Happy Easter

He Is Risen!

He is risen! He is risen!

Tell it out with joyful voice.

He has burst his three days' prison;

Let the whole wide earth rejoice.

Death is conquered; man is free.

Christ has won the victory.

Come with high and holy hymning;

Chant our Lord's triumphant lay.

Not one darksome cloud is dimming

Yonder glorious morning ray,

Breaking o'er the purple east,

Symbol of our Easter feast.

He is risen! He is risen!

He hath opened heaven's gate.

We are free from sin's dark prison,

Risen to a holier state.

And a brighter Easter beam

On our longing eyes shall stream.

Cecil Frances Alexander, 1818-1895

Hymn No. 199 in the LDS Hymn Book

Gay Marriage--The End Game

Rush Limbaugh recently announced that when it comes to gay marriage, resistance if futile. (Although some people disagree). Limbaugh said:

... This issue is lost. I don’t care what the Supreme Court does, this is now inevitable — and it’s inevitable because we lost the language on this. I mentioned the other day that I’ve heard people talk about “opposite-sex marriage,” or you might have had heard people say “traditional marriage.”
... I maintain to you that we lost the issue when we started allowing the word “marriage” to be bastardized and redefined by simply adding words to it, because marriage is one thing, and it was not established on the basis of discrimination. It wasn’t established on the basis of denying people anything. “Marriage” is not a tradition that a bunch of people concocted to be mean to other people with. But we allowed the left to have people believe that it was structured that way.
I would go so far as to say that there are some people who think marriage is an evil Republican idea, simply because they’re the ones that want to hold on to it. So far as I’m concerned, once we started talking about “gay marriage,” “traditional marriage,” “opposite-sex marriage,” “same-sex marriage,” “hetero-marriage,” we lost. It was over. It was just a matter of time. This is the point a friend of mine sent me a note about.
“Once you decide to modify the word ‘marriage,’ then the other side has won, or at least they’re 90% of the way home. The best thing that ‘marriage’ had going for it was basically what they teach you the first day in law school: ‘If you hang a sign on a horse that says “cow,” it does not make it a cow,’ although today it might.” That’s where we are: 5 + 5 could = 11, if it works for the Democrats. A cow could be a horse, if it works for the Democrats. The thing is, discrimination has never been a part of marriage.
It evolved as the best way to unite men and women in raising a family and in cohabitating a life. It’s not perfect. The divorce rate’s what it is. But it evolved with a purpose. It was not a creation of a bunch of elitists wanting to deny people a good time. It was not created as something to deny people “benefits,” but it became that once we started bastardizing the definition. But discrimination is not an issue, and it never was. No one sensible is against giving homosexuals the rights of contract or inheritance or hospital visits.
There’s nobody that wants to deny them that. The issue has always been denying them a status that they can’t have, by definition. By definition — solely, by definition — same-sex people cannot be married. So instead of maintaining that and holding fast to that, we allowed the argument to be made that the definition needed to change, on the basis that we’re dealing with something discriminatory, bigoted, and all of these mystical things that it’s not and never has been.

 If it is not about discrimination, why are progressives so obsessed with gay marriage? Is it to distract the public from our slowly deflating economic system? Or to make us overlook that the Middle-East is about to explode into total war? That the EU is on the verge of collapse or China is teetering on the edge of a demographic, monetary, and pollution cliff?

First of all, because gay marriage is, at heart, a leftist endeavor, it is rooted in a desire for power. Daniel Greenfield explains:

The only question worth asking about gay marriage is whether anyone on the left would care about this crusade if it didn't come with the privilege of bulldozing another civilizational institution.
Gay marriage is not about men marrying men or women marrying women, it is about the deconstruction of marriage between men and women. That is a thing that many men and women of one generation understand but have trouble conveying to another generation for whom marriage has already largely been deconstructed.

