Ralph Peters, writing in the NY Post, slams the mainstream media (MSM) for conspiring to impose an almost total blackout on success in Iraq:

DO we still have troops in Iraq? Is there still a conflict over there?

If you rely on the so-called mainstream media, you may have difficulty answering those questions these days. As Iraqi and Coalition forces pile up one success after another, Iraq has magically vanished from the headlines.

Want a real "inconvenient truth?" Progress in Iraq is powerful and accelerating.

But that fact isn't helpful to elite media commissars and cadres determined to decide the presidential race over our heads. How dare our troops win? Even worse, Iraqi troops are winning. Daily.

Peters is right, this has nothing to do with an absence of blood in non-newsworthy stories. There could be no more bigger news story in the past 5 years, then the revelation that Iraqis and their US and coalition allies have soundly defeated Al Qaeda, neutralized Sunni resistance to the government, and severely constrained the violence and influence of sectarian militias, both Sunni and Shia.

The reason the MSM chooses not to report on our stunning (and widely unexpected) success in Iraq is because they disapprove. They’re profoundly dsiappointed, and they fear the political implications for their preferred candidate in this year’s Presidential election.

Peters concludes his indictment by noting some contrasts, in terms of Legislative accomplishment, media preferences, and ulterior motives:

The surge worked. Incontestably. Iraqis grew disenchanted with extremism. Our military performed magnificently. More and more Iraqis have stepped up to fight for their own country. The Iraqi economy's taking off. And, for all its faults, the Iraqi legislature has accomplished far more than our own lobbyist-run Congress over the last 18 months.

When Iraq seemed destined to become a huge American embarrassment, our media couldn't get enough of it. Now that Iraq looks like a success in the making, there's a virtual news blackout.

Of course, the front pages need copy. So you can read all you want about the heroic efforts of the Chinese People's Army in the wake of the earthquake.

Tells you all you really need to know about our media: American soldiers bad, Red Chinese troops good.

Is Jane Fonda on her way to the earthquake zone yet?

Ralph must listen to National Peoples Republic -- I mean, Public Radio (NPR) -- which must have some official policy that reporting on China must always be upbeat and reflect positively on China’s communist government. Talk about a news blackout.

Apparently, NPR staff were present in rural China, working on a series of reports when the recent earthquakes struck. These reports give every impression on focusing on the hopeful and impressive strides China has made, in transforming their largely rural and agricultural heartland into a burgeoning industrial and economic powerhouse.

Their presence provided them immediate and proximate on scene access to the quake and recovery efforts, on which they’re reporting with gusto. All of a piece, unfortunately, with their gushing coverage for the past several years.

For the earthquake, NPR is awash in heroic stories of the Chinese Army, the Chinese Government, and the Chinese people recovering in the aftermath of the quakes. But they don’t just stop there. An analysis piece the other day suggested that the Chinese central planners have “learned” from bad public relations from previous disasters, and now allow and even encourage international and Chinese press coverage of the earthquakes and relief efforts.

No doubt this is true for China, with MSM fawning friends like NPR, natural disasters and their aftermath can have a positive impact on international public opinion in advance of their awaited Olympic Games. You have to wonder if the conscientious and full-of-good-intentions worshippers of Government supported public media don’t view this situation as a mission: how to make China more appealing. (NPR to the Communists: “Stand back, comrades, and we’ll have this cleaned up for you in no time, at all. Don’t you worry about a thing.”)

If you think this is outrageous exaggeration, listen closely the next time NPR reports from China. In recent stories, even the slight negatives they include are enveloped in excuses for Chinese misbehavior. Admiration and envy are palpable in the reports.

NPR reports that the Chinese have constructed too many dams, now damaged or threatened by earthquakes, but distressingly notes how critical these dams are for energy production. The Army units conducting rescue and recovery operations would be able to reach distressed communities more quickly by water if they there weren’t all these dams.

Darned central planning! There’s always an unanticipated consequence. For which, of course, new regulations and directives need to be formulated. The NPR reporting gives the overwhelming impression that their reporters greatly sympathize with the difficulties of, rather than resent, totalitarian control of everything. (If you want a glimpse of what a Democratic vision for what a Total Government future looks like, stay tuned.)

