Saturday, February 26, 2011

I've Been Busy

There is almost 7 years between the birth of our two boys.  That meant I was almost 40 years old when Grant was born.  I've always said that raising children is a young man's sport, and I'm not a young man anymore.  I'll admit I need to get out, and exercise some more, but time marches on, and I've got the boot prints on my back to prove it.  My oldest son is getting married next month, and I'm taking the younger one to visit colleges.  In this case it was in Miami, Florida International University.  When you do a round-trip to Miami and back to Clearwater in 27 hour period, it's hard on the old man.  Anyway it's done; I'm not even sure if he wants to go down there, but we had to give him a choice, and open his eyes up to something other than the Tampa Bay area.

Unfortunately, I had to miss a Kairos meeting today.  We were thinking of staying an extra day down there for the big open house at Florida International University, but instead we came home last night.  I wouldn't have been able to make it to the meeting as I didn't get up until 8:00 AM.  I forgot, but I also had our yearly retreat today for the worship team at church, so I probably wouldn't have made it anyway.

Enough of the whining, which is a good segue for our Random Stuff for today:
  1. Is Barack Obama Secretly Swiss? - The administration's pathetic, dithering response to the Arab uprisings has been both cynical and naive.  This byline from Slate written by Christopher Hitchens is a telling indictment on President Obama's pathetic Chamberlain'ing response to the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi's shanagans.  The last line in the piece says it all about our leader's response to the uprising in Libya, "Instead, and in the crucial and formative days in which revolutions are decided, we have had to endure the futile squawkings of a cuckoo clock."  Here's the link to the article on Slate:  http://www.slate.com/id/2286522/.
  2. This is a neat YouTube video, Hideaway in Rockford.  Seems like the Rockford, IL is benefiting from their northern neighbor's senators hiding away there.  I wonder if the Wisconsin governor holds back their paycheck, whether they'll tell refugees to go back?

  3. C. S. Lewis on life's interruptions posted on Trevin Wax's blog.  “The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’, or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life – the life God is sending one day by day: what one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phantom of one’s own imagination.”  http://trevinwax.com/2011/02/26/c-s-lewis-on-lifes-interruptions/.
  4. The Gift of Victor Hugo from the Desiring God blog by John Piper,    http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/the-gift-of-victor-hugo.

Friday, February 18, 2011

Description of Christians by UC Davis

This was discovered by The Pearcey Report.  It is from World Net Daily, and it was discovered on UC Davis' website; it's their official 'Glossary'.  The original article "University Defines Christians as Oppressors".  In the article, they have the original link http://occr.ucdavis.edu/poc/glossary.html which is supposed to take you to the glossary, but it looks like they took it down as of the time of this post.  


Below is 500 - Internal Server Error message I got.  

500 - Internal server error.

There is a problem with the resource you are looking for, and it cannot be displayed.


Google though, stores cached pages, and below is the link to page that was stored.  It may not be any good anymore?  I'm not sure how long they are stored, or if it is overwritten when they correct the page, and new cached version of the page is shown.  Now what they hoped when you looked it up is that most people will say that they couldn't find it, and go away.  The link still showed this when I posted this up on Friday morning.


This link does have the offending remarks, as it is a snapshot of the page made earlier, and there is even a notice at the top of the page:

This is Google's cache of http://occr.ucdavis.edu/poc/glossary.html. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Feb 14, 2011 06:53:46 GMT. 

UC Davis on their site, which is an official glossary which they describe their official Glossary:

Glossary

Words hold power beyond their meanings. A term used in one context or by a certain group may constitute a slur or insult in another context or to someone else. Their meanings also evolve and often cannot be fully described in a few sentences.
With that in mind, this glossary is not an exhaustive list or definitive collection of definitions. Rather, it draws from academic sources used by other universities as a starting point to understand terms related to community, diversity and identity.  

and if you go down the glossary to Religion it shows this as their official definition.  How nice, but what else can you expect from the left coast...  

