- Psalm 49:5-9

Something I’ve struggled with for a while now in unrighteous bitterness is looking at how things are going in this country and in fact the world, how the mega-rich along with elitist politicians, make out like literal bandits, bankrupting an entire nation, profiting on the way up and on the way down, not giving one iota of gratitude to the God who grants that they should have what they have; how our democratic society largely isn’t engaged in what is going on at a local or national level, other than sound bites they hear through various propaganda machines; how politicians work in tandem with big corporations to mess the average person over for their own personal gain, all the while exempting themselves; how the middle class is quickly being sidelined into either the elites or the poor, and on and on. I’ve become discouraged and at times feel some sense of hopelessness when looking at the situation.

Then I read the Psalm above, Psalm 49:5-9 in particular, and I am reminded of the situation of us all, including those who have massive amounts of accumulated stuff and power. These people who want control over the lives of others, who want to illicitly gain billions of dollars while your average family is struggling to make ends meet (at their expense too, mind you), it’s all very disheartening, until you consider their end. I’m reminded of this in these verses. And I’m not reminded in the way of boasting or gloating, but one of sadness that they have no idea what is coming: a severely bitter end, for eternity. And their wealth accumulation and their stuff is not going with them. They cannot ever, ever have so much money or power so as to buy God off. He operates on a principle they are not privy to: one of grace through faith in Christ.

One of the reasons I’ve become discouraged in this regard has to do with the fact that I myself have set my eyes upon the hear and now, looking only at what is going on without considering the sovereign of Christ involved in it all. He sees and knows all things, including what every high-tech, power-hungry crook is up to. And on this point, He knows what I’m up to. And it’s sin. I haven’t trusted Him with my all on these points of frustration and frankly unbelief. And after having been reminded of the end of those who in rank unbelief oppress the masses, I turn to myself and my own heart. And in many ways it’s not all that different, just difference of visibility. I too need the cleansing, regeneration and restoration of Christ’s power. It has been very comforting keeping all things, including the deeds of others who have great power over us, under the umbrella of His sovereign love and power that transcends any of what they possess.

1 O Lord, rebuke me not in your anger,
nor discipline me in your wrath!
2 For your arrows have sunk into me,
and your hand has come down on me.

3 There is no soundness in my flesh
because of your indignation;
there is no health in my bones
because of my sin.
4 For my iniquities have gone over my head;
like a heavy burden, they are too heavy for me.

5 My wounds stink and fester
because of my foolishness,
6 I am utterly bowed down and prostrate;
all the day I go about mourning.
7 For my sides are filled with burning,
and there is no soundness in my flesh.
8 I am feeble and crushed;
I groan because of the tumult of my heart.

9 O Lord, all my longing is before you;
my sighing is not hidden from you.
10 My heart throbs; my strength fails me,
and the light of my eyes—it also has gone from me.
11 My friends and companions stand aloof from my plague,
and my nearest kin stand far off.

17 For I am ready to fall,
and my pain is ever before me.
18 I confess my iniquity;
I am sorry for my sin.

21 Do not forsake me, O Lord!
O my God, be not far from me!
22 Make haste to help me,
O Lord, my salvation!

There is a burden and heaviness in his heart for his sinning against God. It is dragging his very soul down with great weight and power. He describes himself as being in over his head with sinning. He knows only the Lord is His salvation that can rescue him from this plight.

This is not just dramatic poetry or emotional, over-done rhetoric. This is the reality of all of our hearts before the Lord. We are sinners to the core, even (and especially) as believers. In acknowledging ourselves to be in this bad of a condition (not merely mistake-makers) we put ourselves in a position to see the greatest of the cross that redeemed our lives from eternal death.

As backward as it may seem to the world, in being this negative toward ourselves and then looking to Christ alone for the remedy, we  position ourselves properly, in godly humility, to see that we have been made right by the blood of Christ alone and that nothing within ourselves is worth saving. He alone saves us and makes us right. We do nothing to contribute anything toward our salvation as we have no righteousness of ourselves. And setting ourselves properly in this context is the single most comforting and satisfying thing in all the world. But we must be ready and willing to admit ourselves as being this bad. This is itself true confession.

• 1 Bottle Llano Sweet Red Table Wine
• 1/2 Cup Vodka, or more to taste
• 1 Bottle Pellegrino Sparking Water
• 1 Large Orange (2 small)
• 2 Limes
• 1 Large Lemon (2 small)
• 1 Green Apple
• 3/4 Cup Sugar,  add more to taste after putting everything together before chilling.
• A large, preferablly glass pitcher for presentation (you eat and drink with your eyes first :] ).

