The WindChime

Finances, The Economy, & Recession: What You Need To Know

2012-01-18T12:59:00.002+08:00

by Andrew Womack Ministries

To help you gain God's perspective on the current "recession" and how you can overcome it, Andrew Womack Ministries hosted a discussion with Paul Milligan, the new head of CBC third-year Business School. He has been a board member of AWMI for many years. Paul owns several companies, with over 1,200 employees, and just like AWMI, he has experienced unprecedented growth during this "recession."

Recently, Andrew Womack sat down with Paul and got an education on monetary matters, and Andrew thought of how much this would benefit many people during this "recession". So, they sat down again and discussed what's happening in some nations economically and what we can do about it. Andrew think this could make a big difference in people's attitude, faith, and prosperity. So, please take the time to watch the video.

Is There a Future for Mining in the Philippines?

2012-01-12T00:45:00.000+08:00

By: Ateneo School of Government

The Graduate School of Leadership and Public Service

This policy brief is based on years of research and stakeholder discussions on natural resource governance and conflict management conducted by the Ateneo School of Government (ASoG). The School has taken every effort to gather empirical data and to understand the concerns of all stakeholders, before synthesizing ideas and formulating recommendations for this policy brief. Most recently, the School invited representatives from relevant sectors to an academic conference on November 22, 2011, to discuss these ideas and recommendations. The School acknowledges the inputs of the experts and stakeholders who greatly contributed to the refinement of this document.

The Ateneo School of Government is neither for nor against mining, a priori, because that would be against its principle of fostering the development of new ideas and approaches that bridge the gap between classroom wisdom and real-world policy decision-making and governance. However, the School does not shy away from taking a principled stand on issues, after rigorous examination of facts and engaging stakeholders with different perspectives in honest and candid discussions. Ultimately, this policy brief is not a consensus document, and ASoG is solely responsible for the views and contents presented.

This policy brief answers ten key questions related to mining and governance:

What is the nature of mining in the Philippines?
Why does mining generate conflicts?
Is mining beneficial to the country and to indigenous and local communities?
What are the real costs of doing mining in the Philippines?
How do we understand risks and conduct a cost-benefit analysis?
What is responsible mining, as applied to the Philippines?
What operational conditions must be met to conduct responsible mining in the Philippines?
What actions must the government take towards the management of responsible mining?
What interim measures must the government take while appropriate mining governance is instituted?
What is the future of mining in the Philippines?

1. What is the nature of mining in the Philippines?

The Philippines is a country rich in mineral resources that would be worth trillions of pesos if sold today (PhP47 trillion, according to a leader in the mining industry). These mineral resources are located within our lands or under our seas, both of which locations are also rich in other living or non-living resources that sustain economic activities such as farming, eco-tourism, and fishing. Mining operations necessarily involve the alteration of the land or seabed, such that people who use the land or sea for settlement and/or livelihood are likely to be displaced by mining operations. The lands where mineral resources are located may also have cultural or ecological values not easily measured in monetary terms.

The benefits derived from mining must balance its costs on people and the environment. Compensation for losses must be provided on top of the rightful share of the country and local people of the income from mineral wealth.

Minerals are non-renewable resources. Therefore, mining operations have a limited lifespan. The scale of alteration or disturbance resulting from mining operations (spatial and temporal) depends on the type of minerals, size of deposit, type of technology used, economic feasibility, and similar factors. The impacts on the environment and people, at any scale, depend on unique local factors: customary traditions and practices, uniqueness of natural ecosystems, risk of accidents brought by natural disasters, availability of livelihood alternatives, or the general ability of people and ecosystems to adjust to the scale of alteration or disturbance. The extent of alteration or disturbance resulting from mining operations may be limited to the period of operations and controlled to minimize its adverse impacts. However, the impacts on the environment and on people generally last longer than the mining operations, and may or may not be reversible. The impacts of mining operations in the Philippines are magnified because their scale is large compared to the total area and population affected (often in small islands, with many communities living in the area intended for mining, with high risk of natural disasters). This is in contrast to the impact of mining operations in continental settings (e.g., Australia, Canada, the United States) where the size of mining operations is small compared to the vastness of the continent, with a sparse population and less diverse natural ecosystems. Mining operations are either large-scale or small-scale, depending on the perspective of regulating the mining operator relative to the size of its operations. The policy criteria for categorizing small- versus large-scale mining do not always match the criteria for determining the scale of environmental impacts or economic benefits.

2. Why does mining generate conflicts?

The conflicts in mining generally relate to the following questions:

Should mining prevail over current land-uses?
Are the benefits from mining sufficient and fairly distributed?
Are the social and environmental costs fully considered and compensated?
Are the risks of adverse impacts reduced to a minimum and socially acceptable to those who bear them?
When local stakeholders decide that the risks are unacceptable, can the national government override that decision based on broader criteria?
Does small-scale mining provide more equitable access to resources? At what cost?

For each of these issues, the fundamental questions are: Who has the right to decide? How are decisions made, and on what basis? According to the current legal framework, the State decides these matters, acting as owner of the mineral resources and as protector of the interests of those who may be adversely affected. However, the State recognizes that stakeholders have the right to participate in decision-making and even to decide on some issues for themselves (e.g., free and prior informed consent [FPIC] of indigenous peoples). Since the right to decide is a matter of State recognition, there are also conflicts about how the State decides on who participates in decision-making, and to what extent their participation affects the final decision. The dynamics of “who decides” keep changing as policies change. The net effect is the absence of stability and consistency in decision-making. Conflicts persist.

How are decisions made, and on what basis? Conflicts about mining can only be resolved after examining the facts by answering: How many occupants are affected? How much production is there? How much water is needed? How much pollution is generated? What is the probability of adverse impacts? How many workers are employed? These facts are not readily available to those who have the responsibility to decide. Gathering and analyzing the data require experts’ inputs and considerable time and money. Understanding these inputs and applying the knowledge to the decision-making process require a certain level of skill. The law places the burden of data generation and analysis on the mining applicant because the studies must relate to the applicant’s proposed activities, and because of the considerable costs. This raises questions about the independence and credibility of the information and analysis.

The people tasked to decide or participate in decision-making have problems securing and effectively using reliable information because:

Sources of information (e.g., experts) are not acceptable to all;
Methods and/or outputs are insufficient or not fully relevant to the decision needed;
Information is in a form that is not easily understood by stakeholders;
Access to information is limited; and
Information is unobtainable or unknowable given available resources.

The law requires experts to evaluate the data gathered and recommend actions to decision-makers or stakeholders. The quality of expert advice may vary considerably, thus decisions might be made based on inaccurate, insufficient or unreliable information – or not based on any data at all. Such decisions are then subject to challenge and reconsideration. The net effect is unreliability of decision-making. Conflicts persist.

When decisions and decision-making are inconsistent or unstable because of the lack of empirical bases, stakeholders tend to appeal to the highest power that can enforce a decision in their favor. This opens up venues for arbitrary decision-making based on factors other than facts. The problem is that decision-makers, even at the highest levels, change with every election. The incumbent may have a different appreciation of particular situations depending on his agenda and what sectors have more political influence. The net effect is policy uncertainty and more conflicts.

Case 1. Here is an example of inconsistency in decision-making on land-use in Palawan:

MacroAsia Corporation, the flagship of one of the country’s most prominent business conglomerates, is applying for local permits to operate its 25-year lease awarded by the national government, on a property in the town of Brooke’s Point that partly overlaps with a protected area on Mt. Mantalingahan. Two other mining companies – Ipilan Nickel Mining Corp. and Lebach Mining Corp. – are in earlier stages of mining project development, trying to secure all the local endorsements in order to proceed.

One of the contentious issues being raised about Mt. Mantalingahan is whether mining should be allowed in “core zone” areas or places where there are old-growth forests, which are protected under a special law – the Strategic Environmental Plan (SEP) for Palawan (Republic Act No. 7611). An initial review by the Palawan Council for Sustainable Development (PCSD), the regulatory agency for environmental concerns in the province, showed that all except 91 hectares of the area leased to MacroAsia are “core and restricted zones” protected under the SEP zoning system. The mining company maintains that its legal right to utilize the lease area has precedence over local laws, including the proclamation of Mantalingahan as a protected area.

There are different institutions responsible for making decisions that determine whether land is to be maintained as a protected area or opened for mining. The inconsistency in decisions, based on differing information on the status of land as a core zone and when mining rights are vested, fuels conflicts.

Case 2. Uncertain future of the Tampakan Copper-Gold Project:

The Tampakan Project is expected to be the single biggest mining project in the country that could potentially double the current contribution of the sector to national gross domestic product (GDP). All eyes are on Tampakan and South Cotabato to see how decisions will be made on whether or not to allow the project to push through.

The Province of South Cotabato enacted a Provincial Environment Code that bans open-pit mining, which happens to be the method of choice for the Tampakan Project. The National Government, through Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) Secretary Jesse Robredo is pressuring the province to reconsider the ban, asserting that the ban is inconsistent with national law.

From various interviews and public pronouncements, it appears that one of the main reasons behind the open-pit mining ban is that officials are not convinced the project will not cause harm to the environment and to local farmers. Former South Cotabato Governor Daisy Fuentes has publicly announced that the decision to ban open-pit mining was made as a precaution to protect farmers from potential water scarcity that can result from mining operations. On the other hand, the mining company claims that water quality and supply issues have been fully considered in its studies and assures the stakeholders that there will be no disruption of water supply for other uses.

Studies conducted by groups opposed to the project evince water, earthquake, and pollution risks, among other issues. MGB also raised three questions to SMI that have not been answered: the 2km-long tailings dam that the government is expected to maintain forever, the cutting of old growth forests and effect of water degradation and supply on agriculture.

The national government is insisting on a legalistic approach, which the province has vowed to face. Underneath the legal posturing are serious issues that cannot be resolved because of the lack of reliable information.

In the Fraser Institute Policy Potential Index (PPI) in 2010/2011, the Philippines ranked 66th out of 72 countries in conduciveness of policies to mining investments. The country ranked low despite fiscal and other incentives provided by the government to mining companies. Could this be due to the lingering uncertainty and conflicts associated with mining activities in the country?

Are all these conflicts over mining policies, decisions, and operations worth it? A look at the benefits and costs of mining may provide an answer.

3. Is mining beneficial to the country and to indigenous and local communities?

Mining operations bring jobs and infuse money into the local economy, and the mining sector contributes to economic growth in general. Even so, is any positive number in terms of job generation and economic growth always a good thing? How much incentive does the government give to the mining sector, which should be deducted from the net benefits to the country and local people? How much more (or less) can the government get if it considers alternative uses of the land? In other words, are Filipinos (as a people) really better off with mining, and is the government getting the best deal for its people? These are tough questions to answer because the researchers do not have the complete picture, due to the lack of data and a framework to analyze benefits as a whole. But there are known facts that can help in this analysis:

a.) Contribution of mining sector to employment generation – According to the Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB), the mining (and quarrying) sector’s contribution to national total employment has always been below 1 percent (1%). Recent data has shown that it has been 0.5% since 2008 until 2010. So far, for the first half of 2011, contribution has been reported as 0.6% (in contrast to agriculture at 33% in 2011). All over the world, extractive mining is known as a low-employment generating activity. The Tampakan project, with expected investments of $5.9 billion, will provide only 2,000 permanent jobs.

b.) Contribution of mining industry to growth in other sectors – Habito (2010) observed that the mining sector has relatively low labor-output ratios in terms of employment generation. Labor compensation accounts for only 13.3% against an average of 20.7% in all sectors. The sector has a backward linkage index of only 0.46, meaning there is relatively little input from other domestic industries; even the forward linkage of 0.82 indicates that the sector is below average compared to all other sectors in generating further domestic economic activities. Minerals are being exported with little value-adding that could have generated further employment and industry linkage.

c.) Contribution of mining to economic growth – At the macro level, the contribution of mining to GDP has remained in the single digits. As of 2010, it only contributed 1.0%, with a Gross Value Added in Mining of PhP88.2 billion (MGB, 2011), compared to the agricultural sector’s contribution of 12% in 2010 (BAS, 2011). As for its contribution to total exports, export of minerals and mineral products has averaged 4.5% in the last four years and reporting 4.3% for the first half of 2011 (MGB, 2011). Total exports of non-metallic minerals’ share are even lower, hovering around 0.4% for the past 4 years (MGB, 2011) compared to agriculture at 8% for 2011. The manufacturing and service sector has always been the main driver of economic growth for the country comprising of over 50% of GDP (ADB, 2011).

However, the picture can be very different from the perspective of a project proponent. In the Tampakan Copper-Gold Project, Sagittarius Mines, Inc. (SMI) estimates that the project alone will contribute an additional 1% of national GDP, or an additional 10.4% of regional GDP for Regions XI and XII. It is difficult to access data for relative contribution of existing projects to local economic growth (at provincial and municipal levels), if data exists at all.

d.) Inflow of foreign investments and outflow of profits – The figures are not readily accessible to the public, but the government should be able to determine how much of the foreign funds that come in actually remains in the country to generate more jobs and economic activities. How quickly do the funds return to the foreign investors?

Figure 1. (Vertical Axis: Units in Millions of Dollars. Horizontal Axis: Years) Total Mining Investment including forecasts that include seven development projects such as Tampakan Copper, Far Southeast Copper-Gold Project, Runruno Gold-Molybdenum Project, Didipio Copper-Gold, Boyungan Gold Project, Sumitomo Nickel Project and Kingking Copper Gold Project (MGB, 2011)

e.) Revenues/taxes received by the government – The amounts of taxes, fees and royalties from mining change from year to year and do not appear to show a trend.

Table 1. Taxes, Fees and Royalties from Mining (MGB, 2011)

There are other factors to consider in how much the government actually gets. It would seem that a tax holiday for Financial and Technical Assistance Agreements (FTAAs) and the 2% limit of government (excise) tax on Mineral Production and Sharing Agreements (MPSAs) translate to almost zero revenue for government. Bautista (2009) estimated that 19.60% to 29.74% of mining revenue accrues to government tax collection. Action for Economic Reforms (2009) calculated only a 7.5% effective tax rate in the industry (1997-2000). AER also cited that the government loses an average of 32% of revenues annually (1999-2004) because of incentive laws. Compared to other countries, the Philippines’ effective tax rate is low. Deutsche Bank (2010) reported that effective tax rate for minerals in other countries are as follows: US (40%), Australia (38%), Brazil (38%), and Canada (23%).

In the Tampakan Project, SMI estimates that the project will produce a revenue stream of up to US$37B (PhP1.85 trillion) over the life of the mine – US$7 billion will go to government as taxes/duties/royalties and US$2 billion will go to local governments and host communities. According to the Chamber of Mines, government already gets 41% of the mining firm’s income before taxes, which is much higher compared to Africa (average 34.4%) or Latin America (average 39.5%).

f.) Poverty incidence in mining areas – There are a few studies that appear to associate poverty incidence with mining. It is difficult to make sweeping conclusions, but the data shows that provinces hosting mining operations do not necessarily demonstrate improvement in the lives of local people.

In a recent study by Balisacan (2011), the poverty incidence among individuals engaged in mining has continued to increase, compared to workers in other sectors. In 2006, income poverty in the sector was at 34.64 and by 2009 it increased to 48.71. The author also uses a multidimensional poverty index (MPI) that captures various dimensions of poverty (see Table 2). The mining sector also shows a high deprivation in health and education compared to other industries (see Table 3).

Table 2. MPI, H, A and Income Poverty by Sector, 2006 and 2009 (Balisacan, 2011)

Table 3. Contributions of Dimensions per group.

The 2003 small area poverty incidence of National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) shows that Bataraza, Palawan, where Rio Tuba has been operating for 30, years has a poverty incidence that is twice the national rate, and is in the bottom 25% of municipalities on poverty incidence.

Some may argue that at the project level, mining operations can have a significant impact on the local community income from royalties and social benefits, which could lift families out of poverty. For the Tampakan Project, SMI expects royalty payments and social development contributions to reach US$800 million to host indigenous and local communities.

There are no systematic studies to track the impact of the mining sector (as a whole or at a project level) to improving the lives of local communities. It is important to measure this economic impact especially after mining activities end.

g.) Improvement of health and education services in mining areas – According to Bautista (2009), a paltry 0.11% to 0.26% (with gold mines at 1.23%) of mining revenues go to community development. How much of this goes to improving the health and education of local communities? Since these services are the responsibility of government, it is also important to know how much of the government’s share from mining revenues has been put into improving basic services.

There are many reports of adverse health impacts associated with mining, both large- and small-scale (Sakoan, 2003; Drasch et al., 2001; Appleton, et al., 1999; 2006). These have shown poor health in communities mostly due to exposure to high levels of mercury, specifically in areas of small-scale mining .Even granting that these incidents are accidental or isolated instances, the health impacts of mining require accurately accounting for the improvement of health services together with the dangers to life and health.

The benefits that the country and local people can derive from mining have a limit in amount and in time period. A visit to a mining operation typically shows new roads and access to transportation, increased trade of goods and services supplied to the mining operations, even improved access to health centers and schools. These added benefits might be provided by the mining operator or the government, or made possible because of the presence of mining operations. Mining companies claim that there are huge economic and social benefits during mining operations, although there are no independent studies that measure the net benefits after accounting for the costs.

On the contrary, there is no dispute that there is little or no economic benefits after operations end. The sustainability of the benefits from mining depends on how the benefits will be allocated among the beneficiaries in the present and for the future. But, is there any municipality that shows significantly better quality of life than neighboring municipalities after mining has left?

Based on available verifiable information, it can be argued that the contribution of mining to the overall economy is small. The Philippine government does not appear to be getting the best deal for the people, especially compared to other countries with mining industries, and most of the benefits go to a very narrow set of beneficiaries. The researchers encourage the mining industry to provide verifiable information on benefits that are not considered here.

