Good morning.

1. Two “thousand word” commentaries.
2. A fable.
3. Separation of Church/State, from the other angle.
4. Inflation in our future.
5. One reaction.
6. The elephant in the evangelical marriage discussion.
7. Volokh conspirator in a bigger venue.
8. In the context of Hawking’s talk of God, Wittgenstein.
9. Physical dexterity.

Good morning.

1. A prediction on Presidential ratings.
2. On his message.
3. He should know, he was one of them.
4. How not to put yourself in others shoes.
5. 2.7kg bike.
6. Tea Party and the starfish (note I got malware warnings from the sidebar blogroll provider site going there).
7. A picture for the day.
8. Look where the libs want to take us, if you think unemployment is bad now.
9. Verse.

All things are better in Koine! And my friend Joe Carter should get a kick out of the shot of Biola’s infamous hippie Jesus mural.

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Bad News / Good News The Bad News? 49% of Protestants think Mormons are Christians. The Good News? Those same Protestants are looking forward to having a whole lot of fun at church this coming Sunday.

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Mexico tosses us a red herring From CNN,

Violence in the United States is not related to illegal Mexican immigrants, but violence in Mexico is connected to vast shipments of weapons from the United States, Mexico’s foreign minister told CNN Thursday.

Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa pointed to efforts by Mexico to stop the flow of weapons, the great majority of which come from the United States.

“Since 2006,” she said in a wide-ranging interview with CNN’s editorial board in New York City, “the Mexican government has seized over 85,000 weapons in Mexico.”

She noted that it’s not just “regular weapons,” but also machine guns, grenades and other high-power arms.

Robert Pastor, a Latin America national security adviser for President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s, pointed out last year there were at least 6,600 U.S. gun shops within 100 miles of the Mexican border and more than 90 percent of weapons in Mexico come from the United States.

I’d venture to say that the chances are slim to none that one could purchase machine guns, grenades, or other [related] high-power arms, in any of those 6,600 gun shops.

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With either choice, your system’s gonna get cleaned out Evidently, people would prefer to have a colonoscopy vs. cleaning out their computer’s registry.

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The FBI chooses Glock Contract award at close to $1 million, for 2,900+ Glock 23 .40SW handguns.

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Lucky Break: significant good fortune or opportunity What do you do, if you’re committed to naturalism, and you’re faced with the fact that your very existence hinged on at least 10 highly improbable events of the past? Well, the rational, neo-Darwinistic logical conclusion must surely be that we were really, really, really, really, really lucky! For those who can actually put 2 + 2 together, the folks at Reasons to Believe have been discussing the design aspects of our universe, for quite some time.

Good morning.

1. Questioning a charge.
2. Cinema exposing life.
3. Queen Ketevan.
4. Some wise words on chastity.
5. Ephraim! (for those who don’t know, St. Ephraim is the Chrismation Saint I chose when I converted to Orthodoxy).
6. Is Atheism a religion?
7. A teachers manifesto.
8. Lower and higher criticism and Islam.
9. Populism, an attempt at a categorization.
10. Trained parrot? Get with the times, that German precognitive octopus is far far better.
11. Freedom and Mr Obama’s agenda.
12. Prepare your encryption engines.
13. A question in comparison.
14. Mormon’s and the Christian question. Why can’t people get that right? It’s like its very complicated. At cultic level, Mormon’s and Nicene Christians are both Christ cults (both are cults in which Jesus of Nazareth is a primary element). The word “Christian” in common usage is commonly shorthand for Nicene Christians, i.e., Christian cultists that affirm that creed. Mormons do not belong to that group. So, are they Christian, technically yes in the cultic sense, but in common usage of the word, no. 
15. A tech gadget for the ages.
16. Not unrelated, and the Iliad is not on the list, so I am a bit put out.

Self Defense for a Bear Attack If it was me, I’d leave the summer squash for the crockpot, and utilize something that has the word “magnum” associated with it.

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Geek News of the Week Images of Aurora on Saturn’s South Pole.

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The S.L.E.D. Test as an argument against abortion Whenever I discuss the topic of abortion with a person who is pro-abortion, it’s amazing to see the lack of clarity and reason in their position. Truth be told, when unpacked to its core features, their position is without rational basis. Scott Klusendorf, formerly from Stand to Reason, discusses the S.L.E.D. Test, what it is, and how to rationally apply it to demonstrate that the unborn are valuable as human beings.

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Funny

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Obama think $1.00 will cover the purchase of 4 apples And, yes, the media didn’t handle it like they did when Dubya was around.

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The 1% Solution? Bono’s One Foundation only manages to direct a little over 1% of what it receives to the needy? Ouch! Maybe the Obama administration should consider a takeover?