How great in contrast to how dreadfully George W. Bush’s FEMA handled Katrina, you have to know they, and their majority audience, are thinking. This despite volumes of evidence of New Orleans and Louisiana incompetence and corruption, and the remarkable and nearly unreported heroics in responding to Katrina, of the Army and Air National Guard, who provided critical, life saving services within hours of disaster.

An offhand tidbit shows the supreme irony of the implicit subtext of NPR’s China reporting. NPR reports that the Government will relocate entire villages to new locations less vulnerable to earthquake, or where services can be restored more quickly.

A government can no doubt be very effective when all the means of a totalitarian state, capable of complete disregard of the life and humanity of its people, are directed at a single mission or task. Chinese political and other prisoners can testify about live harvesting of organs for internal use and international export, for profit. Absolute and total control can look mighty attractive, when state control eclipses and renders meaningless or invisible, the price a society pays for that efficiency.

Hitler did indeed make the trains run on time, particularly those carrying his victims to death camps.

Can anyone imagine how NPR would be reporting on a US Government program to “resettle” New Orleanians to higher ground?

The NPR reporter suggested, “The Government has realized, that in disasters, a free press can hardly have any downside,” or words entirely to that effect. The same feature acknowledged that if remains to be seen if this same “openness” will apply to Chinese political reporting. Are they kidding? I hope they’re not holding their breath.

But with NPR, when it comes to China, it might be hard to tell the difference between them holding their breath, or merely struck breathless in adoration.

(Via Instapundit)

Yuval Levin writing at The Corner spotlights a very curious assertion by Sen. Barack Obama, as reported by AFP:

“We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” Obama.

Levin retorts:

We can’t?  So at what temperature would other countries like me to keep my home, then, and how much should I eat?

But it’s really, really worse than that. Obama made the statement in the context of claiming that, as President, he would ensure that the US set the example on Global Warming.

So should we expect an Obama Administration to outlaw SUVs?

Would Obama’s EPA Director set Federal policy guidelines on how much we eat, enforceable by the EPA? Or would Obama advocate laws to limit dietary intake? Would prosecution involve jail time on reduced rations, or a mandatory attendance at Fat Camp?

Will Obama insist on strict energy monitoring and rationing, whereby home thermostats transmit readings to US Dept. of Energy, resulting in automatic shutoff of energy until room temperatures fall back to an environmentally sustainable 68 degrees?

Even if Obama intends only to use the bully pulpit to encourage the behavior he sees as more of a proper example for the world, does he really want to be both President and First Nag? (Maybe this is part of his campaign readjustments post-nomination, and he wants to incorporate essential qualities of Al Gore and Hillary Clinton.)

I remember a firestorm when a Democrat suggested that the US needed to have the International Community approve foreign policy decisions that we make based on our own National Security. I also vividly recall all the suggestions from the Left that the US should surrender sovereignty to the UN, the International Court, or other international bodies, many of the members of which notably lack any quaint traditions like freedom, justice, or equality.

We need to have other countries give their okay for the individual behavior in matters of personal conscience and liberty of US citizens? Why do I get the feeling that there’s a lot more involved with this man’s choice of wearing or not wearing a US flag on his lapel?

There isn’t any way to escape the conclusion this man’s a born Socialist. If he means what he says, and he seems awfully sincere to me, he means to assert control over every means of production, energy source and consumption, every lifestyle choice at all susceptible to Government interference. I thought Communism was dead.

As an observation, it might be nice if Obama treated the relations between internal US communities with the same deference he shows foreigners. If he did, he would easily avoid gaffes like calling a female journalist “sweetie,” refer to rural Pennsylvanians as “clinging to guns and religion,” or talk about “typical white people,” or suggesting we need to worry about whether foreigners think our personal choices are “okay.”

Noel Sheppard, writing at NRO’s Planet Gore, decries the ‘gross negligence of adoring media when tiptoeing around the blatant vested interests of the exalted Al Gore.

In the midst of an emerging global food crisis greatly exacerbated, if not caused, by increasing production of bio fuels, reporters remain too emotionally attached to their environmental prejudices to start asking questions. Case in point courtesy of Sheppard: the May 6 interview of Gore on Terry Gross’s National Public Radio show, “Fresh Air.”

