Pretty Snowed In

If you are like me, it's interesting to see the surroundings of folks who live other places.

We live at the end of a road, tucked away in the mountains where you aren't likely to end up unless you are completely lost, or you have to find us.  We really like it here.

The big white lump of snow to the left is a cord of firewood.

Because of my broken rib, we had a truckload of firewood delivered.  I could tell enough from the data on the weather sites that their predictions of a good amount of snow was going to be pretty accurate.  We spent time preparing to have enough wood and kindling prepared and stocked so that we wouldn't have to be trekking outside to get any and would be snug and warm no matter what happened.

Chicken Ark I is snowed in.  The chickens don't want to leave their roosts. Moxie LOVES the snow.

Starting at about 09:00 the snow started coming down. The temperature on both outside sensors stayed right at 32° F. and even now at 15:00, one is at 34° and the other is at 33°.  There is at least six inches of snow on all the horizontal surfaces and it's still falling.

Ark II is no different.  They aren't even clucking. Brewster hasn't crowed once today.

I have to admit, this is the most snow I've seen since I was a little kid in West Virginia.  It is pretty.  And since I know we don't have to go out and drive in it, I can really enjoy it.

The only thing I'm a little sorry about is the fact that I have a broken rib, all of my muscles are sore, because, even though I can't swing an axe, I still got out there and helped offload and stack that wood.  I'm not that bad today, because my wonderful wife and nurse took good care of me through the night and helped me get into a position that let me sleep for more hours than I have in days.  The reason that makes me sorry is because now the conditions are right for sliding down the hill on some cardboard, but if I were to even remotely look like I was going to attempt that, I think I would wake up a few days from now with a Lodge Cast Iron logo imprinted on my skull somewhere.
Naw. I wouldn't really need that kind of demotivator.  I may be in the habit of getting the inevitable aches and pains of the regular hard work around the farm, but I'm not stupid enough to go looking for unnecessary pain.

How many people have a Swiss Chalet doll house to hold extra firewood?

Maybe we'll get another snow like this in a month or so, when I'm healed up enough to play like a little kid.  If it keeps snowing like this and the temperature continues to drop, we may get to hear a sound that is very unusual for this area. The incredibly loud "POW" of branches breaking off from the weight of snow.

If it ends up looking more spectacular than this tonight, I'll put up another post with pictures.

Rights? Only If We Feel Like It

If you wish to fly commercially, you will surrender any notions of having your rights protected by the Constitution.

The Feds have decided that you who are willing to fly are too damned stupid to care that you will allow yourself to subjected to things that used to only happen to prisoners in maximum security prisons.  But now, not only are you denied your second and fourth amendment rights, but the first amendment is out of the question as well.

That's right.  You'll do exactly as we tell you, and you'll shut up about it. Capice?

BP and Blame

The central point to this whole issue, which Daphne and others are missing, is that BP, while culpable for their part, should not be the focus in determining what went wrong.  Before I go further, let me make it clear that I don't champion big corporations who indulge in "crony capitalism."  BP is on record for having given millions to Obama's campaign, and they bought into the global warming hoax when it came to advertising to consumers.  BP might be much better off going through bankruptcy and getting all new management.  The point here is to not be conned into letting BP be the sole scapegoat.

That is the heart of it.  If we had to distribute blame according to who contributed the most to not only the accident itself, but the incredibly unnecessary aftermath, it goes something like 20% BP, 50% Federal Government, 30% American people.

First, there is no good reason for BP to have to be drilling that far off shore, that deep, where the problems and risks of drilling aren't just more, they are exponentially more.  This is in light of the fact that we have tremendous amounts of oil we could be getting from under ANWR with minimal risk.  This goes double for the oil sitting under the plains States in the central U.S.  And NIMBY problems don't apply, because we are talking about areas that you'd have to fly to or take all terrain vehicles to.

Second: The emergency response legislation was already on the books giving the Feds the power to respond quickly and decisively to contain and clean up the spill.  It didn't happen.  As if the Obama Administration purposely wanted the spill to become an outrageous disaster, all kinds of equipment and help were turned away under the guise of union protection law, EPA mandates of "perfect or not at all" standards for cleanup.  This is all a matter of public record now.

Third: The sheeple of the United States letting the Enviro-Whacko crowd and the socialist greenie bureaucrats and politicians enact or create by fiat, laws to make it ridiculously costly and difficult to build or modernize refineries or their capacity, and more importantly, build the kinds of state-of-the-art nuclear reactors like what France is using to drastically cut down on the amount of fossil fuel we need to generate electricity.

