All posts by Richard
Their eyes bulge with fat
Surely God is good to Israel,
to those who are pure in heart.But as for me, my feet had almost slipped;
I had nearly lost my foothold.
For I envied the arrogant
when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.They have no struggles;
their bodies are healthy and strong.
They are free from common human burdens;
they are not plagued by human ills.
Therefore pride is their necklace;
they clothe themselves with violence.
From their callous hearts comes iniquity;
their evil imaginations have no limits.
They scoff, and speak with malice;
with arrogance they threaten oppression.
Their mouths lay claim to heaven,
and their tongues take possession of the earth.
Therefore their people turn to them
and drink up waters in abundance.
They say, “How would God know?
Does the Most High know anything?”This is what the wicked are like—
always free of care, they go on amassing wealth.Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure
and have washed my hands in innocence.
All day long I have been afflicted,
and every morning brings new punishments.If I had spoken out like that,
I would have betrayed your children.
When I tried to understand all this,
it troubled me deeply
till I entered the sanctuary of God;
then I understood their final destiny.Surely you place them on slippery ground;
you cast them down to ruin.
How suddenly are they destroyed,
completely swept away by terrors!
They are like a dream when one awakes;
when you arise, Lord,
you will despise them as fantasies.
When my heart was grieved
and my spirit embittered,
I was senseless and ignorant;
I was a brute beast before you.Yet I am always with you;
you hold me by my right hand.
You guide me with your counsel,
and afterward you will take me into glory.
Whom have I in heaven but you?
And earth has nothing I desire besides you.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart
and my portion forever.Those who are far from you will perish;
you destroy all who are unfaithful to you.
But as for me, it is good to be near God.
I have made the Sovereign Lord my refuge;
I will tell of all your deeds. (NIV)
Victory for Atheism!
[Hat tip: Glenn Peoples]
[The Onion] Victory for Hamas!
Jubilant Palestinians mob Gaza streets
Top Hamas officials congratulate their people
Palestinians say eight-day fighting humbled Israel
With gunshots, sweets and cries of victory, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip poured into the streets to celebrate a ceasefire deal on Wednesday which ended eight days of deadly fighting between Israel and Islamist militants.
After being stuck at home for days for fear of Israeli air strikes, tens of thousands of Palestinians crowded into cars and doubled up on motorcycles, waving flags and chanting for Hamas, Israel’s main adversary and rulers of the Gaza Strip.
Women leaned over balconies ululating with joy as children stuffed four-abreast in the open trunks of cars clapped and sent out hoarse screams of “God is Great!”.
“We feel like we’ve gotten our freedom back, our lives back. Thank God for Hamas, and thank God for the patience and strength of the Palestinian people in humbling Israel,” said Mohammed Skeik, marching with a pack of fist-pumping friends.
The Egyptian-brokered ceasefire put an end to Israeli air raids which bombed hundreds of Hamas targets and the firing of more than 2,000 rockets and mortar bombs by Hamas and other factions into Israeli cities, including Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
In all, 162 Palestinians, including 37 children and 11 women, were killed in the offensive, along with three Israeli civilians and a soldier.
Firing a deafening burst from his Kalashnikov rifle, Mohammed al-Ghazaleh boasted: “(Israeli Prime Minister) Netanyahu will mourn tonight, while the people of Gaza are steadfast in their resistance and have triumphed.”
“Israel won’t think of challenging us like this ever again. We payed a dear price in the blood of our people for their aggression, but we made great gains and showed our strength,” he said.
“PEOPLE OF GAZA, YOU HAVE WON”
Members of Hamas’s top political echelons, also forced to seek shelter during the raids because Israel had them in its sights, joined eagerly in the grandstanding.
“The resistance achieved a historic victory against the occupation and laid the foundation for the battle of liberation for all our land and sacred sites,” said senior Hamas official Ahmed Bahar.
During a lull in fighting eight days ago, Israel launched an offensive by assassinating Hamas’s acting military chief, Ahmed Al-Jaabari, on November 14.
“Jaabari won, alive and dead,” Hamas activists shouted through loudspeakers of Gaza mosques.
Green banners waving in the night air, Hamas activists from Hamas cried through loudspeakers at the clogged streets, “Oh people of Gaza, you have won.”
The Ozzman Cometh!
The Prince of Darkness and his reunited band of metallers will come to New Zealand for one show.
Ozzy Osbourne and the original Black Sabbath line up of bassist Geezer Butler and guitarist Tony Iommi will play at Auckland’s Vector Arena on April 20 next year.