4. What are the real costs of doing mining in the Philippines?

As part of assuming the risk of adverse impacts, mining operators are required to set aside funds to compensate for damages. Mining operators may compensate the displacement of communities and economic losses from disturbance based on negotiations with affected stakeholders. Given that the same affected or at-risk stakeholders are also entitled to a share in mining revenues, there should be a net economic benefit to them apart from the costs of displacement, disturbance, or risk of damages.

Conflicts regarding costs are not only about measurable economic losses, but also about environmental and social costs that are either unknown or not measurable in monetary terms. The basic issue is: if these costs are unknown or not measurable, how can decision-makers make accurate cost-benefit decisions? If the environmental and social costs have no equivalent in money, are these costs then ignored? Or should decisions be suspended, pending a better appreciation of these costs? Who decides?

Over the past decade, valuation methods have been introduced to estimate the value of biodiversity and other ecosystem services. As applied to mining, environmental and social valuation is useful for conducting cost-benefit analysis, damage assessment and compensation, regulatory analysis, land-use planning, and natural resource accounting, among others. There is no single valuation technique that can be applied to the Philippine mining sector, considering the diverse nature of the interactions between the economy, the environment, and human communities. Therefore, several techniques must be used in conjunction with one another in order to ensure that the worth of social and environmental health is not undervalued. These methods and results are at best complex and contested, and data-gathering has not been regular.

For instance, although information already exists that shows the financial value of negative environmental impacts due to mining, it is albeit incomplete and outdated. According to data from NSCB (2010), the cost of these negative environmental impacts steadily increased from 1992 to 1996. However, the data data does not distinguish small-scale from large-scale mining.

Figure 3. Cost of Negative Environmental Impacts of Mining (NSCB, 2010)

While determining the social value of a good or a service is complicated, there are several approaches that can be used to establish a reasonable figure. Examples of such methods include willingness to pay, measures of damages (lost wages, health care requirements due to injury or disease), and travel costs (Matthews and Lave, 2000).

One study done in the Philippines that weighed mining benefits against other land uses is the Samar Island Biodiversity (SAMBIO) Project in 2000. The Island is known for its extensive bauxite, copper, and nickel mines. One component of the study showed that total non-use value (i.e., to preserve resources) is around PhP54 million per year, revealing a significant willingness of Samar Island residents to pay to preserve its natural resources. The willingness to pay (WTP) value showed that resources can be equally or more valuable, and also likely to be as profitable as mining (through eco-tourism and non-timber products), with much less risk and uncertainties involved, making conservation a viable land-use option.

Valuation studies are few and limited. The Philippines does not have a system of measuring the value of ecosystems for services provide such as waste treatment and detoxification, nutrient dispersal and cycling, crop pollination, disease control, etc. – services that could be lost when natural ecosystems are destroyed by mining operations. Mining operations directly cause the loss of these services, which must be compensated.

On social costs, how do decision-makers account for the changes in a people’s way of life, their health and well-being, their personal and property rights, and the erosion of their cultural values brought about by the sudden wealth of individuals and communities? These are especially crucial questions as over half of the mining sites in the Philippines is found in socially vulnerable areas, including areas where conflict is ongoing, such as the island of Mindanao (Miranda, et al., 2003; AER, 2009). There is an undeniable and glaring conflict between mining activities and the culture and lifestyle of indigenous peoples (IPs). A UN report in 2007 concluded that in Benguet, Cordillera, the Kankanaey and Ibaloy who had been displaced from their ancestral lands and traditional livelihood have become illegal occupants in the area. Mining activities have occupied lands used to cultivate and raise livestock. This is a common trend in indigenous peoples’ communities across the country.

Recent news reports highlight the security risks of mining operations, as with the reported attack by the New People’s Army (NPA) on mining facilities in Surigao del Norte. The costs to the government of protecting mining companies from these risks represent the real costs of mining. The Philippine National Police and Armed Forces of the Philippines should have estimates of government expenditure to make mining operations secure.

In many coastal provinces, such as Negros Occidental and those along the Ilocos coastline, local governments and local communities are at risk of losing millions of pesos and are compelled to invest hundreds of work hours invested in protecting coastal ecosystem because the Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB) opened up the coastal areas for magnetite mining. Despite LGU opposition through resolutions and ordinances, MGB still entertains applications for sand mining that can destroy fisherfolks’ livelihoods and marine habitats. Losses to government and community investments are not accounted for in the decision to allow coastal mining.

We are struggling with measuring the cost of environmental and social impacts in the present. We have no idea what the costs will be in the future. There are many unknown impacts, and unknown risks. It seems that we are doing no better than guesswork in assessing the real costs of mining.

Is this a responsible thing to do – to base decisions on guesswork? Should we exercise caution instead? How much benefit will we forego if we decide to exercise precaution? Can we afford to gamble our future for so little benefit that extends to so few? Can we afford the cost of conflicts that leave so many with ill feeling, which could prevent cooperation in more inclusive productive activities? Unless we gain a better handle on the value of what we lose in exchange for mining, we have no rational basis for decision-making.

5. How do we understand risks and conduct a cost-benefit analysis?

Like any other development activity done by man, mining has environmental, social, economic, cultural, and political impacts, both positive and negative. There are impacts that are certain: taxes, roads, increase in local economic activities, land disturbance, pollution, etc. There are impacts that may or may not happen. The probability of some of these uncertain impacts can be estimated, especially those that are within human control, such as the likelihood of dam breaking, or of pollution causing health problems.

However, there are impacts whose occurrence is not only uncertain, but whose probability (along with the extent of probable harm) is also unknown: the likelihood that extreme weather conditions can cause a dam to break 100 years from now, or that pollution can cause species extinction. Calculations of probabilities and risks can be adjusted over time to consider new data and improved technology. Mitigating measures to prevent adverse impacts can also be improved based on more accurate calculations.

The complexity of analyzing risks, the lack of information relevant to risk assessment, or lack of access thereto, and the absence of accuracy and credibility of information, all add to the difficulty stakeholders face in making decisions now on what are the acceptable costs and risks of adverse impacts. Because of this difficulty, some stakeholders resort to emotional pleas and indirect attacks to win arguments:

How many people will die should the dam break? One life is one too many – therefore, the proposed activity is unacceptable.
Trust our experts because they stake their careers and reputations on their opinions.
We do not care what your experts say, they are paid to support your position.

Is this a helpful way to frame the issue on acceptability of costs and of risks?

An analogy to air travel might be helpful: Air travel safety has undoubtedly improved with stricter regulations and advanced technology, yet there are more reports of accidents and loss of lives today than in the past because of the scale and amount of air travel undertaken today. The probability of death from an air crash is measurable with reasonable accuracy. But the reality is that lives and properties are lost every year. One life is one too many. There are alternatives to air travel with their own risks. Do we stop flying? How do we assess what is acceptable risk? In going on a flight, does one accept the risks (regardless of insurance and compensation schemes)?

How is this different from mining? Do people feel that they get the same personal benefit from mining as with flying? Do people feel that they will be personally affected by a mining disaster that could impact water, habitats, agricultural productivity, and realignment of public services? Unlike flying, the environmental effects of mining – even without the occurrence of disasters – affect bigger areas than the mining sites as well as more people, including future generations. It is a common observation that most of those opposed to mining operations live farther away from the mining site than those who support it. Do people feel that it is fair for them to bear the risks in return for what they perceive as personal costs and benefits? Different stakeholder groups will have different answers depending on how closely or remotely they feel the benefits and costs – therefore each group may decide differently, and all interests must be taken into account. However, this situation assumes the stakeholders know and understand the level of risks and the magnitude of consequences.

What if the probabilities and magnitude of harm are unknown? In our analogy with air travel, what if the causes of airplane crashes were unknown and there was insufficient data on design, manufacturing, safety, and maintenance on which to base the calculation of risks? Would we fly? Would the government allow airline companies to operate? We would not gamble our lives on the unknown risks of air travel. Why would we gamble on the unknown environmental and social risks of mining? This goes back to the issue of how much value we place on environmental and social costs for the purpose of assessing cost-benefit and risks.

Until we have a better handle on risks, is it reasonable and responsible to continue making decisions on mining applications?

6. What is responsible mining, as applied to the Philippines?

A simple operational answer is: responsible mining is complying with the laws that already take into account its environmental, social, economic, cultural, and other impacts. However, this assumes that the existing regulations are enough to safeguard the health of the environment and human communities, and that these come with effective mechanisms of implementation.

Republic Act No. 7942 or the Philippine Mining Act or 1995 declares that all Philippine mineral resources are owned by the State, which is responsible for the “rational exploration, development, utilization and conservation [of mineral resources] through the combined efforts of government and the private sector in order to enhance national growth in a way that effectively safeguards the environment and protect the rights of affected communities. “The law mandates several environmental and social work programs (i.e., the Environmental Work Program, the Environmental Protection and Enhancement Program, the Final Mine Rehabilitation/Decommissioning Plan and the Social Development and Management Program), as well as financial assurances (i.e., the Contingent Liability and Rehabilitation Fund, Mine Rehabilitation Fund, and Mine Wastes and Tailings Reserve Fund).

However, because of the unreliability and insufficiency of available monitoring data, it is still uncertain whether these mechanisms are enough and whether they are enforced effectively. There is still no definitive document from the government that clearly and specifically details the national expectation for responsible mining. Does the legal framework take into account the uncertainties detailed above, the uniqueness of Philippines as biodiversity-rich, the sensitivity of small islands, the situation in populated mining areas, risks from extreme weather, and so on? Is compliance with the law enough?

Responsible mining can also be measured using basic principles developed and adopted by ethical mining companies worldwide. The Philippine Chamber of Mines’ Compliance and Beyond: A Guidebook on Corporate Social Responsibility for the Philippine Mining Industry is the most comprehensive guidance on responsible mining in the country so far, which includes specific suggestions on how to adhere to responsible mining at every stage of the mining cycle. The following principles are the bases for the Guidebook:

Protect the environment as a paramount consideration in all stages of mining and conduct activities in a manner that will contribute to the broader goals of sustainable development.
Protect the rights of affected communities, including the rights of indigenous cultural communities.
Engage in adequate and timely communication and consultation with them and work for the improvement of the quality of their lives during and even after the life of the mine.
Safeguard the health and safety of mineworkers, local population, host and impact communities, and address foreseeable health- and safety-related impacts associated with mining over its full life cycle.
Maintain a competent workforce that is committed to responsible mining and whose welfare is advanced.
Make sure that affected communities benefit from mining through employment, whenever possible.
Respect, protect, and promote human rights of those affected by mining and promote human rights-sensitive security arrangements.
Adopt responsible corporate governance and management principles that nurture trust and promote company integrity by developing effective self-regulatory practices and management systems and employing business practices that are ethical, transparent and accountable. (Chamber of Mines, 2010)

In the Philippines, a special concern for responsible mining is the identification of “no-go” areas. Despite provisions in the law that identify areas closed to mining, field implementation has been beset by conflicts. There is no clear-cut policy on mining in island ecosystems that are most vulnerable to environmental and social impacts. The National Integrated Protected Areas System (NIPAS) and SEP for Palawan laws should inform such a policy. In 2000, DENR issued Administrative Order No. 83 on “Guidelines for the Management And Development of Small Islands, Including Its Coastal Areas” but this regulation has not stopped the exploitation of mineral resources in small islands and coastal areas.

7. What operational conditions must be met to conduct responsible mining in the Philippines?

Responsible mining has to accurately assess and account for all relevant costs and benefits:

The appropriate valuation mechanisms should be employed to ensure that the environmental and social responsibilities are accounted for, and that the negative impacts are mitigated and affected communities compensated.
There must be a more comprehensive articulation of risk assessment for disaster management, given that the Philippines is prone to geophysical disturbance and climate change-induced hazards.
Regulations on environmental impact studies should be reviewed to account for the value of biodiversity and ethnodiversity significance.

Responsible mining has to respect no-go areas:

There must be respect for the NIPAS and SEP for Palawan that declare areas closed to mining.
There must be respect for the right of local governments to close areas within their territorial jurisdiction to mining operations as a precautionary measure, in the absence of credible information on impacts and acceptable risks.
Small island ecosystems should be excluded from mining. Agenda 21 of the United Nations identifies small islands supporting small communities as special cases for environment and development, being ecologically fragile and vulnerable. The ocean and coastal environment of small islands of strategic importance and constitutes a valuable development resource. Their small size, limited resources, geographic dispersion and isolation from markets, place them at a disadvantage economically and prevent economies of scale.

Responsible mining has to respect the decision of local stakeholders, especially indigenous peoples:

Inconsistencies in the implementation of FPIC raise serious doubts as to the validity of community consent and benefit-sharing agreements.
The right of IPs and local communities to say “no” should be respected and not taken as a provisional decision subject to negotiation until communities finally say “yes.”

Small-scale mining should be held to the same high standards:

Policies on small-scale mining should be revised to account for the same impacts as large-scale mining.

8. What actions must the government take towards management of responsible mining?

The operational conditions for responsible mining must be matched with governance actions, including:

Defining a policy to get the best deal for the people –The country and local communities apparently get little in terms of benefits from mining, compared to the returns that investors get. The Philippine Development Plan (PDP) noted from an assessment report of a mining project (Rapu-Rapu) that the fair share of the government from mining has not been achieved due to the existing incentive mechanism (PDP, p. 297). The current fiscal incentives and taxation regime in mining are inadequate and do not assume long-term national and local benefits in the extraction of exhaustible resources. The government recently proposed the imposition of a 5% royalty for the exploitation of select mineral reservations. This has been met with stiff opposition by the mining industry. Comparative data on government benefits from mining are conflicting; therefore the government must make further studies to firm up its negotiating position.

In the landmark case of La Bugal-B’laan Tribal Association vs. Ramos (GR No. 127882, Jan 27, 2004), the Supreme Court ruled that the Mining Act of 1995 was constitutional provided it was implemented in a manner that truly benefited the country. The Court stated that the government retained control of mineral resources in the country through regulation. Thus, if the government and society at large do not benefit from the current mining revenue system, modifying that system is then justified.
Defining clear indicators for reforms – Clear and measurable indicators are needed to track compliance and progress in reforms needed for responsible mining, including inclusiveness of economic benefits, as well as social, cultural, and environmental safeguards. The government needs to design and implement a systematic monitoring and evaluation (M & E) process based on these indicators.

There should be an objective, third-party review of current operating mines to determine compliance with responsible mining. A more comprehensive compilation of best practices should also be prepared to equip the government, mining companies, and affected communities with information to make rational decisions.
Continuous capacity building – In order to support stable, rational decision-making, the government must have the capacity to implement:
- Natural resources valuation;
- Options for benefit-sharing schemes at the national, local, and community level;
- Measuring local economic impact;
- Measuring impact on community values and culture;
- Establishing systematic monitoring and evaluation of environmental, social, and economic impacts at all levels (project, local, and national); and
- A genuine and inclusive process of obtaining free and prior informed consent.
The Philippine Development Plan acknowledges that “government capacity for resource management is wanting” (p. 309) and that “Ensuring the equitable and just distribution of benefits from extracted mineral resources remains to be a challenge… Currently, there is no standard resource and environment valuation. There is a need to have a cost-benefit analysis and standard parameters that will consider all relevant values (including nonmarket values).” (p. 298)

Risk assessment should also be prioritized. The Philippines is located in the Pacific Ring of Fire. The same tectonic activity that makes it a prime location for economically valuable metals also means that the country is prone to geophysical hazards such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
Setting a clear action plan with a reasonable timetable and sufficient budget and personnel support – The actions needed must be set in a clear, doable, time-bound, and adequately funded action plan, so that all stakeholders can reasonably expect accomplishment of the reform goals. The reforms are only as good as their implementation. Government has to provide the manpower needed to implement the reforms both at national and local government levels.

For decades, the shortcomings in governance have been side-stepped, and the government has assumed that approval of mining operations can continue because capacity-building is taking place. This is no longer acceptable. As shown above, with the inadequacies of regulation and capacity for governance, the government has no rational basis for making decisions on mining.

9. What interim measures must the government take while appropriate mining governance is instituted?

In reassessing its mining policy, the government should adhere to the precautionary principle – a generally accepted international law principle – expressed by the Supreme Court in the Rules of

Procedure for Environmental Cases (Part V, Rule 20):

Sec. 1. When there is a lack of full scientific certainty in establishing a causal link between human activity and environmental effect, the court shall apply the precautionary principle in resolving the case before it.
The constitutional right of the people to a balanced and healthful ecology shall be given the benefit of the doubt.

Sec. 2. In applying the precautionary principle, the following factors, among others, may be considered: (1) threats to human life or health; (2) inequity to present or future generations; (3) prejudice to the environment without legal consideration of the environmental rights of those affected.

Clearly, all the factors for the application of the precautionary principle to mining operations exist.

The government has suspended acceptance of all types of mining applications effective January this year. In Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) Memorandum Order No. 2011-01, Secretary Ramon Paje indicated that DENR is undertaking a “cleansing” of mining applications, apparently to weed out defective applications and unqualified applicants. Recent news reports of disapprovals of mining applications (e.g., in Caraga Region) show that DENR is serious about the clean-up. Civil society groups, including Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center, Inc.- Kasama sa Kalikasan (LRC-KsK), contend that the suspension is not enough because the problems lie with existing tenements or with applications already being processed. LRC-KsK further claims that the suspension will eventually open up more lands for mining applications to replace the defective ones.

The Ateneo School of Government supports the position that the government impose a blanket moratorium that includes the suspension of processing of submitted mining applications, and not be limited to the cleansing of dormant or defective applications. The fundamental uncertainties and gaps raised above call for the government to take pause and re-evaluate its mining policy. The current suspension is not effective in fixing fundamental problems, but will only serve to replace the actors. The same mining areas will be open for application once the unqualified or defective applications have been removed. If we do not know proper valuation, we cannot do rational cost-benefit analysis. If we cannot assess risks, we cannot make informed decisions acceptable to stakeholders.

