Rev 18:3-4 Fed Confusion

Rev 18:3-4 KJV  For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.  (4)  And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.

Federal Reserve Confusion

Road to Economic Disaster

Rev 17.1-19.6 presents the history of the world's great economic system from John's day until its demise just prior to the Millennium. Rev 18.3-4 presents a picture of its activities during the Tribulation. At that time God's people will be advised to get clear of the world's economic system.

The "mystery of lawlessness" is now being restrained (2Th 2.7). So its effects are not as overwhelming as they will be. But in the economic sphere, much irrational lawlessness is currently present. David Stockman explains an aspect of this.

"The Cacophony Of Fed Confusion,"

David Stockman Warns Will Lead To "Economic Calamity"

| Zero Hedge http://bit.ly/1pfpFyn

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/19/2014 20:22 -0400

"We never should have painted ourselves so deep in this QE corner in the first place," chides David Stockman, "because the whole predicate [of Fed policy] is false." The author of The Great Deformation holds nothing back in this brief 3-minute primer of everything is wrong with the American economic system (and the CNBC anchors definitely did not want to hear). "We are already at peak debt and forcing more into the economy didn't work," and won't work as is merely funds Wall Street's latest carry trade to nowhere and fiscal irresponsibility in Washington. Simply put, "the private credit channel of monetary transmission is busted," so the Fed is exploiting the only channel it has left - "the bubble channel."

"There is a massive bubble inflating on Wall Street"

It's hump-day, grab a wine cooler and listen to 3 minutes of almost uninterrupted truthiness

And here is David on The Keynesian Endgame...

Even the tepid post-2008 recovery has not been what it was cracked up to be, especially with respect to the Wall Street presumption that the American consumer would once again function as the engine of GDP growth. It goes without saying, in fact, that the precarious plight of the Main Street consumer has been obfuscated by the manner in which the state’s unprecedented fiscal and monetary medications have distorted the incoming data and economic narrative.

These distortions implicate all rungs of the economic ladder, but are especially egregious with respect to the prosperous classes. In fact, a wealth-effects driven mini-boom in upper-end consumption has contributed immensely to the impression that average consumers are clawing their way back to pre-crisis spending habits. This is not remotely true.

Five years after the top of the second Greenspan bubble (2007), inflation-adjusted retail sales were still down by about 2 percent. This fact alone is unprecedented. By comparison, five years after the 1981 cycle top real retail sales (excluding restaurants) had risen by 20 percent. Likewise, by early 1996 real retail sales were 17 percent higher than they had been five years earlier. And with a fair amount of help from the great MEW (measurable economic welfare) raid, constant dollar retail sales in mid-2005 where 13 percent higher than they had been five years earlier at the top of the first Greenspan bubble.

So this cycle is very different, and even then the reported five years’ stagnation in real retail sales does not capture the full story of consumer impairment. The divergent performance of Wal-Mart’s domestic stores over the last five years compared to Whole Foods points to another crucial dimension; namely, that the averages are being materially inflated by the upbeat trends among the prosperous classes.

For all practical purposes Wal-Mart is a proxy for Main Street America, so it is not surprising that its sales have stagnated since the end of the Greenspan bubble. Thus, its domestic sales of $226 billion in fiscal 2007 had risen to an inflation-adjusted level of only $235 billion by fiscal 2012, implying real growth of less than 1 percent annually.

By contrast, Whole Foods most surely reflects the prosperous classes given that its customers have an average household income of $80,000, or more than twice the Wal-Mart average. During the same five years, its inflation-adjusted sales rose from $6.5 billion to $10.5 billion, or at a 10 percent annual real rate. Not surprisingly, Whole Foods’ stock price has doubled since the second Greenspan bubble, contributing to the Wall Street mantra about consumer resilience.

To be sure, the 10-to-1 growth difference between the two companies involves factors such as the healthy food fad, that go beyond where their respective customers reside on the income ladder. Yet this same sharply contrasting pattern is also evident in the official data on retail sales.

That the consumption party is highly skewed to the top is born out even more dramatically in the sales trends of publicly traded retailers. Their results make it crystal clear that Wall Street’s myopic view of the so-called consumer recovery is based on the Fed’s gifts to the prosperous classes, not any spending resurgence by the Main Street masses.

The latter do their shopping overwhelmingly at the six remaining discounters and mid-market department store chains—Wal-Mart, Target, Sears, J. C. Penney, Kohl’s, and Macy’s. This group posted $405 billion in sales in 2007, but by 2012 inflation-adjusted sales had declined by nearly 3 percent to $392 billion. The abrupt change of direction here is remarkable: during the twenty-five years ending in 2007 most of these chains had grown at double-digit rates year in and year out.

After a brief stumble in late 2008 and early 2009, sales at the luxury and high-end retailers continued to power upward, tracking almost perfectly the Bernanke Fed’s reflation of the stock market and risk assets. Accordingly, sales at Tiffany, Saks, Ralph Lauren, Coach, lululemon, Michael Kors, and Nordstrom grew by 30 percent after inflation during the five-year period.

