Headline Telegraph: Koizumi wins his gamble with a landslide

Q.49. What is the second commandment?

A. The second commandment is: You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate Me, but showing love to a thousand [generations] of those who love me and keep My commandments.

The first commandment teaches who we are to worship. The second commandment teaches us how we are to worship.

The second commandment is very important in teaching the regulative principle, in that we are limited in our worship to do only those things that God commands. The scriptures regulate our worship. Not everyone agrees with the regulative principle. There are those who believe we are allowed to do in worship anything except that which God forbids. But I believe the majority of people haven’t thought at all about what we can and should do in worship, and why.

The second commandment clearly teaches that God is concerned with how we worship Him. He expressly forbids our worshipping with any kinds of physical or visual representations of Him. From our human perspective, these physical representations of God help us worship Him. They give us a concrete focus to our worship, and make our worship more real and active. But they are an offense to Him, because they are contrary to His express command to us of how we are to worship Him.

Headline Reuters: Scientists find growing land bulge in Oregon

That reminds me, I’ve only gone running once this week. I better go tonight.

De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da by The Police.

AFP Photo:

Caption: “One and Two-day-old newborn babies listen to music with headphones at the 1st Private Hospital in Kosice-Saca. The experimental program that started approximetly two years ago, is based on using musical therapy in improving the quality of carring for the newborns shortly after birth.(AFP/Joe Klamar)”

The Pittsburgh area is trying to do what it can for victims of hurricane Katrina. There were several agencies all geared up for a plane-load of evacuees all set to come to Pittsburgh. But for some reason, they now aren’t coming. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article makes it sound like the plane was all ready to take off for Pittsburgh when the change was made. It doesn’t tell where they went instead, or why they are no longer Pittsburgh bound. For now, they just aren’t coming

Beds were ready, hotlines were jammed and donations were pouring in to local agencies ready to assist Gulf Coast hurricane victims expected to relocate to the Pittsburgh area today. But no evacuees showed up, and the one question no officials could answer was whether anyone was coming at all….

Pittsburgh was expecting one planeload of evacuees and Philadelphia expected two. By this afternoon, [Pennsylvania Governor] Rendell said, Philadelphia had received 35 displaced Gulf Coast residents and a dog.

I don’t think the people refused to come because of the smoke and grime of Pittsburgh’s long closed steel mills. Like a lot of other problems with helping the people in this disaster, it must just be a bureaucratic mixup of some sort.

But interestingly, it seems that the Pittsburgh area is doing what it can to make the Louisiana residents feel at home if they ever do come: they are releasing (and then catching) alligators in the Allegheny River.

TARENTUM, Pa. — Crocus, a 2-foot pet alligator, escaped from his backyard enclosure, but was captured by a girl who used what she learned on a nature TV program.

Nicki Hilliard and several friends saw the animal swimming in the Allegheny River.

Note: Tarentum is a (rather long) stone’s throw away from the Knilram.org’s world wide headquarters.

Strange that I found this article in the Chicago newspaper rather than the local news. It tells you something about our local news if this strange story didn’t make it in the papers here.

What is that?

It is a speaker built into the door of our Chevy Express van.

When I get to ride the bike to work, I drive about seven miles from downtown Pittsburgh and park. Then I ride a bike trail that runs by a railroad tracks on the banks of the Allegheny River. Here’s a view of the kind of traffic I have to put up with on the ride.

It’s that age old problem. You don’t have a lot of money to spend on medicine, but you do have a lot of often maligned meat preservatives with a reputation for being bad for your health. What are you going to do? In the past, all you could do would be to skip the medicine and preserve the meat.

But now, scientists have another solution: use the meat preservatives as your medicine.

Headline Washington Times: Nitrite examined as cheap treatment

Could the salt that preserves hot dogs also preserve your health?

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health think so. They have begun infusing sodium nitrite into volunteers in hopes that it could prove a cheap but potent treatment for sickle cell anemia, heart attacks, brain aneurysms, even an illness that suffocates babies.

Those ailments have something in common: They hinge on problems with low oxygen, problems the government’s research suggests nitrite can ease.

Beyond repairing the reputation of this often maligned meat preservative, the work promises to rewrite scientific dogma about how blood flows, and how the body tries to protect itself when that flow is blocked. Indeed, nitrite seems to guard tissues — in the heart, the lungs, the brain — against cellular death when they become starved of oxygen.

Fall softball started this past weekend. At my younger daughter’s level, they have a rule to encourage the girls to swing the bat. If you take a called strike, you lose all the balls you had accumulated in your count. So if you had three balls and no strikes, and you take a strike, the count goes to no balls and one strike.

Question: Wouldn’t it be fair to have another rule that if you swing at a pitch outside of the strike zone, you lose all your strikes?

This evening I’m watching the Miami Hurricanes play football against the Florida Seminoles. The NCAA has made the rule that teams can’t use Indian mascots and team names in the playoffs.

Question: After the destruction and death caused by hurricane Katrina, will the NCAA also ban Miami’s team name?

Q.48. What are we specifically taught in the first commandment by the words before me?

A. The words before me in the first commandment teach us that God, Who sees everything, notices and is very offended by the sin of having any other god.

There is a Latin phrase that expresses this very well: Coram Deo. This means before the face of God. Everything that we do is coram Deo – before the face of God. All that we do is all done in His presence and with His knowledge. Although we can hide things from the people around us, we can hide nothing from God.

Since there is nothing that we do that is not before Him, these words command us to never put anything in God’s place.

Psalm 44:20-21

²⁰ If we had forgotten the name of our God
or spread out our hands to a foreign god,
²¹ would not God discover this?
For he knows the secrets of the heart.