Anyway, the company I work for has been tossing the idea of using social media to promote things around for a while. It’s a ‘wave of the future’ mentality, and as the higher ups are in fact savvy business people, I think they are correct. I need, for the sake of my career to learn this stuff and be more active with it. Adaptation is the key to survival right?

I used to post once a day on this awesome service called Modblog. They had a hard drive or something crash one day and it took the site down. From what I understand there were something like 32 hard drives in the server all in a RAID and some idiot tech took them all out for some reason. Long story short, he couldn’t remember what hard drive went where and there are 1024 combinations they could go back in or something. The owner of the site cut his losses and did something else. Can’t blame him, but dang it if that service didn’t make it easy to write every day in.

If you look back at my postings over the last several years you’ll see that since then I’ve not been able to post once a week, much less once a day on average. Everything I’ve listened to and read says to “get new content out every day” so I’m going to throw back in and try it.

As for useful techie stuff today the only thing I’ve got is that over the last three work days I’ve been reminded what a slow process getting a new PRI circuit installed is. Our old one had errors and they didn’t think it could be fixed, so they’re just stringing up a new circuit. The process at least from my view point as a consumer is this:

1. They inform you that you are getting a new T1
2. They install a card in your smart jack box in your server room
3. They make your phone calls REALLY unstable for a couple hours
4. They finish and test the line for an hour
5. The re-seller then tests the T1 on their end for 24 hours after sending a tech out to put a ‘loopback interface’ in the smart jack. This is really a standard Cat5 jack that’s been terminated to link four of the pins to each other. It’s nothing fancy.
6. The re-seller then tells you when it’s safe to cut over
7. ???
8. Profit?

I often wonder if SIP is not the way to go these days. It might be a lot more convenient. You can’t really beat a PRI for stability though.

Last post on this was basically defining the project and how I would handle everything. I’ve started on my first post about the New World Order. It will take a fair amount of research to get all my ducks on a row on it so that I’m not just spouting my opinion, and can also cite my resources.

I decided I would make a list of topics I would definitely cover based on what comes up in the various churches, or from what my friends, relatives and other acquaintances approach me with.

• Cults – I will briefly talk about some of the more occult things people have asked me about and whether there’s a conspiracy about them or not. This is going to be a touchy subject because of my definition of ‘cult’ and ‘occult’. I do not consider Jehova’s Witnesses, Mormons, Islam, or the Catholic Church a cult even though their message is what most of my peers define as ‘cult’. That is something that adds to the Word of God. Mine is a bit narrower as even the most conservative of Protestant denominations can be called cults according to that definition.
• New World Order – This is a big deal. A lot of preachers talk about this, and get people scared about it. They warp what God’s Word says and show conspiracies in the shadows where there are none. This leads to a lot of worry, which Jesus clearly tells us not to do.
• Bullcrap Detection – A lot of churches will have people speak on the ‘hidden evils’ of the world that normal people aren’t privileged enough to see. They come in all sorts but for the most part they are entirely full of crap. I’ve come up with a couple of acid tests to tell when this is the case.
• Science/Technology/Religion – I don’t think these two are mutually exclusive but some tend to think so.
• End of the World – There is a lot of confusion on this subject. I will tackle this from a Baptist point of view. I’ll relate some other ideas that I’ve heard over the years.
• Natural Healing/Medicine – Not something I hear a lot of debate about in Baptist churches. Most pastors I’ve heard really encourage people to make use of modern medicine as the ongoing idea is that God has gifted physicians with the skills and knowledge to patch us up when we get sick. There are a few denominations that take to this whole medical conspiracy idea with far too much vigor.
• Magical Thinking/Supernatural Phenomena – Not really a conspiracy theory, but an issue I feel strongly about. As a Baptist I have some strong opinions on this as should most any Protestant. Unfortunately there are a lot of people who believe in ghosts, spirits and other supernatural phenomena. The Bible is extremely clear on these subjects and what the truth is about them.

Since this is a more religiously themed blog, I will stick to those theories I hear more from other Christians. They are many and varied, so this can get convoluted very quickly.

They can be broken down into a few basic categories. One is that the Anti-Christ will come and unite all the world governments under one rule. Another more common one that we will somehow manage to do this ourselves through some vast conspiracy and he will just step in as ruler. Yet another posits aliens of various sorts that will come and unite the world in peace and harmony and then Armageddon (yes I heard that in church once). Others involve Nephelim disguised as aliens, angels or whatever basically doing the same.

Essentially this is an idea about the end times.

There are others but those are what I get told about ad nauseum and hear the most about. So before I start in on tearing it apart I will pose a few questions.

What does the Bible say about this?
In this case are there any specific prophecies?
Is this something to worry about?
Is it even important?
Is it plausible this could happen?
What might trigger it?
According to scripture, what should I do about it?

Each of these questions needs to be answered as they relate to the topic. For purposes of this article we will assume the “New World Order” means “One World Government”

What Does The Bible Say About This? 

The largest collection of verses allegedly about a one world government resides in Revelations 13-20 or so, but the whole book talks about it. The rest are in Daniel (Daniel 2, Daniel 7) and other books with prophecies relating to the end times. Interestingly I can’t really find any reference specifically to a one world government. Revelations suggests that all the people on Earth will bow down before a set of “beasts” then goes on to explain that these beasts are symbolic (Revelations 17).  I found this verse a bit confusing myself. It’s when the angel explains about the beast in verse 8.

⁸The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is

Jesus Himself gives a prophecy and specifically refers to the prophet Daniel as to who to look to for information on the end of the world. He talks about it in Matthew 24 in straightforward terms with not much of the confusing symbolism you find in Revelation.

