How To This and That

Just a couple sites that looked interesting today:

over at Dumb little Man: 15 Awesome Tutorial Websites You Probably Don't Know About

and though a bit skeptical of the NY Times much less an article in it on how to make hot sauce ("Get a rope...") there is this "How To" of DIY hot sauce (not to be confused with salsa) over at Life Hacker.

As for me, it's chili making time so let me know how the hot sauce comes out..

A Thumbnail Guide to Obama Cabinet Picks

From the Spectator Blog:

Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner -- More of the same, for better or for worse. Sympatico with Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke on the bailouts. Wall Street seems happy, for the moment.
Attorney General Eric Holder -- Awful. Hostile to both the Second Amendment and the First, and horrible in lots of other ways.
Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano -- Mixed. In the short history of DHS, the politician (Tom Ridge) has been much less impressive than the obscure national security expert (Michael Chertoff). But she might be decent on border enforcement. ..(more)

St. Smart Alec

A martyr after my own heart...From MereComments:

...But here's the surprise, about St. Procopius, a martyr in Palestine during Diocletian's persecution. Prcopius was arrested and brought before Flavian, the local governor..

Ordered to sacrifice to the false gods, he replied that he knew only one God to whom it is proper to offer a spiritual sacrifice. Flavian then required him to offer libations to the four Emperors who shared power at the time [in 305, Constantius, Galerius, Severus, Maximinus]. The holy athlete boldly and ironically answered with a quotation from Homer: That there be several chiefs is not good: One sole king there should be. [Iliad 2,204] The Governor was furious and had him beheaded.... (more)

Advent Study- Coming November 30

Matthew seemed rather obsessed with genealogy. Specifically to show that Jesus was the promised Messiah and son of David. Likewise the season of Advent which is fast upon us, is about the coming of God as Messiah and Saviour. In his first chapter, the gospel writer Matthew provides us a long list of characters leading up to the birth of Jesus. In the coming days as part of an Advent Study for my Sunday school class as recommended by my minister, we will look at this list of folks and determine who they are, where they are from and what place they have in the Biblical text, the story of salvation and in relation to Jesus specifically. You are invited to join in the journey and the discussion. Hopefully you will find something that is of interest along the way. Well begin November 30, hope to see you then.
In the meantime, you might also enjoy this link highlighted from the folks at MereComments on the subject of Advent. Go here for the first part of the study

Our Duty is to "Err on the Side of Life"- The Miracle of Haleigh Poutre

By Michelle Malkin • November 20, 2008 11:46 AM
Almost three years ago, I started blogging about beautiful Haleigh Poutre. She’s the miracle child who was nearly beaten to death by her barbaric stepfather. Hooked to a ventilator in a comatose state, she was then nearly condemned to death by Massachusetts medical experts and the state’s criminally negligent child welfare bureaucracy, which hastily declared her to be in a hopeless vegetative state and wanted to pull the plug on her life. Thank God, the campaign to kill her was stopped. This blessed angel has been nursed back to health by an amazing team of caring therapists. Her plight brought end-of-life issues again to the fore — issues that so many on both the left and right would prefer to ignore. The stepfather is standing trial now for child abuse. And that trial has produced video of Haleigh’s progress that will bring you to tears....(more here with video)

Iran said to have enough nuclear fuel for one weapon

From the International Herald Tribune:
Iran has now produced roughly enough nuclear material to make, with added purification, a single atom bomb, according to nuclear experts analyzing the latest report from global atomic inspectors.
The figures detailing Iran's progress were contained in a routine update on Wednesday from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has been conducting inspections of the country's main nuclear plant at Natanz. The report concluded that as of early this month, Iran had made 630 kilograms, or about 1,390 pounds, of low-enriched uranium.
Several experts said that was enough for a bomb, but they cautioned that the milestone was mostly symbolic, because Iran would have to take additional steps. Not only would it have to breach its international agreements and kick out the inspectors, but it would also have to further purify the fuel and put it into a warhead design — a technical advance that Western experts are unsure Iran has yet achieved....(more)

