harmonicminer

This video is a little long… but worth the time, and likely to tell you some things you don’t already know about “climate change.”  It takes a moment to load… be patient.

Catastrophe Denied: The Science of the Skeptics Position (studio version) from Warren Meyer on Vimeo.

For 50 years we’ve been Waiting for ET to phone us.

West Virginia. It is 6 am on an April morning in 1960 and Frank Drake is freezing cold. He peers up towards the focal point of the radio telescope. He mounts a flimsy ladder to the top and climbs into a space about the size of a garbage can. For the next 45 minutes, he tunes the receiver inside, which feels like starting an old car. He climbs back down and begins to listen.

Drake and colleagues were conducting a seminal experiment: the first modern search for extraterrestrial life. For four months, the researchers used the Tatel Telescope in Green Bank to listen for any intelligent signals from the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani that might be hidden on the same wavelength as radiation emitted naturally by hydrogen. Drake named the effort Project Ozma after the princess in the 0z books by Frank Baum, who wrote that he used a radio to learn of events there.

April 2010 will mark the 50th anniversary of the start of Project Ozma, and those involved in the search for extraterrestrial life, or SETI, will be raising a glass. Not only did the experiment inspire countless people to continue the search, it brought alien-hunting into the mainstream and arguably seeded the science of astrobiology.

Other famous searchers for things that were never found:

   Albert Einstein and Unified Field Theory.

   Don Quixote and defeatable windmills

   Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth

   Isaac Newton and a way to turn lead into gold

   AI researchers and actual machine intelligence

   Modern physics and cold fusion

You get the idea.  Some things just SOUND plausible, even likely.  The argument that “the universe is just so big that there has to be intelligent life out there” is like that.  It just instinctively sounds right.

That doesn’t make it right.

And even if they are there, the aliens are almost certainly far, far ahead of us, so far that we wouldn’t recognize one of their artifacts or communications methods if we saw it.  Or, they are so far behind us that they’re still working on inventing the bow and arrow, or controlling fire.  The odds of intelligent aliens in a detectable state of technological development anywhere near us are so small as to be laughable.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’ll all for funding more SETI, though I’m not acquiescent about more active approaches.  ET may not be nice.

But I don’t expect much to be found.

YES, it’s time to panic

According to the Washington Post, Nebraska’s Senator Ben Nelson has caved to Democratic pressure and will provide the 60th vote Harry Reid needs to pass the Senate’s American-medicine-and-Medicare-destroying version of Obamacare. There is still a chance some other Senate Democrat will refuse to take American medicine over the cliff, but at this point it looks like Obamacare passes the Senate on Christmas eve.

The only good thing this does is demonstrate the D.C. Democrats’ contempt for their “netroots” which are as against the bill as the center and the right. This is a Chicago-machine political bailout, the least common denominator bill that can provide President Obama with a ridiculous claim to having accomplished something, anything, in his first, greatly disappointing year in office.

Still, the Senate may spit in the eye of the country. Whether House Democrats decide to go along over the cliff remains to be seen. Passage of the Senate bill will doom Blanche Lincoln and maybe Evan Bayh, but too many Democrats are too far away from re-election days. When the next vote comes to the House, it will be about 42 weeks before November 2. Between now and then those House members have to hear from their voters and have to see the cash piling up in the GOP coffers.

As I said before the election, they Left only has to win once, and stay in office just long enough to create a new entitlement program.  It appears they are going to succeed.

YOU will pay for it. 

In the meantime, the medical insurance you have today is going to become more expensive (if you can manage to keep it), but it is also going to be worth less.  Not quite worthless for awhile…  though that time may come.

My former colleague of long ago, Bill Mounce, has a nice post on the Greek word ψαλλω, and Musical Instruments in worship:

Someone asked me the other day about the precise meaning of the Greek word ψαλλω and any relationships it has, if any, to the ancient debate of musical instruments in worship.

I hesitate to blog on this because I am sure there has been much discussion in the Worship Wars literature about this and I am not aware of the pitfalls lying in wait for me. (Can pitfalls “lie in wait” or am I mixing my metaphors? Oh well, you understand.) My books on worship are at school and I can’t get to them. So much for disclaimers.

But the person mentioned that some lexicons support one position, and others lexicons support the other. Let’s see.

The latest version of BDAG gives this meaning to ψαλλω: “to sing songs of praise, with or without instrumental accompaniment.” The suggested glosses are “sing, sing praise.” The cognate noun ψαλμος is defined as “song of praise, psalm and is used in the NT as a reference to the Psalms or more generally to a hymn of praise.”

It is interesting that Liddell and Scott give these meanings for classical Greek: “to play a stringed instrument with the fingers; later, to sing to a harp, sing, N.T. Louw and Nida agree. “to sing songs of praise, with the possible implication of instrumental accompaniment.”