Gross in the interview tries to touch on a link between biofuels and the global food crisis, but all Gore had to do was blame any agricultural shortages on drought, caused of course by global warming, and Gross is blissfully off to other bromides.

Sheppard highlights what main and lesser stream media won’t: Al Gore is heavily invested, both from an historical policy perspective, and in lots of real dollars, with ethanol and other biofuel industries. According to Sheppard, Gore is an investor in Amyris Biotechnologies and AltraBiofuels, and cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate 14 years ago mandating the use of ethanol.

Nice work, if you can get it. Too bad media only concerns itself with business connections and dealings that concern Republicans, not sainted sycophants trying to control the means of production for the greater good.

So how bad is the food crisis, made worse by AGW-inspired public policy. Sheppard’s reporting suggests: bad, and if the likes of Gore get their way, certain to get much, much worse:

As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Marlo Lewis wrote in his May 5 NRO article “Food for Fuel Is No Laughing Matter,” a number of key international organizations are expressing dire concern as such grain demand sends prices soaring:

Both World Bank President Robert Zoellick and International Monetary Fund Managing Director Domenique Strauss-Kahn warn that the increase in world food prices could force 100 million people back into absolute poverty (defined as a household income of $1 a day or less), wiping out all the gains the poorest billion people achieved during the past decade.
The price of wheat jumped 120 percent in the past year, hitting a 28-year high in February. The price of rice, the staple for billions of Asians, is up 147 percent over the past year, hitting 19-year high. The price of corn tripled in the past two years, increasing from $2.00 a bushel in January 2006, to $3.05 in January 2007, to $4.25 in January 2008, and hitting $6 a bushel in April 2008.

Anti-humanist Environmentalists might argue that all this amounts to a price we should be willing to pay, to reduce AGW. But do biofuels help, or hurt? Sheppard’s quotes a

Wall Street Journal report:

Now scientists are showing that ethanol will exacerbate greenhouse gas emissions. A February report in the journal Science found that "corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years . . . Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%."

Can you imagine that? An environmental public policy prescription that achieves the opposite of its desired intent. You’d think these people were unscientific, or stupid, or had ulterior motives, or something.

Sheppard concludes, and indicts:

Think about it:

·         Gore and his business associates have now admitted their investments in biofuel companies

·         Grains prices are soaring all over the world as many countries experience food shortages

·         Multiple international entities including the United Nations are pointing fingers at ethanol and biofuel for adding to the food crisis

·         Biofuels actually emit more GHGs than conventional gasoline

·         Gore travels the globe spreading climate hysteria while blaming every natural disaster on global warming

·         Some of the so-called “solutions” Gore recommends to eradicate global warming will increase the international usage of biofuels thereby benefiting companies he and his business partners are invested in.

Yet, to date, no mainstream press member has publicly connected the dots, or questioned Gore about any of this. Is someone going to have to turn a slideshow presentation into an award-winning Hollywood documentary for media to start recognizing and reporting Gore’s really inconvenient truth?

That wouldn’t help. There’d be no funding for that kind of film, and surely, no Nobel Prize or Academy Award.

Vets for Freedom announces support for a revised GI Bill. From their Press Release:

