Category: Uncategorized

The more we see that in some regards, nothing has changed in nearly two thousand years:

Christians in Iraq, including converts from Islam and people involved in mixed-faith marriages, are being crucified by Muslim terrorists, according to a Dutch member of Parliament studying the war-torn country. Several Iraqi Christians “are nailed to a cross and their arms are tied up with ropes. The ropes are put on fire,” Joel Voordewind told BosNewsLife, an online news agency focusing on Christians and Jews in difficult circumstances.

According to the site, Voordewind described how a person, who “survived” a crucifixion, “even showed holes in his hands,” apparently from nails.

Voordewind said victims of the crucifixions are “in most cases Christian converts who abandoned Islam or people who, religiously speaking, are involved in mixed marriages.”

Isn’t it wonderful that America is bringing democracy to this place? I note that Hitler not only won three parliamentary pluralities, but went on to win his four plebiscites with an average approval rating of more than 95 percent, and with voter turnout that was more than twice as high than that of the current United States. There has never been a leader with a greater or more genuine democratic mandate than the late German Reichskanzler.

The good news: Joe Carter of the Evangelical Outpost considers VP to be one of the top 100 Christian blogs.

The bad news: That would be #97… and Joe doesn’t know how to spell it.

Actually, the lowly rating is somewhat of a relief, because as I’ve tried to make clear to everyone, no one should ever makes the mistake of judging the verity or falsity of Christianity on the basis of my example. I’m a Christian, I’m just not a very good one. That’s not modesty – you know I don’t do modesty – it’s just the facts.

There are those who walk the Way in giant strides. Then there are the rest of us, who merely hope that we can manage two steps forward for every one step back. Either way, it’s worth remembering that we have a guide who never hurries.

I find it very annoying that people continue to listen to the idiot Three Monkey commentators despite the fact that they are wrong nearly every time they make a prediction. You may recall that I was pointing out months ago that none of the “major candidates” are even remotely electable, if one defines electable as having a reasonable chance of winning the presidential election:

The latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that nearly a quarter of Republicans are unwilling to back top-tier hopefuls Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, John McCain or Mitt Romney, and no one candidate has emerged as the clear front-runner among Christian evangelicals.

Probably because with the exception of McCain, whose campaign is all but over already, the other three are at least nominally pro-choice on abortion. The Republican Party might as well roll the dice with Ron Paul, he’s the only one who has even a snowball’s chance of beating Hillary although once Bush goes after Iran, it’s all over.

Note that the poll appears to support my theory that Fred Thompson was nothing more than a human none-of-the-above vote back when he didn’t look like a probable candidate. Once he’s in the ring, he’s just another moderate Republican weak on abortion, wrong on the war and questionable on immigration.

It’s not the fact that totally self-centered women do totally self-centered things that stuns me, there’s no shortage of totall self-centered men doing exactly the same thing. What seems to be different is that many of these women appear to be in total denial about their responsibility for their actions. This woman left her husband and her son, and is blaming her ex-husband for the fact that her son wants nothing to do with her… even though their daughter now prefers to live with him too:

You left your son for another man, too – and deprived him of his sister – and that would make the hurt of rejection even harder to bear…. I find it amazing that you think it is your husband’s reaction to this desertion that has turned your son against you. You left him and took his sister. You rejected him. You didn’t find him worth mending your marriage for. You left without a backward glance. That’s enough. His feelings are personal to him. He doesn’t need a father to tell him that things are bad.

I also find it interesting how many children of divorce that grew up with mothers who chose to end their marriages end up establishing good relationships with their fathers and cutting off relations with their mothers. Kids aren’t stupid and it doesn’t matter how many lies they are told, eventually they will figure out who is really the bad guy.

Now that I’ve contributed to the evolutionary canon, I find myself much more interested in reading the work of my fellow evolutionary theoreticians:

Bipedalism—walking on two feet—is one of the defining characteristics of being human, and scientists have debated for years how it came about. In the latest attempt to find an explanation, researchers trained five chimpanzees to walk on a treadmill while wearing masks that allowed measurement of their oxygen consumption.

