tomorrows post

Just a heads up, I'm realizing right now that there is no way that I'm going to have time either tonight or tomorrow to put a decent post together, so there will be no post tomorrow.

Intelligent Design

Let me start this one off by stating that I do believe in God, and I believe that the Bible is His word, which should be taken literally when written literally such as in the book of Genesis, and metaphorically/poetically when written in a that style such as in the book of Psalms or Daniel. That said, this little ad for a dvd arguing intelligent design annoyed me.

In the ad it starts out by telling how because a big asteroid slammed into Jupiter, our planet is shielded from all asteroids and therefore we should all believe in the intelligent design theory. Never mind that this would mean also assuming that God specifically built the dangers too. That kind of intelligence would be like the stalker who burns down a woman's house just so that he can save her. Besides that point, I admit that the point may be better addressed in the film, but when you consider all of the possible angles that a meteor might strike the earth from and that it might be orbiting the sun on a completely different plane, and consider the vast distances between the planets, and the fact that they orbit at different rates meaning that the earth at a given moment be on the opposite side of the sun from any of the gas giants, the notion that the serve as major protectors seems a little silly. I have no doubt that a great deal more asteroids to strike them, they have much larger gravitational planes.

The ad then goes on to hint at all of the other stuff you hear for I.D.ers about how if the planet were any closer to the sun we would all burn, and any farther we would all freeze, and how if the moon were in any different position, or had less craters, or rotated any differently the planet would be uninhabitable. The ironic thing is that many of the people who buy into this stuff can call out the same abuses of logic when practiced by atheists in defense of evolution, or by environmental nut jobs defending cherished dreams of global warming.

To say that you know what would happen in the case of any of these hypotheticals where the moon is different or the earth's orbit was different or whatever is absurd. It's every bit as bad as the atheists and the environmental nut jobs who make their pathetic cases. The truth is our environment is far too complex for these types of statements to be made accurately.   

A Racist Joke

I ran across a poem recently that I personally found laugh out loud hilarious. But when I showed it to a co-worker their reaction was: “...interesting”. Here is the poem that did not illicit even a chuckle.

If our white-majority nation
Has so much discrimination,
Let me float a plan to help the NAMs* survive:
Line them up, in any order,
Send them south across the border —
Hispanics can’t be racist, so they’ll thrive!

*Non-Asian Minorities: blacks and Hispanics.

Now, as my colleague did not find the poem funny, I'm guessing that their internal reaction to this was to think: “Ok, my co-worker is just a little bit racist”. Now I most certainly am a little bit racist, but that fact is not betrayed by my enjoyment of this poem.

So as it is clearly not readily apparent why this is poem is funny, let me explain it. There are lots of complaints of racism today which are very absurd. To argue for the continued existence of racism in our country today on a wide scale, activists have to either rely on bad statistics, lame personal experiences (I went to a restaurant and a guy looked at me funny), or a hand full of events that generally are not even current (and often mis-reported to give them the racist element). Then when these dishonest activists are called out on their double standards, and overt racism against white people, they make the claim that minorities can't be racist. The logic of the argument is in a nut shell that minorities are oppressed and oppressed people cannot be racist. So by their logic when there is a mob of black people out yelling “It's beat whitey night!” that is not racism.  In their mind the mob is oppressed, and the people being beaten are the oppressors.

 

All of these laughably false claims are contradicted by how people vote with their feet. Make all the claims about poor treatment and discrimination that you want, but people risk their lives to run away from their various racist free, socialist paradises south of the border.

So the joke is not hahaha lets run the minorities out of the country. The joke is in pointing out the contradiction in what the race hustlers say they believe and where they live. And you have to admit that's funny.

The false hope in unity

On my drive home from work today I was listening to talk radio and heard a caller make this comment. “I would like to see America rise again to be the greatest nation in the world. And for that to happen, the American people are going to have to come together and stop tearing each other apart.”

I would hope that most people could see the absurdity of this statement on its face, but the idea seems to have some traction with quite a few people. John Steward even won the “who can stage the biggest rally” contest on this theme. Of course what they are really saying even though they don't seem to realize it is “I don't care about politics, so nobody else should either”. I'm willing to bet that most people who spout this ridiculous platitude when press on the specific issues would find that they have an opinion, and get angry at you if you expressed the opposite opinion.

