Are saggy pants really a threat to airline safety?

A dispute that began after a passenger refused to pull up his sagging pants led to his arrest and removal from a plane at San Francisco International Airport on Wednesday, police said.

Deshon Marman, 20, a University of New Mexico football player . . . was being held at San Mateo County Jail on suspicion of trespassing, battery and resisting arrest.

Not to mention all the passengers that were ordered off the plane so he could be arrested in private.

Clearly, the War Against Terror, as it is waged by the TSA, is nothing but a war against individual liberty, with millions of innocent Americans as its victims.

Biographical Fiction and the Snakes of Vietnam

The Land I Lost by Quang Nhuong Huynh has been read by many an elementary teacher to her students. Probably all accept its stories as gospel truth, because the author really did grow up in the mountains of Vietnam.

Likewise, for many decades teachers have read the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder to their students, assured that what they related must be true because Laura really did grow up where she said she did. Now, however, we know that the Little House books were highly fictionalized, with changes in names, ages, and family relationships of the characters, as well as both lapses and inversions in the chronology. Time compression and composite characters are other typical features of dramatized biography.

We need to recognize The Land I Lost for what it is--novelized dramatized biography. How much of the account is actually based on truth, we can only guess. But we certainly shouldn't go adding the Horse Snake (which can kill by both constriction and venom, and is mesmerised by burning the fat of a certain fish) and the Two Step Snake (which can kill just by breathing on its victim) to our Vietnamese Bestiary, just because both animals play prominent roles in the book. In fact, it appears that almost nothing in the book is zoologically accurate. The book should be filed not under Biography, but Mythology--not that educators have learned anything from The Education of Little Tree.

And yet the ACLU has no problem whatsoever that teachers not only read it as literature during instructional time, but expect their students to actually believe it.

Were the founders of Christianity Jews or not?

"On the venerable day of the Sun let the magistrates and people residing in cities rest, and let all workshops be closed. In the country however persons engaged in agriculture may freely and lawfully continue their pursuits because it often happens that another day is not suitable for grain-sowing or vine planting; lest by neglecting the proper moment for such operations the bounty of heaven should be lost."

Thus decreed Constantine the Great in 321, marking the beginning of the 2-day weekend. It was only later that resting on the Sabbath was prohibited, thus making the practice of Messianic Judaism illegal.

Since the idea of religious freedom and a secular state was first proven in America, it has become possible--if not always practical--for Jews and Christians alike to observe the first day of the weekend as a day of rest.

At hopeabbey.com [no longer available] Jake has a very provoking blog post on the deprecation of Jewish Christianity, in which he asks the question,
"Is there any other religion that paints its first adherents as people who never “got it,” never understood their own religion?"

Roman Catholics react to the loss of their New Testament

During the 1970's it was a common misconception that the term "separation of church and state" was enshrined in the US Constitution. In fact, as someone pointed out, the phrase was found in the English version of the Soviet Constitution. It was as if the Communist creed being available in English could somehow overrule our native rights.

We see a similar situation in Roman Catholicism, in which, without any ruling from the college of cardinals or even a bull from the Pontiff himself, the orthodox version of the Latin Bible has been replaced, at least in the New Testament portion, by the Latin translation of a critical Greek text, resulting in the wholesale loss of portions of Scripture formerly held to be divinely inspired and authoritative.

***********************************************
Ron Conte Jr. this summer completed an evaluation of the UBS text and its negative impact on the NV (New Vulgate) Latin edition. He lists several key points online here:

"I was dismayed and appalled by the decisions of the editors of the Nova Vulgata, especially to abandon the Latin scriptural tradition approved by the Council of Trent, and adopt in its place the critical Greek text of Matthew by the (Protestant) United Bible Societies. The UBS text, and the NV as well, omits over one hundred words from the Gospel, found in the Latin Vulgate, includes at least a couple of whole verses."


Problems with the Nova Vulgata (NV):

1. the NV abandons the Latin scriptural tradition

2. the New Testament is simply a representation of the Protestant UBS (United Bible Societies) Greek text

3. the New Testament ignores all Latin and all Greek sources, other than the UBS text, which is mainly the work of Protestant scholars

4. the NV changes the wording in some verses out of political correctness, without any support in any manuscripts for those changes

5. the Latin scriptural tradition is supposed to be used by Bible scholars to settle any uncertain or disputed readings of the text in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. But since the NV does not represent the Latin scriptural tradition, but instead represents the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, it is not useful for that purpose

6. The Council of Trent declared that the Canon of Scripture includes all the parts of each book as found in the old Latin vulgate Bible (the Latin scriptural tradition). But the NV rejects the Latin scriptural tradition, and removes from the Canon very many words and phrases, as well as more than a few entire verses.

7. The NV relies on the Protestant Stuttgart Vulgate for its base text, ignoring the Pope Sixtus V and Pope Clement VIII Vulgate which was used by the Church for several hundred years as the official Latin Bible.

8. The only version of the NV contains hundreds of typographical errors.

9. The New Testament of the NV shows an appalling lack of editorial discretion. The Latin text is forced to conform to the Greek UBS text even when this makes the Latin text awkward or grammatically incorrect. Editorial decisions other than merely changing the Latin to conform lock step with the Greek are rare.

