experience markedly lower birth rates than a broader group of women, some of whom are open to pregnancy.

Consider the silliness of a museum curator or wine steward who proudly compares her collection to that of the average household, or the meaningless boast of an oncologist who compares his cancer cure rate to that of general practitioners.  TWHP is setting a similarly low bar to trumpet its claims of effectiveness.

To calculate the true savings attributable to TWHPs efforts, an apples-to-apples comparison must be made of (a) the birth rate attributable to TWHPs enrollees in 2008, or 4.3 percent, and (b) the birth rate attributable to comparable women, specifically, Texas women seeking to avoid pregnancy in the base year period. As is detailed in the Linacre Quarterly article , using two methods and national health statistics from 2001, more comparable base year birth rates were estimated.  These methods resulted in adjusted base year birth rates of 6 percent and 4.6 percent, substantially less than TWHPs base year benchmark birthrate of 11.5 percent.  In other words, TWHP overstates the standard it seeks to undershoot by 1.9 to 2.5 times.

With the adjustments, TWHP is no longer cost neutral because program expenditures exceed savings due to births averted" by multi-million dollar margins. Additionally, the second proposed adjustment method results in a birth rate that is very similar to the actual birthrate of TWHP enrollees (4.6 percent versus 4.3 percent), which suggests nearly complete TWHP ineffectiveness and calls into question the very reason for its existence.

These results are relevant beyond Texas. A total of thirty one states offer Medicaid expansion programs for family planning services. Like Texas, most of those programs are offered through the CMS waiver process , making it likely that many states are reporting inflated results in a manner similar to Texas. If Texas 2008 miscalculation is any indication, CMS womens health programs are materially overstating budgetary effectiveness.

We now know two things. From the first article , subsidizing new lives is a revenue-positive proposition; and, from the recent Linacre Quarterly article, preventing new lives is a money-losing venture. Perhaps taxpayers should take a closer look at the revenues lost and expenditures wasted on these programs.

Combined, the two articles strongly suggest that, instead of wasting and losing money by attempting to prevent births through contraception and abortion, states should dedicate more resources to real health care for growing families.  

Keith Riler is a financial analyst who has written for the American Thinker, Faith magazine, Texas Right to Life, and LifeNews.

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This is partly in response to Josh's blog entry Calling Bullsh*t in Open Source communities and Sarah Sharp's plea for No more verbal abuse. Normally I don't make these public statements but this time Sarah's behavior hit a raw nerve in me. While this isn't a gender or minority issue, I feel it my responsibility to stand alone and scream so you can here me loud and clear and say NOT ALL WOMEN OR MINORITIES FEEL THE WAY SARAH DOES. I FOR ONE DO NOT and I am both a female and a minority. If it isn't clear by now what my position is, I think Linus Torvalds is being treated unfairly and is being abused for his frank, no bullsh*t, flowery quiky style of stating it. Many have accepted the axiom that Linus is a jerk, childish and needs to conform to the professional standard simply because we are too lazy to analyze the facts for ourselves and like many public figures Linus likes to give people a good show.

I fear the outcome of this discussion is the well-meaning and in my opinion WARPED conclusion that If we want more women and minorities in the OS developer community, we MUST temper our comments and shelter women and minorities in concentration camps where they can think without the testosterone cruelty and bigotry of white men getting in the way.

Quotes from Linus

"Because if you want me to "act professional," I can tell you that I'm not interested. I'm sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm *also* not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what "acting professionally" results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways."

So I read that as "Let's lynch Linus, cause he refuses to wear a noose of the oppressor around his neck like everyone else". Any one of you who've worked in an oppressive office environment know EXACTLY what he's talking about.

In his Defense of being accused of being a verbal abuser

"I definitely am not willing to string people along, either. I've had that happen too—not telling people clearly enough that I don't like their approach, they go on to re-architect something, and get really upset when I am then not willing to take their work."

She simply doesn't agree with Linus brand of Tough love which is a brand that I share -- perhaps because I'm in the same age group as Linus.

So my plea is, please let us not get into the business of training people on the ART OF NICENESS and SENSITIVITY and studying the loop holes so that we can use that as a weapon to stab each other behind closed doors and private emails where NO ONE CAN HERE YOU CRYING FOR HELP.

I think I am more qualified than most to judge verbal abuse and oppression when I see it. I'm the daughter of a black Nigerian man and a white American mother. I was born in Nigeria and spent my youth there. I've been traumatized all my life both verbally and physically from all sides for being different in all kinds of ways. This trauma is most often inflicted by women who've told me to be quiet because I do not have the social skills to grasp what is happening. My lesson learned is your oppressor may be someone that looks just like you (or thinks he/she understands what you are feeling) and your ally just MAY BE a purple dragon living in a cave wearing a bathrobe.

