Do you see a pattern? J.J. Abrams seems to think that a soft-reboot [caution, the review linked has extreme language and sexual crudeness at the end of the review] with a bigger “enemy weapon” is scarier… but merely raises the incredulous nature of originality involved in his movie making.
Dr. Mark Armitage explains his work well by defending against misunderstandings (intentional or unintentional). More on his find that eventially got him fired from CSUN can be found here.
In this first video, Dr. Mark Armitage corrects Dr. Hugh Ross. You may notice his disdain for Hugh Ross, but he explains why at the end of the video. Here is Dr. Armitage’s description of the upload:
In this second video, Dr. Armitage corrects some of the thinking found in the popular movie, Jurassic World’s promotional video. Here is Dr. Armitage’s description of his upload:
The common sense rejoinder would be, “wait, what!?” Richard Dawkins defined his faith further:
A thorough rebuttal to Cenk Uygur’s (host of “TYT” The Young Turks) anti-Second Amendment video. Including facts and sources. You’re welcome!
Turkish Test Pilot Push a Pakistani F-16B to 15,000ft in just 11 seconds
Health and religious pride excluded… only gay pride allowed. (Hat-Tip to Gospel for Life) If you are a medical doctor, do not say the following… as true as it may be:
By the way… if you are “up-in-the-air,” or undecided on if the homosexual lifestyle has a “net” negative effect (especially for gay males), you may want to take some time and read my post on the matter:
Here is a short video and LINK to Mass Resistance’s story:
World Magazine has this to say about the situation:
HIV/AIDS is the most politicized disease of the modern era. From the start of the epidemic, political correctness dampened mobilization against it. When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) first published its report on the strange disease on June 5, 1981, staffers wrangled over how to note the homosexual aspect of the pandemic: Would mentioning that gay men were predominantly affected offend the gay community? Would it inflame and legitimize “homophobes”? Many skittish doctors and leaders tiptoed around telling the gay community to stop having reckless sex.
Medicine and public health reflect political and social climates. The American Medical Association (AMA)—the largest association of physicians and medical students in the United States—has at least 35 LGBT-related policies, several with little or nothing to do with medical practice. One AMA policy calls the denial of same-sex marriage “discriminatory” and “harmful.” Another supports child adoption by same-sex partners. Another suggests “improving” the curriculum in medical schools to portray sexual history in a “nonjudgmental” and “sensitive” manner.
Such LGBT-affirming narrative has infiltrated many medical institutions so deeply that Christian medical professionals find it tough to speak out, even from a medical standpoint.
[….]
Paul Church is another such doctor who’s facing hostility for voicing his medical and moral convictions. As an urologist working in Boston for almost 30 years, Church has had dozens of patients who self-identify as LGBT. Over the years, Church observed a pattern with his gay patients: A majority also suffered from a gamut of serious diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, parasitic infections, hepatitis, and anal cancer.
Church’s patients reflect well-documented, nationwide statistics: Individuals who practice homosexual behaviors face higher risks of various diseases and sexually transmitted infections. Research also shows the LGBT community has higher instances of mental issues, such as depression, suicide, substance abuse, and eating disorders.
So when the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), one of the nation’s top health facilities and a major teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School, started actively promoting the LGBT movement, Church became alarmed. As a member of the BIDMC staff and Harvard Medical School faculty, he voiced his opposition by citing medical, religious, and moral concerns.
[….]
That struck him as irresponsible healthcare, Church told me: “The hospital is not Home Depot or Starbucks. In medicine, we have a higher commitment and mission to promote healthy lifestyles and behaviors, but promoting homosexuality is contrary to that mission.”
Video description:
First time really hearing Dan. His blog is here.
I loved his style/verve. I uploaded the second half of the program, after he got done talking about Friedmans four ways to spend money (below right).
Great stuff. Make sure to follow him on Twitter.