The statistics about the falling marriage rate tell the tale well enough. Marriage is a fading institution. Family is a flickering light in the evening of the West.
... There are two ways to destroy a thing. You can either run it at while swinging a hammer with both hands or you can attack its structure until it no longer means anything.
The left hasn't gone all out by outlawing marriage, instead it has deconstructed it, taking apart each of its assumptions, from the economic to the cooperative to the emotional to the social, until it no longer means anything at all. Until there is no way to distinguish marriage from a temporary liaison between members of uncertain sexes for reasons that due to their vagueness cannot be held to have any solemn and meaningful purpose.
... Every aspect of marriage is deconstructed and then eliminated until it no longer means anything. And once marriage is no longer a lifetime commitment between a man and a woman, but a ceremony with no deeper meaning than most modern ceremonies, then the deconstruction and destruction will be complete.

... In the world that the deconstructionists are striving to build, there will be marriage, but it will mean nothing. Like a greeting card holiday, it will be an event, but not an institution. An old ritual with no further meaning. An egotistical exercise in attention-seeking and self-celebration with no deeper purpose. It will be a display every bit as hollow as the churches and synagogues it takes place in.
The deconstruction of marriage is only a subset of the deconstruction of gender from a state of being to a state of mind. The decline of marriage was preceded by the deconstruction of gender roles and gay marriage is being succeeded by the destruction of gender as anything other than a voluntary identity, a costume that one puts on and takes off.
Destroying gender roles was a prerequisite to destroying gender. Each deconstruction leads naturally to the next deconstruction with no final destination except total deconstruction.
Gay marriage is not a stopping point, just as men in women's clothing using the ladies room is not a stopping point. There is no stopping point at all.
The left's deconstruction of social institutions is not a quest for equality, but for destruction. As long as the institutions that preceded it exist, it will go on deconstructing them until there is nothing left but a blank canvas, an unthinking anarchy, on which it can impose its perfect and ideal conception of how everyone should live.
Equality is merely a pretext for deconstruction. Change the parameters of a thing and it ceases to function. Redefine it and expand it and it no longer means anything at all. A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but if you change 'rose' to mean anything that sticks out of the ground, then the entire notion of what is being discussed has gone and cannot be reclaimed without also reclaiming language.

The left's social deconstruction program is a war of ideas and concepts. Claims of equality are used to expand institutions and ways of living until they are so broad as to encompass everything and nothing. And once a thing encompasses everything, once a rose represents everything rising out of the ground, then it also represents nothing at all.
Deconstruction is a war against definitions, borders and parameters. It is a war against defining things by criminalizing the limitation of definitions. With inclusivity as the mandate, exclusivity, in marriage, or any other realm, quickly meets with social disapproval and then becomes a hate crime. If the social good is achieved only through maximum inclusivity and infinite tolerance, then any form of exclusivity, from property to person to ideas, is a selfish act that refuses the collective impulse to make all things into a common property with no lasting meaning or value.
As Orwell understood in 1984, tyranny is essentially about definitions. It is hard to fight for freedom if you lack the word. It is hard to maintain a marriage if the idea no longer exists. Orwell's Oceania made basic human ideas into contradictory things. The left's deconstruction of social values does the same thing to such essential institutions as marriage; which becomes an important impermanent thing of no fixed nature or value.
The left's greatest trick is making things mean the opposite of what they do. Stealing is sharing. Crime is justice. Property is theft. Each deconstruction is accompanied by an inversion so that a thing, once examined, comes to seem the opposite of what it is, and once that is done, it no longer has the old innate value, but a new enlightened one.

To deconstruct man, you deconstruct his beliefs and then his way of living. You deconstruct freedom until it means slavery. You deconstruct peace until it means war. You deconstruct property until it means theft. And you deconstruct marriage until it means a physical relationship between any group of people for any duration. And that is the opposite of what marriage is.

The deconstruction of marriage is part of the deconstruction of gender and family and those are part of the long program of deconstructing man. Once each basic value has been rendered null and void, inverted and revealed to be random and meaningless, then man is likewise revealed to be a random and meaningless creature whose existence requires shaping by those who know better.
The final deconstruction eliminates nation, religion, family and even gender to reduce the soul of man to a blank slate waiting to be written on.
That is what is at stake here. This is not a struggle about the right of equality, but the right of definition. It is not about whether men can get married, but whether marriage will mean anything at all. It is about preserving the shapes and structures of basic social concepts that define our identities in order to preserve those very concepts, rather than accepting their deconstruction into nullification.

