Month: March 2010

Headlines that make laugh

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From the National Post website, March 20, 2010

It is in vogue to laugh at “goldbugs”.  The fact is that gold remains steady at $1100 and it seems to have found a new floor at US $1050, the price at which India will buy gold for their treasury reserves.  But a headline I saw on the National Post website, made me laugh:  “Gold plunges 1.8% in wake of strong US$”.  Perhaps, “nosedive” or “steep decline” or “precipitously fell”; but “plunges”?  But what’s really laughable is that the “plunge” was caused by a strong US$.  The US dollar has been anything but strong of late, at least from a Canadian perspective.  And frankly, if you bought gold any where below $1050, you’re laughing right now.  The US dollar is in trouble.  It’s just a matter of time before the inflation of the dollar becomes a major issue.

What’s wrong with affirmative action?

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Affirmative action openly favors women and certain visible minorities (Blacks, hispanics, First Nations); it discriminates against white men and even more so against high achieving minorities such as Asians and Jews.  In academics, throw out the CV’s of the majority and look only at the diverse candidates.   That is a recipe for a disastrous decline in standards and a glaring qualitative discrepancy not only between men and women in the field but between the different races.  I don’t see how that can create better education; if you want good education, you have to choose the best and brightest in the field; if that leads to having 100% of the professors in your faculty being Jewish or Asian men, then so be it.  Affirmative action is social engineering that breeds contempt and animosity, as do all forms of favoritism.  I  stopped looking for a job in academics for this reason.  It is an Atlas shrug.  Why bother sending in a CV if you know it will be thrown in the trash because it is not from a woman or a desired minority?  It is a waste of a postal stamp.  And given this experience, don’t expect me to celebrate “diversity” in higher learning.

This is why I like DIY investing.  It’s “welcome to the real world” time (the red pill), not some virtual academic experience (the blue pill) where all that really matters is diversity.  I don’t get special treatment or discrimination because I am a minority.  It’s just me and the market.  Imagine if some one said to you, “Oh because you are woman, we’re going to lower your commission rate”, or “We will give you $0.50 per share more for your stock sales.”

Affirmative action is the tacit admission that you can’t make it without some special help.  It is a confession that you are too dumb to make it without our help.  It is the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Half-Korean basketball players for social justice and egalitarianism!

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I got into this discussion at Prof. Stackhouse’s blog about affirmative action.  I contended that it has watered down academics by filling empty academic posts first from the handful of women candidates instead of also taking into consideration the much larger pool of white angry males.  When Wayne Park called this point into question, I wrote:

I for one do not believe that the sacrifice of quality at the altar of diversity has been beneficial to academic standards in higher learning. Before I started job hunting, one of the colleagues in my field, explained to me how they did a job search at his California University (this was in circa 1994). He testified that they would receive maybe 100 applications. They would take the 95 or so from men and file them in the trash. Then they would choose three from the five women applicants and interview them, and then choose the best candidate from those three.

This means then that a woman can find a job in academics quite easily and men have a much harder time. This scenario is confirmed even by Prof. Stackhouse own confession above. Faculties will go out of their way to “recruit” women; but to hire a man, they just have to post the position and the applications come in.

The same holds true for racial minorities of the correct sort–forget it if you are either Jewish or Asian; that won’t help, because these are over-represented minorities–in fact only the best Chinese or Jewish kids can even get into some schools.

Now imagine if they did this with the NBA. Ok. We are going to give half-Korean men (they are underrepresented in the NBA, quelle horreur!) and females the preference for hiring. How long would it be before people would stop even watching the NBA and just start watching European league basketball instead? But in academics they’ve been selecting the team not to win championships (based strictly on the people with the best talent and the strongest dossier) but to create diversity–then telling the entire world that the team is better because of it. Well perhaps the faculty page on the website looks less monolithic, but I would rather watch European league academics where the concept of diversity has been much slower in catching on.