Both words are used in the LXX to refer to the Psalms, which were often sung with musical accompaniment. However, the word can be used just of singing apart from mention of an instrument (Ps 33:2).

……………………
The New Testament inherits the culture of the Old Testament, and the later was full of instrumentation. The burden of proof would lie on the person assuming that instruments were not used in New Testament worship, and then it would have to be proven that the absence is normative for all worship of all time.

Good ‘ole Jubal, of course, is the first musician mentioned in the Bible… and he was an instrumentalist, it seems.  

Class envy in our country has been planted, cultivated, and sadly, continued to grow almost unchecked.  In my opinion it is a useful tool to many of our current crop of politicians who wish to impose government-enforced equality of outcome rather than the more traditional view in this country of equal opportunity. This is apparent to no greater degree than with the subject of taxes and wealth.

Neal Boortz has written a brilliant piece about this subject.  It is about a fictitious company and a speech given by it’s fictitious president.  But I assure you the subject matter is altogether quite real.  Please read it all!

This is a repost from about nine months ago.  However, having recently mid-wifed the birth of a new academic policy at my university (the gestation period was MUCH longer than nine months), this seemed a good time to repost it.

The original post:

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While I generally try to avoid making too many “inside references,” I recently witnessed a health professional trying to get a feel for how much pain someone was in, and they brought out the Universal Pain Assessment Tool. It didn’t take long to realize the universal applicability of such an assessment instrument, and so, herewith:

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The particular meeting that inspired me to repost this chart, and at which the new (and, honestly, better) policy was approved, took THREE HOURS!!! It was on a day I don’t normally have to come to campus.  There were numerous references to the parliamentarian to make judgments about how we should proceed.   And it included curriculum, assessment, accreditation AND diversity, which means that, as meetings go, the pain scale was way, way off the chart…. maybe about a 25.  It made miss my uncle, a past master of faculty meeting survival strategies.

Uncle Fred was just enough of a politician to survive in the world of academia. (Remember Henry Kissinger’s comment: “University politics make me long for the simplicity of the Middle East.”) …..

He was pretty interesting to watch in faculty meetings. He’d sit and listen for a time, while the various perspectives on the trivial issues of the day were aired.  Then he’d clear his throat, an utterly characteristic gesture, a sort of announcement of pronouncements to come, and as the room fell silent (they knew what was coming), in a very few incisive sentences he’d explain what was wrong with all previous statements, all the while appearing to compliment the wisdom of those who’d made them.  Besides singing, this rhetorical tactic was the other thing he failed to teach me.  Not for lack of trying.   But for me, it was like a person with a club foot watching a ballerina on a high wire.   If I was fast, sometimes I could knock him off the wire, but I could never do the dance.  I saw him literally end a few faculty meetings, working without a net, with no one having anything much left to say.

(I’ve ended a few faculty meetings in my time, too, but somehow it isn’t the same when the paramedics have to come and save people who’ve slit their wrists.)

My Uncle Fred was a man of words, who seemed often to be searching for the exactly right phrasing to say what he meant.  He clearly believed that how a thing was said was important.  (He once referred to me as “a man of words,” but I think he had something else in mind.)  He loved clarity, and concision.

At least all the pain of the recent meeting led to a good outcome.   Would that it were always so.

The ancient Chines curse should be rewritten: “May you attend really, really interesting faculty meetings.”

Are Evangelical Churches Drifting Left?

Did you wake up one Sunday morning and finally realize that you could no longer support or attend a church that has gradually embraced an anti-American, anti-Capitalistic gospel in the name of Christ? Did it suddenly dawn upon you that the ever-present term “social justice” is merely a code word for a Marxist view of redistributive justice wrapped in a thinly disguised Christian veneer? Have you visited church after church after church only to discover that something decidedly unchristian has crept into the gospel teachings replacing, by redefinition, all that has been sacred to Christianity for centuries?

We live in the Age of Heresy and what we have to fear is not the old cults that Christians have traditionally warned against for years. What we have to fear today is the steady drift to the political left that has distorted our many venerable institutions and well-known Christian denominations.

Today 100,000 local congregations and 45 million Christians are supporting leftist goals yet most of the members are still blissfully unaware.

Read it all.

Those nasty, discriminatory Israeli checkpoints are in the news again.  How dare Israelis protect themselves?

Border Guard forces arrest Palestinian carrying pipe bombs

A 20-year-old Palestinian man was arrested Wednesday at the Qalandiya checkpoint after he was caught carrying six improvised pipe bombs.