The most common interpretation of these visions and indeed the one that Daniel himself gave is that the beast is a metaphor for world government, and each of its heads/horns are a different kingdom of some kind. Eventually these ten kingdoms are weakened, defeated, replaced or manipulated somehow by another horn/head. This is the kingdom of the Anti-Christ. Now when I say kingdom, I really mean ‘nation’ or ‘country’ as a kingdom might be inside a much greater collective. So the best we can figure is that there will be ten major players in the world and they’ll be taken down by this ‘one world government’. A lot of people tend to believe this is going on now with the United Nations.

I looked over a basic listing of how the UN is currently set up on Wikipedia. Essentially 193 sovereign nations (with the exception of the Vatican) are members of the UN. I think Taiwan is not considered a sovereign state, though the people there seem to think otherwise. The whole New World Order conspiracy seems to focus on the Security Council which consists of five permanent members (US, UK, France, China and Russia) with ten non-permanent members (As of the Wikipedia article I checked they were: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Colombia, Gabon, Germany, India, Lebanon, Nigeria, Portugal,  and South Africa). I can’t find much of a structure in the UN that is just ten countries, just five and those haven’t changed in a long time. As an aside (and completely anecdotal), someone told me a few months ago Brazil was trying to get permanent membership on this council due to their relationship with middle eastern countries, but have been denied.

It also doesn’t give me the impression that there will necessarily be a one world government to speak of, just that there will be ten entities everyone in the world will bow to. Granted, these are probably nations, but they might be individuals, corporations, organizations or pretty well anything. Governments might just be the means to an end. This isn’t the generally agreed on interpretation but frankly, what is the difference between a multi-national corporation with half a million employees and a small country with a forty thousand citizens? It also doesn’t say that all nations will be included in these ten either, nor the one that overthrows them.

In This Case Are There Any Prophecies

Yes, as shown above there are prophecies in Daniel 2, Daniel 7, Matthew 24, and Revelations 17. These are really the same prophecy. Jesus gives some very specific things to watch out for in Matthew 24, and other parts of Revelations talk about these things in greater detail. I encourage everyone to read Revelations in general, actually.

Jesus’ Warnings

I thought it would be a good idea to list the warnings Jesus himself gave about this prophecy and what to look for. This is all taken from Matthew 24. He’s pretty concise.

1. For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many – I take it to mean a lot of people will come claiming to be Jesus and fooling a lot of people in the process.
2. And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet – There will be wars, and rumors of wars all the time. In this case he says to not worry about it because these things HAVE to happen but it isn’t the end time. A lot of preachers leave that part out.
3. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows - Nations will fight, there will be natural disasters in various places all over. Again, He says that this is just the beginning, it isn’t the end quite yet. Again, preachers leave this out a lot.
4. Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake – He’s saying His followers will be turned in for bad things to happen to them, and we’ll be killed. We’ll be hated by all nations because of Him.
5. And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another – I take this to mean a lot of strife. It’s hard to tell if this happens between believers or not. But there’s a lot of hate and betrayal that will go on. Some of this I take to be because of the wars and disasters He talks about previously (always need a scapegoat).
6. And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many – So after or during all this, or perhaps before and after, there will be a lot of false prophets. Not people claiming to be God, but people claiming to be prophets (probably of various sorts).
7. And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved - These two verses I am not sure exactly what they mean, but I think perhaps he’s saying a lot of people will become very jaded? If someone could send me a good interpretation of what He is trying to get across here I’d appreciate it.
8. And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come – This is the point where He is saying, “OK THIS is how you tell when the end is. When the Gospel of the Kingdom has been preached to all the world.”

After this part Jesus tells us that when this starts to happen it would be best to run for the hills. Hide, don’t even get your stuff from your house first. Basically He is saying to evacuate with extreme prejudice. He then goes on to give a few more details of what things will be like and then says specifically that “Only the Father knows when he will come back.”

Is this something to worry about?

I don’t think so. My credentials in the field of theology are not that high (just most of my entire education revolved around it), but I recall all this prophecy to be a message of comfort. Jesus himself says that the world will hate us for His sake and we will be persecuted. It has happened before, happens now and will happen until the end of time. So we need a message of comfort. That message is “He’s coming back!” 1 Thessalonians 4 talks about how we are to conduct ourselves until the end happens, and some pretty good advice for life in general.

I cannot find anywhere that specifically says, “And verily, there will be a kingdom that encompasses the world. When this happens you’ll know that I’m coming back.” No, there is a prophecy that talks about world turmoil (granted some is political), war, disasters, and misery that will occur at the end of time. These things ARE coming, we don’t know when, but we’ve been given a detailed list of guidelines on what to look for. We should on some level welcome these things as soon we will realize the Kingdom of God, which is the only one world government the Bible does specifically allude to.

Is this even important? 

I think there’s a lot of concern for this one world government that is unwarranted. As I can’t find any specific references that clearly state there will be an evil one world government in the Bible, I can’t say that it is. It does talk about God’s kingdom on earth, which is a good thing. God ensured humanity would never get along at the Tower of Babel, and then gave us the hope that one day we would through Him. Only through Him is that possible. So I can’t bring myself to give this a lot of credibility.

I think this particular idea is very scary to Americans like me. A lot of us don’t have a love of government, or authority and the thought that some outside force could take away essential freedoms really speaks to us. We’re a country that was founded because of opposition to totalitarianism. Most Americans, even the extremely liberal ones, would obviously find a universal, totalitarian government to be frightening at least. Throw in some scriptural backing and you get a lot of upset Americans.

So no, I don’t think it is that important a thing to worry about. Also, Jesus himself warns against worry anyway. At any rate, He Himself says that the end will be there when the gospel of truth has been preached to all nations.