The evident contrast between the two retailer groups, however, was not just in their merchandise price points. The more important comparison was in their girth: combined real sales of the luxury and high-end retailers in 2012 were just $33 billion, or 8 percent of the $393 billion turnover reported by the discounters and mid-market chains.

This tale of two retailer groups is laden with implications. It not only shows that the so-called recovery is tenuous and highly skewed to a small slice of the population at the top of the economic ladder, but also that statist economic intervention has now become wildly dysfunctional. Largely based on opulence at the top, Wall Street brays that economic recovery is under way even as the Main Street economy flounders. But when this wobbly foundation periodically reveals itself, Wall Street petulantly insists that the state unleash unlimited resources in the form of tax cuts, spending stimulus, and money printing to keep the simulacrum of recovery alive.

Accordingly, the central banking branch of the state remains hostage to Wall Street speculators who threaten a hissy fit sell-off unless they are juiced again and again. Monetary policy has thus become an engine of reverse Robin Hood redistribution; it flails about implementing quasi-Keynesian demand–pumping theories that punish Main Street savers, workers, and businessmen while creating endless opportunities, as shown below, for speculative gain in the Wall Street casino.

At the same time, Keynesian economists of both parties urged prompt fiscal action, and the elected politicians obligingly piled on with budget-busting tax cuts and spending initiatives. The United States thus became fiscally ungovernable. Washington has been afraid to disturb a purported economic recovery that is not real or sustainable, and therefore has continued to borrow and spend to keep the macroeconomic “prints” inching upward. In the long run this will bury the nation in debt, but in the near term it has been sufficient to keep the stock averages rising and the harvest of speculative winnings flowing to the top 1 percent.

The breakdown of sound money has now finally generated a cruel endgame. The fiscal and central banking branches of the state have endlessly bludgeoned the free market, eviscerating its capacity to generate wealth and growth. This growing economic failure, in turn, generates political demands for state action to stimulate recovery and jobs.

But the machinery of the state has been hijacked by the various Keynesian doctrines of demand stimulus, tax cutting, and money printing. These are all variations of buy now and pay later—a dangerous maneuver when the state has run out of balance sheet runway in both its fiscal and monetary branches. Nevertheless, these futile stimulus actions are demanded and promoted by the crony capitalist lobbies which slipstream on whatever dispensations as can be mustered. At the end of the day, the state labors mightily, yet only produces recovery for the 1 percent.

Related Notes State-Wrecked: The Corruption of Capitalism in America Mark Pernice By DAVID A. STOCKMAN Published: March 30, 2013 378 Comments GREENWICH, Conn.The Dow Jones and Standard & Poor’s 500 indexes reached ...

I2C 140320a aa Rev 18v3to4 Fed Confusion / I2C / 140320 1541 / Rev 18:3-4 Federal Reserve Confusion / Road to Economic Disaster

2Th 2:7-12 Cyberman commeth

2nd Thess 2:7-12 KJV  For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now [restraineth] will [restrain], until he be taken out of the way.  (8)  And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming:  (9)  Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders,  (10)  And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.  (11)  And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:  (12)  That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

Cyberman commeth

Lying wonders of the "singularity"

Not all lying wonders are miraculous. Even the true signs and wonders of scripture are often highly improbable but possible. The predicted singularity when the union of super-computer and man will produce marvelous new virtually imperishable individuals is a non-miraculous lying wonder. What is to be produced is not a new creature but an artificial entity. Something analogous to a character in fiction. Such characters are readily distinguishable from real creatures made in God's image. We know real creatures through observation, reputation, and biography. They have a depth of consistent individuality that the artifice of the most skilled writers and dramatists cannot replicate. We know Socrates, Napoleon and Jesus in depth from writings. And we know that artifice could not have produced them.

The Future of Brain Implants

[Wall Street Journal] - WSJ.com http://on.wsj.com/1nsaPcf

THE SATURDAY ESSAY [/] How soon can we expect to see brain implants for perfect memory, enhanced vision, hypernormal focus or an expert golf swing? [/] By GARY MARCUS and CHRISTOF KOCH [/] The Future of Brain Implants [/] March 14, 2014 7:30 p.m. ET

Brain implants today are where laser eye surgery was several decades ago, fraught with risk, applicable only to a narrowly defined set of patients – but a sign of things to come. NYU Professor of Psychology Gary Marcus discusses on Lunch Break. Photo: Getty.

What would you give for a retinal chip that let you see in the dark or for a next-generation cochlear implant that let you hear any conversation in a noisy restaurant, no matter how loud? Or for a memory chip, wired directly into your brain's hippocampus, that gave you perfect recall of everything you read? Or for an implanted interface with the Internet that automatically translated a clearly articulated silent thought ("the French sun king") into an online search that digested the relevant Wikipedia page and projected a summary directly into your brain?

