Church Security

Ten years ago this month a man walked into Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, and started shooting. When he was done, eight people were killed and seven others were wounded. On this tenth anniversary, I decided to talk to Jeffrey Hawkins of Christian Security Network to see how churches are doing in the area of security.

For most of us, church has been a safe haven. But the events ten years ago, and subsequent incidents in others churches since then, have changed our perspective. Hawkins has found that people no longer regard their home church as a safe haven. No wonder, already seven killings have been documented in U.S. churches this year. Add to that the increasing number of assaults, arsons, robberies, and burglaries.

People working in law enforcement say that respect for the church has vanished. If anything, the church is seen as a soft target with ample opportunities for crime. In fact, as other buildings (office buildings, government buildings, malls, etc.) have stepped up their security, it makes churches look like much easier targets.

We should also mention that sometimes churches are target of hate crimes just as other houses of worship (such as mosques and synagogues). This can especially be true if the pastor has taken a strong stand on social issues. An unbalanced man might attack people in a church merely because he hates God.

So what are churches and church leaders to do? Hawkins is not calling for posting guards at every door and screening everyone with metal detectors. He says: “Good security is like an iceberg; the general public should only see about 10 percent of what you have.”

Improving security begins with increased awareness and education. A number of faith-based organizations are being formed to help churches and other houses of worship. And consultation with local law enforcement is key.

It is sad that we have to protect ourselves even in church, but that is the world we live in today. Pastors and Christian leaders would be wise to consider how to protect those to whom they minister. I’m Kerby Anderson, and that’s my point of view.

Jobs Going Overseas

Listeners frequently call my radio program to complain about companies who are sending jobs overseas. Although it is easy to blame the companies, there are many cases in which the companies tried to keep jobs at home but lost out because of competition from Chinese manufacturers.

An article this month in the Washington Post tells the sad story of the Cooper Tire plant in Albany, Georgia. For years, workers heard about their rivals in Chinese factories. Managers urged employees to run production lines faster and more efficiently in order to help the company keep up. But they were unable to do so, and 2100 Georgians lost their jobs. Why?

At Cooper Tire, the wages were $18 to $21 per hour. In China they were a fraction of that. The plant was subject to all the U.S. regulations governing health-and-safety, work hours, and the environment. Chinese plants are exempt from these laws and are notorious polluters.

Trade laws also benefit the Chinese. They are granted free and equal access to the American market. But the rulers in Beijing don’t reciprocate. The Chinese manipulate their currency to keep export prices low and even grant a rebate on it value-added tax on exports to the U.S. while imposing a value-added tax on goods coming from the U.S.

The impact has been predictable. In the last three years, the number of Chinese tires imported to the U.S. has more than tripled. Their share of the U.S. market rose from 5 percent to 17 percent. Over this same period, the share of the U.S. market served by U.S. factories declined by a similar amount. More than 5,000 U.S. jobs were lost.

Pat Buchanan sees this as part of a larger trend. He notes that since 2001 (when George W. Bush took office) the U.S. has run $3.8 trillion in trade deficits in manufactured goods. That is more than twice the trade deficits we ran for imported oil and gas.

Pat Buchanan agrees with President Obama’s tariff on Chinese tires. When two people from opposite ends of the political spectrum agree, perhaps we should listen. I’m Kerby Anderson, and that’s my point of view.

Driving While Distracted

Is driving while texting dangerous? I think nearly everyone (with the exception of a few naïve teenagers) know that it is. But what about just talking on a cell phone? Is that dangerous? Researchers have found that talking or texting is much more dangerous than many of us might even imagine.

Recently the Center for Auto Safety released hundreds of pages of research on the impact of cell phone use on America’s highways. Much of the research was done years ago when fewer cell phone users were texting. Essentially the problem has grown worse as texting as increased.

So far 17 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws banning texting while driving. Seven states outlaw drivers from using hand-held communication devices of any kind. This month, the Transportation Secretary is holding a summit to discuss the dangers of driving while distracted.

It turns out that some drivers multitask better than others. One psychology professor studying the effect of driving and cell phone use has concluded that only two percent of drivers are able to safely multitask while driving. In other words, most people are dangerous when they try to do so.

Nearly all users (the other 98 percent) are less influenced by peripheral vision when we talk on cell phones. We also react slower to visual cues even in front of us. Apparently our brains direct attention to the sounds we hear on the cell phone, and that causes the visual capacity of our brains decrease.

We have all probably heard that talking or texting while driving is as dangerous as driving drunk. It turns out it is more dangerous. Participants in one simulator study were faster to brake and caused fewer accidents when they had a .08% blood-alcohol content than while sober and talking on a cell phone.

Some have criticized the simulator study because it is not a real-world test, but I am not ready to test this out on our nation’s highways. We already know the dangers of driving while distracted. I’m Kerby Anderson, and that’s my point of view.

Books Aren’t Dead

A recent Newsweek proclaimed: “Books Aren’t Dead.” While that might seem evident as you walk through any bookstore, it wasn’t so obvious just a few years ago. We have been told that this is a media-oriented generation that is more interested in visual images rather than reading words on a page.

Some were referred to the “Gutenberg Parenthesis” to illustrate that we were moving back to oral traditions of learning. Before Gutenberg and his printing press, knowledge was formed and transmitted orally. Scholars were saying that in this post-Gutenberg era, knowledge is formed through “secondary orality” on the Internet. In other words, books (and the written word) were merely a parenthesis in human history.

Others pointed to the cost of books and the number of bookstores and publishers having difficulty staying in business. So they predicted that book publishing would be on the decline.