For more clear thinking like this from Mark “the Great One” Levin… I invite you to visit:
The animated portion of Bernie Sanders came from Sam Seder, “Bernie Sanders Through the Eyes of Your Crazy Uncle” (https://youtu.be/ZWyzGtv5jSQ) ~ Sam Seders site is here: http://majority.fm/
Here is my intro to this story via my Facebook page for this site (added to just a tad):
A recent story has caught the attention of many in mainstream culture… but is starting to filter down to the myopic persons (like myself). It is this, that eve was not created from a rib ~ (really, something to do with Adams side — probably involving DNA, like adult stem-cells or something… bottom line is though, WE DON’T KNOW) ~ but from Adams penis bone (or, “baculum”).
I didn’t stutter. I said, Adams penis. While I can only imaging the furor and angry clambering across the gender feminist sub-culture (and smile inwardly at this writhing), I HAD to post on this topic.
“Enjoy.”
Another tidbit I learned from cruising the internet about this story is that an extinct walrus is known to have a 22-inch bacula. (The picture to the above/right is of a four-foot walrus bacula)
Keep dreaming boys!
When I first saw the below story… I thought the professor HAD to be a lib! Why? Because progressives have a tendency to sexualize e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g ~ which is why sex-education starts in kindergarten now. Anyhew, here is the “bulk” of the story via The Blaze:
A professor of the Bible in California has posed the theory that the Adam and Eve narrative in the book of Genesis was mistranslated and that Eve was created not out of Adam’s rib, but his baculum, or penis bone.
Ziony Zevit, a professor of biblical literature and Northwest Semitic languages at American Jewish University in California, recently presented his argument in an article in Biblical Archaeology Review based both on what he believes to be an erroneous translation for the Hebrew word for “rib” and also on the unique anatomy of the human male, one of the few mammals lacking a baculum.
He also pointed to the fact that men and women have the same number of ribs and that men have an even number of ribs, suggesting none are missing….
Using the logic from the story I have read… Adam had two??? But I digress… apparently, literally. However… my amateur musings aside, here is the logic of professor Zevit:
The Hebrew is really just saying “from his side.” That is it. “a “rib” is just a cultural “guess” at what took place, but we really do not know.
So after hanging out at a friends house for his birthday, I mentioned that I think the professor mentioned in the story is liberal. [Plus, as a fan of Dennis Prager… I knew the odds were in my favor. See Prager’s “Explaining Jews, part V: Why are Jews liberal?“] So when I got home, I looked him up. This is his background:
Um… Berkeley… in the seventies?
Bam!
I read an interesting article on Professor Zevit’s piece that I think was helpful. The article is entitled “A Flaccid Interpretation of Eden,” and is by Joseph Ryan Kelly. A very informative piece, I suggest reading it in its entirety.
…Novel interpretations like this one occur from time to time throughout Zevit’s re-reading of the second, third, and fourth chapters of Genesis. He maintains that Eden was a real location in the Armenian highlands somewhere west of Lake Van (Eastern Turkey), the most northern corner of the inhabited world known to ancient Israelites. Adam was not created from dust, light in color, dry, and loosely compacted. God formed him from apar, a “clod” which, like humans, is rich in constitution and ruddy in complexion. Following the transgression of the divine command — or the “oblique instruction,” as Zevit prefers for the grammatical informality of the command — God’s curses transform neither the bodies of the individuals involved nor their environment. Rather, as performative speech acts, they transform somewhat negatively how the serpent, “Hawwa” (Zevit refers to Eve by her Hebrew name), and Adam perceive an element of their lives.
Is Zevit just out to present novel, if philologically and historically sound, interpretations of the Garden of Eden? I asked myself this question with increasing frequency as I found it more and more difficult to hold together in my mind’s eye the picture of Eden Zevit was painting. What themes tie together a far northern location for Eden, creation out of clod, ossifical castration, and curses functioning as performative speech acts? This cacophony of novel (and sometimes not-so-novel) interpretations does not resolve harmoniously — at least not into the familiar narrative of sin and death that characterizes Western culture’s tradition of a fall. Zevit’s narrative becomes clear only near the end of the book. Forget sin and death; this is a story about human nature, the acquisition of knowledge, and ethical self-awareness. A story not about loss, but gain. Not a decline, but a rise.
