Sunday, October 31, 2010

Worthy Is the Lamb--Hallelujah Chorus

Today in the church calendar used by my church is the Feast of Christ the King. In the spirit of bringing together old and new, liturgical year and Protestant music, I give you an unusual arrangement of Handel.

The Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir:



Collect for Christ the King:

Almighty and everlasting God, who hast exalted thy beloved Son to be King over all worlds, and hast willed in him to make all things new, mercifully grant that th kindreds of the earth which are wounded and dispersed by sin may speedily be knit together under his gracious sovereignty, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, world without end, Amen.

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Where am I?

In case my readers wonder where I am, I am taking most of my free time to draft a paper on the existence of the external world.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Another day, another tale of homosexual totalitarianism

Here's the story:

We're apparently nearing "National Coming Out Day"--as if normal people should have to know about such a "holiday." So a homosexual activist in Indianapolis makes contact with a bakery called Just Cookies and asks for rainbow-frosted cupcakes to celebrate this faux "holiday." The owner could have told him they don't sell cupcakes, just cookies, as the name of the business says (which is apparently true). But the foolish owner (for whom I have the greatest sympathy), not realizing that he lives in a homosexual totalitarian state and that his city has a "sexual orientation public accommodations law" instead tells him that he wouldn't want to make rainbow-frosted cupcakes to celebrate "National Coming Out Day" at his bakery because it's a family business, and he doesn't want his daughters exposed to that. Perhaps the poor guy was afraid the customer was going to ask for rainbow-frosted cookies if he told him they didn't sell cupcakes.

Uh-oh. This perfectly normal statement from this perfectly normal man has now gotten him in trouble. His business may lose its lease, as the mini-mall or whatever it is where he's located has of course a non-discrimination statement that includes sodomy as one of the things you're never supposed to say anything negative about in your business. And of course he may be fined. His only hope appears to be that the city doesn't seem super-eager to prosecute, but they're being pushed by the homosexual lobby. Such laws have been used to apply to situations like this before--e.g., the Elaine Hugonin case, in which she was required by non-discrimination law to use her photographic talents to celebrate lesbianism. If your business can in any way shape or form be used to make a statement, then it can be co-opted to make a pro-homosexual statement, and woe betide you if you resist.

Mike Adams gets on a wonderful rant here in which he asks whether a Jewish bakery owner should also be required to make baked goods with swastikas on them. No, no, Mike, you don't get it: Neo-nazis don't have power, and the homosexual activists do. So the answer to your question is, "No, of course not. What a terrible suggestion. How could you make such a comparison? As for the rainbows and the bakery, well, it's just obvious: If people don't want to create rainbow-frosted baked goods in honor of Homosexual Sodomy Pride Day, they just shouldn't own bakeries."

(Since we have commentators at W4 who would bore me, annoy me, and waste my time by saying pretty much exactly this, I put this entry here instead.)

But let this be a warning if you run a business: You thought you lived in a free country? Think again, and watch your words at all times. National Coming Out Day is a hallowed day in your community if your city has a sexual orientation clause in its public accommodations law. If you don't want to help celebrate it using the resources of your business, including your children who help you...well...good luck getting out of it. And say as little as possible when you refuse.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

"Down in the River to Pray"--Allan Hall




This a great song I just heard tonight. Very much of an early American folk sound. The musician is the pianist for the group Selah.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Explosive letter on global warming fraud and cover-up in the American Physical Society

Wow. Just wow. You've gotta read this. This is a resignation letter from Harold Lewis, Emeritus Professor at U of CA, Santa Barbara to the president of the American Physical Society. It's incredibly damning and shows the utter corruption of science over "global warming." Read the whole thing. As I read the letter, the ghost of Richard Feynman--who, whatever else one may say about him, was no tolerator of politically motivated baloney and the suppression of scientific inquiry--kept rising up before me. This is a letter Feynman would have appreciated and might very well have written, except his language might have been a little saltier than Lewis's. Here are just a few nuggets (my emphasis).

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
[snip]

About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate.

The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

Okay, now that your appetite is whetted, go read the rest.

By the way, I recently saw a commentator at another blog literally state that AGW is basic physics, demonstrated in the lab, because the radiative properties of carbon are well-understood and demonstrated in the lab. I replied that I exercise a gravitational pull on the planet Jupiter. This also is basic physics. But it does not mean that I am going to cause the planet Jupiter to crash into the earth and that something must be done to prevent this.

In other news, the EPA is considering shutting down the U.S. beef industry by means of draconian regulations on...dust.

Oh, I'll lift here out of obscurity a comment I made about environmentalists in a thread at W4:

Plenty of environmentalists dislike the developed world's economy, period, because they have a romantic love of what they view as a more "pristine" earth in which man doesn't do all the things that really are good for man. How can you reason with people who think that composting toilets are great because they're natural and need less fresh water to operate? Seriously, I think you're leaving out the substantial proportion of this movement that is plain, unvarnished, anti-development, anti-technology, and anti-human and would be just as happy if human flourishing were seriously damaged so long as the world and the human "environment" were left in the end dirtier, smellier, more dangerous, and more like things were before man ever came along. This, as an end in itself.

(And I wrote that before I heard about the EPA's insanity vis a vis the beef industry.)

HT on both the letter and the beef industry news: Secondhand Smoke

Sunday, October 03, 2010

Anti-Israel idiots get fisked

There's a great, great, ranting post on idiot clerics and their recent anathemas against Israel. Desmond Tutu comes in for a well-deserved fisking. One of Tutu's biggest foot-in-mouth moments appears to have been this, which he doubtless thought was profound:

[S]urely we must recognise that people caged in, starved and stripped of their essential material and political rights must resist their Pharaoh?

Joining in the party, the Anglican Primate of Wales, one Barry Morgan, says,

[O]ur own Prime Minister has described Gaza as a prison camp.

To which Midwest Conservative Journal replies,

Then your own Prime Minister is a blithering idiot. He might be anti-Semitic as well but let’s just stick with what we know for the time being.

Midwest Conservative also gives us this great line,

All we’re doing is saying that until Israel works out a “peace” deal with people who want kill every Jew they can and wipe Israel off the map and comes to terms with the fact that Jewish deaths really don’t bother us at all, we’re going to treat Israel as a pariah.

You get the picture. If you are pro-Israel, you'll love it. If not, you'll hate it. I think it's great. Go read the whole thing if you're on my side and give yourself something to smile about this Sunday. Here's that link again.

HT Romish Graffiti