But that’s not what the statistics say. The number of books in print in 2008 rose 38 percent from the year before. And that year itself was up 38 percent from 2006. It appears we have more books in print than ever before.

According to Newsweek, part of the reason is university libraries. They are hawking publishing rights to the contents of their stacks (or at least those books which are out-of-print or in the public domain). For example, the University of Michigan has partnered with Google to digitize more than 400,000 titles. Cornell will do the same with their 500,000 titles.

I might add that the electronic age has also made book publishing and book reading more inviting. At a recent writer’s conference, I told budding writers struggling to find a publisher to become their own publisher and put their book online as an e-book.

Book reading has become so much more convenient with devices like Kindle2 and other digital readers. Reading an e-book online, downloading it to your computer, or reading it on your Kindle or iPhone also significantly reduces the number of trees that need to be cut down to print books.

Books aren’t dead. There are more than ever. And many of the titles are available in electronic formats that reduce your carbon footprint. Pick up a book or a digital reader, and enjoy. I’m Kerby Anderson, and that’s my point of view.

Moore’s Law

If you have ever worked around computers, you have probably heard of Moore’s Law. If not, it is very simple. Back in 1965, the cofounder of Intel, Gordon Moore, predicted that they would be able to double the number of transistors every 12 months (he later amended that to every two years) for approximately the same cost.

He surprised many the skeptics by being proven right all these years. Every few years someone would warn that Moore’s Law would hit a brick wall constructed by the laws of physics. So far, Moore’s prediction has been accurate.

Of course we are all the beneficiaries. Most of us carry around one or more devices in our pockets or purses that have computing power that far exceeds the computers I used at Yale University back in the 1970s.

So where does it stop? People at Intel say they can keep doubling the number of processors for many more generations. So the limits do not seem to be with capacity, but with speed. When microprocessors reached 3 gHz a few years ago, designers reached a limit. Make them go faster, and they overheat. In fact, they even start to melt.

To solve the problem, the industry started making chips that do several tasks at once. If you go to a computer store, you will see advertisement for quad-core chips. These are like four tiny computers on a single chip.

The challenge is how to effectively use these newer chips. Most of our operating systems were set up for a single engine not a parallel one. Many of the supercomputers at universities use parallel computing but the computer on your desk does not. Redesigning these systems for computers is a new challenge for the 21st century.

Programmers are certain they will meet the challenge. After all, the human brain is a massive parallel computer. In a sense, they will be designing programs to work just like your brain.

Isn’t that amazing? Our brightest computer scientists are attempting to write programs that essentially mimic the way our brains process information. Yet evolutionists tell us that our brain evolved by chance. Does anyone see a contradiction? I do. I’m Kerby Anderson, and that’s my point of view.

Marriage and Kids

A strong marriage is good for kids. Conservative researchers have been saying this for decades. Perhaps the single best book to document this would be, The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier, and Better off Financially by Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher. As the title indicates, married people benefit in so many significant ways. And of course their children benefit as well.

Not only are conservative writers saying this, but liberal ones are now joining the chorus of researchers who say that children do best in an intact, two-parent family. Writing in Time magazine, Caitlin Flanagan details “Why Marriage Matters.” She cites research that shows that: “Few things hamper a child as much as not having a father at home.”

Sociologist Maria Kefalas says: “As a feminist, I didn’t want to believe it.” She has co-authored a seminal book on low-income mothers. Women tell her all the time that they can be both father and mother to their children. She says that is not true. Growing up without a father has a deep psychological effect on the child. “The mom may not need that man,” Kefalas says, “but her children still do.”

This also turns out to be true for families at every income, though the greatest impact is on poor families. Sara McLanahan, a Princeton sociologist, has done ground-breaking research on the effects of divorce on children. She concluded that: “Children who grow up in a household with only one biological parent, are worse off, on average, than children who grow up in a household with both of their biological parents, regardless of the parents’ race or educational background.”

None of this should be too surprising. Some of the initial research on the impact of divorce goes back to the 1970s when Judith Wallerstein was tracking the impact of divorce on families and the children. But it is significant that academics and even newsmagazines like Time are publishing the same conclusion. I commend them for doing so. I’m Kerby Anderson, and that’s my point of view.

Medicare

Recently John Stossel detailed the history of Medicare and talked about its future. At a time when Congress is considering a major overhaul of medical insurance, it would be instructive to look at the history and the future of the first government-run health care plan, namely Medicare.

President Lyndon Johnson won a landslide victory in 1964. His election brought many like-minded members to Congress willing to establish a medical entitlement program that would benefit the elderly. Since this was a new program and uncharted territory, government officials made their best-case estimates for costs. We now know that these estimates were off (sometimes by orders of magnitude).

To this day, many retirees believe that their Medicare bills are paid from a “trust fund” that was created with deductions from their paychecks. This is not true. Politicians spend the money they receive through these contributions immediately. The money paid to current Medicare recipients comes from the deductions from the paychecks of today’s workers.

John Stossel says: “This Ponzi scheme worked for a while. But then more people had the nerve to live longer.” Essentially, the same demographic reality that has affected Social Security is also hurting Medicare. But that is only part of the problem. Not only are people living longer, but the ratio of workers to recipients is decreasing.

When Medicare began there were five workers for every Medicare recipient. Now there are only four, and soon there will only be three. The Board of Medicare Trustees predicts the ratio will be down to 2.4 by the year 2030. They also point out that Medicare’s unfunded liability is $37 trillion. That’s $37 trillion with a T.

I have been saying for months that we should solve the Medicare problem before we do anything else. There are possible solutions to this problem, but a 1,000 page bill with additional mandates and bureaucracies isn’t one of them. I’m Kerby Anderson, and that’s my point of view.