Science fiction? Perhaps not for very much longer. Brain implants today are where laser eye surgery was several decades ago. They are not risk-free and make sense only for a narrowly defined set of patients—but they are a sign of things to come.

Unlike pacemakers, dental crowns or implantable insulin pumps, neuroprosthetics—devices that restore or supplement the mind's capacities with electronics inserted directly into the nervous system—change how we perceive the world and move through it. For better or worse, these devices become part of who we are.

Neuroprosthetics aren't new. They have been around commercially for three decades, in the form of the cochlear implants used in the ears (the outer reaches of the nervous system) of more than 300,000 hearing-impaired people around the world. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first retinal implant, made by the company Second Sight.

Both technologies exploit the same principle: An external device, either a microphone or a video camera, captures sounds or images and processes them, using the results to drive a set of electrodes that stimulate either the auditory or the optic nerve, approximating the naturally occurring output from the ear or the eye.

Another type of now-common implant, used by thousands of Parkinson's patients around the world, sends electrical pulses deep into the brain proper, activating some of the pathways involved in motor control. A thin electrode is inserted into the brain through a small opening in the skull; it is connected by a wire that runs to a battery pack underneath the skin. The effect is to reduce or even eliminate the tremors and rigid movement that are such prominent symptoms of Parkinson's (though, unfortunately, the device doesn't halt the progression of the disease itself). Experimental trials are now under way to test the efficacy of such "deep brain stimulation" for treating other disorders as well.

Electrical stimulation can also improve some forms of memory, as the neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried and his colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, showed in a 2012 article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Using a setup akin to a videogame, seven patients were taught to navigate a virtual city environment with a joystick, picking up passengers and delivering them to specific stores. Appropriate electrical stimulation to the brain during the game increased their speed and accuracy in accomplishing the task.

But not all brain implants work by directly stimulating the brain. Some work instead by reading the brain's signals—to interpret, for example, the intentions of a paralyzed user. Eventually, neuroprosthetic systems might try to do both, reading a user's desires, performing an action like a Web search and then sending the results directly back to the brain.

How close are we to having such wondrous devices? To begin with, scientists, doctors and engineers need to figure out safer and more reliable ways of inserting probes into people's brains. For now, the only option is to drill small burr-holes through the skull and to insert long, thin electrodes—like pencil leads—until they reach their destinations deep inside the brain. This risks infection, since the wires extend through the skin, and bleeding inside the brain, which could be devastating or even fatal.

External devices, like the brainwave-reading skull cap made by the company NeuroSky (marketed to the public as "having applications for wellness, education and entertainment"), have none of these risks. But because their sensors are so far removed from individual neurons, they are also far less effective. They are like Keystone Kops trying to eavesdrop on a single conversation from outside a giant football stadium.

A boy wearing a cochlear implant for the hearing-impaired. A second portion is surgically implanted under the skin. Barcroft Media/Getty Images

Today, effective brain-machine interfaces have to be wired directly into the brain to pick up the signals emanating from small groups of nerve cells. But nobody yet knows how to make devices that listen to the same nerve cells that long. Part of the problem is mechanical: The brain sloshes around inside the skull every time you move, and an implant that slips by a millimeter may become ineffective.

Another part of the problem is biological: The implant must be nontoxic and biocompatible so as not to provoke an immune reaction. It also must be small enough to be totally enclosed within the skull and energy-efficient enough that it can be recharged through induction coils placed on the scalp at night (as with the recharging stands now used for some electric toothbrushes).

These obstacles may seem daunting, but many of them look suspiciously like the ones that cellphone manufacturers faced two decades ago, when cellphones were still the size of shoeboxes. Neural implants will require even greater advances since there is no easy way to upgrade them once they are implanted and the skull is sealed back up.

But plenty of clever young neuro-engineers are trying to surmount these problems, like Michel Maharbiz and Jose Carmena and their colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. They are developing a wireless brain interface that they call "neural dust." Thousands of biologically neutral microsensors, on the order of one-tenth of a millimeter (approximately the thickness of a human hair), would convert electrical signals into ultrasound that could be read outside the brain.

The real question isn't so much whether something like this can be done but how and when. How many advances in material science, battery chemistry, molecular biology, tissue engineering and neuroscience will we need? Will those advances take one decade, two decades, three or more? As Dr. Maharbiz said in an email, once implants "can be made 'lifetime stable' for healthy adults, many severe disabilities…will likely be chronically treatable." For millions of patients, neural implants could be absolutely transformative.

Assuming that we're able to clear these bioengineering barriers, the next challenge will be to interpret the complex information from the 100 billion tiny nerve cells that make up the brain. We are already able to do this in limited ways.

Based on decades of prior research in nonhuman primates, John Donoghue of Brown University and his colleagues created a system called BrainGate that allows fully paralyzed patients to control devices with their thoughts. BrainGate works by inserting a small chip, studded with about 100 needlelike wires—a high-tech brush—into the part of the neocortex controlling movement. These motor signals are fed to an external computer that decodes them and passes them along to external robotic devices.

