Author: Kerby Anderson

Kerby Anderson
One of the attacks on the Trump campaign is to whip up voter fears about Project 2025. Kamala Harris said this on the campaign trail: “I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party–and unite our nation–to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda.” Her campaign website claims that Project 2025 will “strip away our freedoms” and “abolish checks and balances.”
Project 2025 is a 922-page document created through the Heritage Foundation by 400 experts. It is essentially a conservative wish list of policy initiatives these experts would like implemented. When asked about it, Donald Trump said he had not read it and it doesn’t represent his policy goals.
More recently, the leader of the project (Paul Dans) stepped down from the project. One of the Trump campaign advisors applauded the action and proclaimed: “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed.”
Although the document touches on just about every aspect of the federal government, it appears that the greatest concern from Kamala Harris and other Democrats is the section on how to rein in the administrative state. Although a Trump administration would like to reform the civil service system so it would be easier to remove some governmental workers, I think it unlikely any meaningful reform will occur. I think American voters should welcome more accountability from unelected bureaucrats, but few in Congress seem ready for such reform.
Another attack on Project 2025 is the fallacious argument that it would radically change Social Security. Donald Trump has made it clear he has no desire to reform Social Security or any other entitlement.
Scaring people about Project 2025 may be an effective campaign strategy, but it isn’t based on reality.

Kerby Anderson
As you may have heard, President Biden wants to change the Supreme Court. This latest desperate attempt at “court packing” will not succeed, but it’s worth discussing as a teachable moment. In his op-ed, the president proclaimed, “I am calling for three bold reforms to restore trust and accountability to the court and our democracy.” One of his proposals is 18-year term limits for justices.
The Founding Fathers gave Supreme Court justices lifetime tenure while serving with good behavior. They did so to assure justices had independence from political whims. Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist Paper #78 that “This independence of the judges is equally requisite to guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals” and would protect them from “serious oppressions of the minor party.”
Kelly Shackelford (First Liberty Institute) quotes Joe Biden, who in 1983 said that court packing “was a bonehead idea. It was a terrible, terrible mistake to make. And it put in question, for an entire decade, the independence of the most significant body” which is the Supreme Court. He says Biden was right back in 1983 and wrong today.
His organization had put together a nationwide coalition of nearly a half million patriots who plan to flood Congress and the White House with this critical message: NO to court packing, NO to the liberal agenda, NO to a Supreme Court Coup.
Kristen Waggoner (Alliance Defending Freedom) also warns, “Don’t be fooled. This move by President Biden has nothing to do with protecting the court and has everything to do with the Left’s desire to dominate every institution in society.”
These proposals have little chance of succeeding since they need an amendment to the Constitution. That requires a supermajority of Congress and ratification by three-fourth of the states.
Fortunately, none of these so-called “reforms” will be enacted.

Kerby Anderson
Most Christians do not have a biblical worldview. That has been well documented in numerous studies. This is puzzling since a significant percentage of Christians without a biblical worldview regularly attend church services. A recent study by George Barna may have an answer.
Put simply, church members don’t have a biblical worldview because the pastor does not have a biblical worldview. Less than a third (31%) of pastors in America have a biblical worldview. That is a shocking percentage.
One pastor told George Barna that may not be too shocking considering that many pastors of liberal churches would not have an orthodox view. But he went on to say that what would be shocking is if the percentages were low among evangelical pastors. The most recent poll shows that a bare majority of evangelical pastors (51%) and only about a third (36%) of charismatic or Pentecostal pastors have a biblical worldview. He also found that less than one in ten (9%) of pastors in traditionally black churches have a biblical worldview.
Another interesting correlation was the relationship between worldview and church size. Generally, the smaller congregations are more likely than the larger congregations to have a biblical worldview. More than four in ten (41%-45%) of the pastors of churches with smaller congregations have a biblical worldview. By contrast, only 15 percent of pastors in churches with more than 250 adults have a biblical worldview.
George Barna explained that pastors who fill the position of Teaching Pastor or Executive Pastor usually had the lowest scores. These positions are found most often in larger churches.
His survey breaks down pastors according to denomination, according to church size, and according to congregational ethnicity. None of the percentages are encouraging and are a reminder that we need to be discerning when choosing a church.

