flog

I signed up to be assistant den leader for my oldest son's den. I figured I'm going to attend most events anyway, so I might as well be in a position to have some say in the direction of den activities. Today was my first time "on the job". My town's Oktoberfest celebration is today, so the Cub Scout pack was on trash detail - going around to the various booths and vendors collecting the full trash bags and depositing them in the dumpster by the town office.

I wasn't sure how it was going to go, but it ended feeling really natural. Being an adult leader in Cub Scouts is just being a parent which I've had a couple years experience with. You handle the larger scale with the buddy system and frequent head counts - easy as pie.

I'm not sure if you, dear reader, are aware, but I'm not exactly confident that god is anything other than a figment of the religious devotee's fevered mind. This technically disqualifies me to be a leader, but I figure: fuck the BSA and their fascist propaganda. There is a good core to the program and I'm not going to let ideology or principles (theirs or mine) get in the way of sharing that good core with my sons.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1843168,00.html:
"But we don't want to interfere with market forces like the French do — until we do."

Dishwasher with a door that wouldn't seal anymore (i.e., cascades of water) and a mattress that one of the neighborhood cats kindly broke into my garage to shit and piss on ==> the dump (both from the "beside my garage" collection).

Here's another one that's a total crock. Christians like to say Jesus will accept you just as you are. With a forgiving god, this would be the case. Once and for all, he'd forgive you. "Don't worry about it, you don't even have to come and ask for it. I just forgive you." That's not (most brands of) Christianity, though. God's got strings attached. "I either have to torture you or my son. You pick. After that I can 'forgive' you." Why he can't just forgive people without the dog-and-pony show is beyond me, but there it is. God will only accept you after you've come crawling to him on your hands and knees, groveling, and kicked his son in the balls (vicariously).

If you're poor and black, then welfare is a waste of money - especially when the we are running low on funds - and is in danger of making you lazy if the government doesn't force you into 40 hours/week of compulsory work and training.

If you're the rich, white CEO of a major corporation or bank, then the Feds practically fall all over themselves giving away my money.

Dubya got it right when he said this isn't a bailout. It is redistribution of wealth on a scale that Karl Marx could have never imagined. As if the fat pigs don't get enough of my money already through the "free" market and clandestine government subsidies, now they're holding out their hand, standing in the fucking dole line, waiting for more. I hope every last one of those fucking fat cunts who gets one of my pennies dies a wasting death.

Here's a couple a got from that file sharing network, the public library.

• Katie Mae Blues - I like this one because it plays around a bit with the blues motif of the "rider". Katie Mae is stepping out and has a new driver for her brand new car.


• Shotgun Blues - I don't remember if there was anything else notable about this besides it's good and hits all the classic blues themes (guns, cheating, and threats of murder).


• Mojo Hand - I had a really good description worked out while driving home from work Friday, but I'll be fucked if I can remember it. Just listen to this one because it's a good tune. That statement is true.

A one-trick pony in a one-horse town
You're feeling lonely and the cable's down
You feel like the only freak in this town
What's wrong with you?
What's wrong with you?
What's wrong with ME?!!

We've got a life of scratching tickets
at the local gas and stop
So suck on another whippit and hear the brain cells pop
I know I'm nothing special
and I know I'm nothing great
I know I'm nothing different
But I just don't feel the same

What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?

Can you feel the radiation
dragging your sister down?
You won't feel the alienation
And you'll never leave this town
I know I'm nothing special
and I know I'm nothing great
I know I'm nothing different
But I just don't feel the same

What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?

I could be happy with less, I guess
If they tell me that less is more
Set a place for me at the table
I won't be hungry anymore
I know I'm nothing special
and I know I'm nothing great
I know I'm nothing different
But I just don't feel the same

What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?

Todd crossed a cock with a goblin to make the star of his next video game:


I was watching this episode last night with my wife, her sister, and her sister's husband. I was the only one laughing in the room. Please, tell me someone else finds cock goblin funny.