Vets for Freedom Supports Revised GI Bill
STATEMENT FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 14, 2008
Contact: Judy Mayka (202) 338-4070
(Washington DC) Vets for Freedom urges Senate members to work together to pass a GI Bill that not only addresses the immediate need for increased financial and educational benefits, but that also takes into account the unique dynamics of today’s all-volunteer force. The US military is working hard to increase its ranks in order to meet strategic needs across the globe; and as a result, it is imperative that recruitment and retention are both addressed as part of any GI Bill.
The Webb Bill correctly recognizes the rising costs of secondary education, and the importance of pegging yearly benefit increases to educational inflation indices, rather than the Consumer Price Index, which would require Congress to revisit the issue in a few years. The Webb Bill also allows for the accrual of Active Duty benefits for Reservists and National Guardsmen, many of which have seen repeated deployments.
On the other hand, the McCain-Graham Bill substantially increases monthly educational benefits and could be implemented immediately; while the Webb Bill would take over a year to implement and would require a new layer of Pentagon bureaucracy. The McCain-Graham Bill also rewards troops who remain in the military, providing strong incentives for our best and brightest to continue their service and support a growing force.
"Both the Webb and McCain-Graham bills have valuable aspects that address the needs of our military and our men and women in uniform." said Pete Hegseth, Executive Director of Vets for Freedom. "Vets for Freedom trusts that those involved will work toward a compromise to integrate the best aspects of both bills, and ensure its passage and implementation in a timely manner."
Vets for Freedom is a nonpartisan organization established by combat veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its mission is to educate the American public about the importance of achieving success in these conflicts by applying our first-hand knowledge to issues of American military strategy. For more information, please visit www.vetsforfreedom.org.

This squares with influential MILBLOGGER and MilBlogdaddy Greyhawk, who comes down squarely in support of the GI Bill as a no brainer, and calls for urgent readjustment of the position of Senator McCain, if he doesn’t want to lose valuable ground to his Democratic Party opponent.

An Essay for the 2008 EO/Wheatstone Academy Symposium

Joe Carter of Evangelical Outpost is hosting the 2008 EO Symposium, sponsored this year by Wheatstone Academy. Joe explains the central topic of this year’s Symposium:

While the current political cycle has sharpened our focus on the role of religion in the public square, we often fail to reflect on the role of the public square upon religion. Increasingly, when Christians engage others in public forums, we do so using tools that we did not develop. Whether through movies, music, or new media, we tend to start with a pre-existing cultural forms and incorporate the Gospel as best we can.

As communication theorist Marshall McLuhan argued, the tools we use to communicate a message can shape that message in ways we may or may not intend.* If this is true then Christians have a duty to critically evaluate the effect of our media choices on our message. Do our choices of media forms allow the message to remain Christian? Or are the tools with which we communicate at odds with the message of the Gospel?

If the medium affects the message, how will the Christian message be affected by the new media?

Joe graciously extended an invitation for me to contribute an essay for the Symposium, and the following is something of an answer to this question.

Wary of Insularity

Introduction

Theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase and elaborated on the concept, that “The Medium is the Message” (TMITM). McLuhan in his lifetime created prolific and elaborate works, combining philosophy and a fair amount of artistic invention. After his death, his family, followers, and business associates have architected around McLuhan’s ideas an impressive edifice of business and educational resources.

I’ve never read McLuhan, but from years of exposure to the many ubiquitous riffs and references to TMITM, it resonates. If nothing else, this year’s Symposium compelled me to read enough background synopses of what McLuhan seemed to be communicating to understand TMITM, at least a little.

It’s a great organizing concept in thinking about creative and expressive acts, and the entirety of consequences that flow from them. Enough to know that I don’t think I’ll take Mark Federman up on his well-intended instructional curriculum for understanding McLuhan. My guess is that summaries like those produced by Federman and his colleagues at the McLuhan Program can convey in two thousand words 95% of the explicit content (if not the implicit media) that McLuhan attempted in two million. (I suppose that’s one way TMITM, too.)

That said, the Christian needs to confront the New Media, and how it might affect the Christian message. More critically, God compels the Christian to consider the fullest range of consequences that result from their own creative and expressive acts, and those of others. This remains true for the Christian, whether in the context of New Media, or in the old, established media of church traditions. I suggest it’s Scriptural.

As I understand him, McLuhan adhered to a definition of media that includes within its scope any extension of ourselves, any tool or utility of matter or expression. A hammer represents a media, as does language, or any act of expression that allows the “‘outering’ of our senses,” to quote Federman, or “anything from which a change emerges.” McLuhan thought of media in this sense as something that grows, and seemingly takes on a life of its own. Federman further asserts that, “since some sort of change emerges from everything we conceive or create, all of our inventions, innovations, ideas and ideals are McLuhan media.”

McLuhan’s conception captures the idea of the individual as a Change Agent, media as the action catalysts, and the message as any and all changes affected.

