This post is the last post I will be placing on this Townhall blog. The voyage will continue over at www.theinterfaceofdataandlife.wordpress.com. (Again, sorry about the long name, but the shorter one was already taken.)

WHAAAAAT!!!!! I thought you said you had to stay here because you hadn’t found a way to write offline? Well, it would seem that Microsoft, that much vilified corporation, actually came to the rescue this time. I found a relatively recent tool for blogging called Windows Live Writer created by those software wizards. With it, I can compose offline with all the formatting and features I need, and then post from the Live Writer platform directly without even opening up and cutting-and-pasting into the blog editor to publish. It works with Blogger and WordPress, and I think with TypePad as well. Of course, it does not work with the Townhall platform (yes, I tried…I’m a scientist, remember?). Bottomline, my primary reason for not leaving Townhall has been removed by this tool that actually makes it easier to post than even the other platforms.

Now as to where I’m actually going, because I am not retiring from blogging, that is another story. My previous effort took me over to Blogger (aka, yourname.blogspot.com) and I experimented with that platform for several posts. I could use RefTagger there and had much greater control over my sidebar than in Townhall. But I was simultaneously researching the web for comparisons and contrasts and evaluations of the three primary blogging platforms out there, to wit, Blogger, WordPress, and TypePad (yes, there are others but those were the three in which I was interested). I was also soliciting comments from former Townhallers who’d migrated elsewhere.

I discovered one factoid to which few have given any thought regarding their blog content. Let me ask you this: who “owns” the content of the posts you, the author, write? Granted, for many this is not even an issue, but for those who put a lot of work into at least some, who is legally the owner thereof? On Townhall, it is Salem Communications, not the blog writer! Don’t believe me? Use the “Print It” option for any of your posts and go to the bottom of the window that opens for the printer ready version. Who has the copyright on the content? Likewise, Google owns the copyright for all Blogger posts. Thus, you the author do not have “rights” to your blog or your blog content on these platforms. WordPress, on the other hand, makes no such claims, and, in fact, the template I’ve chosen even says at the bottom, “Copyright © The Interface,” i.e., I own the content therein, not WordPress. I find I vastly prefer this on principle even if I didn’t plan on publishing my blog contents and making a million dollars therefrom in the future (Pluh-leeze! don’t make me laugh!).

The WordPress platform, like the Blogger platform, gives me full control over my sidebar (wherein I can put Archives and “Best of” Lists and Quotations, oh my!), and it is organized in “Pages” wherein I can put other interesting material, including my “About this blog” content. I can moderate comments and numerous other “nice to have” things with this blog that Townhall just doesn’t let you do. I still can’t use RefTagger with this version of WordPress, but I can’t with Townhall either and I’ve survived. And there is hope that at sometime in the future this can be added to the WordPress platform.

My few readers may have noted my previous post in which I indicated I was going to try moving over to the Blogger platform for blogging (www.theinterfaceofdataandlife.blogspot.com) due to the deficiencies of the Townhall platform. I’ve now done so for a little bit, mirroring my posts here by posting to both sites, and, alas and forsooth, I’ve found one tool in the form of one button that Townhall provides me that Blogger does not (at least not that I’ve yet found) that is crucial to the ease of my posting experience. I vastly prefer the Blogger platform’s flexibility and so-called “gadgets” that can be added, and the larger set of templates, and the ability to add RefTagger to my posts. But…I compose 99.9% of my posts on the train during my commutes to and from work, meaning I do nearly all my work offline. The button Townhall provides is the one labeled “Paste from Word.” This allows me to create posts with all the formatting features I need, italics, bold, indents, etc., that I can then simply cut and paste into my Townhall blog with no further effort since all the formatting, including links, are maintained in this operation using this button. Doing so in the Blogger platform results in the loss of all such formatting (i.e., the pasting of the plain text copy) and the introduction of multiple additional line breaks that require I spend considerable time correcting to get my posts back into the desired format.

Consequently, I will no longer be posting over there unless my query to the technical support for Blogger yields positive results in how to cut and paste maintaining formats and links into this platform. I am now planning on trying the WordPress platform which will not all me to use RefTagger at this point, but if I find I can do the above with the additional flexibility of design noted for Blogger, I will still be ahead of the Townhall platform. When I have that site up and running, I will notify my loyal followers (all two of you?).