I just saw Al Sharpton's first vignette on HBO's Black List, Vol 1 (the one not about his mother), and was blown away by what he had to say about the role of the church in black culture, the civil rights movement, and Hip Hop. I think sometimes Sharpton's reputation gets in the way of his messsage. I searched YouTube for the clip, but couldn't find it, so Chris Rock will have to do:



"You know, Larry Holmes / Gerry Kooney is the perfect example of life. Larry Holmes beats the shit out of this guy for 11 rounds. He knocks him out in the 11th round, they had to stop the fight. The man is bloody; he's been beaten the whole fight. They go to the judges' score cards: Larry Holmes is losing the fight. If he [Holmes] didn't knock him [Kooney] out he would have lost the title. And, that is, essentially, the black experience...in a nut shell."

in the ass, I fucked hard:
http://ifuckedanncoulterintheasshard.blogspot.com/

It is having to put up with this sort of nonsense (oh, and that I'm technically disallowed from participating with my sons because I don't in Santa Claus) that I feel ambivalent, at best, about recently joining the local Cub Scout Pack. Seriously, can anyone explain how being injured while killing (brown) people in prosecution of an unjust war of conquest is something I'm supposed to be proud of or offer moral support to? This is not behavior I want my children to emulate and I'm a little disgusted that I have just paid money to spend time with people who do.

"September 7th, 2008 Lake Ridge, VA -- Pack 1399 was working a popcorn booth sale at the Giant in Lake Ridge, VA on Sunday morning. You could not have asked for a prettier morning to be holding an outdoor fundraiser. As the boys greeted the customers, asking them to support their Cub Scout Pack, many of them would stop and talk for a minute.

There was one gentleman that stood out among the rest – an American soldier that had served in Iraq. He began telling us his story about his time in Iraq. You see, this soldier was the very happy and appreciative recipient of our Trail’s End popcorn while serving in Iraq! He told us how they would get shipments and everyone was excited when they would see all the popcorn. They even shared it with the Iraqis that they were working with. He said how everyone loved it and how it would lift their spirits.

While serving our country in Iraq, this soldier made a solemn trip to Walter Reed Medical Center after being injured in Iraq. He spent a number of months (over a year and a half) there while he recovered. Again, while he was there he received our Trail’s End popcorn as a gift!"

I was watching backlogged recordings of that show House which TiVo lovingly stored away on its little hard drive for me. The show is significant (according to the criteria I just made up right now for this flogentry) because two of the main characters are "atheist*", which is envelope pushing for a network television show, but still unsurprising because the show goes out of its way to trivialize and neutralize their lack of belief in Santa. Most recently, there was a death junkie who, just as Dr House walks into the exam room, quite shockingly stands up, pulls out a knife and jams it into a wall outlet. As expected Dr House resuscitates him and we learn that last week the young man was in a car accident where he experienced cardiac arrest for 97 seconds - the best, most blissed out 97 seconds of his "life". For whatever reason this has an effect on Dr House who repeats the experiment himself later in the episode - apparently having an NDE himself to go along with his troubles.

This annoys me for three reasons.

1. Plenty of people have died and been resuscitated without ever having had an NDE.
2. When NDEs have a religious component, they conform to the person's preconceived notions of the afterlife (i.e., Hindus don't end up in heaven (or hell)).
3. NDEs are easily and completely explicable in terms of brain physiology - no gods necessary.

Interpreted in the best possible light, NDEs are inconclusive (assuming you force yourself to not only accept as reliable not only a person's report of a subjective experience they've had, but also accept as infallible their interpretation of what that experience means) and at worst another pointless distraction from the god crowd.

* Actually, one of the characters, Dr Cameron, says she believes in a guiding entity but doesn't think it is an anthropomorphic person. This sounds an awful lot like theism to me, meaning House is the only atheist on the show.

I threw away a brick that had been sitting on my front porch for 2 years. The brick had been used to help anchor a tripod at one point and it was placed on the porch after the satellite dish (which is what the tripod had been upholding) was mounted on the roof.

I had some files on my work machine that I wanted to copy to my home machine. Sounds easy and it was, but the convoluted path the poor bytes had to travel...

EDDIE -> Remote Desktop -> MARVIN -> puTTY -> EDDIE -> sftp-> localhost -> reverse port forwarding -> MARVIN -> get *.mp3

All this so I could download some of 2's Rants.

