Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
They're starting out to do just that: Communist Cuba will shift hundreds of thousands of state employees to the private sector in 2011 as the government prunes more than 500,000 workers from its payroll. The official trade union federation said on Monday that eventually more than a million jobs would be cut. “Job options will …
Continue reading "If Cuba Can Reduce the Public Sector, Why Can't We?"
The Town of Palm Beach is to be commended on passing a budget without a tax increase... The smaller budget is necessary because of a nearly 12 percent dip in taxable property values, which has reduced the town’s tax base, and because the council decided against increasing the property tax rate. But their cutback, laudatory …
This is the sixth in a sporadic series on the Catechetical Lectures of St. Cyril of Jerusalem. The last post was Touch not God’s Anointed. In the last instalment of the series, Cyril is quoted in saying that the newly baptised and chrismated believers were now the “images of Christ.” (XXI, 1) Concerning the image …
Continue reading "The Difference Between Image and Likeness in Genesis"
That's what David Phipps of the Church Society tells us re John Henry Newman's conversion to Catholicism: No one can be a Catholic without a simple faith, that what the Church declares in God's name, is God's word, and therefore true. A man must simply believe that the Church is the oracle of God. When …
Continue reading "Is Roman Catholicism Really the Ultimate Form of Fundamentalism?"
This, I suppose, is the "9/11 commemorative piece" for today, but actually I first wrote it in 2005. It was a unique experience for my wife and I to attend the Arab Worldwide Evangelical Ministers Association (AWEMA) meeting at The Cove (Billy Graham's conference centre) in April 2003. It was the first time we had …
For those who look at this objectively, the dead end of green jobs stimulus is unsurprising: Noticeably absent from President Obama's latest economic-stimulus package are any further attempts to create jobs through "green" energy projects, reflecting a year in which the administration's original, loudly trumpeted efforts proved largely unfruitful. The long delays typical with environmentally …
The trade union strikes back in the face of the LA Times publishing teacher performance data: Although the Times acknowledged that this measure does "not capture everything that goes into making a good teacher," that's exactly how the paper used this data. In its race to create dramatic headlines, the paper sacrificed both the tenets …
Continue reading "Rating Teachers Would be Simpler Without the State Supported Monopoly"
I have to admit that the Dove World Outreach Church's plan to burn Qur'ans on Saturday is one of the stupidest things I have heard of in a long time. The reason is simple: it is impossible to share our Christian faith with Muslims (have meaningful dialogue, if you please) unless we have a knowledge …
It's the logical "next step" from the smart highways, cars that drive themselves: It may sound like science fiction, but the research arm of the Transportation Department is at work on this future right now. With many modes of transportation already using automation as standard operating procedure, cars guiding themselves and avoiding crashes might not …
Continue reading "Cars That Drive Themselves: The Next Step"
At the end of his piece Why God Did Not Create the Universe, Stephen Hawking makes the following statement: Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense the lords of creation. This statement is part of a long train of inconsistent thinking on this subject. …
Continue reading "Stephen Hawking and the Arrogance of Insignificance"
Positive Infinity 