Is it plausible this could happen?

I think that the attempt at this without God is possible. I don’t think that mankind can actually unite mankind. In fact I think what these prophecies are talking about is how the people in this event are in fact NOT getting along in any sort of one world government. They are bowing down to the beast.

Should we try to stop it? I don’t know. Borders shift, nations fall, new ones take their place. It happens. Scary, but inevitable. Some might seek to change this but God’s Word says that it will fail until He has something to do with it.

What could trigger it?

All sorts of things could trigger a New World Order. Disasters for one could do it. Well meaning governments getting tired of war. The British Empire once decided slavery was wrong and pretty much ended the slave trade. It’s not that unlikely that a group of probably Western governments might actually get along for a while then decide they’ve just had it with oppression and human rights violations, and then just start systematically conquering everything that walks on two legs. Eastern governments might have the same idea too and do the same thing. This can happen. Rome attempted this on some level and established what we called the Pax Romana or “Roman Peace” which allowed the way for Jesus.

I think though that the phrase New World Order has been taken FAR out of context in its original meaning as well. I believe it was John F. Kennedy (he is given credit for nearly everything, ever) who said it first. What he was referring to was the way the world is structured is new. Not that the world will be under one order. A few other American presidents have used the term in a similar context. If you listen to the speeches they aren’t using it in a way that means “One world order” but more “new world structure”.

According to scripture, what should I do about it?

There’s really not much to do. If this happens, it will happen. Just pray and be faithful. Paul says that we should study in quiet, and work with our own hands. Basically mind your own business, keep your head down and study. Jesus gave some outlines on what to do when the end comes, but says little about a one world government to worry about. Jesus, nor Paul were anti-government. We’re to obey the laws of the land so far as they are not sinful. State sanctioned and mandatory rape obviously would be a bad law not to follow. He says to pay taxes, live as good citizens and do what is right.

Paul used the government of Rome to his advantage. He was a citizen of Rome, which was a big deal. He had rights to trial, to speak in the public square. The authorities held off a bunch of angry Jews for him once. And when it came time for his execution he exercised his right to a painless beheading, which was his right as a citizen of Rome. His fellow Jews would have thrown rocks at him until he died.

Should this one world government come about, do what Jesus and Paul did. Pay your taxes, obey the law, be a good citizen to the point where you are not violating scripture. Do exercise your rights. If this is a prophecy of the end of the world then Jesus will be coming back soon. We will be persecuted, we will be killed. That is going to happen, but don’t worry about what might happen.

Now personally I’m not a conspiracy theorist. When I was younger I kind of was, but mostly I was looking for some indication that there was more to reality then what most people saw. I was looking for real vampires, aliens, and shadowy conspiracy groups. The people with these conspiracy theories all seemed to know something I did not and I found it fascinating. I studied all kinds of occult stuff too, both on the net and from books at the library (when I could find them).

I didn’t really believe a lot of the stuff I read though, because I was raised in a Christian home, went to a Christian private school for my elementary school, and actually paid attention during Bible study. So as I would read this stuff I would consistently apply scripture to what I was reading and a lot of it just wouldn’t stand up against what the Bible says to be true. The things that match scripture were often taken far past its logical conclusion. This done by many people who claim to be believers in the Word of God.

What was more entertaining to me was the preachers, and special guests at my church that would parrot the same conspiracies, they just put new faces on them. They saw the devil in every detail. Evil was lurking around the corner, and this vast conspiracy was trying to bring about the end of the world, or at least Christian morals. Of course as a believer who actually paid attention I applied scripture to it and my reaction was, “Oh! Thank God!”.

I recently took to listening to some Skeptic podcasts after hearing this Brian Dunning guy on Geeks Guide to the Galaxy. He runs the awesome Skeptoid podcast. He takes apart a lot of conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, urban legends, myths and other things purported to be true. The guy is an atheist but seems to be rather respectful of other people’s beliefs, which I appreciate. This is unusual as a fair number of skeptics are atheists as well and not particularly respectful of these things.

What I decided to do was take a stab at a few of these things myself for the benefit of my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. This from the point of view of a believer and applying scripture as well as reason and logic to these conspiracy theories and other such things. What I’ve found is there is not a whole lot of contradiction between the biblical view and the more worldly skeptical view of a great many things.

So twelve things before the first post on the subject. These are my sort of ground rules for things I will and will not talk about.