Many committed Christians will testify that, as a follower of Jesus, they experience the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, however imperfectly or inadequately that is oftentimes reflected in their walk and practice. For us, that means we acknowledge conflicting truths: that He who is in us, is greater than he that is in the world; that in our carnal nature, the old sinful man, we do what we do not want to do; and that the Spirit and our carnal nature remain in constant struggle. It also means that for us, the Holy Spirit can make our expressions in media a joint effort between us and God – if we let His will be done. Certainly this can be so with Christian use of new media.

The Internet as Medium

The internet serves as an excellent source of information. It makes a remarkable breadth of tools and resources available in ways both immediate, efficient, and amazingly adaptable to a tremendous range of uses. The simple acts of cut and paste, link and google have entered not only our lexicon, but the almost unconscious habits of increasing automation.

We live a wired, electronic life, often virtual, but seemingly more familiar than much of the natural, physical world. We discover, explore, and often thrive in networks of connection and community. Within these virtual communities, alternative media, new media, flourish and grow. The internet serves as an electronic commons.

Certainly the internet, the many new media outlets and the virtual communities they reflect, stand as vivid examples of the kind of phenomena that McLuhan sought to examine.

The virtual world of the internet creates a moral tension between traditional understandings of reality, and the evident, real consequences that derive from the “unreality” of virtual constructs. Still, the worlds reflected by the internet are merely some from all possible worlds.

And perhaps well reflective of McLuhan’s contemplations, the internet also creates many unanticipated consequences. The internet allows and encourages without much constraint a widespread exhibitionism, however seemingly anonymous. The internet represents the media greenhouse for all manner of crime, exploitation, manipulation, theft, confidence games, frauds and corruption.

Further, many people succumb to an intoxication with online virtual reality. They immerse themselves in activity, thought, the exchange of ideas, and all manner of social networking. Unfortunately, for too many, that community participation comes at the expense of any near equivalent with the physical, external, reality-based world. And it’s not just phenomena of youth.

Many people rely on online community as a crutch, or alternative to real world community. Anonymity and the artificiality, the “virtualness” of the online experience allows people to define themselves, structure their interactions and relationships on individual terms. They have control, power, or influence, in contrast to what they perceive elsewhere. Others just get wrapped up for a season, and sometimes lose perspective.

As a MILBLOGGER, I’ve seen and experienced this firsthand. I find myself so involved at times with online communities, that I lose perspective on how narrow and encapsulated that world can be. Not everyone, maybe not even a significant minority of people read Instapundit, or Real Clear Politics, or Daily Kos for those of a different bent, or even the estimable Evangelical Outpost, and surely not my blog. But many of us who dwell in that world are often confronted with puzzled looks and blank stares even at the mention of blogs or blogging. We are still a tiny microcosm of the online world.

But other than accessibility, visibility, and differences (perhaps) in societal constraint, how is this different than the physical, non-virtual world? Don’t we as Christians run the same risks of cloistering or isolation in the “real world?”

God’s Call to Evangelize

Jesus calls on his followers to go and spread his Gospel, the Good News of God having sent the world His son, so that whosoever believes in Him, shall not perish but have everlasting life. Jesus led by example, seeking out sinners, as they had most need of the Physician. He walked among the lost, He lived life among them, He sought to reach them, and healed those who sought His mercy. He celebrated weddings, provided wine, dined with tax collectors and gave encouragement to the shunned and ignored.

He went where many religious leaders of his day would not go, He exhorted against dead religious observance, and He decried the elevation of man and tradition over the timeless heart and commands of God.

God also admonishes His children to be of the world, but not conformed to it.

The Great Commandment challenges us to serve as vessels for what He has poured into us: that Greatest of all Loves that He has shown to us, we are to share with others. Not when they come calling, not when they make themselves acceptable in His eyes, not under conditions we consider ideal in time and place. Go, He said, and make disciples of all the nations.

I dare to presume He would intend us to make disciples in all possible worlds, the virtual as well as the physical.