I agree with Mark for the most part.  But what I actually see is another example of the leftists not letting another good crisis go to waste.  Anything that bolsters in the mind of John Q. Public that corporations are bad, and government needs to protect us from corporations, even if that means full-blown fascism, bring it on.  The people just keep falling for the same old "management-by-crisis" methods that keep consolidating and concentrating power in the hands of the self-anointed political class.

Blaming BP exclusively for the far reaching effects of the spill is like blaming a ten-year-old for causing a pile up on the freeway after his parents bought him a big, powerful Escalade and handed him the keys.

Puppy Paradise

That's right!  Time to take a break from the serious stuff and post about feel good moments.  Much irony here, seeing as how I'm suffering from a broken rib and the moment in question resulted in some of the worst pain since the fall.

It's been many days since we took the time to lay on the floor in the office and stream a show from Netflix. But I stumbled across the whole series "Firefly," and figured Twyla would like it, given her very discriminating taste in entertainment.  It's a shame the series only lasted for one season, but I can understand why it did.  Die hard Trekkie types wouldn't be able to handle the fact that it's more about plot and character development than about Sci-Fi technogeekiness (did I just make up a word?).  The plots and dialogue are witty and not meant for the American Idol crowd. There's no socialist utopia idiocy. Without you actually going to watch it for yourself, the only quick way I know to describe it is: The Old Western frontier set 500 years in our future. My favorite aspect of the show is the struggle to remain free and being willing to go without a lot of material comfort rather than be a slave to a totalitarian government and society.  Funny, that wasn't the original purpose of this post.

Moxie is quite the energetic dog.  She is as healthy and happy as she can be.  She has the run of quite a few acres up here on our mountain.  Depending on where we need to go and what we are doing, she gets to ride to town about half of the time, and she is a pleasure when it comes to riding.  She sit's quietly; doesn't get anxious about anything.

New "Chicken Little" on the right.

Most of the surprises we get around here are pleasant ones.  This spectacular fall on the back steps was not one of them, but most everything else is.  Like discovering a new chick out of nowhere in the front yard.  About three weeks or so ago, we discovered a new dog hanging around the area.  He's a mutt, but a really nice looking one.  Mostly boxer, and maybe some hound or short hair terrier.  I wish I'd have had a good photo of him by now, but he's still very skittish.  Moxie has really taken to him.  I didn't want another dog, but Twyla convinced me that he belongs here.  He started nesting under the front porch in what was left of one of the straw bales I used for chicken bedding.  Twyla has started feeding him.  He gradually came closer and closer each time Twyla was outside over the past few days, and he finally licked her hand.   I can only suppose that he was treated roughly before somebody either dropped him in this neighborhood or he wandered here from somewhere.  At first, he would run away at the mere sight of me, but he keeps getting closer to the door when I call to him.  Twyla named him "Beau."

Last night, we spread out the blanket and I ever so carefully got down on the floor.  Moxie was nearly beside herself with happiness.  She would get to be laying between master and mistress.  For Moxie, this is Nirvana. Seeing Moxie in that state just reduces Twyla to a fit of giggles, and I thought it would make for a good photo, although I wish I had a remote for the camera, so I could mount it on the tripod, and instead of depending on the timer feature, be able to hit the shutter at the right moment.

Once moxie gets into that position, she goes limp as a wet dish rag.  Everything is perfect in her world. But if I get up, or even act like I'm getting up, she goes straight to a state of alert. I've had several dogs, but never one that was so keen on wanting to be so attentive of my every move when possible.  So getting up to get the camera off of the desk was a major chore for two reasons. Even the tiniest movement that involves bending or twisting my torso can feel like someone is twisting a knife in my back. Secondly, Moxie has a hard time understanding that I'm not really going anywhere, I'm just trying to move a few feet.

Three Amigos in Moxie heaven

After attempting to take seven or eight photos, I got the second one you see here.  Sometime later, Twyla got up for some reason and Moxie followed her.  When they came back, Twyla laid back down and then Moxie, wanting that exclusive spot between us, started over me, but then stepped on my abdomen.  This sent me into breathless gasps, teeth and fist clenching, and tears forming.  Now the poor dog hasn't got any clue as to what she just did, but at this point I just can't stand having the dog leaning in on my left side with a broken rib.