--

Update:
EDDIE -> Remote Desktop -> MARVIN -> puTTY (to setup port forwarding to tunnel RDC through SSH) -> Remote Desktop -> EDDIE

On Tuesday I finally disposed of a bag of top soil and a bag of Scott's Turf Builder something or other. They've been sitting in my backyard for about a year waiting on some forgotten project of my wife. At some point I had resolved to use the bags to fill a hole that had opened up along side my chimney but had been stymied for months by the chain linked fence bisecting the 12 feet from the bags' resting place to the predestined hole. My moment of greatness came when I paused mid-mowing to walk around into the back yard and fling the rotting tatters of the bags over the fence at the chimney and then walked back around the house to tamp the scattered mess down into the hole with heel of my boot.

Turns out it wasn't the anti-virus software, but a bug in the Diebold's code that failed to commit some votes to memory. One would think this would be the sort of thing found by the public if the code were open-sourced, but then if the code were open-sourced these sorts of things would be found and Diebold's government sponsors wouldn't be able to use it as an excuse for voting anomalies.

Why are there any districts in America still using Diebold voting machines instead of something like OVC's plan?

McCain for (the wrong kind of) Change.


McCain - Reformed Maverick


McCain - Reformed Maverick (same as above - posted in case the other is taken down)

The original article is a little too ranty/preachy, "power to the people, revolution" for my tastes, but the author makes a couple interesting points, including the following about how the RIAA turned down early chances at having MP3 purveyors pay because of pressure from brick and mortar retailers (like Wal-Mart and Best Buy).

"The majors made music free, not the public. Napster offered to pay. So many people offered to pay. Even Verizon. But the labels wouldn’t take the money. They wanted to protect Best Buy and Wal-Mart, who have got NO LOYALTY TO THEM! (Meanwhile, they continually fucked the indie retailers in the ass.) They wanted the CD economic model. In an era where people buy iPods capable of holding thousands of tracks, computer hard drives have the capability of holding TENS OF THOUSANDS OF TRACKS! To deny this reality is to try and get everybody to do their word processing on IBM Selectrics!"

The more astute reader will have noted that Part 1 of the Other Story of Votan was basically The Story of Votan. Part 2 will correct this error definitively...for reals.

So Votan walked the earth, marked by Zod for misery and strife. He walked from village to village having abortions and saying Zod was kind of a prick. Because of this, the villagers would say mean things to him including but not necessarily limited to "Votan Wotan little poopy Potan" (there is textual support only for the one refrain noted here, but I have it on good authority that the $revilers used other taunts, as well, including "Votan Votan bo Botan, banana-fana Fo Fotan, me my Motan, Votan...sucks!" and "It is our considered opinion that you carry about you in the neighborhood of your person an odor that is reminiscent of shit.").

After many years of abuse, Votan figured out that if he kept his thoughts to himself, the villagers were much more likely to attribute to him their own opinions and thereby like him and say kind things to him including but not necessarily limited to "Votan Wotan little industrious Potan". Eventually, Votan settled down in a peaceful village, met a woman and got married. He started a new leafsmith shop and had exactly the same number of children as before. He lived happily ever after in his newly restored state because Zod said so.

The End?

Chapter 9A
In which the foot of the abbey is reached, and William demonstrates his acumen

Long ago, in the dim ages of 1996 there lived a servant of Zod named Votan. He pretty much just minded his own business making things out of leaves. That is until one day when Zod decided to be clever and sent neighboring tribes and distant enemies to mock Votan with the vilest of refrains, including but not necessarily limited to "Votan Wotan little poopy Potan" (there is textual support only for the one refrain noted here, but I have it on good authority that the NTADE used other taunts, as well, including "Votan Votan bo Botan, banana-fana Fo Fotan, me my Motan, Votan...sucks!" and "It is our considered opinion that you carry about you in the neighborhood of your person an odor that is reminiscent of shit."). No one knows why the NTADE descended upon Votan that fateful day to disrupt his peaceful existence, but they did. Seriously, I'm not making this up. Anyway, the power of their taunts was so great that Votan ran away, a broken shell of a leafsmith.

