Wednesday Bible Study: The Return of the King
You may recall that an earlier psalm purported to be the last Psalm of David, but as we know, the current Book of Psalms is actually a compilation and the editors just didn ' t delete that. There are more psalms attributed to David and we ' ve come to two of them today. Psalm 101, attributed to David, is a sort of oath of office. Psalm 103 is a song of praise, which gives God several attributes that he clearly doesn ' t have. No, he doesn ' t heal all diseases (v. 3), doesn ' t renew youth (v. 5), doesn ' t work vindication and justice for all who are oppressed (v. 6) and most certainly is not merciful and...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 17, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Spring Garden Street
That ' s actually the name of a street in Philadelphia where my paternal ancestors lived, but it seemed like a good title for this post. If I still had the energy to keep up the Windham County blog I would have put it there, but for now I ' ll just leave it here.Living in the temperate zone we do have to get through the winter, but our reward is spring, which you can ' t have otherwise. I got a load of horseshit from my neighbors last fall and now I ' m starting to spread it around. I planted a Concord grape next to my front porch, with a decent scoop of manure in the hole, and my idea is that it will grow up the column an...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 16, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Yahweh Dah Bomb!
We now get a run of (mercifully short) songs of praise. Again, there are multiple gods but our god is the biggest and baddest. Yes, he is also the creator, but that ' s sort of a contradiction. If the Big Y created the heavens and the earth, where did all these competing gods come from? This is never explained.There is some weird imagery in these, with geographic features engaging in anthropomporphized activities. As a final note, these were evidently written during times of victory and prosperity. They obviously don ' t pertain to the exilic situation in which the book was compiled.98 O sing to theLord a new song,for...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 14, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
We Da Peeps
In the previous post I listed some structural and contingent reasons why the relationship between voting and any idea of popular sovereignty is problematic. I didn ' t even mention some of the specific kludgy features of the U.S. system, such as the overrepresentation of small states in both the Senate and the Electoral College, which is itself an unwieldy and dangerous anachronism; gerrymandering; and obstacles to voting.However, let ' s assume we had none of those problems. In fact, propose a fantasy world in which we either had direct democracy -- all legislation by referendum -- or that representatives had to take a hi...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 12, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
More Poli-sci
This post will be in two parts -- or maybe I ' ll just get to one part now and do the second part separately, we ' ll see how it goes. The first part is some empirical true facts about elections and electoral democracies, or republics if you prefer to use that term for representative systems such as ours. I don ' t want to get hung up on vocabulary. The second is philosophical -- how should we understand democracy, popular rule, We The People? How does that work and how can it work and how should it work?So, Part One. Many people assume that elections and the resulting legislative and executive (and in some states, judicia...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 11, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Political Science
I always do my best to write clearly and precisely, but it seems I don ' t always manage to get my meaning across. So let ' s try a couple of ideas again. Please read carefully, and think about what I actually write, not what you think I might think or what other people think. The First Amendment applies only to government. It constrains what government can do, it does not place any constraint of any kind on any other entity. The courts have interpreted it a bit more broadly than its literal language. If " congress shall make no law . . . " then the executive cannot have any legal authority to do what no law permits. ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 10, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Ye Gods!