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Power to the People! The last best hope…

Photonic computers, that use light rather than electrical signals to do the work, may actually be on the horizon.  This will be huge.  While it’s still a few years down the road, the number of years is in the single digits at this point.

Let’s be more like Europe! “The UK’s tax collection agency is putting forth a proposal that all employers send employee paychecks to the government, after which the government would deduct what it deems as the appropriate tax and pay the employees by bank transfer.”  Even a little socialism can be a dangerous thing.  Exhibit A.

Obama supporters are “exhausted of defending” him.  If this turns into an exhaustion of voting for Democrats, House and Senate seats polling close now may yet be a big win for Republicans.  Obama only has himself to blame; supporters are not exhausted of defending “the mess” he inherited, they’re tired of defending his “accomplishments”.  If you’ve lost Jon Stewart, you’ve lost a lot of folks who think he’s a news anchor.  (Which is, unfortunately, quite a lot of people.)

No, ACORN isn’t really dead, it’s just changed its name.  And it’s still breaking the law, so says federal investigators who are urging that the funding moratorium be made permanent.

Obama says the stimulus kept the recession from falling into a depression.  But economists are now saying that, technically, we came out of the recession in June, 2009.  That’s before the stimulus really kicked in.  We spent $800 billion on measures to save the economy from something it had recovered from on its own.  Under that guise, we got record- and precedent-setting debt.

Which is why the Tea Party influence in the Republican party is so needed now, even if the GOP goes kicking and screaming.  (Click for a larger image.)

Good morning.

1. Two from the movie musical Wizard of Oz, “Courage”: here and (not) here.
2. Missing the point, what he said might be true, but what is the point and what is the effect of saying it? How is it useful?
3. Considering space, and while the space of mathematical concepts is larger not smaller than what we perceive, I think there is still a strong anthropological perceptual bias to mathematical concepts and intuitions. Consider for a while what maths might be developed by a intelligent race whose environment and perception made the notion of the integer as foreign or abstracted as infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces.
4. Mr Obama on foreign affairs, here and (the cartoon is good) here.
5. How it will be seen vs being responsible.
6. Green party, low bar or high bar?
7. Stepping in others shoes.
8. Examining the “crazy” meme regarding Ms O’Donnell.
9. Economics of Obamacare.
10. A first ad.
11. Hmm. Or better perhaps, duh! 

Good morning.

1. Summers out, as you all likely know already. I’ve a naive question, he’s been part of the Obama admin, when and how was his reputation rehabilitated after the Harvard kerfuffle in the eyes of the left?
2. I don’t get why Brooks didn’t just undersell the clone price in the first place?
3. Stimulus, apparently like climate. AGW and the effects of stimulus are deeply hidden in larger noise and short term counterexamples meet the “weather is not climate” rejection. 
4. What soldiers in the field want these days.
5. That girl in the cage … which makes me mindful of the books of Mr Vachss. 
6. Poverty and the elephant in the room.
7. Those CEO salaries.
8. Environment and virtue.
9. A common problem with new green designs, to catch on it needs to be close as good as its replacement, if not better.
10. For those who dismiss the Austrian school, they do it seems collect Nobel prizes.
11. An anniversary of sorts, and a consequence to look out for going forward alas hidden behind subscribers walls, the upshot is apparently that much of the costs of the new expansions in care will be covered by non-wealthy seniors.
12. Mr McChrystal.
13. Working at home, the upside. The downside? No bike ride to work, I guess.
14. Heh.

Oil-eating bacteria had a feast on the BP Deep-Sea oil spill At Reasons to Believe, on the August 25th podcast, they discussed how ocean bacteria ate up a whole lot of the oil from the BP spill. It is very interesting that this phenomenon was unexpected, considering how much we know about the earth. What? We don’t know everything? Oh… maybe we need to be wary of dire predictions due to Global Warming Climate Change.

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Oops Maybe the bacteria ate mostly gas and not oil. Hmmm… what was that you said about hot summers?

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More guns… Yes, less crime.

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Oops 2 Kind of reminds me of the misteaks I made at skool.

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Bush stumbled over his speeches But did we really think we could listen to great speeches for 4 years? Like Matthews says – get rid of the teleprompter!

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Maybe a bit premature Yet people are frustrated.

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Imagine a white Republican making similar statements Just remember that it came from the party of tolerance.

Good morning.