It is unfortunate that Zevit’s chosen path of discovering what really happened in the Garden of Eden elides other interpretive paths explored in Western culture. He focuses exclusively on philology and historical criticism as tools of discovery, but during the Enlightenment a number of philosophers could not regard as purely sinful humankind’s acquisition of knowledge. They too cast aside notions of a fall. Immanuel Kant, for example, saw humankind’s pursuit as a positive step for the development of humankind, even if human actions introduced evil into the world. The first human couple discovers the freedom that constitutes the foundation of human morality. This freedom and capacity for moral discernment is fundamental to Kant’s deontological moral philosophy centered on the categorical imperative.
Philosophers of the twentieth century continued to acknowledge the merits and necessity of human freedom, although they were less enthusiastic about its implications. The circumstances of their own day — world wars and the threat of mutually assured destruction — made it increasingly difficult to remain generally optimistic about human freedom. What they discover in the Garden of Eden is not the origins of sin but an explanation of human sinfulness. The fall is less an experience in history and more the culmination of the creation of humankind.
Acknowledging that “knowledge is not foolproof,” Zevit’s interpretation otherwise lacks the sobering dimensions of this twentieth century philosophical interpretation. The Garden story is a “positive and optimistic one.” Immediately following the events in the Garden, human knowledge leads to the development of urban centers, pastoral nomadism, musical instruments, forged metal tools, and manufactured materials. Where other scholars tend to see an embedded critique of Mesopotamian civilization, Zevit sees only the human capacity to create knowledge. These implicit elements of critique aside, the flood and the confusion of languages at Babel explicitly reveal a darker side of human freedom. Readers of the biblical text, like philosophers of the twentieth century, are justified in recognizing that human freedom has its tragic consequences.
Has Zevit pulled back the curtain on these early chapters of Genesis? While his use of philology and historical criticism forces us to reconsider interpretations often taken for granted, his approach does not produce confident conclusions. Does God really create Hawwa, Eve, out of Adam’s penile bone? Genesis 2:21 describes God removing one ofAdam’s ribs or ṣelaot. To incorporate this detail into his interpretation, Zevit translates the term ṣela as “lateral bone.” Imagining the baculum as belonging to a category of lateral bones strikes me as a specious argument. But perhaps more pressing is the way this proposed etiology differs from other etiologies involving humans in the Hebrew Bible. Elsewhere, biblical texts use past events to explain cultural institutions or customs.
[…..]
What Zevit is proposing is altogether different. By removing Adam’s baculum and closing up the flesh, God forever changes physical features of the male anatomy. The eighteenth century French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck thought organisms could transmit to their offspring characteristics they acquire during their lifetime. However interesting Zevit’s Lamarckian interpretation may be, it seems atypical among biblical etiologies, if not anachronistic. Do other etiologies in the Bible betray a belief in the inheritance of acquired traits? One does not readily come to mind. Moreover, it seems counterintuitive that Israelites would have believed one could inherit acquired characteristics given the regularity with which they circumcised male penises. Though not a coup de grâce, this thought raises a pressing question about an already tenuous interpretation.
The challenge of interpreting enigmatic details like this one exemplifies the problem inherent in trusting that the tools of our academic disciplines will guide us to some supposed real meaning of the biblical text. Claims about the authentic meaning of any biblical text function best as a marketing strategy — a means of attracting a broad customer base for discussions about textual and sometimes historical interpretation that may otherwise fail to produce intrigue among the general public.
