harmonicminer

Visualizing a Trillion: Just How Big That Number Is?

Courtesy the credit crisis and big bailout packages, the figure “trillion” has suddenly become part of our everyday conversations. One trillion dollars, or 1 followed by 12 zeros, is lots of money but have you ever tried visualizing how big that number actually is?

Go to the link for pictures.

Yoni the Blogger

Yemeni court fines man $250,000 for fatal shooting of local Jew

Details at the link.  So, the new version of the insanity defense in Islamic countries is “mentally incompetent” but rich enough to pay $250,000.

Just have to wonder, would a mentally incompetent Jew who killed a Muslim in Yemen be allowed to just pay a fine and walk away?

Learning how to pray? Relearning how to pray?

Sometimes we just don’t know how, or where to start, especially if we feel ourselves to be in a “spiritual dry spell.” You might try Praying Through The Psalms.  They are sometimes brutally honest cries of the heart, from one of God’s favorite very-imperfect people.

Or you might try this.

The evangelical tradition of “improvisatory prayer” has much to recommend it.  But it’s also a box that can capture the spirit by limiting it to one’s own ability to think in words, spontaneously.  God hears our prayers, verbal and non-verbal…  and I think that praying beautifully written and inspired prayers from others has the ability, oddly, to liberate our own non-verbal prayers, as we give our assent and emotional force to the words of someone else.  Sometimes, when the mind has something worthwhile to chew on, the heart is freed.

Jesus seems to have thought this was a pretty good idea, too.

Pajamas Media » Jew-Hatred Is All Too Real in the West   Much more at the link.

On February 21, 130 delegates from 40 countries took part in a British government-backed conference of the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA). On February 22 this coalition, also known as the London Conference on Combating Antisemitism, convened by a group whose majority was non-Jewish, issued a statement acknowledging that the scourge was at its highest level in recent memory.

And in answer to the question posed in the title of this post: because “justice week” everywhere is an exercise of the Left, and the Left can’t be bothered to say much about anti-Semitism, because then someone might think they support Israel.

Here’s a simple little experiment.  Do a google search for these terms: “social justice” (put it in quotes like this), university, and anti-Semitism. Your search entry should look like this:

     “social justice” university anti-Semitism

Compare the kinds of hits you get with this search string:

     “social justice” university racism

or just

     “social justice” university

I think the message is pretty clear that, to university planners of “justice” programs, anti-Semitism isn’t even an afterthought.

Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann on the Sebelius Nomination | Moral Accountability

The appointment of Governor Sebelius as the Secretary of Health and Human Services concerns me on many levels. With her history of support for legalized abortion and embryonic stem cell research, it is troubling the important influence that she will have on shaping health care policies for our nation.

I am also concerned personally for Governor Sebelius. Her appointment as Health and Human Services Secretary places her in a position where, unless she is prepared to reverse her own long held positions, will involve her with the development and implementation of policies that will only deepen her cooperation with the destruction of innocent human life.

I am also concerned that the appointment of Governor Sebelius places another Catholic supporting legalized abortion in a prominent national position. It saddens me that so many Catholic politicians, to gain political advancement have chosen to compromise their Catholic faith by their failure to defend the most fundamental of all human rights – the right to life.

The protection of conscience rights for individuals and institutions is another extremely important issue. If efforts are successful in having abortion included amongst “basic health care services,” then it is entirely possible that doctors, nurses and health care institutions will be compelled to cooperate in the provision of abortion. Advocates for the so called “right to abortion” would love to see Catholic hospitals faced with the choice to either cooperate in providing abortions or close.

In many important areas Governor Sebelius embraces Catholic social teaching. She has advocated for more affordable housing for the poor, she has worked to expand access to health care for economically disadvantaged children, and she has supported incentives encouraging adoption. Still, for the reasons stated above, her appointment is ill advised.

Charles Krauthammer : Obama’s ‘Big Bang’ Agenda – Townhall.com Key graphs below, but all worth reading.

At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan’s Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.

The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.

And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.

What’s going on? “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. “This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.”

Things. Now we know what they are. The markets’ recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions — the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic — for enacting his “Big Bang” agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.

Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy — worthy and weighty as they may be — are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.

On Afghanistan

The mainstream media has finally fully caught up to where we [Michael Yon] were in 2006.

Michael Yon is probably the single best source for actual information, in context, about the Afghanistan/Pakistan situation.

At the link, coverage from Yon’s reporting in 2006 that sounds like the kind of stuff the major media are finally getting around to reporting this year.

UN may make ban on criticizing Islam mandatory, making it a criminal offense in the U.S.

Think it can’t happen here?  Think again.

To Hell with Niceness

Billy Graham, move over, you’ve been replaced.