The School is mindful that a moratorium can have adverse effects, especially on jobs and local economic activities in areas where mining activities are already starting– exploration, consultations, etc. – even though mining applications are still being processed. For this reason, a clear action plan and firm timeline is needed to accomplish the reforms for an improved governance framework for responsible mining.

Local governments that have expressed firm positions on mining have to be heard and their positions respected. Regardless of the legal technicalities that surround the enactment of ordinances deemed inconsistent with national law, local governments are simply expressing and applying the precautionary principle. The national government should continue to engage with local governments in evaluating compliance with the indicators of reforms for responsible mining and governance. Without doubt, local governments will appreciate such a joint problem-solving approach, and may reconsider their positions when compliance is assured. The national government may then lift the moratorium accordingly, on a per-area or -case basis, as soon as target actions have been completed and local governments and stakeholders give their support.

10. What is the future of mining in the Philippines?

We, the current generation, are potential beneficiaries of mining operations. But we must remain aware of our responsibility as caretakers of our nation’s wealth for the enjoyment of our children and their children. The country’s mineral resources are limited and exhaustible. Do we really have to pressure ourselves to cash in on the benefits now? The Ateneo School of Government’s position is that the country could wait for better conditions and negotiate better terms on the basis of better information. The consequences of erroneous decisions are so huge and irreversible that it is better to take a longer view today. The global economic outlook for the mining sector favors prudence and patience because demand for minerals will continue well into the future; thus there is no real opportunity cost in deferring decisions on utilization of our mineral resources.

This is not to say that we should not consider mining at all in the future. We can learn from existing mining operations to improve governance and work towards responsible mining. We recognize that the mining industry has improved a lot over the past decades in adopting new technologies, in considering the environmental, economic, social, and cultural impacts of mining operations. However, in our country, mining still has had to demonstrate what “responsible” mining is. And there is skepticism to overcome because, unfortunately for the industry, mining has a poor record of performance on the issue in the past 50 years. The action plan we propose is only the first step towards a responsible and sustainable governance environment for mining. We should put in place safeguards and governance framework to capture more of the values of our minerals for ourselves.

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

2011-10-11T04:05:00.001+08:00

By Albert Mohler

Crosswalk.com

The death of Steve Jobs, founder and iconic leader of Apple, is a signal moment in the lives of the “digital generation,” which Jobs, along with a very few other creative geniuses, made possible. Few individuals of any historical epoch can claim to have changed the way so many people live their lives, do their work and engage the products of the culture.

Jobs was one of the most influential cultural creatives of all time. If that seems like an exaggeration, it is only because the products that Jobs and Apple brought into being have become so familiar that they appear as the furnishings of contemporary lives. The personal computer was not invented by Steve Jobs, but he saw the possibility of integrated systems that would allow personal creativity to blossom. He saw products that customers did not even know they needed — and then released the products to the public, creating entire new markets and unleashing an explosion of worldwide technological creativity.

The Apple products that Jobs personally introduced, including the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, defined a new era. There is now no going back. We are in the digital age to stay. But, that world will now have to reckon with the absence of Steve Jobs.

Born to unwed parents in 1955, Jobs was adopted by a couple in Northern California — the region later to be known as Silicon Valley. In one sense, Jobs was first defined by Silicon Valley. Later, he would return the favor by defining the region on his own terms.

He, along with Stephen Wozniak, developed Apple as an idea and as a company. After dropping out of Reed College, Jobs joined Stephen Wozniak in attending the meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, which met at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, California. They began attending the meetings in 1975. In 1976, they began Apple with just over $1,000 of their own money. By 1981, the company was worth $600 million. In 1983, Apple joined the Fortune 500.

Jobs had his share of technological failures, or disappointments. Nevertheless, even in his years away from Apple (after losing control of the company), Jobs redefined entire industries. He developed Pixar into a digital movie powerhouse, among other things, returning to lead Apple in 1997 and later to become CEO again in 2000. The rest is history.

Christians considering the life and death of Steve Jobs will do well to remember once again the power of an individual life. God has invested massive creative abilities in his human creatures. These are often used for good, and sometimes deployed to evil ends. Steve Jobs devoted his life to a technological dream that he thought would empower humanity. He led creative teams that developed technological wonders, and then he made them seemingly necessary for life in the digital age.

Jobs’ massive creative genius was matched to an almost unerring intuition of taste. His design specifications and attention to aesthetic detail are legendary. He reportedly held product designs, such as the iPhone, in his hand, closing his eyes as he ran his fingers over each surface, mandating changes to make to the product that were, to his mind, aesthetically perfect. He once defined taste as “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.”

His sense of taste — almost an intuition to know in advance what would be considered tasteful — was remarkable. Nevertheless, taste is not a very substantial basis for a worldview, nor can technology save us.

Steve Jobs lived a life that, by secular standards, will be considered legendary. Generations to come will be directly influenced by forces and products that he and his company brought to reality. He died a legend and one of the world’s richest men.

His personal life was far more complicated than his cool and reserved public image suggested. And his worldview, seemingly and vaguely Eastern in orientation (there was speculation that Jobs was Buddhist), was very much a part of the hidden Steve Jobs. In his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, Jobs said:

“Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

He told the graduating students to pursue their dreams and cited The Whole Earth Catalog, a work that symbolized the quirky culture of Jobs’ youth in northern California: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

In diet, he was a pescetarian, eating fish as the only meat. In public, he was the essence of cool — redefining the role of the CEO as the narrator and public revealer of new technologies and products. In private, beginning in 2004, he was fighting against pancreatic cancer.

In his Stanford address, Jobs told of a saying he first heard as a 17-year-old: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.”

He stepped down as Apple's CEO in August, telling his company’s employee: “I have always said that if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.”

He exited the scene with grace, ensuring that the company he founded would endure when he was off the scene. There is much to learn from his life and his legacy.

At the same time, Christians cannot leave the matter where the secular world will settle on Steve Jobs’ legacy. The secular conversation will evade questions of eternal significance, but Christians cannot. As is the case with so many kings, rulers, inventors, leaders and shapers of history, Christians can learn from Steve Jobs and even admire many of his gifts and contributions. Yet, we must also observe what is missing here.

I am writing this essay on an Apple laptop computer. I am listening to the strains of Bach playing from my iPad via an AirPort Express. My iPhone sits on my desk, downloading a new app from iTunes. Steve Jobs has invaded my life, my house, my office, my car and my desktop — and I am thankful for all of these technologies.

But unerring taste, aesthetic achievement, and technological genius will not save the world. Christians know what the world does not — that the mother tending her child, the farmer planting his crops, the father protecting his family, the couple faithfully living out their marital vows, the factory worker laboring to support his family and the preacher preparing to preach the Word of God are all doing far more important work.

We have to measure life by its eternal impact, even as we are thankful for every individual who makes this world a better place. But, don’t expect eternal impact to be the main concern of the business pages.

My son Christopher, age 19, is very much part of the digital generation — a “digital native” who never knew a time when the digital world was not. To him, and to his generation, Steve Jobs was the worker of wonders. Jobs, said Christoper, “made computing cool” and “brought in the iGeneration.” Texting me after the announcement of Steve Jobs’s death, Christopher wanted to make sure I knew “this is a big deal.” Got it, Christopher. Thanks.

Read also: "Steve Jobs: Trapped by his own dogma"

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"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking." --Steve Jobs

"Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do." --Steve Jobs

But isn't many of today's people living with the results of Steve Job's thinking? Isn't today's generation being trapped by his dogma? Indeed life is limited, but isn't today's iGG (iGadget Generation) living the kind of life which people like Steve Jobs were crazy enough to conform the world according to their concepts?

Like the proverbial fruit of Eden, once one gets crazy enough to take a bite, the "serpentic" lure to change the world according to one's own concepts becomes irresistible. And so, as these so-called world-changers think, so goes this world.

Contraception: Why Not? (Abortion as Contraception)

2011-09-21T16:25:00.000+08:00

The reason why abortion is a demanded form of contraception among women who have unwanted pregnancies is this:

"We have a phenomena here: About 53% of women who go to abortion clinics say that they were using a contraceptive when they got pregnant." --Dr. Janet Smith

In Thailand, the U.N.-advocated Reproductive Health program has long been implemented but with dismal outcome (please see the video about Thailand's RH program failure on my previous post below). The major reason for many governments' contraception program failure is described by Dr. Janet Smith in the video shown above. And because of this reason, abortion as contraception becomes badly demanded to cope with the program's failure.

Thailand's Unborn: A Case of Reproductive Health Program Failure

2011-09-15T22:33:00.000+08:00

Thailand has long been implementing the Reproductive Health program (like the proposed RH bill in our country), and after several years of implementation, its outcome is a dismal failure.

A problem which has more of a psychological/spiritual dimension can't be remedied appropriately with solutions that are merely material in nature and it can't be dealt with effectively if it is addressed in the physical realm alone.

With all of its symptoms and consequences, irresponsible sex is more of a mental attitude problem than it is a physical one. Therefore to address this problem with the use of solutions such as those provided in the proposed Reproductive Health bill -- which primarily includes maternal-and-child healthcare products and services as well as birth-prevention products and services -- is to merely deal with the physical consequences of the problem and does not address the psychological dimension of the problem itself at its very core.

In today's instant-gratification world, the correct and proper teaching of the ABC's of sexual responsibility which is a big part of the most critical phase of youth development has been greatly declining in most of the societies across the globe -- already almost to the point of total neglect. Majority of the young minds of today's information age, on their own, are left freely learning wrong norms from the various forms of media they constantly are exposed to everyday -- the internet, mobile phone, television, radio, movies, magazines, etc. Both at home and in school, parents and educators alike have become seriously negligent of the responsibility of molding the character dimension of the youth. Today's educational systems seem to have failed to prevent the destruction of the balance between material prosperity and spiritual prosperity. More and more focus has been given to career and profession building while less and less focus is given to character formation.

If societies are to succeed in the fight against the consequences of sexual irresponsibility in today's nihilistic and narcissistic world, one key and major factor to be given big focus in the overall strategy is the [re]formation of people's character particularly in the young minds of the youth. Molding them and guiding them spiritually with right values and imparting virtues into their young minds. Approaching the problem this way targets the underlying psychological dimension of the problem of irresponsible sex right at its very core.

Read more: Character Formation: The Only Right Alternative to "RH Bill" for the Youth

"Reduction" Goes Beyond Meddling to Murder

2011-08-21T01:04:00.016+08:00

By Albert Mohler
Crosswalk.com

"There are demands worldwide for a procedure to reduce twins to a single pregnancy and it has grown steadily. The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy is one of the most twisted thinking that justifies the killing of the unborn, and the people opting for this procedure try to evade moral responsibility by calling the procedure a “reduction.” But the procedure so dishonestly called “reduction” is really not about mere “meddling.” It is murder!" --Article Quote

Euphemisms are the refuge of moral cowardice, and no euphemism is so cowardly or so deadly as “reduction” — a word that sounds like math, but really means murder. The August 14, 2011 edition of The New York Times Magazine makes this fact clear in its cover story, “The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy.”

Reporter Ruth Padawer first takes her readers into the examination room of an obstetrician who is about to abort one of two fetuses within the womb of a woman identified as “Jenny.” Padawer writes:

As Jenny lay on the obstetrician’s examination table, she was grateful that the ultrasound tech had turned off the overhead screen. She didn’t want to see the two shadows floating inside her. Since making her decision, she had tried hard not to think about them, though she could often think of little else. She was 45 and pregnant after six years of fertility bills, ovulation injections, donor eggs and disappointment — and yet here she was, 14 weeks into her pregnancy, choosing to extinguish one of two healthy fetuses, almost as if having half an abortion. As the doctor inserted the needle into Jenny’s abdomen, aiming at one of the fetuses, Jenny tried not to flinch, caught between intense relief and intense guilt.

Of course, Jenny was not “having half an abortion,” for she was aborting a baby who was just as alive as his or her twin. The “reduction” of multiple pregnancies is now part of the practice of obstetrics, though largely kept from public view. Ruth Padawer explains that the demand for reductions is driven by advances in reproductive technologies and the reluctance of many women to accept a multiple pregnancy. Some of the most widely-used fertility drugs increase the likelihood of a multiple pregnancy, as does the usual process of IVF procedures.

The procedure was first proposed as a means of reducing the risk of having three or more babies in a single pregnancy. In more recent years, the demand to reduce twins to a single pregnancy has grown steadily. At one New York City medical center, over half of all reduction procedures were to reduce twins to a single pregnancy. Padawer’s report is largely about that phenomenon, for the reduction of a pregnancy from twins to a single baby is not about increasing the odds of a healthy delivery, but about the ominous rise of what amounts to personal preference.

Jenny makes this clear. She explains that she had conceived through IVF and an egg donor. Had the pregnancy occurred naturally, she said, “I wouldn’t have reduced this pregnancy, because you feel like if there’s a natural order, then you don’t want to disturb it.” Nevertheless, “The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control.”

Those words are amazingly revealing. Those who have tried to justify any and all means of controlling reproduction must face squarely the fact that they have created what amounts to a consumer market for babies — and customers eventually find someone to provide what they demand. When it comes to human life, the stage is set for tragedy.

As Ruth Padawer reports, obstetricians were at first reluctant to reduce twins to a single pregnancy on moral grounds, and many doctors who perform reductions refuse to reduce below twins. But the practice is growing, reflecting a shift in medical practice. She profiles Dr. Mark Evans, who at first refused to reduce twins on moral grounds. In 1988 he co-authored ethical guidelines for reducing pregnancies that declared reductions below twins to be unethical. Evans wrote that doctors should not allow themselves to become “technicians to our patients’ desires.”

And yet, in 2004 Dr. Evans reversed his position on the issue. Padawer explains his rationale:

For one thing, as more women in their 40s and 50s became pregnant (often thanks to donor eggs), they pushed for two-to-one reductions for social reasons. Evans understood why these women didn’t want to be in their 60s worrying about two tempestuous teenagers or two college-tuition bills. He noted that many of the women were in second marriages, and while they wanted to create a child with their new spouse, they did not want two, especially if they had children from a previous marriage. Others had deferred child rearing for careers or education, or were single women tired of waiting for the right partner. Whatever the particulars, these patients concluded that they lacked the resources to deal with the chaos, stereophonic screaming and exhaustion of raising twins.

Note carefully that the justification offered for killing an unborn baby is clearly identified as “social reasons.” The medical rationale he cited cannot be taken seriously, even as he cites “recent studies” that “revealed that the risks of twin pregnancies were greater than previously thought.” As this article makes abundantly clear, the main risk of a twin pregnancy these days is the risk that one of the twins will be intentionally aborted.

“Ethics,” Dr. Evans told Padawer, “evolve with technology.” That is a foundation for murderous medical ethics. The Culture of Death has worked its way into the logic of modern medical ethics to the extent that these obstetricians justify killing healthy babies just because the parents do not want the burden of twins.

Padawer allows many of the mothers seeking reductions to speak of their intentions without any effort to filter their language. One mother said she felt like her triple pregnancy “was a monster.” She eventually found Dr. Evans, who reduced her pregnancy to a single baby. Padawer candidly reports that some women use reductions to choose the sex of their baby. “Until the last decade, most doctors refused even to broach that question,” she reports, “but that ethical demarcation has eroded, as ever more patients lobby for that option and doctors discover that plenty opt for girls.”

In other words, sex-selection abortions would be unethical only if the demand for either sex was out of balance?

To her credit, Ruth Padawer points to the growing consumer market for babies as the root issue. She writes:

We’ve come to believe that the improvements are not only our due but also our responsibility. Just look at the revolution in attitudes toward selecting egg or sperm donors. In the 1970s, when sperm donation took off, most clients were married women with infertile husbands; many couples didn’t want to know about the source of the donation. Today patients in the United States can choose donors based not only on their height, hair color and ethnicity but also on their academic and athletic accomplishments, temperament, hairiness and even the length of a donor’s eyelashes.

“The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy” is one of the most significant articles of recent years. With chilling and unflinching candor, Ruth Padawer virtually forces her readers to see the twisted thinking that justifies the killing of the unborn, and then she tries to evade moral responsibility by calling the procedure a “reduction.”

There is a story behind this story, of course. The intersection where modern reproductive technologies and legal abortion meet is now a deadly place for many unborn babies. In the name of personal preference and for “social reasons,” some women now demand that their multiple babies be aborted so that they will have only the one baby they want.

Padawer says that many Americans are uneasy about this knowledge, perhaps “because the desire for more choices conflicts with our discomfort about meddling with ever more aspects of reproduction.”

But the procedure so dishonestly called “reduction” is really not about mere “meddling.” It is murder.

The Illusion of Freedom Separated from Moral Virtue

2011-08-16T10:20:00.008+08:00

By Raymond L. Dennehy
University of San Francisco
Ignatius Insight

(The following are excerpts from Dennehy's essay. Read the complete text of his essay here.)

Liberal democracy cannot survive unless a monistic virtue ethics permeates its culture. A nation whose members lack moral virtue cannot sustain its commitment to freedom and equality for all.

What about a nation whose inhabitants are allowed the freedom to do everything they may wish to do as long as they do not violate anyone else's personal freedom, but do not realize that they have been programmed to desire only what their government determines them to desire? This raises the question: "Is freedom the personal state of being objectively unrestrained or the subjective state of not being aware of being restrained?"