Almost a decade ago, this system was used by a tetraplegic to control an artificial hand. More recently, in a demonstration of the technology's possibilities that is posted on YouTube, Cathy Hutchinson, paralyzed years earlier by a brainstem stroke, managed to take a drink from a bottle of coffee by manipulating a robot arm with only her brain and a neural implant that literally read (part of) her mind.

For now, guiding a robot arm this way is cumbersome and laborious, like steering a massive barge or an out-of-alignment car. Given the current state of neuroscience, even our best neuroscientists can read the activity of a brain only as if through a glass darkly; we get the gist of what is going on, but we are still far from understanding the details.

In truth, we have no idea at present how the human brain does some of its most basic feats, like translating a vague desire to return that tennis ball into the torrent of tightly choreographed commands that smoothly execute the action. No serious neuroscientist could claim to have a commercially ready brain-reading device with a fraction of the precision or responsiveness of a computer keyboard.

In understanding the neural code, we have a long way to go. That's why the federally funded BRAIN Initiative, announced last year by President Barack Obama, is so important. We need better tools to listen to the brain and more precise tools for sending information back to the brain, along with a far more detailed understanding of different kinds of nerve cells and how they fit together in complex circuits.

The coarse-grained functional MRI brain images that have become so popular in recent years won't be enough. For one thing, they are indirect; they measure changes not in electrical activity but in local blood flow, which is at best an imperfect stand-in. Images from fMRIs also lack sufficient resolution to give us true mastery of the neural code. Each three-dimensional pixel (or "voxel") in a brain scan contains a half-million to one million neurons. What we really need is to be able to zero in on individual neurons.

Zooming in further is crucial because the atoms of perception, memory and consciousness aren't brain regions but neurons and even finer-grained elements. Chemists turned chemistry into a quantitative science once they realized that chemical reactions are (almost) all about electrons making and breaking bonds among atoms. Neuroscientists are trying to do the same thing for the brain. Until we do, brain implants will be working only on the logic of forests, without sufficient understanding of the individual trees.

One of the most promising tools in this regard is a recently developed technique called optogenetics, which hijacks the molecular machinery of the genes found inside every neuron to directly manipulate the brain's circuitry. In this way, any group of neurons with a unique genetic ZIP Code can be switched on or off, with unparalleled precision, by brief pulses of different colored light—effectively turning the brain into a piano that can be played. This fantastic marriage of molecular biology with optics and electronics is already being deployed to build advanced retinal prosthetics for adult-onset blindness. It is revolutionizing the whole field of neuroscience.

Advances in molecular biology, neuroscience and material science are almost certainly going to lead, in time, to implants that are smaller, smarter, more stable and more energy-efficient. These devices will be able to interpret directly the blizzard of electrical activity inside the brain. For now, they are an abstraction, something that people read about but are unlikely to experience for themselves. But someday that will change.

Consider the developmental arc of medical technologies such as breast surgery. Though they were pioneered for post-mastectomy reconstruction and for correcting congenital defects, breast augmentation and other cosmetic procedures such as face-lifts and tummy tucks have become routine. The procedures are reliable, effective and inexpensive enough to be attractive to broad segments of society, not just to the rich and famous.

Eventually neural implants will make the transition from being used exclusively for severe problems such as paralysis, blindness or amnesia. They will be adopted by people with less traumatic disabilities. When the technology has advanced enough, implants will graduate from being strictly repair-oriented to enhancing the performance of healthy or "normal" people. They will be used to improve memory, mental focus (Ritalin without the side effects), perception and mood (bye, bye Prozac).

Many people will resist the first generation of elective implants. There will be failures and, as with many advances in medicine, there will be deaths. But anybody who thinks that the products won't sell is naive. Even now, some parents are willing to let their children take Adderall before a big exam. The chance to make a "superchild" (or at least one guaranteed to stay calm and attentive for hours on end during a big exam) will be too tempting for many.

Even if parents don't invest in brain implants, the military will. A continuing program at Darpa, a Pentagon agency that invests in cutting-edge technology, is already supporting work on brain implants that improve memory to help soldiers injured in war. Who could blame a general for wanting a soldier with hypernormal focus, a perfect memory for maps and no need to sleep for days on end? (Of course, spies might well also try to eavesdrop on such a soldier's brain, and hackers might want to hijack it. Security will be paramount, encryption de rigueur.)

An early generation of enhancement implants might help elite golfers improve their swing by automating their mental practice. A later generation might allow weekend golfers to skip practice altogether. Once neuroscientists figure out how to reverse-engineer the end results of practice, "neurocompilers" might be able to install the results of a year's worth of training directly into the brain, all in one go.