The question on the table is whether the institutions that give us meaning will be allowed to retain that meaning. And that question is a matter of survival. Societies cannot survive without definitions. Peoples do not go on existing through the act of occupying space. The deconstruction of identity is also the destruction of identity.
And that is what we are truly fighting against.

The Disappearing Rivers of China

From the Daily Mail:

An official report from China’s Ministry of Water Resources released its first ever national census of water earlier this week found that the number of rivers in China with catchment areas of at least 100 square kilometres has dropped by half compared with 60 years ago.

The official study, conducted by around 800,000 surveyors said there were 22,909 rivers in China which had catchment areas of at least 100 sq km – as of the end of 2011. This is less than half the government’s previously estimated figure of over 50,000.

The large fall in the number of these rivers has prompted fears that China’s rapid economic development has also caused considerable water and soil loss.

China isn't as cheap for manufacturing as people think.  A lot of the costs of manufacturing are externalized (i.e., the pollution and work injuries), and simply not captured in the price charged by the manufacturers.

"Vigilantes" Police Mexican Town

Sometimes self-help is the best help. From the Daily Mail:

Thousands of armed vigilantes have taken over a town in Mexico and arrested police officers after their 'commander' was killed and dumped in the street.

The self described 'community police' and [sic] arrested 12 officers and the town's former director of public security, who they accuse of taking part in the killing of Guadalupe Quinones Carbajal, 28, on behalf of a local organised crime group.

The 1,500-strong force has also set up improvised checkpoints on the major road running through Tierra Colorado, which connects the capital Mexico City to Acapulco, a coastal city popular with tourists less than 40 miles away.
A tourist heading to the beach with relatives for the Easter weekend was injured on Tuesday after the vigilantes opened fire on his car because he refused to stop at a roadblock.

The takeover comes amid a growing movement of 'self defence' groups in the region, which claim to be fighting against drug cartels.

Drug Cartels Are The No. 1 Threat To Texas

Texas law enforcement apparently doesn't agree with the Federal government's assessment of border security. From the Blaze:

The Department of Homeland Security and the other federal agencies can continue downplaying the threat that an unsecure border represents to the United States of America — but that won’t keep Mexican drug cartels from operating freely in states like Texas.

Contradicting Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s claim that “our borders have, in fact, never been stronger,” a new report released by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) reveals Mexican drug cartels are operating in the Lone Star State and are the No. 1 threat to Texas.

“The threat to Texas is significant due to the prevalence of lucrative trafficking routes and smuggling networks throughout the state, as well as the state’s proximity to cities and towns steeped in cartel violence and influence just across the border in Mexico,” the report reads.

While Texas faces a full spectrum of “unique challenges to public safety and homeland security,” drug cartels are at the top of the list.

The Gulf Cartel, Los Zetas, La Familia Michoacana, Beltran Leyva and even the Sinaloa Cartel are all operating out of Texas, including Cameron, Hidalgo and Zapata Counties.

“These powerful and ruthless criminal organizations use military and terrorist tactics to battle each other and the government of Mexico for control over the lucrative U.S. drug and human smuggling markets,” according to the report. “The violence associated with this conflict has increased significantly since 2006. Some 60,000 lives have been lost, and cartel tactics in Mexico have escalated with the continued use of torture and beheading, improvised explosive devices, military-grade weapons such as grenades, and attacks against U.S. officials and diplomatic facilities.”

China & Brazil Agree to Drop the Dollar...

... and exchange each other's currencies when trading between the two nations. When the U.S. dollar ceases to be a reserve currency, its value will drop dramatically.

Was the Cyprus Depositor "Haircut" for Naught?

Reuters reports:

As new President Nicos Anastasiades hesitated over an EU bailout that has wrecked Cyprus's offshore financial haven status, money was oozing out of his country's closed banks.