If the problem with this statement is still not clear, I'll use an analogy to explain it. Say that the country was a race track. Everyone wants to cars on the track to go faster, but they can't agree on how to do it. Some people want to make the track surface as flat and even as possible without losing traction. Others want to install as many speed bumps as they can. The way for these people to reach their goal of making their race track the best in the world again is not to come together and make some stupid compromise. The way forward is for the one group to fight the other until they've removed all the speed bumps those idiots put on the track.  

2011 Elections

Deuteronomy 28 v 1-6

1And it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe and to do all his commandments which I command thee this day, that the LORD thy God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth:

 2And all these blessings shall come on thee, and overtake thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God.

 3Blessed shalt thou be in the city, and blessed shalt thou be in the field.

 4Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.

 5Blessed shall be thy basket and thy store.

 6Blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out.

Deuteronomy 28 v 15-19

 15But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee:

 16Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field.

 17Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store.

 18Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.

 19Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out.

As the 2012 elections come around, with all of the ill will that has been generated by the democratic party, one might think that I'd be excited about the up and coming prospects. But as I servery the potential candidates: Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Donald Trump, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, and the rest, I don't see a single one who appears to be after God's heart.

Every single one of the candidates is primarily concerned with the economy, and yet this is the one area of our lives that God does not seem to want us to be concerned with. One can hardly open up the Bible without getting God's message: obey My commands and I will provide for you. And yet the one area where we are to submit to God and give Him control is almost the exclusive focus of every single political in either Washington or a governor's office.

The greatest thing that any politician could do for our economy would be to put an end to the horrors of abortion, and end the fight against the family unit. Unfortunately, a man who campaigned primarily on these issues would have no chance of winning the election.

Over population

I've let this Friday come up with a little bit too little preparation, so instead of a normal post, I'm just going to put up a part of a facebook post that I wrote in the past in response to a friend who stated that they thought that over population was the heart of all the worlds problems. As a Christian he qualified that he didn't mean religious problems, just secular problems. So below is my response.

I apologize, but I do feel compelled to make one religious statement on it first. I would say the exclusive root problem for all of mans woes is original sin. Man saying “I will be as God” in his heart is the root of all present problems, as far as I can tell. However one could say the over population is the most egregious symptom of the root problem. And there is certainly nothing wrong with addressing symptoms by them selves, same as in medical practice, where one must some times relieve the symptoms as they can kill the patient before they even start to address the root problem.

So to look the issue of over population by itself, one should look at what areas of the world that are over populated, and determine how they are doing on provisions for their population. If you look at top countries by population density, you will see that almost all of them are around China, India, and Japan. It would seem very difficult to say that any of those three (or the most of the smaller countries in the area of disputed sovereignty such as Singapore) are doing badly on the resources front. China just passed up Japan as the #2 economy in the world, which is primarily due to their import/export imbalanced. That is to say that the export much more than they import. In fact they seem to be facing a crisis of over production. With the global economy being what it is countries simply do not have the money to continue purchasing all of the goods that they have been making. They may been on the verge of a crisis with food production as well, but that would be because of the explosion in the manufacturing market making it more profitable for farmers to stop farming and move into the city to get work at a factory. They are still exporting a great deal of food to the entire world, so I would find it a little hard to say that their theorized on coming crisis will be too great. Japan with their “lost decade” in the 90's still remained the 2nd largest economy in the world in front of all European nations until just this month when China passed them up. India is in the worst shape of the three by far, but even they are improving rather than getting worse, with a rapidly expanding manufacturing base. And the exports of all three of these nations is not limited to “produced” goods, but includes natural resources such as steel and oil as well. If you remember when Bush was running for office (I can't remember which time), he made an attempt to win MN votes by promising to put a hefty tariff on imported steel. If I'm not mistaken that steel mostly came from Japan.

So I feel like you cannot say that either food or metal based resources are, on a global scale, in short supply. There are certainly local examples of people running out of these resources, but that would more be a problem of distribution, and in most cases corrupt governments.

