Help Al Gore Save Mars

Our CO2 emissions are getting so bad they are actually causing the climate on Mars to heat up.

Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.

Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.

Ya Think? A natural phenomena? The pompous Al Gore might actually be wrong?

See post below.

Masters of the Universe

Human beings, in their inventiveness, think they can master the earth. But the very solutions they work out become the bigger problems that they can no longer manage. The whole vast scheme of things eludes them; they are not able to put them all together.

--Ray Stedman

...and that's the truth.

Meet Becka

She belongs to my brother-in-law. She's very sweet and I'm not sure her age but she's less than a year old. She's a Boxer in case you couldn't tell.

One of the Good Ones

Here's an excellent interview with John Voight at Radar Online.

The question for me is: who are you and where are your sensibilities? If you're part of a left-wing bias and want to turn what I say in favor of someone on your agenda, I would say I don't want to talk about it with you. It's difficult for me ... because I see so many people go in the wrong direction. I see it all the time and it's very, very disturbing. What's being said in so many places in the country is just dangerous.

Veil of Protection

I joked on the 27th about joining the tinfoil hat brigade because of all the radio waves that bombard us constantly, but apparently this woman is way ahead of me in thinking this through.

Convinced that she had almost certainly found the cause of her illness, she ordered, from the internet, some special rolls of foil wallpaper and a fabric called Swiss bobbinet - a netting made from polyester filaments dipped in silver.

Both promised to "shield" her from any emissions from phone masts or wireless broadband systems.

Within a few weeks of the wallpaper going up and the windows being hung with netting, she began to feel better.

Usually people who do this are protecting themselves from alien signals controlling them or the government beaming thoughts into their head. I don't believe she's on that level but I lean towards believing her problem is psychosomatic. Who knows though.

Carbon Faking

Industry caught in carbon 'smokescreen'

Companies and individuals rushing to go green have been spending millions on “carbon credit” projects that yield few if any environmental benefits.

A Financial Times investigation has uncovered widespread failings in the new markets for greenhouse gases, suggesting some organisations are paying for emissions reductions that do not take place.

Others are meanwhile making big profits from carbon trading for very small expenditure and in some cases for clean-ups that they would have made anyway.

Scam on scam on scam.

Is This Weird?

I was just posting to accounts receivables and while posting to the name "Lieberman," Senator Lieberman came on the TV in an excerpt from a speech.

How's That?

I'm still trying to figure this one out. They couldn't tell the difference between a dog and a sheep? They didn't notice it had hooves until they took it to get trimmed? Who would even think they could fool someone with a scam like this? Do I give people too much credit for having some sense?

The only way this happened is the people really knew they were sheep but were afraid to say something for fear of hurting feelings. I could see that happening in Japan, they have a complex societal system, and aren't as forward as Americans can be.

Wool pulled over Japanese eyes in poodle scam

The scam was uncovered when Japanese moviestar Maiko Kawamaki went on a talk-show and wondered why her new pet would not bark or eat dog food.

She was crestfallen when told it was a sheep.

Then hundreds of other women got in touch with police to say they feared their new "poodle" was also a sheep.

One couple said they became suspicious when they took their "dog" to have its claws trimmed and were told it had hooves.

I Hate Lies

The Big White Lie

The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don’t have to lie. I don’t have to pretend that men and women are the same. I don’t have to declare that failed or oppressive cultures are as good as mine. I don’t have to say that everyone’s special or that the rich cause poverty or that all religions are a path to God. I don’t have to claim that a bad writer like Alice Walker is a good one or that a good writer like Toni Morrison is a great one. I don’t have to pretend that Islam means peace.

Of course, like everything, this candor has its price. A politics that depends on honesty will be, by nature, often impolite. Good manners and hypocrisy are intimately intertwined, and so conservatives, with their gimlet-eyed view of the world, are always susceptible to charges of incivility. It’s not really nice, you know, to describe things as they are.

This is leftism’s great strength: it’s all white lies. That’s its only advantage, as far as I can tell. None of its programs actually works, after all. From statism and income redistribution to liberalized criminal laws and multiculturalism, from its assault on religion to its redefinition of family, leftist policies have made the common life worse wherever they’re installed. But because it depends on—indeed is defined by—describing the human condition inaccurately, leftism is nothing if not polite. With its tortuous attempts to rename unpleasant facts out of existence—he’s not crippled, dear, he’s handicapped; it’s not a slum, it’s an inner city; it’s not surrender, it’s redeployment—leftism has outlived its own failure by hiding itself within the most labyrinthine construct of social delicacy since Victoria was queen.