Credited with creating heavy metal, and widely regarded as one of the most influential bands of all time, this will be the first New Zealand show for the original Black Sabbath in nearly 40 years.
The last time they were on these shores was in 1973, when they played the Great Ngaruawahia Music Festival.
Hailing from Birmingham, England, the band released their debut album in 1970. This was followed up by the classic record Paranoid, which featured the anthems War Pigs and Iron Man.
Black Sabbath has sold in excess of 70 million records worldwide, and the band is currently recording their first new studio album in more than 33 years, which is due to be released in April 2013.
BLACK SABBATH
WHEN: April 20, 2013
WHERE: Vector Arena, Auckland
Tickets from Ticketmaster
Incontrovertible pseudo-science
The latest addition to my reading list is The Greatest Show on Earth (2009) by Richard Dawkins. (You can read it here.)
In his earlier book, The Ancestor’s Tale (2004), Dawkins traced human ancestry back to the dawn of life. Cool story, bro, but where’s the evidence? To answer the question, Dawkins wrote The Greatest Show on Earth. The book is subtitled The Evidence for Evolution and that’s why I’m reading it.
So far I’ve read only the first paragraph of the Preface, and it’s not off to a good start.
THE evidence for evolution grows by the day, and has never been stronger. At the same time, paradoxically, ill-informed opposition is also stronger than I can remember. This book is my personal summary of the evidence that the ‘theory’ of evolution is actually a fact – as incontrovertible a fact as any in science.
FAIL.
In order for a theory to even be counted as a scientific theory it must be controvertible, i.e., falsifiable. If it’s not falsifiable, then it’s not scientific. An incontrovertible theory is not a scientific theory. It is pseudo-scientific hocus pocus. So say I – a good Popperian.
I’ll report back on the rest of the book when I’ve read it.
Meanwhile, philosopher Thomas Nagel has a new book out. It’s called Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Worth a look inside! Here’s Amazon’s book description.
The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology.
Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such.
Nagel’s skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic.
In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.
Not bad for an atheist, huh?
Phillip E. Johnson on Darwinism
Galt’s speech
A sign of the times
[Reprised from beNZylpiperazine, January 2005.]
“Unlocked cars contribute to the growing crime rate!” reads this warning sign by the train station car park. There’s something not quite right about this sign. And it’s not so much what the police say, as the way they say it.
Unlocked cars don’t commit crimes. Criminals do. And criminals are responsible for 100% of thefts of and from unlocked cars, not the unfortunate car owners. Yet the sign leaves me feeling that if I leave my car unlocked and it gets pillaged then I am the criminal.
It’s a classic case of finding someone else – anyone else – to blame instead of the actual offender. No wonder, then, that the government has now decided to penalise those who take insufficient measures to protect their cars from theft.
Last week Justice Minister Phil Goff launched the government’s Vehicle Crime Reduction Programme. All imported cars less than 15 years old (and therefore worth stealing) will now be required to be fitted with immobilisers and be marked with several thousand uniquely identifying microdots. At the car owner’s expense, of course.
Jim Peron says that Goff is substituting Nanny for the police officer. “Instead of protecting people from criminals he proposes a policy to force people to change how they live so the government’s failure to protect them isn’t as apparent.”
Goff is confident that his compulsory measures will lead to a significant reduction in vehicle thefts. But the problem is that criminals will find other, easier targets. The homes of the people who leave their locked, immobilised cars in the station car park, for example. If you want to give the message that crime doesn’t pay, you have to catch the criminals, not chide and coerce their victims into paying for ever more sophisticated security measures.
Take it easy, and take the train. And don’t forget to lock your car.
What would you do?
Here are some other people’s answers.
Duck.
I would give the Palestinians equal rights and not some little concentration camp in the shittiest part of the land.
I think Israel should bomb the shit out of the gaza strip. Then turn onto Egypt. If Egypt gets in on it then wipe out major infrastructure – govt, roads, military bases etc. Part three, turn the guns on Iran. Make an explicit and clear threat of an all blood bath if they so much as even fuckin flinch. Schools, kids, their army, govt – the lot. It’s time to deal with these islamists properly. I reckon it could be done in a week.
I would offer the Israelis New Zealand citizenship and invite them all to emigrate to the West Coast. It’s big enough (23,276 km2), and nearly empty (pop. 32,900). By comparison, Israel’s total land area is slightly less (22,072 km2) but relatively densely populated (pop. 7,941,900).