Is it within the realm of plausibility that the majority of members of a political society could think they are free when, in fact, they are not? The answer is "Yes." The principal cause would be the attempt to preserve a freedom that is separated from moral virtue. But "would be" is the subjunctive mood and, thus, belongs to the realm of the merely possible. It is undeniably possible for a population to suffer from the illusion of being free, but the real cannot be inferred from the possible. Agreed. But the reality is already here, evident from practices ratified by legislatures and popular vote, as well as ratified by the courts as constitutionally protected. Each counts as an example of the freedom to "choose one's own ends." In terms of the public vs. private model, they are alleged to belong in the sphere of private behavior insofar as they pertain to actions that do not violate the rights of others. One relevant example is the rapid decline of public and private support for objective and substantive ethics in favor of relativism.

There are two clashing concepts of liberty: negative liberty and positive liberty. Simply expressed, negative liberty holds that freedom is the absence of external restraint, while positive liberty holds that freedom is the opportunity to do what is worth doing.

The argument against a morally neutral conception of freedom collides not only with a fundamental premise of liberal democracy, but also, it seems, with a central tenet of what is accepted as the public philosophy. Michael Sandel succinctly sets forth that tenet:

"The central idea of the public philosophy by which we live is that freedom consists in our capacity to choose our ends for ourselves. Politics should not try to form the character or cultivate the virtue of its citizens, for to do so would be to "legislate morality." Government should not affirm, through its policies or laws, any particular conception of the good life; instead it should provide a neutral framework of rights within which people can choose their own values and ends."

Both conservative and liberal politics are in agreement that "freedom consists in the capacity of people to choose their own ends." The disagreement occurs when one asks whether any specific traits of character are needed for an individual's exercise of freedom, and who has the responsibility for overseeing the acquisition of those character traits. Since republican political theory sees the government's role as that of preparing people to acquire the virtues needed for sharing in self-rule, deliberating with other citizens about what the common good is and how it is to be realized, it entertains a formative conception of politics that demands its involvement with the moral virtues and chosen goals of its citizens. In contrast, the past decades have witnessed the greater influence of the procedural politics of liberal political theory, with its commitment to ensuring equal justice for all without any officially expressed concern for its citizens' personal moral state. The differences between the two theories are real, but they are not what they seem. Both denounce the government's unjustified interference in the lives of its citizens, but differ on what constitutes the injustice.

If positive freedom, especially the metaphysical version, poses threats to a people's freedom to choose their own ends by imposing the state or a higher self as one's true self, so that one is deluded into believing that by obeying the law, one is really obeying oneself, negative freedom hardly offers a better prospect. The possibility of a nation enslaved in their respective and collective actions by their vices, but believing they act freely because they do what they wish, is as disturbing as it is plausible.

The illusion reveals itself in the inconsistency between the criticism of objective moral norms as the fulfillment of personal freedom and the fact that living and acting without moral virtue inevitably yokes one's will to one and the same object of desire. The standard criticism of positive freedom is that the demand that one act according to putative objective standards in order to be free is to confuse freedom with things, which, however laudable--truth, justice, beauty, goodness, or the law--are not what freedom is. The criticism goes on to say that the confusion is dangerous, since it can delude a population into believing that their adherence to those kinds of lofty standards makes them free when it fact it allows an oppressive regime to control their lives.

But a characteristic of the lack of virtue, and surely of the state of vice, is the will's enslavement to a specific object of desire. So, despite insisting that to be free, the individual must have before him a range of options, the lack of virtue produces the opposite: prospective choices are inevitably evaluated in terms of their relation to the principal object of one's vice.

Virtue ethics offers the solution to the extent that it furnishes the standard for action based on understanding and choice unhampered by un-disciplined passions and appetites. For the virtuous person, freedom is negative in the truest sense insofar as he or she enjoys a freedom from both external restraints and the inner restraints of vice. That is the route to human flourishing, both for self-fulfillment and preparation for citizenship. The argument for a virtuous society must not be allowed to go begging. Thomas Aquinas observed that after one loses the virtue of chastity, thereby succumbing to the vice of lust, the next virtue to be lost is justice, the obligation to pay each his due. That is because vice, being a malignancy, metastasizes.

The enduring ideal is a democracy that confers the widest latitude for personal freedom on its members, the vast majority of whom, including elected officials and judges, have characters shaped by a monistic virtue ethics. The crucial question is, who has the responsibility of inculcating ethics in society? The cackling of the sacred geese warned ancient Rome of impending danger. Where are our geese?

The Allure of the Hive: Social Networking and Social Change

2011-08-15T03:09:00.001+08:00

WYD (Whacked Youth Day) in London

2011-08-11T11:27:00.002+08:00

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See beyond physical eyes -- discern with spiritual eyesight; for in the likeness of the dark spirit this thing has happened today, so shall it be like at an inappropriate time to come. On that day, physically, things are not exactly the same, yet the spirit behind it all is the same dark spirit as today.

Therefore to those who are able to see with the eyes of the Spirit, there is yet enough time to strengthen yourselves and your brothers in the Lord, for your strength is in His might.

[Ephesians 6:11-18]

Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world's rulers of the darkness of this age, and against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.

Therefore, put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and, having done all, to stand.

Stand therefore, having the utility belt of truth buckled around your waist, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having fitted your feet with the preparation of the Gospel of peace; above all, taking up the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God; with all prayer and requests, praying at all times in the Spirit, and being watchful to this end in all perseverance and requests for all the holy ones.

Rendering to God the things that are Caesar's

2011-07-18T19:57:00.004+08:00

State Support for Religion
By: Randy David
Philippine Daily Inquirer

Today in Western Europe, fewer and fewer people go to church. Yet, many modern states in that part of the world continue to collect religion’s share of public taxes. Citizens are asked to indicate to which religious group they belong, and, on this basis, a percentage of the tax collected from them is turned over to their church. If a taxpayer signifies that he has no religious affiliation, the corresponding religious tax is not collected. This valuable tax support has, however, not been enough to keep many centuries-old cathedrals and monuments from languishing in neglect and disrepair. This situation has often forced governments to take full responsibility for their rehabilitation and maintenance in recognition of their historic and cultural significance.

In contrast, religious communities in our country are left on their own to collect contributions from their members in order to sustain themselves. They cannot and do not expect the government to do this for them, consistent with our interpretation of the principle of Church-State separation. Still, religious practice remains fervent here, and churches retain a considerable influence in the public sphere that is seldom seen in modern secular societies.

State support for religion has a long history in Europe. In pre-modern times, the promotion of a religious faith was regarded as a primary duty of the state. Political power was routinely used to suppress other religions. Rulers needed religion to strengthen their legitimacy, and religion needed rulers to defend the one true faith. The gradual differentiation of politics from religion gave rise to the modern state and ended this institutional coupling.

But even in modern societies, such differentiation has not entailed a total break from religion. Governments continue to recognize the positive value of religion to society as a source of moral orientation and as a force for social integration. I learned from a German friend that in his country, at least until the 1950s, religious instruction was offered in public schools, which pupils had the option to skip if their parents did not think they needed it. The state paid the salaries of these teachers.

Modern governments have been equally mindful of the religious content of what is regarded as the cultural heritage of the nation. If one visits any of Europe’s majestic churches today, one is likely to find more tourists than religious devotees staring at their vaulted ceilings, a fact that may suggest that state support for these monuments has more to do with commerce than with religion. But, even socialist Cuba, which is explicitly atheistic, finds it important to preserve its colonial cathedrals as part of the nation’s rich architectural heritage instead of seeing them crumble into ruins.

Again, in contrast to Europe, our resolve to keep Church and State separate from one another is sometimes interpreted so dogmatically that it would outlaw any kind of support for religion, beyond giving churches tax-free privileges. Many fail to see that what the Constitution prohibits is not state support for religion per se but the establishment or preferential treatment by the state of a particular religion.

But, irony of all ironies, this situation has not prevented public officials from showering religious clerics with gifts and favors. The recent revelations made by the new administration of the Philippine Charity and Sweepstakes Office (PCSO) of the disbursement of funds earmarked for charity to some bishops in the form of personal vehicles attest to the existence of this practice. It appears to have reached its peak during the time of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Records show that Arroyo treated the PCSO as her own personal bank for dispensing largesse. A favorite defender of her presidency within the Catholic hierarchy, Butuan Bishop Juan de Dios Pueblos, wrote her a letter in March 2009 asking for a car as birthday gift. She promptly endorsed this ridiculous request to the PCSO “for appropriate action, please.” Three months later, the PCSO sent a check for P1.7 million to the Butuan diocese, care of Bishop Pueblos. What is one to make of this?

It seems to me that what is being violated here is not so much the principle of Church-State separation or the specific prohibition against using public funds in support of a particular religion. What we have here is plain and simple corruption—the appropriation of public funds for private purposes. The gift to Bishop Pueblos has less to do with advancing the cause of any church or religion than with rewarding him as an individual for his past and future political services. From the way he has conducted himself, it is clear that the bishop is no less a politician than the patron who showers him with gifts. He is as much a liability to religion as he is a problem to politics.

Although I do not regard myself as religious, I am nonetheless cognizant of the function of religious communication in even the most modern society. I believe it is crucial for every society to have a standpoint from which to measure and interrogate its notion of development. One such standpoint is that of perfection. It is not to say that only religion can fulfill this function, but the most potent standpoints of perfection have come from religion.

Read also: Do away with "Inappropriate Exchange of Generosity" by The Windchime

Facebook Divorce Stats: Couples 'Be Wise,' Experts Say

2011-07-04T01:51:00.002+08:00

By Michael Foust
Crosswalk.com

Surveys that show Facebook being cited more and more in divorce cases should make spouses think twice before "friending" someone of the opposite sex, experts say.

A 2010 survey by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers showed that 81 percent of "the nation's top divorce attorneys" reported an increase in social networking websites being used as evidence in divorce cases. Facebook is the leader, being cited in 66 percent of cases that involve online evidence.

"We're coming across it more and more," clinical psychologist Steven Kimmons of Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Ill., said in a news release. "One spouse connects online with someone they knew from high school. The person is emotionally available and they start communicating through Facebook. Within a short amount of time, the sharing of personal stories can lead to a deepened sense of intimacy, which in turn can point the couple in the direction of physical contact."

The Facebook-divorce link has been discussed widely in the social media realm lately thanks to a survey from the United Kingdom supposedly showing Facebook being at least partially blamed for one in five of all divorces. The data is from a U.K. online divorce service that found the word "Facebook" appearing in 989 of the company's 5,000 divorce petitions, all of which were uncontested, The Wall Street Journal reported. The company's managing director called the survey "unscientific."

Whether or not Facebook is a reason for one in five divorces, it is becoming an increasing problem in marriages, Kimmons and other marriage experts say.

Couples should take common sense safeguards on Facebook, said Michael Martin, vice president for academic affairs and professor of New Testament studies at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in Mill Valley, Calif.

"People need to manage the beginning of the relationship," Martin told Baptist Press. "If somebody contacts you from your past and wants to strike up a friendship -- somebody that you dated once or somebody that you knew in high school or college, there's nothing necessarily wrong with entering into that relationship. Just do it along with your spouse. Include your spouse into the conversation. If you're willing to do that openly, then it's likely there's nothing at all wrong with the Facebook relationship. If you are being invited into a conversation that you are uncomfortable including your spouse in, then you should not start the relationship."

There "absolutely" are times when a husband or wife should decline a Facebook friend invitation from someone of the opposite sex, Martin said.

Thomas White, vice president for student services and communications at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, said "unhealthy marriages, unguarded partners and fallen humanity" -- not technology -- are the problem. White, who also is an associate professor of theology, offered four tips for spouses who are on Facebook:

-- Give your spouse the password and the "freedom to check your Facebook at any time."

-- Disable Facebook's chat function. "It provides a way to communicate without any record and can lead to a false sense of safety similar to the woman in Proverbs 7 whose husband was away," White said.

-- Set all Facebook messages to forward to someone else's email address who can serve as an accountability partner. An additional layer of accountability, White said, would be to have the messages forwarded to your spouse's email. White said his messages are forwarded to his work e-mail which his assistants view.

-- Don't accept a past romantic interest's friend request -- or send a request -- until discussing it with your spouse.

"Facebook is not evil, but as with all forms of technology, we have to be wise in how we use them," White said.

Ease of communication has opened the door to all sorts of possibilities -- good and bad -- White and Martin said. Prior to the Internet and Facebook, a person would have had to spend days, weeks or even months to try to find someone they knew years ago.

"An out-of-the-blue phone call would have been a much bolder action," White said.

Now, though, a person can do that in seconds, "simply by just going on Facebook or any other social networking site and doing a search for that person," Martin said.

"It can almost be done on a whim, and that's part of the problem," Martin said. "A thing done on a whim can evolve into a secret relationship that evolves into an emotional attachment that then leads to a divorce. There are some early warning signs that a person should note in order to avoid that kind of thing happening."

Facebook relationships, Martin said, are "real relationships."

"It's not a game. It's not a fantasy. These are real relationships.... People can form powerful, genuinely emotional attachments as a result of an exchange that is initially nothing more than an online exchange," Martin said. "Because these relationships are real and relationships shape our lives, we need to manage the beginning of a relationship with an eye toward the possible outcomes of that relationship. In other words, you don't toy with a dangerous animal. If there is something that a person would not do in terms of a face-to-face relationship -- an intimate discussion or a private discussion -- they should not do it on Facebook. Otherwise, they are starting down a path which can have extremely negative consequences."

The Beast Is Rapidly Growing More Than Ever

2011-06-11T08:27:00.012+08:00

Cisco predicts that the Internet will quadruple in size over the next four years. In fact, the incremental growth in Internet traffic between 2014 and 2015 will be 17.2 exabytes per month. That growth alone is roughly the amount of all global Internet traffic recorded last year.

Video And Mobile Are Breaking The Internet
By David Goldman @CNNMoneyTech

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Internet usage is growing so rapidly that just its incremental, one-year growth between 2014 and 2015 will be equal to all the Internet traffic recorded worldwide last year.

Four years from now, the Internet's traffic volume will be so large that every five minutes it will be the equivalent of downloading every movie ever made. In 2015, monthly Internet traffic will reach the equivalent of 20 billion DVDs, 19 trillion MP3s or 500 quadrillion text messages.

Those are just some of the mind-blowing statistics released Wednesday in Cisco's annual Visual Networking Index, a comprehensive view and forecast of the data trends shaping the Internet.

Experts consider Cisco's forecast to be the gold standard for Internet analysis. The annual study, which began in 2008, has historically been accurate to within a 5% to 10% deviation -- usually on the conservative side.

"I think a lot of analysts viewed it as self-serving, but it's taken on much greater importance as some of the forecasts have turned out to be fairly accurate," said Vince Vittore, analyst at Yankee Group.

Cisco (CSCO, Fortune 500) predicts that by 2015, Internet traffic will be significantly more mobile, and it will be mostly made up of video. The data is cool, but the real-world impact may be overwhelming.

Mobile: Traffic generated by mobile devices has been one of the fastest-growing segments of the Internet for years: Mobile traffic in 2010 alone was triple the size of the entire Internet in 2000.

But it's growing even larger. The proliferation of smartphones, netbooks and tablets means that there will be roughly one mobile device for every individual alive in 2015. Cisco predicts there will be 7.1 billion mobile, connected devices four years from now, at which point there will be 7.2 billion people on Earth, according to the World Bank.

That will send mobile traffic through the roof. Internet usage on mobile devices will grow by more than 26-fold between last year and 2015, Cisco predicts.

It's not just smartphones driving that traffic. Internet traffic generated just by tablets -- which barely existed two years ago -- will be larger in 2015 than the size of the entire mobile Internet in 2010.

All of that traffic is going to place a tremendous burden on the world's wireless infrastructure. As a result, Cisco believes networks will have to rapidly adopt significantly more efficient technologies.

"4G adoption will have to happen fast, and perhaps faster than what we have anticipated," said Suraj Shetty, vice president at Cisco.

Video: Last year, video comprised the majority of consumer Internet traffic for the first time, making up 53% of all uploads and downloads. By 2015, video traffic will more than quadruple, and the Internet will be two-thirds made up of video.

If you include peer-to-peer file sharing, including services like BitTorrent, then video actually will make up 90% of all Internet traffic in four years, Cisco predicts.

By 2015, 1 million minutes of video -- the equivalent of 674 consecutive days of viewing -- will cross the Internet every second, and the community of online video users will double to just over 1 billion people.

Though YouTube, live sports, and video calling are all growing, more than half of Internet video will be made up of long-form streaming videos, such as movies and TV shows delivered by services like Hulu and Netflix (NFLX).

Just as mobile data is expected to overload wireless networks, fixed broadband lines may not be able to cope with the increase in video watching either. As a result, service providers will have to get creative about how they deliver video to end users.

"There's a very clear Netflix impact, which consumes a tremendous amount of bandwidth," Shetty said. "Networks are going to have to become intelligent, because they cannot handle video the same way they handle Web traffic. You can't just keep throwing bandwidth at this problem."

A Cell Tower That Fits In The Palm Of Your Hand?

2011-06-11T07:54:00.004+08:00

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- As mobile data usage skyrockets, wireless companies are spending billions each year to maximize capacity, and consumers end up footing the cost in the form of higher cell phone bills.

But a cube that fits in the palm of your hand could help solve that problem.

It's called lightRadio, a Rubik's cube-sized device made by Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) that takes all of the components of a cell phone tower and compresses them down into a 2.3-inch block. Unlike today's cell towers and antennas, which are large, inefficient and expensive to maintain, lightRadio is tiny, capacious and power-sipping.

As tiny as it is, it has been tasked with solving an enormous problem.

The global wireless industry is spending $210 billion a year to operate their networks, and $50 billion to upgrade them, according to Alcatel-Lucent and PRTM. Networks are dealing with that cost by putting data caps in place with heavy overage charges and by raising prices on their smartphone and tablet plans.

