Slept in. Oops. Still at job site here in Sterling. Anyhow, another quick push for the morning.

1. Another sort of race.
2. Of taxes and offerings.
3. Remember how Germany got rid of nuclear power and went to solar and wind. How’s that working out?
4. Entrepreneurship in Iraq.
5. I too cannot listen to prepared speeches, especially when interrupted every 10 seconds by applause. Bonus, a bit for the Palin fans.
6. Not quite the Le Brea Tar Pits (translation: the the tar tar pits). But close.
7. The auto-green interests and the two candidates.
8. A tight squeeze, helps to be boneless.
9. A prize-winner and some of his work explained.
10. More similarities than differences.
11. A question asked.
12. Playing the game as insight into a person.
13. Sometimes Japan is just weird.
14. I bought the first book last night.
15. TARP and a success story that wasn’t TARP-like.
16. Just say no.
17. Social welfare.

Gotta run. Have a good one!

Good morning. I’m short on time … so I’ll try to be quick. I apologize in advance for errors, of meaning and syntax.

1. Water and ballistics.
2. Rhetoric and … I think a reference to the remarks made by Mr Akin.
3. Is this where Illinois corruption skews the pictures?
4. So, does that make the recent German law anti-Semitic? Or just disputed medical results.
5. Relativism and the term “safe”.
6. I wonder if that includes non-government R&D funding? And if so, how the heck would they measure it?
7. No silly, the Democratic base is soon-to-be unemployed journalists and union workers.
8. Noetic mapping.
9. Getting rid of those gomers … and liberal bigotry.
10. Dishonesty in political commercials … I’d have thought the unusual thing would be to look deeper and find honesty.
11. I really really need to dig into Christos Yannaros and how ethics changes when your idea of person changes.
12. ’cause here is where you find freedom (freedom not from rights and choice, but communion in love).
13. So, why do you think why?

Gotta run. That took 10 minutes. Whew.

The ability to make what are called "induced-pluripotent stem cells" (iPS) has been done before. What’s new now is that making them is becoming easier.

Johns Hopkins scientists have developed a reliable method to turn the clock back on blood cells, restoring them to a primitive stem cell state from which they can then develop into any other type of cell in the body.

The work, described in the Aug. 8 issue of the journal Public Library of Science (PLoS), is "Chapter Two" in an ongoing effort to efficiently and consistently convert adult blood cells into stem cells that are highly qualified for clinical and research use in place of human embryonic stem cells, says Elias Zambidis, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of oncology and pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering and the Kimmel Cancer Center.

"Taking a cell from an adult and converting it all the way back to the way it was when that person was a 6-day-old embryo creates a completely new biology toward our understanding of how cells age and what happens when things go wrong, as in cancer development," Zambidis says.

"Chapter One," Zambidis says, was work described last spring in PLoS One in which Zambidis and colleagues recounted the use of this successful method of safely transforming adult blood cells into heart cells. In the latest experiments, he and his colleagues now describe methods for coaxing adult blood cells to become so-called induced-pluripotent stem cells (iPS) — adult cells reprogrammed to an embryonic like state, and with unprecedented efficiencies.

Zambidis says his team has managed to develop a "super efficient, virus-free" way to make iPS cells, overcoming a persistent difficulty for scientists working with these cells in the laboratory. Generally, out of hundreds of blood cells, only one or two might turn into iPS cells. Using Zambidis’ method, 50 to 60 percent of blood cells were engineered into iPS cells.

Click here for other stem cell stories that we’ve covered. The idea that embryonic stem cells are a must-have for research is a myth.

Yikes. Busy busy.

1. Climate changers and the law.
2. Exactly a point I’ve been (unsuccessfully I think) been trying to make repeatedly.
3. Well, I wish I had time to listen to this.
4. Those three young girls rioting in Russia cathedrals. Imagine for a moment that the Polish President, Mr Komorowski, was a practicing catholic and some rock group interrupted a catholic service of remembrance for the slain at Auschwitz. Would they be defended strongly … or would even the left suggest that there is a place and a time for political activism.  Read the link for some context.
5. Speaking of which.
6. Eat and run … yer not doing it right.
7. Remember the press is very very blue. Not so much the readers.
8. Using your hammer to hammer.
9. RepRap? Never heard of it, but it sounds interesting.
10. Trade wars.
11. Educational?
12. That cheap overseas labor … fixed. See more here? And more.
13. Mr Obama against Obamacare on principles.
14. On the left side of the aisle, saying thank you = sucking up. Weird.