Continue reading "In defense of being blunt and to the point"

DavidGilbert99 writes "Microsoft took everyone by surprise last year with the Surface tablet. It was something completely new from the company everyone knew as a software company. However nine months later and the sheen has worn off the Surface tablet and Microsoft's financial results on Thursday revealed it has taken a $900 million write down on the Surface RT tablets, leading David Gilbert in IBTimes to estimate it is sitting on a stockpile of six million unsold tablets."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Uma pausa nas minhas férias para comentar pesquisa Estadão-Ibope de intenção de votos para a Presidência da República. Vocês encontram mais detalhes do portal do jornal. Destaco aqui alguns dados que me parecem relevantes. Também este levantamento, a exemplo de outros que o antecederam, registra a monumental despencada de Dilma Rousseff (PT), que caiu de 58% em março para 30% – no cenário em que aparecem Marina Silva (Rede), Aécio Neves (PSDB) e Eduardo Campos (PSB). Com esses mesmos nomes, Lula obteria 41% e se elegeria no primeiro turno. Em qualquer dos casos, quem mais ganhou eleitores entre o levantamento de março e o de agora é Marina: com Dilma na disputa, ela salta de 12% para 22%, Aécio passa de 9% para 13%, e Campos, de 3% para 5%. Quando o nome do PT é Lula, a ex-ministra do Meio Ambiente fica com 18%, e o senador tucano, com 12%. Em qualquer cenário, a ex-senadora petista fica em segundo lugar. Num eventual segundo turno entre as duas, há empate: 35% para Dilma contra 34% para Marina.

É claro que eu não gosto do resultado, mas ele traduz, sim, o espírito das manifestações de rua, que, sabem vocês, nunca foi do meu agrado. Os números apontam para duas perspectivas para mim horripilantes: a que garantiria a vitória de Lula no primeiro turno e a que permitiria uma disputa, em segundo, entre Dilma e Marina Silva. Nesse caso, ocorreria o que chamo de choque de obscurantismos – o deste mundo (Dilma) contra o do outro mundo (Marina). Sei que ainda não há campanha na TV; que a petista tende a ter um latifúndio de tempo, contra alguns segundos da sua eventual adversária e coisa e tal… A diferença pode fazer diferença no primeiro turno; no segundo, tudo se iguala. Uma Marina Silva falando contra a política tradicional, emprestando-se ares de Davi contra a Golias da Maldade, do “tostão contra o milhão”… Ah, meus caros, a chance de um desastre dessas proporções de realizar é imensa!

E há, como se constata, a chance de Lula entrar na jogada. E cumpre não descartar essa possibilidade. Em palestra para estudantes da Universidade Federal do ABC, ele reiterou que sua candidata é Dilma e coisa e tal, mas avisou: não está doente coisa nenhuma! Sendo ele quem é, não é o tipo de desmentido que se deva ignorar. “Ah, ele só está corrigindo uma informação…”. Não quando se é Lula e quando vemos o patrimônio eleitoral do PT se desmanchar. É uma tolice supor que ele possa mesmo estar fora da jogada. É preciso ignorar a natureza do petismo para supor que o partido caminharia para uma derrota eleitoral certa ou para uma disputa de máximo risco. Se preciso, Lula volta à cena, sim, senhores!, pouco importa o seu real estado de saúde. Se puder fazer uma campanha mínima, isso basta.

Não, não… O resultado eleitoral das ruas buliçosas não é nada bom. No cenário em que Lula (38%) é candidato e em que aparecem Joaquim Barbosa (6%) e Marina Silva (17%), a soma desses três nomes alcança 61%. Nesse caso, o tucano Aécio Neves obtém apenas 12% – índice que se repete em dois outros; o máximo que atingiu foi 13%. Isso significa que o único nome identificado com a oposição obteve bem pouco ganho com a derrocada de Dilma. Como se explica? O movimento das ruas, ainda que assentado, às vezes, em causas as mais meritórias, é, infelizmente, contra a política. E Marina Silva é muito mais eficiente do que todos os seus adversários na arte de fingir de que faz outra coisa que não… política!

