Wet!

... and cold.

When I got home this morning (Saturday), about 11:00, I discovered that water was flooding most of the first/ground floor from a frozen/burst supply line to one of the upstairs bathrooms.

Based on the fact that my (formerly beautiful) hardwood floors were just beginning to absorb water, and haven't yet warped or buckled, I'm thinking that the flooding was for hours, rather than for days. Shoot! If I had just come home last night, I might have caught it before any real damage.

As it is, much of the drywall in the front rooms of the house will have to be replaced. The antique double doors (they're actually old part of a panel of room-dividers from a church) into the LR are ruined. Many of my books are ruined. Granted, most of them are just science fiction and fantasy novels, but still! My wool carpets (area rugs) are soaked. The carpet in most of the upstairs is warping.

Oh, my! The books on the lower shelf of the bookcase which is pretty much just below the burst pipe have absorbed so much water that I can't get them out.

Just a few minutes ago, I discovered that the motor of the "squirrel cage" furnace-fan has broken loose from one of its three mountings. Thus, the fan is dragging on its housing and cannot turn. So, the furnace is now off ... and it's getting colder outside. I wonder whether the furnace not working properly may have contributed to my little disaster?


2014/02/18:
I just received word from the insurance agent that the insurance company isn't going to renew my homeowners policy.

Mind and the Limitations of Science

Shadow To Light: Mind and the Limitations of Science

I've written about the 'Houben Case' in the context of strip-mining of human beings for vital organs to transplant into other (apparently, more important) human beings.

'Shadow To Light' used the reported facts of the case as the basis of a thought experiment concerning 'philosophy of mind', and which high-lights an important limitation of science, and of what if knowable via scince, one which the 'Science!' refuse to see.

Nailing it

Michael Egnor has a recent post to which I wish to draw Gentle Reader's attention, and also to a comment by 'Big Rich' that nails it -- Does Catholicism minus the Enlightenment equal the Inquisition?, which is in response to a piece by John Zmirak, in which is asserted that "Catholicism minus the Enlightenment equals the Inquisition."

As you may (or may not) know, I have no use for the Roman denomination; I think Christianity would be much improved were all Catholics to wash themselves of the effluvia of the Cloaca Maxima and become Protestants. That said, I wholly agree with Egnor that it is a "damnable lie" that "Catholicism minus the Enlightenment equals the Inquisition."; I also agree with him that the Inquisition itself is not inherently bad or immoral.

Here is the comment by 'Big Rich' I wish to bring to your attention:

Does Catholicism minus the Enlightenment equal the Inquisition? The better and more obvious question is, does the Enlightenment without Christianity equal the holocaust? And the answer is, of course it does. It also equals the guillotines of the French Revolution, Mao's and Stalin's purges, America's forced sterilizations and the -- the greatest genocide perpetuated on mankind and done specifically in the name of enlightenment -- the slaughter of the unborn. The death toll which lays directly at the feet of an unrestrained enlightenment is the better part of a billion human lives, but according to sons of the Enlightenment like Peter Singer -- we need to be more dead bodies -- just not his or course.

'Talitha koum!'

Susan D. Harris (at American Thinker): Hospital Spokesman Dictates Limits For Hope and Prayer --

Sam Singer, spokesman for the Children's Hospital Oakland, has taken it upon himself to dictate the limits of hope and prayer.

Singer is one of the players in the gut wrenching saga of Jahi McMath, the 13-year-old Northern California girl who went in for a tonsillectomy and ended up brain dead. The second girl in two years to suffer severe brain damage under similar conditions at Children's Hospital Oakland, the case obviously has the hospital on the defensive.

In a jaw-dropping statement, made on behalf of the hospital, Mr. Singer, speaking with greater authority than anyone could have imagined, told the world: "There is, unfortunately, no amount of hope, no amount of prayer that can bring her back."

