The memo suggests that even as the attack was still underway--and before the CIA began the process of compiling talking points on its analysis of what happened--the White House believed it was in retaliation for a controversial video.

What a fight we ended up having, they really ran her through the mill.

First she told me something was wrong in this country when Tim Tebow gets fired for praying in public and Sam is a horrible player but he gets hired because he comes out of the closet.  This is not a football family, but Sam was an SEC player of the year.  I didn't know how she got her facts all screwed up at first, then realized that her church members who live in my neighborhood and are on my facebook got a hold of her.  I had to explain to her that Tebow did not lose his gig because he prayed, it was based on his athletic abilities.  And some worried that Sam had destroyed his once great draft chances by coming out, but he didn't though it may have affected when he was chosen.

She said Tebow suffered negative comments directed at him, I agreed that he had but he also sold a lot of tickets and trinkets because he did pray on the field and he had sworn adoring fans for it too.  I told her if Tim Tebow wants a bunch of liberals to love him all he has to do is publicly say he doesn't believe being gay sends you to hell and he would be golden, look what it did for Pope Francis.

Then she brought up those Poor Folks at Duck Dynasty getting such a hard time, but this town doubled down on DD when things went viral.  This town, this community, thankfully doesn't run this country or world though, there are other votes involved here.  And who isn't to say they didn't lose a bunch of redneck viewers when it was revealed that prior to DD reality TV they were all clean shaven college educated golfers?

The word used by Paul or the unknown author was a Greek word - "Arsenokoitai" ("Arsen" - man and "koitai" - beds).  It was a new word and there is no record of it being used prior to Paul/the forger.  When it was translated into English, it became the phrase "abusers of themselves with mankind".  While conservatives like to interpret the phrase as referring to homosexuals, there was already a Greek word referring to sex between men ("paiderasste"), so there would be no need for an entirely new word.  Others have interpreted the word to refer to either - homosexual offenders (rapists, pedophiles, etc.), male prostitutes, pimps, or masturbators.

I notice that fornicators and adulterers are also on the no-go-to- heaven list. ("Fornicators" was left off Ducky's "paraphrase"). That's a mess of people right there. Drunks? Greedy? Wholly Hat Hannah! All of Wall Street is packed in the back of that bus to he!l. Ring the Bell: Drunken, greedy fornicators from Goldman/Sachs arriving on track seven.

What occurs to me is that we are at the mercy of translators - some of whom have an agenda. That would not be unprecedented methinks.

With things that matter to me - when I am reading something that is a second or third hand account - I have become used to reading between the lines... By which I mean - I can feel things that feel real to me, and other things that feel filtered through the ego of the translator or writer.

I even have several recorded interviews with people i admire - they are recorded mind you - you can hear the person speaking - and even the transcribers will mess with it or not be diligent enough to transcribe it accurately.

I approach the Bible in the same way:
There are things in it that are meaningful to me. Philosophies that make me think.
There are other things that just read like fables, science fiction, or agenda-driven polemics aimed to appeal to or placate a particular audience.

The list of sins is likely based on rumors that Paul heard about Corinth, says Warren Throckmorton, a psychology professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania who has studied the Bible's teachings on homosexuality. Bible scholars call it a "vice list," and it appears several times in Scripture.

So what does Paul's "vice list" say about homosexuality? That's the tricky part.

The first word Paul uses is "malakoi," which means "soft" in Greek, according to Allen. By analogy, the word came to mean "effeminate," which is how the King James Version of the Bible translates it.

"In the ancient world, it would refer to a boy in a relationship with an older man," Allen said. "It was pederasty, not homosexuality as we think of it today."

The other relevant word on Paul's "vice list" is "arsenokotai," which means "male sex." It refers to the other half in the man-boy relationship, common in Greece at the time, Allen said, the older male having sex with the "soft one."

"It isn't anything to do with what we would see today in an intimate, mutual relationship between gay adults," said Allen, who is co-authoring an upcoming book on homosexuality and heterosexuality in the church.

....feel the warm sun on your face, the gentle breeze on your skin, smell the perfume of honeysuckle, fresh-cut grass, and wild roses wafting through the air, get rich, dark earth under your nails in the garden, and just live.  Just let it go for an hour or an afternoon.  Watch the bees moving from flower to flower.  Listen to the birds....

....Go have some fun - real fun.  Go fishing, or take a hike or take the dog for a walk.  Go walk the edges of the lake or the pond or the river and see if the frogs have laid their eggs yet.  Tell your kids stories about tadpoles and salamanders.  Muse about when you'll see the first fireflies this year.

Have a s'more - or three!

Fun is my favorite thing!

free range living can be rather dangerous and stressful for chickens. "There's research suggesting that free range chickens show all the signs of having a stressful life," Stewart says. "They have more broken bones, they get broken legs, etc., whereas birds raised in little boxes don't have those indicators of stress. And who's to say which is better?"

Professor of animal welfare, Christine Nicol, said enriched cages performed better on animal welfare measures than some free-range farms.