Kerby Anderson
Why do we write down our laws? I recently read an article providing a practical reason for writing down the laws of a nation, but I would also like to add one historical reason for why we write down our laws.
This country is supposed to be a nation of laws and not men. We haven’t always lived up to the vision, but that is what we are to aspire to achieve. When you write down a law, you give it a fixed meaning. A government with laws with precise meanings is a government of law not of arbitrary power. You know what rights the government acknowledges, and you know what prohibitions will be punished.
In my booklet A Biblical Point of View on Constitutional Interpretation, I talk about two different views. Originalism attempts to understand the mindset of the framers who constructed it. That is why some have referred to this view as “strict constructionism.” The other view is modernism, also often called “the living Constitution.” It attempts to find meaning for the Constitution today and rejects attempts to view it through the eyes of white men who lived in the 18th century. Ultimately, rights and legal definitions become putty in the hands of judges and justices.
Historically, we write down laws because of the Puritans. They wrote out their covenants because they understood that they were to answer to God for their actions. These covenants bound each person to another person and the whole community as an agreement under God. They also understood that the rights they enjoyed came from God. Ultimately, these Puritan Covenants became a model for the US Constitution.
Americans want to live under a government of law, not a government where justices find principles in the unwritten “penumbras” of a living Constitution. Laws are written down to fix their meanings and protect against judges and justices who want to change the law arbitrarily.

Kerby Anderson
You have probably heard the phrase, “History Does Not Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes.” That observation is true, especially in economics.
Investor Ray Dalio learned that lesson at a young age. In 1971, he was clerking on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. When President Nixon announced that paper currency could no longer be turned in for gold, he expected pandemonium on the floor as stocks took a dive. Instead, the stock market jumped 4 percent as the dollar plummeted. He was surprised because he hadn’t experienced a currency devaluation, but he would have known if he had studied history.
This isn’t the first time the US has had to deal with significant inflation. In fact, the current chairman of the Federal Reserve (Jerome Powell) vows that he won’t make the mistake of Arthur Burns, who was Fed chairman in the 1970s.
I recently read an article from a Yale economics professor who was at the Federal Reserve back in those days. He said Arthur Burns wanted to remove energy-related products from the Consumer Price Index (CPI) because of the Yom Kippur War and the subsequent oil embargo. Blaming oil prices on a war. Does that sound familiar?
Then came surging food prices. Arthur Burns argued that this was traceable to unusual weather (specifically an El Niño event) that affected such things as fertilizers and feedstock prices. He, therefore, wanted to remove food prices from the CPI. Again, doesn’t this sound familiar?
By the time he was done, only about 35 percent of the CPI was left. If you have been listening to my commentaries for any length of time, you know that we no longer measure CPI the way we did decades ago.
This isn’t the first time America has had to deal with significant inflation, and we can learn lessons from economic history about what we should do.

Kerby Anderson
A few decades ago, Americans were increasingly concerned about privacy. Back then, we did several radio programs on the topic but now many of our privacy concerns have faded.
Mark Zuckerberg put this in perspective. He said when he got to his dorm room at Harvard, the question many students asked was, “why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?” He then went on to acknowledge that people (especially his generation) became more comfortable with sharing information online.
In his book, Why Privacy Matters, Neil Richards writes about some of the myths that surround privacy concerns. One myth is that privacy is about hiding dark secrets. We hear the argument that “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” But that doesn’t mean we should have everyone see everything. We wear clothes out of modesty. We don’t want videos of what we do in a bathroom or bedroom.
Another myth is that privacy isn’t about creepiness. He provides lots of examples of privacy invasions we would not tolerate. Yet we have the famous comment by Google’s Eric Schmidt that I have mentioned in previous commentaries. He explained that: “Google’s policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”
Another myth is that privacy isn’t primarily about control. We are assured that we can make informed choices about the amount of information a technology company can use. But do you really read all the words in a privacy notice? One famous study from more than a decade ago estimated that if we were to quickly read the privacy policies of every website we encounter, it would take 75 full working days to read them all.
Privacy concerns still exist, and we need to focus on them in the future.

