Scrolling around...March 3, 2013

The Floodgates Open: More Accounts of White House Thuggery Emerge  In the wake of last week's brouhaha between journalistic legend Bob Woodward and the Obama White House, other reporters have come forward to talk about their own experiences with the controlling and sometimes abusive administration...


Will 3D Printing Change the World?

'The Bible' Actor Diogo Morgado: How Can You Play the Son of God? You Can't
...Morgado, who grew up in Portugal, described his homeland as a religious country. He said he was not only challenged by the role, but was humbled at being selected for the part. "How can you play the Son of God? You can't," he told the crowd. "What I had the privilege of playing was simply the words of Christ and taking the journey of the scriptures."...

The 10-hour, 5-part TV miniseries "The Bible" will premiere tonight on the History Channel at 8/7c.

One of the exterior facades of the St. John Stoudios

Turkey: Famous fifth-century monastery to be turned into a mosque  More indication of the rapid Islamization of Turkey. It is noteworthy also that none of the world's "human rights" organizations seem concerned about this, or the worsening plight of the remaining tiny Christian minority in Turkey, at all...
 Byzantine miniature depicting the Stoudios Monastery (c.1000)

Albert Mohler: The Christian Leader in the Digital Age
The Digital Age is upon us. In the span of less than three decades, we have redefined the way humans communicate, entertain, inform, research, create, and connect – and what we know now is only a hint of what is to come. But the greatest concern of the church is not a technological imperative, but a Gospel imperative.

The digital world did not exist a generation ago, and now it is a fundamental fact of life. The world spawned by the personal computer, the Internet, social media, and the smart phone now constitutes the greatest arena of public discussion and debate the world has ever known.

Leaders who talk about the real world as opposed to the digital world are making a mistake, a category error. While we are right to prioritize real face-to-face conversations and to find comfort and grounding in stable authorities like the printed book, the digital world is itself a real world, just real in a different way...

Australia: Ethicists Argue in Favor of ‘After-Birth Abortions’ as Newborns ‘Are Not Persons’
Alberto Giubilini with Monash University in Melbourne and Francesca Minerva at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne write that in “circumstances occur[ing] after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible.”

The two are quick to note that they prefer the term “after-birth abortion” as opposed to “infanticide.” Why? Because it “[emphasizes] that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus (on which ‘abortions’ in the traditional sense are performed) rather than to that of a child.”...

Sowell: Shepherds and Sheep
...Implicit in the wide range of efforts on the left to get government to take over more of our decisions for us is the assumption that there is some superior class of people who are either wiser or nobler than the rest of us.

Yes, we all make mistakes. But do governments not make bigger and more catastrophic mistakes?

Think about the First World War, from which nations on both sides ended up worse off than before, after an unprecedented carnage that killed substantial fractions of whole younger generations and left millions starving amid the rubble of war.

Think about the Holocaust, and about other government slaughters of even more millions of innocent men, women and children under Communist governments in the Soviet Union and China.

Even in the United States, government policies in the 1930s led to crops being plowed under, thousands of little pigs being slaughtered and buried, and milk being poured down sewers, at a time when many Americans were suffering from hunger and diseases caused by malnutrition...

Bloomberg booed at annual St. Patrick’s Parade in storm-ravaged Rockaways
Mayor Bloomberg was booed yesterday as he walked in the annual St. Patrick’s Parade in the hurricane-ravaged Rockaways.

The jeers grew so loud toward the end of the Queens parade that mayoral candidate and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn appeared to break away from the mayor to march separately....

Botched Late-Term Abortion Lands 14th Woman in Hospital Since 2008
“Today’s incident further emphasizes the dangers of late-term abortions that are being done in inadequately equipped outpatient clinics without proper monitoring by abortionists who have a long history of injuring women,” said Cheryl Sullenger, Senior Policy Advisor for Operation Rescue. “Late-term abortions are too dangerous to tolerate and it is past time to pass legislation that will ban this barbaric procedure for good.”

About Paul Ehrlich and ‘The Most Spectacularly Wrong Book Ever Written’
...Certainly, Ehrlich’s book was “spectacularly wrong,” and he was a ubiquitous media presence in the late 1960s and ’70s, appearing repeatedly as a guest on The Tonight Show, among other high-profile venues. However, Jonathan Last is incorrect to say that “one guy, Paul Ehrlich” was responsible for all this disinformation about demographics.

No, ultimately, that “one guy” is John D. (David) Rockfeller III, who became obsessed with neo-Malthusian worries about overpopulation in the 1930s. Ehrlich was merely one of the chief propagandists who helped popularize bad ideas Rockefeller promoted for decades...