Get it on iTunes here. (No, I’m not making a cut. It’s good.)

“Nature of Things” has made me want to sing again.

However, Palin is clearly a strong candidate. From the time she was announced, the wind was completely sucked out of the Obamafest speech. The Dems really don’t know how to respond to a Republican party that fielded a strong, young(er) woman as a candidate.

The big question for me is “why is it that a strong candidate has to be selected as a VP in the Republican party?” Palin is, in my opinion, a stronger candidate than McCain. But she would have never survived the primary process.

The crusty, meandering party politics have grown too thick to produce a good candidate organically. And that’s just the election.

They’ve definitely lost their ability to produce good policy in practice.

And they’re saying “aha…I found his website!”.

C’mon folks. Even a cursory look would show that this is a tag and not a nickname. I’ve never posted anything anywhere under the name “agoodday”. You have not found “agoodday”’s website.

But no Mac version yet. Bleh.

So I now use firefox for most browsing across platforms. IE for mandatory stuff. Safari for the occasional non-firefox-friendly sites on the mac.

Now this. I’m going to give it a shot. I’m sure there’s going to be quite a bit about it over the next few months.

After the river breached, it headed south and soon flooded the villages in its path. More than 2.1 million people in the worst-hit parts of Bihar are not only homeless but stranded, and 55 have been killed as the floods washed out the roads and railroad lines that connected residents to the rest of the country.

I gots to come up with some posts pronto!

I don’t think they sell collector glasses anymore because they all break on the boat from China. And nobody here knows how to make them.

The bad news is, he never was sick. It’s not a miracle. He’s a fake.

I don’t understand people who fake cancer. One, it’s a terrible thing to do in light of the fact that there are people who actually have it. The other thing is…and this sounds bad…but you know, sooner or later people are going to expect something to happen to you. It’s worse than selling your soul. It’s like selling someone else’s soul for a short term gain.

I was recently asked to sing this song at a local church. But man, after seeing him with the oxygen in his nose…I don’t think I can sing it for a long time. Although I can say that having an oxygen tube would be very helpful with singing if it weren’t so downright evil. He better have sounded pretty awesome. It’s like doping for vocalists except everyone tests positive for oxygen (hopefully).

So this brings up the question….was the power of the song in the dude who wrote it? Or is the power of the song in the God that the song is about?

If you dig into it, the backgrounds of the writers of some of our favorite hymns are pretty spotty.

It’s still a great song. So I say let the song stand as it is when the time is right. Focus on what it’s about.

And Michael, you better do the right thing and take care of this business.

• Oil always drops this time of year, for various reasons.
• The dollar seems to be having some better days.
• Global and domestic demand is waning, especially in China.
• Global output has increased by a smidge.

But I wouldn’t get our hopes up. We’re still (from my readings) in a very tenuous supply situation.

All it takes is one thing to remove just a little bit of supply, and it could spiral out of control.

If anything, we’ve been given a very valuable warning. Start thinking about what will happen if global production shrinks by any degree.

What’s interesting is that the extreme left side of the scale contains just as much wonder as the right side. Maybe more.

Second, how in the world can paramutual wagering gambling be illegal in Alabama, yet the carnival games in Alabama Adventure be allowed to take gobs of cash on the pretense of a fair game?

Apparently the real singer wasn’t cute enough for Communist sensibilities.

First my childhood is crushed with the discovery that Kung-Fu movies are fake…now this. And it’s required some hasty backtracking since I’d told my daughter that “see, she’s the same age as you and there she is singing in front of billions of people.” I knew she wasn’t singing live, but “see she’s the same age as you and some other girl is lip syncing her singing in front of billions” just sounds…sad.

This is just evil.

It blocks your internet connection for up to 3 hours…giving you time to catch up on life.

But what if it never comes back on? And you can’t google to find out the fix?!?!?

Primarily the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and the Baku-Supsa Pipeline.

Russia is setting itself up as the prime controller of Europe’s oil, and those Georgia pipelines are a problem.

Go ahead, check out the map. It’s pretty obvious. Wait until the world is watching the Olympics. Bomb the snot out of a bunch of people. Bomb the pipeline. Profit!