This story is brought to you with limited commercial interruption by Asshat.com


While in exile, the NTADE took over Votan's leafsmith business and promptly ran it into the ground by using it as a front to launder money from their illicit goat prostitution cartel. They also prayed to Zod who turned Votan's wife into a goat, which the NTADE then prostituted out. All of Votan's children were given lollipops despite having early onset Type II diabetes. They promptly slipped into comas and died, but not before their feet fell off. What, they were really big lollipops - you know, the kind you get at the carnival that are stuck atop a dowel rod. As if that weren't enough, they setup one of those text mailboxes where you could text the word "ASSHAT" to the mailbox's number and you could listen to a "yo momma" joke about Votan's dearly departed Oma. Basically, what I'm trying to get at is that the NTADE's humiliation of Votan was utter and complete. If you have any other good ideas for illustrating this point, feel free to add them using the "add comment" link below. Personally, I'm already growing tired of this story and it's only half done. Christ, does anyone want to finish this for me?

Get chrome.

My office neighbor claims it is much faster. I have yet to see that. I've used chrome 3 times now and everytime a few minutes into using it my machine's CPU utilization spikes to 100% for about 15 second. I also don't like that the tabs appear in the window's title bar in contradiction of the UI standards for just about every mainstream GUI.

However, on the good side, it is made by Google, starts up each tab in its own process (allowing you to use more memory and kill individual tabs without taking out the whole browser), and lets you resize textareas (I know this is pointless but I think it's cool).

I have yet to form an opinion about the "omnibox" (the combination address bar + search box + browser history with suggestions).

I know someone out in FlogReaderLand knows this one (or can point me in the right direction). Given a floating point number (say 1.71285) how do I find out which two integers equal it when divided by one another? I'm not even sure what terms to use for a google search on this one. Help a h/cracker out.

I met up with a co-worker who left Initech a couple months ago to work at a full-time web development shop. While he was here, he did ColdFusion work on the corporate website, and ColdFusion was much better than ASP or ASP.NET. Since moving on he has begun to do work in Java and has co-workers using C#. Now Java is the best and C# is better than VB.NET. Of course, Initech is stupid for making a corporate decision to go with VB.NET (in an attempt to leverage the thousands of years of combined experience in VB6 during the move to .NET).

I didn't have the heart to explain to him that C# and VB.NET both compile down to the same bytecode and that they're really just different interfaces to the same underlying language - MSIL. Since the core of the work is done using the .NET Framework's shared object hierarchy and all .NET languages adopted a common set of native types and operators, the only substantive difference between C# and VB.NET is whether you use curly braces or whether you type out "then", "do while", "loop", and "end if". He's right, though, VB.NET sucks.

I took me a while to warm up to the fascist share ratio enforcement (which made it easier for a Power User to seed to a good ratio than a newbie), but it really was a one of a kind place. From here:

"Newspapers are a good example: It used to be that people read newspapers to get the news. That was the distribution method, and newspaper companies controlled it. You paid for a newspaper, and you got your news, that's how it worked. Until the internet came along, and a new generation of innovative people created websites, and suddenly anyone could distribute information, and they could distribute it faster, better, more efficiently, and for free. Obviously this hurt the newspaper industry, but there was nothing they could do about it, because they didn't own the information itself - only the distribution method. Their only choice was to innovate and find ways to compete in a new marketplace. And you know what? Now I can get live, up-to-the-minute news for free, on thousands of different sources across the internet - and The New York Times still exists. Free market capitalism at its finest. It's not a perfect example, but it is a part of how the internet is changing every form of traditional media. It happened with newspapers, it's happening now with music, and TV and cell phones are next on the chopping block. In all cases technology demands that change will happen, it's just a matter of who will find ways to take advantage of it, and who won't.

Unlike newspapers, record companies own the distribution and the product being distributed, so you can't just start your own website where you give out music that they own - and that's what this is all about: distribution. Lots of pro-piracy types argue that music can be free because people will always love music, and they'll pay for concert tickets, and merchandise, and the marketplace will shift and artists will survive. Well, yes, that might be an option for some artists, but that does nothing to help the record labels, because they don't make any money off of merchandise, or concert tickets. Distribution and ownership are what they control, and those are the two things piracy threatens. The few major labels left are parts of giant media conglomerations - owned by huge parent companies for whom artists and albums are just numbers on a piece of paper. It's why record companies shove disposable pop crap down your throat instead of nurturing career artists: because they have CEOs and shareholders to answer to, and those people don't give a shit if a really great band has the potential to get really successful, if given the right support over the next decade. They see that Gwen Stefani's latest musical turd sold millions, because parents of twelve year old girls still buy music for their kids, and the parent company demands more easy-money pop garbage that will be forgotten about next month. The only thing that matters to these corporations is profit - period. Music isn't thought of as an art form, as it was in the earlier days of the industry where labels were started by music-lovers - it's a product, pure and simple. And many of these corporations also own the manufacturing plants that create the CDs, so they make money on all sides - and lose money even from legal MP3s.

