The Power of His Mouth?

The cold front the Weather Channel forecast arrived Tuesday evening. It's been a relatively pleasant week. Temperatures have been mostly in the lower 80s(26.67+C) during the day and down to 58F(14.44C) at night. Humidity has also been lower. Normally, it would be brutally hot and humid with the real heat coming in August. I was expecting a few days of lower temperatures, but the Weather Channel says temperatures will be lower until at least August the 4th. If this is climate change, I need to go burn a stack of old tires. I'll make it autumn all summer long.

Not too long ago I heard this television pastor talking about the mark of the beast. He said, "It can't be a tattoo, because I said years ago it would be about the size of a grain of rice." That's the quote as I remember it. Apparently, based on the power of his word and his word only, it must be an implantable microchip. The pathetic thing is that he was serious when he said it couldn't be anything other than something he said years ago, because he said so. He's not that old by the way, so it couldn't have been that many years. I hear other religious figures making grand statements about the Bible as if they were facts. If something sounds good and sells books, they'll say anything.

There's a problem with implantable microchips. According to an article I read a while back, they cause cancer in humans. The percentage is small, well below 1%, but would you want to gamble on not being one of the cancer victims? On a global scale tens of millions or more people would get cancer from being implanted. That's the size of however many U.S. states or however many small countries. This would include the people passing the laws to require it and their families. Is any politician going to pass a law that could give his own children cancer? I don't think so. Not unless there's a cure for all cancers by then.

A while back Somark Innovations invented an RFID tattoo that they claimed is 100% biocompatible and can't cause cancer. That link is an older one and not the best. They wanted to use it to tattoo cows to track disease outbreaks like mad cow disease, but it could also be used for things like military personnel in combat scenarios. A wounded soldier might be unconscious and not be able to give a medical history in the field. Scanning the tattoo would let a medic have instant access to drug allergies and things like that. The Somark tattoo can be colored or invisible.

The thing about Bible prophecies is that they have to occur in context of reality. Unless the Antichrist plans to go door to door healing people, something that causes cancer in humans is not very realistic. A safe, biocompatible tattoo is much more realistic, especially considering other factors. Microchips require a minor surgical procedure that takes about five minutes. The Somark tattoo takes about ten seconds. For a population of over 7 billion, five minutes takes forever compared to ten seconds.

A lot of pastors believe in the microchip hypothesis, but it doesn't match what the Bible actually says, and it doesn't match practicality. When the real mark comes out, all the Antichrist would have to do would be to say that everyone knows the mark of the beast is a microchip, and his new system has nothing to do with that. All the pastors railing against the microchips would turn out to be helping the Antichrist.

Have a great weekend.

Cool Front Coming

There's an article today titled [sic]"How the 2019 coffee crisis might affect you'. I didn't read it, since I drink tea. I don't consider a coffee problem to be a crisis. But in case you personally want to read it, it's here across the pond.

In other news there's a new flying squirrel in town.

I talked the other day about a cool front that came through in June and how awesome that was. Forecasters are predicting another one that reaches where I live on Tuesday. I'm right at the bottom edge of where it's supposed to reach, so I don't know if it'll be awesome or not. The high Tuesday is supposed to be 78F(25.56C). The low Wednesday morning is supposed to be 63F(17.22C). I'm hoping for a few days of cool weather before dreadful August. If climate change is real, I really like the cooler temperatures. 78F in late July? Awesome!

So, another female teacher had sex with a male student. He was 13. This always upsets the parents. They're so angry about it every time. What made me mad about the story was the woman got 20 years in jail. That's not justice. How in the world can somebody go to jail for 20 years for that? Has this country gone insane?

As a former 13-year-old, I'm here to tell you these woman are not predators. These students are not victims. This reminds me of that Bible story in which the woman was caught in the act of adultery, and the hypocrites wanted to stone her to death but not the man. Why don't we put the students in jail for taking advantage of lonely, needy women? That woman gets twenty years in jail while that guy spends the next twenty years bragging about living one of his ultimate fantasies. That's not right. That's not fair. That's not justice.

Don't get me wrong. What these teachers are doing is immoral, but it's not jail time immoral. There should be some kind of punishment. They should be banned from teaching for life and maybe get probation for a few years. But to send them to jail for decades with real criminals? No way. Those students knew exactly what they were doing. At 13, I would have for sure. I know they do. Losing a teaching license and the humiliation thereof plus having to start over in life is punishment enough.