Seems there is no limit to offshoring.

(HT: Stacey)

He found him for 50 cents in a vending machine after rendering unto the machine what belongs to George Washington. Or maybe Jorge, since pictures were en Español.

The troubling thing is that I don’t know how to describe this situation without being offensive. But then I realize that’s just over-Religiousity speaking worrisome thoughts. I think Christ would have smiled slightly and then used a parable or two to illustrate what’s really up. Something along the lines of “let me tell you about the real me”.

I know he would have smiled at the way my son lights up when he sees any representation of Jesus.

It’s where we go for everything. Hurricane? Borrow and spend, and complain that the blessings of deficit-god didn’t arrive quick enough. Terrorists? Wade into a million things we don’t understand, borrow and spend and if anyone disagrees they’re doubting deficit-god itself. Sickness? Nothing that the allmighty deficit-god can’t fix. Just don’t doubt it’s power or be stingy with it’s blessings because that’s the ultimate sin in the U.S. these days.

How long will this golden calf hold up? It would seem that we’re going to find out.

Record deficits expected in 2009.

And that’s just the normal stuff they’re telling us. And that’s just the “normal” deficit, not counting all the Social Security stuff, medicare stuff, etc.

The economy is currently vibrating to the sounds of internal havoc. This havoc is made up of the sounds of various types of obfuscated debt imploding. Normally this would be affecting all of us.

But what’s really happening is that trillions in bad debt is steadily being transferred over to be guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. This transfer is giving people faith that everything’s gonna be alright.

Because deficit-god takes care of his children right?

We’re going to find out the hard way that our deficit-god is really us. To the tune of many thousands of dollars per family. Easily 6 figures. We’re praying to ourselves…which we love to do until the bill comes due and the results are in.

What’s going to happen when we see the deficit-god for what it really is? What’s going to happen when it can no longer answer?

But not Fiji. It is nearly indestructible. The thickness is such that you could cut the top off and actually have a decent, reusable drinking cup that would easily last a couple years.

Which makes you think….maybe the more eco-conscious thing would be to make the bottles thicker and more expensive so that they could actually be used for something. Then someone, somewhere might get some use out of them.

Such as us, when we use them to collect rainwater after civilization as we know it collapses in a few years. It’ll be like Lost except with far fewer plot twists.

Anyway, the Fiji bottles are very hefty.

Then there’s the fuel burned to transport the stuff. The bottles are made in China, transported to Fiji, filled up, then transported to the U.S. It’s bad enough that we haul them from the grocery store, but couldn’t we at least cut out a few thousand miles of this? We have aquifers in the U.S.?

Lastly, there is the treatment of the people in Fiji. Supposedly, they actually have water supply problems in the very country that is shipping water all over the world. And they aren’t exactly reaping the benefits from this business. In that way, Fiji is the Hummer that peels out in front of the less fortunate.

Here’s the speech.

Here is a similar post from an Iraq soldier who prepared a final blog entry should he be killed in his tour of duty.

And there are other ways people have persisted beyond their existence. Such as books and letters. I actually just became custodian for some important letters of my ancestors dating back 100+ years.

These kinds of things are obviously moving. All of us want to have some sort of impact. We were created with an intense need for community, and we project that need to our post life existence of memories and evidence.

(I think they are more moving to secular humanists and atheists/agnostics, because…hey…that’s all there is.)

But the sad fact is that in short order nobody is going to remember anything about us. Nothing. Nada. Nobody is going to know about us.

Unless you were a Julius Caesar, or a president, or some other major figure, nobody will have the slightest inkling of who you were. And if you were one of those figures people won’t really know you. They’ll know what’s been left about you and little else. The famous you they remembers would likely be completely different.

The digital age promises to change this. In the physical world whatever you leave behind changes. But now huge amounts of audio, video, and text can now be stored indefinitely in multiple copies. It will be much easier for people down the road to get to know the people who lived in our current age. I’m pretty sure that someone will read this text long after I’m dead.

But this could get even more depressing….as many billions of individual histories start to pile up will anyone ever read them? Isn’t the prospect of your digital remnants sitting untouched for eons in some super-advanced storage library…well….kind of sad?

