How Come

South Africa's former Deputy President Jacob Zuma has apologized after offending the homosexual community. He was quoted as saying that same-sex marriages were "a disgrace to the nation and to God".
The homosexual lobby organisation Joint Working Group said “How can a narrow-minded person like this be expected to lead our nation?”

Speaking of narrow minded people.

The top lawyer at Hewlett Packard (HP) has resigned, ahead of a congressional hearing into its snooping on the phone records of executives and journalists. "Stepping down was a very hard decision for her, but by doing so she has put the interests of HP above her own and that is to be commended," HP chief executive Mark Hurd said in a statement. In her testimony to the committee, ousted Hewlett Packard (HP) chairwoman Patricia Dunn is set to deny she hired private investigators to carry out an internal inquiry into boardroom leaks.

How come some certain small minorities can lead whole countries around by the nose, discrediting elected by majority officials and burning up public money in court over private affairs ? Oh yes I remember, “there are no absolutes”. So how can there be such a thing as hate literature or “hate speech”.

I’m sooooo confused ! !

What a Waste

The European Union recently has issued a directive calling for biofuels to meet 5.75% of transportation fuel needs by 2010
The grain required to fill the petrol tank of a Range Rover with ethanol is sufficient to feed one person per year. Assuming the petrol tank is refilled every two weeks, the amount of grain required would feed a hungry African village for a year
Much of the fuel that Europeans use will be imported from Brazil, where the Amazon is being burned to plant more sugar and soybeans, and Southeast Asia, where oil palm plantations are destroying the rainforest habitat of orangutans and many other species. Species are dying for our driving
Food prices are already increasing. With just 10% of the world's sugar harvest being converted to ethanol, the price of sugar has doubled; the price of palm oil has increased 15% over the past year, with a further 25% gain expected next year.
How much oil does it take to make a plastic bottle?
Next we wonder how much food producing space is taken up with tobacco and alcohol related production.
Not to mention the amount of time effort and fertilizer that goes into lawns. Why not produce ethanol from grass clippings?

Money Well Spent

The Moon provides great opportunities for robotic and human space exploration, said a report by the National Academy of Sciences. the Moon is "priceless to planetary scientists" "Only by returning to the Moon to carry out new scientific exploration can we hope to close the gaps in understanding and learn the secrets that the Moon alone has kept for eons,"


In 1992, EU leaders agreed that MEPs should hold 12 "plenary" sessions every year in Strasbourg. More than 700 MEPs and also their aides and numerous documents have to travel the 454km (280 miles) from Brussels to Strasbourg.
One million people have signed an internet petition calling for an end to the European Parliament's monthly sessions in Strasbourg. The parliament, which does most of its work in Brussels, pays 200m euros (£135m) annually for what many MEPs condemn as a "travelling circus". "Strasbourg costs 200m euros a year - money which would be far better spent on investment in jobs or on more help for the developing world.

Reminds me of the time when some woman wasted a whole lot of precious ointment on Jesus according to those who were looking on.

It sure is hard to decide on the priorities. If the EU parliament does not need to go to Strasbourg why do we need to explore space? On the other hand ...

Why

It happened again. “People are asking how such an event could happen in a country that prides itself on tough gun control laws.” They suppose that they are sitting on high moral ground, by being so horrified that a person could walk into a college and start shooting But …
The rest of the world has lived with this for a long long time They never stop to consider, why was our country not like this and why is it now ? ? There are bad people, Crime has always been and will always be with us, but something has changed. Why? I have asked the question before and I ask it again, why did Iraq or Iran or Arabia not put a man on the moon 3000 years ago or 2 or 1000 years ago. Why did India not put a man on the moon millenniums ago? Or China? Why did it take The USA to do it, a country only a fraction of the age of those other countries? I dare to suggest that it is their religion. When was the last time that a country published far and wide “In God we Trust”? BUT We have left God. In leaving God we have left moral absolutes. In leaving moral absolutes we have left ourselves wide open to anything and everything including this.
We have traded freedom for tolerance (unless of course it is MY stuff or ME that gets destroyed and then we sue).

Beneath the Poppies

Why did they plant poppies in Flanders Fields? My WIF and I have this ongoing discussion with Puff at the focal point. The Magic Dragin. Henri said it himself, (Pappion) I never killed anyone but it was easy to frame me being who I was and where I was. If PP&M had not been the vanguard singing through all that blue haze Puff might never have been suspect. We also have a go around wonderland every once in a while with Alice. Would LC ever have been able to write such a story if he had not been dedicated to opium himself? 1819 John Keats, 1821 Thomas De Quincey, 1830 22,000 Lbs imported into Britian, 1837 E B Browning, 1874 first Heroin. Even Sherlock Holms himself when he did not have a case to work on drifted off into never never on opium’s magic carpet and the good doctor used to get after him about it.

“Scientists found that the human brain's neurons had specific receptor sites for opiate drugs: opium, heroin, codeine and morphine. But then there was the obvious question. Why would nature put in our brains a receptor for a plant? After all, human beings didn't evolve over millions of years eating opium or shooting heroin. The scientists reasoned there must be some other function for these receptors sites. They soon figured out that the active ingredient in all these opiates - morphine - had a chemical structure similar to endorphins, a class of chemicals present in the brain. Endorphins are feel-good chemicals naturally-manufactured in the brain when the body experiences pain or stress. They are called the natural opiates of the body.”

All this because Karl said “religion is the opiate of the people”. I often wonder how many people are asleep under the poppies. I think Karl was right for the most part. Certainly he never experienced a personal relationship with God and it seems that religion was just a pain killer for him. However it is too bad that he had to go on to something stronger. For how many Christians is God just there to dull the pain or for euphoria?

1753 Linnaeus, the father of botany, first classifies the poppy, Papaver somniferum-- 'sleep-inducing', in his book Genera Plantarum. We can “not sleep though poppies grow” because God is real, it is not opium it is the real thing, God is there ! ! ! Sure Jesus died but He rose again and that is where we are, Jesus said “live life !”.

Guilt Relief

This morning Tom on Music and Company referred to a study that has been done …
I found it at livescience.com
“Researchers discovered sins actually seem to urge people to clean themselves, a phenomenon they dubbed the ‘Macbeth effect’ after dramatized murderess Lady Macbeth, who vainly tried scrubbing her hands clean of imaginary blood in Shakespeare's famed Scottish play.
‘Out, out spot … All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand …’
Intriguingly, the researchers also found purifying the body then helped people absolve their consciences.
Past studies have shown there are definite overlaps in the brain in the regions stimulated by moral disgust and physical disgust.”
The researchers reported their findings in the Sept. 8 issue of the journal Science.
“My people have committed two evils; they have forsaken Me the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. For though you wash yourself with nitre, and take much soap, still your iniquity is marked before me”, says the Lord GOD. Jer 2:22
I haven’t heard anyone who in talking about stress relief refers to the problem of relieving guilt. We know that guilt does a lot of things to the mind; what of the body? See that wrinkle right there? That is the time that I stole a …
Guilt relief is simple, though not easy. Ask for forgiveness and effect restitution as nearly as possible. God forgives on the basis of death, if we acknowledge that we deserve to die for our sin, however small it was and accept Jesus’ death on our behalf God will forgive us. Christians forgive, should forgive, on the basis of God’s mercy toward us. People in general should forgive because we each know that we could do just the same or worse.

Long time away

It has been a loooooong time since I have published anything on my blog. I just went back to it and read the last entry, that remings me that I do have a blog. I do, I do !