When my personal grasp of the gospel was very weak, my self-view swung wildly between two poles. When I was performing up to my standards—in academic work, professional achievement, or relationships—I felt confident but not humble. When I was not living up to standards, I felt humble but not confident, a failure. I discovered, however, that the gospel contained the resources to build a unique identity. In Christ I could know I was accepted by grace not only despite my flaws, but because I was willing to admit them. The Christian gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time.

Oh the venom… here’s the official MSNBC version that wouldn’t embed in the right format.

An email is going around blaming illegal aliens and the Democratically controlled congress as the chief causes of our current financial woes. Yes, Democrats do like to spend money, but could they have possibly caused such economic shift in such a short amount of time? I’m no economist, but I wouldn’t credit Congress with such expedient results. Here’s my armchair-pundit opinion:

I realize that caring for illegal immigrants is a huge cost but compared to the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, two non-budgetary inestimable undefined projects, they are a bargain. Think about it: is it harder to take care of a generally hard-working people who live illegally within your borders and are mooching off your existing infrastructure who speak a simple language that most of us have learned in high school or is it harder to destroy an empire on the other side of the planet in the most violent region on earth in a hostile climate and impossible terrain where the people speak one of the most difficult languages and expect to rebuild THEIR infrastructure, secure THEIR borders, police THEIR neighborhoods, and not accidentally kill THEIR honest citizens making us more enemies, and then have to build a gigantic base in the middle of it all to babysit this process for rest of time?

Why single out the Democrats when it is this bi-partisan-initiated and Republican-perpetuated project that has drained our treasury, taken our focus off the security of US borders, and delayed the solutions to our domestic immigration problems? Isn’t OUR homeland’s security the reason we went to war in the first place? Are we insane? The wars have cost us MUCH more than taking care of uninvited persons on our continent. Seriously, in 2003 Bush estimated $74 billion as the total cost, now it’s estimated to hit $3 trillion—50 times more—for a non-budgetary item! The direct costs in cash and lives far outweigh the benefits, but it’s the negative macro-economic impact of an extended Middle Eastern occupation that is truly unfathomable. Imagine you couldn’t afford to build a $200,000 house but you decide to do it anyway, then halfway through you estimate it will be $10,000,000. Could you possibly continue?

Our nation is $9 trillion in debt (largely to the Chinese, the people who make everything we use, which is essentially the same as owing your soul to the company store) and the government is bailing out the banks and giving us kickbacks this year! Seriously!?! Our current economic downturn, of which the price of gas is just a major indicator, cannot be blamed on Democrats or illegals—two red herrings—but our complicit stupidity for acting impulsively and not counting the costs of war.

“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’

“Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Will he not first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace.

Jesus (Luke 14:28-32)

McCain’s YouTube Problem Just Became a Nightmare

My previous political post illustrated the basic economic differences between Team Elephant and Team Donkey—the merits of individual compassion over artificially forced and inefficiently implemented socialism. In this video, we see Team Elephant’s “most popular” contender for President caught in some major contradictions. His experience as P.O.W. and his bulldog physique make him come across as “tough on terror” and this is enough for most of Team Elephant fans to think he’s their man. He may be their man, but if he’s going to be the type of leader who acts first and seeks factual justification later, he’s not going to be my man.

Nobody wants to get on the wrong side of an army of angry youtube content creators. I wonder how long it will take for the impact of user-created content to trump the major media outlet.

