Earlier this year -- Next year
It was tough going, so I could only do a page or so (maybe a half chapter) in the alloted time, but I started learning the words. Within a month or so I was looking a lot less often, and after doing a couple books -- I forgot exactly when or where this happened -- I started covering up the English as I worked my way along the Hebrew line, then sliding the card back when I hit a word I didn't recognize. The history books got a lot easier, but poetic books still have a lot of words not otherwise used, so I do a lot more peeking.
One of the things I noticed early on is that the Hebrew language changed. That's not surprising, considering how many years the composition is spread over. In another place I describe the effects of time on language. If (as I believe) the Bible was written mostly by eyewitnesses and their contemporaries, then we have over 3000 years of language change to account for. You can actually see the difference in successive chapters of Genesis, all of which is different from Exodus and the other "Books of Moses" (curiously, I cannot find a single place in the Bible where Genesis is attributed to Moses). Anyway, I could see differences in vocabulary working through Kings and Chronicles. Some of that might be attributed to different scribes doing the writing, but I suspect a lot is just the slow migration of the language through four hundred years.
I'm now in Nehemiah, and the historical parts are a lot different from the earlier books, words used differently, probably some borrow-words from Aramaic, which was likely the language Nehemiah spoke in his official duties in the King's palace, and perhaps even at home. There are several chapters of Ezra in Aramaic, which is enough differnet in structure that it's easy to tell, but then he switched back to Hebrew earlier than my English Bible said, but kept using some of the Aramaic spellings of names.
Hebrew has a unique word, a characteristic preposition 'eth' which is used to indicate the direct object of a verb. English has no such preposition, it's entirely by word order for us, so the interlinear has no gloss for 'eth'. It was kind of funny looking at a Christian book written by somebody who did not read Hebrew, but only looked at the interlinear glosses for his understanding of the Hebrew text. Seeing no gloss for this word, he assumed that it was mystical, "Aleph-tau" (the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet), with no meaning of its own. You can make blunders like that when you know neither linguistics nor the other language. Anyway, this preposition does not occur in Aramaic; instead it has its own peculiar word 'di' (pronounced "dee") which serves as a sort of connector between clauses, not exactly "and" or "which" but sort of a combination of them. Both words in their respective languages occur frequently enough that it's easy to see which language it is.
Like I said, I'm now in Nehemiah, and there these long lists of names, all the people who signed a pledge to avoid intermarrying with the local non-Jews, or who volunteered to live in Jerusalem, stuff like that. Reading it in English, one can slide over these names and think nothing of them, but it's a lot slower in Hebrew. All Scripture is inspired by God and is "profitable" so I wonder what purpose these names serve.
The same person who lent me the book with the "Aleph-tau" blunder lent me another book this week, different author, same ignorance of Hebrew, different blunder. There's this picture suppossedly showing us the difference between the Code of Hammurabi and the Ten Commandments, with an image of each sort of mashed together in what they used to call a collage (but now is called "PhotoShopped"). Part of the Hebrew text is blurred, but I was able to read a full verse near the end, which I translate here somewhat literally,
And-arose after Abimelech to-save Israel Tola son-of Puah son-of Dodo [a] man-of Issaschar and-he-lived in-Shamir in-hill-of Ephraim. And-he-judged Israel...Names are pretty easy to find in the Bible. That's not the Ten Commandments, it's the beginning of Judges chapter 10. Apparently whoever was doing the graphics for this book looked on the internet for something that looked like Hebrew, and downloaded this image of a page from a modern Hebrew Bible without worrying about which page it is. For all I know, the "Code of Hammurabi" probably isn't either, but I don't read cuneiform so I can't tell. They misspelled some Biblical names in another graphic. Not a good sign.
Their cover for Thanksgiving week showed a cornucopia, the traditional iconic representative of fall harvest abundance, this time filled with assorted "organic" and chemicalized foodstuffs, most notably including a puffy loaf of "gluten free" and "organic wheat" bread. Obviously they pay their cover artist for his visual skills, and didn't bother to check the facts on his artistry. The main protein component of wheat and barley is gluten, and it is the gluten that makes the dough sticky so it traps CO2 released by the yeast during the fermentation of sugars in the dough, so the bread rises. "Organic" is usually taken to mean minimal artificial processing, such as might occur if they could actually remove the gluten from wheat flour, but "gluten free" usually means it contains no wheat components at all, because it's so hard to get it completely free of gluten otherwise. Me, I want to buy some of that "organic wheat" bread made without wheat, and see whether it tastes more like unicorn steak or dragon tears. Maybe Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy will bring me some for Christmas.
The previous issue filled their entire sports page with the story of
the fake "touchdown" a high school football coach engineered for a popular
student with Down Syndrome. My niece has a high-functioning Down Syndrome
child, so I get to hear about how that works. One of the symptoms is degraded
motor skills, and the kid in the story obviously was not up to playing
on the team in competitive games, so after the game on October 18, the
coach got the referees and opposing team to pretend there was 30 seconds
left on the clock, and Josiah O'Brien got to run his "touchdown" through
a wide pathway the opposing team opened up for him before pretending to
try and tackle him. His team had already won 48-27, and his fake "touchdown"
had absolutely no effect on the score nor their standing in the playoffs,
it was nothing more than a thrill for the kid, who probably never knew
he was being lied to. It was a cute story, and endorsed by every one of
the media that reported it, but it was a lie. God hates liars, none of
them will ever make it into Heaven. So I asked WORLD
Editor Marvin Olasky how he justified the deception, and he defended it
as "a nice gesture, no big deal, fun for everyone." It seems to me that
hypocrisy like this is what gives the atheists fuel against Christianity.
(Read more here)
With drone and smart bomb capability, we almost don't need boots on the ground in combat zones. It may be that women can push buttons as well as guys in remote combat; I have not seen any good research one way or the other -- nor are we likely to: everybody is afraid that it will show the official dogma to be false there too. Besides, if a guy tried to do that kind of research, it would destroy his career, the way saying something out loud about (or even just believing) the science against Darwinism now gets people fired.
Military leaders (and combat flicks) seem to think we still need boots on the ground.