From the Patriot Post:

A new study has many people eating their words, including a few journalists. Just days after The Washington Post's Rob Stein wrote a derogatory article about abstinence-only programs, a new study published in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine shows that such programs can in fact delay the onset of sexual activity in teens. Stein then scrambled to write a second article stating that these programs "may work."

The University of Pennsylvania studied 662 students from four public middle schools between 2001 and 2004. Students were randomly selected to attend one of the following eight-hour classes: a) abstinence only; b) safe-sex; c) a combination of the two, or d) a class with a concentration in general healthy living. The results were shocking to the liberal elites who had long disparaged abstinence. Only 33 percent of the students who had taken the abstinence-only class had engaged in sexual activity within the next two years, as opposed to the 52 percent who had attended the safe-sex class.

For its part, the Obama administration cut $170 million in abstinence education funding, while spending $114 million on other forms of pregnancy prevention education; he wants to increase that amount to $183 million. Of course, if the point is to prevent either pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease, abstinence works every time it's tried.

Reference: 

To the modernist, the "mask" metaphor is a recognition of the fact that words are not always to be taken literally or as directly stating a fact--that people largely use language elliptically, metaphorically, or to state falsehoods, that language can be textured with layers of meaning, and that it can be used to cover hypocrisies or to rationalize. Accordingly, unmasking means interpreting or investigating to a literal meaning or fact of the matter. The process of unmasking is cognitive, guided by objective standards, with the purpose of coming to an awareness of reality.

For the postmodernist, by contrast, interpretation and investigation never terminate with reality. Language connects only with more language, never with a non-linguistic reality....

For the postmodernist, language cannot be cognitive because it does not connect to reality, whether to an external nature or an underlying self. Language is not about being aware of the world, or about distinguishing the true from the false, or even about argument in the traditional sense of validity, soundness, and probability. Accordingly, postmodernism recasts the nature of rhetoric. Rhetoric is persuasion in the absence of cognition....

- Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism (Pgs 175-177)

Or as explained by Humpty Dumpty:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master-- that's all.”

 

Being high in loyalty genes, however, I resisted this movement, although a significant part of that inertia was more laziness than anything. Now a new utility that doesn’t work with Townhall blogs but does with most of the others has finally kicked my, um, bottom, hard enough to cause me to start moving. As regular readers know (all two of you), I frequently cite Bible verses in my posts as evidence of the relevance of the biblical worldview to the subject of said post. The utility of which I speak is RefTagger and what it does is convert Scripture references into hotlinks that popup the verses cited in the translation of your choice when the reader hovers their mouse pointer over the reference. Very cool, and totally inoperative in Townhall.com blogs.

As I considered the desirability of using this tool in my posts, I also did a more critical review of other blogs and found I would, indeed, like to have some of the features like archives, “best of” lists, and the ability to add other text to sidebars and titles that one just cannot do at Townhall. Activation energy having been thus achieved, I started emailing fellow bloggers who had left Townhall and gone to WordPress, or TypePad, or Blogspot (aka Blogger) and queried them for their reasons they chose the platform on which they eventually landed. I also started looking at the features those platforms offered and found that most of them offered nearly the same feature set and all were improvements on Townhall (surprise!).

While I think I would have preferred to go with WordPress, the free flavor of that platform didn’t support RefTagger, so I’ve have settled for now on BlogSpot.

This, then, is an invitation to all my readers to check out www.theinterfaceofdataandlife.blogspot.com (sorry about the longer name, but there was already someone using theinterface.blogspot.com to blog about computers, and while I’m sure he’s nowhere near as handsome as me, he was there first) where I will mirror my Townhall posts for some time until I master its ins and outs and determine whether or not I want to stay there. I would greatly appreciate comments on anything and everything at this site, including whether or not you think I should stay, from font to color to whether or not you prefer to see the entire post “above the fold,” i.e., with no “fold” as Townhall now does it, or if the “Read more…” option with just the initial 20 lines or so of a post is preferable so that you can determine whether or not you want to read a post and if not can move more quickly to the next post (clear as mud?).

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted some Spurgeon here, and one of my favorite sources for such posted a good one a few months ago that is still applicable today. The following excerpt is from a sermon titled "Waters to Swim In," originally preached on a Thursday evening, 25 April 1872, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, London. I’ve added some emphases to highlight some of the more apropos thoughts of this Prince of Preachers.

