1516 Martin Luther preached against the abuse of indulgences one year prior to his nailing of the 95 theses to the Castle Church door in Wittenberg. 1517 Luther posted 95 Theses on the Castle Church door in Wittenberg, calling on all and sundry to debate the question of indulgences by word of mouth or by pen. As a result Thomas Cardinal Cajetan (1469 - 1534) at Rome wrote " On Indulgences " against Luther. Johann Tetzel got Professor Konrad Wimpina (ca. 1460 - 1531) of the new University of Frankfort to write two sets of theses against Luther. Johannes Mair von Eck (1486 - 1543) of Ingolstadt denounced his friend Luther as a " Bohemian, " equating him to Jan Hus (ca. 1369 - 1415).
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I am on the BART train trying to get home, what a strange ride this has been! First we were trapped in the Embarcadero Station for 45 minutes waiting for a train because some inconsiderate jerk committed suicide by jumping in front of a train at Powell Street. This caused them to shut down the station while the coroner did his business and caused tens of thousands of people to be significantly delayed on their trip home. Finally we got a train and only a few minutes later there was a 5.6 earthquake that caused BART to halt all trains while they checked for damage. I like boring uneventful rides, interesting rides are not good. Ah well, I think I might finally make it home, we are just outside of Dublin now... if I survive my bike ride home from the station I'm having a whiskey and going to bed :-) Other gripes for the day: I got a note from the incompetent louts at the Voter's Registrar saying I had not registered a PARTY! What crap! I deliberately re-registered as a Repu...
Proverbs 30:7-9 7 Two things I ask of you; deny them not to me before I die: 8 Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, 9 lest I be full and deny you and say, "Who is the LORD?" or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.
The other day we watched the movie "I am David" on DVD. I don't often write movie reviews but this movie was so good I feel like I need to say something here. I initially rented it because it had James Caviezel in it, the actor who played Jesus in "The Passion of the Christ". I was wondering what else he had worked on and this was one that came up. The reviews were all good so I ordered it from Netflix. The story is about a boy trapped in a communist labor camp in Bulgaria in the early 1950's and his escape and journeys as a refugee. The story is simple but incredibly moving. The actor who plays David, Ben Tibber , is exceptional, his eyes and face are so expressive, and much of the story is told just by looking at his face, his reactions to what is going on around him are as real as any I've ever seen. James Caviezel's character is actually rather Christ like, at least in that he gives up his life for another, saving David by taking his place...
Philipp Nicolai (1556 - 1608) was a pastor in Germany during the Great Plague, which took the lives of 1,300 of his parishioners during a sixth-month period. In addition to his heroic pastoral ministry during that time of stress and sorrow, he wrote the texts for " Wake, Awake, for Night Is Flying " and " O Morning Star, How Fair and Bright, " known, respectively, as the king and queen of the Lutheran chorales. Johann Heermann (1585 - 1647), also a German pastor, suffered from poor health as well as from the ravages of the Thirty Years' War (1618 - 1648). His hymn texts are noted for their tenderness and depth of feeling. Paul Gerhardt (1607 - 1676) was another Lutheran pastor who endured the horrors of the Thirty Years' War. By 1668 he lost his pastoral position in Berlin (for refusing to compromise his Lutheran convictions) and endured the death of four of his five children and his wife. He nevertheless managed to write 133 hymns, all of which reflect hi...
These women were exemplary Christians who demonstrated their faith by their material support of the Church. Dorcas (also known as Tabitha) was well-known and much loved for her acts of charity in the city of Joppa, especially for her making clothes for the poor. When Dorcas died suddenly, the members of her congregation sent to the neighboring city of Lydda for the Apostle Peter, who came and raised her from the dead (Acts 9:36 - 41). Lydia was a woman of Thyatira, who worked at Philippi selling a famous purple dye that was so much in demand in the ancient world. She was also a "worshiper of God" at the local synagogue. When the Apostle Paul encountered her in prayer among other proselyte women, his preaching of the Word brought Lydia to faith in Christ. She and her friends thus became the nucleus of the Christian community in Philippi (16:13 - 15, 40). Phoebe was another faithful woman associated with the Apostle Paul. She was a deaconess from Cenchreae (the port of Corinth)...
