Balafon

This story pretty much epitomizes the end result of statism. When you allow, and then expect, the government to take care of you, the government will inevitably criminalize taking care of yourself (emphasis mine):

David N. Cox says he was merely exercising his right to petition the government, but a state Department of Transportation official has raised allegations that Cox committed a misdemeanor: practicing engineering without a license.

David N. Cox and his North Raleigh neighbors are lobbying city and state officials to add traffic signals at two intersections as part of a planned widening of Falls of Neuse Road.

After an engineering consultant hired by the city said that the signals were not needed, Cox and the North Raleigh Coalition of Homeowners’ Associations responded with a sophisticated analysis of their own.

…

Cox has not been accused of claiming that he is an engineer. But [chief traffic engineer] Lacy says he filed the complaint because the report “appears to be engineering-level work” by someone who is not licensed as a professional engineer.

We’re from the government, and we know better than you.

Hopefully this will be the final nail in the coffin of the anti-vaxxers. Turns out that the original study linking vaccinations to autism was not merely shoddy or erroneous, but out and out fraud:

An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study’s author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study — and that there was “no doubt” Wakefield was responsible.

“It’s one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors,” Fiona Godlee, BMJ’s editor-in-chief, told CNN. “But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data.”

Turns out that there is an amazing new technology being tested in surgeries around the world that has been shown to reduce patient deaths in surgery by 50%:

The checklist.

Party like it’s 1867.

Many people on the interwebs would benefit from a study of logical fallacies.

The clueless demagogue Mark Driscoll (but I repeat myself) has recently threatened spouses who fail to adhere to the sacred doctrine of Leave it to Beaver with hellfire and church discipline (which is worse, I wonder?).

John Stackhouse all but calls him an exegetical imbecile.

Ben Witherington brings some much-needed context:

The household Paul has in mind has slaves (see [Titus 2] vss. 9-10) which in itself makes the situation totally different from the modern Western household, unless of course you’ve hired illegal immigrants to do the grunt work at home and are paying them under the table. Then there could be some analogy. But any home that had domestic slaves such as this situation, had the slaves to do ALL THE HOUSEHOLD WORK, including minding the children and helping them with their school lessons. In fact there was a particular household slave used for the latter — the paidagogos which does not mean pedagogue, though that is where the English word comes from, but rather means the child-minder of younger children, the nanny, who among many jobs walked little Publius back and forth to school and helped with the homework.
The wife, in this case, the young wife, did NONE of these jobs on a regular basis, in such a household. She supervised the management of the household. In fact, she was the de facto head of the household. What did the husband do?

On a normal day, he handed out the list of jobs to his slaves and clients between 6-9 in the morning, and then he went out to the forum or agora to chew the fat, make business or political contacts, play backgammon, go to the baths and gymnasium, get a hair cut etc. In a situation like this, it was the wife, more than the husband who was not merely the bread baker but the head of the household, making sure their [sic] would be bread on the table. The man’s job was to go out and establish the public reputation of his family through dialogue, meals, going to games. etc. Both husband and wife ‘provided for the family’ in such situations, and in a high status marriage, like those Paul is most concerned about in the Pastorals, very often the women had more money, social status, and business acumen and contacts than the men — which is why a smart man would marry her in the first place. Anyone who has been to Pompeii will have seen the homes in which the front lower level of the house is the family business, for example serving food. On a day to day basis it was more likely to be the wife and slaves who ran the family store front business, while the husband ran around making contacts, playing games, eating with friends and the like.

The problem with fundamentalist nutcases like Mark Driscoll (following in the footsteps of James Dobson et al) is that they are not advocating a return to a Biblical culture, they are advocating a return to a mythical fantasy-land that never existed in any time in history, let alone anywhere in the Bible. The family values displayed in the Bible leave a lot to be desired.