—Marburg in Angola, Houston libraries crack down on hygiene, Desktop Fusion, NASA “cooks” return to flight data?, NY sues spyware distributor

Marburg in Angola
253 dead of another horrific hemmoragic fever that can be transmitted in, among other things, sweat and tears.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/africa/04/28/marburg.reut/index.html
Reminds me of the movie “Outbreak” with Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo, except that real people are dying, many of them children. It is probably just a matter of time before one of these tropical viruses becomes resistant, or more efficient.

I’m sorry, Sir or Madam, but you can’t smell in here….
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,154898,00.html
Fresh from subjecting the people of Houston, Texas to forced towing of highway breakdowns after six minutes, its mayor is cracking down on hygienic offenses in its libraries. Granted, this seems to be aimed at those who use the library restrooms to bathe and groom, and the benches for sleeping.

Desktop Fusion
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7654627/
This appears to be for real. Physicists at UCLA have managed to fuse deuterium in a kind of solid-state reactor. No break-even on energy production is to be expected from this technique, apparently. The result is scientifically groundbreaking, but practical applications would probably be limited to neutron generators.

Is NASA fudging statistics to make STS look safe?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7604783/
A report by James Oberg for MSNBC. First, the new NASA chief said that the Columbia Review Board would be countermanded, if needed, by agency decision-making for the return to flight. Now Hale, who somehow manged not to be fired for his role in overlooking the damage to Columbia which resulted in the catastrophic destruction of the spacecraft, assures everyone that nothing is being done to cover up risk factors in the return to flight decision. Surely no one could possibly fear that his job is at risk if he speaks up about safety issues.
Nothing that could possibly break off the External Tank can be nearly as big a risk factor to the Shuttles as the management continues to be.

NY Attorney General sues Intermix for spyware distribution
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050428/D89OGEJ00.html
“…the suit combats the redirecting of home computer users to unwanted Web sites and its own Web site that includes ads, the adding of unnecessary toolbar items and the delivery of unwanted ads that pop up on computer screens.”
“…the company installed a wide range of advertising software on countless personal computers nationwide. ”
The programs “…foul machines, undermine productivity and in many cases frustrate consumers’ efforts to remove them from their computers. ”
I’ve been charging customers to remove this stuff from their almost unusable computers for about the last six months. These “advertising” spyware programs have become more damaging than most virus/trojan combinations, if only because of the numbers of people affected.

“In any case, I must keep going today and tomorrow and the next day—for surely no prophet can die outside Jerusalem!”
-Jesus (Luke 13:33, NIV)

—Airbus 380 airborne, Toads that ’splode, India has priorities

Airbus 380 maiden flight
The new record holder for the world’s largest passenger plane.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,154745,00.html

” …840 passengers… ” More “eggs” in one “basket”? What are the security implications in the current “threat environment”?

Toads that ’splode
That’s right, folks, toads in Hamburg, Germany are swelling up and exploding for no apparent reason.
“…residents have been warned to stay away from the pond. “
They wouldn’t have to tell me twice.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,154761,00.html

“India Successfully Tests Multi-Target Missile“
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/missiles-05zb.html
What is the rate of grinding poverty and starvation in India these days?

Though you grind a fool in a mortar, grinding him like grain with a pestle, you will not remove his folly from him. Proverbs 27:22 [a sort of "holographic" priciple of foolishness]

—Buffalo tennis, Border crisis, Titan upper-atmosphere organics

Buffalo herd at large
—please supply your own Buffalo/tennis-related pun here
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,154650,00.html

Do good fences make good neighbors?
The solution for the illegal immigration problem (aside from terrorist infiltration and other security issues ) is for Mexico to become a country where people want to live and have families. A strong, prosperous Mexico would also go a long way toward solving the security issues:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,148226,00.html

“Organic Materials Spotted High Above Titan’s Surface”
Complex organics far from the extremely cold surface. Yes, this is one of the weirdest placest we’ve seen yet. What else do you have to do—watch the Jackson trial?
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press-release-details.cfm?newsID=561

—Traffic accident in space, Pope calls for unity, Syrians go home?!