I get enough breath in my lungs to muster up a very forceful command to "MOVE!" and this would be my undoing.  She was laying on her side facing me, and to reposition herself to get up, she pressed her back against Twyla and proceeded to shove her paws straight out against me to make room to stand.  Her lower paw thrusting directly into my rib cage.  I screamed.  Er, actually I SCREAMED!!  Every muscle I had originally strained on the fall felt like they were now tearing anew.  After the reflex of expelling all the air out of my lungs and every muscle in my torso seeming to have locked up as if I had been tasered, I wondered if I would pass out from the pain and actually hoped I would.  I had to concentrate on trying to make enough muscles relax in order to inhale.

Poor Moxie now lay in the doorway looking confused and frightened.

Later on, and it took a good while for the pain to subside, I thought about how much that dog loves me unconditionally, and could never conceive of trying to hurt me.  She was actually trying to be obedient to me at the very moment she hurt me.  I thought about how sometimes, in our relationships with other humans, we do things that end up hurting each other without even realizing it, because of things we aren't even aware of.

Every one of us walks around with a black box inside, and a special button outside somewhere that nobody sees.  Every once in a while, somebody pushes that button by sheer accident and a reaction takes place where the bystanders and the poor button presser are left in a state of bewilderment,  wondering, "What in the hell was all THAT about!?!?!"

Me love you.  I can has scurd now?

Sometimes it's major and sometimes it's minor.  Most of the time it's because we perceive an offense where none was intended.  What if, when such a painful thing happens to us, instead of lashing out at the "button presser," we instead asked ourselves why we felt like reacting the way we did? What if we could muster up the incredible grace to assume that the "button pusher" was innocent of any malice of forethought?  What if God allowed me that moment of incredible pain in order to prepare me for something similar down the road?

 Just a thought.

We Celebrate Because . . .

I don't do this blog because I want to purposefully offend people.  Any thinking person with any experience in the world knows that there is no way you can breathe without offending somebody.  In spite of popular opinion, nobody has any right not to be offended.  The world is in a very deep pile of guano because we've allowed idiots to use our own sense of decency to make us ignore tried and true wisdom.  We've become tolerant of stupidity for fear of hurting people's feelings.

Now that we're over the edge and falling into the abyss, I don't hold back on the things I believe are important because it might make someone angry.  And no, I'm not perfect and don't have all the answers, but some things are just glaringly obvious, or should be, and when I feel called to write about it, I will.  All the best teachers I ever had challenged me and made me think and didn't give a damn about my feelings when my feelings were getting in the way of the truth.

I have avoided writing about Christmas, because I just didn't feel like running the risk of offending for no good reason or being perceived to be. But lately I've been running across more and more stuff in the blogosphere that indicates there are a lot more people who have been researching and looking for answers regarding the "tradition" of Christmas and it's origins, which makes sense, considering its real history and roots in paganism and its lack of having anything to do with the birth of Messiah.  I guess I should be thankful that the internet has made it so much easier to find and disseminate tremendous amounts of information for those who are willing to sift through all the garbage and find the truth.

One example that I found this morning comes via Bayou Renaissance Man in the form of a cartoon that is spookily reminiscent of Calvin & Hobbes:

One of the most difficult aspects of being a disciple of Yeshua the Messiah and defending His Word, the Bible, is convincing fellow believers that the main thing that separates our religion from all the others is the proof of historical fact.  It's very wearisome and irritating to have to explain to non-believers why so many in Christendom go along with traditions that simply shouldn't be tolerated in the Church.  It's uncomfortable to maintain friendships with our "Sunday brethren" when such topics come up and they just don't want to explore the problems. It can seem pretty lonely out here being Messianic.

But I'm hopeful.  I see more and more people asking questions and somehow wanting to know the truth and how to keep in line with it.  I hope the trend continues.

Good Answer

I wish I could have written this answer.  It may not perfectly fit everything I believe, but it comes very close.  Maybe someday I will take the body of the text and embellish on it.

I think my favorite aspect of his explanation on the answer is the fact that we conservatives, and I mean true conservatives, and not the George Bush, John McCain, Karl Rove types, have to explain our conservatism in contrast to leftists/progressives.

Knowing God: Part 2

This is part 2.  Click here to read Part One.

It was the following day that I took time after class to go to the biggest Christian book store in Tampa.  This place had been in business a long time.  A free standing building about a third of the size of your average Barnes and Nobles, maybe a little smaller.  It wasn't just some little shop in a strip mall.  I figured if any place has some books with the answers to help me with all of the doubts and questions, surely this was the place.

