"His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a little, I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your master.'"
Toronto Raptor fans were disappointed when Chris Bosh decided to sign with Miami and to play with Lebron James and Dwayne Wade. This is perhaps the biggest investment error that a player like Bosh could have made.
Toronto fans have seen it before. Damon Stoudemire, Mighty Mouse, left Toronto to join the Portland Trailblazers. He went from “the man” to a role player, and his career was never even close to the same–but perhaps it’s only because he had a marijuana problem. Arguably Vince Carter has not done as well since leaving Toronto. Tracy McGrady left Toronto to escape Carter’s shadow, and it diminished his chances at a title, though not his scoring ability.
But Bosh’s decision is a little puzzling. Is a chance at being a contender immediately so important? What happened to the David Robinson approach of sticking with the same franchise and building brand for himself and for the city. Is that approach dead? Perhaps not with Kobe Bryant who is a Laker for life.
Bosh’s numbers are down across the board. I suggested to a friend that he would become the Lamar Odom of Miami (but Odom is much better rebounder); Bosh is not even second fiddle in Miami. In Toronto the offense revolved around getting it to the man, the go-to guy, Chris Bosh. Now, his shot attempts are down 33% from 16.5 attempts per game last season to 11 per game in Miami. Even more telling, his free throw attempts per game are down 45% from 8.4 to 4.7. He is not getting the touches–the ball-handlers James and Wade are getting theirs–but poor Bosh requires that someone pass to him. But there is no Jose Calderon in Miami. Wade and James will make the All Star team. But Bosh will only make the All Star team by sympathy vote.
If he had stayed in Toronto and built up a contender around himself, he had a chance of retaining his brand, an all star, perhaps an all-time great player. Now, the only chance he has of regaining his market capital is if he helps Lebron and Wade win a championship in Miami. But then he is not Lebron’s Scotty Pippen. He is more like Lebron’s Ron Harper or Tony Kukoc. He doesn’t rebound well enough to be Lebron’s Dennis Rodman.
As for whether Miami will win a championship any time soon, I have my doubts. The last time Bosh, Wade, and James played together on the same team, they lost to the Greek national team.
As a visiting professor in an African school that taught to the Master’s level I was once confronted with student who plagiarized a paper and failed the class as a result. The academic dean pleaded with me to give him a third chance after the student failed the mandatory remedial session with me. Thus, I permitted the student to take an oral examination, but he gave the most absurd answers to the most rudimentary questions of biblical history, such as he could not tell me the order of the empires, Persians, Greeks and Romans. Later, I was told that this student was a womanizer who spent as much time in the local neighborhood chasing skirt as he spent in class. It was hardly any surprise that he couldn’t pass his course with me. But to my chagrin, this student went on to defend his master’s thesis and graduated, while the course he had with me was pre-requisite to entering the final year at the master’s level–a course he never passed. Now this man is apparently a Bible professor in the capital city of his country.
I present this anecdote only to say that sometimes the diploma from a school is a meaningless paper, inflated like so much fiat money that is printed endlessly to the point of being worth nothing. Perhaps this story is a no-brainer. What should we do with an incompetent womanizer? Fail him of course. He has no business having a theological degree.
But what if it is the case of an extremely brilliant but wrong-headed student? I have become somewhat of a nemesis to PoserorProphet, a self-stylized biblical scholar who is finishing his Master’s degree at Regent College. And yet he has serious problems in biblical interpretation. But he is able to defend his point, albeit with subtle and specious arguments, with such brilliance that he could easily pass any academic program at a secular university. So now it puts theological educators in an awkward position: are we to serve the church and the Kingdom of God, or are we to serve secular academic standards? If the student can put together a specious heretical argument for a position, does that mean he deserves to pass so that he can then serve his heresy to the world, but now bearing the recognition of a theological degree from a once reputable institution? Or should the school risk legal sanction for failing a student who is brilliant, academically gifted and yet theological off-the-wall? There is a great deal at stake here. I don’t see that there is simple answer. But as a teacher of exegesis and biblical interpretation I have some serious problems with what I see.
We have had lengthy discussions with this student, PoserorProphet, who though attending an evangelical school has openly advocated full equal rights to practicing homosexuals in the church; the acrobatics that it takes to get around the biblical prohibition against homosexuality is already reason to have grave concerns. But this student, in his embrace of liberation theology, has also taken passages like “Thou shalt not steal” to mean something like, “Thou shalt not not share”, thus twisting the plain sense of the text. But then he also has recently advocated vandalism, such as done by anarchist demonstrators, through the texts recounting Jesus’ cleansing the temple, Jesus’ allowing the demons called “Legion” to enter into and kill a herd of swines and Jesus’ tacit approval of the the digging up of the roof to lower the paralytic, thus doing property damage to the house. The main difficulty is that the Bible isn’t teaching that it is ok for us to go out and vandalize to support a higher cause, i.e., the poor and marginalized. It has another agenda about which PoserorProphet seems quite unconcerned. Through his exegesis, the Bible serves his liberation agenda. In a discussion over at the City of God, I said that his “exegesis” is like that of the Marxist in the Fiddler on the Roof: He recounts how Laban cheated Jacob, causing him to marry Leah while the original contract gave Jacob the right to marry Rachel. Now, Laban required Jacob to work another seven years to pay for Rachel. The Marxist’s conclusion: The Bible teaches us that you can never trust an employer! See the clip at 1:07:
Even the milkman’s daughter can see through this Marxist interpretation. It is a moment of light humor. But PoserorProphet is not joking. He’s serious. And yet his interpretations are hardly less ridiculous.