E os pobres?
Tomei aqui algumas pancadas porque escrevi que, até agora, os pobres não foram às ruas. Pancadas, acho eu, injustas porque eu não estava desqualificando nada. Fazia um registro para entender a realidade e não alimentar falsas ilusões. A pesquisa Ibope evidencia que a minha observação era pertinente. O movimento das ruas fez quase dobrar o índice de Marina. Agora vejam este número: Marina tem 44% das intenções de votos de quem ganha mais de 10 mínimos, contra apenas 19% de Dilma – em março, era o contrário: 43% a 18% em favor da petista. Já entre os que ganham até um mínimo, a presidente alcança 43%, contra apenas 13% da ex-ministra.

Os números estão aí. Reproduzo na íntegra, título incluído, um post que publiquei no dia 28 de junho. E volto aos dias de hoje para encerrar:

Não tem pobre na rua mesmo, ué! Por que a braveza? Ou: Existe um jeito de combater a esquerda que só a fortalece

No fim do debate de ontem da VEJA.com (assista ao vídeo), afirmei que “não há pobres nas ruas”. Algumas pessoas ficaram bravas. É possível que tenham entendido tudo errado. Disse isso no contexto em que sustentei que Lula é um dos vitoriosos dessa jornada infeliz porque voltou ao jogo sucessório. E não precisou fazer muita coisa para isso. Sua candidatura em 2014 é debatida a céu aberto no PT.

Fazer o quê? As pesquisas estão aí. Os miseráveis e os muito pobres não estão nas ruas. Lula fala com eles melhor do que qualquer grupo portando cartolinas. E já se articula freneticamente para fazer o que mais sabe: jogar brasileiros contra brasileiros. Os 52 milhões que são tocados, de algum modo, pelo Bolsa Família estão cantando e andando para o Passe Livre ou para protestos como “Hospitais Padrão Fifa”.

Alguns bobos acham — justo eu??? — que estou colaborando com o petismo quando faço essa crítica. Bobagem! Eu estou fazendo um alerta. Há motivos, sim, para protestos, mas não para esses ensaios meio grotescos de insurreição popular. “Ah, mas se tudo andasse às mil maravilhas…” Olhem aqui: com o processo de demonização da polícia a que assistimos, esse desdobramento era óbvio e cheguei a antevê-lo aqui. Pura lógica. Há mais causas contingentes do que de fundo. A economia vai mal, mas a ruindade ainda não chegou às ruas com esse força. Reconhecer a realidade ajuda a gente a não errar…

É claro que o PT mobilizará seus aparelhos ou para fazer frente a essa onda ou, como é mais provável, para surfar nela. Afinal, é o que estão fazendo hoje parlamentares, o governo federal e até ministros do Supremo. Quando a equação incluir os pobres, aí vamos ver. A torção à esquerda da política já se deu. Uma coisa é certa: enquanto o incentivo ao vandalismo (ver post anterior) for chamado de “movimento pacífico infiltrado por baderneiros”, os baderneiros continuarão a serviço do suposto “movimento pacífico”.

Será que eu “petizei”? Não é isso, não! Nunca esses caras me provocaram mais repulsa! É que existe um modo de combatê-los que os enfraquece, e existe um modo de combatê-los que os fortalece. Os métodos até agora empregados e incensados atuam contra a racionalidade administrativa, o estado democrático e a sociedade de direito. E quem conhece essa praia são as esquerdas, antes e depois do Facebook.

Encerro
Marina é de esquerda, ainda que modernosa. E é do pior tipo. Finge ser vegetariana, ou herbívora, para que possa ser mais eficientemente carnívora.

Pronto! Agora volto à minha viagem ao século 15, antes que o Brasil retorne ao… 19!

Poland is the latest country to ban kosher slaughter on the spurious grounds of humane treatment of animals. Last Friday, the Polish parliament rejected legislation from the Polish government that would have permitted kosher slaughter. New regulations from the European Community requiring animals to be stunned electronically before slaughter made it necessary for national governments to create an exception for religious practice. To its disgrace, Polish legislators refused to do so. This elicited condemnation by Jewish organizations and protests from the Israeli government.

No English-language media–and none of Jewish blogs–reported that the Polish Catholic Church defended the right of Jews to practice kosher slaughter — as did the Dutch Catholic Church when the same issue came up last year in the Netherlands. A friend in Poland sent me the statement of Bishop Mieczyslaw Cislo, President of the Polish Episcopate’ Committee for Dialogue with Judaism, defending the Jewish position: “Ritual slaughter in accordance with centuries-old religious Jewish tradition does not have to be in conflict with the principle of humane treatment of animals. [...] In case of conflict between modern sensibility to the rights of animals to be treated with dignity and the right to freedom of religion, you have to opt for the priority right to religious freedom because of its fundamental character.”