Have you seen this little ditty floating around the internet (e.g., on Facebook)?

Cute.

Here are my thoughts:

• Schools:  Along with Public School Employee Unions, low performing teachers, overpriced and bloated administrations, emphasis on testing rather than students? Average expenditure / student in US = $11,665. And you want MORE?
• Roads:  Along with Public Employee Unions, excessive benefits, civil service mentality, bureaucratic red tape? Try contracting roads to private firms to see efficiency in execution.
• Firefighters:  Along with early retirement pensions for some at upwards of 90% of final salary?
• Police Officers:  Along with early retirement pensions for some at upwards of 90% of final salary?
• Hospitals:  You mean like the ones run by the Catholic church?
• Paramedics:  A wonderful perk of living in the 21st century West.
• HAZMAT Teams:  Oh yeah, that must be a big line item in the budget.
• Soldiers:  Definitely.
• Sailors:  Definitely.
• Airmen:  Definitely.
• Marines:  Definitely.
• Coast Guard:  Definitely.
• Clean Air:  Not at the expense of bloated over-regulation.
• Clean Water:  Not at the expense of bloated over-regulation.
• Safe Food:  Not at the expense of bloated over-regulation.
• Pure Drugs: Not at the expense of bloated over-regulation.
• Child Protection:  As long as child protection agencies do not abuse their authority and power.
• Safe Products:  Not at the expense of bloated over-regulation.
• Air Traffic Control:  Yes, definitely. And fire them all (a la Reagan) if they try to go on strike.
• Space Exploration:  Robotic exploration is the future.
• Bridges:  Managed by government, contracted to private firms. Kind of like the transcontinental railroad.
• Tunnels:  Managed by government, contracted to private firms.
• Flood Defenses: Hopefully not as was managed in New Orleans (by the gov’t)…
• Universities:  Like Stanford, Claremont, or Yale? Oops, those are private firms. Same comment regarding overpriced and bloated administrations.
• Museums:  Culturally enriching… yet a low priority for taxing the citizenry – ask the 1%’ers to help out.
• Science:  Science? Science couldn’t exist without more taxes?
• Diplomatic relations with other countries:  Definitely.
• Public Parks:  The ones that are used frequently or the ones that sit empty for most of the week?
• Criminal Justice: Definitely.
• Medical Research: This can’t happen without taxes? Oh yeah, when you socialize medicine, you take away incentives for private research – got it.
• National Forests:  Definitely.
• Care for the Elderly & Disabled: This is the government’s responsibility?

Way back in 2006, I blogged about how cheap Hollywood liberals thought we were as a country, and then noted a study by Arthur Brooks that showed that, the more conservative and/or religious you were, you gave more than the liberals complaining about how stingy we were. (Link goes to the archived version of "Stones Cry Out", before we converted to WordPress.)

Six years later, the trend has continued.

Red states give more money to charity than blue states, according to a new study on Monday.

The eight states with residents who gave the highest share of their income to charity supported Sen. John McCain in 2008, while the seven states with the least generous residents went for President Barack Obama, the Chronicle of Philanthropy found in its new survey of tax data from the IRS for 2008.

The eight states whose residents gave the highest share of their income — Utah, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, Idaho, Arkansas and Georgia — all backed McCain in 2008. Utah leads charitable giving, with 10.6 percent of income given.

And the least generous states — Wisconsin, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire — were Obama supporters in the last presidential race. New Hampshire residents gave the least share of their income, the Chronicle stated, with 2.5 percent.

“The reasons for the discrepancies among states, cities, neighborhoods are rooted in part in each area’s political philosophy about the role of government versus charity,” the study’s authors noted.

But it’s not just about politics — “religion has a big influence on giving patterns.”

This particular study only included taxpayers with incomes of $50,000 or more, so it didn’t factor in the poor, as the Brooks study did. Still, the results pretty much line up with his findings; the more conservative and/or religious you are — that is, the more you believe that charity is a personal issue — the more you put that belief into action. I would add that the more you think it’s the government’s issue, well then, the more you put that belief into action.

Good morning

1. Forgotten people?
2. Economic growth.
3. Let’s see, asymmetric information is a reason for higher taxation? Like the government has really proved it spends its money wisely.
4. Next target for computer security attacks.
5. Voter ID.
6. Last words of one man, still not as witty as Oscar Wilde, who had the funniest last words I’ve ever heard (“Either that wallpaper goes, or I’ll go. (then he died)”)
7. Why all them great books?
8. Some baseball quips and anecdotes.
9. Religion and the law in Pakistan.
10. Not Maize, Taize.
11. Of culture and evangelism.