I appreciate that Zevit has produced a book discouraging scholars and the general public from taking for granted the interpretation of this classic biblical text. However, I question the value of perpetuating the misconception that the object of interpretation is to discover the one real meaning of a text. If a text contained only one truly authentic meaning, it seems reasonable to assume such interpretations would have long since been realized. That scholars like Zevit continue to use the tools of their disciplines to construct different plausible historical interpretations of biblical texts should indicate not the inadequacy of their tools, but rather the inadequacy of such a limited understanding of textual meaning. Despite the interesting insights Zevit derives from his imaginative interpretation of Genesis 2-3 — or rather because of them — we are no closer to discovering what really happened in the Garden of Eden.
BTW, “baculum” (Latin) is part of a fallacy in logic:
Argumentum ad baculum is a fallacy in argumentation that is based on an appeal to force. For example, “You better believe what I say because if you don’t, I will beat you up.”
(See more at Twitchy!) Jihad Watch has this:
At the time the fire was set, it garnered much attention as a “hate crime”: “The Houston chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations called on authorities to investigate a possible bias motive in the case, citing what it called a ‘recent spike in hate incidents targeting mosques nationwide.’” But it turns out to have been yet another fake hate crime. Islamic supremacist groups such as the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) want and need hate crimes against Muslims, because they’re the currency they use to buy power and influence in our victimhood-oriented society, and to deflect attention away from jihad terror and onto Muslims as putative victims. Hamas-linked CAIR, designated a terror organization by the United Arab Emirates, and other Muslims have on many occasions not hesitated to stoop even to fabricating “hate crimes,” including attacks on mosques. Most notably, in February, a New Jersey Muslim was found guilty of murder that he tried to portray as an “Islamophobic” attack, and in 2014 in California, a Muslim was found guilty of killing his wife, after first blaming her murder on “Islamophobia.”
Moonbattery adds this to the “Hate Hoax List”
…While the motive is not known, this crime has all the hallmarks of a hate hoax. Had Moore not been caught, this story would have caught fire in the media, amid intimidating shrieks of Islamophobia. Let’s add him to the Hate Hoax List.
And Creeping Sharia:
The media and terror-linked Muslim groups like CAIR were quick to paint the Christmas Day torching of a Houston mosque as an example of Islamo-faux-bia, a hate-crime and even suggested Donald Trump’s America-first policies were to blame.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, a nearby banquet hall provided a place for the Muslims to pray on Christmas and until their mosque is repaired.
Now that a devout Muslim has been charged with arson in the mosque fire you’ll hear crickets. Another in a growing list of mosque attacks by Muslims for which Muslims and the media immediately and falsely blame Americans.
Atheists reject evidence as illusory…
Why?
Because they “have to.”
I put these two ideas from separate fields of study together. Why I didn’t before is a mystery… but like with any field of study, you can go over the same topic again-and-again — you continue to learn. The first example come from biology and the natural sciences. Here are three examples of the beginning of my thinking:
The important point here is that the Judeo-Christian [theistic] view would posit that we (and nature) is designed, and would notice it in ourselves and in nature. The atheist MUST reject design as an illusion because their worldview demands that chance cobbled together what we see… so dumb luck needs to be seen as opposed to design.
Steven Pinker summation:
Pinker’s newer book, The Blank Slate, revised his views on free will, in that he no longer thinks it’s a necessary fiction. The chapter on “The Fear of Determinism” takes an explicitly deterministic stance, and usefully demonstrates the absurdity of contra-causal free will and why we shouldn’t worry about being fully caused creatures. However, Pinker remains conservative in not drawing any conclusions about how not having free will might affect our attitudes towards punishment, credit, and blame,; that is, he doesn’t explore the implications of determinism for ethical theory. This, despite the fact that in How the Mind Works he claimed that “ethical theory requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused” … We await further progress by Pinker. (Via Naturlism)
Daniel Dennett:
Dennett worries that there is good evidence that promulgating the idea that free will is an illusion undermines just that sense of responsibility many scientists and philosophers are worried about losing. Critics maintain that Dennett’s kind of free will, with its modest idea of “enough” responsibility, autonomy and control, is not really enough after all.
[….]
