Author: Brandon

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Government schooling trains for subservience

People don’t seem to realize this very often: allowing the government to control education is inconsistent with living in an individualistic and free society.

Case in point: A Judge rules that school administrators can take punitive actions against students for things they write outside of school.

U.S. District Court Judge Mark Kravitz denied Avery Doninger’s request for a temporary injunction to overturn her high school election results Friday, but the Burlington teenager isn’t giving up her fight.

Doninger alleges Lewis S. Mills High School Principal Karissa Niehoff and Region 10 Superintendent Paula Schwartz violated her First Amendment right to free speech when they banned her from running for Class of 2008 secretary after she posted an offensive reference to school officials on a blog site from her home computer.

If public schools are a function of the government, what does punishing students for things they say against it, on personal blogs, teach about free speech?

Is it any wonder that each American generation seems more willing to give up responsibilities to the government?  Why not?  They are trained to sit down, shut up, and do as they’re told.  And if they speak out against the agents overseeing their daily training, there will be consequences.

The Bible in Klingon?

Shakespeare is best in the original Klingon, as every Star Trek fan knows.  The Bible… not so much.

Joel Anderson has used a lexicon to “translate” the Bible into Klingon and compiled a SwordSearcher “Klingon Language Version.” Tranlsate is in quotes because as Joel says on his website, “It is useful for for entertainment value, not linguistic purity.”

Here’s John 3:16 in the KJV:

John 3:16 vaD  joH’a’  vaj loved the  qo’,  vetlh  ghaH  nobta’  Daj  wa’  je  neH  puqloD,  vetlh  ‘Iv  HartaH  Daq  ghaH should  ghobe’  chIlqu’,  ‘ach  ghaj eternal yIn.

Here you can see the difficulties of using a lexicon-based translation system (heh — lots of people try to do that with a Strong’s dictionary on a routine basis!). Should and eternal don’t seem to have corresponding entries in the English-Klingon lexicon.

Does your red-letter Bible misquote Christ?

A long-standing feature request from users of SwordSearcher is “words of Christ in red.” One of the things I’m working on for the next release is adding red-letter data to the KJV module so that users can (optionally) have the Lord’s words colored differently than regular text.

One difficulty with this is that the various red-letter Bibles don’t agree 100% on which words should be attributed to Jesus. As my “source” I am using an Old Scofield Reference Bible, and I am comparing it to a Thompson Chain Reference Bible to ensure no errors.  Thanks to the work of Bill Bonnell I have a list of verses to which I can compare mine (automatically). After reconciling some differences, I’m satisfied that I’ve got an accurate data set.

Anyway, to the real point of this post:

If you have a red-letter Bible, open it up to John 8:51 and 8:52.

The Lord says:

Joh 8:51 Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death.

Then they respond:

Joh 8:52 Then said the Jews unto him, Now we know that thou hast a devil. Abraham is dead, and the prophets; and thou sayest, If a man keep my saying, he shall never taste of death.

Notice the subtle difference — they changed “see” to “taste of” when quoting the Lord*.

We have three different “red-letter Bibles” in our home, and one of them actually shows this misquotation by the Jews in verse 52 as red letters, incorrectly attributing what they said to Christ.

Ooooops!

*And for you folks thinking there might be something more going on “in the Greek,” no, there isn’t.  The word translated as “see” (theoreo) in verse 51 is not the same as the word translated “taste” (geuomai) in verse 52. Coloring the misquotation as red is simply an error, probably made by a careless editor.

Keyword Stuffer SpamPro Elite Gold

Web marketing seems to come down to one of two things:

1. Stay on the cusp of search engine manipulation. Keep one step ahead of Google so that you can have well-ranking web pages that customers will blunder on to, only to have to click an AdWord link to get to what they were looking for in the first place. Or,

2. Work steadily to create legitimately useful content, and hope the search engines will eventually notice its value and send users your way.

After looking around for a while, it seems that all of the keyword research tools available cater to the get-rich-quick school of thought (number 1 above). The “Keyword this-and-that” programs have mile-long web pages full of infomercial style sales pitches, promising that once you buy their software you’ll be an instant internet mogul. They make my skin crawl just scrolling down the pages.

I can’t seem to find much for those of us in group #2.

My main goal in web marketing is to help my customers find me.  I know they are out there. The trick is writing articles and pages that word their problems in the same ways they do, so they’ll find them.

I’ve decided that I should develop my own keyword research software. I have some very specific needs in mind that I don’t see being filled by these programs.

What about you?  If your work includes web marketing, have you ever thought “hey, I need something that does X?” Let me know.

Global Warming Bureaucrats and Politicians

The majority of global warming research is funded by government grants.

These government grants provide excellent job security for researchers. And since they come from the government, an entity not subject to the natural forces of the private sector, results are not particularly important.

Global warming scare mongering gives government agents (politicians and bureaucrats) another foundation on which to seize power. (Any time politicians preempt the private sector and take away personal freedoms, they are transferring power from the individual to the collective.)

Global warming scare mongers and the government that funds them are in perfect symbiosis and are worthy of the utmost suspicion.

So what happens when this research is scrutinized?

From the American Thinker:

“Last week, Hansen, NASA’s lead scientist on global warming, penned a rather strange ad hominem attack against critics that questioned the validity of his work in the wake of corrections prompted by Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit http://www.climateaudit.org/…”