Breastfeeding fathers? The NIV and Numbers 11:12

Don't clic here
"Have I conceived all this people? have I begotten them, that thou shouldest say unto me, Carry them in thy bosom, as a nursing father beareth the sucking child, unto the land which thou swarest unto their fathers?" --KJV

Now, there's a problem with this. Has anyone ever heard of a nursing father? Yet the word is in the masculine gender. This is how the NASB has it:

"Was it I who conceived all this people? Was it I who brought them forth, that You should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom as a nurse [Or foster-father] carries a nursing infant, to the land which You swore to their fathers’?" --NASB

Now, by 2010, 'nurse' still carried a female connotation, but much less so than it did 50 or even 25 years earlier, when a man who was a nurse was always referred to as "a male nurse."

So, let's give the CBT credit for making the best of the gender-specificity problem on the first try.

"Did I conceive all these people? Did I give them birth? Why do you tell me to carry them in my arms, as a nurse carries an infant, to the land you promised on oath to their forefathers?" --ONIV

But the New and Improved NIV couldn't resist getting rid of that last vestige of sexism, the word "forefathers:"

"Did I conceive all these people? Did I give them birth? Why do you tell me to carry them in my arms, as a nurse carries an infant, to the land you promised on oath to their ancestors?" --NNIV

The NLT clearly went too far trying to feminize the entire verse:

"Did I give birth to them? Did I bring them into the world? Why did you tell me to carry them in my arms like a mother carries a nursing baby? How can I carry them to the land you swore to give their ancestors?"

But focusing on gender only obscures a literal understanding of the passage. This is the situation: Moses is complaining to God that the people he gave him are too much to bear. Moses is carrying on a one-sided conversation with God:

Why am I saddled with the impossible job of leading these people? (is it because I deserved it?)
What have I done to deserve it? (is it because I'm their progenitor or something?)
Did I conceive them?
Did I carry them in my womb?
Did I give birth to this people?
(implied answer: No)
Then why are you making me carry them at my breast all the way to the promised land?
How can I possibly feed them all? They are hollering for food.

This is obviously a metaphorical picture Moses is painting, of someone who has never been pregnant, much less given birth--and therefore can't lactate--being handed a baby and told to nurse it. S/he can't! Neither can Moses handle the burden of providing food for six hundred thousand men and their families.

God's answer?

"Okay, so you can't handle the responsibility for all these whiners. Send seventy men up on the mountain and I'll distribute your authority upon them so they can share the load of leading my people."

This is clearly the intended meaning of this passage. Interpreting it literally, as the KJV does, offends the language; we don't have nursing fathers--at least not in the dialects of most English speakers. Interpreting it metaphorically, on the other hand, unpacks the literal meaning: Moses didn't think he could physically handle the job God had given him.

The NIV, more concerned with gender sensitivity than unpacking the meaning, obscures the literal meaning by translating ha-omen as "nurse." For one thing, it's not the usual Hebrew word for wet-nurse; look how the NIV translates its other occurrences in the Bible:

Ruth 4:16 Then Naomi took the child in her arms and cared for him.

Lamentations 4:5b Those brought up in royal purple now lie on ash heaps.

Isaiah 49:23 Kings will be your foster fathers, and their queens your nursing mothers.

Isaiah 60:4 Your sons come from afar, and your daughters are carried on the hip.

The word omen signifies, not a breastfeeding relationship, but one of caring for a nursing baby in other ways than breastfeeding. Moses uses it ironically: God is telling him to take a nursing baby, and care for it himself--without breastfeeding--all the way through the wilderness journey to the promised land! Clearly this is impossible, as Moses sees the situation. So let's see how we could allow this meaning, clear in Hebrew, to come across in English:

So Moses said to YHWH, "Why are You doing this to Your servant? What have I done to deserve You putting the burden of all these people on me? Did I conceive all these people, or give them birth, that You should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom,’ as if I were a father carrying his suckling child all the way to the land which You swore to their forefathers? Where am I to get meat to give to all these people? For theirs is a constant whine in mine ears, saying, ‘Give us meat, that we may eat.’"

Once again, we see the NIV's Committee for Bible Translation  translating a masculine word in such a way as to thrust femininity into a context where it has no business being. Their pink-coloured glasses have blinded them again.

EDIT July 2017

It's been brought to my attention that the word 'nurse' as a verb carries very different connotations in American and British English, respectively.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the primary meaning of 'nurse' is to care for a person or animal that is sick. From that, the verb split into to secondary meanings on either side the Atlantic--and in both cases, these became the most common usages of the verb: In Britain and thus the Commonweath, to 'nurse' a baby simply means to care for it; the term 'baby-sit' is approximately analogous. But in the USA, to 'nurse' a baby clearly means allowing it to suck at the breast (whether natural or artificial).
The ONIV was an attempt to produce an English version free of both Briticisms and Americanisms. To accomplish that, it would have been best to eliminate the word 'nurse' altogether, but a compromise at least was reached in using the word only as a noun, where it carries close to the same meaning in either dialect--someone whose job is to care for sick and injured people--a meaning, however, that simply doesn't apply here.