Oil is a different matter. There is a scare which is effecting the commodities markets on oil. This is due to rumors that Saudi Arabia has greatly overstated their supply. With them being the #2 largest oil producer in the world this is a very large problem. However, the problem here does not seem to be a lack of oil existing in the world but more where and how oil is being produced. Both the #1 and #3 nations on the list of oil producing nations (Russia and the US), have vast oil fields that have not been touched due to regulations, politics, and the nature of the oil. Saudi Arabia has sweet crude oil vs the oil grade found in the shale oil fields. Because of this they have been able to produce and sell us oil cheaper than we can get it out of the ground ourselves. However as refining processes improve this is becoming more and more irrelevant, as demonstrated by Canada (the #1 importer of oil to the US) who's oil reserves are very similar in grade to the shale. So in all the untapped oil in the world is by all accounts greater in supply then the sum total of oil in the reserves that we are currently using. The shale by itself is estimated to have more oil than all of the middle east. So I feel safe in saying that we are not running out of oil, and any resource crisis that may be coming in that regard has more to do with mismanaged resources than from a lack of them due to overpopulation.
As for water, I'm fairly convinced that the whole scarcity thing is a propaganda movement aimed at selling low flow toilets and other green products. The thing with water is that it is not really ever created or destroyed by anything man does. You might say that in the case of water used in nuclear power plants which is sealed up in barrels never to be opened again is “destroyed”, as it will never become rain again, but even that is a very insignificant amount (plus nuclear power plants have 0 air pollution resulting in less/no acid rain). Areas that are effected by lack of water seem to mostly be having issues with distribution as well rather than problems with over population. One could even argue that it is a lack of population that causes an area to be the most desperate for water. If you look at the areas that get the least water in the world, namely deserts, you will see that they are the most sparsely populated. If on the other hand you look at what is now modern day Israel as a case study, you will see that before the 20th century, it was mostly populated by nomadic tribes, and the land would be mostly described as a desert. Then in the second half of the 20th century they had a population explosion, and now are one of the most densely populated countries in the world (945 people/square mile vs the US's 83 people/square mile). It is also one of the most fertile areas in the world receiving a great deal more water annually than it did before.

Another interesting side note is that at the moment the total world population is going down rather than up.

Mistaking Principles

A fairly common occurrence that I notice when talking with people about politics, theology, or morality in general, is that people tend to take situational ethics and make principles out of them.

Now a lot of you might be thinking: "What is the difference?". The difference is that a principle is a moral rule that is true regardless of application. Situational ethics refers to moral rules that are only true in certain situations. If you are a Christian an example of a principle would be the 1^st commandment: you shall have no other gods before God. There is no crazy situation where you should in your heart put anything at a higher value that God. An example of situational ethics would be the statement that you shouldn't kill people. Generally this is true, however in situations such as war, self defense, defense of others, it would take a fairly twisted individual to say it is always true.

A clear cut example of how I've seen people switching the two would be on the issue of respect for the office of the presidency of the US. When George Bush was president he was the object of tremendous rage and mockery. Many people said that even if you don't like his policies and don't like him as a person you should still hold back out of respect for the office he was holding. Then when Barak Obama was elected everyone traded places. The truth of the matter is in this case is that no one thinks the office holds respect apart from the person holding the office. If a wicked man is in office, it is right to tear him down. If a righteous man is in office it evil to tear him down.

The easy way to avoid this is, whenever you think that you have found a principle, make up extreme theoretical situations and see if it still applies. For example, if Hitler came back from the dead, got elected as the president, and started killing Jews, would it still be wrong to compare him to Hitler out of respect for the office he held?

People know righteousness when they see it

Today I stumbled on a couple of human interest stories regarding the two kids in the viral video with the bully getting body slammed . Here is a link to the main story that saw:Bully Richard Gale Interview. What I find interesting about this is the huge disparity with which people react to this story and the way that the media reacts. In almost every story that I read, barring blog posts and less official outlets, the obvious tone is that although the bulling was not great, the response was bad too. In many cases, this is not just the under tone but overtly stated. Of course, based on the comments for the youtube clips, facebook, and all other sources of real person responses that I have come across, normal people are overwhelmingly supportive of Casey Heynes (the kid who was being bullied).