If Mr. Singer wants to tell us she is brain dead, fine. If he wants to tell us that an independent physician also declared her brain dead and "there was no question of that," - fine. She was indeed pronounced dead only three days after she underwent surgery to treat sleep apnea. The "complications" she suffered have not been detailed, but we do know she went into cardiac arrest. We also know that after an independent review of the case, a judge gave the go ahead to remove the life support that was keeping her alive. It was at this point that hospital spokesman Sam Singer threw down his theological gauntlet.
...
It is not uncommon for medical miscalculations to be made, or for God to be underestimated. Just last year, a young man in the U.K. was declared brain dead by four specialists after he suffered devastating injuries in a car crash. His parents refused to give up hope, his father begged doctors to check again, and two weeks later faint signs of brain activity were detected. Seven weeks later, he was released from the hospital. If not for his parent's perseverance, he would be dead.

We don't know what will happen in the case of little Jahi McMath; but with every ounce of my being, and for the sake of everyone who dares to hope and pray for loved ones around the world, may God prove the doubters wrong once again and say "Talitha koum!" - "Little girl, I say to you, arise."

Whatever the outcome, may we never lose hope, nor our faith in the power of prayer - and may we never be guilty of that greater sin...causing others to lose theirs.

As one wag put it: "The problem with living in a less religious society isn’t that people don’t think about God but that they think God has a position in their bureaucracy (below theirs)."

What's so great about Ilion's blog?

Recently, one of the God-hating leftists who infest Michael Egnor blog asked, "What's so great about Ilion's blog?"

In full, he said, " What's so great about Ilion's blog? His posts consist mainly of links. There are hardly any signs of intellectual activity there."

Think about this condemnation of me he offers -- because I think that others' thoughts are worth thinking about and are worth sharing with others, therefore, there are hardly any signs of intellectual activity here.

You just know that if I never posted anything but my own musings, he'd be condemning me for that ... and in the same terms.

Leftists, atheists ... they are almost always intellectually dishonest.

Yet another conundrum

Here is yet another conundrum for evolutionism --

Cornelius Hunter has a recent post concerning the "sixth sense" of magnetoreception that many animal possess, with a focus on how this ability relates to evolutionism Evolutionists Conclude Magnetoreception Evolved (After They Doubted its Very Existence) ... but then, they “conclude” that about everything, once they stop denying that it exists.

Hunter: -- “... It is also another example of the failure of evolutionary theory. Not only is there no scientific explanation for how such magneto reception, processing and decision-making could evolve, but the entire idea runs counter to evolution. Fifty years ago evolutionists ridiculed the idea that animals could detect such weak signals and use them in a sort of geographic information service. Now they claim it is all a result of blind evolution. As one evolutionist explained regarding the loggerhead turtles, “We think different areas along the migratory pathway are marked by unique magnetic signatures, and the turtles have evolved responses that are coupled to these signatures.” They think that not because the turtle’s magnetoreception appears to be a product of evolution, or that they have anything close to a scientific explanation for how it could have evolved. They think that because they believe evolution is true.

That is the extent of evolution’s contribution to this research.”

Here is the conundrum for evolutionism -

Supposedly - it’s (presently) Gospel in evolutionism -- the earth's magnetic field periodically collapses and reverses.

So, one must wonder, given Darwinsm/evolutionism, and give the periodic collapse and reversal of the earth’s marnet field, how do there happen to be species that rely upon magnetoreception to get to where they need to be when they need to be there (for instance, their breeding or spawning grounds)?


A collapse and reversal is supposed to happen on an average of 450,000 years. That hardly seems like time enough for magnetoreception to randomly evolve-and-fix. Or, even if it were enough time, about the time a species came to get good at it and to depend upon it, the magnetic field would collapse and reverse.