Even with our soul in an iPod, it is still almost 100% that all we ever were will be long forgotten. All is vanity.

Ecclesiastes 12:13 The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. 14 For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.

And of course any study of the subject must end with our great hope in Jesus Christ:

Philippians 3:20 But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.

1 Corinthians 15:50 I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. 51 Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, 52 in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. 53 For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. 54 When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory. 55 O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?

1 Thessalonians 4:16 For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. 18 Therefore encourage one another with these words.

I think these scenarios are much better than taking my chances on some text on a dusty ol’ CD somewhere. The ability of Youtube to pull videos is not a good vision of eternity!

First, a 1975 slide presentation on computing, showing that buzzwords have been around since day one.

Second, a group of pictures from Mike Tyson’s long abandoned mansion. Which kind of looks 1975′y too. (warning…reader comments are a little rough)

If archeologists found this place in the distant future, I wonder what they would think?

It appears they’re also offering fake coffee too.

Frankly, I thought he was going to maul them….

First, I’m hoping to record a couple additional tunes soon. These 2 songs will be put together with all 20 other songs from the CD’s and put into one massive CD. The idea is to make it easier to give away CDs (economies of scale) and make the full album purchases on iTunes, etc. more valuable to the listener.

Second, iTunes has been gradually phasing in iTunes plus for indie artists. All M.S. tunes except 2 are now converted. That means DRM free and 256k bitrate. They sound good and will play on any player that supports AACs (not just iPods).

Third, Last.fm is starting to get a buzz because of it’s new site design, iPhone radio app, custom apps for playing content, and (pricey) streaming player.

I have a page up there, which I hope to be updating soon.

I would say this needs some revision. Like a back to the drawing board evaluation. You know…square one kind of stuff!

You can see things on TV, read websites, hear rumors, listen to criticism, and generally find out all sorts of things. But you really never know until you’re there. You don’t see the fruit until you actually talk to the people, hear the music, hear the teaching, and see things with your own two eyes.

This is not to say you can’t make assessments about something you directly experience unrelated to the church itself. For instance, I’ve never been to that Lakewood church, but I do see their TV ministry and I find quite a few problems with it. That’s because the TV ministry is what it is when you watch it.

However, I can’t really comment on the church itself because…well, I’ve never been there.

In fact, I’ve found that many of the things I hear people say (in speech or in writing) about churches are just plain incorrect. When you put boots on the ground you often find the exact opposite of the things you heard.

I’m not sure why this is the case. I guess it’s just part of our tribal nature, and the tendency of organizations to say “there be dragons” at the other group across town. But we need to check this tendency and make sure it’s being properly handled by the Spirit.

So next time you hear something about a church…take the time to visit it before you just believe it.

This enthusiasm included how they treated visitors. Everyone was extremely friendly, and we found total strangers answering our questions and giving us directions. The pastor’s wife, Gayla, noticed that we were visitors and took the time to come and talk with us.

The coolest thing about our visit was the short time after the service, where they have a meet-n-greet with Pastor Danny. We were going to skip this, as it was getting late and we didn’t want to leave our son in a new place for too long.

However Gayla waded through the crowd as we were leaving and made a point to personally invite us to the meet-n-greet. It was interesting how a corporate invitation was easy to pass up, but a personal invitation was different. This is stuff we all know, but it’s interesting to see it in action.

After retrieving our exhausted son (they had been playing outside), we made our way back to the hospitality room adjacent to the sanctuary. There, about 3 or 4 other visitors were talking to the pastor and some of the other people.

We also talked with him for a few minutes, and found him to be a very nice guy. I liked him. He picked right up on my daughters recent study of the Bible and had some very encouraging words about it. The other thing he really talked about was his staff and how great they were to work with, which I found interesting.

I determined that this was the coolest thing about our visit this church. A pastor taking the time to meet new members and visitors on the spot…and an extremely proactive greeting of visitors. It was very New Testament.

Matthew 6:19 Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal,

Unless of course your treasure is FDIC insured. Then everything’s going to be just fine.