What I find interesting about the responses is that everyone seems to immediately seem that this was an act of righteousness. A boy was confronted with evil, and forcefully responded. The experience was good for both boys. The one being bullied, now knows how to confront evil when its in his path, and the bully has (hopefully) learned the folly of his wickedness. I believe that this is the true reason that this video has resonated with so many people, more so than because of simple empathy. I don't believe that I have ever been bullied like that, just the opposite in fact. But this video strikes a cord in me just the same.  It is inspiring to see a boy stand up, conquer his fear, and do what is right.

This begs the question, what is it that has so seared the consciences of today's journalists that they are unable to correctly see what is so obvious to everyone else?

The other thing that bothers me is that in making the “other side of the story” news clip, they really are taking away from what the bully should be learning here. He needs to learn that you reap what you sow. He is thinking of himself as a victim, when he is not, and by giving voice to those thoughts they are just help him to divorce the consequences from his actions in his own mind.   

The benefits of smoking

Today I ran across an interesting article about smoking that you can read here: Could Tabacco Be Good for You?. In the article the author talks about how there are some confirmed benefits to smoking. If you read the article, the whole tone is much more like an adolescent, which I would say is in stark contrast to articles that display wisdom. In my experience wisdom tends to be both calm and slightly amused.

Tone aside, I do think that the author makes some good points. Smoking does in fact have some positive side affects. Personally I've suspected that smoking is much like drinking. It can be done responsibly, and in proper proportions may even be beneficial. And from what I've heard about people quitting, it also seems the same. Some people don't find at at all difficult, and for others its nearly impossible. If this is the case, then smoking is no different than any other kind of consumption, with the possible exception that it really does smell bad. But on the other hand drunks aren't exactly easy on the nose either.

The single most valuable thing that I learned in my intro to statistics class is that correlation does not equal causation. When people say that smoking causes cancer, they are incorrect. Smoking correlates to cancer, we do not know what causes cancer. Radiation is a pretty safe bet, but that's about it.

To demonstrate the point, in the early 19 hundreds, there were a number of cases in rich families where newborns developed scurvy. The reason was that rich mothers could afford to feed their kids processed milk, which lacked vitamin C. So at the time, before they knew that scurvy was a vitamin C deficiency disease, one may have concluded that processed milk caused scurvy in newborns. But the truth is that you could give them processed milk till you were blue in the face and they would never develop scurvy as long as you gave them some vitamin C as well.

On supporting revolutions

With all of the uprising that is going on in the middle east, and the questions of what America should do about them has gotten me to thinking about revolution in general. In Egypt for a lot of people it seemed very natural to support the protestors and to cheer on the ousting of a dictator. And this is all well in line with Americas history. We were founded on revolution, the founding fathers were all very much for throwing off the chains of tyranny, making statements such as: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”.

But in looking at the history of people rising up against their current masters to form new government, America stands almost completely alone in achieving positive results. I admit that I'm not a historian and may be overlooking some historical events, but off the top of my head the only revolution that I can think of that was even arguably good in its immediate after math would be Cromwell's revolution in England.

But the rest of the list is quite ugly

• The French Revolution. It left the country in chaos. There are estimates as high as 40,000 people were killed without trial to please the blood lust of the revolutionaries.
• The Bolshevik Revolution. Lead to the communist take over of Russia, the USSR, Gulags, millions of people dead, etc.
• The communist revolution in China (1949). Lead to the rise of communism in China, show trials, Tienanmen Square, etc.
• The communist revolution in Korea. Lead to North Korea, need I say more.
• The communist revolution in Vietnam. Though it was overshadowed by the revolution in Cambodia, the victory of the communists in Vietnam lead to a blood bath for those who had either fought with, or were accused of fighting with the US.
• The communist revolution in Cambodia. Something like one 10^th of the total population was slaughtered in the killing fields.
• The Iranian Revolution. Lead to the US hostage crisis, and the throwing of an otherwise modernized nation back into the dark ages.

I admit that I know that revolutions happen all the time in Africa, and I'm not all that aware of them on the whole. But looking at how most African nations currently stand, although it may not have hurt them, it also didn't seem to help them too much. And if you think that they are doing ok, they just started way behind, look at Japan. There is a nation that both before and after WWII was able rise from the ashes (or from a realization that they were about 1 millennium behind the rest of the world). That is what a nation can do with the government is not actively hurting its people's attempts to better themselves.