In banknotes at cash machines and exceptional transfers for "humanitarian supplies", large amounts of euros fled the east Mediterranean island before and after Cypriot lawmakers stunned Europe by rejecting a levy on all bank deposits.

EU negotiators knew something was wrong when the Central Bank of Cyprus requested more banknotes from the European Central Bank than the withdrawals it was reporting to Frankfurt implied were needed, an EU source familiar with the process said. "The amount the Cypriots mentioned... on a daily basis was much less than it was in reality," the source said.

... No one knows exactly how much money has left Cyprus' banks, or where it has gone. The two banks at the centre of the crisis - Cyprus Popular Bank, also known as Laiki, and Bank of Cyprus - have units in London which remained open throughout the week and placed no limits on withdrawals. Bank of Cyprus also owns 80 percent of Russia's Uniastrum Bank, which put no restrictions on withdrawals in Russia. Russians were among Cypriot banks' largest depositors.

While ordinary Cypriots queued at ATM machines to withdraw a few hundred euros as credit card transactions stopped, other depositors used an array of techniques to access their money.

Companies that had to meet margin calls to avoid defaulting on deals were granted funds. Transfers for trade in humanitarian products, medicines and jet fuel were allowed.

Chris Pavlou, who was vice chairman of Laiki until Friday, said while some money was withdrawn over a period of several days it was in the order of millions of euros, not billions.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said the bank closure had limited capital flight but that the ECB was looking closely at the issue. He declined to provide figures.

While we are looking at what the EU is doing to Cyprus' depositors, we should keep in mind that the theft of deposits in the United States is much greater.

Cyprus' Efforts to Prevent Bank Run

Cypriot banks have been shut for more than a week while the government worked out the bailout and will stay closed until Thursday to prevent a run. Meanwhile, Cypriots have been queuing to withdraw cash from automatic teller machines, with limits at some shrinking down to 100 euros a day.

(Full story here).

China Uses Military Exercises to Lay Claim to Spratly Islands

From the Associated Press:

China's increasingly powerful navy paid a symbolic visit to the country's southernmost territorial claim deep in the South China Sea this week as part of military drills in the disputed Spratly Islands involving amphibious landings and aircraft.

The visit to James Shoal, reported by state media, followed several days of drills starting Saturday and marked a high-profile show of China's determination to stake its claim to territory disputed by Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei amid rising tensions in the region.

Sailors joined in the ceremony Tuesday aboard the amphibious ship Jinggangshan just off the collection of submerged rocks, located 80 kilometers (50 miles) off the coast of Malaysia and about 1,800 kilometers (1,120 miles) from the Chinese mainland, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Wednesday. China planted a monument on the shoal in 2010 declaring it Chinese territory.

Religious Persecution at Florida Atlantic Univ.

You may have read earlier about a student at Florida Atlantic University who objected to a class activity where the students were to write "Jesus Christ" on a paper and then stomp on it. The University had previously indicated that the student was not being punished. However, Fox News is reporting that the student is, in fact, being disciplined by the University.

A Florida Atlantic University student who filed a complaint against his professor after he was ordered to stomp on the name of Jesus has been brought up on academic charges by the school and may no longer attend class, according to documents obtained by Fox News.
The “Notice of Charges” against Ryan Rotela [who is LDS] is contrary to a statement the university released late Friday night saying no one had been disciplined as a result of the classroom activity.

“We can confirm that no student has been expelled, suspended or disciplined by the university as a result of any activity that took place during this class,” the university said in a prepared statement.

However, according to a letter written by Associate Dean Rozalia Williams, Rotela is facing a litany of charges – including an alleged violation of the student code of conduct, acts of verbal, written or physical abuse, threats, intimidation, harassment, coercion or other conduct which threaten the health, safety or welfare of any person.”

“In the interim, you may not attend class or contact any of the students involved in this matter – verbally or electronically – or by any other means,” Williams wrote to Rotela. “Please be advised that a Student Affairs hold may be placed on your records until final disposition of the complaint.”