“It’s important because of the longstanding tradition that free will is a prerequisite for moral responsibility,” he says. “Our system of law and order, of punishment, and praise and blame, promise keeping, promise making, the law of contracts, criminal law – all of this depends on one notion or another of free will. And then you have neuroscientists, physicists and philosophers saying that ‘science has shown us that free will is an illusion’ and then not shrinking from the implication that our systems of law are built on foundations of sand.” (Via The Guardian)
Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Kruass, Christopher Hitchens:
Sam Harris:
Stephen Hawkings:
One of the most intriguing aspects mentioned by Ravi Zacharias of a lecture he attended entitled “Determinism – Is Man a Slave or the Master of His Fate,” given by Stephen Hawking, who is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, Isaac Newton’s chair, was this admission by Dr. Hawking’s, was Hawking’s admission that if “we are the random products of chance, and hence, not free, or whether God had designed these laws within which we are free.”[1] In other words, do we have the ability to make choices, or do we simply follow a chemical reaction induced by millions of mutational collisions of free atoms? Michael Polyni mentions that this “reduction of the world to its atomic elements acting blindly in terms of equilibrations of forces,” a belief that has prevailed “since the birth of modern science, has made any sort of teleological view of the cosmos seem unscientific…. [to] the contemporary mind.”[2]
[1] Ravi Zacharias, The Real Face of Atheism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2004), 118, 119.
[2] Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago, IL: Chicago university Press, 1977), 162.
The bottom line is that free-will, self, freedom to be above and distinguish between actions, is all an illusion.
Why?
BECUASE if free-will existed… then this would be an argument f-o-r theism. F-o-r God’s existence. Like the founding director of NASA’s Goddard Institutes, Robert Jastrow’s description in his book of a disturbing reaction among his colleagues to the big-bang theory—irritation and anger.
Why, he asked, would scientists, who are supposed to pursue truth and not have an emotional investment in any evidence, be angered by the big-bang theory?
They had an aversion to the Big-Bang.
Because it argued F-O-R theism. F-O-R God’s existence.
Jastrow noted that many scientists do not want to acknowledge anything that may even suggest the existence of God. The big-bang theory, by positing a beginning of the universe, suggests a creator and therefore annoys many astronomers.
This anti-religious bias is hardly confined to astronomers.
As we see, the above persons in rejecting evidence of design in nature and consciousness, are doing so based on an aversion to “God evidence.” Another well-known philosopher John Searle notes this illusion as well:
All these people are misusing science and remaking it into “scientism.” AND, they are “not allowing a divine foot in the door,” as Dinesh D’Souza notes:
Scientism, materialism, empiricism, existentialism, naturalism, and humanism – whatever you want to call it… it is still a metaphysical position as it assumes or presumes certain things about the entire universe. D’Souza points this a priori commitment out:
Naturalism and materialism are not scientific conclusions; rather, they are scientific premises. They are not discovered in nature but imposed upon nature. In short, they are articles of faith. Here is Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin: “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have [an] a priori commitment… a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”
Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great about Christianity (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2007), 161 (emphasis added).
“Minds fit into an theistic world, not an atheistic one”
What are intentional states of consciousness? Are states of consciousness plausible on either a theistic or atheistic worldview? This clip shows the exchange between Dr William Lane Craig and Dr Alex Rosenberg on intentional states of consciousness in the world. On February 1st, 2013 at Purdue University, Dr Craig participated in a debate with Dr Rosenberg on the topic, “Is Faith In God Reasonable?” Over 5,000 people watched the event on the Purdue University campus along with tens of thousands streaming it live online from around the world.
For more on this, see my “quotefest” here: Evolution Cannot Account for: Logic, Reasoning, Love, Truth, or Justice
Breitbart has a bang-up article talking about quantitative easing and the affect of government “spreadsheet ‘fixing'” on the middle-class:
…Even left-wingers agree, uncomfortably, that “income inequality” got much worse under Obama, as the rich got richer, while the poor… didn’t. Left-wing analysts will tie themselves in knots trying to shift blame away from Obama and his policies for this state of affairs, with arguments that boil down to “this proves we need even more central planning and socialism to make everybody equal!”
