Marion Morrison

John Wayne FTW.

Someone Issued a Bible Re-Written For Political Purpose

...and this is news?

All my life, I've noticed that "Christian Book Stores" that have maybe one full translation of the Bible in stock will have a Baskin' Robin's worth of KJVs with matching "Chicken Soup For the Soul"-- "For Women," "For Students," "For Mothers," "For Those in Mourning." Not even going to touch the various let's-change-the-gender-God-used versions.

The Anchoress covers the story much better than I can, mostly because I'm still over here going "Hi, Church of England? King James Version was written for them? Dude wanted to get out of a marriage and possibly get the power that comes as the head of a church? How does that not count?"
(Interesting history side-note here, not fact-checked.)

How is it news that religion is powerful, and folks will try to use it for their own ends? It's a bit odd that such openly, callously applied ideology is on the right end of the spectrum, but that has more to do with more of the right-end taking such things seriously than the left-end. (Something I expect to change if the Church in the US doesn't get better, but that's another rant-- well, two, with the "'independent' means I can be a Dem but I'm special and a free thinker, now fall directly into line with me" tangent....)

Mother Angelica Honored-

IRONDALE, AL, October 5, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Pope Benedict XVI has awarded EWTN foundress, Mother Mary Angelica, and Deacon Bill Steltemeier, Chairman of EWTN's Board of Governors, the Cross of Honor for distinguished service to the Church. The medal, officially known as "Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice" (literally "For the Church and the Pope"), is the highest honor that the Pope can bestow upon laity and religious.

Good for her! My grandmother-- VERY Protestant-- in the last years of her life took to watching EWTN. Towards the end, the Mass on that station was about her only contact with a church.

Every So Often

I will either
1) despair of the survival chances of humanity (at least in America) if we lose our computers, or
2) argue with someone about the amount of information we have in tradition sources-- baselines vary from "all computers are nuked," through "all libraries are nuked" to "somehow all books are just destroyed, OK?"

In situation 2, I usually draw on the stuff my folks' generation knows-- mom has a BS in animal husbandry and does leather working, dad blacksmiths as a hobby and just knows tons of survival stuff, both need zero reference stuff to raise animals, raise plants effectively (including rotation, crossbreeding, etc) and repair most anything well enough to get back to someplace that can fix it. I've got uncles who can make guns and ammunition, can find mines, tell you now to mine, smelt and such... all kinds of information, in short, is in leetle gray cells.

This trope gives me hope that there is an even bigger pool of information to be drawn from-- for example: Dwarf Fortress is probably the only game in existence for which a geology textbook is a good substitute for a strategy guide. The steps for creating alloys and certain types of glass are also 100% accurate, and most existing abstractions are temporary.

So He Asked The Great Pumpkin For a New Battleplan

From Coyote Blog

Two short quotes, one where he's quoting someone, one that's just me quoting him. The implied context is correct:

I too was not surprised by the members not endorsing an invitation. Nothing I heard had to do with your science on harvesting or your research on polar bears – it was the positions you’ve taken on global warming that brought opposition.

And:

If you are not familiar with Taylor’s positions that are alluded to, as I understand it they include: 1) The fact that most polar bear populations have been rising rather than falling over the last decades and 2) polar bears have survived interglacial periods in which we believe all sea ice disappeared.

'Nuff said.