There was a joke going around when we were bogged down in VietNam. Israel had just wiped the ground with their Arab aggressors in the Six Day War, so General Westmoreland (our guy in Nam) reportedly asked Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan how he did it. His reply: "It helps if you're fighting Arabs." I've heard different versions of Arab incompetence in battle from several independent sources. If Arabs were competent, and if we had women out there in combat, We. Would. Lose. Viet Nam would be a picnic in the park by comparison. It is only God's Providence that keeps us from such a sorry disaster.
What brought this up was a couple of library action flicks in a row
with the new female team member. In both cases, it was the sequel (#2 or
#3) to a previous action flick with the same title characters and no women
(except doing what women have always done to disable men, which does not
involve strength or weapons ;-) In each case it was the last in
the series. Hmm, I wonder why. Guys watch adrenaline flicks to get their
adrenaline shot, but women in combat arouse different juices. The market
may yet do to them what religion and science and history failed at.
Anyway, working my way through the library flicks today, I happened
on a VeggieTales title that succumbed to the same fantasy: "Girl Power!"
I guess women are more into fantasy
(the denial of Reality) than men are, and women tend to be in charge of
buying flicks for the kids, so guess what the marketing people came up
with. Unfortunately, the smart guys who invented VeggieTales weren't very
smart about finances, so they lost control of it. You can expect more Political
Correctness than Biblical Reality in that franchise after a catastrophe
like that. sigh
"Wager" is a somewhat archaic English word, and only religious and pseudo-religious contexts use archaic words. I thought it might refer to Pascal's Wager, but I guess that was too esoteric. In fact it was something of a parody of God's bet with Satan in the book of Job (see my review of The Gospel According to Job), but poorly conceived and not well developed.
Unlike Christmas movies, there are no explicit wishes at the front of this flick. Instead, the hero, who is already a nominal Christian (so the obligatory conversion experience is unnecessary), gets hit with a series of "Biblical" (in the sense of humongous) catastrophes. Perhaps unlike Job, his response is muddled. But like the Christmas movies, everything gets back to what a secularist would call a good ending: mostly all the catastrophes are reversed, and he gets back his fame and his job (with a promotion). It's a secular ending. OK, Job ends that way too, but fame and fortune are more Old Testament ends, not Christian. Jesus promised his disciples persecution, not wealth and fame. Like Christmas movies, it's a lie.
I could relate to this guy. Most of his catastrophes also happened to me at one time or another (but not all at once). One that I have not experienced was the media lying about him (I'm not famous enough for them to care). There is this one scene where the lyingest "journalist" offers to stop harassing him if he would grant him an exclusive interview. The writers of this movie missed a marvelous opportunity (that's the "poorly written" part), "Not before I see your public apology for all the lies!" I probably wouldn't have thought of it in real time either. In the end all his woes were reversed. Even the journalist apologized. That didn't happen to me. Like Christmas movies, it mostly doesn't happen, not in the real world. It's a lie.
One would hope that a "Christian" movie would tell a true story, if not an actual event, at least something that happens generally. This is not such a movie, and it's rather more blatant than most. Stories that are true to Scripture are not fun to (read or) see. I know, I tried to write one (see Lazir). Nobody likes it. It doesn't have a happy ending.
I'm beginning to think that "Christian" movies are really Relationshipist movies. People -- at least the Feelers -- want to be affirmed, to believe against all hope or odds or history that things will come out happy. "Never give up!" they tell us. I can't find that line in the Bible. The Christian story does have a happy ending, but it's in Heaven, not here. The things we want in the here and now are pagan values, not Christian. Some of the things I chose for myself are essentially pagan. When catastrophe takes that way from me, I should give it up. Others were not bad in themselves, but God seems to have other things for me to do, perhaps not so pleasant, but (potentially) benefitting more people. I need to give up my own pleasures for the sake of other people. It's the (true) Christian way. But Relationshipism is selfish, not Christian, and these movies (mostly) promote selfish values.
They cannot completely abandon the Christian principle. This movie did
have one scene where the hero turned away from his own selfish ambition
to help a child. He didn't actually do it intentionally -- I guess that
would have been too other-worldly for the film makers -- but it turned
out that way. It was the turning point, after which he got his fame and
fortune back. I suspect a real world that had previously accused him of
pedophilia would have looked for a negative way to portray his rescue,
but this is fiction, not reality.
It seems the vendor noticed that most people just ate the fizzy pills, so now they also offer "chewable pills" 13 to the box instead of ten of the fizzy model, same price. That seemed like a good deal, so I kept looking, and found lozenges, same brand, 20 to the bag for the same price. I thought I should make sure they really were the same, so I looked at the fine print. The lozenges had the same vitamin C but less of some of the minerals -- then I noticed: "Serving size: 4 lozenges" compared to one fizzy pill. The customer actually got only five doses instead of ten for the same price. The chewable pill ingredients seemed to match the fizzy pills, but again, "Serving size: 4." They were screwing the customers who thought they were getting a better deal. I bought the house brand fizzy pill clone (same listed ingredients) at slightly over half the name brand price, and will probably never go back to the name brand. Their dishonesty lost me as a customer.
They won't lose much money from me buying the competitor, but if enough people get mad enough at their duplicity, they might feel it. Don't reward dishonesty by buying Airborne brand, Wal-Mart makes a cheaper clone with the same ingredients. It's probably even cheaper to buy the various vitamins and minerals separately and make up your own, but it's a hassle.
A few years ago Sony was installing viruses on their music CDs. They got caught and stopped, but refused to promise never to do it again. As a consequence, I do not buy Sony products. You never know when they might decide to start putting viruses back on them. Bad faith costs more than it gains. A year ago, I needed a prepaid credit card, so I bought the Wal-Mart house-branded model. It turned out that the terms & conditions, which were not disclosed at the time of sale (I looked), prohibited using it for anything one might reasonably want to use a credit card for, and the company refused to refund my money. I sent the card back to the local Wal-Mart manager and complained. She sent me a money order for the full value, and converted me from hating her store to having (mostly) good things to say about it. Their checkers are still slow, but what do you expect for minimum wage? Low wages keep the prices down. Guess where I went to buy my cold pills.
Marketing 101: Keep the customers happy by treating them fairly and
honestly. Sony and Airborne got it wrong.