So with this in mind, why do we feel like as Americans we should stand be the protestors in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Libya and all the other muslim countries were the people are in a state of unrest?

BS Formulas

In the early 19^th century, there was a scientist named Franz Joseph Gall. His contribution to the world of science was a book that detailed how a persons behavior can be attributed to the shape of their skull. By feeling the bumps in a the heads of various subjects, he was able to determine that there are 27 organs that make up the human personality. Animal's brains are similar in their function, but contain less organs resulting in simpler personalities.

From the shape of a persons skull, simply by feeling around it, Franz Joseph Gall could get a general idea about the size of each of the 27 organs and make inferences about the persons personality. He could tell if a person was affectionate, clever, proud, vain, or any other number of things simply by feeling around their skull. He could even tell what the persons natural aptitudes were. He was able to find if they would make a good painter, or song writer, or any other vocation.

This theory, called Phrenology was first taught in Europe and then later gained popularity in America. In its height, it was even used by employers to see if their applicants were honest and trustworthy. Then during the early 20^th century, it was eventually reject when people started to notice that it was pure fiction.

The reason that I went over this bit of history as that scientists are doing the same things today that the phrenologists of yesterday were doing. The problem with phrenology is that it takes an incredibly complex system, the human brain, and attempts to reduce it to an incredibly simple metric, the shape of the skull.

The other part of this equation is that “scientists” in many cases will substitute inferences for the scientific method. Had Franz Joseph Gall actually used the scientific method properly, he would have immediately found tons of contradictory evidence to his theory, and may have actually made some serious contributions to the field of neuroscience. Instead in the book of scientific history, his name is found under the “bloopers” section.

One of the most obvious and glaring example of how this is being done today is with “scientific” theory of global warming. I will admit there is some actual science there. It has been proven that CO2 and a number of other gasses do in fact absorb some specific wave lengths of energy radiating from the earth. After that science stops and wild inferences are piled one on top of the other to form the “scientific” consensus that just happens to play into the narrative that human development and advancement is bad for the earth and that we all would be more morel if we lived lives like the tribes that were conquered or displaced by western cultures.

Now I know that there are going to be a lot of people who will say (if I had a lot of readers anyway), “Hey wait a minute. You didn't prove that the theory of anthropogenic climate change isn't real science! You just said it was and moved on.” So here is why I don't consider that theory science. For one it fits the formula. The climate is an incredibly large, complex system. And CO2 levels are a contemptibly simple metric to base a whole full blown theory of future climate activity on. Let alone one that makes predictions over 50 years in the future. Here is a list of some other things that may have some effect other than rising C02 levels.

• Sun Spots
• Solar Flares
• The fact that the earths orbit is not the same one year to the next
• The fact that the earths axis was shifted by the recent earth quake in Japan
• The fact that the day was shortened by said earth quake
• Volcanic activity which includes both the CO2 output, general heat release, and large ash clouds
• Ocean currents
• Changes to the ozone layer
• The spreading of the Sahara desert
• New plant life
• Old plant life being destroy
• The increase and decrease in the numbers of various animal species
• The possible effects of the unknown presents of dark matter/energy
• The fact our understanding of physics has in its current state lead to the very strange ideas of dark matter and dark energy, suggesting that there may be some problems in the under lying models we have. This may need revising which could result in us throwing out everything that we currently think that we know and understand about the universe and start from scratch.

And that's just off the top of my head. I'm sure that a large group of scientists could come up with a much larger list of things that would have to be taken into account in making accurate predictions about what the climate is going to do for the next 50 years. And I'm also sure that the list that could theoretically be made would still be missing a whole host of unknown unknown factors, which may even make up the bulk of what would be a complete list.

But we are being told that all of that does not matter. All that matters is that there is an increase of CO2 levels. And to make it even worse, we are told that all it takes to heat up the climate of the entire world in a measly 2.5% increase to the amount of CO2 that would be put into the air naturally. That is said to over ride all other factors, known and unknown.