Kerby Anderson
After a mass shooting, one question rarely asked is whether there is any connection to psychiatric drugs. As I have explained in previous commentaries, there are many factors and explanations for young men who decide to shoot innocent citizens. There is no “one size fits all” explanation.
It’s worth a brief mention that many of these young men were on what are called SSRI drugs. That stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Correlation is not causation, but we can’t ignore that the significant increase in mass murders and suicides does correlate with the same increase in the use of these psychotropic drugs.
Just a casual search on the shooters surfaces a common pattern. So many of them were on one or more of these SSRI drugs. We have learned about the video games and movies the Columbine shooter watched but hear much less about the two drugs he was on. We have heard about the racist ideas of the young man who shot up the church in Charleston, but we have heard much less about the drug he was on.
I recently talked about the lost boys of America. We need a national conversation about why we are seeing so many mentally disturbed young men. Loneliness and isolation are an issue. Broken homes, bullying, violent video games, and several other factors contribute. But we need to add the possibility that these drugs are also a factor.
The Journal of Political Psychology put together a list of numerous mass shootings committed by young men on prescription drugs. At the least, there seems to be a correlation that is worthy of further research.
Lots of factors feed into these horrible mass shootings. Drug use by these shooters is another factor worth considering.

Kerby Anderson
Yesterday, I talked about robots and wanted to follow up with some perspective on how artificial intelligence represents independent thinking and autonomous actions. There are reasons to believe that AI and robots will be learning and thinking in ways we might not predict. Let me illustrate this with the game Go.
Go is an ancient East Asian game played on a nineteen-by-nineteen grid with black and white stones. The goal is to surround your opponent’s stones with yours. Once you do that, you take them off the board. It is more complex than chess. After a few moves, there are 200 quadrillion (2 x 1015) possible configurations.
When computers beat chess masters, they used a brute force method (where they merely crunch through all sorts of possible moves). That is not possible with Go. Therefore, engineers produced AlphaGo to learn by watching 150,000 games played by human experts. Then it played against copies of itself.
The engineers then organized a tournament in South Korea against the world champion of Go. AlphaGo won the first game, but it was the second game that had everyone talking. The machine made a series of moves that made no sense. Commentators explained to the people watching that it was “a strange move” and that AlphaGo had made “a mistake.”
But the world champion knew something wasn’t right. He took a very long time before he took his next move. Before long, it was obvious that AlphaGo had won again and Go strategy had been rewritten right before everyone’s eyes.
Later versions essentially dispensed with human knowledge and developed their own strategies and thinking. This illustrates the power and the peril of artificial intelligence.

Kerby Anderson
If you mention the term “killer robots,” people are likely to think of the Terminator movies. But these are real and will change the nature of warfare.
Mustafa Suleyman devotes a section to “robots with guns” in his book, The Coming Wave. He tells the story of an attack on a heavily guarded Iranian convoy that came from a nearby empty pickup truck outfitted with a gun. It was fired by a “high-tech, computerized sharpshooter kitted out with artificial intelligence and multiple-camera-eyes, operated via satellite.” Although a human authorized the strike, it was the AI that fired the weapon and automatically adjusted the gun’s aim.
In the future, imagine robots equipped with facial recognition and automatic weapons. That may seem like science fiction, but military drones firing missiles at the enemy is fact. Soon they will become autonomous drones that don’t even need human interaction.
Paul Wood proclaims that “The Killer Robots Are Coming.” He is concerned that the “dangerous marriage between AI and robotics is already happening, creating autonomous killing machines that can work with little or no human oversight.”
He describes a Ukrainian drone company that claimed it had deployed a fully autonomous weapon that used AI to decide on its own when to shoot and whom to kill. In South Korea, guard robots on its border have the capability to detect, track and fire on intruders without humans giving commands.
Of even greater concern is the possibility that a nuclear weapon could be deployed by artificial intelligence. He suspects that Russia and China may already have automation where early-warning systems trigger a reflex to launch missiles in return.
Killer robots are no longer merely the stuff of science fiction.

Kerby Anderson
The Wall Street Journal editorial board begins with this observation: “The laws of economics continue to exist even when politicians ignore them.” What they are talking about is the decision in California to increase the fast-food minimum wage to $20 an hour. When the editors predicted the inevitable outcome, the governor’s office claimed they were “pushing a false narrative.” Now reality has set in, and the predictions have come true.
Over the years, I have written commentaries about progressive attempts in cities like Seattle and Portland to raise the minimum wage significant amounts. The results are always the same. Some benefit, but most others do not. Owners cut back the number of workers and the number of hours for those who remain. And prices go up. California is no different.
“An Associated Press dispatch last week reported that California fast-food franchises have been cutting worker hours after the wage mandate took effect…. A Del Taco manager slashed the number of workers for each shift by half. A Jersey Mike’s franchise owner reduced morning and evening shifts, reduced his staff by 20 workers, and raised prices.”
The greatest harm is to those who lose their jobs. Research done by Beacon Economics recently found that California’s minimum wage law, “does particular harm to teenagers. In the past two years, unemployment among 16-to-19-year-olds nearly doubled.” As the editors noted, “Instead of flipping burgers, more California teens will be flipping through TikTok videos.”
Think of your first few jobs. Like me, your only job skills were a strong back and a good work ethic. We probably weren’t worth $20 an hour, but we did learn from skills that have made us successful today. Many young people won’t get that opportunity because of this law.