Orbital traffic accident
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/050422_dart_update.html
Space.com reports that the DART autonomous rendevous test craft goobered its 4-15 rendevous test a little more seriously than previously thought. It not only ran out of fuel due to “…excessive propulsion system thrusting caused by noisy GPS system inputs….” but it was learned that it actually struck the target satellite by “…ground controllers at Orbital Sciences who detected that the military satellite was in a slightly higher orbit than it was before its encounter with DART….”

New Pope calls for unity
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,153995,00.html
“He said his “primary task” would be to work without fail to reunify all Christians and that sentiment alone was not enough. ”
But we are called by Christ to Unity in God’s Love (John 17:22-23), not in mens’ political and social ambitions. Nevertheless, it is as good a time as any to discuss these matters. If anyone is actually reading this blog, it is open for commentary dialog.

Syria leaving Lebanon
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,154446,00.html
No, I can’t believe it, either.

A fool finds no pleasure in understanding but delights in airing his own opinions.
Proverbs 18:2

—Christian books for prisoners, obese statistics, bad traffic lights

” Obesity Death Rate Lower Than Thought “
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,153944,00.html
” But like several recent smaller studies, it found that people who are modestly overweight actually have a lower risk of death than those of normal weight. “
Which, I think, means they haven’t got any idea what they’re talking about. This is what happens when statistics fall into the wrong hands.

“Report: U.S. traffic signals get poor grades “
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7569757/
We live in a large metropolitan area of the US, where it is possible to be stopped twice on the opposite sides of an underpass. The mayor was elected, in part, on a promise to synchronise the traffic lights, which he apparently took to mean those in a 10-12 block area of the city center.

” Thanks to book sender, prisoners access world”
http://www.floridatoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050420/NEWS01/504200372/1006
http://www.nbbd.com/npr/PrisonBooks/index.html
Ray Hall of Port St. John, Florida sends Christian books to prisons all over the world.
I have several years of experience with a prisoner correspondence Bible study. There can be no better counter to recidivism, and no better means to reverse lives of crime, hate, and violence than Peace through Jesus Christ ( Philippians 4:7 ).

Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent, and discerning if he holds his tongue.
Proverbs 17:28

—habemus Papam, the Pope is Catholic, Royals, the “new” NASA, Relativity is 100, Titan musings

Ratzinger selected as new Pope:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,153862,00.html
I stepped away from the Fox News ChimneyCam for just a minute….

“Talk-Show Host Fired Over Pope Question”:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,153598,00.html
The host was apparently fired for letting a question be asked. The incident was treated as a denominational dispute, a disagreement within the family of Christian faith. This is not true. Doctrines, such as Catholicism, Mormonism, Adventism, and others, which espouse other means or requirements for Salvation and admission to the Father’s Presence than those taught by Jesus are not legitimate Christian theologies. It doesn’t matter how long the deviance has been taught, or to how many people. If it isn’t the Truth in Jesus Christ, it isn’t.
John Paul II was an admirable, courageous, and constructive man. We can hope his successor is as positive an influence on world events. But in Spiritual navigation, it’s not enough to be good—you have to be right.

Report: Prince Harry Lacks PC Skills
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,153610,00.html
…And personal judgement, and maturity…. Nobody would have noticed the misbehavior of just another misdirected young person, except for the whole royalty thing. Maybe he’s another Henry V.

“NASA’s new chief takes on tough decision”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7549978/

“But the launch decision is ultimately NASA’s, regardless of what the task force concludes, he said. ”
About a week and a half with the new administrator, and I’m already grinding my teeth together involuntarily.

“Einstein’s revolution enters second century ”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7327050/
And about ten years ago, we just about had the basics of how the Universe works figured out. And then the Unknown happened—again.

This week’s wierdest place in the Solar System:
A tar-covered snowball with methane rivers:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=1469
Considering the number of ways the Huygens probe could have failed, these pictures are especially amazing:
http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/cassini_huygens/huygens_land/landing_01_H.jpg
So now we know of yet another place in the Universe that looks like the parking lot of a West Texas Dairy Queen….

Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart.
The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the Name of the LORD be praised.
Job 1:21

—The Spectacle

Numbers 21
4 They traveled from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea, to go around Edom. But the people grew impatient on the way; 5 they spoke against God and against Moses, and said, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the desert? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!”
6 Then the LORD sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died. 7 The people came to Moses and said, “We sinned when we spoke against the LORD and against you. Pray that the LORD will take the snakes away from us.” So Moses prayed for the people.
8 The LORD said to Moses, “Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” 9 So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, he lived.

When Israel was suffering in Egypt, God saved them and brought them out to make a nation of them to serve His Purpose. In the desert, when they needed food and water, He provided for them. But again and again, it just wasn’t good enough for them.
And every so often, the incessant griping started to make even the loving God of Israel angry. Worse, His Provision for their needs was now “miserable” to them. God sends poisonous snakes among the people to afflict them, and many die. But God relents, as always, and provides relief to His People when they repent of their sins. But there is something very different about the relief this time. First of all, God doesn’t remove the affliction of venomous reptiles from the camp like they asked (v.7). Instead, Moses is to make an image of one of the snakes out of bronze, and lift it up over the camp on a pole. When anyone is bitten, they can be healed by looking at the bronze snake.
What’s going on here? They most certainly aren’t being asked to worship the image of the snake (Their descendants tried that for a while, and fared badly for it. King Hezekiah had to clean up that mess ( 2 Kings 18:4 ) ). No, they are simply to look at it. What is God trying to tell them, and us?
Later, Jesus says:

John 3
14Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.
16“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Jesus has begun to show us the purposes of His death, the reasons for the terrible manner in which He is to die. Like the display commanded to Moses, Jesus is to become a spectacle for all generations to come of the consequences of our sin. People—Jews and Romans— who thought, acted, and made their decisions just like we do today, subjected history’s only truly innocent Man to a humiliating criminal’s death because He insisted on telling the Truth. Jesus is the Indictment against us, our lives, our governments, and the way we live our lives in rejection of God.
Blessedly, however, there’s more. I have always found it easy to remember the first halves of Romans 3:23,24 and 6:23, but for some reason I have a problem remembering the most important part of each:

Romans 3
23for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
24and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
Romans 6
23For the wages of sin is death,
but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

We deserve to be cast away by God, but He loved us too much to leave us under that curse:

Romans 5
6You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. 8But God demonstrates his own love for us in this:
While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Jesus is also our Pardon. If we can be led by His Holy Spirit to acknowledge our crime against God, and to look up and see the inexpressable horror of its consequences, and repent, God will forgive us.
But even that wasn’t all! If we acknowledge our powerlessness against our sin, and place our faith in Jesus (Ephesians 2:8-9), He will restore us to God’s Presence, with full rights as the children and heirs of God (John 1:12), so that we may sit at the very feet of the Almighty and learn His Ways (John 14:26).
The unsearchable Miracle which restores us to God is found only in Jesus Christ—the condemning spectacle of His death, the Pardon in His Sacrifice, and the Hope in His conquest over death by His Resurrection—because only in Jesus is the whole Truth found, together with the Power to put it into effect in our lives.

Romans 8
38For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

—”Head of Church – How the Papacy Works”

From those wacky guys at HowStuffWorks. I just had a feeling that there was some kind of major misconception at work here. Matthew 16 indeed says:

¹⁵“But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
¹⁶Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
¹⁷Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. ¹⁸And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.¹⁹I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

There is apparently an easy temptation to misinterpret verse 19, at least for some. However, Mounce, in Basics of Biblical Greek, uses verse 19 as a beginner’s example of Greek exegesis , especially the phrases “estai dedemenon “ and “ estai lelumenon “, which are future passive pluperfect periphrastic contructions (See also http://www.greekbible.com/, if you have inclinations to 1st-Century Greek). This is also indicated in the NIV text notes. To make a long story shorter, the meaning is “will have been bound” and will have been loosed”— Peter, and the other Apostles, aren’t being given power to give orders to Heaven (or in place of Heaven!), but assurance of Divine Guidance in the decisions of the Church. This is, after all, pretty basic theology, fully consistent with doctrines established in the rest of the Gospel—unless for some reason you really want to mess it up.
Who is the Head of the Church on earth? No Christian would have to ask:

^{Ephesians 1
22}And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, ²³which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.