And that's just the start of the theory. Beyond just saying that they can tell that the increase in CO2 is going to over ride every other factor and make the earth warmer, no matter what, they believe that they can accurately predict by how much. But even that's not the end of their hubris. The believe that beyond just saying how much the earths temperature will increase on average, they even know that the local effects are going to be years in the future. The IPPC has made many predictions that go years into the future in specific areas. So precise is the knowledge that they claim to have that they know that SPECIFIC AREAS will not get colder as the rest of the world warms.

This is no where near the end of the assumptions that have been built on a theory that has nothing to do with science, but I believe that I have made my point.

So, to summarize my points:

1. When some one takes a very simple metric and applies it exclusively to a complex system, you can almost always safely ignore the conclusions they arrive at.
2. When scientists make statements that have not been backed up with proper application of the scientific method, what they are doing is not science and 9 times out of 10 is laughably wrong.

And one point that I have not made so far, is that another way to spot bad philosophy masquerading as science is to look at how neatly it fits into a major narrative. I choose to focus on global warming because I find the underlying narrative that it slavishly serves to be especially annoying. However the same point could also be made about:

• Radiocarbon dating (at least for anything older then a few thousand years)
• Young earth theory
• Old earth theory
• Almost any theory that deals with determining things that have happen more than a few thousand years ago using “science”
• Basically all of psychology
• Evolution

On the reactors in Japan

Last night I read Ann Coulter's new column on the situation in Japan (http://www.anncoulter.com/). Now as of late I've become less and less a fan of Ann Coulter, and I have to say that this article did nothing to help that. My issue with this column, and any column that is either saying that the reactors are not that big a deal or that its an on coming apocalypse (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8384809/Japan-nuclear-plant-disaster-warning-of-an-apocalypse-as-fallout-hits-danger-levels.html ), is that the dust has not settled yet. Its not even done rising.

There are two narratives that seem to surround nuclear power plants. One goes that because of Murphy's law (everything that can go wrong will go wrong), sooner or later every nuclear power plant will have a critical malfunction resulting in another Chernobyl. The other goes that the reactors are as, if not more, safe than any other type of electrical generating system.

Regardless of the truth to be found in either narrative, I find that people going out and shooting their mouths off while the people in Japan are still in trouble, and before we know the extent of the problem, to be extremely distasteful. All it does at this point is to belittle the situation, and the people who are currently risking their lives to minimize the damage being done.

There will be a time to sit back and make arm chair observations, and if whatever happens supports your belief, to push your agenda with the facts that have arisen. But that time is not now. Now is the time to pray for the people of Japan.

Moses and the vail

In the book of Exodus chapter 34, Moses is on mount Sinai writing down the words of the Lord onto two stone tablets. This was to replace the stone tablets that he had previously destroyed when descending from the mountain to find the people worshiping a golden calf. So when descending the second time after going for two rounds of 40 days and 40 nights on the mountain without food or water, talking to the manifest presence of the Lord obscured in a cloud, Moses face shone in such a way that the people of Israel were terrified. Moses was forced to put a vail on his face in order to be able to relay to the people of Israel what God had just spoken to him.

I looked up what the Hebrew word “shone” means according to Strong's Concordance, and it has two definitions for the word (if you want to see yourself: qaran).

#1 To send out rays

#2 to display or grow horns, be horned

Oddly and unrelated to any point I'm going to make, the pronunciation seems to be the same as name of the Muslim holy book the Qur'an.

I find this passage interesting, because there is a tremendous lack of detail. It does not say why Moses face shone, or why a shiny face was so terrible that the Israelites had to hide from him. All that we can do is to speculate, which is what I am going to do now. In my opinion, Moses face shone because the manifest presents of God had physically rubbed off onto him, and it was the Holy Spirit coming off of him like rays of light. Maybe I'm thinking to literal, but the fact is that the people were unable to look at him, so the light itself that was coming off of him effected them in some way that normal light does not. This is why I believe that the light was the Holy Spirit radiating from his person.

With this assumption what I wonder is how is it that Moses seemed to be fine when he so clearly had many times the level of Gods presence on him then the people around him were getting. It would be like I was exposed to so much radiation that wherever I went people would be in danger of getting radiation poisoning, but I was just fine. Incidentally that would also have people saying that my face “shone”.