Wayne Park then proceeded to insinuate that I believed that white Europeans are more intellectual than other races, not to mention that he found my comments demeaning to women.  Also, he did not like that I used “sarcasm”.  My comment about half-Korean men in the NBA was the point of contention and he did not find the analogy helpful.  I guess I made the mistake of forgetting that I guy named “Dunn” should not assume that guy name “Park” would immediately understand such a line to be self-deprecating humor but would perhaps consider it instead an attack on Koreans in general. But maybe it is a good question:  why aren’t there more half Koreans in the NBA?

Where am I supposed to go after all?  Studies have shown that half Koreans excel in the academy, and so we find no special treatment there.  If anything, we are lumped with other over-acheiving Asians and discriminated against.  Full Koreans in Korea generally appreciate purity– have you ever played the Asian game Mah Jong? My Korean grandparents taught me when I was eleven; the game rewards every conceivable form of purity and eschews mixture: a game with a mixture of pung and chow is called a “chicken hand” and is considered worthless.  I am a person of Korean and white race (mostly Scottish) and am therefore a “chicken” person.  So I won’t get any special favors if I went to Korea.  The special word for half-breed in Korea is togee or something like that.  I learned the word years ago from an article about a poor, starved half-Korean girl who was adopted by American parents.

So even though I have a degree from the University of Cambridge, and very high g.p.a. from both Regent College and my undergraduate studies, nobody has ever offered me a full-time job in academics.  So I feel free to express bigoted comments about the academy, though I have many friends who are academics.  When you hear about how people bend over backwards to hire blacks African-Americans, Hispanics, white et al. women, and First Nations, it’s maddening.  I mean I’ve often considered changing my last name to Muktuk and saying that I grew up in Bethel, Alaska, of a Yupik father and a white mother–I know just enough of the language to be able to fake it in the interview, arigato very much.  My brother’s best friend in high school was half Yupik, half white, and looked a lot like him, and their teachers mixed them up. So I could do it, and then I’d be on the short list for every job I applied for.

So why not the NBA?  Why shouldn’t social justice and egalitarianism for half Koreans start with the NBA?  My high school basketball coach did a short stint with the LA Lakers, but I don’t think he really liked me, and he certainly gave me no playing time; he seemed to prefer the high-flying African Americans to me and my steady set shot.  Ok, so I’m 5 ft, 9 8 in. with 26.5 inch inseam.  My standing vertical jump is about six inches.  But I can shoot a mean three-point shot; the NBA player that I try to emulate is Steve Kerr.  My high scoring game was 44 points; it was circa 1984 at Northwest College, an intramural game–ok, I admit that the other team only had four players.  So I think in order to give half Koreans a step up, they should get preferential treatment in the NBA.  Every single NBA team should be required by law and social pressure to hire at least one half Korean.  I volunteer to play on the Raptors.  I would be at the same time the first half-Korean and the oldest player in NBA history.

The one great thing about DIY trading is that nobody asks you your race when you trade, unlike the US census.  It’s anonymous.  And as a half Korean, a member of a despised group both in Korea and in the other half of the world, I find great solace and refuge in that anonymity.

Streams of Justice: Against recycling

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The latest endorsement from Streams of Justice, Dave Diewert’s social justice group, is of “The One ‘R’ Posse”:

Communiqué from The One ‘R’ Posse!

Operation Knock Over Recycle Bin and Strew The Contents All Over The Street!
Just say no to Recycling! If you Reduce and Reuse, there is no need to Recycle. Recycling is just a way for capitalism to ride the back of environmentally conscious people with out ever having to actually change their fundamental system.

In Seattle during the anti-WTO convergence, in 1999, we set a dumpster of cardboard recycling on fire. This action was widely misconstrued as a bunch of hooligan police provocateurs attempting to besmirch the good name of respectable protesters and rioters alike.

Our goal in Operation Set Cardboard Dumpster On Fire was to prevent the recycling trucks from coming to pick it up, using fossil fuels and ever increasing road networks to bring it to the recycling depot, process it then transport it in more trucks to factories to manufacture it into goods consumers would drive their cars to malls to yet again purchase, starting this whole ‘recycling’ charade all over again. How many times can one recycled box be recycled before the recycling process itself becomes just another toxic pollutant!