I'm probably in the minority on this, but I believe in real justice. Before we go after people having sex, we need to go after government officials for routine treason. I'm looking at you, Congress.

Have a great weekend.

There was a Setting for That

There was an article this week about an Android phone malware. It's mostly limited to Asia, but it's in the U.S., too. It affects phones with versions of Android older than 7. I have version 6 on mine, and there's no patch for that. The easiest fix is to turn off allowing apps from unknown sources to install. It took forever to find that setting, and once I did, it was already turned off. It was a hassle.

However, there was a silver lining. One of the most annoying things about cell phones is the swipe screen. I really hate pressing the on button and then having to swipe the screen to actually turn it on. It seems so insane to have to do that twice. While I was trying to find the unknown sources setting, I ran across a setting to turn off the swipe screen. Yay! I upgraded my phone not long ago from an older one and didn't even know that was a setting. Life just got easier. When reading French, I almost always use my phone to look up words my paperback dictionary doesn't have, which is a lot when reading novels. Having to hit the button and then swipe the screen was a major pain, especially one-handed.

It's been muggy and hot this week but not excessively hot. I haven't been on the computer much. I spent some time thinking and watching a few shows I've never watched. One of them was an FBI show in which the agents constantly used the phrase "the unsub" to the point of parody. That's what they called perpetrators. If Mulder and Scully didn't do it, I'm not sure it should be allowed. Anyway, it was super annoying to hear that every other sentence. I finally looked it up. The perpetrators weren't unsubscribing from email lists as one would suspect. Unsub is a contraction of unknown subject.

I watched several old episodes of that show. About 30 to 40 minutes into an episode, the unknown subject's identity would become known. The agents would know his name, address, history, etc. They would keep calling him the unsub, the unknown subject. If he's known, why call him unknown? Basically, the writers for those episodes didn't know what unsub means. Color me unsubscribed from ever watching that show again. It's okay to write about things you don't know about as long as you do the research and don't try to take it too far. Not looking up the meaning of a word is a basic fail. The show genuinely felt like a parody and not a real show.

The reason I haven't been on the computer much is because I'm  having a problem with my air conditioner. Hopefully, I'll get that straightened out soon.

Have a great weekend.

Not So Woke

Sometimes, I'll run across the word woke online. The incorrect usage instantly offends my inner English teacher and is a sign of cultural decline. One of the hard things about being from the 80s is living in a lower culture today. The United States in the 80s enjoyed a superior level of culture to today's United States. Kids today have things like "woke" they think are real but actually aren't. Part of being "woke" is knowing things "the man" doesn't want them to know. Basically, it's another conspiracy theory, although there's a strong element of fantasy involved.

So many people are fighting "injustices" today, but the injustices are imaginary. I think people enjoy feeling better than other people, and that's the cause of the social justice fighters. It's about pride and ego and feeling superior to others. In the old days we had something called shrugging it off. If someone did something offensive, people shrugged it off like adults and moved on. Even kids did that. Sometimes, shrugging it off is called forgive and forget it. Instead of carrying around all this imaginary injustice, what if people would forgive and forget? How about, instead of fighting these imaginary ego fights, people just love their neighbors as themselves and stop worrying about what other people are doing? The sad thing about people who claim to be "woke" is that they're actually asleep.

At the end of the day, it's really no one's business what other people think, feel or do, as long as it's not criminal. If someone ever asks me if I'm woke, I'm going to try to play it like this:

Are you woke?

Of course, I've been done woke up since this morning.

No! You know. Are you woke?

Honestly? I'm not a morning person, so I've really only been done woke up since about 11.

I think I could pull that off without laughing. At some point, of course, there would be laughter. And that's what we did in the 80s. Instead of being offended at everything, we made fun of it and laughed it off.

To get back to the conspiracy aspect of being woke, it involves believing that "the man" doesn't want people knowing things. No one can deny that the government routinely hides things from the people. However, a lot of the conspiracy theories are pure imagination and remind me of a verse. 

Isaiah 8:12 Do not call everything a conspiracy these people say is a conspiracy. Do not fear what they fear, nor be afraid.

Conspiracy, conspiracy. Everything this people speaks of is a conspiracy. Don't be afraid of what they fear. I believe that in Isaiah's time his country had resorted to conspiracy theories instead of facing and solving the real problems. Not being able to face reality, they were conquered and driven out of their land. If modern conspiracies are a parallel, the U.S. is in real danger of being swept from the pages of history. Things like "woke" will likely turn out to be canaries dying in the coal mine.

Have a great weekend.