That won't happen in the next decade or maybe even in the one after that. But before the end of the century, our computer keyboards and trackpads will seem like a joke; even Google Glass 3.0 will seem primitive. Why would you project information onto your eyes (partly occluding your view) when you could write information into your brain so your mind can directly interpret it? Why should a computer wait for you to say or type what you mean rather than anticipating your needs before you can even articulate them?

By the end of this century, and quite possibly much sooner, every input device that has ever been sold will be obsolete. Forget the "heads-up" displays that the high-end car manufactures are about to roll out, allowing drivers to see data without looking away from the road. By the end of the century, many of us will be wired directly into the cloud, from brain to toe.

Will these devices make our society as a whole happier, more peaceful and more productive? What kind of world might they create?

It's impossible to predict. But, then again, it is not the business of the future to be predictable or sugarcoated. As President Ronald Reagan once put it, "The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave."

The augmented among us—those who are willing to avail themselves of the benefits of brain prosthetics and to live with the attendant risks—will outperform others in the everyday contest for jobs and mates, in science, on the athletic field and in armed conflict. These differences will challenge society in new ways—and open up possibilities that we can scarcely imagine.

Dr. Marcus is professor of psychology at New York University and often blogs about science and technology for the New Yorker. Dr. Koch is the chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.

Related Notes

A Chip In The Head: Brain Implants Will Be Connecting People To The Internet By The Year 2020 Michael Snyder The American Dream October 30, 2013 Would you like to surf the Internet, make a phone call...

I2C 140318a aa 2Th 2v7to12 Cyberman commeth / I2C / 140318 1740 / 2Th 2:7-12 Cyberman commeth / Lying wonders of the "singularity"

1Cor 13:1 Luke 7:32 ++C Bishops Politics

1Co 13:1 KJV  Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

Luk 7:32 KJV  They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.

++C CoE Bishops vs Parliament

Human inconsistency both tragic and comic

Drama was divided into tragedy and comedy in ancient times for the convenience of playgoers. They could make a choice on the basis of their own perceived entertainment needs. Was it a time for them to laugh or to consider? (Ecc 7.14)

But human inconsistency gives rise to both tragedy and comedy. One of the world's great plays, O'Casey's "Juno and the Paycock", gives us both in full measure.

First Corinthians 13.1 reminds us of the tragedy of magnificent and truthful speech without love.

Luke 7:32 reminds us of the humor in the inconsistencies that come about when judging others.

The frequent inconsistencies in the speech of children is comic.

Inconsistencies in the mature is often tragic.

The excellent web logger ++Cranmer excels in presenting both the tragic and comic aspects of human inconsistency in the political and ecclesiastical affairs of his nation.

The effect of an established religion in his nation seems to have made human inconsistency more obvious in public affairs, and thus enhanced both the comic and the tragic literature.

Like O'Casey, ++Cranmer does an excellent job in showing the intermingling of the comic and the tragic in the real life of humanity.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said when informed of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, "You don't have to be Irish to know that the world will break your heart.

"Here's to the ferrybank piper, / May his sad songs never die, / May his gay songs lift your weary heart, / 'Til in the grave you lie." - Robbie O'Connell

++Cranmer: Why don't bishops just pick up the phone to ministers?

http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/2014/03/why-dont-bishops-just-pick-up-phone-to.html

or http://bit.ly/1lTpPyg

[Web log introduction:] Archbishop Cranmer takes as his inspiration the words of Sir Humphrey Appleby: ‘It’s interesting,’ he observes, ‘that nowadays politicians want to talk about moral issues, and bishops want to talk politics.’ It is the fusion of the two in public life, and the necessity for a wider understanding of their complex symbiosis, which leads His Grace to write on these very sensitive issues.

Why don't bishops just pick up the phone to ministers?

Another bishop has bashed the Government. This time it's the Rt Rev'd Dr Peter Forster, Bishop of Chester, who is of the view that stay-at-home mothers and carers are being discriminated against in the tax and benefits system. And so The Independent gleefully conveys the damning critique: "married couples with only one earner keep less of every extra pound they earn in the UK than in any other country in the developed world."

This follows hard upon the 27 bishops (actually, 35) who clobbered the Coalition over the rise of food-banks: "Britain is the world’s seventh largest economy and yet people are going hungry," they wrote to the Daily Mirror.

And let us not forget Cardinal Vincent Nichols, leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, who referred to Iain Duncan Smith's welfare reforms as “frankly a disgrace". He explained to the Telegraph: "..the basic safety net that was there to guarantee that people would not be left in hunger or in destitution has actually been torn apart."

It gives His Grace no pleasure when the most senior Roman Catholic in England and Wales tears strips off the most senior Roman Catholic in the Government. And it must have been a cause of grief in the heavenlies when the Secretary of State's delivered a withering response (via the Sunday Politics) which was steeped in incredulity and contempt for the Cardinal's concerns: "I'm not quite sure what he thinks welfare is about," the Minister scoffed, after entreating: "It would be good if he actually called me before he made these attacks."