Get Real

Let's be realistic about reality -- Mark Steyn

I think we have a problem in our culture not with "realistic weapons" but with being realistic about reality. After all, we already "fear guns," at least in the hands of NRA members. Otherwise, why would we ban them from so many areas of life? Virginia Tech, remember, was a "gun-free zone," formally and proudly designated as such by the college administration. Yet the killer kept his guns and ammo on the campus. It was a "gun-free zone" except for those belonging to the guy who wanted to kill everybody. Had the Second Amendment not been in effect repealed by VT, someone might have been able to do as two students did five years ago at the Appalachian Law School: When a would-be mass murderer showed up, they rushed for their vehicles, grabbed their guns and pinned him down until the cops arrived.

But you can't do that at Virginia Tech. Instead, the administration has created a "Gun-Free School Zone." Or, to be more accurate, they've created a sign that says "Gun-Free School Zone." And, like a loopy medieval sultan, they thought that simply declaring it to be so would make it so. The "gun-free zone" turned out to be a fraud -- not just because there were at least two guns on the campus last Monday, but in the more important sense that the college was promoting to its students a profoundly deluded view of the world.

Defining Violence down

A Moment of Silence by Charles Krauthammer

VA Tech, Pre-Gun Ban

Death toll limited before campus gun ban

On Jan. 16, 2002, Peter Odighizuwa, a 43-year-old student from Nigeria, walked into the Appalachian School of Law offices of Dean Anthony Sutin, 42, a former acting assistant U.S. attorney, and professor Thomas Blackwell, 41, and opened fire with a .380 ACP semi-automatic handgun – shooting them at close range.

Also killed in the same building was student Angela Denise Dales, 33. Three others were wounded.

As soon as the gunfire erupted, two students acting independently of one another, Tracy Bridges and Mikael Gross, ran to their vehicles to retrieve firearms. Gross, an off-duty police officer in his home state of North Carolina, got his 9mm pistol and body armor. Bridges got out his .357 Magnum.

Bridges and Gross went back to the building where the shots were heard and as Odighizuwa exited, they approached from different angles. Bridges yelled for him to drop his weapon and the shooter was subdued by several unarmed students.

Gross went back to his car and got handcuffs to detain the shooter until police arrived.

Most news reports of the incident failed to mention the presence of two armed students and their role in subduing the shooter, saying only that he was tackled by bystanders.

Speaking Of Wi-Fi

Everyone should be aware of this:

Public Wi-Fi may turn your life into an open notebook

"When people are on a public wireless connection, they have the same expectations about privacy as when they are on the Internet at home," said Cheung, 32, a computer security expert and an editor for TG Daily, a technology news website.

"But it doesn't work that way. Someone could be listening in."

Cheung was using a "sniffer" program that intercepted online signals as they flew back and forth from the laptops to a wireless modem hidden somewhere amid the coffee paraphernalia.

Radio Waves

Wi-Fi: Children at risk from 'electronic smog'

Professor Olle Johansson, of Sweden's prestigious Karolinska Institute, who is deeply concerned about the spread of Wi-Fi, says there are "thousands" of articles in scientific literature demonstrating "adverse health effects". He adds: "Do we not know enough already to say, 'Stop!'?"

Why pick on Wi-Fi? What about television waves, radio waves, radar waves - and break each of those down into the different types? Did you ever think about just how much of this stuff is out there, everywhere, 24 hours a day? You can't get away from it. Does anyone even know what it's like to grow up without being bombarded with these waves constantly? I bet if you stopped all these transmissions the Earth would cool a few degrees just from that.

It must be time to join the tinfoil hat brigade.

Gun Control Is BS

An excerpt from the show "Bullshit" where Penn & Teller discuss gun control. Don't watch if you are offended by foul language.

The Fruit Of The Spirit

An excerpt from a sermon by G. Campbell Morgan.