There isn't going to be another Steve Jobs. A couple decades after Jobs came into this world, it became the USA official policy to kill off all such people before they are born. You see, Steve Jobs was one of those "unwanted" pregnancies. He was adopted. Present American policy (which is the same in most other countries, including Mexico) encourages the mother to kill her baby. No more Seve Jobs.
People do not get smart by being loved, they get smart by surviving difficulties. It also helps if they live in a culture where there is ready access to the intellectual infrastructure of technology. Steve Jobs had both. Paloma Noyola Bueno, the girl on the cover, had a few difficulties, but with a loving natural father in her home and very limited access to technology, was very different from Steve Jobs.
But WIRED covers are largely bait-and-switch, probably because the editors are not the sharpest tacks...
The story behind the girl on the cover is about the ready access to the intellectual infrastructure of technology. One school teacher in Mexico figured out that his kids weren't learning anything, so he experimented with an alternate teaching model. The model worked, but only because he was there to make it so. Copying the model (but not the teacher) does not turn out math wizards like cookies. Even in his class, not everybody aced the math test. All of them did better than their peers with other teachers, but only a few sparkled like Paloma Noyola Bueno.
Anyway this girl will not be the next Steve Jobs, because she will now be showered with attention and benefits. She got the highest math score in Mexico. The pressure is off. She also will not be the next Steve Jobs because Steve Jobs was not a math whiz. It takes different skills to figure out what people will want to buy and how to make it so, than to ace a multiple-choice national math test. Jobs was no mathematician. He had a visionary view of what would sell, and how to get there -- mostly by motivating smart people to build it for him. That's a complex cluster of skills which is hard to find, and frowned upon when you do. Steve Jobs was a tyrant. The Apple Board of Directors got rid of him after his second success (the Mac), and didn't bring him back until every other CEO -- the ones who fit better into the mainstream -- had bungled their leadership of the company, and the board had no other hope of saving their fannies.
I'm all for customizing education -- you probably noticed I do not think highly of the union-driven edu-factories -- and I happen to have a degree in math (because it's an important discipline), but God makes superior people and gives them superior opportunities when He wants to. We can break things (and governments largely do) but we cannot improve on what God has chosen to do.
There isn't going to be another Steve Jobs.
Bill Gates is supposed to be "Guest Editor" of this issue, but there's not much evidence he did more than write a short essay and show up for an interview with long-time tech writer Steven Levy. Others (probably low-level staff writers) picked up on several things that had the Gates name attached, and wrote them up as one-page featurettes.
Fixing the world is a worthy goal, but the WIRED issue is a fraud. Near the front of Gates' essay, he mentions "an idea we learned from our parents: Everyone's life has equal value." Except of course the lives of all the children his money kills before they are born (see "Bill Gates Foundation Openly Supports Abortion"), but those kinds of inconsistencies are quietly omitted from left-wing rags like WIRED.
Bill Gates is not stupid. The (real) editor enlarged the lead sentence of Bill's essay, "I am a little obsessed with fertilizer." It's not just fertilizer, but that's one important aspect of factory farming that so annoys the greenies, and which otherwise made the USA (and Bill Gates) rich, as I noted previously. It wasn't clear in the story here, but Gates is probably the biggest bucks behind the push to eradicate polio. There's an interesting chart on "The Economics of Eradication" that shows the "cost per reported polio case" skyrocketing to $2.5M each, partly from fighting (or rather, 22 health workers being killed by) the Taliban in Pakistan. Throwing money at the problem is not going to solve problems caused by throwing money at them.
One of the little teasers on the cover boasts that we can "End Poverty"
by "mining data to find what works." It's a fraud. The inside story tells
about doing statistical studies on the effects of charity, but doesn't
mention poverty at all. The fact is, "poverty" is one of those mushy words
that morphs as fast as you attack it. Near the end of the story the author
turns to the favorite whipping-boy of the left-wing bigots, the USA, and
tells us about "15 percent of Americans living below the poverty line."
It's a statistical legerdemain performed by raising the poverty line (FPL).
My income is less than half the FPL, and I'm not poor.
Bill Gates, in his essay, was "shocked" at the radical poverty in some
of the countries he visited with his wife when they were first looking
at what to throw his money at. They had not seen real poverty, because
it pretty much doesn't exist here in the USA. What we do have is a differential
between the top and bottom, but it's not all that different from the differential
in other countries, just higher for everybody. So we raise the FPL
to make sure at least 15% fall below it. That's why Jesus said we would
always have poor among us. Most Americans don't know what "poor" is.
This blanket is unique among the broken models for sale, in that it recovers from a power failure, so I bought a timer to interrupt the power for a minute every few hours, and that fixed the problem. Until last night, when the timer stopped doing what it was programmed to do. "Chinese junk" no longer refers to an oriental sailing vessel.
It's not just electric blankets. I used to warm the tiny place where I eat with a low-wattage heating pad, but they too have stopped doing what people buy them to do, which is to keep you warm. So now I must do the same job with a high-wattage space heater -- or else heat the whole room with an inefficient ceiling heater which puts most of the heat above my head where it does nothing but melt the snow off the roof (which is probably not the government's fault; they don't have a monopoly on stupidity). When the left-wing bigots tell you about "carbon footprint" they are lying through their teeth. Their government forces me to waste electricity on high-wattage heaters, because they took the low-power solution off the market. They almost did that to lights, too. The "Costly Failed Lumenaries" (CFL, usually thought to stand for "compact flourescent") are so dim during the first ten minutes, that you must leave them on for a long time ahead of actual usage, so you can see what they are there to illuminate when you need it, with the result that -- except for the places where you plan to leave them on all day or night anyway -- they actually waste more electricity than the cheap functional non-polluting tungsten bulbs, which you can turn on for a minute while you do what needs doing, then turn off again. No matter, the whole "global warming" thing was a political crock, as everybody except the government idiots in Washington already knows.