The young man arrived at the north Jerusalem checkpoint at around 3 pm. He aroused the suspicion of Border Guard forces stationed there that upon a search of his possessions found six small pipe bombs, and proceeded to arrest him. A sapper was called in to dismantle the devices.

Earlier this month a video documenting a stabbing attack at the Qalandiya checkpoint on October 25 was posted online on the Youtube video sharing website. A female terrorist in her 20s pulled out a knife she had been hiding in her clothes and stabbed one of the security guards at the checkpoint in his lower abdomen.

The two-minute video shows the guards checking the woman’s items in an x-ray machine. When they shift their gaze from her for a moment, she seizes the opportunity to quickly pull out a knife and attack.

A Magen David Adom paramedic told Ynet on the day of the incident, “The guard was lying on the ground with a stab wound to his lower abdomen, and the young female terrorist was apprehended. The guard was in great pain; he was in a state of shock.”

You hear an awful lot about “sustainability” these days, the notion that we don’t dare use anything until we’re certain we can replace it. This bit of leftist piety is intellectually and scientifically vacuous, of course, not least because of the laws of thermodynamics, one of which makes it clear that you ALWAYS waste energy in a process of resource consumption, so that it’s literally impossible to have a “zero footprint.”  It’s especially laughable for anyone living in the first world to make such a claim.  It is literally impossible to live in an advanced society and not benefit from the expenditures of others that produce carbon emissions from which you benefit.

It’s a little bit like claiming to be a pacifist, but accepting police, prisons, etc., because you really can’t live in a society without them…  or at least you wouldn’t want to.

Perhaps if you walked naked into the wilderness somewhere in the American west, without any modern device or accoutrement, and then found a way to survive using only what you could find and make….  but I’m guessing your survival is soon going to depend on fire, and there goes the carbon footprint.  Too bad.  It’s just so unfair when you know you want to do the right thing, but nature just won’t cooperate.

Maybe you could have a zero footprint if you just died, but someone will doubtless waste some energy dealing with your corpse.

The laws of thermodynamics aren’t the only issue, though.  There are also some laws of economics to consider, as explained in Sustainability: An Assault on Economics, which after a thorough explanation of the economic foolishness involved, ends this way:

Is the Sustainability Crusade Sustainable?

How long will sustainists be able to beat their drum, simultaneously trumpeting their greener-than-thou self-image and attempting, with varying degrees of coercion, to make the rest of us act “sustainable” too? With the global warming scare losing credibility by the day, the likelihood of sustainists being able to claim even a moral victory is fading.[4] Barring the earth melting down from a little bit of smoke, I’m not too worried about sustainists having much of a long-run impact.

Hardcore sustainists are asking for a radically disruptive change from the natural order of the free-market economy. They’re asking us to forego wealth and embrace privation in the name of their cause.[5] Although citizens of the Western democracies have seemingly become easy marks for anything green, we will only go so far toward saving the planet, especially when it becomes apparent that sustainability requires a march toward poverty and a deeply regimented and regulated society (and that the planet’s not really in peril, after all).

Also, and perhaps more importantly, people in developing countries will be increasingly turned off by the sustainists’ demands for sacrifice. Having just arrived at the high living standards that long-term capitalist development yields, my sense is that they will turn a cold shoulder to the idea of ratcheting down their development.

The current resurgence of the classical-liberal tradition in economics will also reduce the appeal of sustainability. The idea of imposed or centrally planned sustainability will crumble under the realization that the spontaneous order wrought by the invisible hand of the free-market price system is amazingly sustainable in and of itself. Add to the mix the hardships of the current recession, and it won’t be long before enough people, even sustainist crusaders, come crawling back, box of chocolates in hand, to the free-market economy.

The sustainists are the modern Luddites.  I invite each and every one of them to put their carbon credits where their mouth is and take up residence on a tropical island with fruit trees, one so temperate that they never need a fire, never have to cook food, never have to plant food, and never need to waste innocent plant life by making clothing from it.   They can just live off the bounty of nature, about like a chimp with an extra big brain (what a waste).

Of course, when the first tsunami hits and decimates their tropical paradise, I expect them to welcome the U.S. Navy’s rescue services with open arms, even though our noble seamen arrive in a cloud of diesel smoke and gamma radiation from nuclear power propulsion, grilling steaks on the deck for the rescued, providing them with oil-derived synthetic clothing to keep them warm in the unseasonable weather, and giving them helicopter rides to civilization, where they can go on the show that was formerly known as Oprah! and flog the book they’ve just written about their harrowing encounter with the implacable forces of nature, just before the book tour begins with a whirlwind of commercial flights from city to city for book signings at stores staying open late with electric lighting just to accomdate the crowds, who will have consumed enormous quantities of food from the vendors in the area while they waited in line, and dropped the trash all over the place.