These are days of "modern thought;" as you are all aware men have become wondrously wise, and have outgrown the Scriptures. Certain unhappy children's heads are too big, and there is always a fear that it is not brain, but water on the brain; and this "modern thought" is simply a disease of wind on the brain, and likely to be a deadly one, if God does not cure the church of it.

Within the compass of the orthodox faith - within the range of the simple gospel - there is room enough for the development of every faculty, however largely gifted a man may be. No matter, though the man be a Milton in poetry, though he be a master in metaphysics, and a prince in science, if he be but pure in his poesy, accurate in his metaphysics, and honest in his science, he will find that the range of his thought needs no more space than Scripture gives him.

It has been thought by some that these persons who run off to heretical opinions are persons of great mind; believe me, brethren, it is a cheap way of making yourself to be thought so, but the men are nobodies. That is the sum of the matter.

We are satisfied with the theology of the Puritans; and we assert this day that, when we take down a volume of Puritanical theology we find in a solitary page more thinking and more learning, more Scripture, more real teaching, than in whole folios of the effusions of modern thought. Modern men would be rich if they possessed even the crumbs that fallen from the table of the Puritans. They have given us nothing new after all. A few variegated bladders they have blown, and they have burst while the blowers were admiring them; but, as for anything worth knowing, which has improved the heart, benefited the understanding, or fitted men for service in the battle of life, there have been no contributions made by this "modern thought" worth recording; whereas, the old thought of the Puritans and the Reformers, which I believe to be none other than the thought of God thought out again in man's brain and heart, is constantly giving consolation to the afflicted, furnishing strength to the weak, and guiding men's minds to behave themselves aright in the house of God and in the world at large.

There are "waters to swim in," in the Scriptures. You need not think there is no room for your imaginations there. Give the coursers their reins: you shall find enough within that book to exhaust them at their highest speed. You need not think that your memory shall have nothing to remember; if you had learnt the book through and through, and knew all its texts, you would have much to remember above that, to remember its inner meaning, and its conversations with your soul, and the mysterious power it has had over your spirit, when it has touched the strings of your nature as a master harper touches his harp strings, and has brought forth music which you knew not to be sleeping there. There is no faculty but what will find room enough in the word, if we will but obediently bring it to the service of the Lord.

 

 

After a concise discussion of the First Amendment and the letter in which Thomas Jefferson actually coined the phrase “separation of church and state,” (which does not appear in the First Amendment despite you’re your history/sociology/leftist teacher may have told you) including giving the text of both so one can judge the validity of said discussion, the Bookworm succinctly observes (emphasis added):

It is manifestly clear from perusing both the Bill of Rights and Jefferson’s own letter that none of the Founders intended that religious people must be barred from civil participation. They can bring their values to bear in the civic arena, even if those values are religiously inspired. What they cannot do is hijack the government so that the government uses its coercive powers to force people to worship a specific faith, to interfere with a religion’s doctrine, or to punish or ostracize people for practicing a faith that the government does not sanction.

These subtleties — the difference between government controlled religion, which is bad, and a religious people whose religion informs their conduct, which is constitutionally neutral — completely eludes the anti-religious Left. They want people who enter government to check their religion at the door. They are incapable of understanding that the complete absence of religion is a religion in and of itself, with faith in government and its bureaucracy being substituted in place of faith in God and his morality.

In light of this history, i.e., the background facts and data, there follows an interesting critique of Secular Humanism from a former secular humanist, the blog author himself (herself?), using the vehicle of this hysterical (in both the senses of hyperventilating rhetoric and side slapping humor) letter from Barry Lynn, the Executive Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Instructive reading. Go take a look and arm yourself with some rationality and counterarguments should such drivel try to intrude into your sphere of influence.

After observing the fecklessness of the United Nations yet again and the lethargic response of the Obama administration (there’s the disgust part), she writes:

In Haiti, however, there has been one foreign nation that has conspicuously broken free of this paralysis and has had no difficulty in setting up emergency aid for the Haitian victims.  That country is Israel.  Within hours of the earthquake striking, the Israeli media was reporting that Israel was assembling a team of no fewer than 220 emergency aid personnel to fly to the stricken country.  As this CNN report shows, the Israelis have set up a fully equipped field hospital in Port-au-Prince treating wounded and sick Haitian victims.