Despite all that spending and pressure on consumers to curb their data usage, the networks are fighting a losing battle. Mobile data usage is expected to grow 30 times in the next four to five years and 500 times in the next ten years, according to Alcatel-Lucent.

With a combination of miniaturization and cloud technology, lightRadio just might be able to help wireless carriers keep pace with their customers.

When conceiving of lightRadio, Alcatel-Lucent's engineers stripped out all the heavy power equipment that controls modern cell towers, and moved them to centralized stations. That allows the lightRadio cubes to be made small enough to be deployed virtually anywhere and practically inconspicuously: Atop bus station awnings, on the side of buildings or on lamp posts.

Their small size and centralized operation lets wireless companies control the cubes virtually. That makes the antennas up to 30% more efficient than current cell towers. Live data about who is using the cubes can be assessed, and the antennas' directional beams can be shifted to maximize their potential. For instance, radios may be pointed in one direction as people are coming to work in the morning and another direction as they're leaving work at the end of the day.

The lightRadio units also contain multi-generational antennas that can relay 2G, 3G and 4G network signals all from the same cube. That cuts down on interference and doubles the number of bits that can be sent through the air.

Today's cell towers, by contrast, send power in all different directions, most of which is lost, since it doesn't reach anyone's particular devices. They're inefficient in other ways as well: Roughly half of the power from cell towers' base stations is lost before it makes its way up to the antennas at the top of the tower. And they have separate antennas for 2G, 3G and 4G networks, causing interference problems.

All of lightRadio's smart technology and power efficiency can help cut carriers' operating costs in half, Alcatel-Lucent believes.

"We need to think differently about this, because no one wants limits," said Tod Sizer, head of wireless research at Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Laboratories. "We hope to solve this problem so that the AT&Ts (T, Fortune 500), Verizons (VZ, Fortune 500) and Sprints (S, Fortune 500) of the world will be able to provide the data capacity that is needed by the customer."

The lightRadio trials will begin in September 2011, and the company expects to be producing them in volume by 2012. Several carriers have expressed interest in the technology, and Sprint Nextel plans to try out the cubes later this year.

"Sprint is talking to Alcatel Lucent about this technology and we will be working with them to test and evaluate it," a Sprint spokeswoman said. "We have been aggressive in smaller factor cell sites to help us support the growth in data traffic."

Sizer said he sees lightRadio as a complimentary technology to existing cell towers. Those big antennas still serve a purpose, providing long distance signals or beams down a highway.

But as wireless companies add infrastructure to keep up with the ever-rising data demands from tablets and smartphones, carriers are finding that they're running into a cost and a space issue: Towers are expensive, and they're running out of room to erect new ones.

Each 1.5-Watt lightRadio cube powers about a two-block radius, so in urban areas, they can be deployed throughout the city and stacked like Lego blocks in stadiums or other areas that need extra capacity. In rural areas, they can be deployed atop existing cell towers in arrays.

"The thing that's incenting us to move quickly is that more and more people are using smartphones, and my customers are being crushed by the enormous amount of data that people want to use," said Sizer. "We have to meet the access demands of the consumer, who wants to access data in any place."

Internet Addiction

2011-04-13T16:47:00.016+08:00

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The Virtual Creature
By The Windchime

Unless our internet gadgets and devices are all broken (perhaps due to excessive use or abuse), we would probably not go to bed early and consequently would not be able to wake up early. In the past there was a saying that goes this way: "Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." Today the saying now becomes: "Early to bed and early to rise is a sure sign that your computer is already a broken device."

According to studies conducted by some experts, the internet is fast becoming the number one "psychological addiction" of the 21st century that is sweeping the entire globe and has affected and is continuing to affect millions of people from all walks of life, race, religion, and ethnicity.

Unlike any other form of addiction, the negative effects of internet addiction are subtle and bring far more gradual destruction in the long run to the addicted person compared with being addicted to drugs or alcohol or any other form of psychological dependency.

Things have their inherent potential to be something good or bad, but it all depends on how they are used or intended to be used. For instance, drugs are good when they are used for the appropriate treatment of sickness, otherwise they can be harmful. Or work for instance, it can be a productive expending of human energy when done with appropriate regulations and within proper confines, otherwise over-zealous motivation for it could turn a person into a self-draining workaholic. Right kind and right amount of alcohol in the body is good for the heart and other organs, but abuse it and you could turn into a pathetic alcoholic.

Much so, the internet can be good or bad. How we use or abuse it makes the difference. The internet's potential is so great and vast as the ocean. Because of its tremendous capability to feed our minds with just about anything the mind is capable of imagining and able to process and comprehend, it carries both the productive and destructive power to effect or cause both good and bad things to happen to people who are hooked on it, as well as influence the worldwide community. Nothing like this thing had ever been made before! Its awesome power makes it the greatest tool for good and evil that mankind has ever created.

Realize, that every time you touch a keyboard, your fingers are stroking a part of this great man-made creation. And unless you know exactly what you are doing, beware! For while most people might just innocently and unknowingly be tickling the creature into some playful amusement, there are people whose fingers intently goad the creature into causing something evil to happen. Or worse, you may not know it but your fingers might be poking the creature into causing unintended serious negative consequences you are totally oblivious of.

Remember, the moment you log-in to the WWW (World Wide Web), you momentarily become a part of it! And whatever is in your mind becomes a part of the creature's mind and whatever information or idea you communicate out through the web becomes yet another talking voice of the creature. From the great multitude of thoughts that originate from the individual souls hooked up to the internet, the great creature draws its awesome power to influence and possess people's hearts and minds. With our addiction to the internet, we become the empowering force behind the creature. Through the internet we become globally united as one. Collectively therefore, we are the Virtual Creature (or "Beast", if you like).

The internet is now growing so fast and is becoming stronger and wilder each day. Millions upon millions of people have come to embrace it and believe in the awesome potential of its power. Internet followers and patronizers believe that with the touch of the keyboard buttons, together they can and are changing the world. It has become the new obsession of the recent century. And this virtual creature is now becoming the world's new religion.

Just as the mind is unstoppable, so is this virtual creature. Its power is like the mighty wind. Its force is more stronger than the biggest ocean waves sweeping across the lands. Its domination is as vast as the ocean. Who can subdue it?

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The sound of a great multitude of people is like the sound of the waves of the ocean. And out of the seas emerges a great creature who could talk and speak in many languages and it has the power to perform wonders and miracles and many have come to worship it.

Tale of two interventions

2011-03-22T20:25:00.001+08:00

By Conrado de Quiros
Philippine Daily Inquirer

What makes the Iraq War completely condemnable and today’s Allied strikes at Libya perfectly laudable?

First is that the Iraq War had no UN sanction while today’s strikes do.

Had another country done what the US did in 2003, that country would have been called a rogue state and faced reprisals. The UN saw no compelling reason to take military action against Iraq. It never bought the US line that Saddam Hussein was armed with weapons of mass destruction and were ready to use them against the US. All its experts were saying Saddam’s force was spent, all he had were weapons of mass delusion.

The US went on to invade Iraq anyway, but not before disparaging the one body that had been the repository of post-war world opinion, depicting it as having become irrelevant in today’s world. In lieu of the UN, all the US had was the Coalition of the Conscripted, countries like the Philippines headed by someone who counted on the US to be quiet while she oppressed her people and/or while she plotted to steal the vote the following year.

Today’s Allied strikes have UN sanction and the backing of world opinion. It wasn’t just the Libyan rebels who celebrated after the UN’s declaration of a no-fly zone over Libya, firing rockets in the air and chanting “God is the greatest.” The world did. Except for China and a few countries which expressed reservations about the UN resolution. China opposes military action in international relations, a generally good position to maintain except in cases that involve genocide or mass murder, cases like Bosnia, Rwanda, and increasingly, yes, Libya.

Second is that the Iraq War was first and last a response to the needs of the American government while the air strikes are first and last a response to the needs of the Libyan people.

When no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, as the Americans who opposed the war expected, though they were the minority drowned out by a general paranoia and jingoism fueled by Congress and the media which went along with the war, the official line promptly went on another track. That was that the invasion of Iraq was a war of liberation to free the Iraqi people from the clutches of Saddam. Which was all very fine, except for several things. One was that the world did not lack for SOBs except that the others were America’s SOBs, and in any case had no vast supplies of oil. Two was that there was no home-grown revolt against Saddam, other than all sorts of religious and tribal schisms. Three was that the Iraqi people themselves, including women and children, took the brunt of liberation from America’s smart bombs, sending their keening and lamentations to heaven.

The Libyan civil war began as an uprising by the Libyan people following similar uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt that had ousted long-time rulers, Ben Ali and Mubarak. Remarkably, all three took place on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the EDSA revolution, giving us to see with new eyes something important we have bequeathed to the world. The first two took the same route as EDSA (some of the parallels, including the rulers vowing to fight till death but slinking away in the night, are uncanny), the last has not. Determined to fight on despite his alienation from his own people and those of the world, Gadhafi has turned the uprising into a civil war, threatening wholesale slaughter upon his enemies.

International law, which the UN exists to uphold, is clear on the point: You do not interfere in the affairs of another country in the name of any good, implied or stated. The only time you may do so is on humanitarian grounds, to prevent an imminent bloodbath. The point, and a most insightful one, is that the intervention is bound to produce consequences that are worse than the bad it means to correct. Even if the American invasion of Iraq represented a patent good—and the cynicism of its motives, the deviousness with which its government sold it to the public, and the arrogance with which it carried it out preclude that idea—it would have remained unjustifiable.

Not so the strikes on Libya.

Third is that the Iraq War paid service to a lie, the strikes on Libya pay service to the truth.

At the very least, the first was quite literally premised on the lie that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the US. Saddam had no reason to threaten the US and had nothing to threaten the US with. He had no visible connection to al-Qaida, which the US believed to have mounted 9/11. As to his being barbaric, capable of wholesale carnage via poison gas, the US, along with France, Britain, and other Arab countries did not particularly mind when he was doing that to the Iranians, even calling him at the time “an agent of the civilized world.”

There is little doubt that Gadhafi would first obliterate his people before he gives in to them. He is the nightmare that would have happened to us if Marcos had dug in.

At the very most, the first is premised on the bigger lie, shown up by history: that liberation can come from outside, that freedom can be given as a gift.

At the end of the day, when Gadhafi is gone (and he will be gone whether it takes a month, a year, or several years), he cannot stop the march of history which has often taken the form of the people expressing their wrath, it will be because of the people and not their benefactors. It will be because the people have suffered, because the people have struggled, because the people have spoken. Freedom is never given, it is fought for. Liberty is never granted, it is earned. With blood and tears. The world will have helped to lessen the blood and stemmed the tears, but in the end the victory, and liberation, will have been won by the Libyan people themselves.

There’s no grander truth than that.

The World Needs Leaders Who Can Empower Rather Than Control

2011-03-17T11:46:00.003+08:00

[...] Over the last few decades, leaders have encouraged people to raise the bar of leadership. They have drawn heavily from traditional leadership models and principles, and they have elevated the values of excellence and efficiency. But today's generation of young world-changers has grown skeptical of these values and the leadership principles that produced them. They are increasingly seen as too corporate, too controlling, and the source of too much consumerism.

Today's young generation is hungry for something more than the 15 principles for building a better team or the 21 reasons why you should be a leader. They are not content with just filling a role on a task force for growth. They are hungry for more. They want a voice. They want influence. They are not a generation that is merely content with just receiving a vision; they want to be part of shaping and creating the vision. [...]

Click here to read full text.

Analyzing the Developments of Libya's Uprising (Inside Story - Al Jazeera)

2011-02-25T13:33:00.000+08:00

02/21/2011 - Crushing Libya's revolt. The unrest in Libya started out as a series of protests inspired by popular revolts in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia but was met by a fierce security crackdown and the use of militias.

02/22/2011 - Libya: Ready for civil war? As protests spread across the country, Seif al-Islam Gaddafi vowed that the regime would "fight to the last bullet".

02/23/2001 - Libya on the brink. Libya's embattled leader clings to power, with his military unleashing the bloodiest crackdown among the wave of protests sweeping the Arab world. But how long can Muammar Gaddafi survive? And what are the risks if his regime is toppled?

02/24/2011 - Embattled but defiant. A former member of Gaddafi's closest circle gives an insight into the Libyan leader's state of mind.

Libya's Lucrative Ties (Riz Khan - Al Jazeera)

2011-02-23T23:07:00.005+08:00

02/23/2011 - Libya's lucrative ties. As world leaders condemn violence against protesters, what is at stake for Western nations with close ties to Gaddafi?

Truthfullness: Libya's Challenge To The International Community?

2011-02-22T20:11:00.007+08:00

Khaled Al Ga'aeem, under-secretary of Libya's foreign ministry, phoned Al Jazeera on Monday night. This is a translation of part of the subsequent conversation, which aired live.

Feb 22 (Reuters) - African mercenaries are being used by Libya to crush protests, prompting some army troops to switch sides to the opposition, Libya's ambassador to India, who resigned in the wake of the crackdown, said on Tuesday.

"They are from Africa, and speak French and other languages," Ali al-Essawi told Reuters in an interview, adding that he was receiving information from sources within the OPEC-member country.

Essawi, who has left the embassy since he resigned on Monday to protest the violent crackdown and is now staying at a hotel in New Delhi, said he had been told there had been army defections.

"They (troops) are Libyans and they cannot see foreigners killing Libyans so they moved beside the people," Essawi said, looking nervous and agitated.

Diplomats have said the U.N. Security Council would hold a closed-door meeting on Tuesday to discuss the crisis in Libya.

"Libyans cannot do anything against the air fighters. We do not call for international troops, but we call on the international community to save the Libyans," Essawi said.

Earlier on Tuesday, Essawi told Reuters that he expected more diplomats at foreign missions to resign due to the ongoing violence in Libya. He said ambassadors in China, Poland, Tunisia, the Arab League, and the United States had also stepped down.

"Fighter aircraft were bombing civilians on the streets of Tripoli, this is unprecedented violence," Essawi said.

Help to the helper? Aid to the aider?

2010-12-22T17:53:00.008+08:00

1 in 7 Americans rely on food stamps
CNNMoney.com

The use of food stamps has increased dramatically in the U.S., as the federal government ramps up basic assistance to meet the demands of an increasingly desperate population.

The number of food stamp recipients increased 16% over last year. This means that 14% of the population is now living on food stamps. That's about 43 million people, or about one out of every seven Americans.

In some states, like Tennessee, Mississippi, New Mexico and Oregon, one in five people are receiving food stamps. Washington, D.C. leads the nation, with 21.5% of the population on food stamps.

"The high unemployment rate caused the high participation rate," said Dottie Rosenbaum from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank.

But it's not just the nation's stubbornly high unemployment rate of 9.8% that's driving the increase in food stamp use. Some states are expanding their definitions of poverty to include more people.

At the same time, the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act boosted annual funding to the nationwide food stamp program, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, by $10 billion.

The average recipient receives $133 in food stamps per month, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That amount varies from state to state; in Hawaii the average is $216, while it's $116 in Wisconsin.

But the Recovery Act funding increased the maximum food stamp benefit by 13.6%, which translates to about $20-24 dollars per person per month.

The U.S. government considers food stamps to be effective stimulus for the economy, because the recipients usually spend them right away.

Idaho saw the biggest increase in its food stamp program, with a spike of 39% compared to last year, followed by Nevada, at 29%, and New Jersey, at 27%.

New Jersey's food stamp program expanded at least in part because the state raised its poverty level in April, according to Nicole Brossoie of the state Department of Human Services. That let the state add 35,000 people to its food stamp rolls, an increase of 5%.

Also, Brossoie said that program has been made more accessible to poverty-stricken residents.

"Through newsletters, posters, counseling and other outreach, the stigma associated with food stamps has diminished and more individuals and families are seeking assistance," she said.

What happens when the jobless give up?
The government is also beefing up unemployment benefits. The unemployed will get a 13-month extension to file for additional unemployment benefits, which can last as long as 99 weeks in states hit hardest by job loss.

As the job market continues to dog the economy, the increase in food stamp funding is set to remain in place for nearly three years.

Dottie Rosenbaum said the hike in food stamp benefits is set to expire Nov. 1, 2013. Typically, food stamp funding increases every year to match inflation. But if Congress does not extend the stimulus funding beyond the 2013 cutoff, then food stamp benefits will revert to their original levels, but still be adjusted for inflation.

She said the budget office is forecasting a potential drop of $49 a month in food stamp benefits for a family of three, or $59 for a family of four, if the stimulus program is not continued.

President Obama, while signing a child nutrition bill on Dec. 13, said he was working with members of Congress to extend the food stamp funding.

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What a very rare time it will be when those who lend will themselves be in great need of the things that they used to lend to others. What a day like no other day it will be when those who give aid will themselves be in need of the things that they used to give to others.

He who used to lend time to others shall be given enough time by them. He who gave blessings to others shall in turn receive from others blessings. Those who lend troubles to others will gain a manifold increase of troubles.

Though the branches will be cut off, yet the Lord will preserve the trunks and the roots so that in time there may be new young branches that will sprout. In the winter, no one who toiled in the field during the season of plenty should curl cold in a barn full of chaffs, for the Lord will honor their labor; and there will be aid to the aider, and help there shall be to the helper.

What's Going On?

2010-12-09T05:04:00.003+08:00

What happened to this case? Where is justice?

A highly encrypted video document such as this which is supposedly under the watch and safe keeping of one of the world's most advanced military and intelligence agency, all of a sudden is in the hands of some group of whistle-blowers and they were able to decrypt it? There must be something going on here than what seems to be a case of security lapses.

Woe to those whose fingers twirl the devilsticks!

Who Really Are Behind WikiLeaks?