My experience thus far with the Apple 12″ Powerbook G4 1.5MHz:

1. June 2005 - May 2008 - Three years without quirks, lockups, reformats, reinstalls, defrags. My computer just works and I use it at least 5 hours a day, that’s 5475 operating hours, 30 trillion clock cycles of happy computing. Maybe I locked it up once but I had like 40 apps running.
2. April 20, 2008 - I notice things to seem a bit sluggish. I’m using about 78GB of my 80GB drive and can’t decide what should go. Moving archives off to the backup drive guarantees that I will need to use them (some kind of Murphy’s Law). Too many photos and unneeded video footage. My new camera with an 8GB card only makes the onslaught worse. Lack of free space is obviously affecting the swap file breathing room and hurting performance.
3. May 1, 2008 - My cheapo mouse was becoming inoperable on most surfaces and froze on the screen. I wiggled it to get it to move and within a few seconds I got the above message for the first time ever. This must be the mac equivalent of a blue screen of death. It’s such a foreign experience to me that I was quite scared by it.
4. May 10, 2008 - I was doing basic web dev stuff, javascript was getting some errors and the fan kicked on high gear (I don’t understand why it’s such a processor hog). Then everything starts working extremely slow. Activity monitor says there’s a kernel_task using 99.5% of the processor. It seems to be melting but I’m able to use the .5% and a lot of patience to get the machine to shut itself down. It starts back up fresh and spry.
5. May 12, 2008 - iMovie is crashing for no good reason.

I have no need for a MacIntel, though sometimes I’m curious what I’m missing with Leopard. I’m perfectly content with using this machine for the rest of my life. I pray this is just a midlife crisis.

Once upon a time in the land of Grossly Simplified Political Ideologies:

John McCain and Hillary Clinton were walking down the street and came to a homeless person. John McCain, gave him his business card and told him to come to his office for a job. He then took $20 out of his pocket and gave it to the homeless person. Hillary was impressed, so when they came to another homeless person, she stepped forward to help. She gave him directions to the welfare office, then reached into McCain’s pocket and got out another $20. She kept $15 for administrative costs and gave the homeless person $5.

These movies were taken on May 1, 2008 on our trip from Dragon’s Tooth to McAffee’s Knob to Tinker Cliffs. Jojo (Josh Johns) fearlessly captured these creatures on the way up McAffee’s. For some reason I’m not getting the QT movie controls to embed properly above, it should play if you double-click it. If not, try these links below.

• The snake tamer
• The lizard tamer
• The full photo gallery

Matt Rogers on 700 Club, April 15, 2008 with live feedback from rest of staff team (in lieu of live studio audience).

On Saturday, April 12, 2008, a group of thirty diverse people gave tribute to the red-headed Messianic Jew who brought us all together through prayer, friendship, and Pepsi. If you weren’t able to join us, we hope the following will be meaningful to you.

1. Memorial Bulletin (2MB pdf)
2. Memorial Audio Recording (30MB, 74min mp3)
3. Elder Abraham Phonemail Prank (1MB, 2min mp3)
4. Photo Slideshow (as seen above, 9MB, 2min mp4)
5. Jewish, Presbyterian, and Episcopal Prayers (72KB pdf)
6. Memory book in pdf form (coming soon)

If you’d like to leave comments about the memorial, please do so here. If you’d like to leave a few words in memory of Andy, that might belong better on this post.

As I sit in my 59 degree home with an empty oil furnace tank, I’m thankful that we made it through the winter with fuel. Too bad it wasn’t enough for the mysterious Appalachian post-winter weather spasms. It took over $1000 to fill the tank in the fall and now it’s dry. This summer I’ll be looking into replacing some of our larger single-pane windows. Until then, we’re looking at some cheaper alternatives to fill our tank this coming year. I’m surprised to find that trendy and new-fangled biodiesel, is actually cheaper than petrodiesel. We just need to find a supplier who can truck some to us. Here’s some interesting facts from my research found at http://biofuels.coop:

• total oil used since 1850:
  1 trillion barrels
• total world reserves remaining:
  1 trillion barrels
• percent oil discovered before 1973:
  70%
• time left at current world usage (29 billion/yr):
  33 years
• time left if US uses strategic oil reserves:
  1 month
• time left if US uses only oil in US fields:
  3 years
• time left if US grabs/uses all of Iraq’s oil for itself:
  15 years
• time left if whole world uses oil at US’s current rate:
  6 years