But this is what happened with Moses. So my question is was there something in the general Israelite population that was repulsed by God so much so that His presence was found unbearable, but that was not in Moses? And if so, can I look at my own life and see those same patterns? After thinking about it, the answer is absolutely yes. When I have knowingly surrendered to sin, I find it very hard to pray, worship, or in anyway directly interact with God. Like Adam and Eve in the garden after eating the fruit I find myself running from Him, and that is a very bad place to be in my life.

The answer of course is to turn from my wicked ways and to seek Gods face, but the more time I spend worshiping my golden calves the harder that is to do, and by the way the greater the reward for finally doing it.

The direction of this blog

I've thought about it, and decided that the best way for me to use this blog is going to be too take a different format than originally intended. I was thinking that I'd try and get several major posts put up every week. This has turned out to be way to much work given the amount of free time that I have. So instead I'm going to move to the format of putting up one smaller post, that will not necessarily reflect any research done or anything like that, once per day. In addition to that on Fridays I will put up one major post. The Friday post will be like the equivalent of a weekly political commentary.

For the daily post, I'm going to broaden the scope quite a bit, to simply what issues are on my mind at the moment or on that particular day.

So let me know what you think, and I'll try to keep up with the comments. BTW I am aware that I currently don't have any readers, but this is mostly an exercise for my own development anyway, any readers that stumble on my blog and are interested would simply be a bonus.

There were WMDs in Iraq

I know that this is an old story, but I was reminded of it a few days ago when I came across this story: WikiLeaks Revelations. The story tells how among other things, WikiLeaks exposed that we did find WMDs in Iraq. Specifically we found chemical weapons. This has been common knowledge for our troops for some time. I've heard many times, albeit second hand, that it is was not uncommon for our troops to uncover containers of sarin gas and the like. And yet non of this was ever reported. Now, the real point that this post is meant to demonstrate is that even though the truth is out now, it does not matter. The journalists and commentators already have their story and are sticking to it. This new is months old now, and although it made a few ripples, it really didn't have any real impression. I have seen, expect to continue to see liberal pundits talking about how Bush lied, and the conservatives that they are talking to will continue to say, “Well he really did think that there were WMDs in Iraq, so its not a lie”. I know that this is how it will go because this is how it went the last time news came out about WMDs in Iraq. In 2008 it was reported that 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium was moved out of Iraq and sold to Canada for use in nuclear reactors. You can read about it here: Secret U.S. mission hauls uranium from Iraq. If your wondering how much 550 metric tons is, it was stored it 3500 barrels.

So Iraq had chemical WMDs, as expected. They had a lot of uranium, as expected. They also had a nuclear program, as was stated by our intelligence. And yet we still hear the montra that Bush lied. It is clear that if it came out that Iraq had complete nuclear bombs on long ranged missiles pointed towards the United States, we would still here that Bush lied and there were no WMDs in Iraq.

Now my point is absolutely not you should all support the war in Iraq. I personally think that nation building is one of the worse ideas that any of our presidents have ever had. But not being for the war does not excuse ignoring the truth when it does not fit what you want to believe.  

Introduction

This blog has been a long time coming for me. Through out most days, I normally spend several hours reading news and political commentary. Over the years I've come to realize a few things about the news, foremost of which is that journalism in its pure form is dead. I'm fairly certain that it never existed as it is taught some times, but I can only speak to the last 10 years myself.

The other thing that I have learned is that the reason journalism is dead is because of political narratives. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a political narrative is story that a person or group of people put together to explain the present state of politics, the economy, and life in general. An example of this would be the stated reasons for the economic collapse. The main leftist narrative would state that the cause was unbridled capitalism. Lots of investors made high risk investments that went bad all at once, and if only we had better regulation this never would have happened. The main right wing narrative is that regulation made the banks give out bad loans, and if they had not been pressured to do so this never would have happened. Another important part of each narrative is that the other one is completely wrong.

The problem with these narratives is that they almost never tell the whole story, and that journalists and commentators alike become identified with them. And so only stories that either enforce their narrative, or discredits their opponents narrative are told or discussed. And in this scuffle, the truth is normally left bleeding on the side of the road, as those promoting their narrative sacrifice all logic and reason to promote their side.

The goal of this blog is to take those narratives, and expose their absolute absurdity.

I do have an idea for my first expose, but its getting late, so it will have to wait till tomorrow.