A Biblical View of Cities... Excerpt from a podcast by Albert Mohler When it comes to worldview, geography matters, and I often describe this in terms of a series of words that begin with C. The closer you get to a coast, the closer you get to a city, the closer you get to a campus, well the closer you get to moral progressivism or liberalism, the coast, the campus, the city, and you could add some other words as well. The point is, the closer you get to the cultural creatives, the closer you get to the coast. Yes, the cities turn out to be far more liberal, not only in terms of contemporary American culture, but throughout most of history. By the way, one theme of biblical theology is how the city is considered in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. In the Old Testament, there is an almost exclusively negative view of the city. The city is seen as a cesspool of sin. A city is seen as a place of human arrogance. The city is condemned by the prophets for their unbelief, for their lust. You go down the entire series, injustice, unrighteousness, but there is a shift in the New Testament. That shift in the New Testament, by the way, also at least has an analogy in the fact that Jerusalem is described not only in terms of its prophetic identity and its geographical and theological significance, but also an anticipation of a new Jerusalem in which the kingdom of Christ actually is described, at least in part in terms of a redeemed city. But the New Testament is also very honest about cities, honest about the fact that cities are indeed pools of all kinds of temptation. One pastor, by the way, in a modern city told me that he says to young Christians moving to his church and his city that they better watch out because they're about to find out who they are, because just about everything in terms not only of ideas and ideologies, but all kinds of temptations can be found in a city, whereas, they cannot be found in the same way in the countryside or in more rural areas. The New Testament has so many books named for cities because they were letters written by apostles to these cities, most importantly, the Apostle Paul. In the New Testament, even human cities are translated not just from a negative view, but to a positive role in terms of mobilization for the gospel and the planting of churches and the reaching of populations. But if you put the Bible together, Old Testament and New Testament, there's a very realistic understanding of the city. So when you consider the city and you consider temptation, concentration of human hubris and other things, this is a very old story.
Understanding How Cities Operate (and How They Disintegrate) Excerpt from a podcast by Albert Mohler So when you consider the city and you consider temptation, concentration of human hubris and other things, this is a very old story, but it's also as new as the headlines just these days. In the United States, cities are generally far more liberal than more rural areas. So as you have states that are more dominated by rural areas, they tend to be red, not blue, cities tend to be blue, or at least blueish or purple, even in red states. Being in a city makes a difference, and evidently, being in a city means you can also politically and morally speaking just lose your mind, such as the case right now in a city that's becoming a parable of our age, and that city is the city of Chicago. In a recent citywide election in particular, the runoff for the election of Chicago's next mayor, Chicago went left again, way left again, and that's after you had voters repudiate the incumbent, very liberal mayor of Chicago because of all kinds of problems, including spiking crime rates. So they didn't nonetheless make a correction. They basically just went with another candidate from the far left. Speaking of left, one of the reasons that the candidate of the left won is because so many people who would've voted against him left the city. Speaking of the liberal side, the political left, The Wall Street Journal ran a headline last week, The left wins big in Midwest elections. The editorial board summarized the Chicago election this way, "The Chicago runoff was a battle between the moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic Party and the left won. Despite public frustration over rising crime and failing schools, Brandon Johnson's victory means the city's decline as a laboratory for progressive governance will continue and more companies will consider following the example, the recent exits of Caterpillar, Boeing, and Citadel. Actually the list of companies and of people leaving Chicago is very, very long and getting longer." Another way of understanding this is to say that the majority of the voters, those who have stayed in Chicago, they tend to go for very liberal candidates, and this becomes a cycle. So even as Chicago voters elected, Lori Lightfoot and her administration on the left was judged by almost everyone to be a failure, you had Chicago voters choose someone of the same political cloth, in this case, also someone radically of the left, someone liberal even by liberal terms, and you just have fewer people who would vote conservative left in the city. So here's a very interesting political parable with vast worldview implications playing out right before our eyes. How in the world could correction come to a city like Chicago when almost day-by-day, certainly month-by-month, there appear to be fewer people who would vote anything other than extremely liberal left in the city? Businesses are leaving and there is every evidence to indicate that the election of this new mayor means that there will be more businesses leaving. Alicia Finley writing for The Wall Street Journal, put it this way, "There's a great deal of ruin in a nation as Adam Smith once observed. The same," she says, "could be said of America's big Democratic run cities. Brandon Johnson's