1. I won’t talk about evolution vs. creation. I think this is far too complicated a topic to discuss with fallacies and outright liars on both sides. Personally I am a biblical creationist but I reject the idea that the earth is only six thousand years old.
2. I define scripture as anything within the canonical text of the Bible, that is the normal sixty six books you find in a standard King James Version. There are some Catholic Bibles that have a few extra chapters and might include the Apocrypha. I won’t use that as a reference because even the Catholic Church does not recognize some of that stuff as canonical and I’m not sure what all they actually do. Various other translations have some extra stuff, or omitted stuff and I’m not certain what those things are.
3. I will use either the King James Version of the Bible or the New King James Version of the Bible for my scripture references. The latter is my preferred version but a lot of very fundamental English speaking Christians will only accept the KJV as accurate. Since in the English speaking world few people reject the KJV as an accurate translation I’ll stick mostly to that. I find the NKJV has a few points in its favor for modern English and will make note when I use that and include the KJV verses for comparison. I will either type them in straight from the book, or use links to BibleGateway.com which has many varied translations and languages to look at for your convenience.
4. I will not use writings of various ancient saints and Christian philosophers as canonical references in the place of scripture. Their writing was not divinely inspired and do not always hold up to scripture itself. I also will not use apocryphal texts in the place of scripture either. I may however, reference either of these if applicable. For example a demonic hierarchy isn’t mentioned in scripture, but several monks and canonized saints have written books on this matter. That being said, these guys had a lot of good stuff to say, so I won’t disregard something just because it isn’t quoting directly from the Bible.
5. I will not use mythology as a stand in for scripture. It is true that some texts have similar, or nearly identical stories to biblical stories but they are not scripture, and will not be used as such. If it is not a credible historical text, scholarly work, or scripture portraying events that actually happened, I will assume they didn’t actually happen in reality. I don’t particularly care if archaeology has verified these events entirely as that science is pretty conservative and doesn’t always offer concrete conclusions. I will however try to make note of any relevant archaeological findings I come across.
6. I will use logic and reason in addition to scripture when taking apart some of these topics. It is foolish not to use the brains God gave us. Jesus Himself used reason in combination with scripture to get His point across to the masses. Think of His sermon on worrying if you are unsure. God is the Creator of the universe, He set the planets in motion and distanced them with logical repeating patterns. He made snail shells and fern leaves to exhibit the same patterns. His attributes include reason, and logic as well as love and grace.
7. I hold that the Bible is clear on which parts are metaphorical and which parts are literal recounting of events. I will endeavor to make this distinction as needed.
8. I will attempt to cite my references when available, whether this is a web page, or a book.
9. I do think Wikipedia is decent reference material and most of the articles I’ve ever read are fully cited so if something does contradict it, that information is easily available.
10. I will accept any corrections offered to my work. I try to moderate my comments for spam and all that so, if you do have a correction go ahead and comment on that page with the correction and I’ll update as soon as possible. I will of course try and research it to make sure the correction is indeed correct.
11. I will most definitely accept collaborative help. Since it is my blog I do reserve the right to choose who can and can’t help. I will say up front that you probably must either be a Christian (don’t particularly care what denomination), atheist or an agnostic of the more Christian persuasion to really help much. My thought is that I probably won’t get along much with other faiths (or lack thereof) since I’m rejecting any scripture other than the Bible as authoritative. I would assume most atheists or agnostics would not disagree with me much where logic and reason matches with scripture and vice versa as I am not using the Bible as my only historical reference.
12. This is not a means of me trying to prove any historical event as recorded in the Bible. This is only about applying Biblical principles to conspiracy theories and other such topics. I’m a firm believer that the Bible is accurate, and the inspired Word of God. This does not mean it is a scientific reference, nor a historical reference, though many of its books are indeed historical records. It is scripture, a guide on living your life, how to conduct yourself, and how to think.

I will stick to these twelve points, but I may add a few more along the way.

So I’ve renewed my subscription to World of Warcraft after nearly a year of not playing. I’ve had multiple hiatuses (or would it be hiati?) over the years and generally do come back for the expansions out of curiosity. What’s intrigued me the most about this current expansion and patch set isn’t the new stuff, but what they’re doing with old content. I’ve always wondered how a sprawling game like WoW could keep things fresh and interesting after a few years. It looks like Blizzard has managed to do that though by reworking a lot of the classic ‘vanilla’ content.

I think it’s about time too, I’ve always dreaded moving to a new server to follow friends just because the old content now seems dated and boring. I can do a lot of the early quests in my sleep, and may have done so on occasion. Also, I’ve said since the beginning that the Barrens was way to huge for a zone and hated questing there with passion (especially since when I started playing mounts were a level 40 thing).

I’m actually looking forward to making a few new characters and playing them through, especially since I’ve found a good server with a lot of heavy role-playing potential. I’ve generally always played on role-playing servers more for the fact that they usually have smaller populations. The normal servers, even the lower population ones usually fill up pretty fast. This is really the first time I’ve seen a consistently high amount of RP going on in World of Warcraft.

Got a character to 80 last night for the first time last night as well. It didn’t take a lot of dedication either. Just about ten or so half hour random dungeon runs and a few minutes of basic questing in between and I was pretty well set. Now if I only had some half decent gear to aide in getting to 85 on Tuesday.

Addendum 12/5/2010: I know I’m probably asking for it here posting an update, but I will anyway. The guys at Manga Plasma commented on this post in episode 20. I found it pretty amusing actually. I apologize to Screago for misspelling his name/handle. I had actually written this  after listening to the first six episodes more or less all at once and somehow I got that they were saying "Skwee-goe". I don’t know why since they explain the name at least once. I had actually looked it up on their site to check but apparently never made the correction here. So that is failure on my part, and my sincere apologies to Screago. I did want to defend the point on the humor a bit, again a failure on my part for not putting a time stamp up when I originally posted.

Yes, I do listen to the show and, yes I do like it a lot. They have gotten MUCH better after about episode 15 or so. I do plan on revisiting it soon. I won’t be retracting this review though.

So I got a comment from a previous post about manga related podcasts. This person suggested Manga Plasma. They also suggested that if I liked Manga Pulse (which I’m a huge fan of) I’d like Manga Plasma.

While I do agree that these guys aren’t bad at all, I can’t say they are particularly enjoyable from what I’ve heard so far. I’m up to episode six and I’m seeing that this is really just some high school guys’ take on Manga Pulse, not so much an original show. Here are a few bullet points about the show and why each point is a good or bad thing.