Quite why Cardinal Nichols chose to smear a very prominent Conservative minister in the Telegraph before discussing his manifold concerns with a co-religionist is something of a mystery. Unless, of course, the Cardinal is allowing his personal socialist-inclination to cloud his discernment and nullify expressions of basic courtesy. Christian brothers are, after all, supposed to treat one another with kindness - except, it seems, when one hails from inner-city Birmingham via the Thatcher-loathing tenements of Liverpool, and the other from ultra-Tory Chingford via the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. Perhaps they simply can't be bothered to test each other's grasp of Roman Catholic social teaching.

But there is no excuse at all for bishops of the Church of England not to pick up the phone to MPs, ministers and secretaries of state before sounding brass and tinkling their cymbals in the left-wing tabloids. This is the Established Church, after all. The Bishop of Chester even sits in the House of Lords: it's not as though he lacks parliamentary nous or an extension number.

As His Grace wrote a few weeks ago: "Conservative politicians do themselves no favours when they try to lecture the Church on social thought when they clearly have little understanding of the depth and long history of Christian social thinking. But Anglican bishops do themselves no favours when they fail even to entertain the moral philosophical stream from which conservative thought proceeds. If the poor are homeless and hungry, there is nothing to be gained by bishops and politicians ranting at each other in public denunciations of their mutual ignorance."

Successive broadsides in the media render mature discussion and debate almost impossible, for each bombardment magnifies distrust, and the crossfire yields nothing but mutual enmity and loathing. And while God's holy warriors and belligerent politicians are scrapping over the definition of justice, the poor go hungry and the homeless shiver in urine-drenched doorways, wondering why God has abandoned them.        

So, for God's sake, Your Graces and Eminences, pick up the phone. It's good to talk.

posted byArchbishop Cranmer at 8:50 am Permalink

34 Comments: [At above link. Many quite interesting.]

Related Notes [Retained from my Clearly / EverNote copy of above post]

Archbishop Vincent Nichols hails 'the end of the Reformation in England'  It's funny.You hear absolutely nothing from Westminster's Roman Catholic Cathedral for months and months on end, and then up p...

Pope's choice of new cardinals puts emphasis on poor By Philip Pullella | Reuters – 5 hours ago By Philip Pullella VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis put his first stamp on the group at the top of ...

I2C 140311a aa 1Co 13v1 Luk 7v32 ppC Bishops Politics / I2C / 140311 1807 / 1Cor 13:1 Luke 7:32 ++C CoE Bishops vs Parliament / Human inconsistency both tragic and comic

Exodus 18:21-23 Anglican subsidiarity

Exo 18:21-23 KJV  Moreover thou shalt provide out of all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness; and place such over them, to be rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens:  (22)  And let them judge the people at all seasons: and it shall be, that every great matter they shall bring unto thee, but every small matter they shall judge: so shall it be easier for thyself, and they shall bear the burden with thee.  (23)  If thou shalt do this thing, and God command thee so, then thou shalt be able to endure, and all this people shall also go to their place in peace.

A:( -  Anglican subsidiarity

Episcopal Church USA Governance

Jethro proposed a judicial system for Israel under Moses that conforms to the principle of subsidiarity. A great and knowledgeable web logger has proposed ecclesiastical governance following the same principle for the denomination whose woes he has ably chronicled.

Subsidiarity regards higher levels of responsibility as subsidiary to lower levels. When authority over those created in the image of God is necessary, it is, for the most part, best exercised by those closest and most familiar. Exercise of authority at higher levels is exceptional.

A Modest Proposal to Reform ECUSA (I) http://bit.ly/1jRzZfJ

Anglican Curmudgeon: Curmudgeonly comments on the current trials and tribulations of being in the Episcopal Church (USA) and the Anglican Communion at the same time---with some leavening for good measure.

TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 2014 | A Modest Proposal to Reform ECUSA (I)

The Task Force to Reimagine the Episcopal Church (TREC) has been busy reporting on the ideas it is considering to restructure how ECUSA works, and its proposals have been garnering both positive and negative comments. The most recent split seems to be between those who view ECUSA as their personal vehicle for "social justice", and those who would like to make General Convention "more efficient."

Briefly, TREC has proposed to limit the kind of resolutions that General Convention may consider -- only those which would amend the Constitution, Canons, or Book of Common Prayer, or which fulfill election duties entrusted to it.  Gone would be the hordes of special interest resolutions -- and presumably also, the innumerable Agencies, Boards, Committees and Commissions which generate them. 

It is a good proposal, as far as it goes, but it comes too late in the day. As a body, General Convention has grown too large -- but for a New Hampshire Town Meeting, the Chinese National Peoples' Congress, and the British Parliament, it is the largest legislative body in the world. For a national Church, that is ridiculous -- General Convention is far too unwieldy, far too expensive, and far too ineffective for all the money that is spent upon it.