victory in last week's Chicago mayoral race is a reminder that no matter how bad things get, they can always get worse." She explains, "The situation very well. Chicago is functionally bankrupt, it's high crime and taxes are driving away businesses like Citadel, Boeing and Tyson Foods." She continues, "Despite some of the highest property taxes in the country, its pension funds are in a death spiral. Scads of people are moving out, a net 175,000 people left Cook County that Chicago's home county between 2020 and 2022. The same thing is happening in other liberal cities that are becoming failed municipalities." She writes, "Between 2020 and 2022, about 71,000 people net left San Francisco. That's about 10% of its population." During the same period she says that a half million people moved out of New York City. That's about four times the population of Topeka, Kansas. Now there's a reason why these cities are veering so far left is because so many people work for the cities. Many of the people who are left are in these incredibly liberal cities where the government is so big that just about everyone is either working for the government or dependent upon government programs and government spending, or actually the recipients of that government spending. Alicia Finley writes, "America's big cities are increasingly steered by the interest of government unions and those who depend on the government dole. Unlike businesses, cities can't liquidate. Politicians can always raise more money from taxpayers to pay off their public union friends and buy votes from the government dependent class, which nowadays includes outfits that contract with cities to provide social services," end quote. So what the cities can't do is hold residents hostage. You have people if they have means and they have ability simply deciding, "I am not staying in this failed city any longer." The crime rate, the stink rate, the entire breakdown of civilization, the high taxation, the threat of even greater taxes to build an even thicker government, many people are simply saying, "We're out of here." There are so many businesses right now, there are clearly deciding, "We can't continue to operate in Chicago." Store after store. Even in the formerly illustrious shopping districts of Chicago are saying, "We are out of here." It's not just The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post columnist, Jim Garrity, wrote a piece with a headline, "As ominous clouds gather over Chicago, progressivism marches on." Garrity writes, "When a deeply troubled city chooses to double down on all the policies that aren't working, it's like watching sailors on a sinking ship bailing water in instead of out. Welcome to Chicago," he says. Here's how he summarizes the situation, "Brandon Johnson, a 47-year-old Cook County Commissioner, will be the city's next mayor. Voters had earlier rejected progressive first-term mayor, Lori Lightfoot, who won just 17% in the crowded first round of voting. Johnson, a former Chicago teacher's union organizer promises to govern from the same progressive playbook." Garrity goes on to explain that the rate of overall crime in Chicago is spiking, "more robberies, more burglaries, and way more thefts and motor vehicles stolen. Even with the recent decline, Chicago's homicide rate is still nearly 40% higher than in 2019." He continues with the pathology, "Significant numbers of Chicago cops at every rank are quitting, retiring, or transferring to the suburbs. Large companies are moving out of the downtown area citing high crime rates that make their employees feel unsafe. In just the past few years, Boeing, Caterpillar, Citadel and Tyson Foods have moved out of Chicago. So far, this year, Old Navy closed its flagship store in the loop, and Banana Republic said it will not renew the lease on its Michigan Avenue store." I'll just say, as a matter of pun, I guess it takes a Banana Republic to recognize a Banana Republic. Garrity gets to a very interesting point when he says that in order to get this kind of lopsided electoral picture, you not only have to mean that most Republican votes just don't count, you also have to understand that the Democratic votes are basically moving left far, left further left. The reason for that is that so many people have left the city who would've voted otherwise. That means not only those who would've voted in a conservative Republican direction, but those who would've voted in a less progressive liberal direction. They're looking for happier places to live as well. As for Brandon Johnson, he's got big plans for getting new big taxes as USA Today reports, "Johnson has called for new taxes and expanding social programs. He says the city should focus on mental health treatment, affordable housing and jobs for young people instead of further investing in policing and incarceration. So the new mayor intends to leave a lot of the vacant police positions vacant even as crime rates are spiraling." USA today also reports, "He has proposed a plan he say will raise $800 million by taxing ultra-rich people and businesses. Johnson's plan includes a per employee head tax on employers and an additional tax on hotel room stays." Let me just ask you to be a prophet here. What will be the most likely outcome of those two policies? Fewer rich people living in Chicago and fewer people staying in Chicago hotel rooms. People do have a choice as to whether or not they will come to much less live in Chicago. Now, I want to state that I happen to like the city of Chicago for any number of reasons. It's not only very important in American history, it is a major engine of the American economy. But what we need to recognize is the Christian understanding that a city is only possible if it follows certain rules and meets certain preconditions. You have to have a stable society. You have to be one that encourages investment and enterprise. You have to be