Well, the morning and lunchtime were busy … and Wednesday I’m back out to Western Illinois. Tuesday … well well. About six weeks ago my eldest very very introverted daughter suddenly became a baseball (White Sox) fan. So … we’re (a) learning about baseball and (b) going to the Sox/Yankees game Tuesday night with a pair of free upper deck tix. So now I’m paying for those decades a cyclist thinking that baseball is almost not a sport (and don’t let me get started on golf).

1. On prayer and fasting.
2. Tuff enuff?
3. From the side of the aisle hiding the Holodomor and Katyn forest deniers … just treatment of some other deniers celebrated. In that light, I’ll recommend this book Bloodlands, which I read recently.
4. And a little context for the above.
5. Lilith.
6. On the monastic calling.
7. More books.
8. Religion poisons everything … or perhaps not.
9. A crazy way to make a living, eh?
10. GM
11. The left and right ‘splained to a youngster.

And now my other daughter wants to borrow this computer … so, perhaps more tomorrow.

A couple months ago I started a new project; a political and cultural opinion podcast where I say what I’m going to say in 10 minutes or less. It doesn’t require as much a time commitment from you to listen in, and I want to hear back and make it more of a conversation than a monologue.

Today I hit a milestone; the 10th episode. There’s something of a psychological part of this as well. Folks who keep track of such things say that if you get (on average) past episode 7, that seems to be a tipping point. Podcasts that get past that generally continue on. So here I am at 10, and hopefully we’ll just roll along, with your input.

My topics are usually varied, but this episode focuses on the Paul Ryan VP pick. Let me know what you think of that choice by either commenting on the show notes, on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+. You can even use that tried and true method; E-mail.

Archeology keeps giving us reasons to believe that the history of Israel we find in the Old Testament is an actual account of real events rather than some epic storytelling of the period. Eric Metaxas, who shares the "Breakpoint Commentaries" duties since the death of Chuck Colson, explains.

The findings at Sorek [of an 11th century BC coin of a man with long hair fighting a large animal, suggesting that Samson-like men actually exited before the account in the Bible] are only the latest in a series of archaeological discoveries that are changing the way modern historians look at biblical narratives. It’s becoming more difficult for them to maintain that the narratives are pious fictions invented long after the era being depicted.

The most famous of these discoveries is the 1994 discovery of a stele in Tel Dan bearing an inscription that contained the words “House of David.” It was the first extra-biblical evidence of the Davidic dynasty. Prior to the discovery, many scholars doubted that David ever existed, much less founded a dynasty. The discovery was so out-of-line with expectations that more than a few insisted it must be a forgery.

Today, it is clear to even the most skeptical scholar that—surprise!—there really was a David who founded a ruling dynasty. That dynasty included his son, Solomon, and evidence of Solomon’s building projects described in Second Samuel have been found by archaeologists as well.

The Bible tells us about God because the events that it represents as historical are, indeed, historical. If they were fictional, they would tell us nothing about the nature of God any more than the story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree tells us anything about Washington himself. Fictional stories do, indeed, help us explain concepts, but those concepts must pre-exist the story. First we must know what God is like, and we know what He is like by reading about what He did; not some fantasy of what He might have done given a particular situation. Once we know what God is like, fiction and parable are then useful.

So our understanding of God relies on the accuracy of the Bible. And archeology just keeps showing that to be true.

Still on evening posting schedule, probably for the next two weeks.

1. Some back history on high speed rail and its US development (or lack thereof).
2. Light rock making news.
3. Puppies can be cute …. and dogs again for your back to school crowd (my kids start tomorrow).
4. Three notes on Mr Ryan … which for me the most interesting point was the remark about weak (perception or reality) that Congress has gotten. Seems to me the John Adams prediction of executive becoming royalty/tyrant (or the Roman weak-Congress allowing the start of the Empire). For those who worry about “climate change” this climate is one that will kill us first.
5. And a comparison of Ryan and Obama, and their early life.
6. The weather service bucks up for … what?
7. Mr Lincoln.
8. Ah, but there is the immediate and logical reply, “if you say that … you’re a bigot.” And you’d be right. Bigotry in its essence is condemning a group en masse where you should be judging people as individual. When you make the statement linked, you are condemning a group in exactly that way.
9. Search or not?

Now that Paul Ryan is the VP nominee on the Republican ticket, his budget proposal has been in the spotlight all over again, and all the same distortions about it are being trotted out. Guy Benson writing at TownHall.com gives us 5 facts to remember about the Ryan budget.