Editorial: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

For those hearty souls for whom a walk though such matters is not too cumbersome..
from the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology :
...“tradition” also serves an important, critical, and corrective role for us today as we seek to apply and live out the Scripture. As the old statements remind us—“there is nothing
new under the sun” and “those who cannot learn from history are doomed
to repeat its mistakes”—we neglect our theological forefathers to our detriment.
In reality, tradition and the study of historical theology ought to be viewed as a
kind of laboratory in which the strengths and weaknesses of past practices, ideas,
and doctrines are tested under the pressures of real-life circumstances, denials,
and challenges with the goal of learning from the past in order to better address
the issues, debates, and challenges of our contemporary world.... (more)

For me, I hope such conversations are but the continuing examples of God re-knitting the Body of Christ back together...

Farewell, fat gene ... goodby gay gene ... so long, sloppiness gene

Over at Salvo:

When someone tells you it (whatever it is) is in their genes, show them this article:

new large-scale studies of DNA are causing her and many of her colleagues to rethink the very nature of genes. They no longer conceive of a typical gene as a single chunk of DNA encoding a single protein. “It cannot work that way,” Dr. Prohaska said. There are simply too many exceptions to the conventional rules for genes.
It turns out, for example, that several different proteins may be produced from a single stretch of DNA. Most of the molecules produced from DNA may not even be proteins, but another chemical known as RNA. The familiar double helix of DNA no longer has a monopoly on heredity. Other molecules clinging to DNA can produce striking differences between two organisms with the same genes. And those molecules can be inherited along with DNA.
The gene, in other words, is in an identity crisis. - "Now the Rest of the Genome" by Carl Zimmer (November 10, 2008)

"Why Believe in God?"

From STR:
"Just be good for goodness' sake."
That's the ad campaign launched in Washington, D.C., by the American Humanity Association. It strikes me that this ad betrays the persistent misunderstanding atheists have about the grounding question in ethics. The grounding question is one I've brought up a lot on the blog. It is the explanatory power a worldview has to justify and make sense of morality, good and evil. It's the question often raised by theists to atheists in debates and most often the question is either misunderstood or the terms are changed. And that's what's going on in this ad once again. (more)

True American Hero

Petty Officer First Class Marcus Luttrell was born in Huntsville, Texas in 1975.A graduate of BUD/S Class 228, he was the only survivor of the fateful events of June 28, 2005 in Afghanistan. Luttrell and three teammates from SEAL Team TEN were assigned to a reconnaissance mission, operation RED WING, in the Hindu-Kush mountain region of Afghanistan. Their objective was to gather intelligence on Taliban movement in the area. Luttrell’s team was eventually discovered and outnumbered by over 200 Taliban fighters. Petty Officer Luttrell was the only to survive enemy contact. In the rescue mission that ensued, 16 Special Forces personnel, including 8 SEALs, died when their helicopter was shot down by Taliban fighters. It was the largest single-day loss of life in the SEALs’ history.In 2006, Petty Officer Luttrell was awarded the Navy Cross for combat heroism.His full story is documented in his heroic account of the operation, entitled: Lone Survivor.Marcus’s twin brother, Morgan Luttrell, is also a SEAL, still on active duty.
Marcus speaks at the National Rifle Association on May 16th, 2008

Funding Coercive Abortion

From a friend who I hope will be posting on his own soon:

Imagine this scenario: My neighbor hands me some money and tells me to threaten my wife if she does not kill one of our children. Is my neighbor in any way guilty for the murder that follows? We had better decide, because we are all about to become that neighbor as our tax dollars go to support coerced abortion and involuntary sterilization in the next legislative session.