After being lambasted in the corporate media and ruthlessly chastised by all factions in the Left, we stopped everything we were doing and retreated to re-evaluate and perfect our strategies. After a decade of intensive internal theoretical and strategic development, we finally returned, only to find our actions meeting the same merciless critique by our allies.

On Feb 13, 2010 as part of the convergence against the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, the One ‘R’ Posse knocked over a recycle bin in solidarity with the Left, and to move forward our own cause of stopping the ‘recycling’ ruse consumers have been duped into by so called environmentalists who are decreasing their carbon footprint with one foot while just making another one with the other foot!

The One ‘R’ Posse took into consideration that setting that cardboard dumpster on fire, while preventing the production of greenhouse gasses in transport and manufacturing only added to Global Warming by adding milligrams of smoke into the atmosphere. After being thrust into the global spotlight of criticism and a decade of internal reflection, we changed our tactic. We realized the world just wasn’t prepared for the radical reality of a dumpster fire. We needed to take action that makes sense under current social conditions. Littering was the solution we chose. City workers were thus employed to clean up the plastic bottles, creating jobs and showing solidarity with Union workers. At the same time Environmentalist NGO’s can rest easy that no carbon emissions were unnecessarily created. Workers and environmentalists are finally united over the same bin!

This is beyond satire. I’ve tried to satirize these people. But the reality is so much more farcical and ridiculous than any satire that I could imagine.

This sort of thing on the part of Christian social justice group makes Glenn Beck’s recent statements seem not only justified but eminently fair and sober minded:

In recent radio show, that was broadcast on more than 400 affiliates, he told his listeners to leave any church that uses the phrases “social justice” or “economic justice.” “I beg you, look for the words ’social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site,” he said.

“If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!” He went on to say, “If you have a priest pushing social justice go find another parish. Go alert your bishop and tell them. [Ask them] are you down with this whole social justice thing?”   (Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/; The National Post is now on Facebook. Join our fan community today.)

Of course in the National Post article did not interview Canadian theologian Dr. Craig Carter who has a series on the problem with the term “social justice” that pretty much agrees, in a sophisticated manner, with Glenn Beck’s warnings.

Craig Carter did two recent posts on “social justice”:

What is my beef with social justice I

What is my beef with social justice II

O Anarchist, Where is your faith?

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Christian anarchists, communists, and socialists seem to view the economic world as a pie.  You can only cut it up so many ways.  So if a rich person has a lot of money, then he has a larger portion of the pie.  For them, economics is a zero-sum game.  A poker game is a zero sum game:  at the end of the game there is only as much money as what the players originally brought to table–it’s redistributed differently, but its the same amount of money.  Thus, in the view of these people, if wealthy Christians have money, they have defrauded the poor.  That is why perhaps they support political systems that would force the wealthy to relinquish their riches; but in the end, where ever such a system is tried, everyone ends up living in dire poverty; communism shrinks the pie.  We’ve seen it in dozens of countries.  In my view, these Christians do not understand economics nor do they have sufficient faith in God:  “And without faith it is impossible to please him. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Heb 11.6).

My goal as a wanna-be righteous investor is to increase the size of the pie.  Christian ministries don’t usually generate wealth themselves but depend upon Christian men and women who work jobs or who have successful businesses or other investments.  Those ministries like Streams of Justice which aim toward political advocacy requiring more funding for the poor will have a negative impact on the bottom line of these Christians and decrease their ability to give.  If we are smart, Christians donors must begin to resist the politics of envy and so-called Christians ministries which have lost faith in a big God and instead turned to big government for solutions.

I found an example of envy and of lack of vision on PoserorProphet’s blog, where he, in his typically jaundiced and imbalanced fashion, criticizes a large Vancouver church for mistreatment of the poor. The sycophants of his blog–I call them that because I’ve learned that if like me you are highly critical of Poser, he will not even allow you to comment on his blog–some of the sycophants of his blog believe that Broadway Church has defrauded the poor with the buildings which are “a country club” for its members.  The Pastor of Broadway, Darin Latham came online and defended the ministries of his church, saying that they do devote considerable resources to helping the poor:

You failed to mention, however, that hundreds of thousands of those dollars we raise feed over 150 homeless every Sunday morning of every week of the year, plus we supply groceries to 120 families every week, free of charge. We also run a free clothing depot… Not to mention a few geared to income housing complexes we operate throughout the city.