It's not just electric stuff. Last time I drove across the country,
I got a nasty cramp in my hand because the steering wheel was designed
by government bureaucrats in Washington instead of the smart Japanese who
made the rest of the car. So now whenever I need to steer through some
complex path (like my own driveway) I keep hitting the horn button, which
on the previous car was in the middle of the steering wheel where I could
find it when I need it, and not otherwise. Shortly after I bought the car,
I went to a conference in Canada. Their government wasn't as stupid then
as it is today, and the same model car was sold there with a much more
comfortable steering wheel. I asked the local dealer about trading the
goofy wheel out for a good one, but he didn't have any in stock and wanted
to charge me $700. So now I get cramps from trying to hold a badly-designed
steering wheel without hitting the horn button.
Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his love endures forever. Psa.118:1 oNIVAlso, I have been thanking God all week for factory farms and processed food, which freed up millions of people to do things that made America rich, so I can do fun things like program computers. Read all about it here and also my two postings last week.
I was prepared to say something about it over dinner today -- some family
traditions go around the table with each person expressing something they
are thankful for -- but the family that invited me this year didn't do
that. One young lady had an 8-month-old child, and her cousin was a couple
months into her first pregnancy, so much of the conversation centered on
having babies. And football, which was continuously running in the background.
I don't have much to contribute to those topics.
Two really good insights struck me. In book 3, chapter 1 "The March to Kurdestan" Xenophon is giving a pep speech to his generals and captains -- he seemed to do that often -- and he says of his troops, "there will be a great rise in their spirits if one can change the way they think, so that instead of having in their heads the one idea of 'what is going to happen to me?' they may think 'what action am I going to take?'" This is awesome advice, and it is no wonder that John Ringo, whose anti-left-wing politics I have previously mentioned, thinks so highly of this book. Ringo derides as "grasshoppers" the first group of people, who passively wait for something to happen to them, and praises as "ants" those who plan ahead and do constructive things.
The other one was in book 5, chapter 6, where Xenophon expresses a Machiavellian
"might makes right" kind of thinking, "One of the results of power is the
ability to take what belongs to the weaker." Bullies in every age and culture
-- including our own -- live this policy, but few are willing to express
it so clearly. With an army of 10,000 soldiers to feed, Xenophon is constantly
worrying about where to get provisions. Sometimes the king they served
provided, but mostly they had to forage the local villages, plundering
and taking what they can grab. This is of course Greek soldiers in Bithynia
(northwest modern Turkey) 400 years before Christ told us to do otherwise.
Bullies still do that kind of thing, but they are mostly ashamed to say
so, because Christian values so pervade our culture.
It's hard to separate atheism from Marxism, they tend to grow and die together. Economics and religion are soft sciences, lots of unsubstantiated opinion, but weak on facts. However we do have history. The atheist-Marxist Soviet Union (with its satellites) self-destructed after seventy years. Sixty years after Mao, China has already abandonned Marxism, and its atheism is already on a slippery slope down. Cuba and North Korea have not yet reached their time of demise, but everybody sees it coming.
On the other hand, we have hard science and facts to evaluate food production. Thomas Malthus was proven wrong by technology (aka factory farms); take that away, and Malthusian predictions will prove true with a vengeance. Maybe that's why the greenies are so eager to kill people off, it's inevitable in their economic model. But it's not Christian.
Ultimately, market economics works in political and religious themes
also. Low-pollution cars can be enforced all over the USA because it does
not cause massive starvation; all it does is drive up the cost of the vehicle.
That may increase the number of clunkers on the road (thereby defeating
the intent of the laws), and be particularly hard on poor people -- but
nobody ever cares about the poor, especially not the left-wing bigots they
regularly vote for, and who continually inflict these hardships on them.
But not even the left-wing bigots can force organic farming on the country,
because the hunger would be too obviously linked to their laws, and would
drive them out of office. Market economics (also known as Natural Selection)
is a powerful force. It just doesn't create anything, smart people -- and
God -- do that.
I tried looking for independent verification of the facts, but it's pretty hard to find anybody at all willing to defend conventional ("factory") farming methods, and then they do it mostly on the crop yield per acre, which is only 25% higher than factory-farmed organic. Yes, most of the organic farmers do "factory farm" things too, like using (USDA-certified) pesticides, which the government approves as "organic" but are less effective, so they must use more of them with the consequent higher burden on the environment (see Christie Wilcox's "Mythbusting 101").
I suspect that "organic" is politically correct (like promoting unhealthy and unnatural sexual preferences), and anyway, the economics speak for it. It's not just the yield per acre, which is close enough that taking out a few more wilderness parks would enable 100% organic farming to feed the USA (but probably not the world: recall that the USA is a net exporter of factory-grown food). The real difference is the labor cost. Everybody -- including the organic promoters -- admits that organic farming is labor intensive. But nobody wants to give any numbers, because it's so bad. I did find one farmer who gave real numbers: "If you took my size of acres of operation and farmed it conventionally, it would probably only have one operator, and we are involving three people on a full-time basis." Organic requires three times the labor as conventional farming.
But organic farming is profitable. Everybody (at least all the promoters) say so. Of course they admit that's because organic produce sells at nearly twice the price as conventional. If the whole country was forced to go 100% organic, the labor costs would skyrocket. Today, the organic farmers are mostly small family farms, where everybody wants to be there, so they are willing to work for low wages. Triple the demand for farm labor, and the cost of labor will go up dramatically. It's called "supply and demand." Nobody wants to do stoop labor, that's why they hire Mexicans to come in illegally to do it. If you are going to hire citizen union labor, the cost of organic food won't be just double the conventional, it will be double or triple what it is now. Right now organic food is a luxury item, something rich Americans can indulge their wastefulness on. Take away the factory farms, and the price of food will quickly become unaffordable for all the rest of us.
This CT article makes a big thing of "locally grown" produce, but they neglect to tell us what the cost of that is. In Ohio (where the featured chicken farm is) they might be able to grow chickens all year, and they might be able to grow the grain they feed them locally, and store up enough to cover feeding them during the winter, but where are you going to get fresh fruit and vegetables during the off-season? Canned? Up-scale restaurants (again mentioned in the article, and lots of hits when you Google the terms) cannot feed canned or frozen food to their rich patrons, it doesn't taste as good. Hot-house growing is a lot more expensive than growing in fields, and uses a lot more energy. Yes, energy is another supposed benefit of eating local. Don't believe it, it's a crock. That works in July through September, but otherwise not. California farms may raise three crops a year, but not in the rest of the country. California is not local to Ohio and New York residents.