The chimps were measured both while walking upright and while moving on their legs and knuckles. That measurement of the energy needed to move around was compared with similar tests on humans and the results are published in this week’s online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It turns out that humans walking on two legs use only one-quarter of the energy that chimpanzees use while knuckle-walking on four limbs. And the chimps, on average, use as much energy using two legs as they did when they used all four limbs.

However, there was variability among chimpanzees in how much energy they used, and this difference corresponded to their different gaits and anatomy. One of the chimps used less energy on two legs, one used about the same and the others used more, said David Raichlen, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona.

“What we were surprised at was the variation,” he said in a telephone interview. “That was pretty exciting, because when you talk about how evolution works, variation is the bottom line, without variation there is no evolution.” If an individual can save energy moving around and hunting and spend more of it on reproduction, “that’s how you end up getting new species,” he said.

Walking on two legs freed our arms, opening the door to manipulating the world, Raichlen said. “We think about the evolution of bipedalism as one of first events that led hominids down the path to being human.”

Theirs is the latest of several explanations for walking upright. Among the others have been the need to used the arms in food gathering, the need to use the upper limbs to bring food to a mate and offspring and raising the body higher to dissipate heat in the breeze.

This is silliness to the Nth degree. Watch how any given ten people run. Some people run gracefully and efficiently, others lurch wildly all over the place as if they were having an epileptic fit. I remember one kid from my elementary school who used to flop his head from his left shoulder to his right when he ran, he looked like he was laboring harder than a team of oxen trying to pull a covered wagon out of quicksand.

Is there any doubt that if all of the chimps had shown that they used less energy walking upright that it would be cited as evidence than man evolved to walk bipedally? So, naturally, the contrary fact that most of them expended MORE energy on two legs, but ONE used less is cited as proof of the same.

This is science, in that they are using scientody, but it is bad science because they are taking a tautological approach to how they interpret the results. And, as always, there’s not just one unsupported assumption in the mix, but several, strung together to reach a conclusion – humans walk upright to conserve energy – that is simply not justified by the evidence presented.

Do they mean to say that wallowing in your problems in order to get attention isn’t likely to lead to a positive outlook on life? Who would have ever thought it?

A researcher at the University of Missouri-Columbia has found that girls who talk very extensively about their problems with friends are likely to become more anxious and depressed…. “For years, we have encouraged kids to find friends who they can talk to about their problems, and with whom they can give and receive social support,” Rose said. “In general, talking about problems and getting social support is linked with being healthy. What’s intriguing about these findings is that co-rumination likely represents too much of a good thing. Some kids, especially girls, are taking talking about problems to an extreme. When that happens, the balance tips, and talking about problems with friends can become emotionally unhealthy.”

Dr. Helen wonders if this extends to adult women as well. I’m not a trained psychological science researcher or anything, but I think it’s pretty safe to conclude that the answer will be yes, wallowing in petty negativity like a hippo in the Nile during the rainy season is likely to cause a few problems upstairs.

Some women enjoy voluntarily digging holes for themselves because they derive drama and a sense of importance from having trouble. They’re like attitudinal sharks, if they stop whining and complaining, they’d sink and drown. I utterly loathe them, just as I despised my would-be angst-filled male and female counterparts constantly moaning about how awful their parents were when I was a teenager.

Women, if you ever want to know why the men in your social circle often act as if they don’t even hear you when you talk, chances are good that you complain too much. Men actively dislike whiners of either sex, that’s why “whiner” is one of the worst insults a man can have directed his way. Complaining doesn’t make us feel bad for you, it makes us want to punch you in the mouth so you’ll shut the hell up. Since that behavior is frowned upon, we simply nod, smile, make a few sympathetic noises and then back away as quickly as possible.

In case you haven’t noticed, that’s also the way men treat insane people. It’s not a compliment.

Fred is amazed, but not surprised:

Comic books. We’re now using comic books to prepare kids for….

