It's an Ugly World We Live In

"You're Ugly!"
Thirty-thousand people recently got good news and bad news from beautifulpeople.com, an online dating service where 'beautiful men and women' meet. The good news: we'll give you a refund. The bad news: you're ugly! So we're going to dump you!

For more read here:
http://www.myfoxny.com/dpps/news/offbeat/dating-site-causes-outrage-by-dumping-ugly-people-dpgonc-20110620-fc_13763177

Gendercide: Aborting Girls
Even uglier than the people who got given the boot, and the company who dropped them, is the worldwide moral climate in which abortion, for whatever reason, is readily available. A new book, Unnatural Selection, estimates that since the late 1970s, 163 million girls have been aborted . . . because . . . they . . . were. . . girls.

The Wall Street Journal review notes:

Despite the author's intentions, "Unnatural Selection" might be one of the most consequential books ever written in the campaign against abortion. It is aimed, like a heat-seeking missile, against the entire intellectual framework of "choice." For if "choice" is the moral imperative guiding abortion, then there is no way to take a stand against "gendercide." Aborting a baby because she is a girl is no different from aborting a baby because she has Down syndrome or because the mother's "mental health" requires it. Choice is choice. One Indian abortionist tells Ms. Hvistendahl: "I have patients who come and say 'I want to abort because if this baby is born it will be a Gemini, but I want a Libra.' "

This is where choice leads. This is where choice has already led. Ms. Hvistendahl may wish the matter otherwise, but there are only two alternatives: Restrict abortion or accept the slaughter of millions of baby girls and the calamities that are likely to come with it.

You can read more here:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303657404576361691165631366.html

For the Dad Who Thinks He Has Everything

It's Father's Day. And, frankly, I was kind of hoping...

I have a Wenger backpack that I love. And I just wanted something matching to put inside it. I found this on Amazon.com.
87 implements with 141 functions, not including the weight-lifting (it weighs almost 8 pounds).

Just a few of the implements:

• Cupped cigar cutter with double honed edges
• Laser pointer with 300 ft. range
• Removable tool holder with expandable receptacle
• Special self-centering screwdriver for gunsights.

Wow. All this and much more for only $899. For real:

http://www.amazon.com/Wenger-16999-Giant-Swiss-Knife/dp/B001DZTJRQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=industrial&qid=1308523130&sr=8-1

Woody Allen and Billy Graham

Since the Aussie and the Dalai Lama was such a success, I knew it was going to be a hard comedic act to follow. However, I trolled around a few blogs and, thanks to Postman Dave, think I have found it. Here are two very different, but very funny, guys: Woody and Billy.

The Aussie and the Dalai Lama

Now it's no secret that there is a little rivalry between Aussies and Kiwis, primarily because the former are secretly very jealous of the latter. :)

Psychologists tell me this jealousy is most clearly manifested in the many sheep jokes Aussies tell about Kiwis.

But one Aussie reporter decided a sheep joke wouldn't work so well on the Dalai Lama. So he launched out in another direction: a pizza joke with a metaphysical twist.

So this post is in honor of my good mates across the pond:

Danger in the Digital World

It's getting interesting in cyberspace. One click on his Twitter account while at a hockey game, and Congressman Weiner's life, career and marriage will never be the same again.

Meanwhile 6 million Americans and 1.5 million Canadians recently quit Facebook in the space of just one month.

Guess some of us are learning the dangers of the digital world where oodles of data gets exchanged every second, but not much wisdom.

Tim Challies writes:
In the 1980s, Russell Ackoff, longtime professor at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, popularized what has since become known as the DIKW model, a model that aptly marks the progression from data to wisdom. Ackoff suggested the following progression:
Data — > Information — > Knowledge — > Wisdom

At the most basic level, we have data, which simply describes one or more symbols. A letter, an emoticon, a list of numbers within a spreadsheet—these are all data. They represent raw symbols and have no meaning outside of their context. As we collect data into a kind of cohesive whole we create information. Information answers basic questions about the data: the who, what, where, and when? Information is data that has been assigned some kind of relational connection or has some kind of meaning. If we add a heading to a list of numbers in a spreadsheet, we have made data into information; we have turned a list of numbers into a list of prices or ages or totals. We now know what these pieces of data are meant to represent.

When we collect, collate, and compare pieces of information, we have acquired knowledge. Knowledge makes information useful. A multiplication table is an example of knowledge, a table we can memorize that allows us to use information in a useful way so that we can always know that 2 times 2 equals 4 and 9 times 9 equals 81. Solomon’s proverbs, the hundreds of them listed from chapters 10 to 29 of his book—if we simply commit them to memory—are a form of knowledge. Knowledge is a “general awareness or possession of information, facts, ideas, truths, or principles.”2 Finally, when we use knowledge to make good decisions, when we apply facts and knowledge to life situations, we express wisdom. Wisdom combines knowledge with experience to live with virtue. Every day we encounter data, information, and knowledge, yet God calls us to live with wisdom.

Challies, Tim (2011). The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion (p. 140). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

For My Wife

Out of nowhere, I just had a great chuckle at my wife, and she at herself, and she at me. She was reading a letter out loud to herself, of all things.

It was one of those little moments in a marriage that is, in itself, insignificant. And yet it was a moment of joy. A moment we alone shared, and no one else.

Till I wrote this, that is.

But, see, the moment converged with a song I was listening to as I'm working on my message for tomorrow, "I am James." That's the message, not the song. The song is "Dancing in the Mindfields," from Andrew Peterson. And it's got absolutely nothing to do with introducing the book of James with a dramatic monologue, yet this song says it all.

Watch this video and judge for yourself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtTa81LyuQM