Limiting its competence will not make it more competent. What is needed is a major downsizing.

But to downsize General Convention means we first have to downsize the Church it represents -- i.e., the number of dioceses, and consequently, the number of bishops, needs to be greatly reduced.  Make the Church structure a workable one, and General Convention will take care of itself.

Fortunately, your Curmudgeon has been a student of ECUSA's polity for all of his adult life. And though the powers at 815 did not see fit to accept my offer to work on the Task Force, I can still (through this blog) put forward my Modest Proposal for the Church's thoughtful consideration.

A bit of background, first. There is a huge gap between ECUSA as 815 and their lawyers think of it, and ECUSA in reality. For 815, the standard mantra is that the Church is a "hierarchy" of three tiers: General Convention is at the top, the 110 dioceses are subordinate to General Convention, and the 7.000+ congregations are subordinate to the dioceses.

Viewed in that way, ECUSA is only an abstraction of the intellect (and a meme in the courts that have blindly bought into 815's abstraction, because they never see or experience the reality). In real life such a tiered structure is unworkable, principally for the reason that General Convention is like the Village of Brigadoon -- it comes together for a brief moment in the present, and then vanishes into the mist, never to be experienced by the same people in the same way, ever again.

Imagine if the U.S. Congress completely reconstituted itself every other week -- and then agreed to meet only every 156th week. Do you see what I mean?

After the required three years pass, a new General Convention springs into being -- unable and incapable of maintaining any continuity with all of its predecessors, and once again existing for just the few moments of its delusional triumphs. The Convention disbands, and without anyone left to sustain them, the triumphs of the moment quickly turn into wilted flowers and rotten fruit.

How can a Church be run by a body so ephemeral? It can't -- and that is one key to my Modest Proposal.

The next tier down -- the dioceses -- is likewise, if one considers it a monolithic structure, an intellectual abstraction. You can't get 110 dioceses (let alone 7,000+ parishes) to agree on anything, not even eternal salvation through Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Face it: ECUSA is an unwieldy and unworkable agglomeration of individual units that cannot, and never will, work together toward one common goal. It is more akin to a 110-ring circus, with individual acts succeeding one another in gloriously haphazard fashion, as the culture and the times dictate to each ringmaster.

The only glue that even begins to hold it together is money. The dioceses feed off the ingrained habit of individuals' contributions and pledges to their parishes, and 815 feeds off the dioceses.  General Convention, with funding from all three sources, feeds off everything in the Church, and (since its inherent ephemerality means it can never be held accountable) wastes millions and millions of dollars for its follies.

The other factor that holds together a part of the Church -- and only a very small part -- is the social activism of many who get involved at the diocesan and national levels. But it is this very activism that puts the leadership (such as it is) at such odds with the masses who fill (to a lesser and lesser degree) the pews Sunday after Sunday.

The leadership pretends it must be doing something right, because the "quality" of Episcopalians is improving generation after generation, even though their numbers are declining severely with each generation.

Translation: "We like ever more and more the activists who are floating up to join us at our level -- they are kindred spirits. You can ignore the slaves in the galley -- they are there just to fuel the engines, and there are still plenty enough of them for our purposes. Plus, all their fathers and grandfathers had the foresight to entrust us with their hard-earned wages for future purchases of engine fuel, so we won't be running out any time soon."

What a picture, eh? In need of reform? You bet!

But how to reform such a monstrosity, that has gone so far off course from its original moorings?

Break it down into its component parts, that's how.  Come, reason with me --

Herewith my Modest Proposal:

All the existing parishes and missions remain intact as they are, because they are the physical reality of "The Episcopal Church". All else is administration or abstraction.

Parishes elect their own vestries, just as before. And parishes call their own rectors, again just as before -- though so do the missions, if they are functioning (a change from before, where a bishop chooses the priest/vicar for a mission). But the screening process is more rigorous -- meaning there are more hoops to jump through. Every new rector, for example, must serve a probationary period for one year, and then the parish  or mission votes whether or not to retain that rector, or to start the process to find another. No bishop can ever force a rector on a functioning parish or mission.

The number of dioceses is reduced from 110 to 10, modeled on the existing ten provinces. The 110 "diocesan" bishops become vicars of their respective regions, which are mostly the former dioceses, but now purely geographical, rather than administrative, units.  The former dioceses are broken down further as needed to provide continuing employment for current suffragans and assistants. All such vicars have chiefly pastoral -- and very, very little administrative -- duties. That is, they make parish visitations, baptize and confirm, and ordain new priests and see to their training, but they do not have a budget of their own. Instead, they are all salaried, on a scale that goes up with experience and pastoral merit, as voted by the parishes in the vicar's jurisdiction every five years. The parishes don't think their vicar is doing his job? No raise for another five years.

The vicars are not called "bishop", and they do not get to go to Lambeth, or to anything called a "House of Bishops." They are pastoral representatives of the true episcopal authority of the Church (read on).  Although they can certainly hire more staff out of their own pockets, they are each authorized to have only one paid staff member, and an office rent allowance for the cost of five hundred square feet, at going local rates (which they can locate in their own residences, if they wish).