Much of the debate over the maybe-recovery concerns the manipulation of government reports: the sense our vast bureaucracy is cooking the books to make the economy look more robust than it really is. A persistent complaint concerns the way inflation has been hidden, or almost redefined out of existence. (Ed Butowsky discussed this bureaucratic sleight-of-hand on Breitbart News Radio in November, noting that the government began concealing consumer inflation decades ago with some eye-popping formula changes.)
Now comes a fascinating article from Wolf Richter at Business Insider, which brings inflation games, currency manipulation, and near-zero interest rates together, into a unified field theory of how very low nominal consumer inflation has concealed skyrocketing asset inflation… leaving middle-class and low-income workers stuck with flat wages and debt slavery.
Governments across the industrialized world made themselves look better by tinkering with the money supply, lowering the bar for macro-economic success… and sold the Little Guy shackles of debt, at discount prices.
Richter’s key insight is that quantitative easing (QE, or “central banks printing lots of money” in layman’s terms) and near-zero interest rates for loans caused very little consumer inflation, with a few notable examples, so we’ve been treated to plenty of headlines about how inflation is totally under control… but QE caused “rampant asset price inflation, with stocks, bonds, real estate, classic cars, art … all skyrocketing over the years.”
In other words, the things rich people buy and trade have inflated, but most of life’s necessities and modest luxuries have not. That’s because, as Richter puts it: “The money never went to consumers in the form of wages. They would have spent most of it, thus driving up demand that could have created some inflationary pressures in consumer prices. But they never got this money.”
Unfortunately, because QE funneled money into big corporate and investor interests, wages flattened or declined, while household spending power for the poor and middle class declined. Low interest rates made it easy for them to borrow money to make up for lost purchasing power, especially for a few big-ticket purchases that have inflated enormously over the years – particularly health care and higher education. President Obama’s mind-boggling expenditures on both of those goods have done absolutely nothing to slow their inflation – on the contrary, ObamaCare’s meddling with student loans caused that debt bubble to explode.
Richter’s sobering diagnosis of what the Federal Reserve has done to workers:
The Fed keeps a hawk’s eye on wages, especially in the lower 80% of the workers. Its goal is to provide cheap labor to corporate America. And when wage inflation ticks up, the Fed can get quite radical about rate increases.
But because cheap labor makes for bad consumers, the Fed is trying to make cheap debt available to them, turning them into debt slaves, problem solved, for the moment.
So this is one lesson we learned: QE channeled to financial and corporate entities causes asset price inflation, not consumer price inflation. And it tends to exacerbate wage deflation at the lower 80% of households.
One of the exceptions is rent. When residential property prices soar, rents tend to follow. And rents have increased sharply in many cities. But unlike stocks, people have to live in these units, and when rents move beyond their reach, all kinds of things happen, including property price crashes.
That sounds like a far more clear and terrible example of “trickle-down economics” than anything liberals have attempted to slander with the term. Obama built on years of monetary manipulation to create an economy where the government is printing dollars and stuffing them in the pockets of big corporations and wealthy investors, vainly hoping they would invest the money in a way that created jobs, while the media cheerfully pumped out politically-useful stories about a roaring stock market….
(Wall Street Journal) The recapture of Ramadi marks a major turnaround for Iraq’s U.S.-trained military, representing its first success against Islamic State as a mostly independent force.
Iraqi forces claimed victory Monday in the fight for the capital of Anbar province, a success that political leaders hope to replicate in future operations against the insurgents.
To signify their victory, Iraqi soldiers raised the national flag over the government compound in the center of the city which had been the last bastion of an estimated 200 Islamic State fighters, who fled on Sunday. Iraqi security officials said they retreated to the eastern part of the city, which Islamic State still largely controls, according to Iraqi security officials….