That’s right, Israel, that hated evil capitalistic Jewish state that refuses to die though bombarded with missiles on nearly a daily basis. The nation which, lambasted if ever it raises a hand in self defense, is the target for annihilation for every Arab state in the world. If ever there were an example of 1 Peter 2:12, this is most certainly one.

Ms. Phillips, herself an Englishwoman, continues:

A further Israel Foreign Ministry bulletin states that so far 200 patients have been treated.  It would appear that it is only Israel which has managed to establish such advanced assistance this quickly.  One desperate American aid worker tells CNN:

I’ve been here since Thursday; no-one except the Israeli hospital has taken any of our patients.

Another remarks of the Israeli field hospital:

It’s like another world here compared to the other hospitals.  They have imaging... my God, they have machines here, operating theatres, ventilators, monitoring, it’s just amazing.

Of any American field hospital, there is apparently not yet any sign.   The reporter observes that the Israelis have come from the other side of the world.  Another aid worker says it makes them ashamed to be Americans.

Israel sent a team of 220 aid workers. Israel has a population of six million.  The population of Britain is 60 million. I’d say that was a disproportionate Israeli response, wouldn’t you?

In February 2003, Dr. Louise Brinton, the National Cancer Institute's chief of the Environmental Epidemiology Branch, Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, served as chairperson at an NCI workshop in Bethesda, Md., to assess whether abortion was implicated as a breast cancer risk.

In the opinion of "over 100 of the world's leading experts," said the subsequent NCI report, including Dr. Brinton, the answer was no.

One expert disallowed from participating was Dr. Joel Brind, a biology and endocrinology professor who had co-authored a metaanalysis [a combined statistical study; idiot Townhall censor won't allow real name with hyphen between the a's!] demonstrating an abortion/breast cancer (ABC) link.

Brind protested that the outcome was predetermined by "experts" handpicked by Dr. Brinton who either were not really experts, were dependent on the NCI or other government agencies for grants, or were pro-abortion extremists, such as two who had previously provided paid "expert" court testimony on behalf of abortionists.

Studies concluding there was not an ABC link were included in the workshop analysis; studies concluding there was were not.

At the time, 29 out of 38 studies conducted worldwide over 40 years showed an increased ABC risk, but the NCI workshop nevertheless concluded it was "well established" that "induced abortion is not associated with an increase in breast cancer risk."

Brind went on to write a minority report NCI alludes to on its website without publishing or listing its author and did not even mention in its workshop summary report.

Life went on, except for post-abortive women inflicted with breast cancer anyway.

Yes, folks, we have another coverup by the scientific community, but this time the consequences are much more disastrous on a personal human level. One could call this Abortiongate if one were so inclined (I’m not particularly) because the similarities to the so-called Climategate and other such scandals is striking. Data contrary to the desired outcome are ignored and buried, while loudly touting the falsified picture as the truth. So how do we know about this? The story continues:

But six years later something happened. Dr. Brinton either flipped her lid, flipped ideologies, restudied the evidence and decided to recant, or couldn't sleep at night – and she began righting her wrong.

In April 2009, Brinton co-authored a research paper published in the prestigious journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, which concluded that the risk of a particularly deadly form of breast cancer that attacks women under 40 raises 40 percent if a woman has had an abortion.

Curiously, the paper included as corroboration two studies Brinton's 2003 NCI "experts" had rejected. More curiously, it turns out Brinton co-authored one of those two studies.

For nine months, that little bombshell of a disaster for pro-abortion ideology was published without the NCI acknowledging it or changing its stance.

Then this month, Brind spotted and wrote about Brinton's concession and NCI's hypocrisy.

You can read the original for all the resulting machinations. The next critical question to ask is Why? Why this coverup if women’s health, indeed, their very lives, are at stake? Very succinctly put:

Pro-aborts are understandably mum about Brinton's concession. Confirmation of the ABC link would eviscerate public acceptance and participation in abortion. Exposure of a long-term cover-up would eviscerate the savings accounts of abortionists and the abortion industry following lawsuit losses of a magnitude as great as or greater than the class-action lawsuits against tobacco companies.