Guess: First grade, you’re thinking, right? Not a bad idea, really. Give kindergarteners Little Lulu comics, maybe Casper the Friendly Ghost, and they’ll be reading by first grade. Good idea. In fact, any number of kids invented this approach on their own. They learned to read, and there wasn’t a damned thing the schools could do about it.

But no, that’s not it. We’re using comic books to prepare high-school graduates for universities! So help me. Honest.

This is amusing, but the more cogent point that parents must understand is this: Universities are about tuition. The money of the barely sentient spends as well as any other, and there are more of them. Like all businesses, the schools, if such they are, want to expand their customer base. They want to spread the wondrous radiance of cultivation over the autistic, the anencephalic, and perhaps the dead, who might be taught by channeling.

There is no reason to mindlessly buy into the idea that all education is good. It isn’t. So, the important thing is to investigate whether the product is worth the price tag, just like any other purchase you consider.

Chiefs TE Tony Gonzalez commits without putting his financial future at risk:

Tony Gonzalez is officially off the market. Well, sort of officially. Tony G isn’t getting married, but he is planning a “formal commitment ceremony” on July 20 in Huntington Beach, Calif., where he’ll pledge his love to girlfriend October Russell.

A formal commitment ceremony? That’s so California….

“We’re not signing any papers,” Gonzalez told her, “but I wanted the world to know that I love her and want to spend my life with her. I did it the best way for me.”

I expect we’re going to begin to see a lot more of this sort of thing until American women manage to pressure legislatures into giving them a means of obtaining money from men to whom they were never married. Of course, by that time, the robot sex dolls should be ready to roll.

Alternatively, there’s always the Brad Pitt excuse. “I refuse to get married until everyone can marry whoever they want” sounds so much more noble than “I don’t believe in marriage”. And even if homogamy is unexpectedly legalized, Brad can always nobly refuse to get married until people are permitted to marry chimpanzees, fire hydrants or six additional partners.

He reminds me of Sir Galahad, really.

From ARIS:

The data in Exhibit 8 underscore the accuracy of conventional wisdom in the main: those who identify with one or another of the main religious groups are considerably more likely to be married than those who have no religion. Particularly the “no religion” group was far more likely to be either single, never married or single, living with a partner than any other group. Indeed, the “no religion” group shows the lowest incidence of marriage (just 19%) of all twenty-two groups. In sharp contrast, those identifying with the Assemblies of God or Evangelical/Born Again Christians show the highest proportions married, 73% and 74% respectively.

I also found it interesting that 11 percent of the “no religion” group refused to answer the question of marital status despite answering the other ones, whereas the none of the other groups were reluctant to do so. Given the way the percentages work out, I wonder if that reluctance could be related to the relatively high percentage of homosexuals who are irreligious.

Bane and numerous others find it impossible to believe that the current administration is capable of doing what its predecessors did:

Republican presidential candidate, Rep. Ron Paul, said the country is in “great danger” of the U.S. government staging a terrorist attack or a Gulf of Tonkin style provocation, as the war in Iraq continues to deteriorate.

The Texas congressman offered no specifics nor mentioned President Bush by name, but he clearly insinuated that the administration would not be above staging an incident to revive flagging support.

Read the comments. They’re like frightened cattle mooing because the meat-packing factory for which they are headed made an unexpected noise that scared them silly, but they don’t offer any evidence or even any logic in defense of their position that it is absolutely impossible for the U.S. government to stage a false flag event in order to drum up support for its foreign policy.

Never mind the fact that false flags are known to have been staged during the McKinley, Wilson, Roosevelt and Johnson administrations, proposed during the Kennedy administration and openly discussed by Bush during his first term in office.

By the way, the link shows how Bush also let the cat out of the bag about the illegitimacy of the US war on Iraq: “The US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach.”

In other words, firing on US planes was never a breach of the peace treaty because there was no treaty between Iraq and the USA, the only treaty was between Iraq and the United Nations.