Congresswoman Confident Obama Will Fund UNFPA, Which Supports China's Coercive Abortion Program

The Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace

-- Jeffrey Scott Shapiro at WSJ:

...It seems that no matter what Mr. Bush does, he is blamed for everything. He remains despised by the left while continuously disappointing the right.
Yet it should seem obvious that many of our country's current problems either existed long before Mr. Bush ever came to office, or are beyond his control. Perhaps if Americans stopped being so divisive, and congressional leaders came together to work with the president on some of these problems, he would actually have had a fighting chance of solving them.
Like the president said in his 2004 victory speech, "We have one country, one Constitution and one future that binds us. And when we come together and work together, there is no limit to the greatness of America."

To be sure, Mr. Bush is not completely alone. His low approval ratings put him in the good company of former Democratic President Harry S. Truman, whose own approval rating sank to 22% shortly before he left office. Despite Mr. Truman's low numbers, a 2005 Wall Street Journal poll found that he was ranked the seventh most popular president in history.
Just as Americans have gained perspective on how challenging Truman's presidency was in the wake of World War II, our country will recognize the hardship President Bush faced these past eight years -- and how extraordinary it was that he accomplished what he did in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time. (more)

"I apologize for the Jewish vote for Obama"

from The Jewish Journal:

...For now, we must leave the Lost Tribes of Obama on their own. If their earscould not hear and their eyes could not see all the pre-election warningsthat a President Obama may cost Israel its very survival, and in a dominoeffect destabilize the Western world and America, I have yet to discover themagic words that would wake them from their trance....

...What do we do now?
I don't yet know the answer. I do know that we can no longer count on sensibility to save the day. I do know that the people, countries and way of life we hold most dear are under serious assault, and we are summoned to disrupt the calmness of our pre-election lives to acknowledge as much. And I do know that we can't count on non-Jewish allegiance to have eternal patience.This is no simple lost election where we lick our wounds and pledge to fight on for another day. On Nov. 4, the world, especially the Jewish world, was set on a new, frightening course, and we must soberly acknowledge as much. A month before the election, Anne Bayefsky, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, warned that not since Hitler's time has civilization teetered so perilously on the brink of catastrophe. "So when you cast your ballot this election, make no mistake: You are voting for or against a nuclear holocaust," she wrote.
Nuclear holocaust won. (More)

Pope Clarifies Luther's Idea of Justification

Says It's True, if Faith Is Not Opposed to Love
VATICAN CITY, NOV. 19, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI says Martin Luther's doctrine on justification is correct, if faith "is not opposed to charity."...More here

Counterfeit Marriage and its Counterfeit Movement

Gay marriage is not about equal rights. No one is denying anyone the right to marry. Gay marriage is about redefining marriage to include certain sexual preferences of a minority of the population...
From Townhall:
...By drawing artificial parallels between the systematic persecution experienced by blacks over centuries past to the inherent aversion most have toward biologically unnatural, traditionally immoral and objectively perverse sexual behaviors, the homosexual lobby trivializes and diminishes the African-American struggle for civil rights. It's dishonest and offensive for people who choose to define their identity based upon aberrant sexual proclivities to compare sexual temptation and volitional sexual conduct to immutable and innocuous biological traits such as skin color.
"Don't compare your sin to my skin," ...

Blackout of Left’s “Fairness” Doctrine Push

From the Media Research Center:

...But there has been news to report, as Democrats have been more than candid about their plans. On Election Day, for example, New York Senator Charles Schumer justified regulating political speech. “The very same people who don’t want the Fairness Doctrine want the FCC to limit pornography on the air,” Schumer told the Fox News Channel. “You can’t say, ‘government hands off in one area’ to a commercial enterprise, but you’re allowed to intervene in another. That’s not consistent.”
In late October, Democratic Senator Jeff Bingaman told a New Mexico radio station how he “hopes” the Fairness Doctrine returns so radio will be more to his liking: “For many, many years, we operated under a Fairness Doctrine in this country. I think the country was well-served. I think the public discussion was at a higher level and more intelligent in those days than it has become since.”
Democrats have launched various attempts to control of broadcast content since the Fairness Doctrine’s demise in 1987, but the push has become more insistent in the past couple of years. After the failure of a liberal immigration bill in 2007, Senator Dianne Feinstein told Fox News Sunday that she was “looking at” a new Fairness Doctrine because “talk radio tends to be one-sided....It's explosive. It pushes people to, I think, extreme views without a lot of information.” As with Schumer and Bingaman recently, none of the broadcast networks thought Feinstein’s threats worth reporting....(more)