My assumption was totally wrong.  There was a big section that had lots of different translations of the Bible.  At that time, I didn't understand why that was necessary.  Of the most popular translations, you even had different variations: red-letter, chain reference, topical, etc.Nobody to explain why all that was necessary, but it was all there.  Then there's all the different binding, and, oh-my-goodness!,  the selection of very fancy covers or carriers to tote them around in. A whole corner of the book area was devoted to such paraphernalia. Then there was a huge section that had to do with "Spirituality." Then an area about "self-improvement." Biographies took up another section.  There was a section with Bible dictionaries and encyclopedias and other large reference works. Of course there were books about end time prophecy.  Everybody wants to know what's going to happen and when. Smaller sections covered evangelism and church organization, and of course there were lots of books about current events and culture and what was wrong with the world. There were books on single topics or areas that I don't even remember.There was a large section of the store devoted to popular or contemporary gospel music, both recorded and sheet music.  Then there's the clothing.  Tee shirts, jewelry, choir robes.  Sunday school supplies, lesson books, felt boards, posters.  Artwork, paintings, candlesticks, knick-knacks, whatever.

I think I'd spent over two hours browsing the titles and reading the jackets to find something that dealt with just the basic questions I had.  In the reference section there was some fat volume about Bible criticism.  Perhaps it was Gleason Archer's When Critics Ask or some such, but that's the kind of stuff for second and third year seminary students and dealt with internal textual minutia that didn't have anything to do with answering any of my deeply held belief in evolution.  It seemed like I was wasting my time and I was coming to the conclusion that I wasn't going to find anything because there was nothing to find.

Let me back up a bit here.  As I was being made fun of for my new faith, I was asking questions of the priest and the other people I went to church with.  A lot of those people had gone to church all their lives and seemed to have great faith, and for heaven's sake, what's the point of getting a seminary degree and becoming ordained if you aren't going to learn how to answer people's questions about why we should believe in this stuff.  But when I would ask my questions, pointing out the glaring contradictions in what we accepted as fact from science versus what the Bible said, the only responses I got were pretty much one of three kinds:  "What's important is just having faith." "The accounts in the Bible are just parables or allegories, they're not to be taken as literal history."  "Evolution is just God's way of doing things."

The problem is, all of those answers mean that you couldn't trust what the Bible said about anything.  My logical mind wouldn't let me come to any other conclusion.  Especially since the Bible itself claims over and over again that it is the truth. I was not about to buy into any solipsistic nonsense about it.  And if you are one of those idiots who believes in solipsism, you might as well stop reading and go someplace else, because I got no use for you, unless you want to be disabused of that garbage.

Some people can somehow find a way to shut down that part of their mind that demands to know; "How did we get here, and why are we here?"  I really don't understand how someone of even average intelligence can do that, but that's a whole new post.  Those fundamental questions are why we spend trillions of dollars all over the planet,  building superconducting super colliders  and engaging in quantum physics research.  It's why we keep peering farther and farther out into space and launched Voyager and have radio telescopes listening for aliens.  I have a strong suspicion that even the people who claim not to care about the basic issue of human origins really do care when faced with their own mortality or deep personal crisis.

It would also be another thing if the Bible didn't deal with the issue of our origins, but it does.  It doesn't simply tell us, "God just created everything you see, and He really doesn't want to be bothered with telling you how He did it."  Quite the contrary.  It not only tells us the order that certain things were made, but defines what a day is and how long it lasts, and the order in which things were created made no sense according to everything I'd been taught in school.  And that was just scratching the surface of all the problems I had with the stories in the Bible.  I walked out of that store feeling pretty let down.

As I went to pull out of the parking lot the radio was playing something I found very irritating at that moment and so I hit another preset, to land on a station that carried Dr. D. James Kennedy's Truths That Transform just in time to hear that the program was about a book that was full of evidence that countered evolution.  It  seemed to have basic rebuttals to some things that I'd always just accepted as fact: Carbon dating, how primitive early man was, billions of years of geological evidence, etc.

Wow, why hadn't I ever heard anything like that before?  Even so, it sounded like stuff that should be pretty easy to falsify if it was just typical Christian propaganda.  I ordered it.  The book itself was pretty simple and seemed to be written for a general audience, but with lots of references.  I no longer have it in my library, having loaned it out many years ago and never gotten it back, but its footnotes and bibliography got me started on research, and within a couple of months I was spending a lot of money buying books from other sources, and finding out some really amazing things.