2010-12-07T04:07:00.006+08:00

With the way the information are selectively released, some people have now started to become suspicious of WikiLeaks. The mere fact that until now no one from WikiLeaks has fallen into the hands of authorities raises serious doubts as to who really are the masterminds behind this group of the so-called "online whistle-blowers". With these doubts and suspicions, it has now started becoming difficult to believe that it is the noble motive of Julian Assange to help keep governments open.

More than meets the eye, it is now beginning to appear that this whole thing is not merely leaking "secret/confidential" information for the purpose of government transparency.

Woe to those whose fingers twirl the devilsticks.

Diplomacy After WikiLeaks

2010-12-05T23:25:00.006+08:00

By Randy David
Philippine Daily Inquirer

For some people, ethical diplomacy is an oxymoron, a self-contradicting idea. Foreign policy, of which diplomacy is but an instrument, is supposed to be driven by the self-interest of nations, not by any notion of what is good for the world or for humanity. Accordingly, no one should be surprised or find offense in the ruthless selfishness with which the United States pursues its interests, as shown by US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks. It is just the way foreign relations are conducted by nations everywhere.

I would argue that the average individual would find this view too cynical. While one expects nations—like persons—to keep secrets, he would nonetheless expect them to pursue their interests with decency, in a way that is worthy of the respect and trust of those with whom they deal.

In many ways, this is the burden of diplomacy. Indeed, this will not be appreciated by countries that treat their diplomats as no more than glorified shopping guides for traveling politicians and their spouses. But the work of diplomats, who are the public face of their people in the countries to which they are sent, is crucial to maintaining peace and harmony in the world.

I recently came across a lecture delivered by the British ambassador to the Vatican, Francis Campbell, before an audience in Newcastle, United Kingdom, in which he reflects on what he claims is the often misunderstood art of diplomacy. “When one mentions diplomacy many negative images can spring to mind. Perhaps none more so than Sir Henry Wotton’s description of an ambassador as ‘a man of virtue sent abroad to lie for his country’.”

This witty description of the diplomatic function seems so benign compared to what diplomats actually do, if one goes by the accounts that American ambassadors write and send to Washington. It leaves out of the picture the equally important task of interpreting what’s happening in a country, and why its leaders and people are acting the way they do, from the particular vantage point of one’s own nation. Such information is essential to any government that seeks to persuade another to act on the basis of mutual interests.

“At heart,” says Campbell, “diplomacy is about a relationship—it is about building, managing, deepening and maintaining a relationship.” From the embassy cables released by the WikiLeaks website, one can conclude that a good number of America’s diplomats fulfill this function in a way that does credit to their jobs and their government. But, when these cables are read by the very people who are the topic, the consequences can be unpredictable.

These cables, sent from 274 US embassies and consulates all over the world, were written for very specific readers—mainly the heads of regional desks in the foreign office and other high government officials. Most are cast in dry and tedious bureaucratese, while a few can actually pass for literary gems. Some are artfully anthropological, others profoundly psychological. One can imagine how the boredom of an ambassador in a hardship assignment may be greatly relieved by the writing of a report that mixes imaginative gossip with dry empirical facts, political analysis with cultural interpretation. What has made these cables especially controversial however is the attitude they seem to embody—a condescending “orientalism” (in Edward Said’s sense of the word) that can only erode the trust that diplomats are supposed to build.

This is the effect that US President Barack Obama and State Secretary Hillary Clinton are now doing their best to neutralize. When allies and leaders of friendly nations are depicted in disdainful and mocking language by US diplomats in their memos, not even a personal call from the American president may suffice to repair the injury that has been done. Out of politeness, America’s allies will likely dismiss these incidents as insignificant. No formal diplomatic protest will be lodged by anyone, except by politicians who like to perform before the peanut gallery at home. Still, the US would be greatly mistaken if it takes this to mean that all is well among friends.

This is one time when America’s diplomats may need to summon all their skills in cultural interpretation if they are to get past this crisis. In many places in the non-Western world, as they may know, trust is everything. Lacking the hard information they need to make rational choices, people in these societies tend to rely mainly on their instincts—that is to say, on the relationships of tacit trust they build with other people—to make decisions. It is this kind of trust that has become the first casualty of WikiLeaks’ disclosures.

Perhaps it is just as well that small nations that have tended to conduct their foreign relations on a foundation of personal trust are getting a good education in modern diplomacy. It is probably to them that WikiLeaks speaks when it claims that its work is inspired by this quote from James Madison: “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

The WikiLeaks cables are supposed to span the period 1966 to February 2010. That’s a long time. Many transitions happened in the Philippines during those years, and we know that more than any other nation, the US played a big role in those events. We don’t know the full extent of that role. Information of this sort will not allow us to undo the past. But it may lead us to a better understanding of the persistent problems that have troubled our nation, and what we need to do to overcome them.

Utillizing Media for Goodness

2010-12-04T20:38:00.002+08:00

"Humanity in every age, and even today, looks to works of art to shed light upon its destiny... The Church is called to use the mass media to spread the Gospel." --Pope John Paul II

Diplomacy. Anyone?

2010-12-03T21:24:00.005+08:00

"Ground zero... So this is where the first guy got aids?" --Peter

I laughed hard watching this segment of a TV cartoon "Family Guy". This is one hilarious way (for people who are against the U.S. foreign policy) of bashing the U.S. for relying on a poor intel in persuading its allies into taking part in the invasion of Iraq.

In relevance to the confidential U.S. "intel" documents recently being leaked by WikiLeaks, it may be pathetic but the documents give ordinary people (including the likes of the cartoon character Peter) a glimpse of how most leaders of supposed great democratic nations have mastered the art of political hypocrisy which they insist to call "Diplomacy".

Unable to properly digest the tons of leaked confidential information, there is a possibility that some leaders of some countries affected by the leak may misinterpret the huge volume of info and may fail to correctly connect some dots. In their confusion, some leaders might arrive at a wrong conclusion.

In the video clip, an overwhelmed Peter, in his innocence and confusion wrongly concluded and exclaimed, "So you're sayin' we need to invade Iran?" I laughed even more hearing Peter's last line.

World's Changing Demographics: What's The True Story?

2010-11-28T23:51:00.003+08:00

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Stool Repair 101: A Commentary on the State of the Pillars of Family

2010-10-29T04:43:00.003+08:00

By Jim Tonkowich
Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
Commentary - Crosswalk.com

In the beginning, God created a three-legged stool: marriage, sex, and children. The beauty of three-legged stools including God's is that they're solid and hard to tip over regardless of the uneven ground on which they stand. Observe the simplicity, wisdom, and stability of God's stool!

Though people regularly break the rules, in God's economy, the commitment of marriage comes before sex. The sacramental quality of sex is recognized in the notion of consummation. Sex seals the covenant between man and the woman physically: "the two shall become one flesh."

Babies are the natural and expected result of sex within marriage. Without artificial contraception, sex always carries the risk—or more accurately, the blessed possibility—of pregnancy. Even well into the twentieth century, a "barren" woman (not that people used that term) was looked on as an object of pity.

Sex then is reserved for marriage and produces children, the rearing of whom is a primary purpose of marriage to begin with. Couple's needs for companionship are taken care of. Aggressive male sexuality is reigned in. And the future generation enjoys the benefits of growing up with stability and love.

While revealed in the Scriptures and affirmed by the Church, this three-legged stool is also clear from natural law. With some variations, twists, and a great deal of dysfunctionality, the three-legged stool has been the foundation for nearly every human culture throughout the world from time out of mind.

So marriage, sex, and children go together. Or at least they did until what by historical standards is just yesterday.

Sex has been sawn apart from marriage, marriage from children, and children from sex. The result is the mess we still call "marriage," but marriage encumbered by abortion and "reproductive technologies," divorce and cohabitation, "hooking up" and pornography, out-of-wedlock births and blended families, the political and cultural war over same-sex marriage, and the subsequent damage to our children and the future.

For 1,930 years, Christian churches uniformly taught that artificial birth control was inherently evil. Martin Luther, to pick just one example, ranked the sin of birth control as, "far more atrocious than incest and adultery." As extreme as that sounds to modern years, Luther, who was never one to mince words, was in the mainstream of Christian belief and teaching.

But under social pressure that was already building, the Anglicans opened the door—just a crack—to artificial contraception at their 1930 Lambeth Conference. The next year the American the Federal Council of Churches followed suit and the Washington Post excoriated them: "Carried to its logical conclusion, [churches permitting artificial birth control], if carried into effect, would sound the deathknell of marriage as a holy institution by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalized contraceptives would be ‘careful and restrained' is preposterous."

The Post was right, but that didn't stop the tide it predicted from engulfing the country and before long Christian pastors were asking couples in pre-marital counseling what sort of birth control they intended to use and even making suggestions.

In 1968, a mere thirty-seven years after that Post editorial, Pope Paul VI's encyclical, Humanae Vitae, a document that was consistent with 1,968 years of Christian teaching, sounded even to Christian ears as not only completely outrageous, but also as brand new, as if its contents had been conjured out of thin air for the occasion. Five years later abortion was legalized in the United States and the connection between sex and childbearing was completely severed.

New attitudes toward and the easy availability of artificial contraception—including abortion as an ex post facto method of birth control—democratized the sexual revolution that had begun at the end of the nineteenth century. Marriage could not help but be the victim.

At the same time, "reproductive technologies" beginning with in vitroin vitro without moral due diligence since it appeared to be the answer to the prayers of infertile couples everywhere. fertilization separated childbearing from sex. Biological children were suddenly available not only to infertile couples, but to gay couples (through a surrogate), lesbian couples, and unmarried individuals. And many churches embraced

This is the short version of how marriage, sex, and children became independent of one another. The three-legged stool is in pieces and, needless to say, no longer functions as designed.

In light of the ongoing judicial usurpation of marriage in the recent decision striking down Proposition 8 in California and other victories for same-sex marriage, we must, Christian leaders tell us, defend and fix marriage. Agreed, but defending and fixing marriage is a vast, long-term cultural project, not a quick legislative sprint.

Changing a few laws and winning a few court battles will accomplish little unless we address all three legs of the stool and begin reattaching them according to God's original specifications. This begins by with the difficult task of challenging the now conventional wisdom that birth control is not only a right, but a normal, wise, and even godly practice.

Jim Tonkowich is a Senior Fellow at the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and a scholar at the Institute on Religion & Democracy. He holds a degree in philosophy from Bates College and both a Master of Divinity and a Doctor of Ministry from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. More of his work can be found at jimtonkowich.com.

A Muslim Cries Out to Jesus

2010-10-20T03:10:00.004+08:00

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He heard a voice call his name and saw a vision of Christ. This was miraculous, because up until then, Kamal was a Muslim.

"If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; If he is thirsty, give him water to drink." (Proverbs 25:21)
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Betraying One's Own Conscience

2010-10-19T08:46:00.005+08:00

Fr. Barron on Obama's "The Audacity of Hope"

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Be Not Deceived By False Christianity

2010-10-17T00:54:00.008+08:00

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"This is a shockingly powerful & biblical message preached to about 5,000 youth in a day when youth are appealed to through shallow and worldly means. At one point in this sermon the 5,000 Youth are clapping and yelling but then the preacher makes a comment that change the whole atmosphere to where you could have heard a pin drop... As you can imagine, the preacher was never invited back. We believe the whole sermon will be a blessing to many souls." --Heart Cry Missionary

"For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away [their] ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables." (2 Tim 4:3-4)
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Equiping The Young Generation

2010-10-15T23:46:00.000+08:00

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"If abortion is about women's rights, then what were my rights?" --Gianna Jessen

2010-10-12T02:02:00.000+08:00

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Part 1

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Part 2

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The Heart Of The King They Wanted

2010-10-10T16:43:00.000+08:00

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The people demanded to the servant of the Lord and said, "Give us a king to judge us." The Lord said to his servant, "Listen to the voice of the people in all that they tell you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me, that I should not be king over them. According to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them up out of the Land of Slavery even to this day, in that they have forsaken me, and served other gods, so do they also to you. Now therefore listen to their voice: however you shall protest solemnly to them, and shall show them the manner of the king who shall reign over them." (Reference: 1 Samuel 8:6-9)

The king's heart is in the hand of the Lord, as the rivers of water: he turns it wherever he will. (Reference: Proverbs 21:1)

And the Lord hardened the heart of the king..., and the king pursued after their children... (Reference: Exodus 14:8)

See video: Planned Parenthood
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The Hijacked U.N. General Assembly Agenda

2010-10-09T00:58:00.004+08:00

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"...the U.N. General Assembly has never agreed, never agreed that Reproductive Health includes abortion..."

Superficial Preaching: Greatest Obstacle to Evangelization

2010-10-08T14:15:00.006+08:00

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One bishop complained: "In the 'Acts of the Apostles', the apostles gave one sermon and made three thousand converts. We give three thousand sermons and don't make a single convert."

"The greatest obstacle to evangelization is superficial preaching." --Pope John Paul II

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[2 Timothy 3:16-4:5]

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.

I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom; Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; and they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.

But watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry.

[Luke 21:33] Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away.

[Matthew 28:19-20] Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.

There's No Such Thing As An Atheist

2010-10-07T20:35:00.004+08:00

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Watch the full video: The Virtue of Faith
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Not Enough Young To Support The Old

2010-10-07T15:55:00.004+08:00

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Problems of aging, shrinking population
The Economist

The population of bugs in a Petri dish typically increases in an S-shaped curve. To start with, the line is flat because the colony is barely growing. Then the slope rises ever more steeply as bacteria proliferate until it reaches an inflection point. After that, the curve flattens out as the colony stops growing.

Overcrowding and a shortage of resources constrain bug populations. The reasons for the growth of the human population may be different, but the pattern may be surprisingly similar.

For thousands of years, the number of people in the world inched up. Then there was a sudden spurt during the Industrial Revolution that produced, between 1900 and 2000, a near quadrupling of the world's population.

Numbers are still growing; but recently an inflection point seems to have been reached. The rate of population increase began to slow. In more and more countries, women started having fewer children than the number required to keep populations stable.

Four of nine people already live in countries in which the fertility rate has dipped below the replacement rate. Last year the United Nations said it thought the world's average fertility would fall below replacement by 2025. Demographers expect the global population to peak at around 10 billion (it is now 6.5 billion) by mid-century.

As population predictions have changed in the past few years, so have attitudes. The panic about resource constraints that prevailed during the 1970s and 1980s, when the population was rising through the steep part of the S-curve, has given way to a new concern: that the number of people in the world is likely to start falling.

Some regard this as a cause for celebration, on the ground that there are obviously too many people on the planet. But too many for what? There doesn't seem to be much danger of a Malthusian catastrophe.

Humankind appropriates about a quarter of what is known as the net primary production of the Earth (this is the plant tissue created by photosynthesis) -- a lot, but hardly near the point of exhaustion. The price of raw materials reflects their scarcity and, despite recent rises, commodity prices have fallen sharply in real terms during the past century.

By that measure, raw materials have become more abundant, not scarcer. Certainly, the impact that people have on the climate is a problem; but the solution lies in consuming less fossil fuel, not in manipulating population levels.

Nor does the opposite problem -- that the population will fall so fast or so far that civilization is threatened -- seem a real danger. The projections suggest a flattening off and then a slight decline in the foreseeable future.

If the world's population does not look like it's rising or shrinking to unmanageable levels, surely governments can watch its progress with equanimity? Not quite. Adjusting to decline poses problems, which three areas of the world -- Central and Eastern Europe, from Germany to Russia; the northern Mediterranean; and parts of East Asia, including Japan and South Korea -- are already facing.

Think of 20-somethings as a single work force, the best educated there is. In Japan, that work force will shrink by one-fifth in the next decade -- a considerable loss of knowledge and skills. At the other end of the age spectrum, state pensions systems face difficulties now, when there are four people of working age to each retired person. By 2030, Japan and Italy will have only two per retiree; by 2050, the ratio will be three to two.

An aging, shrinking population poses problems in other, surprising ways. The Russian army has had to tighten up conscription because there are not enough young men around. In Japan, rural areas have borne the brunt of population decline, which is so bad that one village wants to give up and turn itself into an industrial-waste dump.

States should not be in the business of pushing people to have babies. If women decide to spend their 20s clubbing rather than child-rearing, and their cash on handbags rather than diapers, that's up to them. But the transition to a lower population can be a difficult one, and it is up to governments to ease it.

Fortunately, there are a number of ways of going about it -- most of which involve social changes that are desirable in themselves.

The best way to ease the transition toward a smaller population would be to encourage people to work longer, and remove the barriers that prevent them from doing so. State pension ages need raising.

Mandatory retirement ages need to go. They're bad not just for society, which has to pay the pensions of perfectly capable people who have been put out to pasture, but also for companies, which would do better to use performance, rather than age, as a criterion for employing people.

Rigid salary structures in which pay rises with seniority (as in Japan) should also be replaced with more flexible ones. More immigration would ease labor shortages, though it would not stop the aging of societies because the numbers required would be too vast. Policies to encourage women into the workplace, through better provisions for child care and parental leave, can also help redress the balance between workers and retirees.

Some of those measures might have an interesting side effect. The U.S. and northwestern Europe once also faced demographic decline, but are growing again, and not just because of immigration. All sorts of factors may be involved; but one obvious candidate is the efforts those countries have made to ease the business of being a working parent.

Most changes were carried out to make labor markets efficient or advance sexual equality. But they had the effect of increasing fertility.

As traditional societies modernize, fertility falls. In traditional societies with modern economies -- Japan and Italy, for instance -- fertility falls the most. And in societies that make breeding and working compatible, by contrast, women tend to do both.

Art, or Blasphemy?

2010-10-05T13:50:00.000+08:00

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Some people, when they are in a state of denial of their silent crisis of spiritual identity, subconsciously tend to resort to art as a means of abstractly ventilating their inner confusion.