Kerby Anderson
One of my recent in-studio guests had a rags-to-riches story that was one more example of achieving the American dream, like the one we heard recently for J.D. Vance. My guest attributed his success to education and is a strong proponent of the American educational system. But he also acknowledged that education in America faces many challenges.
Earlier this year, I wrote a commentary about the 1983 assessment of American education from the National Commission on Excellence in Education. The panel lamented: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might have viewed it as an act of war.”
Forty years later, the state of education in America seems worse even though we spend more on education per capita than just about any other country in the world. Not so long ago, the US was producing the best and brightest students in the world. Now, they are about average in science and reading and below average in math.
As a nation, we don’t even know our history or basic political facts. A study done by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation discovered that only one in three (36%) Americans could pass the U.S. citizenship test.
During the recent Republican National Convention, we heard many speakers suggest school choice might be a solution. At a previous Republican Convention, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice observed that, “when I can look at your zip code and I can tell whether you’re going to get a good education, we’ve got a real problem.” It is unlikely that school choice will be mentioned positively in the upcoming Democratic National Convention.
An important issue in this election is how we can meet the education challenges before us.

Kerby Anderson
Over a week ago, I talked about the dangers of alcohol. We know so much more about its dangers than we did just a few decades ago. This is also true of cannabis.
A few months ago, I quoted from a psychobiology professor at Harvard Medical School who put together a detailed review of cannabis and its medical uses for the World Health Organization. There are several US government organizations and experts who also document the dangers of cannabis.
The National Safety Council warns that marijuana has a negative impact on job safety. It is a leading indicator of workplace accidents. It affects depth perception, reaction time, coordination, and other motor skills. It creates sensory distortion. For someone operating machinery, these effects can be deadly.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, employees who tested positive for marijuana had 55 percent more industrial accidents, 85 percent more injuries, and 75 percent greater absenteeism compared to those who tested negative.
The National Institutes of Health have reported, “Young men with cannabis (marijuana) use disorder have an increased risk of developing schizophrenia.” This conclusion came from the detailed study of “health records data spanning 5 decades and representing more than 6 million people.”
I remember when many years ago, I had an author on my radio program who documented the link between cannabis and schizophrenia. I received complaints from some in the audience about his statement. We now have solid evidence of that potential danger.
Cannabis is not as harmless as promoters of drug legalization would have us believe. This is another case of “the more we learn, the more we learn of its dangers.”

Kerby Anderson

We can see some cycles in history. Yesterday, I talked about a political/cultural cycle. Today I want to talk about a technological cycle and a financial cycle.
There appears to be about a fifty-year technological cycle, in which we see important technological revolutions. In the 18th century, we saw the beginnings of what today we refer to as the industrial revolution. Fifty years later was the age of steam and railways that changed the world significantly. Up until that time, we had manpower and horsepower. Now people could move faster and carry heavier loads.
Fifty years after that we had steel and electricity. Fifty years after that we had oil, automobiles, and a revolution in mass production. By the 1970s, we came into the age of information and telecommunications. Today, we find ourselves in a world of fast computers and artificial intelligence.
Some of the financial cycles parallel the technological revolutions. America moved from an agricultural society to an industrial economy to an information society. If you look at the wealth cycles of nations, you notice something interesting. The financial superpower changes over time, with an average of about 100 years. Perhaps you have seen a chart that shows those changes from Portugal to Spain to the Netherlands to France to Britain to the US.
As I have mentioned in previous commentaries, this country (along with other countries around the world) are experiencing a debt crisis. But this is happening as all three cycles (the political, technological, and financial) are converging.
What is on the horizon? I think we are likely headed for a massive change in the future. We should all be in prayer for our leaders and prepare ourselves for possible turmoil ahead.