The bottom line for this article in a Christian magazine is that we should thank God for our food. The author seemed to think seeing the chickens slaughtered "humanely" helped him do that. Me, I thank God for my low-cost food that I do not need to dirty my hands to buy. Sure the veggies are grown in the Salinas valley not far from where I used to live, and the fruit comes from Chile and New Zealand and Florida, and I can thank God that He gave lots of oil to the Arabs, so I don't have to pay very much for that fruit and those veggies -- less even than I paid for the same produce in California where they grow it.
The author is trying hard to make a Christian case for local organic food, but by neglecting the larger economic issues, he fails utterly. Factory farming methods reduced the cost of living in this country to where large numbers of people -- none of them needed on the farms -- could be paid to take the gospel to distant countries. Some of those people not needed to grow food could spend their time productively inventing computers and programming them to be word processors so ChristianityToday can tell us about organic farming, and with an additional result that one of those programmers can afford to work for free for 15+ years on a computer program to translate the Bible into languages that don't yet have it. Maybe I won't succeed, but we would never know if I had to spend all my time growing the food I eat, or working hard to earn enough to pay for it.
Nov.23 Addendum: After carefully reviewing the CT article again, I am unable to find the word "organic" in it. It also does not appear on the featured Lamppost Farm's own website. I asked, and they replied effectively, "all but certified." Substitute "sustainable, GMO-free, free-range" for "organic" above, because that phrase did appear in the article and it means about the same thing -- but without the government certification, so they can fudge when the economics doesn't work out conveniently. The Salt of the Earth restaurant the article mentioned has no website that Google could find, but there were five accessible review websites, and one of them used the word "organic" to describe it. Not all the reviews were favorable (high priced small servings, more focus on flash than flavor, no reservations, petty little stuff like that), but it was clear from the menu items mentioned that not all their fare is "local" to Pittsburgh. Western Pennsylvania may be local to eastern Ohio, but not to where scallops and octopus and salmon are obtained. My point remains: "local organic" may be a convenient label for charging more for the same basic nutritional content, but it's not sustainable except as a small-scale luxury item in an economy sustained by factory farming methods.
My letter to CT is here.
The "making of" documentary for Sneakers was particularly interesting, after a slow start in which the writer/directors or whoever they were spent a long time telling us how their flick got off to a slow start. They had brief cameos of key real-world people like Adleman and John Draper aka "Cap'n Crunch" and others. I suspect Draper tested some of his hacks on my computer, before I knew anything about "Cap'n Crunch" and his blue-box exploits. I never knew until today when they told us on the DVD why he was missing all those teeth and looked so decrepit the last time I talked to him.
I guess it was three years ago I stumbled
across a movie whose leading actress is probably the granddaughter
of one of my playmates as a kid. John Draper was on this screen for less
than a minute, but he was once in my house, and he knew me by name, I guess
now 15 years ago. A bigger frog in a smaller pond, but still something
to write home about anyway.
I almost forgot, my Bible readings also have me in the early chapters
of Ezra, where Cyrus King of Persia sends the Jews back (from Persia) to
Jerusalem to rebuild the temple there. This seems to be a different Cyrus
than the guy who led the Ten Thousand (they actually started in western
Turkey at more like 13,000 soldiers) to battle against the King of Persia
in hopes of taking his throne; that Cyrus died in the battle. Perhaps he
was a descendant of the guy in the Bible, Wikipedia
is a little vague.
In the last chapter, Ringo's left-wing bigots (he uses epithets that make my "left-wing bigot"* label sound like praise) have taken over Detroit and replaced the normal democratic (small-D, the political process, not the party falsely so named) government with a "Caliph" who is raping children and treating "dhimis" (non-Muslims) as slaves. The hero, "Bandit Six" comes riding in on his white horse (Abrams tanks) to the rescue and kills the Bad Guys. And everybody lives happily ever after.
It's not real. I mean, like I'm on the same (political) side as Ringo, and the American people were stupid enough to elect Obama a second time, and the MSM (main-stream media) really are lying to the public, but the reporters mostly believe their own rhetoric. They have to look at their own faces in the mirror each morning, and they could not think of themselves as "good honest people" (which I'm sure most of them do) if their lies were as blatant as Ringo makes them out to be.
Detroit really is (literally) bankrupt (even in 2008), and the left-wing bigots really did do it to them, but there are a lot of Christians in Detroit defeating the Powers of Evil there -- see for example the WORLD magazine cover story or Christianity Today's feature, both earlier this year -- and like the brave guys on Flight 93, they are not going to let the Powers of Evil win. Bandit Six is not the only guy in the USA with his head screwed on straight. But Muslims really do those kinds of things -- if not in Detroit, certainly in Sudan and Nigeria and (probably) Saudi Arabia and Iran, and they wish they could do so in every other Muslim-dominated country, but cannot always get away with it (think: "Arab Spring" in Egypt today). The only reason they do not attempt it today in Detroit is because they are not a majority, and even the left-wing bigots have Christians (and probably also atheists with closet-Christian values) among them who would not stand for it.
Ringo makes a big thing of "trust" in this book, but does not offer
any basis for that trust. He admits that some of the so-called "high-trust"
people he describes are not doing it because they trust anybody, but rather
because their Christian faith requires it of them. I'd guess (he does not
say) the philosophical basis for his theory is Darwinist: "trust" is deemed
better for society and therefore confers survival value on its practitioners,
but it suffers from the whole Darwinist failure to explain altruism, which
truly is better for society as a whole, but not for the individual practitioners
of it (they only benefit from other people's altruism). Therefore
it cannot start up in a culture without it and then be preserved by Natural
Selection, nor is it likely to survive in a culture that already has it
-- apart from religious (meaning: Christian or post-Christian) values promoting
it, witness Ringo's own description of Detroit. Unlike some of the other
anti-religious writers and reporters discussing the same topics, Ringo
is honest enough to admit that Christians generally made better distributors
of charity (his preferred term was "voluntary random associations" but
Christian service organizations don't very well fit the description, most
notably the "random" part) in places where that is needed. He compared
the March of Dimes (30% efficiency, the other 70% going to overhead and
high executive salaries) with Christian Children's Fund (90% efficiency,
and open records). Come to think of it, I have not seen any MoD collection
boxes lately, probably not since 2008. I wonder why.