one that preserves order on the streets. You have to have neighborhoods that are functional based on families that are functional. If you invest in all the kinds of social policies that undermine every bit of that, then you should expect to find something like what Chicagoans are now facing. The election of Brandon Johnson means not only that the city is not correcting its course, it has decided to move left full speed ahead. The interesting thing to note here is that you have all these warnings based upon already learned experience that so many corporations and people who have the options will simply move. They don't have to move to Wyoming, they can simply move out of Cook County, in that sense, you have what has happened in so many American cities where the people who have the means and the liberty, they move out. You have the ability to go into Chicago if you have some reason to go into Chicago, but you don't have to live in Chicago and be victimized by Chicago politics. But there's something else we need to note, and that is that we are currently in a vast national experiment to see just how far that works, just to what extent are people willing to move out, say 20, 30, 40 miles? This is where you are likely to see the rise of a lot of mid-size cities actually growing very fast. You see this in Texas. You see this in many other states. Tennessee is one of those states where you see mid-size cities all of a sudden growing where people say, "I want to move to a more reasonable livable place where I'm not going to be worried about all these pathologies knocking on my door every day." Here's where you have the other problem that's now being experienced by Texas and Tennessee. You have people who are moving from places like Chicago and they keep voting as if they're from Chicago. Okay. So the big picture here for our worldview consideration is understanding that the first issue here is that this is a city and it is a massive city. It's a city on such a scale that it's only unreasonable given the history of the United States and current economic factors. You have to have the industrial revolution, you have to have all kinds of new technologies that make a city like Chicago possible. But the Christian worldview understanding is that even as cities can demonstrate some of the best of human achievement, they can also demonstrate the breakdown of human order. You come back to where we started and that is that cities are overwhelmingly more secular than more rural areas, and they often become engines of secularization as well. With those secular worldviews come secular ways of understanding a vision of human happiness, the understanding of the human being and human dignity and the role of government. Here's something else to understand, those who believe in a more secular worldview tend to believe in a far more omnicompetent and ever-expanding government. That is a closely-tracked parallel, and it's because there's a shift of authority. There's a shift of hope. There is a shift of understanding what's most important. If you believe that what's most important can be delivered by government, then you'll expect a very big government to deliver on those promises. All that just underlines that these worldview issues are always there and often very, very close to the surface. I go back to the fact that the closer you get to a city, the closer you get to a campus, the closer you get to a coast, well, the closer you get to a more secular and a far more liberal worldview. I'll let the last word on this come from The Wall Street Journal, the editorial board of that paper summarize this situation this way, "You think a new mayor who ran as a leftist would try to reassure employers that he'll not be as crazy as he sometimes sounded during the campaign. But now that he's won, he apparently feels liberated to sound crazier."
A LESSON IN BRITISH AND U.S. HISTORY... The ‘Special Relationship’ That Now Unites the United States and Britain Took a Long Time to Develop: Does Anyone Remember War Plan Red? R. Albert Mohler, Jr. But at this point, I just want to say that American and British history, the combined histories of our nations, as I say with great affection and with great personal interest, the People's United and as Churchill said, also divided by a common language, a common culture, a common understanding of the rule of law, a common understanding of basic constitutionalism. We share much more than what separates us. And I think Churchill's right, we basically are seen together part of the English speaking world and united as, you might say, siblings in the English speaking peoples. There's a long history. And in this sense, we put American history as an extension of British history. And that's the way many British people and British historians see the situation as well. So with just a few minutes remaining, what's the other big twist in this story? Well, it is the fact that most Americans don't know how recently the special relationship between the United States and Britain really developed. Because you might think, "Well, it was back there during Victoria in the 19th century." Really not so. The United States and Britain sure had that combination of a common language, but they also had very divergent national interest. The United States was an anti-imperialist nation when it came to the observation of Britain and the very strong imperialistic rule that Britain was extending through what has been estimated to be 1/6 of the Earth's surface. Now remember, this nation was born in a military uprising that became a war against Britain, against the monarch, King George III. Remember that just a matter of about a generation later, the United States and Britain went back to war in the war of 1812. Just consider the fact that even as the border between the United States and Canada is often described as the longest non-militarized border anywhere on the