How not to waste your life

The other hockey stick

It's official: it's a scientific fact.

All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

See: we only have about 200 years of measured-by-instrument temperature data, so we don't really know how the weather pattern of the planet works.

Here's what I mean by that: let's assume for a second that the naturalist view of cosmology is right and the Earth is 4+ billion years old, having been habitable for about 3+ billion years. To observe only 200 years worth of weather pattern data -- particularly temperature data -- is to observe only 0.00000666666666667% of all the possible data points during the 3 billion years of habitable planet.

To put that into perspective, there are 604,800 seconds in a week. If you blink your eye, that lasts about 0.4 seconds -- but 0.00000667% of a week is 0.0403 seconds. Our recorded observations of the planet's temperature are for less than a blink-of-an-eye's worth of total possible observations.

But that's not even the worst part. When we're talking about climate change, we're talking about measured changes in the range of 0.3 to 0.75 degrees -- and in the last 200 years, how much of that time has been spent measuring the temperature outside with thermometers which are accurate to a full degree?

So when the "science" data scribbles out a hockey stick, but now in what is apparently the wrong direction, let's not start hording canned food and bullets. It is not the end of the world -- it's just the end of another apocalytic hoax.

woops.

Can we get the Nobel prize back from Al Gore?

Can we at least put a carbon footprint on his double-wide butt?

Piper and Mantra

John Piper, John 1, and the Gospel, all of which plainly tackles the question of whether or not yoga is a Christian pursuit.

And you thought the Iron Man video was cool.

toys

I just ordered a pizza from dominos.com, and I can watch its progress from the web site.

Somehow, that feels like too much information.

And when their site told me that 100 acres of Pizza is eaten every day by the citizens of the United States, I wanted to call off my pizza. That's gross, dude.

the worst of all

OK: before I give you the link, you have to swear two things:

[1] You are completely and utterly forewarned that the language on the other end is ROUGH. Bar room, street-ugly, offends-Mark-Driscoll rough.

[2] YOU WILL NOT DROP A COMMENT IN THE THREAD.

You swear? I'm serious: you can't click the link unless you take an oath to the above, and if you violate the oath you can't say I didn't warn you, and you can't blame me.

Ready? Pajiba reviews For the Bible Tells me so.

Now, listen: here's why I don't want you people commenting over there. It's my opinion that 99.95% of you will go over there and start defending the doctrinal issue that homosexuality is a sin. And let's be clear: I think homosexuality is a sin, OK? If any Pajiba readers come back this way and want to cuss me out for that, fine, but my opinion is that arguing about that in the context of Dustin Rowles' review is utterly pointless -- because there's a worse problem in that review which really isn't the reviewer's fault.

Here's what I'm thinking: I think Dustin's complaint that the people who beat his dad to a pulp for being a homosexual is the real apologetic problem -- because he's right about them.

See: if I say, "well, homosexuality is a sin, Dustin," what Mr. Rowles hears -- and I think he's listening just fine -- is the subtle hint of this outrageous lie: "he actually deserved what he got." I know none of you regular readers of this blog would actually mean that, but the ones who harnessed that conclusion up to the horse of my assertion are the ones who pounded his Dad's face in for being gay -- you know, God hates fags, boy, so I'm going to smash a coke bottle in your face.

Before you read any farther, get yourself a coke bottle and a metal mixing bowl. Turn the mixing bowl upside down and cover it with a folded towel. Now try to break the coke bottle on the covered mixing bowl, and when you succeed observe the damage done to the metal bowl, and consider what sort of lunatic would do that to someone's skull. That's what someone did to Dustin Rowles' dad, they said, because homosexuality is a sin.

So the problem in talking to Mr. Rowles now is not trying to convince him what the Bible says about (for example) homosexuality. The problem is convincing him that you don't want to bash his father's head in over it. That kind of ferocious evil is what Dustin Rowles associates with the moral affirmation "homosexuality is a sin". My suggestion is that helping him believe what you believe about homosexuality is frankly a stupid gambit. At best, you might get him to conceded that the Bible says such a thing, but because the people who did this to his dad allegedly believe the Bible, you can stick that Bible in the toilet and flush until your finger bleed.

What somebody needs to show Mr. Rowles' (and, apparently, many of the Pajiba readers) is that Jesus didn't come to make skinhead punks or redneck drunks out of his followers -- which is not a matter of tea-totalling and wearing nice suits. It's a matter of recognizing that those of us who are allegedly ambassadors of Christ bringing a message of reconciliation have to somehow overcome the wicked and misguided violence of people who have in the past, are today, and will in the future represent the Gospel as a threat rather than the strong tower which protects from all threats, and the safe haven from the storm. The Gospel is not the threat to believe or else I'll crush you like a bug: the Gospel is that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the worst of all. But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the worst one by far, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life.

Be in the Lord's house on the Lord's day with the Lord's people this weekend, and pray for Dustin Rowles' father, and for the men who made Jesus Christ a menace to him rather than a savior. Pray that by God's will and power, the true light which gives light to everyone will give them the right to become children of God, not born of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but born of God.

Not the Gospel

John Owen would say this sort of thing leads to sin because it's, well, it's cool.

Who asked him?

The angels wept

OK -- democratic primaries are not going well for the second round of the Clinton regime, as evidenced by three things:

[1] Hillary lost Wisconsin. Obama can have Hawaii -- Wisconsin is bread-and-butter Democratic sustenance.

[2] Hillary can't figure out if he's proud of her own daughter's employment or not. She has completely come unglued from traditional feminism in this, and I think it speaks to her state of rest and state of mind.

[3] Hillary can't figure out with whom she ought to be at war. Check this out:

"Both Senator Obama and I would make history," the New York senator said. "But only one of us is ready on day one to be commander in chief, ready to manage our economy, and ready to defeat the Republicans. Only one of us has spent 35 years being a doer, a fighter and a champion for those who need a voice."

Defeat the Republicans? Are they the enemy? Or are they the opposition party with whom one must deal with to get anything done while in office?

See: I'm all for robust rhetoric. I am in fact a practitioner of such a thing. What I am not in favor of is loose talk and stupid errors. For that gaff alone, Hillary ought to lose. That gaff on top of here lifetime history as a divider and a self-server tells me she needs to get out of politics and go teach at Wellesley or Yale or something.

On your radar

Get the two books listed in this CT article on your radar.

Not the first sentence

Read this, and then realize that while the first half isn't great, it's the last paragraph that sinks this ship.