Halo Halo / Tiny tips
Halo, halo
Social media shorthand SMH means ‘shakes my head’. When the German Hindenburg airship caught fire landing in New Jersey in 1937 the radio commentator cried out, ‘oh, the humanity!’ The current seventh-century rulers of Afghanistan cause both of those reactions. The Telegraph, 25 March, reports that a Mullah there has declared, ‘we will soon implement the punishment for adultery. We will flog women in public. We will stone them to death in public.’ Words fail.
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Fulcrum7.com in a book review says the author posits the ridiculous theory that Noah carried dinosaurs onto the Ark as juveniles or even as eggs. Because obviously think of the space a pair of eighty-foot dinosaurs would take up! The reviewer says, rubbish! Well of course. That’s like the old comedy routine where someone claims to have two lions, a giraffe and an elephant in a shoebox they’re carrying. The reviewer then says, ‘I believe the dinosaurs were among the “confused species”, which were the result of genetic engineering and one of the reasons for the Flood was to destroy those animals’. Words fail.
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In June 1812 Napoleon Bonaparte and his French army invaded Russia. In 1812 Mary Anning and, initially, her brother dug the skeleton of an unknown seventeen-foot-long creature from the cliffs of Lyme Regis. Now it’s known that it was the skeleton of an ichthyosaur from the Jurassic period. Mary Anning was aged twelve when she discovered this.
With hindsight, which of those two events was the most important? It’s not known if this is one of the animals that the Flood failed to destroy.
Mary Anning and her family were avid fossil harvesters selling their finds to tourists. Oxford professor William Buckland teamed up with Mary. Peal writes that Buckland was a committed Christian who had difficulty in reconciling Mary’s finds with Bible stories. To maintain his delusion Buckland said that the skeleton must have come there as a result of the Flood.
Mary also discovered a plesiosaur and a pterodactyl. She is quoted as saying that, ‘great men of learning had taken advantage of her.’ ‘They ‘sucked her brains’ of her knowledge, and stole the glory of her discoveries for themselves’ (Meet the Georgians, Robert Peal, 2021,).
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The protagonist sees a group of flagellants in St James’s Park. He converses about it with his chauffeur who says; ‘I find it ridiculous. If God exists and He’s decided He’s had enough of us, He isn’t going to change his mind because a rabble of no-hopers dress up in yellow and go wailing through the park.’
‘Do you believe He exists?
‘Perhaps His experiment went spectacularly wrong. Perhaps He’s just baffled. Seeing the mess, not knowing how to put it right. Perhaps not wanting to put it right. Perhaps He only had enough power for one intervention. So He made it. Whoever he is, whatever He is, I hope He burns in His own Hell’ (The Children of Men, P.D. James, 1992).
DC
Tiny tips
‘The princes are nothing but tyrants who flay the people; they fritter away our blood and sweat on their pomp and whoring and knavery.’ These were the words of Thomas Müntzer at the head of the massed ranks of a peasant army in the year 1525. Ranged against him was the might of the princes of the German Nation. How did Müntzer, the son of a coin maker from central Germany, rise in just a few short years to become one of the most feared revolutionaries in early modern Europe? (Penguin Random House, tinyurl.com/ytj8wzrj).
Like many of Myanmar’s young men and women, Ko Naing said he had no intention of answering the call and would instead do whatever it takes to avoid the draft. ‘The one sure thing is I won’t serve. If I’m drafted by the military, I will try to move to the remote areas or to another country,’ Ko Naing told Al Jazeera from Myanmar. ‘Not only me, I think everyone in Myanmar is not willing to serve in the military under the conscription law’, he said (Al Jazeera, tinyurl.com/mwk76z2w).
The ‘one land, two peoples’ analysis of the situation is nonsensical. The land does not belong to the people [proletariat], anywhere in the world. It belongs to those [bourgeoisie] who own it. This might seem very theoretical, but the mere existence of social relations on the ground shows to whom the idea of two camps belongs, ie, the ruling [bourgeois] class (libcom.org, tinyurl.com/mrprshp9).
South Africa’s Western Cape is known for its dramatic coastlines and acres of wineland. But behind the blue skies and rolling hills, the province is grappling with a heartbreaking health crisis. The area has the highest rate of foetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) in the world – a group of debilitating and life-long disabilities caused when a mother drinks during pregnancy. Whilst FASD affects about 0.7 per cent of the world’s population, in the Western Cape rates are as high as 31 per cent, and across South Africa, it’s estimated that 11 per cent of all newborns are affected each year (The Telegraph, tinyurl.com/sd6xsnb5).
As BBC Ukraine reported in November, 650,000 Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60 years old have left Ukraine for Europe since the start of the war. Zelensky’s former adviser Alexey Arestovich recently claimed that 4.5 million Ukrainian men, nearly half of the Ukrainian male population, had fled abroad to avoid military service, and that 30 to 70 percent of military units consist of ‘refuseniks’ who have gone absent without official leave (AWOL) (WSWS.ORG, tinyurl.com/43w42rvj).
‘And if they’ve refused three offers of a job, or whatever the number would be, and they say ‘I’m sorry, I’m not doing any of that’, you then say – in which case you must go and do two years in the Armed Forces’ (Daily Express, tinyurl.com/4fbr4r6y).
‘Universities should be havens for robust debate, discussion, and learning—not sites of censorship where administrators, donors, and politicians squash political discourse they don’t approve of’ said the head of the NYCLU (Common Dreams, tinyurl.com/3k25wc8b).
(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)
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Fulcrom7.com is apparently the site of a 7th-Day Adventist who advances Young Earthism.
The entire review (critical of a book that purports to discuss ‘five positions on origins, (1) atheistic evolution, (2) theistic evolution, (3) intelligent design, (4) old-earth creationism, and (5) young earth creationism’) is here:
https://www.fulcrum7.com/apologetics/2024/3/8/baby-dinosaurs-on-the-ark
In it, among other delights, you will see:
QUOTE:
As an Ellen White-believing Seventh-day Adventist, my young earth creationism does not call for any dinosaurs aboard the ark. I believe the dinosaurs were among the “confused species, which were the result of genetic engineering (“amalgamation,” as Ellen White called it) and one of the reasons for the Flood was to destroy those animals:
[SUB-QUOTE]
“Every species of animal which God had created were preserved in the ark. The confused species which God did not create, which were the result of amalgamation, were destroyed by the flood.” Spiritual Gifts, vol. III, p. 75. (The Spirit of Prophecy, vol. I, p. 78).”