Kerby Anderson

Are there cycles in history? Yes, even though there is a linear trajectory in history, there are generational cycles we can observe. No doubt you have heard the phrase: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.” Or you may have heard: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” And you may have heard the phrase “the fourth turning” that predicts a crisis at the end of a four-fold cycle.
Today and tomorrow, I will talk about three often quoted cycles: a political/cultural cycle, a technological cycle, and a financial cycle. And I might mention that all three seem to be converging today.
There appears to be about an eighty-year political/cultural cycle (which averages out to about 84 years). Go back to 1848 and you have Karl Marx publishing the Communist Manifesto and other works. The political and social impact of his Marxist perspective swept through Europe, changed the political structure of many countries, and is still an influence today.
Another important political change happened 84 years later in the 1930s. In Europe, you have the rise of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. In this country, you had the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt who signed into law a significant number of New Deal programs that vastly expanded the scope of government and are influential in our lives today.
If you add another 84 years, you come to 2016. In Europe, you have the political battle known as Brexit and the beginning of some populist uprisings. In this country, you also had the rise of populism as illustrated by the election of Donald Trump.
Tomorrow I will show how this cycle coincides with the technological and financial cycles.

Kerby Anderson
Wilfred Reilly has written a book about how American history is taught today. It has the provocative title, Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me. In some ways, it can be seen as a response to the book by James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me. You can read his opinion column that provides a summary of his book.
What is his concern? “We often, bizarrely, hear the claim that American history is taught mostly from the political right — and that it presents our nation as bucolic. But, in fact, many of the best-selling social-science books of the past few decades focus on the idea that the ‘real’ history of the United States was a virtually unending bloodbath.”
Two of those books are Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and the New York Times best seller The 1619 Project. He adds that “the contemporary US national media and professors lean roughly 93 percent to the left, and this has been the case for some time. Within the secondary schools, two popular curricula currently in use come from the 1619 Project and Dr. Zinn himself.”
As I have said before, there are many dark chapters in American history. Those need to be taught, but not to the exclusion of the many positive aspects of our history. Students are often left with the impression that the US was the only country that had slavery. They don’t learn about how nations in Europe and North America set out to end the institution of slavery. They may learn about European colonialism, but not about Ottoman, Mongol, or Arab Muslim colonialism.
Wilfred Reilly’s book reminds us that if there is a bias in the nation’s textbooks, it is a leftwing bias against America.

Kerby Anderson
There are many reasons why politicians talk about “draining the swamp.” The federal bureaucracy is bloated. Our taxes don’t even cover all the costs of the executive branch in the federal government.
Economist Stephen Moore argues that “The Case for Draining the Swamp Is Stronger Than Ever.” He reminds us that the latest official employment report finds once again that “the federal government and state-local hiring spree is still in full gear.” Government and health care are hiring many more people than the ones hired by the private sector.
Although there are more government workers than ever before, he says, “good luck finding them or getting them on the phone. This is because so few of them are actually physically on the job.” He has the statistics to back up that claim.
A recent Federal News Network survey of federal workers finds only six percent are working full time in the office. Even more surprising, it reports that thirty percent are full-time remote. No wonder so many of the offices in Washington, DC buildings are empty, especially on Fridays.
When we compare these percentages to the private sector, we discover that federal employees are three times more likely to be working remotely either some or all the time. The irony is that three years ago the federal government issued an order to federal employees to return to work post-COVID-19. Thousands ignored the order.
Stephen Moore has a solution: stop hiring new people. The government is losing almost $2 trillion a year. How about a hiring freeze until we get government spending under control? He adds that if government needs more revenue, it should start selling half-empty federal buildings.
This is one of many good reasons to drain the swamp.

Kerby Anderson
With political tensions throughout the world, we need someone to step forward and promote some important principles for America to provide global leadership. It isn’t too often that a speech by the Speaker of the House fulfills that need. But these are not ordinary times.
Earlier this month, Mike Johnson spoke at the Hudson Institute and laid down a marker for future leaders because he rejects American decline and retreat. He explained, “While democracy is not perfect, the burden of self-government is certainly far lighter than the yoke of tyranny.” But he laments that “absent American leadership, we’re looking at a future that could be” defined by “communism and tyranny, rather than liberty and opportunity and security.”
He warned about the three major dangers facing the world. Chinese President Xi Jinping wants to expand “his communist footholds.” Russian leader Vladimir Putin envisions a Russian empire that absorbs more of Europe, including the Baltics. The Muslim leaders in Iran plan to wipe Israel off the map.
The current administration does not seem to take any of these threats seriously. The Biden Administration, he explains, is “appeasing and apologizing and accommodating.” America is threatened “by Chinese Communists, by Russian oligarchs, and Islamic terrorists. We can choose to ignore them. We can try to appease them.” Instead, the Speaker offered that “we can choose another course.” He has a solution: “We can rearm, rebuild, reinvigorate, restore, and reinstate fear in our enemies.”
We will hear many speeches from candidates between now and November. This is one we should remember. The world needs global leadership from America’s leaders.