• Format – Near and Screago took the format from Manga Pulse. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing since Tim and Weltall took the format from somewhere else. If I remember correctly they said this is the same format Top Gear uses. To their credit they seem to break away from this in episode six. It’s a good format so, not really a bad thing.
• Humor – A lot of the jokes are again, taken from Manga Pulse, who took them from somewhere else. The "COMICON!" joke especially. Come on, be more originally funny if you can. That’s not easy but it can be done. The show is pretty dry otherwise, but not as dry as Ichigo’s usually are. This is episode 5, at about the 2:55 – 3:00 mark. To be fair other shows may do this to, I’ve just not heard it anywhere else.
• Rating System – Again exact same thing, they’ve just changed the wording up. The no middle ground thing is a good idea, but a different rating system can be used. A two point rating system might be more their speed. Not saying they’re unable to handle a more complex rating system but they don’t even use their own terminology, at least up to episode six, they fall back on Tim and Weltall’s. My suggestion would be to have a "It’s Crap" or "It’s Awesome" rating system or don’t even do a scaled system at all.
• Delivery – I don’t have any issues about their delivery as far as clarity, speech patterns and general pacing. I didn’t hear as many "ums" as I thought I would that early in the show so on this point they’re awesome.
• Length of Episodes – Their timing and length of episodes are in the twenty minute to thirty minute range. This makes them have about a fifth the length of Manga Pulse’s epic hour to ninety minute shows. Personally I like the longer episodes, but it isn’t for everyone. They get right to the point most of the time and don’t waste huge amounts of times going off on tangents and riffing on various religious and political groups.

All in all they aren’t crap, but need about forty more episodes before they hit their stride. Manga Pulse was about the same until about twenty or thirty episodes in.

In fact they’ve given me an idea for a new four point rating system to apply to anything. It goes like this from worst to best:

1. Total Crap
2. Almost Crap
3. Approaching Awesome
4. Awesome

Give Manga Plasma a try but don’t expect greatness until about episode 40 or 50. I’m going to revisit them once they have a fair number more episodes out and I have a really long drive ahead of me (which is exactly what I did with Manga Pulse).

The issue has a lot to do with the theory of evolution and the idea of an ancient earth, and the pervasive atheism surrounding the research. I don’t believe in evolution in the sense that all living beings share a common ancestor and evolved from them. I believe God created all things, but that all of humanity has a common ancestor in Adam, and in the soil beneath our feet, as Adam was created from dust. I do however believe that natural selection (not just sexual selection) is exactly how things work. I don’t believe that a species evolves over time into another separate species, just a variation of the same one. It happens fairly quickly else the species dies off. This might be an issue in the definition of ‘species’.

I also don’t buy the ancient earth idea much either. However the very young earth (the six thousand year old earth) is just as full of holes with even more sketchy ‘proof’ than the old earth which makes it far more a matter of faith. I won’t go into the technical ideas of either because I don’t have a firm understanding of how they derive those numbers. For one carbon dating is only useful up to 60,000 years ago, some say 45,000, and only for currently organic matter. Other radioscopic dating methods tend to be crap because of the insane amount of nuclear testing over the past seventy years.

Point is that a lot of both sides are based on assumptions. Many of these assumptions have some circular reasoning behind them. Essentially what we have is controversy. Controversy is defined by myself as: “two idiots standing across from each other in a room calling each other stupid”. You have both sides finding things that seemingly prove their points, then each side has rebuttal for the other with sometimes hilarious results.

There’s a rock bed somewhere in my home state with dinosaur footprints in it, and near by are human foot prints. Creationists say, “HA! Proof man walked with dinosaurs!”. The normal, rational individual would agree. There’s proof in the rock. If they didn’t walk together then one at least came by pretty quick after the other. The other side says something to the effect of, “No! The dinosaur walked here when it was mud and it stayed mud for a couple of million years perfectly preserving the foot print. Then about forty thousand years ago a guy walked here and it hardened up soon after.” Yes, that is an actual explanation for something I read once. So was there no weather millions of years ago? Did the tectonic plates not shift? What bizarre set of circumstances happened to leave a foot print there on a planet that can’t make up its mind about how things are supposed to look? Are we even interpreting the data correctly? Is this just a hoax?

Unfortunately, legitimate or not, this is proof of not much of anything except two footprints are in some rock somewhere. The ancient river bed this was found in is exposed to the elements and sedimentary in nature (Limestone). I find it a bit odd that the various layers of strata are exposed, instead of depressed like all the other fossil footprints in stone I’ve seen. The man’s footprint looks goofy too. The hoax idea is more reasonable and likely, I’ve read the discoverer admitted as much, than the “it stayed mud for a few million years” explanation. Here’s a picture:

I find this a bit sketchy. Personally I think it's a hoax, and just one more thing for evolutionists and creationists to argue about that doesn't matter much.

Unfortunately you get just as dumb sounding the other way around. We were all taught that light moves at about 186,282 miles per second and as far as we know always has. There are some repeatable tests for this and it is part of the basis of modern physics. So you’ve got a star that’s about ten billion light years from here, again we can measure these distances. They are also provable mathematically. It takes light ten billion years to travel from that star to our position in space. If the universe is only 6,000 years old how can we see those stars? We can’t. There must be some problem. Is the universe older?  Might be except the stars were made on the fourth day. The interesting thing is that God made plants before He made the sun. He made dry land before He made the moon. If you will contemplate on that for a few minutes and refer back to your elementary school science you’ll see an interesting issue come up. I won’t spoil the surprise for you. What it boils down to is that God created night and day and time BEFORE He created the mechanisms to govern and measure them. So yes the stars are ten billion light years away.

The explanation for this is not, “well God created the photons in mid journey.” That’s just dumb. That doesn’t seem like the way God does things. The distances don’t prove or disprove anything. There’s been some interesting breakthroughs in physics about time and how light might not travel at as constant as speed as we think all over the universe but not enough to prove or disprove anything.