1. Slice up (1/2 large, 1 small) orange, 1 lime, (1/2 large, 1 small) lemon, 1 green apple, and put the slices in the pitcher.
2. Pour in the whole bottle of wine.
3. Pour in vodka.
4. Pour in sugar.
5. Using other pieces of fruit, squeeze the juice out of the (small) / (1/2 large) orange, lime, and (small) / (1/2 large) lemon into pitcher and stir it all together.
6. Pour in about 3/4 a bottle of Pellegrino sparking water and stir again.
7. Immediately cover (so you don’t lose the fizz from the sparkling water) and chill for approximately 1 hour. For fruitier taste, chill longer, like over night.
8. Serve over ice in an 8-12 oz glass or wine glass.
9. Don’t forget to eat the sangria-soaked fruit! Yum.

The numbers tell the story. A couple of articles in particular are pointing to this fact. One on CNBC, the other by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Telegraph. In addition, even liberal, Keynesian economist Paul Krugman from the New York Times is calling this the beginning of the Third Depression, as I talked about in my last entry. He is dead wrong on how to fix it, but his diagnosis is correct.

With the US trapped in depression, this really is starting to feel like 1932 – Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Telegraph

“Let us be honest. The US is still trapped in depression a full 18 months into zero interest rates, quantitative easing (QE), and fiscal stimulus that has pushed the budget deficit above 10pc of GDP.

“Roughly a million Americans have dropped out of the jobs market altogether over the past two months. That is the only reason why the headline unemployment rate is not exploding to a post-war high.

“The average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks. Nothing like this has been seen before in the post-war [World War II] era. Jeff Weninger, of Harris Private Bank, said this compares with a peak of 21.2 weeks in the Volcker recession of the early 1980s.

“The share of the US working-age population with jobs in June actually fell from 58.7pc to 58.5pc. This is the real stress indicator. The ratio was 63pc three years ago. Eight million jobs have been lost.

“The housing market is already crumbling as government props are pulled away. The expiry of homebuyers’ tax credit led to a 30pc fall in the number of buyers signing contracts in May. “It is cataclysmic,” said David Bloom from HSBC.

“Federal tax rises are automatically baked into the pie. The Congressional Budget Office said fiscal policy will swing from
a net +2pc of GDP to -2pc by late 2011. The states and counties may have to cut as much as $180bn.”

Wow. Good news! Right. The thing is Austrian economists predicted this exact scenario several years before it started to unfold, even during the boom times. The one thing many got wrong was a scenario entailing hyper-inflation. This is clearly panning out to be a deflationary depression. The core problem at the root of the financial crisis was debt and complex, exotic financial instruments leveraged against that debt (CDO’s, Derivatives, MBS’s, etc). Once the housing market began its tumble, the house of cards came tumbling down and the economy down with it.

Simple logic says that trying to solve an economic problem caused by debt with more debt is like a heroin addict trying to solve his addiction with more heroin. The problem is that the more we keep putting off the inevitable deep collapse and restructuring the economy needs, the worse the collapse will be, just as the more heroin an addict uses makes his withdrawal worse. This is not hard to understand and it doesn’t take a Ph.D in economics to figure out.

Dow Repeats Great Depression Pattern: Charts – CNBC

“The Dow Jones Industrial Average is repeating a pattern that appeared just before markets fell during the Great Depression, Daryl Guppy, CEO at Guppytraders.com, told CNBC Monday.

“‘Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it…there was a head and shoulders pattern that developed before the Depression in 1929, then with the recovery in 1930 we had another head and shoulders pattern that preceded a fall in the market, and in the current Dow situation we see an exact repeat of that environment,’ Guppy said.”

Instead of talking about the rest of that though, how exactly is this going to impact the church? I believe this will be an incredibly good thing as the church and the Gospel are concerned. As gold is refined through the fire, so God will sovereignly use (and has even purposed) this hard time to refine His church, His bride. Nothing stands, comes about or exists outside of His sovereign ordination.

As John Hendryx said in an interview with the Internet Monk a number of years ago, things like this can serve to burn off the dross in our churches, that is, those who are merely nominal Christians with no basis in true discipleship or true faith for that matter. There is great hope in worldly calamity oddly enough, as hard as that is. James speaks of this, as does Paul, as does Jesus and pretty much all of Scripture.

The hope in calamity is that we will begin to turn our attention more toward eternal things, namely the things of the Spirit and the Gospel, rather than Earthly things that have so captivated the American church for far too long. Will it be hard? Certainly. But we can be assured in calamity that God is for us because of the wounds Christ endured on behalf of His people. We will endure for eternity even while we suffer loss here. And in suffering loss, we will be refined and made more into the image of Christ. That is quite a hope.

Anyone else find it odd the “flash crash” (1000 point dow drop within a matter of minutes) happened right when Congress was negotiating rules regulating derivatives? Oh and oddly enough now, the rules around derivatives have been completely gutted as I understand it. There is rampant corruption and looting going on within the government and the larger corporate world, particularly the monolithic banks. This is not a free market but an oligarchy.