As an undergraduate in Dr. Pecota’s Principles of Interpretation course, I was required to read James Sire’s Scripture Twisting: 20 ways cults misread the Bible (see this summary). Part of the art of biblical interpretation is knowing how not to do it. So Sire’s book is a lesson in good interpretation by avoiding pitfalls. PoserorProphet actually commits a fair number of these 20 ways of twisting Scripture: I would mention: 11. Selective citing; 12. Inadequate evidence; 14. Ignoring alternate explanations; 18. Supplementing biblical authority (with such writers as Michel Foucault!); 19. Rejecting biblical authority; and 20. World-view confusion (confusing his anarchist views with the Bible). Thus, a basic undergraduate course in theology already would provide the ability to see how PoserorProphet is twisting the Bible, and yet today, it is apparently ok for him to defend a Master’s thesis in biblical studies. There is no questioning his brilliance. It is his judgment that I challenge. But is it the task of theological education to produce brilliant heretics? Or are we rather to produce graduates who will serve the church and the Kingdom of God. If we knowingly pass even one such student, does that not call into question the whole enterprise?
The recognition that a theological diploma establishes should not be considered lightly. Since the early church, Christian heretics have sought recognition from authorities who stood in apostolic succession. For example, according to Irenaeus, Marcion once approached Polycarp and made a request: “Recognize me.” Polycarp responded in a manner which I think was appropriate, “I recognize you; I recognize the first-born of Satan.” Polycarp was following the example that Paul laid down (Tit. 3.10-11):
As for a man who is factious, after admonishing him once or twice, have nothing more to do with him, knowing that such a person is perverted and sinful; he is self-condemned.
In an article at the Weekly Standard, “American Narcissus“, Jonathan V. Last has compiled a very comprehensive list of anecdotal evidence of Obama’s narcissism. He even mentions the story of a beloved classmate of Obama at Harvard Law school that they had a Obamameter:
“One of our classmates once famously noted that you could judge just how pretentious someone’s remarks in class were by how high they ranked on the ‘Obamanometer,’ a term that lasted far longer than our time at law school. Obama didn’t just share in class—he pontificated. He knew better than everyone else in the room, including the teachers. ”
Obama’s career before becoming a senator suggests that affirmative action played a large role. Last outlines how the University of Chicago wanted him as a faculty member because he was the editor of the Harvard Law Review and an African American. With the effects of affirmative action policy in full bloom, Obama is the first affirmative action president, and has become an utter failure of incompetence. This demonstrates why we must fully reject affirmative action and diversity hiring.
My in-laws have traveled to India four times. In their first trip in 2004, vendors happily quoted them prices and accepted payment in US dollars. They returned from their last trip a few days ago to say that vendors no longer accept US dollars. Is this another sign that US dollar is losing its status as the reserve currency of the world?
Well good news to investors comes today from an agreement between Ottawa and Beijing to allow Chinese insurers access to the capital markets in Canada, which would bring in potentially billions of new dollars into the TSX and the Canadian bond market; this will undoubtedly help push up asset prices in our relatively small market, as the Chinese seek to diversify their holdings out of US Treasury instruments. The Finacial Post says:
The China insurance pact comes on the heels of the decision by Ottawa to stop a proposed bid by Australia’s BHP Billiton Ltd. to acquire Saskatoon-based Potash Corp. The ruling sparked widespread worry among policy experts that Canada would find it difficult in the future to attract foreign investment, which is required to help boost innovation, domestic competition and lacklustre productivity.
The Financial Post suggests this is welcome news in the light of recent events. The Canadian journalist community had convinced themselves that the failed Potash bid of Australian mining company BHP would send a negative message to foreign investors. However, according to a very thorough article in the Globe and Mail on the failed deal, the fault lies entirely with BHP, starting with their low-balling the initial bid, making it so that neither the Potash board of directors nor the province of Saskatchewan were much interested in the offer. In other words, if you want Canadian assets, you better be ready to pay a premium for them, and that is as it should be. The BHP bid of $130, though 20% above the price of the day of the offer, was ridiculously below POT all time high over $244.
In my view, this is another reason to be bullish on the Canadian oil and gas sector. In China, there is a growing demand for energy and a diminishing stock pile, as the WSJ has pointed out (hat tip Devon Shire). I believe that the Chinese insurers will seek out energy stocks as one of their main interests, as they know their own demand for the products will continue to force up the price. Meanwhile, there are still deals to be made in the TSX. For example, Petrobakken has made a serious dip since its quarterly report, as investors were disappointed with less than spectacular results caused by wet weather which hindered drilling. Penn West Energy and Pengrowth Energy are both dipping, having both been downgraded by TD Newcrest from Action Buy List, to Buy–based only on their recent, dramatic increase in share price.
The Righteous Investor 