(10-23) 06:26 PDT SAN DIEGO (AP) -- Like Hurricane Katrina evacuees two years earlier in New Orleans, thousands of people rousted by natural disaster fled to the NFL stadium here, waiting out the calamity and worrying about their homes. The similarities ended there, as an almost festive atmosphere reigned at Qualcomm Stadium. Bands belted out rock 'n' roll, lavish buffets served gourmet entrees, and massage therapists helped relieve the stress for those forced to flee their homes because of wildfires. "The people are happy. They have everything here," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared Monday night after his second Qualcomm tour. Although anxieties ran high, the misery index seemed low as the celebrity governor waded through the mob. Scarcely a complaint was registered with him. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/10/23/national/a024152D24.DTL&tsp=1
Yesterday I drove my car to the BART station. I thought I would save some time because I was dropping off Serenity at day care and then going directly to the BART station. Boy was I wrong! In the first place, I'm leaving late because I’m working 9-5 all this week. There was a lot of traffic on the road and it took forever to get to the station. Then I had to park about halfway back to the house in the far western end of the BART parking lot and walk for about ten minutes to get to the station! It took way longer to drive, park and walk than it does to ride the bike all the way to the entrance of the station. The same thing on the way back, traffic and walking took longer than just hopping on the bicycle and riding home along the Iron Horse Trail! Today I'll just ride my bike.
Krauthammer's razor (with apologies to Occam): In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit.
The US arms industry is backing Hil liar y Clinton for President and has all but abandoned its traditional allies in the Republican party. Mrs Clinton has also emerged as Wall Street's favourite. Investment bankers have opened their wallets in unprecedented numbers for the New York senator over the past three months and, in the process, dumped their earlier favourite, Barack Obama. Full story is here. Hil LIAR y Clinton is the candidate of the Merchants of Death and Greed, who is shocked by this news? If the Merchants of Death and Wall Street are your backers you are my enemy, and you are an enemy of humanity. A vote for Hil LIAR y is a vote for mass murder and theft. A vote for Ron Paul is a vote for freedom and peace.
...a 72-year-old grandfather who promises...nothing other than to leave [us] alone... Check out Anatomy of the Ron Paul Nation By Cyd Malone
At the start of the Academy Award-winning movie "American Beauty," a character videotapes a plastic grocery bag as it drifts into the air, an event he casts as a symbol of life's unpredictable currents, and declares the romantic moment as a "most beautiful thing." To the eyes of an oceanographer, the image is pure catastrophe. In reality, the rogue bag would float into a sewer, follow the storm drain to the ocean, then make its way to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that's twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists. The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii. Full SF GATE story is here . When I go to the store I almost always use the plastic bags. Sometimes I recycle them, sometimes I reuse them for trash bags or dog p...
October 17, 2007 The other day, my old sparring partner in so many Congressional committee hearings, Alan Greenspan, was on the Fox Business Channel. After Alan promoted his new book, the reporter asked if we really needed a central bank. Greenspan looked stunned, and then said that was a good question; he actually talked about fiat money vs. a gold standard. Now, the ex-Fed chairman is not about to endorse our sound monetary policy, but you know our Revolution is working when such a question is asked in the mainstream media, and this powerful man gives such an answer. You and I are reopening a whole host of questions that the establishment thought it had closed off forever: on war, on taxes and spending, on inflation and gold, and on the rule of law and our Constitution. A few years ago, I asked a famous conservative columnist a question. What did he think about the prospects for a restored Robert Taft wing of the Republican party? He thought I was joking. As you know, I was not. Afte...