Going back to the question at hand. Is the painting mentioned in the video an art, or is it blasphemy? There should be no argue as to whether it is an art or a blasphemy because clearly it is a combination of both. It is an artistic blasphemy as well as a blasphemous art. It is a work of a soul who is subconsciously learning the art of blasphemy.

Their worldview. But how about you, what's your view?

2010-10-04T00:50:00.006+08:00

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People Say, "Life Is A Gamble"

2010-08-12T04:08:00.014+08:00

Book Title: "Gambling: Don't Bet on It"
Author: Dr. Rex M. Rogers
Publisher: Kregel Publications

Source: Crosswalk.com

The Earl of Sandwich was a problem gambler who wouldn't leave the gambling table long enough to eat his dinner, so his servants had no choice but to develop something he could eat with one hand while he gambled with the other. Hence the birth of the sandwich as we know it today. This tidbit from the new Kregel Publications release, "Gambling: Don't Bet on It," demonstrates the degree to which gambling can alter a lifestyle, a personality, and in this case, even our eating habits.

Finally, we have the definitive book on gambling, better defined as, the game ... that turns into pain. It has become a religion where people faithfully worship at the Temple of Chance, genuflecting before The Wizard of Odds. It is a totally inclusive religion that welcomes outcasts and ne'er-do-wells, along with the rich and the powerful. As long as you have a few bucks in the pocket, it's an egalitarian community.

The big names caught in the grip of gambling's tentacles include sports figures, religious leaders, movie stars and government officials who have been sucked into this "sophisticated" lifestyle to their ruin.

This well-researched and thoroughly documented work by Dr. Rex. M. Rogers puts gambling in a perspective that has never been captured so effectively. It details a fascinating history ... and yes, they did cast lots in biblical times even though it is explained how that was not considered gambling.

The author reveals the very nature of gambling, its destructiveness, those who are behind it, and how the odds are skillfully rigged against the players so that the casino must make a profit at the player's expense (or more correctly stated, the player's "loss").

It is not by chance that the casino wins, as the public has been duped to believe. Common sense should tell you that those elaborate hotels and casinos were not built by you winning. To further hammer home that point, heed these words of wisdom from Steve Wynn: "If you want to make money in a casino, you'd better own it." And he should know. Wynn, who masterminded the gaming revolution in America, is also known as "The Casino King of Las Vegas." (See page 54 in Rogers' book.)

Every ploy and psychological device is employed to entice a "mark" (as the carnival refers to those who stroll down their midways) to part with their money. The reader will be amazed at how purposeful casinos are designed for that very purpose.

Hooking potential lifelong gamblers is the goal. Pit bosses and casino owners make special efforts to appeal to the young. The televised poker tournaments show young players making it all look chic to instill a desire in teenagers to take it up. And the new on-line poker tournaments make it easy and immediately accessible.

This is all carefully planned. The liquor industry has contrived to lure the very young to the habit of drinking cocktails by offering a kids' cocktail – called a "Shirley Temple" – which they enjoy while the adults sip their martinis. It is all designed to shape a habit. And remember years ago when beautiful young girls with short skirts came to the high schools to give out free samples of cigarettes?

Chapter Seven in this book, "Gambling as a Means of Fund-Raising," spotlights the contribution of the Church to gambling, which is disturbing. A nationwide survey conducted by the Barna Research Group in 2002 found that 27 percent of Evangelicals, to varying degrees, consider gambling morally acceptable.

You can say what you will about the Mormon Church, but they have taken a strong stand against gambling, and Utah is the one state where it is not permitted. The Mormons have given us a good example of the impact that united religious people can exercise in a democratic polity.

Church-sponsored "casino nights" imply a stamp of approval for gambling from the highest of all authority. Then with the lottery being sponsored by our own state governments with ads and TV spots suggesting it is patriotic to play the lottery, gambling has become legitimized and accepted.

There was a time when gambling was considered outside the rules of law and decency. It was taboo. Not any more. It is legally here – it is everywhere, and its presence is growing. Poker tables are sold now in various family stores. Leading bookstores stock dozens of books, prominently displayed, that purportedly tells the reader how to win at gambling. It is all glamorized to bait a new mark.

Those who profit from gambling do not care that people are driven to bankruptcy, that families are devastated, that crime rates soar as gamblers begin to embezzle money to pay off gambling debts, and that the suicide rate for gamblers is staggering.

Readers will be astonished to learn how much money these game operators take in; and they will learn the real inside story of the Indian casinos, where the money goes and – most startling of all – how the public is being manipulated. This book should challenge everyone to re-think participating in so-called "charity gambling."

And let no one mislead you into thinking that a casino improves an area. This book provides solid documentation of what actually happens to cities like Atlantic City (and others) when casinos are brought in. It shows clearly how crime skyrockets in the wake of casino gambling, identifies the kinds of crime that casinos attract, and explains how much money actually goes to the community.

"Gambling: Don't Bet on It" shows that the so-called community and state "windfall" that results from legalized casino gambling is a delusion. It reveals that for every dollar gambling contributes in taxes, taxpayers spend at least three dollars fixing streets, increasing police patrols, and treating compulsive gamblers (page 82). The only financial "windfall" goes to the casino owners and certain politicians.

What is worse, the "powers that be" – those politicians and casino owners – have no conscience or even concern that they are aiding and abetting an addiction that is every bit as damaging as drugs, alcohol, and sex addition. Their only interest is bringing in the money.

Dr. Rogers' book cites scriptural authority of what our role as Christians should be. Is gambling a sin? (See Chapter 4.) Is it a disease? (See page 124.) What is the Catholic view? (Page 62.) And what does Pete Rose, whose gambling habit cost him a spot in the National Baseball Hall of Fame, say about the Church and gambling? (The answer is on page 145.)

Finally, suggestions on how to begin to defeat gambling and stop further growth of this sordid industry can be found in the last chapter. And this is not signing a petition or blast-faxing officials; this is solid, workable information.

And frankly, I think another way to slow down the spread of gambling is to get this book in the hands of as many people as possible – including those who have a gambling problem. Seeing the shocking truth about the gambling industry should cause even the most dedicated gambler to pause and think. Resources for gambling addiction recovery are listed.

Dr. Rex M. Rogers has done an outstanding job with this book. Every pastor, chaplain, and counselor should have this book in their library for reference.

The history of gambling is a consistent record of broken promises, broken dreams, and broken lives. Indeed, gambling seems to thrive on destroyed lives. Without fail, gambling produces detrimental personal and social consequences

Read Also:

* The Effects of Gambling
* Gambling Away The Golden Years

How's The Condition Of Your Laptop Computer?

2010-08-10T18:56:00.015+08:00

By The WindChime

Laptop computers are supposed to last between five to seven years. But one day last week, I was starting a repair work on my father's 3-year old laptop computer whose power circuitry simply went dead. When I opened the unit I discovered a thick layer of lint and dust accumulating in the cooling gills of the unit's copper heat sink/radiator. This condition prevented the external air sucked in by the internal cooling fan to circulate and exit from the unit since the exhaust passage through the heat radiator's gills is clogged with bonded particles of dust. When such condition occurs, heat quickly builds up inside the laptop until one (or more) of its electronic components overheats and fails.

In my years of experience as a computer technician, I can say that most of the common hardware-related failures occurring in laptop computers today can be traced to overheating as the main cause. This is because in the tightly confined and very limited space inside any laptop, the ventilation is very poor and this condition is conducive to overheating. The combined heat that is simultaneously generated by the so many compact electronic components cramped inside the laptop's circuitry builds up quickly and, if not exhausted fast enough, could heat-compromise component parts inside and cause them to fail. This is the reason it is very critical for laptop computers that their internal cooling system's efficiency be maintained and must be in top working condition all the time.

Every time you use your laptop computer the internal cooling system of your laptop sucks air from its surrounding environment to cool itself. As air is taken in by the cooling fan, some dusts and other very tiny particles floating in the air around the laptop's close vicinity are also sucked in. While most of these tiny particles are carried away by the stream of of the exhaust air out of the system, a few amount of them get deposited in the area around the cooling system's exhaust passage when the laptop is turned off. And as the laptop cools down, these deposit of dusts and other tiny particles will attract themselves electrostatically bonding together to form a very fine layer of cobweb-like material. As time goes by, the continued use of the laptop without periodically cleaning its internal area can cause the accumulation of dusts and tiny particles to continue and the build-up of the fine layer of cobweb-like material will grow thicker at the critical area between the very narrow spaces of the laptop's exhaust air passage until clogging of the outflow of air in the laptop's cooling system will begin to occur. When the laptop is in this condition overheating is sure to happen and it will just be a matter of time before hardware-related problems start to develop and manifest intermittently every now and then until eventually your laptop's motherboard will totally fail.

Since most owners of laptop computers are unaware of the necessity to periodically get their laptop computers cleaned internally as a simple measure to prevent overheating, this is perhaps the main reason why so many laptop computers don't last up to their maximum lifespan.

Laptop computers' motherboards are designed differently from desktop computers' motherboards in such a way that their dimensions or form factor is very much proprietary and model specific. So when your laptop's motherboard is dead beyond repair due to overheating, you have no other choice but to contact the manufacturer of your laptop and ask for a replacement. But if the model of your laptop was some two or three years ago, chances are the manufacturer had already stopped producing parts in support for that specific model. What happens now is that you are left with no choice except to trash your laptop and painfully bleed enough cash to buy for another laptop unit. This is a criminal offense against austerity in the season of economic crisis.

If only laptop manufacturers were able to redesign the cooling system of their products such that it was possible for users by themselves to easily access and clean even just the cooling gills of the heat sink/radiator located at the critical part of the cooling system's exhaust passage without having the need to disassemble the laptop, I believe this would have significantly reduced the number of customer warranty services availments and would have saved them a lot of after sales customer support costs. And also since it would have helped maximize the lifespan of their laptop computers sold, people would have been buying laptop computers not too unnecessarily and as a result there would have been a reduction in the rate of wastage resulting from premature deaths of laptop computers, and possibly a lessening of the manufacturers' overall demand for raw materials, and ultimately thus helped promote environment friendly sustainable manufacturing. Not to mention the tangible and intangible benefits the manufacturers would have enjoyed as the result of the improved reliability of their products.

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The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do. -Ted Nelson

People think computers will keep them from making mistakes. They're wrong. With computers you make mistakes faster. -Adam Osborne

Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window. -Steve Wozniak

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers. -Sydney J. Harris

Why is it drug addicts and computer afficionados are both called users? -Clifford Stoll

Finding Your Leadership Style

2010-07-24T09:45:00.007+08:00

Ten different ways to lead God's people
Christianity Today
By Bill Hybels

A few years ago, I began to notice major differences in the ways gifted leaders led their teams. They all had the spiritual gift of leadership referred to in Romans 12:8, but they approached the challenges of leadership differently.

About the time I was making this observation, the management team at Willow Creek gave me a leadership book for my birthday. (The year before, they had hired an Elvis impersonator, who burst into my office during a meeting to serenade me. Elvis discovered my leadership style in a hurry. He barely made it out of my office with his blue suede shoes.)

This year they gave me a more appropriate gift—Certain Trumpets, by Garry Wills. Wills describes the enormous impact of great leaders whose particular leadership style meshed perfectly with a certain need in society.

For example, when people are being oppressed and want to break free from that yoke, the situation calls for a radical, transforming leader.

In a complex, pluralistic democracy, with thousands of constituencies that must be drawn together to form a government, a political or electoral leader is necessary.

In war time, a military style of leadership works best.

During an ideologically intense social struggle, an intellectual leader might fit the bill.

Wills effectively argues that there are many different styles of leadership, and certain styles fit certain leadership needs better than others.

Over the last few years, I've identified at least ten manifestations of the leadership gift as it plays out in the church. It's been helpful to our staff to identify our leadership styles and build leadership teams accordingly.

1. Visionary Leader

These leaders have a crystal-clear picture in their minds of what they want to happen. They cast visions powerfully and possess indefatigable enthusiasm to pursue the mission.

Visionaries shamelessly appeal to anyone and everyone to get on board with the vision. They talk about it, write about it, burn white-hot for it. They are future-oriented, usually idealistic, and full of faith to believe the vision can and will be actualized if the dream is talked about and cast often enough.

Visionary leaders are not easily discouraged or deterred. In fact, if people tell them their dream is impossible, that just adds fuel to the fire in their spirit.

Visionary leaders may or may not be able to form teams, align talents, set goals, or manage progress toward the achievement of the vision. But this one thing is sure: They carry the vision. They cast the vision. They draw people into the vision, and they'll die trying to see it fulfilled.

I was at a conference with John Maxwell some time back. John was teaching on vision, and he started his talk on one side of the sanctuary to symbolize the beginning of the vision.

"You have no money, you have no people, you have no faith, but you have the vision. So you put one foot in front of the other, and you walk, by the light of the vision . ..." He began to walk across the stage.

"Then, along the way, as you share that vision, God gives you the faith, the power, the people, the resources . ..." Everyone's eyes were riveted on John as he made this vision walk. But there was a planter between where he was and where he was headed. Inside, I'm screaming, Watch out for the planter! John never saw it. He ran into it and stumbled—but the vision was so powerful that he never stopped speaking, never lost his train of thought. I was looking around the crowd, and no one else even seemed to notice!

You know a person is a visionary leader when he trips on the stage and no one even acknowledges it! It was a picture of the leader who cannot help but pour out the vision, despite any obstacle.

2. Directional Leader

This style doesn't get much press, but it is exceedingly important. The directional leader has the uncanny, God-given ability to choose the right path at those critical intersections where an organization starts asking hard questions: "Is it time for a wholesale change or should we stay the course? Do we focus on growth or consolidation? Should we start new ministries or deepen and improve existing ones? Should we add facilities or relocate? Is it time for some fresh staff, or do we dance with those who brought us here?"

These are directional issues, and they are capable of immobilizing an organization. But a leader with a directional style is able to sort the options. He or she can carefully assess the values, mission, strengths, weaknesses, resources, personnel, and openness to change of an organization—then, with remarkable wisdom, point that organization in the right direction.

Wrong calls at these key intersections can wreck organizations. Shortly after Solomon's death, his son Rehoboam became king. His first critical intersection came almost immediately: a representative group of the people asked for their workloads to be reduced. Solomon had worked people to the point of despair. Rehoboam had to make a directional call. The older counselors said, "You'd better ease up on them." The younger counselors said, "Just load them up." He made the wrong call at that intersection, and it wrecked the kingdom.

When Willow Creek is at such a crossroads, I will not move in the direction I believe God is calling us without the green light from two board members who are strong in directional leadership. Whenever we've followed their lead, we've made good decisions. Whenever we've ignored their advice, we've paid a high price.

3. Strategic Leader

Some leaders have the God-given ability to break an exciting vision into achievable steps, so an organization can march intentionally toward the actualization of their mission.

Visions are powerful. Visions excite and inspire people. They compel action. But unless people eventually see progress toward the fulfillment of the vision, they conclude the vision caster is just blowing smoke.

A strategic leader forms a game plan everyone can understand and participate in, one that will eventually lead to the achievement of the vision. A strategic leader challenges the organization to work the plan. She says, "Don't get distracted. Do what needs to be done to achieve the next step, then the next, and we'll achieve the vision together." A strategic leader is able to get various departments of an organization synchronized so that the organization is focused toward the prize.

The vision of Willow Creek has been compelling for more than twenty years. But it has been a seven-step strategy, put together by leaders in the early days of our church, that has helped us move toward the achievement of that vision.

4. Managing Leader

There is always discussion in leadership circles about the differences between management and leadership. You've heard, "Managers do things right; leaders do the right things," and other delineations.

Those may be helpful, but I'm convinced certain leaders possess the unique ability to establish mile markers on the road to the destination, then organize and monitor people, processes, systems, and resources for mission achievement. Old Testament examples include Joseph and Nehemiah.

What's most amazing to those who don't have this style is that managing leaders derive enormous satisfaction from doing all this managing!

You'd be surprised how many visionary leaders are inept at managing people, processes, and systems. Many directional and strategic leaders are incapable of actually putting the players, resources, and systems in place for the goals of the organization to be achieved.

I've often said around our church, "Sooner or later someone's going to have to manage all of this stuff." We've always had an abundance of visionary, directional, and strategic leaders, but we've always had a shortage of managing leaders. That has hurt us all along the way.

Managing leaders often aren't as popular as the leader who can give the big vision talk or make the big decision around the board-room table or put the big plan in place. But in the day-to-day world, someone has to manage the process to make sure we get where we want to go.

5. Motivational Leader

These leaders possess insight into who needs a fresh challenge or additional training. They can sense who needs public recognition, an encouraging word, or a day off. They know when a pay increase, office change, title change, or sabbatical is needed.

Unfortunately, some view the motivational style as a lightweight style of leadership. Well, just ask team members how important it is to receive ongoing inspiration!

I will follow a leader who will fire me up, call out the best in me, celebrate my accomplishments, and cheer my progress, even if it means a lower-voltage vision, an occasional bad call at a crossroads, or a periodic lapse of managerial effectiveness.

Motivational leaders know that teammates get tired, lose focus, and experience mission drift. Workers wonder if what they're doing really matters to anyone—or to God. Motivational leaders don't get bitter or vengeful when morale sinks. They see it as an opportunity to inspire and lift the spirits of everyone on the team.

Jesus was a consistent motivator of the disciples. He changed Peter's name. He promised his followers a hundred-fold reward in this life and in the next. Often, Jesus would take the disciples away and say, "Let's not take a hill. Let's sleep at the bottom of one. Let's go fishing, eat, and hang out."

Some of our teammates would love more than anything else a day with their leader around a campfire in an unrushed setting, instead of always being under our command.

Remember the time Jesus said, "I call you friends"? He always promised them, "In my Father's house are many mansions. I can't imagine spending eternity without you people around me. You'll be with me forever."

Don't ever look down on yourself if God has given you the motivational style.