At the top of all this is the rigged, outdated, and unfair structure of current intellectual property laws, all of them in need of massive reform in the wake of the digital era. These laws allow the labels to maintain their stranglehold on music copyrights, and they allow the RIAA to sue the pants off of any file-sharing grandmother they please. Since the labels are owned by giant corporations with a great deal of money, power, and political influence, the RIAA is able to lobby politicians and government agencies to manipulate copyright laws for their benefit. The result is absurdly disproportionate fines, and laws that in some cases make file sharing a heftier charge than armed robbery. This is yet another case of private, corporate interests using political influence to turn laws in the opposite direction of the changing values of the people. Or, as this very smart assessment from a record executive described it: "a clear case of a multinational conglomerate using its political muscle to the disadvantage of everyone but itself." But shady political maneuvers and scare tactics are all the RIAA and other anti-piracy groups have left, because people who download music illegally now number in the hundreds of millions, and they can't sue everyone. At this point they're just trying to hold up what's left of the dam before it bursts open. Their latest victim is Oink, a popular torrent site specializing in music.

If you're not familiar with Oink, here's a quick summary: Oink was was a free members-only site - to join it you had to be invited by a member. Members had access to an unprecedented community-driven database of music. Every album you could ever imagine was just one click away. Oink's extremely strict quality standards ensured that everything on the site was at pristine quality - 192kbps MP3 was their bare minimum, and they championed much higher quality MP3s as well as FLAC lossless downloads. They encouraged logs to verify that the music had been ripped from the CD without any errors. Transcodes - files encoded from other encoded files, resulting in lower quality - were strictly forbidden. You were always guaranteed higher quality music than iTunes or any other legal MP3 store. Oink's strict download/share ratio ensured that every album in their vast database was always well-seeded, resulting in downloads faster than anywhere else on the internet. A 100mb album would download in mere seconds on even an average broadband connection. Oink was known for getting pre-release albums before anyone else on the internet, often months before they hit retail - but they also had an extensive catalogue of music dating back decades, fueled by music lovers who took pride in uploading rare gems from their collection that other users were seeking out. If there was an album you couldn't find on Oink, you only had to post a request for it, and wait for someone who had it to fill your request. Even if the request was extremely rare, Oink's vast network of hundreds of thousands of music-lovers eager to contribute to the site usually ensured you wouldn't have to wait long.

In this sense, Oink was not only an absolute paradise for music fans, but it was unquestionably the most complete and most efficient music distribution model the world has ever known. I say that safely without exaggeration. It was like the world's largest music store, whose vastly superior selection and distribution was entirely stocked, supplied, organized, and expanded upon by its own consumers. If the music industry had found a way to capitalize on the power, devotion, and innovation of its own fans the way Oink did, it would be thriving right now instead of withering. If intellectual property laws didn't make Oink illegal, the site's creator would be the new Steve Jobs right now. He would have revolutionized music distribution. Instead, he's a criminal, simply for finding the best way to fill rising consumer demand. I would have gladly paid a large monthly fee for a legal service as good as Oink - but none existed, because the music industry could never set aside their own greed and corporate bullshit to make it happen."

If I understand the Cedarville situation correctly, there is a debate going on over this statement, which they want to be the standard for faculty employment and which contains within it the seeds of its own contradiction.

The Holy Scriptures as found in the books contained in the Old and New Testaments constitute a sure and certain revelation of God. The Scriptures are both inerrant (contain no error) and infallible (will not lead astray). Limitations in human ability and the ravages of sin interfere with our ability to interpret its message, but the Bible's message is true and certain in its entirety. The great doctrines of the Faith are given in the Holy Scripture with such clarity that we can be wholly certain of these truths.

How can one be wholly certain of any truths in Scripture if limitations in human ability and the ravages of sin interfere with our ability to interpret Scripture (which would be a necessary position to hold since Christian doctrine has evolved over time)?