IndyMac Bank failed today. The second largest bank failure in U.S. history. The largest was Continental Illinois.

Take a look at the stock price history. Less than two years ago, shares in IMB were $47. Today (before the news) they were 28 cents.

You expect this kind of chart from, say, an online pet food store with a fleet of corporate jets and a superbowl ad. In other words, these aren’t toy dot com companies…these are U.S. financial institutions.

And from the Wall Street Journal:

The collapse is expected to cost the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. between $4 billion and $8 billion, potentially wiping out more than 10% of the FDIC’s $53 billion deposit-insurance fund.

A few more of these and things are going to look pretty crazy. And it looks like there may be some more in the pipe. Bookmark this page.

My prediction is that we’re going to hit the Federal credit card quite a bit over the next 2 or 3 years. These banks were considered “too big to fail”. What about the Federal government? From the Titanic to the Hindenburg, people are often fooled by perception.

Because she has to read a bazillion books this summer for school in the fall, I quickly made any tribble purchase dependent on a book reading. She is extremely incentive driven and ran right then to start reading. Two days later, she finished…and sent this email this morning:

Dear Dad, July 10,2008

here are some questions: question 1: When is my tribble going to be here?!?
question 2: Is it tan?!?
question3: Was it 13$

The enumerative style is like her dad. The list of demands is like her mom!

In the last year I’ve read hundreds and hundreds of church blogs Christian bloggers. This one has stuck in my reader. I’ve never been to this church, so all I know about it is via the web.

When visiting a church, I am always so inspired by the sheer presence of the Holy Spirit. You both feel and know it when you’re in the presence of other Christians. It’s similar with this website for some reason.

Albert Mohler has a good take on it.

Stuff like this comes and goes. But the Word is permanent.

For some reason (possibly search engines) traffic to that page has increased, even though that post is way old. A gentleman named Rick took issue with the post:

I thus encourage you to be more open-minded, before criticizing or opposing something that you don’t have first hand knowledge of (don’t judge less you be judged).

Having thusly been judged as less-open minded (which I guess means closed minded), I decided to take a fresh look.

The Recovery Version is a Bible by/for the group called “the Lord’s recovery” movement, and/or the “local church” movement. The group seems strongly opposed to labels so it’s hard to call them something.

You can view an online version of this Bible here.

Anytime a group says they have their own Bible, I tend to approach with caution. Not much good comes from needing your own version of the Bible. Mormon and Jehovah’s Witnesses are Theological examples of what happens when someone needs such a thing.

The Recovery Version has a huge, huge amount of footnotes…which as I understand it is part of the version itself. Most people should see a problem with this. This isn’t like a “study Bible” or “Bible with study aids” as these folks like to say. This commentary is dangerously close to being a part of their scripture, by most accounts (and if not, why call it a “Version”)? That, and the sheer volume of the “study aids” should make things seem a little bit odd.

Lastly, this Bible is extremely critical of a few other denominations. This handful of denominations includes all Catholics and all Protestants. And by critical, I mean calling them “an organization of Satan as his tool to damage God’s economy”.

So we have a church with their own version of Bible, with huge chunks of exclusive interpretation, who calls everyone else a tool of Satan.

You know…I think most Christians can see what’s up here. Approach with prayerful caution.

Check out this article on the “Gospel of Accomodation”.

This is an excellent example of what I’m talking about. Look at the examples that David Wilkerson uses:

“You don’t like choirs. Well, would you go to a church that didn’t have a choir?” Yes.

“You don’t like to wear suits. Would you go where it’s informal?” Yes.

Then you go to your computer and design a gospel that will not confront but will shoot out the desires and the needs of the people. After you have gathered a handful of people, you keep interviewing them to find out what they want; then you design your message to help people cope with their needs. The program you design is intended to make the church comfortable and friendly for all sinners who wish to attend.

Note the critical error here. It’s obvious to anyone who values God’s Word over Man’s tradition.

Choirs are good. I think that a compelling Biblical case could be made for them. But where in the Gospel of Christ Jesus is a choir mandated? And even if it’s mandated, how are the particulars mandated?