1. "The Republican reform plan totally exempts anyone over the age of 55 from any changes." Basically, if you like your plan, you can keep it. (I know I’ve heard that somewhere before.)
2. The Democrats have already raided $741 billion from Medicare to pay for ObamaCare. They are the ones cutting Medicare.
3. "Medicare’s own accountants have calculated that Medicare will be insolvent within 12 years." This means that doing nothing is really what guts Medicare.
4. Ryan’s Medicare proposal is actually the result of a bipartisan solution, "co-authored by a committed liberal who understands that the clock is running out to save the program." And it’s means-tested so that the poorer get more protection.
5. The plan increases spending every year, just not as much as Obama wanted in his budget proposal (which was, just to remind you, unanimously defeated by his own party).

That last point, calling a spending increase a "cut", is a ploy used by Democrats and parroted by the news media.

Keep these in mind when you hear talk of "gutting" Medicare. It’s just not true.

I’m going to be working early this week.

1. But we can start off with some verse.
2. “An atheist” abandons (silliness) doesn’t mean they all do. Next … maybe they’ll come around to realizing the foundations of their precious enlightenment and scientific revolution was Christian in origin.
3. Inventing ritual and rite didn’t work in post-revolutionary France. Those who don’t know history, condemned to repeat.
4. Camouflage … do y’all approve? Good idea or not?
5. When politics becomes a thing defining enemies … keep these handy.
6. Some striking photographs.
7. Arrgh. Faster to production … please? And speaking of faster …
8. Why even think of doing a hit piece at all? It makes no sense at all to me.
9. Not-so-deadly weapons.
10. Religion and our drive-by media.
11. A picture makes an argument.
12. Remember the Obama Cairo thing, where he talked up the accomplishments of Islamic science? In this context, that sounds like talking up the new discoveres in treatment of hypothermia advanced by Dr Mengele.
13. Free speech and academia? Not so much any more. And guess what … it’s not just academia.
14. The placard linked is not unrelated to the above.
15. Obama continues lying. Gosh … what a surprise.
16. Norway and its police.
17. Drones not in the sky.

Apparently, that’s where the Norwegian government thinks they come from.

Now comes a suggestion from a Norwegian official called the “Ombudsman for Children in Norway” proposing that the ancient procedure be replaced by a “symbolic, nonsurgical ritual.” Apparently in Norway it is possible to create religiously meaningful rituals overnight, which is an insight into the understanding of religion in Norwegian public life. And Norway’s “Centre Party,” which is a member of the governing coalition, has just proposed that circumcision be outlawed entirely.

Something similar is happening in the US as well. Do governments not have enough to do, that they must bother Jews about a religious tradition handed down by God thousands of years ago?

An interesting reasoning that Judge Alan Kay used to uphold the law (emphasis mine).

HONOLULU (BP) — A federal court has refused to legalize gay marriage in Hawaii, ruling the issue is best addressed by the legislature and that the current law — which defines marriage as between a man and a woman — does not violate the U.S. Constitution.

The ruling by Judge Alan. C. Kay Wednesday (Aug. 8) broke a string of court losses by traditionalists on the subject of gay marriage.

At issue in Hawaii was a constitutional amendment passed by voters in 1998 giving the legislature the power to define marriage in the traditional sense, which legislators subsequently did.

A lesbian couple and a gay man filed suit in federal court last year against Hawaii officials, arguing the amendment and law violated the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the U.S. Constitution. But Kay, nominated by President Reagan, ruled the legislature had a rational interest defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

"Throughout history and societies, marriage has been connected with procreation and childrearing," Kay wrote in his 117-page decision. "… The legislature could rationally conclude that on a societal level, the institution of marriage acts to reinforce ‘the important legal and normative link between heterosexual intercourse and procreation on the one hand and family responsibilities on the other.’"

The legislature, Kay wrote, could "also rationally conclude that other things being equal, it is best for children to be raised by a parent of each sex."

"Both sides presented evidence on this issue and both sides pointed out flaws in their opponents’ evidence," he wrote of parenting. "Thus, the Court concludes this rationale is at least debatable and therefore sufficient."

The issue, Kay added, is up to the legislature.

He deferred to the legislature when the point was debatable. What’s very interesting about this is that it is essentially the reasoning Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts used to uphold ObamaCare; a decision that liberals hailed. While Roberts rewrote the law to make the individual mandate a tax (not something I agree he could or should do), he then concluded that it was within Congress’ power and deferred to them.

This is the very opposite of judicial activism, and what they’re supposed to do; judge the law and not redefine it.