6. Shepherding Leader

This man or woman loves team members so deeply, nurtures them so gently, supports them so consistently, listens to them so patiently, and prays for them so diligently that the mission of the team gets achieved. It happens primarily because of good will in the hearts of those who have been cared for by the shepherd.

I'm on the board of World Vision, an organization that has fed starving children for more than thirty years. They've had several different presidents, and constituents have supported the vision, regardless of who was at the helm.

It's a different dynamic with shepherding leaders and their teams. Team members support their shepherd, and teammates often feel, Whatever cause is important to the leader is fine with me. If it's broadly Christian, if we can accomplish it in community, if we can retain our shepherd, we'll do it.

Second Samuel 23 records David's leadership in the early days. He drew together the lonely and disaffected, then shepherded them deeply and lovingly. One night, he happened to mention that he was thirsty, but his troops were surrounded by the enemy. Three members of his team risked their lives to sneak behind enemy lines to bring David a jar of water. When they gave him the water, he was so moved by their expression of love that he poured it out as a worship offering.

While there are many cause-driven people waiting to be drawn into a mission by a visionary leader, there are surprising numbers of community-driven people who want to be shepherded and loved. When they are, they will joyfully pursue almost any kingdom purpose. If you can shepherd a group of people, you're a leader, and you can really make a difference.

7. Team-building Leader

Team-building leaders have supernatural insight into people. They find or develop leaders with the right abilities, character, and chemistry with other team members. They place people in the right positions for the right reasons who will then produce the right results.

When the team-building leader gets everyone in place, he or she then says to the team, "You know what we're trying to do. You know what part of the mission you're responsible for. You know what part of the vision the rest of us are responsible for. So head out. Work hard. Achieve your objectives. Communicate with your co-laborers, but lead."

The team-building leader might not nurture or manage people well. He or she reasons that shouldn't be necessary. If the right people are in the right slots doing the right things for the right reasons, they'll get the work done without the leader looking over their shoulder. Few things are as exciting to me as drawing together the right people, putting them in the right positions, then letting that team play hard and have fun.

8. Entrepreneurial Leader

These leaders possess vision, boundless energy, and a risk-taking spirit. Their distinguishing characteristic is they function best in a start-up operation. They love being told it cannot be done.

But once the effort requires steady, ongoing leadership—once things get complex and there are endless discussions about policies, systems, controls, and databases—the entrepreneurial leader loses energy and may even lose focus and confidence. He or she starts to peek over the fence and wonder if there's another start-up project out there.

Entrepreneurs often feel guilty at the thought of leaving something they gave birth to. But if they think, I can't give birth to something every few years, something inside them starts to die. That's their style. It's important in the kingdom.

The apostle Paul was an entrepreneurial leader. He wanted to build churches where Christ had not been named. He wanted to pioneer them, then let someone else run them so he could move on. He made no apologies for his leadership style.

9. Re-engineering Leader

Some leaders thrive in a situation that has lost vision or focus, or one that has been staffed inappropriately. This kind of leader says, "Oh boy, I get to re-engineer this whole situation." They find out what the mission was and what it needs to be now. They decide how progress and success will be measured. They love to tune up, heal, and revitalize hurting organizations.

But when the group is running on eight cylinders, re-engineering leaders may not want to lead over the long haul. Often, rather than manage what they've re-engineered, they look for another project to overhaul. When they find one, they salivate. "Would you look at that train wreck? I'd love to get my hands on all that twisted metal and human carnage. I could really sort that out and make something great out of that."

10. Bridge-building Leader

This leader brings a wide variety of constituencies together under a single umbrella of leadership so that a complex organization can achieve its mission.

This feat requires enormous flexibility in a leader—the ability to compromise and negotiate, to listen, understand, and think outside of the box. It requires not only the ability to be diplomatic; it requires also the gift of being able to relate to diverse people.

In a start-up venture, a leader is surrounded by those who share his or her vision. Contrast that with a church or parachurch organization made up of scores of well-defined constituencies, many of whom care little about the overall vision of the ministry anymore. They just want to make sure their interests are served.

I talked to a pastor who said, "I'm dying. The choir wants new designer robes. The youth want a new gymnasium. The missions department wants to give more money away. The Sunday school department wants more classrooms. The production people want more equipment. The seniors want large-print hymnals, and the Gen Xers want to turn the board room into a cappuccino bar."

The variety and velocity of those requests had him imagining each of those subministries as the enemy. But that situation fires up a bridge-building leader. A bridge builder becomes the best friend and advocate of all the constituent groups. He or she seeks to unite them and focus their efforts.

Beyond envy

It concerns me that there is a certain amount of "gift envy" among church leaders these days. God gave each of us our gift mix for a reason. When leaders adopt someone else's style, they miss the unique opportunities God has given them.

I celebrate when I look around the world and see flourishing churches of all kinds, with many different types of leaders, because it's going to take a variety of churches led by a variety of leaders to reach our world with the love of Christ.

Whatever your style, recognize it, celebrate it, and step up to the plate and lead.

You may also want to read the following related articles:

* The Gift of Giving by Charles Stanley
* The Gift of Mercy by Charles Stanley

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For even as we have many members in one body, and all the members don't have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. Having gifts differing according to the grace that was given to us, if prophecy, let us prophesy according to the proportion of our faith; or service, let us give ourselves to service; or he who teaches, to his teaching; or he who exhorts, to his exhorting: he who gives, let him do it with liberality; he who rules, with diligence; he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness. (Romans 12:4-8)

On Equality And Inequality

2010-07-16T14:06:00.007+08:00

Talk by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett co-authors of "The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger" recorded January 8, 2010 at Hogness Auditorium, University of Washington, Seattle.

* * * * *

The Inequalities of Equality
All Things Being Equal, Not Everything Can Be Equal

By Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.

Ignatius Insight
Originally Published: October 12, 2005

"The idea of the equality of man is in substance simply the idea of the importance of man." — G. K. Chesterton, A Short History of England

I.

Anyone who has ever thought about the subject of "equality" knows that, however noble sounding, it is an intellectual minefield. Equality is the idea that makes most normal people feel a sense of dizziness when reading a book like Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. Of the French triad, "liberty, equality, and fraternity," equality is by far the most slippery and ambiguous. Much of modern political thought has been devoted to producing "equality," usually at the expense of liberty or fraternity, if not sanity. Modern thought has also had to sit by and realize not only that inequality won’t go away, but that the noble efforts to be rid of it often have totalitarian implications.

No reader of Plato can entirely forget these things, which is one of the reasons why we still read him. The most perfect human "equality" imaginable, after all, is contained in the contemporary proposals of massive cloning of human beings so that everyone would presumably have the identical genes and corpus. Equality equals identity. The system would also rid us of the necessity of "begetting," which is seen to be the root of inequality. This very proposal as something good is a form of madness.

All human beings have the same nature that sets them apart from other beings natural and transcendent. No human being is exactly the same in anything beginning with his cells, to the color of his eyes, to his willingness or unwillingness to practice virtue. Even though Hobbes postulated that human beings are approximately of equal strength, the differences among men in terms of talents, energy, vice, health, fingerprints, and endurance are enormous. Some of these differences are measurable; some are not.

Such differences, however, are themselves generally goods, things to be fostered. They represent a richness about our kind, not a defect They are intended to make possible, as Plato also said, a division of labor and a variety of specialized contribution that cause greater things to exist than would result if everyone had to do everything by himself. Everyone is better off because of the variety and difference of talents and capacities among us provided this exists within a spirit and reality of reciprocal exchange, including exchange of the highest things.

Moreover, a whole intellectual industry is devoted to what I call "gapism." Any "gap" in income or talent or material goods between rich and poor, this nation or that, or this person and that, is said to be a sign of injustice, imbalance, or evil. While this view practically ignores the whole history of how wealth came to be produced and distributed in the first place, the thesis is constantly repeated as if it were obvious, which it isn’t. As a result, we inaugurate agonizing crusades to right the imbalances. Massive efforts in unequal taxation and discriminatory policy initiatives are set in motion whereby these "gaps" are to be leveled down so that those who are said to suffer under them can feel more "equal."

Interestingly enough, studies in the history of envy show that often envy, the spiritual vice associated with equality and inequality, is more prevalent when people are more nearly equal than when they are not. This fact suggests that this "gap" analysis is missing something fundamental about human nature. Indeed, chances are that if we took a given population and somehow made them, on a given day, absolutely equal in terms of income and property, after a few years we would return to see that, in the meantime, by normal workings of exchange, talent, energy, and effort, some would have more, others less. The same inequality would return. Some people will be horrified by this result. Others will understand that inequalities are themselves a normal part of the human condition, something that explains why elements of aristocracy, the distinction between virtue and lack of it, have always existed in every society.

The further trouble is that not everyone wants or needs the same things. The philosopher in Greek thought, for instance, not to mention innumerable saints in Christian tradition, affirmed voluntary poverty. Many of the things that everyone else said he needed, the philosopher did not need or want. The philosopher could have been rich if he wanted to be. He knew how to create a monopoly. But he chose not to be rich so that he could be free, yes, imagine, free to do what he could not do if he were burdened with riches. Thus to make him "equal" in terms of material goods would prevent him from being "unequal" in terms of spiritual ones.

II.

These initial remarks are occasioned by my brother having sent me an essay of David Brooks in the New York Times entitled, "An Elite Class Splits the Nation: Higher Education Is Now Causing Most of the Inequality in America." About the only thing worse than "gapism," I sometimes think, is such elite-class analysis, however popular. This rather frantic, but insightful, article informs us that we academics are causing "most of the inequality in America." If true, this is definitely a man-bites-dog sort of situation. Since the very purpose of higher education is, in a sense, to produce inequality, to find out who learns and who does not, who is willing to learn and who is not, it follows (so it is said) that institutions of higher learning are doing something subversive, setting the elite against the non-elite.

This essay on "neo-elitism" reminded me of the old statistics I used to read about the percentage of students who went to college in England, France, Germany, or Italy, in comparison to the much higher percentage who went to college in the United States. It turned out that a far higher percentage of students went to institutions of higher learning in the United States than in any of the European nations. Why? It turns out that the Europeans had a different idea about what higher education was for. They also recognized more frankly that not everyone was made for the academic or intellectual vocation. If we put people in institutions for which their talents did not fit them, what happened was either that we had to lower the standards or to give those students who could not hack the matter a huge inferiority complex.

In the meantime, the Americans did about the same thing that the Europeans did, only they called it something else. We established all sorts of institutions of "higher education" including junior colleges, city colleges, state colleges, technical schools, and huge multi-disciplined universities with a myriad of different kinds of degrees, as well as elite colleges and universities. When it comes to a really elite intellectual vocation, we did not really differ much from the Europeans who also have trade schools and programs for training those not in college, but they do not call these institutions, as we do, colleges.

Brooks argues that more people are coming out of high schools but are not going to college. Most studies I have seen of late indicate that our elite graduate schools–especially in the sciences–are more and more populated, not by Americans, but by foreign students. Our schools are becoming the training grounds for foreign elites. Moreover, our high school performance compared to other nations shows that the quality of secondary education is in constant decline no matter how much money we spend on it. Money is not really the answer to their problems. So perhaps something else is at issue besides the mere statistics about who does or does not go to college.

Brooks’ thesis is that those who are educated tend to pass on talents and wealth to their offspring so that we are creating a new class of those who enter and can survive in college. The universities, in being universities, are presumably at fault for not recruiting and training those who do not come from these well prepared familial backgrounds. Brooks also notes that those who are educated divorce less, vote more frequently, and even exercise more. I believe in earlier eras it was the upper crust who were said to divorce more, eat more, and exercise less, while the poorer classes stayed married, had a religious aversion to drink, and worked hard.

Behind this analysis, we must also consider the massive transfer of technology and service industries outside of the United States. This transfer is to be seen in the light of the radical decline of birth rates of Americans and Europeans. Immigration problems are, at bottom, a function of birth problems. Formerly, as Brooks argues, these industrial and service areas provided employment and opportunities to the non-college types to get ahead. Now, it is argued, the middle is evaporating so that what is left is only the very rich and the very poor, "gapism" run wild. The physical labor force in Europe and the States is becoming Muslim and Latino. It is because of this situation that critics like Pat Buchanan and others seek to restore American industry and jobs through governmental policy.

In one sense, this export of technological knowledge–we still are in the forefront of its invention–is what we have always wanted, namely, that the poorer nations learn more and more skills and acquire the capacity to care for themselves. Most of the current criticism is that our restrictive import laws (often because of union pressure to save high-cost jobs) have prevented industry in the poor countries from growing by normal market processes. Now that growth in the poorer world is happening, we think that it is a threat to our own well being. It may be, but not because of the transfer of technological know-how. More likely, it is because of the ideologies and religions that we see in China, the Islamic world, India, and other points of the globe that determine the use of such economic growth in terms of political power.

One of the ironies of this analysis, I think, is again its Platonic background. Though perhaps not seriously, Plato held in the fifth book of the Republic that inequalities were caused by families and property. The only way to get rid of such inequalities would be to prevent parents from bringing up their own children and thereby giving them unfair advantages. Communize families and property. Plato also suggested a kind of genetic engineering to produce only elites, along with governmental day-care centers and control of education to enforce them. Such things are not wholly unfamiliar to us. Our age is rather more Platonic in this sense than we want to admit.

III.

A part of any understanding of education, especially higher education, has been the recognition that the function of education is to increase the inequalities for the good of the whole. This latter side involves the moral and religious notions of gift, charity, generosity, and sacrifice whereby those who have received education consciously recognize their responsibility to others, especially, in Brooks’ terms, of teaching others. The Christian notion that those in authority are to be there not for their own self-interest but for service to others is, more than we will admit, itself a part of the American tradition.

It is of some interest that when there is any sort of crisis throughout the world, it is our wealth and initiative that are looked to deal with it, be it floods, wars, earthquakes, or terrorism. We take this expectation for granted and seldom wonder where it came from. But it is something rather unique in the world. And a part of this effort is the simple idea that any nation can learn to take care of itself, provided that it recognize the meaning of free enterprise, justice, property, control of corruption, initiative, selection and control of leaders, profits, allowing one’s work to benefit also oneself and families, with a consciousness of generosity to others. And this latter is not solely or primarily a governmental thing, though is it government that can most easily foster or hinder it.

Brooks’ analysis is presented almost exclusively in terms of education and not of virtue or goodness. Aristotle was always the first to point out the limits of knowledge of moral things as opposed to the habits needed to put it to good usage. The real lesson Brooks seems to point to is that if families stay together, if they successfully teach children responsibility, honor, and the value of knowledge, if they learn and understand the consequence of vice of whatever sort, they will prosper.

It is often said, for instance, that if a woman wants to guarantee that she will be poor later in life, the easiest way to do so is to be divorced, not that there isn’t usually an irresponsible man involved. Yet, divorce is considered a "right," as if it has no consequences. The point is that what we need is not just educational institutions, but virtue-making institutions. This is the real danger, I might add, of religion, the classic virtue-encouraging source in our society, preaching "rights" and not virtue.

Let me say, in conclusion, a final word about universities. Universities, as we know them, were originally founded by the Church. They grew within a philosophic environment that understood justice and mercy, but also one that understood intelligence. Aquinas is famous for concerning himself with the problem of how to teach "beginners."

Universities did stand for the principle that everyone ought to be allowed to and encouraged to learn to the limit of his ability or desire (they are not the same). But this is a two-way street. It recognizes that inequalities will come forth since human beings do not have identical talents or desires to bring them forth. The answers that we are looking for must include virtue enhancing ideas and institutions, the understanding that the principal reason for many human problems is not lack of wealth or education, but lack of virtue.

But if we cannot admit that there is such a thing as virtue, then we will seek to solve an essentially spiritual problem with an intellectual problem, namely, more education. And this brings us up against the fact that criminals are also very shrewd and intelligent. The history of dope and its usage, of its relation to crime and the corruption of governments in the contemporary world, is surely not merely a question of the poor and uneducated. But the essential point I want to make is that education is, and should be, an inequality-making institution. How the resultant inequalities, which are as such to be praised, return to the common good of all is not itself primarily a question of education but of virtue.

When Chesterton remarked that "the idea of equality" is simply the "idea of the importance of man," he intended to include, I think, both the things in which men are equal and the things in which they are unequal. Both are necessary, both are, in principle, good; neither will go away. But they are intended to exist in harmony, something that depends on virtue, knowledge, generosity, and yes, sacrifice and probably faith.

The "inequalities of equality" are, paradoxically, what brings us closest to a proper notion of equality. This is one that sees the proportionate and objective differences in talent and education to be arrayed not against the less talented and less educated, but as means to bring all talent, properly developed, into a relation to a larger common good.

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"Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference." - Voltaire

"Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity." -Irving Kristol

Nature-Loving People?

2010-07-08T01:06:00.005+08:00

A Startling Contradiction

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In my "third world" country we used to destroy these gentle sea creatures for survival. But now we have learned to take care of them because we finally realized that our chances of survival are greatly increased when the survival of these gentle creatures of the sea are also assured.

When one is forced to destroy nature in order to live, it's one thing. It's another thing when one's overwhelming desire forces nature's destruction. The former may be called survival, but the latter is called greed.

It's neccessary insticnt for one to want to survive; it's his foolishness that survives his unneccessary want.

What's Today's Young Generation Aware Of?

2010-06-16T11:23:00.009+08:00

The problem of human trafficking is once more gaining some attention on the news lately as reported.

I remember few days ago, as we were lining up for the baggage check-in procedure at the NAIA terminal on our connecting return trip from Singapore, I chanced upon this Jejemon-looking youngster remarkably advocating against human trafficking in his own unique little way. At his age, I was quite impressed that such social problem found some space in his young mind.

How many of our today's young generation have such sort of social awareness?