Ringo accurately demolishes the pseudo-science around global warming
(his second catastrophe is global cooling, which the science he
cites actually supports), and he explains the science about "organic" farming,
showing why the USA exports food today -- factory farm methods produce
three times the crop yield of organic methods -- and why American factory
farmers could produce comparable output even in the face of massive climate
change, but not if the government meddlers get involved. It was the left-wing-bigot
government in his story that turned a 20% population decrease from a virulent
bird flu (his first catastrophe) into massive starvation. That's still
more than likely, given that even the so-called "Republicans" in Washington
can't keep their hands off. We still need government to make the vendors
tell the truth about their products, and to keep predatory super-corporations
from driving smaller competitors out of business by temporarily selling
for less than cost (Ringo does not mention these temptations, nor the need
for government to prevent them).
The bottom line is that the catastrophes Ringo builds his story on are
somewhat improbable, but plausible, and the knee-jerk responses of the
left-wing bigots in his story are in fact what actually took the richest
nation in Africa (Rhodesia) down to being poorest in the world (now called
Zimbabwe). Like I said, it's a good wake-up call, if you like drinking
sewer water. sigh
* Left-Wing Bigots -- Polite people, and the LWBs
themselves, prefer to call them "liberals" but this is both inaccurate
and misleading. The word "liberal" means open and generous and accepting,
but these people are knee-jerk heterophobic anti-Christian left-wing bigots
(their own phrase, with the polar words inverted). I refuse to call "liberal"
anybody whose pants are on so tight they can't even sit down and discuss
the issues politely, it just isn't honest.
They spent a lot of time interviewing people who thought the government failed leading to and on 9/11 -- and never mentioned the non-government guy(s) whose bravery brought the fourth plane down in Pensylvania instead of on Pensylvania Avenue. They made a big deal over the one guy who said, on-camera, that the government failed -- and then immediately misquoted him. He did not say the government could have done better: they could not have done significantly better with the information and experience they had. Yes, some people dawdled and dithered when they should have been getting information to relevant authorities, but even if the information had gotten through, and even if the military pilots could have gotten there and intercepted the hijacked planes, what are they going to do, shoot down a civilian plane filled with non-combatant civilian passengers? It goes against everything we knew. I think it was the third or fourth novel in Joel Rosenberg's Last Jihad series, where the President is faced with eactly that question -- and this is after 9/11 -- and gets severely criticized for shooting them down, over the ocean even (so only those on the plane died). None of the four planes on 9/11 were over water. By the time people figured out what their intentions were, most of them were over population centers. More people would have died if a plane came down in a shopping mall or a school than actually happened at the WTC.
3000 people died. That sounds horrific, until you realize that's only 0.001% of the population of this country. More people die in traffic accidents every year. Who's complaining about government inaction in those deaths? Nobody, because we already know what the government does to prevent auto accidents: they make cars slower and more expensive. You personally can do something to reduce traffic deaths -- but you probably don't want to drive slower. You almost certainly don't want to take public transportation instead of driving. Most people don't even know anybody who died in a car accident. Maybe they know somebody who knew somebody. It's not an immediate problem. Neither was hijackers flying planes into distant skyscrapers. More people die every day in abortions than the entire 9/11 death toll, and what are we doing about that? Nothing. What is the government doing about it? They are paying for it from your tax dollars. Why aren't people demanding that it stop? There's a disconnect here.
Nobody had response protocols (their term) for the kind of attack that
happened on 9/11, because it had never happened before. To see what I mean,
think for a minute, What recovery plans have you personally made
for whan an airplane falls out of the sky on your own home in the middle
of the night? None, right? It's never happened to you, nor to anybody you
know. So if it happens tonight, you will have "failed" just like the Federal
government failed to prepare for 9/11. The government did not have enough
specific information to take effective preventative actions. They said
so on this flick, but then voice-over quickly shifted to criticizing that
same Cabinet member for not being more forthcoming. She was both honest
and respectfully defensive in the face of unwarranted hostility from the
interviewer. Sure the INS bungled the hijackers' entry
visas. If they had been more careful, then the Bad Guys would have taken
a little more effort to fill in the forms correctly -- and still gotten
in with plenty of time to do their nasty stuff. But this movie did not
say that.
I mentioned that I'm reading The Last Centurion.
Author John Ringo divides people into two classes, grasshoppers and ants.
In his description, ants plan ahead. Ants are farmers and soldiers. Ants
get things done. Grasshoppers just want to sit around and let the government
do everything, and eat what somebody else worked for. This movie was made
by and for grasshoppers. Grasshoppers will always be angry at the government.
I'd rather be one of Ringo's ants.
Bottom line, you don't want to watch this movie. Unless you like Obama.
But, as Ringo points out, Obama's policies (really, his Hillary clone's,
but the same politics) are far more devastating to the country during a
catastrophe than Bush's ever were.
Anyway (Olasky prehaps excepted), it seems to me that most of the moral arguments people bring to bear against the death penalty are based on the atheistic notion that there is no afterlife, no Heaven to look forward to, plus a rather ostrich ignorance of the barbaric conditions in the American prison system. It isn't just in the movies, Olasky himself admits the terrifying and dehumanizing quality of life behind bars. A sentence of "life" (or even many years) under those conditions cannot be less cruel and inhumane than a quick end to it all. As a Christian, I would consider a quick trip to Heaven much more attractive than anything this world has to offer, let alone the tortures of the modern prison system, and so apparently did the Apostles in the Bible.
I believe it was shortly before the Patty Hearst trial, when pundits everywhere were predicting that she would get off with a minimal sentence because of her father's money, I heard the sarcastic line, "America has the finest justice that money can buy." In my experience, that's true: in my few contacts with the system I didn't pay for any justice, and I didn't get any. While the Patty Hearst verdict surprised everybody with its severity, the predictions nevertheless proved true, as the increasingly left-wing politics of the American news media got rewarded by her early release and pardon by Democrat Presidents.