More generally, here are Davidowitz’s views on the economy at large. Even Paul Krugman from the New York Times is calling the Third Great Depression, though he’s completely wrong about the remedy (even more spending).

I know Carl Trueman from Reformation21 would appreciate this article. I don’t agree with every point, assumption or conclusion in this article (try to guess). But the broader, general points about American society being completely oblivious to the things that matter as far as democracy and our society is concerned are right on. I really sympathize with how this guy feels looking out over American society and seeing the utter banality of so much of what people are devoting their lives to. I don’t say this as one looking out and feeling better about myself, but one who mourns what is happening to society as a result of sin. You start talking about things going on in the news that matter and affect us collectively and privately and eyes glaze over, especially from people my age and younger. Most in our society, even confessed Christians, are obsessed with their image and their “brand”. Or if they’re not obsessed with themselves, they’re obsessed with the next new fad or movement or whatever. Few good quotes from the article:

The United States, locked in the kind of twilight disconnect that grips dying empires, is a country entranced by illusions. It spends its emotional and intellectual energy on the trivial and the absurd. It is captivated by the hollow stagecraft of celebrity culture as the walls crumble. This celebrity culture giddily licenses a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness and betrayal. Day after day, one lurid saga after another, whether it is Michael Jackson, Britney Spears or John Edwards, enthralls the country … despite bank collapses, wars, mounting poverty or the criminality of its financial class.

It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. Michael Jackson, from his phony marriages to the portraits of himself dressed as royalty to his insatiable hunger for new toys to his questionable relationships with young boys, had all these qualities. And this is also the ethic promoted by corporations … It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. It is the nationwide celebration of image over substance, of illusion over truth. And it is why investment bankers blink in confusion when questioned about the morality of the billions in profits they made by selling worthless toxic assets to investors.

We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. It is this perverted ethic that gave us investment houses like Goldman Sachs … that willfully trashed the global economy and stole money from tens of millions of small shareholders who had bought stock in these corporations for retirement or college. The heads of these corporations, like the winners on a reality television program who lied and manipulated others to succeed, walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses and compensation. The ethic of Wall Street is the ethic of celebrity. It is fused into one bizarre, perverted belief system and it has banished the possibility of the country returning to a reality-based world or avoiding internal collapse. A society that cannot distinguish reality from illusion dies.

Keep reading on.

With that said, here’s what I gathered from the President’s speech tonight on the oil crisis: in the words of our friendly, radical, self-admitted Communist, former Green Jobs Czar (appointed by President Obama I might add), Van Jones, “This movement is deeper than a solar panel! Deeper than a solar panel! Don’t stop there! Don’t stop there! We’re gonna change the whole system! We’re gonna change the whole thing. We’re not gonna put a new battery in a broken system. We want a new system. We want a new system!” (from Van Jones’ Powershift ’09 Keynote Address, Part1, Part 2, Part 3)

And what is that new system? A whole new way of living, a transformation of every aspect of our lives, from the top down. Energy, healthcare, economy, social services, politics, your private life, your income, all of it. The whole thing. They aren’t kidding. The radical environmental movement, and by radical I mean 21st century postmodern egalitarian environmental Marxism, has gotten in deep within the upper echelons of our government. They want an upheaval of our current system of governance. Some might call it a soft coup d’etat from the inside-out.

On a global scale, the US included in this picture, the new European Union President (unelected by the EU constituents, I might add) says it looks like this: “The Climate Conference in Copenhagen is another step forward towards the ‘global management of our planet.” Listen yourself. These things are happening right now, right under our noses and they threaten the freedom this nation has come to enjoy for more than a couple hundred years now.

Al Gore speaks of very similar things:

What I find particularly odd is how BP fits into this whole equation given above. Drudge linked this story after the President’s speech tonight: “BP was founding member of ‘cap-and-trade’ lobby.” Bizarro.

Well, our President is certainly wasting no time to push through draconian climate and energy legislation, that’s for sure, while millions of people and a coastline are in the middle of suffering from the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.63a128958094fb519016d188cf557e83.101&show_article=1

“‘In the same way that our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by 9/11, I think this disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come,’ he told Politico.com.”

“Obama said he would be making a fresh bid to get Congress to pass a major energy and climate bill.”

Good yet odd timing, I must say, Mr. President.

The Star-Telegram is reporting on a good friend of mine, Kent Pingel, whose site PingWi-Fi.com, appearing on the bottom of the menu column at the right, has been requested by Ping, Inc. to give up his site name and brand because they claim it conflicts with theirs. I mean the big guys can’t have anything that even comes close to their own name and brand right, so the exec’s can keep playing, well, golf? As the article reports, when Kent Pingel filed for a trademark on his site name and brand, he was immediately flagged down by Ping, Inc. and legally pursued to change the site name. The big guys against the little guy. There’s a lot of that going around these days. You can read the rest here.