Ignatius of Antioch , Pastor and Martyr Ignatius was the bishop of Antioch in Syria at the beginning of the second century A.D. and an early Christian martyr. Near the end of the reign of the Roman emperor Trajan (98 - 117), Ignatius was arrested, taken in chains to Rome and eventually thrown to the wild beasts in the arena. On the way to Rome he wrote letters to the Christians at Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles, Rome, Philadelphia and Smyrna and also to Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna. In the letters, which are beautifully pastoral in tone, Ignatius warned against certain heresies (false teachings). He also repeatedly stressed the full humanity and deity of Christ, the reality of Christ's bodily presence in the Lord's Supper, the supreme authority of the bishop and the unity of the Church found in her bishops. Ignatius was the first to use the word catholic to describe the universality of the Church. His Christ-centeredness, his courage in the face of martyrdom, and his zeal for the tr...
Please read the whole article, it's glorious, life without cops can be a good thing :-) Anarchy, or Spontaneous Order, on the Streets of Saigon by Joshua Snyder News of the several successful experiments by several European cities with getting the state out of traffic regulation created quite a stir last year. (See European Cities Do Away with Traffic Signs. ) Non-libertarian-minded folks saw it as counter-intuitive, not self-evident, that people themselves would do a better job looking out for their own safety rather than relying on a nanny state to warn them of every conceivable danger. But it turned out that drivers slowing down at intersections and looking both ways was much, much safer than blindly trusting one's life to a mindless green light. Perhaps these ...
Check out this set of stories about police thugs in several different "police" departments around the Empire: The "Showtime Syndrome" I once felt it necessary to concede to people, when talking about these myriad cases of brutal assaults on innocent people by the so-called "police," that there was at least the slight possibility that these cases are the exception and that most "police officers" are dedicated servants of the law and their communities. I no longer am willing to concede this point. The police in America have been militarized so much that they are no longer "police" at all but are really an army of occupation . Excessive use of force is not rare but common, and violence is the first response by these thugs at the slightest sign of resistance by the peasants they rule. I have less than no use for the police. I have never been helped by the police and would prefer they were disbanded completely, or at least disarme...
It looks like they will be making a movie of the Hobbit, sadly Peter Jackson will not be directing. I am looking forward to seeing it anyway though. From the BBC: McKellen keen to be Gandalf again Sir Ian said the Hobbit film was becoming "more and more Likely" Sir Ian McKellen has said he would be "very pleased" to reprise his role as wizard Gandalf in the planned film of JRR Tolkien's novel The Hobbit. "If I am still functioning and working well, it is very likely I would be asked to do it," he told Reuters. Sir Ian played the role in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, landing an Oscar nomination in the process. Full story is here .
Oh Woe! Woe! Doom and despair! Oh pity poor wretched me who has melted down his computer! Bummer. I was fooling around with part of the operating system I ought not to have been fooling with, since I do not know what I am doing. Changing "skins" for windows, making it look "cool," as I thought. And I found upon the World Wide Web a place where one said he could make my computer look " WAY COOL " and I did download his evil program and I did run it without looking at it or really thinking about it. And behold it did summon up the demonic blue screen of death, and did dump memory and did prevent booting up of the computer in any way at all. And lo, I was forced to format my hard disk and reinstall my system to its original factory issued state and all was lost... all was lost... woe is me! But I have back ups of most everything anyway so it's really not all that bad :-) It is just a royal pain in the neck for sure.
Psalm 65 O God of Our Salvation To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David. A Song. 1 Praise is due to you, O God, in Zion, and to you shall vows be performed. 2 O you who hear prayer, to you shall all flesh come. 3 When iniquities prevail against me, you atone for our transgressions. 4 Blessed is the one you choose and bring near, to dwell in your courts! We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house, the holiness of your temple! (This is one of the morning Psalms for the 12th of the month and this portion leaped out at me today. Even in the Old Testament it is clear that we are saved by the actions of God and not of ourselves.)