Gene Edward Veith Jr.'s Blog, page 403
June 10, 2013
The Surveillance State is also Bugging the Internet
As we posted about last week, the federal government has been secretly monitoring millions of phone calls. Now it has been learned that the feds are also secretly monitoring massive amounts of internet activity by tapping into servers of internet companies.From Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras in the Washington Post: The National Security Agency and [...]
June 7, 2013
Religion and crime
The worst criminals tend to be very religious. In fact, they often use religion to rationalize their misdeeds. Of course, in doing so, their theology is horrendous. Nicholas C. DiDonato reports on some research that studied How criminals use religion to justify their crimes. Details after the jump.This draws on the paper “With God on [...]
The Surveillance State
The federal government has been monitoring the phone calls of some 10 million Verizon subscribers (nearly 10% of them), thanks to a secret court order that initiated what is being called the largest and most open-ended surveillance effort ever and a grave assault on civil liberties. From Dan Roberts and Spencer Ackerman, Anger swells after [...]
The biggest bestseller in Norway is the Bible
Norway is considered a hyper-secularized country, but its biggest bestselling book today is a new translation of the Bible. From the London Telegraph: The Bible has become the number one bestseller in Norway, outselling Fifty Shades of Grey. Yet the Bible, printed in a new Norwegian language version, has outpaced Fifty Shades of Grey to [...]
June 6, 2013
Update on “Why Calvinist Baptists but not Lutheran Baptists?”
That post we had the other day about why there can be Calvinist Baptists but not Lutheran Baptists turned out to be part of a very interesting discussion in the Christian blogosphere. Superblogger Joe Carter wrote a post summarizing the various points in the debate. (He scored us the winner.)Joe Carter, from Debatable at the [...]
Cicadas and Resurrection
Our pastor had some good reflections in our church newsletter on the 17-year locusts (a.k.a. “cicadas”) coming out of the ground around these parts. He manages to connect cicadas to people, sin, the church, death, resurrection, and baptism!Rev. James Douthwaite, Cicadas and Resurrection: As I sit writing this letter to you all, I am listening [...]
How Gallup blew the presidential election polling
On the eve of the last election, the venerable polling firm Gallup predicted that Mitt Romney would beat Obama 49% to 48%. Actually, Obama won, 52%-42%. The company has been studying what went wrong. Despite Republican complaints that pollsters were using methods that were undercounting conservatives, in fact, Gallup, at least, was over-counting them. After [...]
June 5, 2013
The best book on classical education?
One of the best books I have ever read on classical education is the just-released title Simply Classical: A Beautiful Education for Any Child (Memoria Press). It’s by my friend and colleague on the board of the Consortium for Classical & Lutheran Education, Cheryl Swope. Classical education is best-known for its powerful academic chops, for [...]
A Christian physicist, the Higgs particle, and an anthropic multiverse
Christian physicist Stephen M. Barr, of the University of Deleware and a frequent contributor to First Things, wrote with some other scientists a paper on the Higgs field–an aspect of the so-called “God particle”–that is getting new attention in light of the collider that has recently assembled evidence about this mysterious yet fundamental entity. See [...]
The tornado set a record
One of the tornadoes that hit the Oklahoma City area on Friday was the widest ever recorded at 2.6 miles. It was rated an EF5, which is the very top of the tornado scale. Nine days earlier, another EF5 had hit Moore, an Oklahoma City suburb. And in 1999, Moore had another of the rare [...]