"I'm not saying it's great, there's still a lot of room for improvement but the birds have space, they've got a little perch, they've got things they can scratch on," she said.

"And the welfare measures that we take show that these birds had fewer fractures, they had much lower mortality, they had lower stress levels, they did less damaging pecking to each other than the birds on the smaller free-range systems."

and getting back to Anne's entreaty, why not complete virtual reality for humans:

Reality is costly in other ways as well. It's unpleasant and dangerous. Just going to work can be a trial, what with traffic and fickle public transport. You have to take all the bad sights and smells with the good ones. And at any moment you could be hit by a truck. One sympathises with the chickens; free-range life is stressful.

Enter virtual reality: a means to instantly interact, albeit in a not-especially real way, with anyone else who happens to be on the platform. At very low cost. The technology will initially appeal to those underserved by reality....

...those who can't afford or who are otherwise unable to interact in person with distant friends: teenagers, for instance, who can't readily hop a flight to another city, or households for whom international travel is financially out of reach. And it may include those whose reality may not be particularly appealing....

Once in, people may notice all sorts of other advantages. Children sent to virtual reality schools are less likely to come to harm at or on the way to school than kids stuck in old-fashioned reality. That's a powerful incentive for worried parents to get their children inside a VR headset. So is the fact that taking the kid from school to piano lessons to the movies with a friend involves considerably less driving in virtual reality than in reality. But we're thinking too small. What about the fact that one's hair is always perfect in VR? That one is always fit and well-dressed (unless one wishes to look unfit and rumpled). Virtual sex, should they perfect it, is unlikely to end in unwanted pregnancy. And work conferences could take place on the moon or under the sea or on a pirate ship or in whichever totally awesome setting you chose.

I got to drive thru that beauty to go to the mall to get there before 10 since my phone broke. That is the only reason I go to the mall. I finally got an apple appointment at 1:00 and spent time mall walking which was really painful since I need to, yet again, get a hip replacement and my last steroid shot is wearing off. I was glad to tear myself away from that, get a few errands done and finally get home where I can say down on a couch for a few minutes and play games on my phone.

I bought a nice chardonnay and my friends will bring a nice red.

I'll dry brine a NY cut steak and then sous vide cook it and then crust it up. Or I may freeze it for an hour and then sear it and then sous vide cook it. I'll lightly saute some assorted wild mushrooms in bacon butter then top the steaks with that, deglaze the pan with a little red wine and add that too.

Dessert is a raspberry gelato I bought. It's perfect as it is.

And I need to make up a big pot of sauce as I'm starting to see the first trickling of tomatoes at the market and I still have some of last year's crop left. Heck, I still have peaches left, lol!~ (guess I need to make more breakfast bars) I think things are coming in early this year. . . .

Antarctic polar ice extent has set another new record, defying alarmist global warming claims. Surpassing the greatest month-of-April ice extent in recorded history, the new record throws cold water on alarmist claims that the Antarctic ice cap has crossed a melting point of no return.

The most recent Antarctic ice sheet alarm began with a paper examining a particular glacier in West Antarctica that "has long been considered prone to instability." The paper speculates that a collapse of this particular glacier is unavoidable, though it will not actually collapse for at least a couple centuries and possibly not until 2900 AD.

Notably, while the majority of Antarctica is getting colder and the Southern Hemisphere polar ice cap is expanding, West Antarctica is a smaller portion of the continent that is experiencing modest warming. Taking advantage of this outlier trend in a smaller portion of the continent, the media has a long history of highlighting modest warming in West Antarctica or a small retraction of West Antarctic sea ice and falsely claiming this is caused by global warming and is representative of Antarctica as a whole.

The addition of alcohol makes the gas burn cleaner thus reducing pollutants in the atmosphere, including CO2, the dreaded cause of global warming (sarcasm alert).

Ethanol in this country is made almost exclusively from corn. This new demand on an important food crop has driven up corn prices and, in turn, food prices. A few years back Mexico had riots over the high prices. We had various discussions about this in TL.

It has also caused thousands of acres of new crop land to be put into production which releases soil stored CO2, the dreaded cause of global warming (sarcasm alert)into the atmosphere.

Alcohol has a nasty effect on some rubber hoses, gaskets and such and older model autos suffered from rotted hoses, etc. The hoses have been changed and the problem no longer exist on new models. Same for lawn mowers, chain saws, etc. I haven't seen a warning on any of these for the simple reason that  they wouldn't sell many if they couldn't use readily available fuel.

Alcohol binds with water very very well. So if it is left in a gas tank over the winter then it may absorb enough condensation to cause problems. Two cycle engines use an oil mix to lubricate that reduces energy of the fuel  so they are easier to fail prey to water absorption. Solution: drain your fuel tank when storing for the season. Use fresh fuel in the spring or fall for you snow blowing folks.

Ethanol also causes a drop off of fuel economy. In Denver when November rolled around and ethanol, or MTBE, was mandated, I always saw around a 5-10% drop in mileage. So we burned more fuel to have a cleaner atmosphere. Somehow that doesn't compute well.