Christian New Media

There are excellent examples of Christian use of new media, and flourishing Christian online communities. Leading ministries reach contemporary audiences with new media, and the sometime difficulties of finding Christian publications and resources have been erased thanks to the adroitness of Christian publishers and the explosion of Christian internet sites. Christian bloggers abound, forming communities and blogging collectives. Some, like EO, are making significant inroads in traffic and exposure. No doubt, they reach many unsaved, and start conversation and debate. Some of these, by search and curiosity, then yearning and yielding, eventually find faith in Jesus as their savior.

Christians evangelize with new media. They reach the lost. They start conversations. They create relationships, and trust. They provide comfort and encouragement. They share ideas. They build, fortify, and amplify each other in Christian collective expression. They share audience, and thereby extend networks and the relationships they enable.

In every sense, Christians inhabit virtual reality in all the ways they inhabit the physical world. They learn and make use of new and emerging tools. Many churches keep their sermons online. Christian music abounds in music sharing sites, and many Christian families are carrying around I-pods filled with praise and worship music. Christian online dating services have even emerged.

Just as Christians used radio, and then television, as a media for evangelism and outreach, so too Christians have taken to the Internet to attract seekers and searchers, to proselytize, to evangelize, and to more flexibly and creatively serve their congregations, physical and virtual.

Cloisters of Fellowship

Does that mean that any and all Christian use of the internet and new media is holy, righteous, or in keeping with God’s purposes? Of course not.

God’s people aren’t always very Godly. We fail our Creator, we fall short. Tragically, one of the most damaging ways we fail in our faith is that we isolate, we stick to ourselves, we focus inward, we shrink away from a difficult world, from dangerous and hurting people, and we turn away from the Greatest Commandment. Worse, many of us never see the slide from grace for what it is. We don’t acknowledge our failure of responsibility. We convince ourselves, just as the fallen do, that we’re pretty good, or good enough, or the good we do outweighs the bad, and certainly outweighs the good we never get around to doing.

In modest tribute to McLuhan, I devised a media (expression) of the all too common trajectory of Christian zeal for evangelism. Think of it as the Bell Curve of a too common Christian maturation process:

God

God’s Call

God’s Call upon the Christian

God’s Call upon the Christian to Evangelize

God’s Call upon the Christian

God’s Call

God

We start with an awareness, then acceptance of the reality of God.

We then hear God’s call to us.

We accept and acknowledge Jesus as Lord and Savior, and by the Holy Spirit, begin to walk out God’s plan for our lives.

At its fullest expression, our understanding of God’s call leads us to evangelize, in fulfillment of the Great Commandment.

Sadly, some never make it that far, and the power of their faith ebbs like retreating tide. Even many who get there, retreat anyway.

The Cloistered Online

I submit that the greatest danger the internet and new media poses for the Christian (practitioner or evangelist) is the same danger posed by more traditional Christian community. Fellowships that turn inward, Congregations that self-serve, church bodies that exclude or separate or find more division with other Christians than unity, all of these stray from God’s call.

I don’t suppose this potential is any greater via new media than in the easier ways we isolate ourselves in the physical world. I certainly have witnessed enough isolation and cloistering behavior in churches to think the very act of stepping out online represents something of a hopeful sign, denoting an attempt to reach beyond the comfortable or known, seeking those who are lost.

In dialog such as those encouraged by Evangelical Outpost, and this Symposium, and the emerging communities of Christian bloggers, I also see a breaking down of denominational and doctrinal boundaries which have far too often stifled and stunted, than protected believers from error or bad doctrine.

I’ve read Catholic and other Orthodox church theologians, and serious students of Protestant faiths, and lots and lots of Christians who have tried to remain unaffiliated on doctrine, doing their part to confess the One Church of Jesus Christ.

We all bring a perspective of the faith experience, and if new media accomplishes little else, it encourages all of us to get out and about, and meet some of our neighbors. We walk past walls and through gates which in the physical world, remain tightly closed.

By seeking a broader, virtual community of Christ, we have the opportunity to more easily advance the purposes of God, and the advancement of His Kingdom.

That, and I kind of like the idea that God’s people can transmit the power of the Holy Spirit in the electronic dimensions of the internet. Not that He needs our help, not that He can’t find any way He wants, but there are far too many people who hide out in their virtual neighborhoods, hungering for freedom in faith, and the Truth that will set them free.