Here’s a link and some information on what seems to be the most distant object that we can see in the universe:

New candidate for most distant object in universe

(PhysOrg.com) — A gamma-ray burst detected by NASA’s Swift satellite in April 2009 has been newly unveiled as a candidate for the most distant object in the universe. At an estimated distance of 13.14 billion light years, the burst lies far beyond any known quasar and could be more distant than any previously known galaxy or gamma-ray burst. Multiple lines of evidence in favor of a record-breaking distance for this burst, known as GRB 090429B for the 29 April 2009 date when it was discovered, are presented in a paper by an international team of astronomers led by former Penn State University graduate student Antonino Cucchiara, now at the University of California, Berkeley. The paper has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.

Even if it is proven the light somehow got to us faster than possible, or slower than possible, this still won’t be conclusive. The reason I think this is because God wants our faith and love. If He wanted us to know definitely He was there and how He did all this, He would have made it a lot easier to figure out.

Here’s the thing, Jesus said, “Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed.” It’s all about faith. Because when it comes right down to it, what we don’t know is greater than what we do.

The problem being a man of faith, as well as a geek who is into most things related to science (especially astronomy, chemistry and physics to some degree) is that you get called stupid from both sides. Your fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, like most people, will not spend time educating themselves on the very book that dictates their beliefs, much less anything science says. They are then prone to accept everything a fanatical young earth creationist says without going back to their own Bibles  and seeing if that’s even what it says. These guys are professional debaters that can discredit evolution entirely on rhetoric. I’ve seen these guys say Pi is exactly 3, use scripture to back it up (1 Kings 7:23-26) and not even take a moment to figure out what was going on in the scripture they reference. Then they listen to other peoples with varying degrees of mental disorders that say many of the same things and start believing things that are antithetical to reality AND scripture and see no problems with that. This all leads to them not taking you seriously just because you can prove what they are saying is not only wrong, but is contrary to scripture as well. I consider myself no expert on theology, but my entire education until college was based around reading and discussing scripture daily. I’m familiar with what it says, its interpretation and how to find what I’m looking for within it. It isn’t hard.

When discussing things with people of a more atheistic bent, I’m actually treated a lot nicer than I am by my own kind! I’m occasionally called stupid for believing in God, despite ‘proof that He doesn’t exist’, but that isn’t always the case. Mostly they just question ‘why’ I believe in God. I can then tell them why. The problem is, in general my beliefs are mocked, and I am chided as being ignorant. Quite a lot of these people will just say, “Here is the evidence we have, take it how you want.” Sometimes they are even nice enough to explain it, and point out any holes science hasn’t quite got around to figuring out. The aggravating part about that is, they will then say things about what the Bible says that aren’t true because they, like many Christians, have not educated themselves on whether what they are saying is correct or not. Or will reference scholarly works that have been discredited, sometimes by people who are atheists themselves! Again with the making claims they haven’t even attempted to verify themselves. When presented with this evidence they are just as likely to ignore it, frustrating the same people they were just showing their evidence to. One can’t even use the excuse “Well I am not a Christian I have no reason to know this” as it sounds a lot like “Well I’m not a scientist so I really don’t know this stuff”.

I decided a while back that I’d broaden my horizons on the food I ate. I decided at least once a month I’d learn to make something new and try it. Then I’d try to make it my own. This isn’t really my first experiment but it’s definitely the bravest so far, and one I don’t think I’m going to attempt to improve on too much. Last month it was Gazpacho, which I’d tried before at a Jason’s Deli, this month it is something a bit braver than that.

This month it is a Limburger Sandwich. For those who aren’t aware it’s a kind of sandwich from Germany and Belgium. It consists of two pieces of rye bread, a thick layer of limburger cheese, and a thick slice of raw onion. Definitely braver than Gazpacho.

First off I’d like to say that I’d never even smelled limburger, much less tried it. I’d just seen on cartoons as a kid that it was terribly smelly, and probably not very good. It is the cheese jokes are made of. But I decided, what the heck, they’ve been eating the stuff in Europe forever so it probably wouldn’t kill me.

I also had some trepidation about an onion sandwich. That’s just not something I’d ever thought about eating, much less being palatable to someone who hadn’t grown up eating it. I do like onions, and again they eat it in Europe so it probably isn’t going to kill me.

Pictures and Comments

Here are some pictures of my ingredients. All this stuff is more or less local, except the cheese which was imported from Germany, and the mustard I believe is from Ohio.

This is pumpernickel bread from United. Locally baked, and pretty good. I don’t think this is exactly the kind of rye bread that they use traditionally but a lot of people seemed to prefer it when I read up on this adventure. It’s also the only fresh baked rye bread I could find at United. It’s about $4 a loaf.

This is what it looks like sliced. Pretty good stuff. I toasted it before eating. That was kind of a mistake, I’ll explain why later.

I cut the onion about half an inch thick.

Bayerischer Limburger. This is imported from Germany, made from pasteurized milk. I don’t know that they use pasteurized milk to make it normally. I think it’s illegal to sell products made from raw milk in the U.S. though, so it might not be terribly authentic. This was $7 at United. I researched Limburger online and developed a respect for the cheese. This was especially true after seeing how they package it. It was double wrapped in cellophane. Each wrap was about four to six layers deep. Underneath the cellophane was a foil wrapper, and beneath that was wax paper.