Kerby Anderson
It’s time to have a meaningful conversation about tipping, for two reasons. First, there is a significant reaction to the expectation of tipping. Andy Kessler writes about “The Tyranny of Tipping.” Second, tipping may become a political issue. Donald Trump declared in Nevada: “When I get to office, we are going to not charges taxes on tips.”
Why do we tip? Historically, it goes back centuries. Andy Kessler talks about London taverns in the 17th century that suggested tipping “to insure promptitude.” Or to put it in modern terms, “to insure prompt service.” Frankly, many customers tip today because a percentage is already on the credit card screen. It is easier to add a tip than to zero it out and then feel guilty.
Most of us are glad to tip people who perform an important service. The frustration comes when we are asked to tip at a fast-food restaurant where we must pick up the food, take it to the table, refill our own drinks, and then throw away our garbage.
The social and economic consequences of tipping are significant. The IRS reported $38 billion in reported tips a few years ago. This would likely mean a loss of income in taxes. But what might this do to human behavior? Will employers pay less since they assume that workers are getting tax-free income? Will other professions start asking to be paid in tips?
Here’s another question. If we no longer tax tips, will they go up or down? According to the Fair Labor Standards Act, employers receive a tip credit between $2.13 per hour and the federal minimum wage. In a sense, your tips now pay part of a workers’ base salary. Will that increase or decrease?
America needs to get ready to have a serious conversation about tipping.

Kerby Anderson
If you spend any time viewing social media, you have probably seen a few clips from notable experts on the dangers of alcohol. We know so much more about its dangers than we did just a few decades ago.
Professor Jordan Peterson warns that “alcohol is an extraordinarily pernicious drug.” He understands why people would use it because of its anxiety reducing properties. But he argues that alcohol is a really bad drug. He says, “50 percent of murders take place in an alcohol-fueled environment, either the victim or the perpetrator or both are drunk. It’s almost the sole cause of domestic abuse. It’s almost the sole cause of so-called date rape.”
He also adds that “it’s the only drug we know that actually makes people more aggressive.  Alcohol can turn perfectly good people into impulsive and dim-witted monsters.”
Dr. Daniel Amen, MD explains that he started looking at the brain in 1991. He found that people who drink every day have a smaller brain and when it comes to the brain, size matters. He reports that “people who drink every day have more disrupted white matter in the brain. The white matter brain cells are the communication network. It’s the highways. People who drink, even a little bit, have more disrupted communication networks.”
He also points to the fact that “the American Cancer Society came out last year and said you shouldn’t drink because any alcohol is associated with an increased risk of seven different kinds of cancer.”
Six years ago, I did a commentary on alcohol consumption based on a study in the journal Lancet that concluded there was no safe level of alcohol consumption. Each year we seem to be learning even more about the dangers of alcohol.

Kerby Anderson

Warner Wallace has a new book out with the title, The Truth in True Crime: What Investigating Death Teaches Us About the Meaning of Life. Although he is known as a cold-case homicide detective, he is best known in Christian circles as an apologist.

The title of his book might be a bit deceiving. He uses the crime scenes he investigated over the years to point to life principles that lead to human flourishing. The fifteen chapters discuss wisdom, friendships, marriage, humility, contentment, purpose, justice, grace, guilt, and shame. It also includes a chapter on the importance of fathers. Each chapter documents an important principle from his experience and is validated by secular studies. He then ends by showing that each of these are what the Bible claims allow humans to thrive.
You can buy the book (published by Zondervan) in a bookstore. But everything else you might want (like a video series on the book) is free on his website. When he was on my radio program last week, he said he wanted to make sure that most of the material Christians might want to use did not cost anything. The book could certainly be used by an individual, but it would be much more effective as a group study. He has provided all you need to get started.
Each of the chapters looks at the evidence. He then provides pictures and diagrams that help clarify some of the life principles. Finally, he provides some concrete suggestions on how to alter your life course to incorporate these principles into your life.
He ends by noting that cultures that aim at human flourishing hit the bull’s-eye called Christianity every time. Once again, we see that the Bible offers wisdom from above.