According to the Wickedpedia (no foe of evolutionism, that!) - " A geomagnetic reversal is a change in the Earth's magnetic field such that the positions of magnetic north and magnetic south are interchanged. The Earth's field has alternated between periods of normal polarity, in which the direction of the field was the same as the present direction, and reverse polarity, in which the field was the opposite. These periods are called chrons. The time spans of chrons are randomly distributed with most being between 0.1 and 1 million years with an average of 450,000 years. Most reversals are estimated to take between 1,000 and 10,000 years. The latest one, the -BrunhesMatuyama reversal, occurred 780,000 years ago. A brief complete reversal, known as the Laschamp event, occurred only 41,000 years ago during the last glacial period. That reversal lasted only about 440 years with the actual change of polarity lasting around 250 years. During this change the strength of the magnetic field dropped to 5% of its present strength."

So, according to evolutionism, a mere 41,000 years ago, there was a brief (i.e. 440 years) complete reversal of earth’s magnetic field. Now, while 440 years (or 250 years) may be “brief” on geological time-scales, in the life-span of an organism which needs to be at the right places -- feeding grounds and/or breeding grounds -- at the right times, this span of time of being unable to rely upon its magnetoreception to get there equals species extinction.

Hey, we do that here too!

Dubai sends American to max-security prison for … a YouTube satire video

As Bob Parks noted: Hey, we do that here too!

Stupid 'Atheist' Tricks VI

The blogger ‘Shadow to Light’ has a recent post concerning just how weak-vaporous are Jerry Coyne’s “powerful arguments for atheism”. I have some comments --

Shadow to Light: "This [the sixth "argument"] is a nonsense question. We inquire about the origin of something if we have reason to think that thing came into existence. Treating God as if He is supposed to be one more thing that is part of contingent reality means you have not seriously considered the question of God’s existence, which is probably why this is a favorite argument among the pre-teens and young teens."

Also, as an "argument", it is blatant straw-manning and question-begging built upon an equivocation. Consider it again --

Jerry Coyne: "6. Who made God? Secularism provides the best explanation for the idea of God, for we have ample reason to think (and in fact have often witnessed) that gods are created by the human mind."

The equivocation: no "idea of God" is God himself. Conceptions of 'god' may or may not be accurate -- they may or may not actually refer to the actual God -- but even accurate conceptions of God are incomplete. And none of them is God himself: no more than is one's understanding of one's father one's father himself.

The strawman: as 'Shadow to Light' notes, "[t]reating [the Biblical Judeo-Christian conception of the Creator-]God as if He is supposed to be one more thing that is part of contingent reality means you have not seriously considered the question [and arguments] of God’s existence"

This strawman contains another equivocation -- Coyne is treating the Biblical Judeo-Christian conception of the Creator-God -- the uncreated/non-contingent Necessary Being who is the "ground of all being", who is "being itself" -- as being logically equivalent to any of the various the pagan conceptions of their gods, all of whom were conceived as being contingent, all of whom were conceived either as having been born of some pre-existing deity, or as having spontaneously "arisen" from some pre-existing state of affairs.

It is a favorite strawman of atheists to knock down Zeus and then triumphantly proclaim that they have knocked down The Ancient of Days.

The question-begging: by equivocating between conceptions of God and God himself, this atheist "argument" begs the question whether the term 'God' refers to anything other than this or that conception of 'god'. That is, this "argument" *begins* with the assumption that the terms 'God' and 'god' refer ever and only to ideas and never to what those ideas are believed to concern. So, of course, by *assuming* that the Judeo-Christian use of the term 'God' refers *only* to the Judeo-Christian concept of what God is like, and never to God Himself, he is able to "conclude" that God is merely an idea "created by the human mind."

Well, d'oh!

Keep in mind, Gentle Reader -- this is the *best* that the militant God-haters (and would-be murderers of his people) can do.

Gettin' your freak on ... and not

Bob Parks: How To Piss Off Your Wife

'I do not think that word means what you think it means'

Bob Parks: Boneheads Of The Day -- Notice the sign a person in the picture is holding -- as Inigo Montoya might say, "I do not think that word means what you think it means". For, after all, what they are demanding for 'Juan' is the opposite of justice.