Religion: 1. An organized belief system based on certain tenets of faith. 2. A belief in a supreme supernatural force or god(s)
Religious/Spiritual Discrimination - The loss of power and privilege to those who do not practice the dominant culture's religion. In the United States, this is institutionalized oppressions toward those who are not Christian.
Click here to see a PDF of their Glossary as of the cached date.  I copied it, and made a PDF of it.  So if it changed, you'll know why.  It's full of other definitions that are not shared by that most of the people who live between New York, and Los Angeles.

Random Stuff for 2/18/2011:
  1. The more I read about this, the more I can't believe the horror that these poor, and desperate women went through, The Gosnell Case and American Abortion Law.
  2. The article starts with, "The Obama administration has revoked nearly all the conscience protections put in place by the Bush administration".  This is an abuse of executive power, http://www.albertmohler.com/2011/02/18/conscience-trampled-by-the-regime/.
  3. Wisconsin teachers showing that they really need to be working in some other type of employment; they're hiring at McDonalds, http://hotair.com/archives/2011/02/17/the-historical-illiteracy-of-wisconsin-teachers/ and 







Saturday, February 5, 2011

I Agree With Chris Matthews

This is something, I think I would never say in my life, "I agree with Chris Matthews."  There, I've said it.  Believe me, it's only once.  We are on different planets when it comes to politics.  Of course, he's on a different one.  This time however, he revisited us, and he's actually speaking the truth.  I mean when you hear Pat Buchanan agree with Chris Matthews, I can't help but look to the sky and see if Jesus is returning.







This is about President Mubarak of Egypt.  When we deal with our friends in the world, I'm amazed at how quickly we drop them off the cliff.  President Mubarak kept war out of the Middle East for years.  Unfortunately he did it with a iron fist, but then again, this part of the world is a powder keg, and it's worked.  I know that old saying that politics make strange bedfellows, and international politics, takes it up a notch.  We know that thanks to Julian Assange, the David Bowie look-alike at WikiLeaks.  President Obama has basically told his counter-part in Egypt to hit the road, and let the change happen in Egypt.  Oh yeah, he also has to let non-secular interests take part in the formation of a new government:

Ok, so I guess that was invite to the Muslim Brotherhood, who going back to 1928, when Ataturk the President of Turkey ended the caliphate, the Islamic form of government and brought in a western form of government.  They are the oldest form of Islamic radicalism in the world, and every Islamic radical group since them has sprung from them.  Here's an article by Brigette Gabriel at Human Events.  The leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt wants the peace treaty with Israel abolished.  That's just what we need.

Is this what John was prophesying in Revelation 9:16 with the invasion of a 200 million man army.  Israel is slowly being surrounded by Sharia law based countries, who call for the destruction of Israel. With 1.3 billion adherents to Islam in the world, and a conservative estimate of about 10% being fundamentalist, it makes you wonder; only 700 million more to go, and we'll have 200 million.

It's going to be interesting to see what happens, but in the mean time, our view in the world has been diminished as we throw another leader under the bus, and it's reported by the mainstream media as business as usual.  Then again, this is all being orchestrated by God, and we have to be obedient.  Never look for justice in this world, but then never cease to give it.

Random Stuff for 2/5/2011:

  1. A peak at a couple of Super Bowl commercials, http://hotair.com/archives/2011/02/04/superbowl-commercials/
  2. Who's going to replace Keith Olbermann?  Here's Jon Stewart's rant on it:

    The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10c
    Olbertunity Knocks
    www.thedailyshow.com
    Daily Show Full EpisodesPolitical Humor & Satire Blog</a>The Daily Show on Facebook

  3. This is a good article on the social costs of pornography, http://takeyourvitaminz.blogspot.com/2011/02/social-costs-of-pornography.html
  4. From TakeYourVitaminZ blog, http://takeyourvitaminz.blogspot.com/2011/02/older-and-better-version-of-follow.html.
  5. From HotAir.com on Mark Kelley, Gabrielle Gifford's husband, and his new found faith, http://hotair.com/archives/2011/02/04/gabrielle-giffords-husband-expresses-newfound-faith/.
  6. Excellent post from John Piper's Desiring God website on the first published black poet, Phillis Wheately, http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/first-published-black-poet-in-america.