"The fruit of the Spirit is love." The word "fruit" presupposes life. There can be no fruit apart from life. The word "fruit" indicates cultivation. Fruit comes to perfection only in answer to the touch of cultivation. Fruit, finally, suggests sustenance. Fruit is food. In these simplest thoughts concerning the word we have a revelation of the whole method of Christianity.

Fruit suggests life. The Apostle writes, "the works of the flesh," but "the fruit of the Spirit." As my friend, Samuel Chadwick, of Leeds, once forcefully put it, "The word works suggests the factory: the word fruit suggests the garden."

Works, the works of men, are always operations in the realm of death, and they forevermore contain within themselves the elements of disintegration. Fruit is always an operation in the realm of life, containing within itself the power of propagation.

The finest works which man has ever wrought are all operations in the realm of death. If your quickly moving mind questions me about the flowers and tells me that they are man's work, I reply that it is where man's work ceases and God's begins that life proceeds. Man's work is always an operation in the realm of death. Take the building in which we are gathered. It is useful, necessary, proper, but it could not be erected save as man handled dead materials. The tree in the forest with it's rising sap and it's budding life was no use to the builder. It must die before man could begin his work. Man's works being operations in the realm of death, they contain within themselves the elements of break-up. While this building was being erected, long ere the builder put on the final stone with rejoicing, old mother nature with mossy fingers had begun to pull it down, and , notwithstanding the fact that we have reconstructed it, she is busy destroying it at this moment. As quickly as man works, his work crumbles and passes. That is the figure the Apostle used when he was speaking of the flesh. The works of the flesh are operations in the realm of death. The finest thing a man can do within his own self-centered life is a thing of decay and break-up, which perishes and passes and cannot abide.

Fruit is an operation in the realm of life, that mystic fact, which we all know by observation and none of us knows by final analysis and explanation. Life is of God as much in the flowering of a daisy as in he blossoming of stars. It owes it's origin to God a surely in the sparrow as in the seraph. Fruit is God's work. You may paint fruit, but it fades upon your canvas though you mix your colors with the skill of a Turner. You may make your fruit of wax, but it perishes, notwithstanding the fact that you put it under a glass case. Fruit has in it the properties of perpetual life: "the tree bearing fruit, wherein is the seed thereof, after it's kind." There is the potentiality in all fruit of unceasing propagation. It is a thing of life. Christianity is a thing of life. The love which is it's final fruitage cannot be manufactured; it must grow, and it must grow out of the principle of life.

Fruit implies cultivation. There can be no perfection of fruit without cultivation. Let the tree in your garden run wild, never use the pruning knife, and all the fine quality of the fruit will pass away from it. The fruit of Christianity, which is love, comes to perfection only by the processes of cultivation, not your cultivation, but Jesus'. "I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman ... ye are the branches." Let me turn aside for one brief, passing message to some heart in trouble. You are passing through the fire, you are overwhelmed with sorrow. You crept up to the the assembly of saints feeling inclined to say, "Has God forgotten me? Why this pruning, this beating, this buffeting?" Hear this: The perfection of Christian character comes only by cultivation. "My Father is the husbandman." He holds in his hands the pruning knife. "All chastening seemeth for the present to be not joyous, but grievous: yet afterward ..." God help you to look to the afterward, and to know this, "whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth," and to see that by these processes of cultivation He is perfecting the fruit.

Finally, fruit suggests not merely life and cultivation, it suggests sustenance - sustenance for God. "God is love." God's heart hungers after love. God can be satisfied only with love. Listen to the wailing minor threnody of the old Hebrew prophets. They are from beginning to end the sighing of God after the love of his people. I shall never forget what a revelation of God came into my own life when a few years ago I gave myself to the study of their writings. I had thought of them as men of thunder and found them to be men of tears, I had thought of them as men of wrath, uttering denunciation of sin and proclaiming the terrible judgment of God's holiness. They are all that; but I found that at the back of all the thunder was an infinite disappointment of God because men did not love him. "How shall I give thee up, Ephraim?" That is the cry of a Being hungry for love. If you go a little further back in your Bible to the old story in Genesis, you will find God saying to Adam, "Where art thou?" That is not the arresting voice of a policeman. It is the wailing voice of a Father Who has lost His child. God is hungry for love. Take a figure nearer to home. We believe He is here in this house. He has come to His garden. He is among the branches of His own vine. What is he seeking? Love. The proportion in which he finds love in your heart, dominating, flourishing, mastering, is the proportion in which God is satisfied with you. The fruit of the Spirit which is for the sustenance of God's own heart in it's hunger is love.