1. As I’m from Chicago, some Bears talk, here and here. I thought the first well written.
2. Someone forgot it’s not ants, but white mice.
3. Wealth and birth rate.
4. I’m not sure what the heck that man is doing, but the tag “pic of the day” is not inappropriate.
5. Ms O’Donnell. 
6. A prayer-as-humor?
7. On Tea Parties and here on their likely future.
8. A rejoinder to “It’s hard to believe Republicans would get much support if people were smarter” might be that if people were smarter we wouldn’t require the Democratic nanny state and therefore we’d all be small government Republicans.
9. Verse, for me, though the lens of Google translate.
10. Travels completed (for now).
11. Talking about a somewhat unserious study on cutting government spending, inasmuch as in my brief look for the authors government spending does not include entitlements at all, which makes it quite unserious as a not insignificant piece.
12. Great news, and is this a Geek thing? Epsilon? Our first was “Floid” prior to birth, the “i” instead of “y” a pointer to computer automation and such geekery.
13. On boredom. 
14. Well, recently I noted a father/son exchange quoted, here’s another with a different flavor.

Good morning.

1. A Protestant prepares to consider Orthodoxy asking “what do they consider the most important” … if he doesn’t come up with a call for repentance as the most important, then he’s missing the forest for the trees (at best).
2. Fossil fuels and climate.
3. Religion and language compared.
4. Chesterton defended.
5. A tale told.
6. A Greek considers tourism.
7. Mr Obama’s boilerplate campaign speech.
8. On hard circumstances.
9. Witness and example.
10. Travel with Dad.
11. Dealing with the ‘extremists’.
12. Well, it seems to me, if the Democrats (or any party) decided to front a similar notion, that would be their death knell.

Good morning.

1. Mr Obama’s new people, here is one and … it looks like I can’t find the link for the second which was about Ms Warren. I haven’t seen liberal/progressive blogs criticizing that appointment. Have you? Because if you don’t that’s a sign of partisanship trumps consistency.
2. Targeted killing.
3. For the Mr Krugman fans (or anti-fans), a first round knockout. 
4. On marriage. 
5. Also on marriage.
6. Institute ala squirrel.
7. Uhm, perhaps he’s talking about dance because school killed the notion of creativity linked with math so completely it doesn’t even enter the picture.
8. Why are the Democrats so against Mr Soros and the like?
9. Silly things said by Delaware pols.
10. On the pundit simplification.
11. Charity.
12. Newsworthy or not?
13. Well, the left has lost all standing with respect to their claim the “we’re behind small business.”
14. Dropping the “weather is not climate” position on AGW.
15. For the Palin fans which continues here.
16. So … will the lunatic fringe come back in fashion?
17. I have to disagree a bit, the Eastern Roman empire used a mix of force and appeasement with some success for centuries before the Crusaders sacked Constantinople. But there has to be a strategy.

Update: link for 17 fixed.

I’ve been on the road this week, and by the time this posts I’ll be heading home.  I haven’t done much blogging as a result, but I have collected a few links.

Remember all the riots, protests and violence when the US military burned Bibles?  Or when Muslims blew the doors off churches, burned Bibles and destroyed every cross they could find?  Yeah, me neither.  Define for me “religion of peace” again?  The actions that the Left calls “Islamophobia” in America don’t hold a candle to what gets done to Christians by Muslims elsewhere, but somehow “Christophobia” hasn’t entered their vernacular yet.

The amount of money the United States now owes is more than all the money in the world.  That’s how bad it is.

Christians protest abortion, the media yawns.  One pro-abortion protestor hits the streets, you get an article with pictures.

Gun owner ship goes up.  Violent crime goes down. If the Left was right about poor economic times causing crime, and that more guns cause more crime, there ought to be more heads exploding on that side of the aisle, if they’re being intellectually honest.

The return of no-money-down mortgages.  Um, that’s what got us into this mess in the first place!

The disappearing homeless.  Well, they’re still there, and likely there are more now that the housing bubble popped.  But the media has gone silent on them.  Guess they’re waiting for a Republican President, like they did before.

And finally, from Chuck Asay, some advice about getting your religion hijacked.  (Click for a larger version.)

Good morning.

1. An economist responds.
2. Noting the problem.
3. Well, it might be because they take religion and politics in a positivist manner, hewing to consequences of matters because the logic dictates as such.
4. The Roma in Russia.
5. Two trees.
6. He has a point, one wonders how a government that subsidizes alternative energy can complain that another country is doing the same.
7. More Tea Party ruminations.
8. A “short horror story.”
9. Talking ancient science.

Good morning.

1. Humility in a pro athlete.
2. A question for the Keynesian stimulus proponents, where’s the bump?
3. A film setting aside Hollywood preconceptions about the Islamic world.
4. Advice for those seeking God.
5. Tax on the high wage earners.
6. Mr Reno on Mr D’Souza.
7. More for the Palin fans.
8. Burning the Koran and legal consequences, continued.
9. Humility.
10. Macro-Economics and the court jester on the Hill. This is in line with a lot of my notions about economics.
11. Some verse, here and here, although I think the only common thread there is that both are samples of poetry.