mjh's blog

That is a false doctrine

The News-Press: Opinion – Stop funding false religion By CAL THOMAS

Much of what is proclaimed as God’s will on TV and in fundraising appeals is false religion. People who respond with checks are either ignorant or willfully disobedient to what their spiritual commander-in-chief and the early apostles taught and practiced.

One of the great pronouncements on a Christian’s relationship to the world is contained in 1 John 2:15-17: “Do not love the world or anything in the world. … For everything in the world — the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does — comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away.”

Too many Christians think if they shout loud enough and gain political strength the world will be improved. That is a false doctrine. I have never seen anyone “converted” to a Christian’s point of view (and those views are not uniform) through political power. …

If people who bear the label “Christian” want to reduce these embarrassments, which interfere with the proclamation and the hearing of “true religion,” they should refrain from sending money to TV preachers and contribute more to their local church.

The Conservative Defense of Judicial Activism

The Value of ‘Activism’ By George F. Will

Convinced that popular sentiment is with them, some conservatives fan the flames of resentment of judicial review, calling for judicial “restraint.” They do so in the name of dogmatic majoritarianism — the right of majorities to have their way. There are, however, impeccably conservative reasons for regarding judicial review as a valuable restraint on majorities, and hence for having high regard for some judicial activism.

I am, indeed, a monkey’s uncle

Our disregard for our nearest kin is equal to our disregard for each other. More importantly, how few genetic changes there are between us. We are about to take sledgehammers to our own genome without any real sense of that subtlety.

Case in point: chimps rarely get Alzheimer’s. Therefore, let’s find that gene that protects them/harms us and deal with it. After our mucking about, will we even be capable of seeing we’ve lost creativity or a grasp of what freedom is? mjh

Scientists Complete Genetic Map of the Chimpanzee By Rick Weiss

The fresh unraveling of chimpanzee DNA allows an unprecedented gene-to-gene comparison with the human genome, mapped in 2001, and makes plain the evolutionary processes through which chimps and humans arose from a common ancestor about 6 million years ago.

By placing the two codes alongside each other, scientists identified all 40 million molecular changes that today separate the two species and pinpointed the mere 250,000 that seem most responsible for the difference between chimpness and humanness. …

As predicted by preliminary studies, the human and chimpanzee genetic codes are essentially 99 percent identical, a testament to how fundamentally similar the two species remain. At the same time, it is powerful evidence that seemingly modest changes in molecular code can lead to very different stations in the web of life.

Because of that 1 percent difference, experts noted, humans now dominate every ecosystem on Earth while chimpanzees and other great apes — a group that also includes bonobos, gorillas and orangutans — are at risk of becoming extinct within the next few decades, largely because of human activities. …

The human and chimpanzee genomes are distinguished by 35 million differences in individual DNA “letters” — each the result of a tiny, random mutation — and an additional 5 million larger differences in which entire chunks of DNA were either added to or deleted from one genome or the other.

All told, the two sequences differ by 4 percent. But three-quarters of the differences seem to be in non-functional parts of the genome, suggesting that a mere 1 percent variation makes all the difference.

Put another way, the difference between the human and chimp genomes is 10 times as great as the difference between any two humans. …

Acknowledging recent challenges by proponents of “intelligent design,” a proposition that posits the need for an intelligent creator, several scientists said the genome study offered elegant confirmation of Darwin’s vision of evolution.

One analysis, for example, showed that the accumulation of deleterious mutations in the human and chimp genomes is greater than in the mouse and rat genomes in just the proportion predicted by one of the mathematical corollaries of the theory of evolution.

“I can’t imagine Darwin hoping for a stronger confirmation of his ideas,” said Robert H. Waterston, who led the Washington University team.

First Chimp Fossils Found; Humans Were Neighbors
Cameron Walker for National Geographic News

Researchers have found the first reported chimpanzee fossils in Kenya’s Rift Valley, providing the first physical evidence that chimpanzees coexisted with early human ancestors, known as hominins.

Thousands of fossils, including the famous Australopithicus afarensis, “Lucy,” found in Ethiopia, have been filling in the hominin family tree. Early humans split off from a common ancestor shared with chimpanzees between five and eight million years ago.

Think About It, If You Still Can

PowerPoint: Killer App? By Ruth Marcus

The most disturbing development in the world of PowerPoint is its migration to the schools — like sex and drugs, at earlier and earlier ages. Now we have second-graders being tutored in PowerPoint. No matter that students who compose at the keyboard already spend more energy perfecting their fonts than polishing their sentences — PowerPoint dispenses with the need to write any sentences at all. Perhaps the politicians who are so worked up about the ill effects of violent video games should turn their attention to PowerPoint instead.

Photo of Paintball Wound

There are two things that bring more people to this blog through Google. They are this photo of a wound from paintball and the words “clever trever.”

Since many of the “clever trever” searchers come from the UK, I trust they are not looking for my take on the Albuquerque Journal’s not-so-clever editorial cartoonist, John Trever (Clever Trever Two, What An Ass We Have In Trever).

As for the photo, I have to wonder, is it just morbid curiosity? Do paintballers want to see a wicked wound? Does it please them?

Let me tell you the story that goes with the picture, if you don’t know it already. Two years ago, my wife and I were walking our dog Lucky around our neighborhood after dark as we do every night. On this occasion, a car sped up behind us. We heard two small explosions and each instantly felt searing pain in our backs. As awful as that pain was — and it was intense — it was nothing compared to seeing the expression on Merri’s face when she cried “I’ve been shot!” while grappling with my own overwhelming fear and pain. It was horrible and I wish a comparable misery on the shooter and his gang. The shooter who cackled wickedly as the car sped by.

Remember, guns don’t shoot people, idiots shoot people. And cowardly, brutal idiots shoot strangers in the back. mjh

PS- If you’re a cop or attorney looking to bust some thugs like those who attacked us, I have other photos.