Now we get some (mercifully short) songs of praise. The fun thing about these is that they cast Yahweh as the greatest among a pantheon of gods. That ' s how people thought about gods in the time most of the Tanakh was written. You ' ve got your god, we ' ve got ours, but ours is the baddest baddass of all the gods. This is somewhat different from polytheistic religions. All the Roman or Norse gods were gods of the Romans or Norsemen, although Jupiter and Odin were the head honchos. So the basic structure of the Deuteronomistic history is that when the Israelites please God, he gives them victory over their neighbors,...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 10, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Dump Punts
Apparently realizing that they were caught on the horns, as it were, the dumpsters handlers wrote a statement for him in which he tried to split the baby by saying that abortion policy should be left entirely up to the states. Presumably he agreed to this although his dementia is too far advanced for him to have written the statement.The whole issue has never been anything but opportunism for him. He proclaimed himself to be a strong supporter of abortion rights until he decided to run for president as a Republican, and then he had a very difficult time articulating exactly what he thought about the entire question until t...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 8, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: The usual BS
We now have three fairly short pieces, all of which are in the same vein. The righteous will prosper, the wicked will have their downfall. Sad to say, it just ain ' t so, and repeating it every Saturday won ' t make it true. If we want the righteous to flourish, and the wicked to have their downfall, we need to make it happen ourselves. God is of no help.A Psalm. A Song for the Sabbath.92 It is good to give thanks to theLord, to sing praises to thy name, O Most High;2 to declare thy steadfast love in the morning, and thy faithfulness by night,3 to the music of th...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 7, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
More on Freeze Peach
This is a topic I address from time to time, but it seems a new post is needed now because of various nonsense that ' s going on. First, let me make one thing perfectly clear, as a man we would all like to forget used to say: free speech and academic freedom are not the same. Legally, the only meaning of Free Speech ™ is the First Amendment, as interpreted by the courts. Originally it applied only to the federal government, but the 14th Amendment extended the protections of the Bill of Rights to the States, so it now applies to all government entities within the United States, and that includes your small tow n Board of ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 4, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: A public health lesson
Psalm 90 is attributed to Moses. At least David might have existed, although he certainly did not write the psalms attributed to him. Moses is an entirely fictitious character. We know for a fact that the Egyptian captivity and the exodus never happened. But I ' ll give the writer this much credit -- the human lifespan of 70 years was probably pretty accurate at the time, in the sense that it was about the longest people could hope to live. You may recall that in Genesis 6:3 God says the human lifespan will be 120 years, and that many of the characters in Genesis lived for hundreds of years. However, life expectancy -...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 3, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Paranoia
I have a popular security product on my ' puter -- well okay, it ' s Norton utilities -- and it seems to do the job. However, they are constantly trying to upsell me, to the point where it ' s seriously annoying. Their latest ploy is to repeatedly show me pop-ups telling me that they ' ve found data brokers selling my information on the (doom chords on the organ) Dark Web. They are kind enough to reveal for me what the information actually is. My name, email address, employer, address, and phone number. Also who my relatives are. Oh no, I ' m dooooooooomed. It turns out that the phone numbers are landlines I had when ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 1, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Sadly, no
Psalm 89 is quite lengthy so it will be our only text for the day. I ' m afraid I can ' t do anything special for Easter because we haven ' t gotten to the messianic prophecies yet. It isn ' t clear when Psalm 89 was written, but Ethan the Ezrahite was an associate of King Solomon, mentioned in Kings 4:31. One problem is that the (probably fictional) reign of Solomon as described in Kings does not include any of the hard times evoked here. It was a time of prosperity, military strength, and conquest. It could refer to the invasion by Pharaoh Shisak during the reign of Rehoboam, after the civil war that saw the northern kin...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 31, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Country life
As I may have mentioned from time to time, I live in a small town, a farming community. Like a lot of people here, I heat my house with wood. We do it because we can, basically. There are only three retail businesses in town: a liquor store, a seamstress (yes) and a chainsaw shop. In my case, between my own wooded property, and my neighbor who owns extensive forest land and is constantly having trees fall down across his roads, I get all the firewood I need by dint of my own efforts. I pretty much exclusively rely on deadfall, unless for some reason we ' re removing a tree anyway, so I ' m not angering the ents....
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 30, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Medical Costs
People have complained that I haven ' t said why Medicine is costing so much in the U S of A. Give me a break -- I can ' t talk about everything at once. I ' ve been intending to get to this all along. This is just the first installment, it ' s a long story.So, thanks to all the mind boggling complexities of employer-provided insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and a few other programs, something like 90% of Americans have some form of health insurance. Great news! That means we can all afford the medical services we need and nobody has to go broke because they get sick or are injured in a car crash or ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 28, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