But despite his efforts, some of Poser’s readers were unimpressed:

Subversivechurch writes (sic):

Notice Darin does not touch on the topic of the operating expenses (salaries, ultilities, upkeep, etc.). And the chances are pretty high that he won’t either because when people start looking at the revenue… I mean income… I mean tithes of a church and where they go, you start to see why I refer to the IC [institutional church] as a country club. The amount of money that stays within the IC for the benefit of the members is vastly greater than the money that is used outside of the building. [snip]

Would a congregation realize that if they hadn’t built such a large structure, they could have helped a mother avoid depression by feeding and clothing her child, or a father not decend into violence because he can’t find work and feed his family?

Pastor Darin rightly defended his church as having the building to do all kinds of ministry: Christian education, counseling and worship.  For the subversives, the only thing they know is envy which sees economics as a zero sum game and God as so puny that he cannot provide all of our needs according to his riches in glory.  So they begrudge the church’s use of an expensive PA system:  Envy.  So why not have big mega-church?  Personally, I don’t like mega-churches and I think they come with their own challenges.  But if God called the founders of Broadway Church to build a mega church, then that is up to God, isn’t it?  I will testify, however, that the one time that I suffered from want I was helped by Frank Merriwether, who was at the time a College & Career Pastor at Broadway.  So I owe a debt of gratitude to that church.  Why is it that these arrogant anarchists believe that their agenda is the only one that Christians should concern themselves with.  They insist:  become like the poor, become homeless, identify with poor homeless, have solidarity with the poor–the whole world revolves around the poor.  Yet the homeless in Vancouver number about 3000.   I hate to tell you this, but there is over 600,000 people in that city and they all have spiritual needs, every single precious one of them.  It is not just about the poor.  It is about reaching out to the grandmother whose grandchild was killed in an accident and she can’t pray anymore.  It is about the parents who live in an upscale neighborhood whose daughter can’t be found.  It is about that depressed computer programmer who wants to swallow a bottle of pills.  It is about the widower who lies awake at night wondering if God is there. It’s about teaching kids about God in Sunday school; it’s about helping young people find their vocation in the Lord; it’s about helping the working poor and the working well-off, because we have spiritual needs too.  God cares for the poor, but he also cares for every single one of the rest of us too.  And it is about that guy at Regent College who was lonely and ran out of money while waiting for his student loan cheque.  John 3.16 says that God so loved the poor, right?  No, God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son …  And what about these passages:

The Lord is not slow about his promise as some count slowness, but is forbearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. (2 Peter 3.9)

This is good, and it is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. (1 Tim 2.3-4)

For to this end we toil and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of those who believe. (1 Tim 4.10)

But why can’t a church like Broadway, if some have a vision, have strategic ministries for the poor (which they do) and keep their building?  Is God so weak that he can’t provide both everything the church needs to pay for that wonderful facility and staff in addition to ministries for the poor?  Where is your faith?  These people have a puny view of economics and they have a puny god.

What happened to the Pauline concept of the body of Christ?  Isn’t it possible to have some people care for the poor and others who care for the elderly?  Some to care for the teens and others who dedicate their time to missions?  Why should the toe or eye say I don’t need you?  Why should the belly button say if you aren’t a belly button and do exactly what I do, you are not a member of the body, and you are not doing what you should be doing for the Kingdom.  Poppycock!

The Christian God, the one and only God, is big, and he has the resources of glory at his disposal.  He can provide Broadway Church both with resources to maintain their church building and to provide for the poor, as he calls the congregation to movement.  It is just simply silly to suggest that God would insist that they use that facility for the homeless or as a warehouse for feeding the poor, etc., when it is used by the congregation for worship, Christian education, and all the other ministries.  Beware, these anarchists are trying to sow seeds of dissension and envy, and the rest of us, the evil institutional church people, don’t have to put up with it.