Obama Declares War on Conservative Talk Radio

The weapon will not be "The Fairness Doctrine" but rather "localism." Read the article and take action now by contacting broadcasters, senators and representatives...
From AmericanThinker:
...Obama is on record as saying he does not plan an exhumation of the now-dead "Fairness Doctrine". Instead, Obama's attack on free speech will be far less understood by the general public and accordingly, far more dangerous.
The late community organizer Saul Alinsky taught his followers to strike hard from an unexpected direction, an approach known as Alinsky jujitsu.
Obama himself not only worked as an organizer for an Alinsky offshoot organization, Chicago's Developing Communities Project, but would go on to teach classes in Alinsky's beliefs and methods.
"Alinsky jujitsu" as applied to conservative talk radio means using vague rules already on the books to threaten any station which dares to air conservative programs with the loss of its valuable broadcast license.
Team Obama and the "localism" weapon
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rule in question is called "localism." Radio and television stations are required to serve the interests of their local community as a condition of keeping their broadcast licenses.
Obama needs only three votes from the five-member FCC to define localism in such a way that no radio station would dare air any syndicated conservative programming.
Localism is one of the rare issues on which Obama himself has been outspoken.
On September 20, 2007, Obama submitted a pro-localism written statement to an FCC hearing held at the Chicago headquarters of Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr.'s Operation Push.
Furthermore, the Obama transition team knows all about the potential of localism as a means of silencing conservative dissent. The head of the Obama transition team is John Podesta, President and CEO of the Center for American Progress.
In 2007, the Center for American Progress issued a report, The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio. This report complained that there was too much conservative talk on the radio because of "the absence of localism in American radio markets" and urged the FCC to "[e]nsure greater local accountability over radio licensing.
Podesta's choice as head of the Federal Communications Commission's transition team is Henry Rivera.
Since 1994, Rivera has been chairman of the Minority Media Telecommunications Council. This organization has specific ideas about localism:
In other words, it would not do for broadcasters to meet with the business leaders whose companies advertise on their station. Broadcasters must reach beyond the business sector and look for leaders in the civic, religious, and non-profit sectors that regularly serve the needs of the community, particularly the needs of minority groups that are typically poorly served by the broadcasting industry as a whole....(read the full article here)

Don't Bail Out the United Auto Workers

Just a smattering of newsbits on the threats by the Big 3 and the UAW thugs against the rest of the country if we dare not prop their sorry backsides up anymore... Let them dangle...

...GM's statement comes as the mendicant company is threatening to collapse and make a mess unless Washington, which has already voted $25 billion for GM, Ford and Chrysler, provides up to $50 billion more -- the last subsidy until the next one.

Best suggestions over at the WSJ:
General Motors is a once-great company caught in a web of relationships designed for another era. It should not be fed while still caught, because that will leave it trapped until we get tired of feeding it. Then it will die. The only possibility of saving it is to take the risk of cutting it free. In other words, GM should be allowed to go bankrupt.

and IBD:
Filing for Chapter 11 protection under bankruptcy law is the normal way a company stays in business when facing an unmanageable financial situation. It keeps creditors at bay while the company reorganizes under court supervision and settles its debts. In recent years it has served as a refuge for major airlines (Delta and United) which, you may notice, continued to fly while in Chapter 11 and, post-bankruptcy, fly today.
Bankruptcy protection also frees companies from union contracts. Could this be why it seems to have been taken off the table as an option, at least among Democrats? We can only surmise, but it's clear that a bankruptcy process would be rough going for the United Auto Workers.
The Big Three's high labor expenses would no doubt need a trim. During the last round of contract talks in 2007, the average hourly costs were over $70 at all three of the domestic automakers, compared to about $48 for Toyota.