Senseless Sunday: Rolling space wax

• The inability to roll your tongue is a genetic trait that may involve more than one gene.¹
• American pronunciation of tt and dd in words like letter and bladder make the same tongue movement and similar sound as the rolled Spanish “r”.
• A person in orbit around the earth gets taller while in orbit.
• Sahara Desert is growing about 1/2 mile southward per year.
• Before an official name was chosen in Mandarin Chinese, one of many transliterations of the name Coca Cola was “bite the wax tadpole.”   Another was “female horse fastened with wax”.  Current official transliterate trademark is made up of the characters of K’o K’ou K’o Lê which translate as ”to all the mouth to be able to rejoice”.²

Who are we calling producers and who are those who refuse to produce?

One of the sad sign of our times is that we demonize those who produce, subsidize those who refuse to produce, and canonize those who complain. --Thomas Sowell

This is a particularly disgusting statement.  First, those who produce and those who do not is a matter of perspective.  What do you tell the father of 3 who has relied on a job for most of his life, who then lost his job because the company who he worked for was mismanaged by executives and had to shut down?  What do you tell that same father when the same guys that ran his company into the ground got huge bonuses "so they wouldn't leave" before operations were completely shut down?  If the father had stock in that company, he lost on two fronts because of those executives.

Given Sowell's statement above, I would ask, who is he calling the producer?  Who is he calling "those who refuse to produce"?  Would it be the executives that drove their company into the ground, not only losing value in the company, but also within the greater economy?  If anything, they are anti-producers.  This makes them worse than the supposed people who "refuse to produce", whoever they are.  The producer is the father who worked his entire life at his company, making the goods and services that found their way into homes all across America.

Fed has spent trillions to keep a dying financial industry on life support, who in turn gave huge bonuses to the very people the caused the last melt down of our economy.  What did those people do with the rest of the taxpayer's money?  Most of it is locked away, being kept out of the economy (likely for good).

Are we really all that worried about giving a few pennies (comparatively) to people who are likely already not putting enough food on the table because they believed in this very system that eventually let them down?  It's this kind of nonsense that makes communism start to look good to the starving masses.  We would not need to raise taxes had it not been for the massive problems that we, the voters, allowed in Wall Street by putting congresspersons in office that are more worried about the next big donor than they are about the solvency of our system.

How badly do we want to lower taxes?  Well, let's consider something.  Out of the last three crashes of our economy, two were caused by real estate financials games that started happening as a direct result of deregulation of particular financial institutions.  The games these institutions were playing eventually stopped working, but the corporations still needed to pretend they were making money (when, in fact, they were losing massive amounts of money).  So, they created paperwork fantasies to keep showing profits on Wall Street in order to convince everyone that nothing was going on until it was too late.  The third economic crash was caused by too much speculation on Wall Street. The common thread here is Wall Street and all the money that the taxpayer is continuously asked to pay to keep these guys rich when really they should be in jail.

Why these guys were at CES 2013 (Consumer Electronics Show) confused some people, but I get it. (Sourced from this article: Bad Dog Tools Demos Drill Bits That Cut Through Basically Everything There Is [Video].)

Just say NO to free bridges in Detroit!

Just say NO to free bridges in Detroit! (Daily Show report)

 

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-january-9-2013/bridge-to-canada?xrs=share_copy

Cavity causing bacteria, your days are numbered!

Gotta love the 21st Century! Now we know how cavity causing bacteria evolved and we can use that information against them!

Evolution of Cavities

When will the end be according to Jesus? Not when you've been told...and yes, it really is specified

When will the end come according to Jesus' speech in Matthew 24, Mark 13 and Luke 21?  The prophesy in those scriptures is often quoted.  Jesus tells of earthquakes, wars, famine, etc as happening right before the end.  When did he prophesy the end would be?  In that speech, he states, 

But of that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.

So far, that's a good argument for saying that we don't know when the end will come.  Except, it's taken out of context of the prophesy.  A few versus prior, Jesus states,

Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.

Who is this generation?  Well, we get all kinds of arguments about "which" generation is being spoken about.  But, in context of the scripture itself, we know which generation.  It was the small group of people to which Jesus was speaking.  That group was his disciples who asked him privately about when the end would come.  (Actually, technically, according to Mark, they asked Jesus about the destruction of Jerusalem that he previously mentioned, but Jesus used the opportunity to talk about the end of everything, implying the destruction of Jerusalem was linked to the end of everything; in Matthew, they asked about the end and return of Jesus.)

How do we know that "this generation" applies to the one of which the disciples where apart?  Even within the same speech, Jesus is imploring his disciples to be watchful, that the end could come at any moment.  He doesn't say, "When that generation sees these things, then they should be watchful."  He tells his disciples that he's putting them in charge, and for them to keep alert.

Take heed, keep on the alert; for you do not know when the appointed time will come. It is like a man away on a journey, who upon leaving his house and putting his slaves in charge, assigning to each one his task, also commanded the doorkeeper to stay on the alert.  Therefore, be on the alert--for you do not know when the master of the house is coming, whether in the evening, at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or in the morning-- in case he should come suddenly and find you asleep.

Then Jesus says that all of his followers should be alert.  None of these statements were meant for some future unknown and unspecified generation.  It was a message intended for the disciples to which Jesus was directly speaking.  This prophesy was intended to be fulfilled before their generation passed on.  This means, according to his prophesy (taken in context), the world should have ended sometime in what we now call the 1st Century, just over 1900 years ago.  Well, Jerusalem was sacked (not really destroyed, though the Second Temple was destroyed) in 70 C.E., and the rest of the world is still here.  This isn't a prophesy about the future.  It is a failed prophesy about a time in ancient past.

All scripture quotes in this article are from Mark 13 of the New American Standard Bible via The Unbound Bible.