Anyway, I do not intend to commit any crimes (let alone capital crimes),
but mistakes happen, and if I should find myself thus on trial, I think
I would insist that any plea bargain I agree to would minimize incarceration
in favor of execution. As if my opinion in such matters carried any weight
at all.
It wasn't until I got to the "making-of" documentary that I learned that this was supposed to be an anti-violence flick. The irony was astounding. The director was saying "I wanted [the audience] to be complicit," as if that would result in revulsion instead of adoption. He really should understand the dynamic. Right there on-screen he says:
The fact that in the United States violence is celebrated, it tells you that, as a society, we have a long way to go. And we sort of become inured to violence because it's just relentless, it's constant. So you're never really allowed to take a break and think about what just happened.Nevermind that his flicks, and this one in particular, do that celebration, that relentless constant. Film is like that, it's relentless, you are whisked along at the breathless speed of the movie, with no time to stop and think. Playing it at home, I can pause, but this stupid DVD player (see "Blame Hollywood") doesn't know that the computer shut down the disk drive, and that it takes a couple seconds to spin back up, so it skips a couple seconds of movie trying to get back on schedule. Which is ridiculous, I just came out of pause, there's no schedule to catch up to. Even if there were, and the player is going to freeze for two or three seconds, I'd much rather it just resumed where it left off. Most movies I can back up over the missed content, but some of the movies are starting to disable that feature. Blame Hollywood. So pausing to think about what one just saw is a hassle not encouraged by the vendor. This director can't be that clueless, can he?
Maybe so. Like most modern movies, this one was filmed in Canada --
the Canadians are rather smarter than the idiots in Sacramento, who are
trying to chase everything of value out of their state -- and it happened
to be during November 2004, so the film crew staged a mock election. One
of the voters held up their ballot to the camera showing some offensive
pejorative scribbled over Bush's face. It was no surprise that Kerry got
75 votes to Bush's 6 (probably some of the Canadian crew, who were also
invited to vote). The film industry is as out of touch with the American
people as the other media (TV and print). So I shouldn't be surprised that
the director of this flick should be so clueless about his contribution
to what he claims to oppose, that is, violence in America.
Politics aside, there was a little linguistic tidbit that I found interesting.
I don't live back there, so I had not noticed that there is a definite
dialect difference between Philadelphia (where the Bad Guys in the flick
were from), and say New York or (presumably) Indiana where most of the
action was set. But one of the credits was for a dialog coach, and he was
boasting about an actor who was familiar with the phonetic alphabet, so
he could tell him to use or not use a schwa there, and he understood
and could change his dialect. They gave a little sample on-screen, and
you really could tell the accent difference, from the same actor, one second
to the next. These guys are professionals. A different flick earlier this
week, the lead actor had a native Irish accent, but I didn't notice until
the "making-of" doc, because he did the American accent so well on-screen.
Except in the high-priced supercomputers, the first computer displays were just TV monitors. Engineers knew how to get full image quality (no lopped corners), but that's not a control available on your average consumer TV set, so the rest of us just put up with lopped corners. Or else our display driver hardware shrank the image before it got to the TV set.
When LCD displays came out, they could make them exactly the size of the image, no lopped corners, and no black crescents around the edges. That was great. Until they started playing movies on these screens. Most of the cinemascope movies that were repackaged for TV lopped off the ends of the image to make it fit. Maybe they adjusted the position if the image focus was at one end, or maybe the camera operators (like their TV colleagues) knew not to put anything important on the ends, but I never noticed it -- except once, the guy on-screen was talking like he was seeing somebody coming in the distance, but there was nobody there (until he got close, big enough to not be completely lopped off). I guess this annoyed the directors, so they started shrinking the movies to show their full width on TV, with black bars at the top and bottom. The computer people saw more and more movies being played on their systems, so they made the screen wider. Now you cannot buy a 4x3 screen on a computer any more, they are all various degrees of wide, all different.
Enter the software fixups. Black bars are still (traditionally) anathema, so they stretch the image horizontally or vertically to fill the available space, and you get this goofy low-quality image where all the people are tall and skinny, or else short and fat. When (low-quality) digital TV replaced the much better analog a few years back, it's all done on computers, so they kept on shrinking or stretching the images, so there's no way you can get a good quality (correctly proportioned) image on one of these new digital TVs: in addition to one-inch blocks of frozen image and stuttered sound, you also get fat or skinny people. Every one. The DVD movies do that too. When I get a library movie that offers both "full-screen" (4x3, with the ends lopped off) and the other kind (with black bars at the top and bottom), I always choose the full-screen version, because at least the circles are round and the people not fat. The camera operators still know to keep the important parts of the picture in the center, so I don't miss anything (except that once). Most of the recent flicks don't give that option, so I get to see the tiny image with fat people and the black bars. One of them put black bars on all four sides.
Do I care about the movies? Not much. But the same pea-brains doing the TV monitors are designing the computer monitor hardware. That basically sank my attempt to get Linux up on my PC laptop, because the castrati doing Linux couldn't make it work with the hardware, and the hardware people refused to display in high quality what the computer people gave them. The result was unreadable blurry pixels. WinXP at least is smart enough to display the desktop with black bars around it if you wanted 1024x768 and wanted to actually read the text, but who ever said unixies were smart? Bye and bye, the same demonic serpent bit me on my development PC (see "Chinese Junk" yesterday). The computer is old, it only does 1024x768 or smaller. The display I got is stupid, so the pixels muddle together unreadably. Why can't they just show black bars around a high quality image?
Anybody know where I can find a flat 1024x768 monitor?
One of the problems I don't think I mentioned was the monitor that came with it. It worked more or less OK, but never was very bright, and slowly degraded until it was very hard to see with the room lights on. The monitor's own menu was bright enough, but it seemed to think the PC was telling it to go dim. I later tried it on the OSX computer, and it was no brighter. Cheap Chinese junk, not to be confused with an oriental sailing vessel. Anyway, the PC gets very little use, except when I'm trying to make a program run on it. That started again yesterday, except that the monitor finally became completely inoperable. Not dead, just that it would blink on (dim) for one second every time the host computer changed resolution, then back off again. The local Wal-Mart sells monitors, but nothing in 1024x768, which is the only thing this PC knows about. Radio Shack has none at all any more. The computer integrator where I bought the computer is gone I know not where, there was a bookstore there instead. But across the street was a used-stuff vendor, and they had several monitors, but nobody there knew what resolution. The first one I tried was 1280x800 and glaringly bright (no brightness control), and the pixels were all blurry. It seems the monitor vendors don't know how to make sharp pixels unless you feed it native resolution, but they don't want to tell you what that is. I took it back and traded up to another screen that turns out to be the same blurry resolution, but at least I can dim it down to something reasonable. At $20 less than a new monster from Wal-Mart, I'm not sure I got a good deal. sigh At least I only have to look at it for a few days.
