Church these days loves to remind us that “God is love,” but it is funny how little we hear about when Jesus said, “Do not presume that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill.”  Too often we like to use the former to justify the church looking the other way about some issue.  I thought about this as I read into Graham Platner this week.. . .

Yesterday I wrote, “I have always considered politics a mirror of our culture.  Right now, if we are completely honest, the image is not pretty.  The image is one primarily of distaste, discord and hatred.  Our politics seeks not to build, but to oppose.”  Nowhere is this more evident than in the current scandal surrounding the Southern Poverty Law Center.  The SPLC was paying for impotent white supremists to continue their activities just so the SPLC had something to oppose….. . .

I have always considered politics a mirror of our culture.  Right now, if we are completely honest, the image is not pretty.  The image is one primarily of distaste, discord and hatred.  Our politics seeks not to build, but to oppose.  We don’t hear much about lofty goals anymore – we only hear about “Candidate X must be stopped.”  Sure Candidate X may need to be stopped because he or she is perceived to be opposed to some lofty goal, but somehow the lofty goal gets rapidly lost in the conversation, leaving only opposition.  And with the lofty goal lost that opposition quickly turns to something much

Numbers are not supposed to lie.  Lord Kelvin once said, “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarely, in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science.”  But then Lord Kelvin never met a modern day Democrat.. . .

After the two major, one of them deadly, chemical tank incidents of last week, the drumbeats continue to sound for increased regulation.  On Monday I covered the cultural differences between the two regions of the country.  On Tuesday I covered how one cry related to regulation was, at best, specious.  I have resisted to date speculating on the cause of these incidents.  There is simply not enough information publicly available for such comments to be other than pure speculation – at least on a technical level.  But given these drumbeats there is one aspect of causation that I think should be discussed.. . .

Back in 2020, when they endorsed Joe Biden for president, I wrote an epitaph for the magazine Scientific American.  Sure, it is still being published, but it is now just another Trump bashing bit of media and no longer worth the effort necessary to pick it up.  I haven’t looked back, but just to prove my point they published an op-ed last Friday concerning the two tank incidents I looked at yesterday.  (A friend sent it to me, I did not go looking.  It may or may not be behind a paywall for you.  I was able to read it for a couple of days before the paywall notice started to appear.)  It is not science – it is

Best as I can tell, everybody has heard about the near disaster related to a tank in Garden Grove, CA.  The emergency is subsided, the evacuation over.  The predicted explosion or major release never occurred.  Yes a lot of people were inconvenienced in the related evacuation, but that is the only consequence.  Litigation now flies around like a swarm of locusts and the company owning the tank will have a major clean-up on their hands.  Meanwhile, at roughly the same time, a tank in a Longview, WA paper plant mill imploded, killing 9 people and producing a fish kill in the water bodies that feed directly into the Columbia

Jill Biden’s contention, that she worried her husband was having a stroke during the 2024 debate is one of the most obvious lies n political history.  Lies so audacious are not born of simple attempts to “change the narrative,” cover up wrongdoing or some other self-serving reason.  Such obvious falsehoods, spoken with such apparent sincerity, are a sign of self-delusion. Jill Biden was not lying to us, she was lying to herself.  That makes it difficult to know how to react.. . .