Here is the cheese unpackaged. I was surprised at the smell actually. Because it’s been refrigerated, or maybe it’s made just a touch different for sale in the US, or maybe because I was determined not to let this stuff hit room temperature, the smell wasn’t overwhelming. The smell isn’t hard to describe. It smells like human body odor. I don’t mean it smells reminiscent of human body odor, or like it, or reminds me of body odor. I mean the smell coming off the cheese is that of human body odor. Like the high school boy’s locker room. Like feet. If you want to know exactly what this smells like, work out for an hour, don’t wear deodorant, then smell your armpits. That’s what Limburger cheese smells like. I assume if I let this get to room temperature it would have been stronger. In fact what got on my hands got pretty strong fairly quickly. The actually use this stuff in places with malaria carrying mosquitoes to draw them away because the bugs can’t actually tell the difference between the cheese and a person. The reason is they use Brevibacterium Linens to make it. That is exactly the same bacteria found on human skin and produces our distinctive body odor.

This is what it looks like inside. I got some mixed information online. Some said the rind (the orange part) is inedible, others said it was perfectly fine to eat it. I didn’t particularly care to try it so I cut it off. The cheese is a little firmer than Brie, but not much. Definitely tastes nothing like Brie either. It’s got a fairly strong taste, but it doesn’t at all taste like it smells. It’s milder than I thought. I’d expected something a lot different. As it warmed up it got stronger. You’ll note the glass jar in the background. I had to wrap the cheese in cellophane and foil and put it in the jar to keep the smell down.

I read that in the US the onion sandwich is usually served with a strong brown mustard. I thought I’d try with and without. So I got some stone ground mustard, but decided to put it on with each bite rather than spread it over half the sandwich.

All the ingredients together.

I read that this is best eaten with something strong to drink. Most sites recommended a dark beer of some kind. Since I absolutely don’t drink, I decided to go the strong coffee route as some suggested. That’s Peet’s 2010 Anniversary Blend coffee made in a French Press.

My Thoughts

I thought the sandwich was surprisingly good. I wasn’t a big fan of there only being a big chunk of onion in it though. The onion was fairly sweet with a bit of a bite in the aftertaste. The cheese complimented it quite well. It was a bit bland though. Just wasn’t much to it. Definitely an acquired taste.

The half of the sandwich with the mustard was definitely better. The mustard brought out the flavor of the cheese a bit more and subdued the onion. It might have been that half of the sandwich had warmed up as well so the flavors were a bit stronger. Might have also been that half had a bit more cheese, and a bit thinner onion.

I kind of expected it to make my stomach upset, Brie has a tendency to do to that to some extent. The Limburger really didn’t. That surprises me but since it’s a bacteria and not a mold that produces the flavor that might have something to do with it. Since we all have this bacteria on us and in us, I guess that’s why. I’m mildly lactose intolerant so I am guessing the bacteria broke the cheese down enough it doesn’t cause a lot of issues for me.

I can definitely see why this would be a popular sandwich in some areas. It’s relatively inexpensive, a lot of flavor at room temperature or just a little cooler. It’s one of those things that might be a local favorite especially if you were raised eating it. If I were somewhere that served this and I wasn’t worried about the inevitable smell, I would order it. It’s not going to do pretty things to your breath at all. Kind of a guy’s “I dare you” foods.

On a scale of one to ten, ten being “Awesome”, I’d give this an easy four. It’s not terrible. Overall it doesn’t sit with my tastes very well.

My Ideas

The first thing I’d do is not toast the bread at all and cut it a little thicker. The pumpernickel is pretty airy and with even just a light toast it is very fragile. Maybe use a denser bread.

I’d treat the cheese a little differently. I’d either let it warm up so it spread easier, or I’d slice it up. Kraft or some other company supposedly makes or made a processed limburger type cheese that might be more acceptable to American tastes. If that’s still available somewhere, it might be a better alternative.

The onion was probably the weirdest thing about the sandwich. I kind of wanted something meatier than just a big slice of onion. Perhaps a different kind of onion, and a strong sausage of some kind would be better. It wasn’t unpleasant, but there’s room for improvement there. I might have got the onion to cheese ratio wrong after looking at some pictures online.

The mustard stays.

As just an onion sandwich, I’d make it smaller and serve it with a meat of some kind. Again sausage or something like that would be excellent.

I’d also have yogurt for dessert to deal with the breath problem. Preferably greek style yogurt (Like Oikos, although I make my own). Then follow that up with a mint. Or two. Or a whole box.

Variation

A neat variation might be a wheat bread with apple and labneh cheese as a sweeter, healthier variation.  Would probably fit most people’s palate a lot better, especially Americans. Maybe have honey or olive oil in place of the mustard.

Limburger has a LOT of calories and a crapload of cholesterol. If you have issue with that it’d be a good idea to avoid this particular sandwich.

The subject matter here is something that hits pretty close to home for me. This is on the topic of online gaming. My boss recently asked me how hacking World of Warcraft accounts was a money making business. He didn’t see how, of course most non-gamers wouldn’t think about this. Unfortunately a lot of gamers don’t really either.

Here’s the run down of why cybercrime involving World of Warcraft and other MMO’s have become a money making business.