The idea is to keep the regional vicars close to the parishes they can pastor within a given year, and to foster their identification with a manageable number of parishes. As I say, suffragan and assistant bishops will likewise become vicars of their own regions, so that no one vicar has to supervise more than is practicable. Visits once a year mean a maximum of fifty congregations -- and even that would be higher than the ideal, of thirty to forty (say). 7000 (congregations) divided by 35 (average number of congregations per vicar) equals 200 vicars needed to cover them all, which is well within the number of bishops ECUSA has already. A limit of 35 or so congregations per vicar also ensures that no one region will be too large to administer.

A regional vicar is elected by the parishes of that vicar's region, from among the rectors in that region. (No more pastoral surprises from outside.) If a region ceases to have enough parishes to keep a vicar busy, it is merged into a neighboring region by the Church's Administrative Office (see next post). Rectors, on the other hand, are welcome from other regions -- but only after going through the rigorous vetting process to ensure that they will be good pastors to their congregations.

Face it -- this reform means that ECUSA can no longer serve as a welfare organization for incompetent and misguided priests. If they cannot preach and practice the faith so as to make their parishes want to keep them, then they are out, and if they cannot find another parish that wants them -- well, it is time to look into another career. The former bishops (now vicars) will have no patronage privileges, and no ability to protect unwanted priests from unemployment.

The ten dioceses will each be headed up by a true bishop, so ECUSA will have in all just ten bishops, who rotate annually through the post of Presiding Bishop. Thus every bishop will serve as Presiding Bishop for one year out of every ten. But the only duties of the Presiding Bishop are to chair the regular quarterly meetings of the ten bishops -- now called the "Council of Guardians", to emphasize their true role in the Church. As one of ten diocesan bishops, the Presiding Bishop will have primary responsibility for the pastoral operation of his own diocese, and will specifically (by canon) have no other role as a spokesperson for the national Church.

The ten individual bishops will have the primary duty to guard the faith and the traditions of the Church, as the same have been handed down from the saints.  They shall be chosen from among the vicars in each diocese, and confirmed by a vote of two-thirds of the Council (seven out of nine -- because there will be a vacancy), before being consecrated by the traditional laying on of hands by the members of the Council. They are required to meet with the assembled vicars in their respective dioceses twice a year, in order to discuss and go over diocesan issues, amendments proposed to the BCP and Canons, hold diocesan court sessions, and similar functions. Additionally, they have full archiepiscopal powers within their diocese to issue pastoral directives, disciplinary sentences and the like with respect to the vicars and rectors in that diocese.

To the Council is entrusted the responsibility to publish the Church Canons, as well as to oversee and maintain the Book of Common Prayer in the tradition handed down from the saints.

Unlike the current model, the Canons which the Council has the power to publish will be limited to just standards for clergy discipline administered by diocesan courts and bishops. Liturgical matters will be covered by the rubrics of the BCP. No individual bishop will any longer have the power to "supplement" or "grant dispensations from" the liturgy of the BCP. If it's not in the BCP, it's not part of the Church's liturgy, period.

If the Council wants to propose a revision to the BCP, they first must pass such a revision at two successive meetings a year apart, and the proposal is circulated to each diocese for distribution to each and every parish in that diocese in the intervening twelve months, so that they may provide feedback as they choose to the Council.

Once a proposal to amend the BCP has passed the Council by two votes a year apart, it then officially circulates, first to all the vicars, and then to the rectors for discussion with their vestries and congregations. For the proposal to be finally adopted and effective, it will need to receive a favorable vote from two-thirds of the parishes at their annual meetings in each and every region, plus the approval of two-thirds of the vicars in any given diocese. Only then does it come back for a final vote in the Council of Guardians, where it requires a minimum of eight out of ten votes to become finally effective.

This process will guarantee a stable BCP, and prevent any faction from ruining it with the fads of the age.  And with that, we have taken care of the main missional and pastoral functions of the Church. The rest is just administration -- oh, and allowing venting for "social justice."

I will cover those aspects in my next post.

Related Notes [Retained from Clearly / Evernote augmented copy of web post]

Anglican Curmudgeon Saturday, September 21, 2013 Taking up the Fiddle While Rome Burns ECUSA's House of Bishops scheduled its fall meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, starting this Thursday, with a theme...

Anglican Curmudgeon: Bandit Bishop Running Outlaw Gang in South Carolina

Bandit Bishop Running Outlaw Gang in South Carolina KJS: She's head of the Church of England. If she can do it, why can't I? Bandit Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, known far and wide in ECUSA for h...

I2C 140305a aa Exo 18v21to23 Anglican subsidiarity / I2C / 140305 1244 / Exodus 18:21-23 A:( -  Anglican subsidiarity / Episcopal Church USA Governance