surface of the earth, just remember that during the Civil War, and for that matter, even later, there were active war plans in the United States about invading Canada as a way of limiting the influence of the British empire. Furthermore, there were active war plans all the way up until the threshold of World War II, in which many American military strategists thought that the most likely eventual challenger to the United States that could come to blows and even to war was England. And so during the period between, say, the late 1920s until the fairly late 1930s, one of the most important American war plans on file was what was known as War Plan Red. Red as in red coats, red as in Britain. It was more formally known as the Atlantic Strategic War Plan and it envisioned a situation in which the United States and Britain would go to war in the war that was eventually to shape up as World War II. Now, that's not something you hear much talked about when that special relationship is cited. But at the very same time, even as that war plan was put into place, and by the way, the British Navy also had war plans against the United States, the fact is that no one by that period really believed that Britain and the United States were to go to war when you saw exactly what was going on in the World War I alignment in which the United States and Britain were allies, the same thing would happen in World War II. But those two world wars also with America and the United Kingdom being on the same side, cemented that relationship. By the end of World War II, there is no doubt that the United States and Britain would see each other as the most crucial allies to be found on the surface of planet Earth. But there's just a lot of twisted history here. A lot of very complex history. Canada, during much of America's history, was much more identified with the direct rule to the British crown. It was not then a part of what was known as the Commonwealth. It was then basically just a part of the British Empire. And so you had a fast-growing, increasingly powerful, industrializing, muscle flexing United States with what was really declared to be British territory right across our northern border. By the way, Canada had war plans against the United States. The United States had war plans against Canada. All that looks a little antiquarian right now, but it's just a reminder that history is a lot closer than you might think. It's one thing for a president of the United States to decline the honor of being invited to head a delegation to the coronation of a British monarch. It's quite another thing for an historian to pull out War Plan Red and put that before the people and say, "Did you realize that we actually had plans in the event we went to war with one another instead of together going to war with Nazi Germany?" Now, a part of what was going on there was the United States growing into itself as a modern nation and eventually the most powerful military nation on Earth. And that, of course, came at least in part of the expense of the Mother Nation Britain. And for many of those years, Britain had the most powerful Navy in the world and basically controlled the oceans. So there was a bit of conflict built in there. But what solved the conflict? Well, you could say it was an exterior force. It was an enemy force. It was Imperial Germany, what became World War I, and then it was Nazi Germany and World War II, and then it was the Soviet Union and its allies during the Cold War, and that cemented the relationship, what Churchill again called that special relationship in such a way that it is now virtually unimaginable that there could be a major conflict between the United States and Britain. But let's just remind ourselves that is how this nation's story began. We can be very thankful that War Plan Red never became an actual war. But history is always closer to us than some might think, and it's always interesting, if not always determinative, to know what that history is. By the way, you would say there is no more peaceful relationship than between the United States and Canada. That's basically true. But by some reports, even now, there is a lingering territorial dispute over one island, and on that island is a lighthouse, and Canada currently is manning that lighthouse. It could be automated with no personnel needed on the island whatsoever, but Canada keeps someone there because if the Canadian leaves, some American might show up and hoist the American flag. So I conclude by going back to what I said, I'm affirming President Biden in this. President Biden, you're doing absolutely the right thing and you're honoring the president of every one of your predecessors in office by not going to the coronation of King Charles III. But if you have a spare ticket, here's just a little hint, I'll go for you.
Monday | May 8, 2023 | 4:25 PM PDT Later today I plan to begin the process of learning to create my own educational animated videos, thanks to Cascadeur... I eventually want to have an animation studio, made up primarily of students, that releases full-length features fit for the big screen. But first, I need to return to full-time live trading (in mid May) using the "master" version of my system, developed since I "hit the road" a little over a year ago.
When you initially open the program, you'll be greeted by this popup window. To get started, you first need to click on "LEARN" and then click on "SAMPLES..." Then pick any of the first three "scenes" already populated with a character to follow the tutorial embedded below:
The introduction to the Daz Studio Masterclass is here... https://www.daz3d.com/community/masterclass?trk_msg=2QFRBGU45ID41EEOM7450CKONG&trk_contact=FM8QG3FA0OLITVBPE74U2Q3T80&trk_sid=NN4DVGV5ES69O9O8TBDQEQHQPG&trk_link=PQ1TSR0REG7K1ALJ6A03RU189O&utm_source=listrak&utm_medium=email&utm_term=learn+how+to+use+Daz+Studio&utm_campaign=Your+Software+&+Tutori