1. Lots of people play MMO’s. WoW (World of Warcraft) alone has several million players worldwide. Last I saw WoW had over ten million players all over the world. Of course the vast majority of these players are American. If just 2/3 of all players are Americans that means that roughly 2% of all Americans play WoW. To put that in perspective, if you are American and know fifty people at least one plays WoW.
2. Online gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry. If you assume all players of WoW pay on average $15 a month, that means Blizzard’s gross income per month is about 150 million US dollars. That’s 1.8 BILLION a year, just on subscription fees. That’s not including other income like character transfers, merchandising, comics, licensing and other things. I don’t know what their overhead is but 1.8 billion dollars is a lot of money regardless. Many people who play likely have enough spare cash to spend a little extra on point 3.
3. There are some people who will pay a little real money to get ahead in the game. Underground sales of characters is fairly profitable. Look up level 80 characters on eBay or one of the numerous WoW auction sites. It’s ridiculous. In game gold also goes for a fair amount of money. I get spam advertising a thousand gold for $11 on some servers. People will even pay other people to level their characters. This isn’t limited to “Chinese Gold Farmers” either. I’ve bought gold from people in Canada, and the US. Eleven dollars isn’t a lot of money, and a lot of these transactions take place through legitimate services like Verisign and Paypal so there’s little risk of identity theft.
4. Hacking an account and stealing gold, and items and such is the quickest way to gain these things. If you were to play a character and just farm gold it’d take a while to get a decent amount. So why not let someone else do the work? Write a virus/trojan, get it on a person’s machine. Get their account steal their hard earned in game stuff, clear out their guild banks. Delete characters to make it look malicious and you have spent 30 minutes getting what many hours would do. Best of all there are basically no repercussions for this. Your account gets hacked, you call Blizzard, they get your stuff back, hacker gets away clean and you are only mildly inconvenienced. They sell gold which probably isn’t tracked as much as Blizzard claims and everyone is happy. What I just described would cost a person maybe $8000 and a ‘guy who knows a guy’ to set up. Used to you could get the tools to do it for free.

So there you have it. It’s basically gamers willing to ‘cheat’ a little to get ahead or make things a little easier on themselves. This can be justified as “enhancing the enjoyment of the game”. If you don’t have to worry about gold, you don’t have to worry about a lot of things. New players are probably bigger targets for sales than veterans as most of us have a fair amount of gold laying around among our characters.

If you don’t think my points are valid, check out the validator device Blizzard sells. It’s basically an RSA key fob. If you haven’t seen these before, they are used for other things than gaming. They’re essentially a number generator that comes up with a new key number every x number of seconds. This key number is the only way to get into an account of some kind. It might only be good for 10 seconds. This makes things fairly hard to hack (but not impossible). I’ve worked with guys that sold pharmaceuticals and various equipment where privacy was a huge concern that carried these things. They’re selling these fairly high security type devices for a GAME, and for about $6 USD. That should tell you something. I spend more than that a week on comic books.

If you follow a few basic things to secure your account you can avoid a lot of this. The most basic thing is do not use the same e-mail address you use for your Facebook account as your WoW login. If you do, and I can’t stress how much you shouldn’t, then use a different, strong password. Six letters, one capitalized and two numbers or one number and one symbol should be secure enough for a WoW password. Don’t forget to change it fairly often too. Don’t make it something anyone could possibly guess either. I’ve used the names of friend’s children, long dead relatives and ancestors, and various other things as bases for passwords.

A good trick is to pick a couple of base passwords and then change the numbers and rotate through them. That way you don’t have a lot to remember, you can spread them out among different accounts, and if you use about three of them you can avoid a lot of lockouts for bad passwords. Make sure you change your three base passwords occasionally too.

A validator is also a good tool to have. Personally I don’t have one, but if you are concerned, it’s $7 of anxiety relief. It isn’t a perfect solution but it might deter a lot of things.

Here are a few tips for your gaming accounts to remember:

1. If the game uses an e-mail address as your login name do NOT use the same e-mail address as your Paypal and Facebook accounts. Have two, if not THREE e-mail addresses, one for gaming, one for Facebook, one for Paypal. GMail is a good choice because you can easily forward multiple accounts to one inbox. In fact getting your own domain and signing up for google apps standard is a really good idea, and really inexpensive. Then you can have wow@mydomain.com, paypal@mydomain.com, and facebook@mydomain.com or some variation and have them all point to yourname@mydomain.com. Ten dollars a year, and you have a really secure set of login methods for your accounts. I suggest changing this once a year too. WoW at very least allows this. If your game uses a normal username make sure it’s a strong username. Plus hey, cool e-mail address. wow2010@mydomain.com for this year, wow2011@mydomain.com for next year and so forth are ideas.
2. Do not under any circumstances use the same passwords for any social networking site as you do for PayPal or your game. Keep three separate strong passwords. The reason for this is, if one of those accounts gets compromised, they all use e-mail address/password combo for login credentials, it’s a pretty safe bet you use the same e-mail/password for all three. I can verify this from experience. The last thing you want is to find your WoW account hacked, then huge charges on your PayPal account, and then find out your Facebook account has been spamming people. Not a good day.
3. Change your password often. There’s no magic number for this but once a quarter is definitely not too frequent. Once a month is better, but I highly doubt it is necessary. Again if you use the Password12 method you can just change the numbers. Change the base password every so often too.
4. This one is obvious, but don’t give out your password. Do not use leveling services either. If for some reason you do, refer to points 1 and 2 and don’t complain if you get cheated out of your money. Change your password after services have been rendered.
5. Don’t use dubious add-ons or download any ‘cheats’ for WoW. These could be trojans or keyloggers, or who knows what else. Run an antivirus scan often. If you have Windows 7, contemplate doing a full system backup once you have your gaming machine like you want it, and then do a system restore to make sure you’re working off a clean hard drive a couple times a year.
6. Make sure your username and password are not things that ever come up in conversation.
7. Use a validator if you can. It’s just one more layer of security to have.
8. Keep up with your games security changes. It’s boring stuff but it’s good to know what they’re doing and why.

None of this is a 100% surefire bet you won’t get hacked. I’d say the first 4 are definitely the most important, but they’re all important and good practices in general. If you do get hacked, it is not that hard to recover from.

It is just a game, but for a fair number of people that is their main hobby. If you collected gold coins you’d keep them under lock and key. If you play games online, you should do the same!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:W 7th Ave,Amarillo,United States