Like the fact that some of the best and brightest scientists with advanced degrees, all over the world, not only believed that the Bible was true, but that the earth was very young.  I'm not talking about crackpot, or fringe scientists, but guys with Ph.D.s from major universities and who were well respected and even taught at such places or were doing cutting edge research.  Like Dr. Richard Damadian who invented the MRI., Dr. A.E. Wilder-Smith a holder of three separate doctorates in the medical field; Dr. Russell Humphreys who was once the lead scientist in high energy plasma physics.

Those are just modern scientists.  I'm sure nobody cares that Isaac Newton, or Michael Faraday, or Louis Pasteur or most of the scientists of the 18th and 19th centuries were devout believers in the Bible and believed that the pursuit of science was, as Faraday put it, "thinking God's thoughts after Him."

All of this information really shook me up.  I read volumes and volumes of material.  I read the criticisms of these men and their research and conclusions and found myself having to agree with them.  I discovered Dr. Robert Gentry's work on polonium radio halos in granite and how none of the evolutionary scientists could find a flaw in his logic of what the implications were.  It actually made me angry for weeks.  I'd been misled for a long time.  I'd been lied to.  I thought "all" scientists were in agreement that evolution was a fact and that there was no mitigating evidence to the contrary. You see, it's one thing to present both sides of an argument fairly and let the audience decide, but that's not what goes on out there.  I would get to experience it first hand for myself, long before Ben Stein would come out with his documentary, EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed.  I have been in college classrooms and in churches and parties where, once I began laying out evidence that made evolution easily falsifiable, my opponents would say I was nuts, but couldn't produce or cite a single piece of evidence to refute me.

This post, and even this entire blog is not for the purpose of laying out over 24 years of my experience and research into the debate and the evidence.  I've been a subscriber to Creation and now Answers magazine, as well as the scientific, peer reviewed journals of the Creation Research Society, and Answers In Genesis' Technical Journal.  I've listened and read, over, and over, and over to the evolutionists talk about how creationism isn't science, but then they never deal with the science.  Their argument always gets reduced to being about religious people trying to impose their beliefs on everybody else.  This has become so routine, that I have never been afraid to engage in debate with any doctor of any discipline anywhere at anytime regarding creation versus evolution. I'll try to keep to the topic of how the decay theorem proves that radiometric dating is always just a guess, or really a SWAG, and they'll just tell me it's "settled" science, without dealing with the mathematical equation.  They have nothing, and they prove it every single time.  Maybe I should share some of those encounters in other posts, but that's not the purpose of this particular post.  Here, I am just wanting to deal with the idea of knowing God. The background is important, however, because we are not talking about God as just anybody wants to understand Him.  The God that you understand on your terms is no god at all.

Once again, my logical, science loving mind was very concerned with the question of: Which God?  Is there just God and all roads lead to him?  Is the god of the Hindus and Buddhists and the Muslims and even the Mormons all the same entity?  Is religion just this big, complex salad bar that we all slide our tray along and get to pick and choose what we like, but we all end up eating in the same dining room?  All of these religions contradict each other on so many points and so many levels.  They can't all be right.  The universal language of the Universe is mathematics.  All the laws that govern this Universe are very exact and precise.  It stood to reason in my mind that a God who created all of this must have some very well defined rules.  It also made sense to me that any entity or religion that claimed to know God would not reflect any characteristics of a God that were inconsistent with nature.

Being logical, I asked myself: "What if I were God?"  Would I create a universe with very precise and logical mathematical laws, incredible beauty, mind-boggling diversity, then create sentient beings capable of tremendous abstract thought and deep emotional capability, and then leave them to their own devices and not provide a way for them to find out about me?  Maybe it's just me, but I find that line of thinking stupid beyond words.  So, now a big part of my journey was going to be about discovering whether or not I could know if I had the right God.  This would prove to be my journey on the road called epistemology.

I had already had enough experience from as far back as I can remember of experiencing the most asinine and moronic behavior in churches.  It still goes on to this day.  One need only turn on the TV and experience the clownish antics of the prosperity hucksters and simple-minded "evangelists."  Way too much of what the world encounters under the label of "Christianity" on television looks like a combination of Ringling Brothers and Saturday Night Live.  I would have to find out, apart from the "church" that God is not afraid of the toughest questions I can put to Him.  I would also have to learn that the vast majority of stuff done in His name had nothing to do with Him.

The next post on this theme is going to deal with,  "How do we find  the real God?"

You can move to the next post by clicking on Knowing God: Part 3