Jesus is the Leader of His Church, and His children on earth! All would be well advised to stay out of His Way.

—Civilization Takes Another Leap

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,152273,00.html
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,152176,00.html
http://www.anncoulter.org/ (this week’s commentary: “The Emperor’s New Robes”)

Is it significant that the English language uses the same word for both judicial and sexual misconduct? We say “sexual perversion” and “perversion of justice”. Why? A reflection of the similarly severe consequences of both to our social structure? Certainly neither can be tolerated if a society is to survive for any length of time. And here we are, as citizens of the American Republic, suffering under both kinds in apparently unlimited abundance.

Isaiah 10
1 Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, 2 to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless. 3 What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar? To whom will you run for help? Where will you leave your riches?

Why can’t we make a government that lasts? Why does every system either fail outright and disappear or become degenerate and abusive or succumb to the madness of power? While we can argue indefinitely about whether or not the American Republic has or hasn’t arrived at its “Rubicon” moment, there is no reason at all to believe that it is headed in some other, more constructive direction. Babylon, Assyria, Greece, Macedon, Rome, all gone. There is no reason to believe that any of the current crop of government systems will fare any better. Where else would we go for hope for the future? France? Saudi Arabia? China? It’s all been done, most of it more than once. In fact, in all of human history, the Truth is the only form of government that hasn’t been tried.
Before you look the other way while your judicial institution passes judgment on the Ten Commandments, think about how many human empires have fallen to dust since the Ten were written down.
The truth is, Civilization doesn’t actually work. It never has. It was a failure from the beginning—how many human civilizations have lasted more than a few hundred, perhaps a thousand years? Certainly none will last forever. If insanity is to be defined as trying the same thing over and over, fully expecting it to work “this time”, then our species is in serious trouble, if that wasn’t obvious from other observable parameters. I think we are able to continue to convince ourselves to keep trying the same mistake again and again, and to believe that Civilization is The Thing To Do, because at the end of every generation, we destroy the evidence. God instituted the Fifth of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:12) for a good reason.
Civilization doesn’t actually work, because the concept is flawed from its foundations up. It would require that we replace God’s Judgment with a mindless paper automaton of laws, sufficient to predict and counteract all the enormous number and ever-evolving variety of ways that an ill-motivated human can discover to cause evil and chaos. It would also require that we replace God’s Justice with some sort of administration for the impossible system of laws made up of men who, although evil and sick with power, are to be expected to act in the interest of the governed instead of for the personal political and financial gain of the administrator.
Worst of all, the very idea of human government apart from humanity’s Creator requires that we separate ourselves from God’s Presence. Civilization’s founding principle is the lie (John 8:44), and its driving ambition is evil. Evil is a terrible basis for a government. Remember the Third Reich? The Soviet Union? But maybe it will work next time.
Given a few generations at best, a given attempt at government most often differs from hell only in duration. Been in a court of law in the U.S. lately? Nor is the perversion limited to the judiciary. Had an elderly relative’s insurance near the finish line while they were under extended care in a hospital lately?
How do we escape this worst of all bad ideas? How do we fix this? By returning to God’s Kingdom, and submitting to the King He has placed on its Throne:

Isaiah 9
6 For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, [a] Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. 7 Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever. The zeal of the LORD Almighty will accomplish this.

We admit our mistake, and accept Him by faith:

Romans 3:
23for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

We re-admit His Presence into our lives:

John 14:
26But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.

We become God’s Nation:

Exodus 19:6
You will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

1 Peter 2:9
But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.

Matthew 16:18
…and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hell will not overcome it.