And suits…where in the Gospel is any kind of formal attire mandated as a matter of procedure? If anything, a compelling Biblical case could be made against standard formal attire.

It’s absolutely amazing to me how we could possibly be familiar with scripture and not see the methods of the pharisees all over this article. Does the Gospel of Jesus Christ require a tie? Or is just a collar enough? What color shirts are acceptable? How about some snazzy cuff links? Will I be ceremonially unclean if I wear loafers?

It’s pure tradition that these type of things exist in current form. And there’s nothing wrong with those traditions so long as they are Gospel-centered and not the Gospel themselves.

But in this article, to eliminate these traditions in favor of something else is to support sin. And thus, the full body of scripture that deals with sin and false gospels can now be brought to bear against things whose only mandate is that the author likes them.

The rest of the article is pointless because it relies on a false premise. And that’s a problem because there are legitimate issues of repentance that could be addressed.

Go down the list: Humphrey, McGovern, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry.

And now their ineptitude is threatening to make their convention a fiasco.

Obama seems to have the wherewithal to avoid this. Looks like he’s going to campaign like a leader with major party support…much like the Democrat candidates of old.

While I have a problem with just about every policy of Obama’s, I think it’d be an interesting thing to watch such a communication-driven leader. We haven’t had that since Reagan. (Clinton just had a general likeability).

The what-is-a-government-anyway policy thing won’t be a huge deal to me, because we’re already toast. We’re nearly 10 trillion dollars in debt and the economy is simply not sound enough to be tapped without major implications. There’s no money left to implement the sweeping increase in government that Obama is likely to favor. And besides, GWB and the Republican congress already increased the size and scope of government responsibility enough, so who cares?

With regard to social policy, we’re going to get what we deserve just like humans always have. God is pretty consistent with that.

There is only one policy that really bothers me, and that’s his radical support for the most horrific abortion procedures. This is a bit much.

Politically, Americans are going to experience the cause->effect of what they bring on themselves. But abortions, particularly the late term kind, are a supreme injustice. The fact that “Change” supports such sinister policies is troubling.

Guess what evangelicals? We get to see this sinister code of ethics hooked up to all that Patriot Act policy we ignored for 8 years. I think we’re going to get a real lesson in what happens when you play both sides of the absolute truth card. Some of those rights won’t look so ‘alienable’ after all.

He routinely plays all over the world, including a tour of just about everyplace in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you’ve heard of the Iraqi/Afghan city on the news, he played there.

Here he is on TV. He’s famous.

I mean….that is a big wolf.

‘Send Me’ - Live at MHC | Ballard from Mars Hill Church on Vimeo.

This isn’t really my thing, but I respect it as valid Christian (teaching) music. Because while I can think of many personal/cultural reasons not to like it, there are no valid Biblical arguments to say it’s not right. Every criticism will first visit a cultural angle, then ‘hook’ that cultural angle up to scripture and hijack the authority.

Meanwhile, Tom Schlueter’s article “music is never neutral” was also picked up by a Christian music blog. I like this blog, but definitely sourced in western church music–which is a style all its own. Look at this from a review of Holy Holy Holy:

The descent of the ‘c’ phrase contains a marvelously constructed sequence of detail. The descending fourth in m. 13 is followed immediately by another descending fourth in m. 14. After these initial two leaps, we can watch as the descending intervals narrow sequentially: mm. 14 and 15 conclude the hymn with descending third, a descending second, and finally, a repeated prime. Mirroring the narrowing descent is the rate at which the descent occurs: in mm. 13 and 14 the descending fourths require two beats to occur; in m. 15, the descent of the third takes only one beat of time; the descent of the second and unison increased to the eighth note level, dawg.*

* Randyism mine

Holy Holy Holy is a great traditional Hymn. And this analysis is spot on…for the western hymn genre. In fact, you could even do a similar analysis of “Sweet Child o’ Mine” by GnR, or even the Beatles.

But while music is universal, genre and tradition is not. There is a world of music out there and this analysis wouldn’t make sense in other types/styles. More importantly, this analysis (while good) is traditional in nature and not Biblical.

Thus, the cultural judgments continue. And that’s fine, as long as we see that for what it is.