We've Come A Long Way, Baby

A Culture of Passivity by Mark Steyn

They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are “children” if they’re serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton’s Oval Office. Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

Sad Day In Virginia

My heart goes out to the victims of the shooting today at Virgina Tech and their families.

It is unfortunate that this incident will become another rallying cry for gun control. It is, in fact, all the more reason why law abiding citizens should be allowed to carry guns (allowed, not forced). Anti-gun laws and attitudes have created a vast, powerless victim class. Laws do not govern the lawless, criminals laugh at your laws and thank you for making their job safe and easy.

The government cannot and will not protect you from criminals. They will show up after you have been shot, fill out the proper forms, and notify the next of kin. This is not a knock on law enforcement, it's just reality. They are human and can't be everywhere at once.

Strength is not the enemy, lack of character is. Allow those who are willing and able to carry a gun and chances are an incident like happened today would be put to an end before so many were murdered.

My ideal society is a gentle society. Gentle, not weak and ineffectual. I recently read of gentleness in a book (The Westminster Pulpit) by G. Campbell Morgan.

It is not often we learn things from a definition, but George Matheson defined gentleness for me, and now I know what it is. He said, "Gentleness is strength held in check." I cannot quote his actual words here, but only his thought. One speaks of the gentleness of the brook. There is no gentleness in the brook. It rushes and presses, laughs and roars, and does all it can by it's puny strength. There is no gentleness there. But if you will stand by the mighty ocean when there is such a tide as "moving seems asleep," and the great waters kiss the shore, and your little one paddles upon it's edge, and is kissed by the crest of the wave, that is gentleness. With one great uprising the sea might engulf the child, but it's strength is held in check.

That is what America should be. Gentle, but quite willing and able to put evil in it's place.

Natures Answer To Global Warming

Quake lifts Solomons island out of the sea

Rising sea level? No problem!

In an instant, the grinding of the Earth's tectonic plates in the 8.0 magnitude earthquake Monday forced the island of Ranongga up three metres (10 foot).

Submerged reefs that once attracted scuba divers from around the globe lie exposed and dying after the quake raised the mountainous landmass, which is 32-kilometres (20-miles) long and 8-kilometres (5-miles) wide.

Corals that used to form an underwater wonderland of iridescent blues, greens and reds now bleach under the sun, transforming into a barren moonscape surrounding the island.

The stench of rotting fish and other marine life stranded on the reefs when the seas receded is overwhelming and the once vibrant coral is dry and crunches underfoot.

Dazed villagers stand on the shoreline, still coming to terms with the cataclysmic shift that changed the geography of their island forever, pushing the shoreline out to sea by up to 70 metres.

Too bad about the coral though, they should pass a law and make it a criminal offense for the Earth to do that.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

A Template for the Treatment of People

Reality Banned

The House Armed Services Committee is banishing the global war on terror from the 2008 defense budget.

If we would just stop using the word "terrorism" then there wouldn't be any more terrorism. Think outside the box. Why don't they ban the word "Jihad?"

Sad

How gun control trades life for death

There was a time when a majority of American men would almost surely have come to Clara's aid. They believed in an ethic that said, "Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter." (Proverbs 24:11)

It was a day when men, recognizing the reality of evil, carried weapons that enabled them to stand in the gap for those being unjustly tormented and threatened. Virtually any man on the street could come to the aid of a victim like Clara.

That was then; this is now.

Believe Their Threats

What not to do in a (hostage) crisis

The elements are many – not only the hostage British active duty military, but the virtual inaction by the United States Congress and the U.S. administration and the inappropriate muscle-flexing by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Great Britain is a major power and this blatant violation of international law by Iran is a provocation and clearly was done with intent, likely with the assumption that nothing substantial would be done to end it.

Thus far, the Iranians were correct. A Western battle of words, or toothless demands, mean nothing to them. Such limp responses to an affront of this magnitude are a clear sign of weakness – of Britain, the U.S. and the West.

It's a perfect example of how the thinking of the West and East are diametrically opposed. It's also why the West will lose this battle against militant Islam unless it faces the truth of the enemy, their tactics and their goals.