The Catholic Church as well as the Polish government are defending Jewish religious freedom. The persecutors of Jewish religious practice are the Polish left-wing parties. Commentary’s blog got that part of the story right:

The two main Polish political parties that opposed the government bill are not, as might reasonably be expected, populated by snarling right-wing skinheads. One of them, the Democratic Left Party, or SLD, was co-founded by Alexander Kwasniewski, who served as Poland’s president from 1995-2005. Throughout his time in office, Kwasniewski was feted by Jewish groups, particularly in the United States, for his strong stand against anti-Semitism; after leaving office, he was one of the backers of the European Council for Tolerance and Reconciliation, an organization that is unlikely to share the SLD’s revulsion for shechita.

The other party, the Palikot Movement (named for its founder, Janusz Palikot), is variously described as liberal, even libertarian. The party’s support for gay civil unions and the legalization of soft drugs are noteworthy in a country that remains socially conservative and devoutly Catholic. Yet one of Palikot’s leaders, Andrzej Rozenek, sounded like a traditional anti-Semite when he declared that “there is no permission for animal cruelty in the name of money”–the implication being that what really worries Jewish defenders of shechita is the loss of a $400 million dollar regional market for kosher goods produced in Poland.

Once again, it is the secular left that wants to forbid a fundamental aspect of Jewish religious observance. That was the case when the Dutch parliament tried to ban kosher slaughter in 2011, and again when a German court tried to ban circumcision in 2012. In both cases, the Catholic bishops of Holland and Germany respectively supported Jewish religious freedom. How long will it take American Jews to understand that the secular left are our worst enemies, and the Catholic Church is our best friend? In several posts on this site last year, I deplored the failure of the major American Jewish organizations (with the notable exception of Agudath Israel, the Haredi umbrella group) to oppose the Obama administration’s persecution of the Catholic Church, by forcing Church institutions to offer abortifacient drugs as well as birth control, contrary to Catholic religious doctrine. The Catholic Church is now the canary in the coal mine. If the religious freedom of the largest Christian denomination in the US is impaired, we Jews will be next.

Jews have long memories. Yesterday, observant Jews fasted on the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, and chanted liturgical poems mourning the mass murder of Rhineland Jews by marauding Crusaders in 1096. We do not need to forget past injuries by Christians in order to understand that we are now in the same foxhole with our Christian friends on the fundamental issue of religious freedom. It is not only shameful but self-damaging for Jews to turn their backs on the Church as it battles the worst assault on religious freedom in American history. Before World War II, the European right-wing parties tended to be anti-Semitic (and right-wing American isolationism was generally anti-Semitic as well). Things have changed. Militant secularism is now the greatest danger to freedom of religious observance.

Two postscripts for non-Jewish readers are in order.

First: Observance of dietary laws is so fundamental to Jewish practice that the greatest Modern Orthodox sage of the 20th century, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, emphasized that it is more important than prayer: Dietary laws were given to us at Mount Sinai, while the thrice-daily prayer services were instituted by the rabbis of antiquity after the fall of the Temple. Judaism brings eternity into everyday life, and the holiness of the body (through the dietary laws and the laws of family purity) are both a sine qua non of Jewish observance. To ban kosher slaughter is to ban the practice of Judaism.

Second: As I wrote in June 2011 (in Asia Times and the Dutch daily De Volksrant), the allegation that kosher slaughter is cruel to animals is a vicious lie.

Evidence is overwhelming that kosher slaughter is just as humane as any modern method of killing animals, and more humane as a matter of practice. The standard method in today’s slaughterhouses – shooting a bolt into the animal’s forehead – has a high failure rate, and animals frequently are shot several times before losing consciousness.

Temple Grandin, America’s foremost expert on humane treatment of cattle, published the definitive study on the subject in the May 2006 issue of the journal Anthropology of Food. Professor Grandin was the subject of an eponymous 2010 feature film.

Observing the slaughter of animals by a trained Jewish specialist, she reported: “I was relieved and surprised to discover that the animals don’t even feel the super-sharp place as it touches their skin. They made no attempt to pull away. I felt peaceful and calm.” More skill is required for humane slaughter without stunning, Grandin observes, but Jewish religious law requires special implements and a very high level of skill. Muslim halalslaughter, according to Grandin, has no such safeguards.

The Polish leftists who rejected the Polish government’s well-intended efforts to project Jewish religious freedom did so not because they care about animals (Poland allows hunting, and no-one has proposed to ban that), but because they hate religion in general and Jews in particular.