Anybody know where I can find a flat 1024x768 monitor? I don't have
desk space for a tube.
Even more remarkably -- I hope the Anti-Christian Litigation Unit doesn't notice and shut it down -- she's a Christian, and she prayed over her finalist students before they went into the final competition. There was also a short scene shot inside a church, where (I think it was one of the students) clearly sang one of the same praise songs we sing in the church where I go:
What a mighty God we serve.The main difference between this Christian version of "God is great" and the Muslim version, is that we really believe it, we bow and adore and let our mighty God fight His own battles, whereas the Muslims know their god is helpless, so they must do everything for him. I finished reading The Last Jihad series a couple weeks ago, and he tells it like we believe it: God fought the battles, the humans (including the Muslims) stood back in shock and awe while God wiped out their capital cities and their militaries. The school teacher in this movie works hard, and gets her students to work hard, then lets God do whatever God is going to do. I think that's a great balance.
What a mighty God we serve.
Angels bow before Him,
Heaven and earth adore Him,
What a mighty God we serve.
I can't learn anything about you I can't learn in some book. Unless you want to talk about you, who you are. Then I'm fascinated. I'm in. But you don't want to do that, do you, sport?The first half of the flick was about this super smart wiz, just a janitor, who could solve math problems that stumped the profs at MIT. Then Robin Williams came in and turned the whole thing into mush. And I knew where it was going when he gave that line. The wiz was going to throw it all away. And he did! The closing credits were over him driving into the sunset, away from doing the Right Thing. I should have known. The movie industry (like the churches in America) is run by and for Feelers. A smart guy doing smart things is anathema to them. That's why the USA is dead last in math and science among industrial nations. It's why we have somebody like Obama as President.
Robin Williams may be a good actor, but when I see his name on the billing,
it tells me something about the movie, like seeing Harrison Ford tells
me whether I will like the move. I can't think of a Ford movie I didn't
like. Harrison Ford is a big name, and he can pick the stories he is willing
to play, and he picks good ones. Robin Williams is a big name too, but
he has lousy taste in story lines. Maybe I liked one or two early Williams
flicks, but it was so long ago, I can't remember it ever happening. He
plays his part well, but the movie itself sucks, and good acting cannot
redeem a rotten script. Every one in at least the last decade. Probably
longer. I think the first time I saw him, it was so bad, the group I was
with didn't finish it. That was 25 years ago. This one was made in 1997.
He has not gotten better.
I can start by comparing this label to a different label that also offends those whom it describes. Three years ago a Darwinist took issue with my use of that label to describe the adherents of his religion. In my reply I pointed out that his preferred term is ambiguous and therefore misleading and dishonest. That is not the case here. There is only one dictionary definition of the term, and its adherents are not arguing for a different sense.
The accepted term does not imply nor deny the fascist imposition of religious dogma on people who (for religious or scientific reasons, independently) believe otherwise, but it is in fact the law of the land; using the derisive label is thus both a form of political speech and an expression of freedom of religion, both guaranteed in the US Constitution. Being in a minority on this topic makes it all the more important to speak out.
From time to time the science against the feminist lie squirms its way past the opposition into public view, and I mention it here when I notice; just today, while looking for something else in my blog, I happened on "Gender Wars" from a couple years ago, where the obviously feminist writers in a popular business magazine could not hide the facts they were arguing against.
Referring also to my remarks on lack of employment, my assailant blamed my outspoken opinions and claimed that he would prefer to hire somebody [only] "if it means I can tolerate them." Basically, he was admitting to religious discrimination in the workplace, which is unlawful but hard to prove. No matter, I wouldn't want to work for a bigot, either. I'm pretty sure one university declined to make me an offer in 2002 because I'm a complementarian, but as a religious institution, they had that right. Another college stopped the interview process in 2010 after reading some of my blog posts, perhaps including one expressing opinions too diverse for their misleading "diversity" policy. Those rebuffs may be rude and insulting and just plain wrong-headed, but people are entitled to their own bigotry, and I am disinclined to impose myself where I am unwanted, whatever the reason. While those employers lacked the courage and honesty to disclose their reasons, I do not intend to be so dishonest about my beliefs. I'd rather they know what I believe because I said so, than that they invent something to believe about me because I didn't say -- I get enough of that anyway, and it's far more offensive than not getting hired.
The Golden Rule is about treating others as I want to be treated. Do I want to be called a derogatory (but accurate) label when there are less derogatory (and less accurate) but unambiguous labels available? Accuracy is the key. This guy started out insulting me in ways that were informative. Perhaps he did not intend it to be informative, and I have no way of knowing if he intended it to be inaccurate. I thanked him honestly. That apparently wasn't what he was aiming for, so he raised the level of hostility to include things he could not possibly know to be true or even likely. No, I don't like people being hostile and just plain wrong, and I won't do it to other people. It's against my religion, twice over. What I have said is not an example of it -- and this guy never argued otherwise -- but he certainly gave that to me. I also don't like people being hypocritically "nice" and just plain wrong, and I won't do it to other people. It also is against my religion. His religion is different, but he's too ashamed of it to engage.
All things considered, the more derisive term is more accurate, but
perhaps unnecessarily offensive to people who are already committed to
a position they are unlikely to be moved from for any reason. This person
admitted that of himself, albeit indirectly. On the other hand (again like
Rush), I try not to apply the term to any particular people -- certainly
not to this guy. So I don't know. Perhaps I can be more moderate, perhaps
God will not allow it. As I told him, the time for political correctness
(politeness) on this topic is past. That was often the case with God's
prophets. Sometimes even Jesus himself was rather insulting. I will never
apologize for (nor turn from) being like Jesus.
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