It is tempting to scoff at this point, but I have to admit as I look at it, this issue strikes at the heart of fundamentalist Christianity. If we cannot be certain of the great truths of scripture the fundamentalist house of cards (i.e., that scripture is inerrant and infallible) tumbles to the floor - at least for all practical purposes. Without certainty it is possible that scripture really is inerrant and infallible, but we sinners would simply have no way of knowing it.

Of course, the certainty issue is the "official argument", the real meat of this argument isn't about the epistemological implications of certainty, but about the firings. The professors that have been dismissed are inline with the "old guard" which pisses off the conservatives (like Bartholomew who's been around since nearly the Presbyterian days). The appearance that Cedarville is sliding away from the good, old doctrines of the Faith and beginning to mingle with undesirables is also playing a part here. Bartholomew offers advice to parents who may be worried about their children (his term) on how they can avoid "the fractured-faith syndrome (sometimes termed by detractors as the Mills Malignancy)". Let us pray that more Cedarville students are exposed to the Mills Malignancy and thereby move on to embrace sense.

This is the terror moving across Cedarville's campus, according to Amy-Hope Guisleman (a philosophy professor who resigned because of her objection to Cedarville's tolerance of any non-certainty view):

I was teaching on this issue (certainty) this morning in class when one of my students expressed the fact that he was blown away by a course he took here at Cedarville in which students were asked if they knew that the Bible is true. Most responded 'yes' and the professor proceeded to demonstrate to them that they did not in fact know it. They were left with the instruction that though we cannot know that the Bible is true, we must accept its truth on faith.

I have to agree this is an insidious doctrine, but not for the reason the certainty crowd would put forth. In fact, I find this position more insidious than the certainty position, because you could attack the certainty position on a rational front, but the non-certainty view insists on accepting biblical authority in the absence of any reason to accept it over any other piece of paper that has claimed to be divine revelation. This is why it will eventually prevail (mark my words). It is less stringent and less defensible from a fundamentalist point of view, but it is more resistant to being rooted out by rational inquiry. We are watching memetic extinction in action. How exciting.

--

Just because it's hard to dismiss so much fodder for comment, some disjointed pot-shots follow.

Bartholomew writes about Amy Hope-Guiselman, "Having prepared for a life of teaching in a Christian environment, she found that unbearable because of the heterodoxy there." - I can't think of anything more pansy-assed than quitting your job because you have to work in an environment where there are people who disagree with you. How fragile does your philosophy have to be that it cannot survive in a heterogeneous environment?

Also from Article II: "Such should probably reprove Dr. Luke for writing that "Jesus showed Himself alive after His passion by many infallible proofs" (Acts 1:3). Let us hope that ABNOCers don't conduct their lives by the thesis that we don't need "proven facts." The Apostle John reminded his readers right up front that which "we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled...(I John 1:1). That sounds like he is providing sensate facts to his readers." - For the sake of argument, let's say that Jesus really was an historical figure and really did show Luke and John the many infallible proofs they write about in their respective Gospels. Only the densest, most obtuse fool would say that those writings constitute "sensate facts" for us readers today. At best, they are hearsay.

"You do not threaten people with the greatest consequence in the world, damnation, without making certain to them the terms of entrance and avoidance. Such a God would be unjust, arbitrary, not to be worshipped. But our God has made the terms certain." - This is an absurd statement. God has done nothing to make the bible stand out in the midst of all the other scriptures in the world. Once one takes a step back out of the closeted, claustrophobic world of Mid-Western Regular Baptist theology, it is readily apparent that there is an entire marketplace of gods all making similar (and often mutually contradictory) claims and that the bible of the fundamentalists looks no different from any other scripture vying for the lost man's attention.

"A God who does not provide certainty in the most consequential act of life (heaven or hell) is not to be worshipped as a just god, but as an unfair, unjust authoritarian. The amazing fine tuning of the universe, and the astonishing facts of cell complexity reinforce the certainty of creation and the Creator. Humans are "wihout excuse" (Rom. 1:20) God is vindicated. Students who learn this can proceed with certain, solid underpinnings." - As usual, theologians should stay away from science because they pathologically bend and misinterpret it to suit their own ends. The physical constants are not fine-tuned. The universe is obviously not suited (on average) for human occupancy (cf the small number of "earth like" planets in the observed universe). The biochemical complexity of the cell is not a problem for evolution nor does it imply the cell was "designed".