Exp God, Aug 22 – The Meek
[5] God blesses those who are humble, for they will inherit the whole earth. (Mt 5:5 NLTse)
…meekness is that of a stallion that has been brought into subjection to its master. Whereas it once fought against any attempt to bring it under control, resisting direction with all its strength, now it yields its will to its master…
…For the Christian, meekness requires submitting our will to the Master. Meekness is not submitting to everyone around us; it is taking our direction from God. Meekness means that we do not have to defend our rights, but we allow the Lord to defend us. Meekness means a life that is submissive to the Holy Spirit, giving Him the freedom to make any changes He knows are necessary…
…When we doubt the Father, we tend to act in our own strength, rather than relying on His power. Jesus said that in relinquishing control over our lives to God, we will gain life in abundance!
Exp God, Aug 21 – Hunger and Thirst
[6] God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice, *for they will be satisfied. (Mt 5:6 NLTse)
…Each Christian has an inner longing that only Christ’s righteousness can satisfy. But we cannot be filled with righteousness if we are filled with self…
…Our selfishness will be replaced by the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Ga 5:22-23). The Spirit will make us to be like Christ…
…Our desire for personal righteousness must be powerful, all-consuming, dominating everything we do. Pursuing righteousness means that we value the opinion of God far more than we treasure the opinions of people…
…We are not only to seek the kingdom of God, but we are also to pursue His righteousness (Mt 6:33)…
[13] If you look for me wholeheartedly, you will find me. (Je 29:13 NLTse)
[22] But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, [23] gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things! (Ga 5:22-23 NLTse)
[11] So you also should consider yourselves to be dead to the power of sin and alive to God through Christ Jesus. (Ro 6:11NLTse)
[33] Seek the Kingdom of God * above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need. (Mt 6:33 NLTse)
Exp God, Aug 20 – Those Who Mourn
God blesses those who mourn, for they will be comforted. (Mt 5:4 NLTse)
God wants us to experience His joy ( Jn 15:11). Yet we cannot experience His joy until we have mourned over our sin. If we do not grieve over the weight of our sin, we have no concept of sin’s devastating power…
…There cannot be repentance without the realization of the gravity of sin. Regret for sin’s consequences is not the same as sorrow for sinning against holy God. Confession of sin is not necessarily an indication of repentance. Repentance comes only when we acknowledge that our transgression has come from a heart that is far from God, and we are brokenhearted over our grievous offenses against holy God.
Jesus said that those who are heartbroken over their sin will find comfort…
…God will not leave you to weep over your sin but will forgive you, comfort you, and fill you with His joy.
*****
[11] I have told you these things so that you will be filled with my joy. Yes, your joy will overflow! (Jn 15:11 NLTse)
[23] For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard. (Ro 3:23 NLTse)
[8] Come close to God, and God will come close to you. Wash your hands, you sinners; purify your hearts, for your loyalty is divided between God and the world. [9] Let there be tears for what you have done. Let there be sorrow and deep grief. Let there be sadness instead of laughter, and gloom instead of joy. [10] Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up in honor. ( Jas 4:8-10 NLTse)
[18] “The Spirit of the LORD is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released, that the blind will see, that the oppressed will be set free,
[19] and that the time of the LORD ‘s favor has come. *” ( Lk 4:18-19 NLTse)
Exp God, Aug 19 – The Poor in Spirit
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Mt 5:3
The Bible presents many paradoxes that challenge our human way of thinking. We think of the poor as possessing very little, yet Jesus said the riches of heaven belong to the poor in spirit. Self-reliance robs us of God’s good gifts.
Jesus insisted that in order to follow Him, we must deny self. As long as we rely on our own resources, we will never place our trust in Him…
…Those who realize their inherent spiritual poverty apart from God will trust in Him, and He will enrich their lives immeasurably. Do not allow your resources, wisdom, talent, or abilities to prevent you from trusting the Person who can bring you abundant life.
Cringly: Is cyber insurance AAA for data or another back door?
Comments from Cave Painter August 4, 2013 at 10:10 pm
…what about all the pieces of code in between the customer and my server? What about the operating system and support applications on the machine hosting my application? What about the embedded microcode in the chip that implements the higher level abstraction that is the CPU (made in Taiwan or China)? What about those things in all the machines that my application’s traffic traverses as it travels the internet? All of those things have the potential to expose my application or its data to exploitation one way or the other.
Ultimately it comes down to the question, “who do you trust?” Unless you can control the implementation of every piece of software, firmware and hardware your applications reside on, and their communications traverse through – you will not be able to certify your implementation is really secure. Since that is out of the question, how do you take the guesswork out of the decision of what software/products to trust versus what to run away from screaming?
What do you think about this as a possible solution: a certification ‘badge’ that says a particular software or hardware product is certified secure? The product in question would have to have all of its code open for review by independent auditors. It would also be stress tested in a live environment by anyone who cares to try to break the system, with awards for each exploit detected. Upon passing these tests over a given timeframe, it would be awarded the badge. At first, I don’t think many systems will pass the test. But as more do, momentum would grow as purchasers of these systems might get discounts on their insurance, if they use ‘badged’ products in their networks vs. non-badged, and so on…
I think this would drive developers to go back to their engineering roots and really approach systems development with the KISS principle (Keep It Simple Stupid) in mind. I think it would also drive developers to more formally break development capabilities into two areas: systems development vs. applications development – so that the security aspects (e.g. memory allocation/deallocation management – source of many buffer overflow exploits) are abstracted away from the application developers (why is it that applications developers have to reinvent the systems level security wheel every time they create a new app? Doesn’t make sense to me). Finally – due to the need for open access to code and test implementations – it would quickly define who to trust, and who are the snake oil salesmen in the pack….
From <http://www.cringely.com/2013/08/04/will-cyber-insurance-be-aaa-for-our-data-or-yet-another-back-door>
Exp God, Aug 9 – Put Away Evil
…you will purge this evil from among you. (Dt 22:21b NLTse)
It is a dangerous and costly mistake not to take temptation seriously. The sad testimony of many who have succumbed to sin’s enticements is that they thought they were strong enough to remain in the midst of temptation and resist it. God requires that His people remove evil from their midst ( Dt 21:21). One way to do this is to remove anything in your environment that may tempt you to sin. When wickedness surrounds you, you are in danger of becoming anesthetized to its destructive potential. Never assume that you are immune to temptation. Do not underestimate the craftiness of the evil one.
God does not tolerate evil, for evil cost the death of His Son. Sin causes untold pain and destruction to everyone it touches. Treating evil lightly shows foolish disregard for God’s redemptive work. An honest evaluation of your life will reveal temptations that you should remove, such as some forms of entertainment or ungodly relationships. When God convicts you of evil in your midst, remove it immediately!
There are times, however, when you are powerless to remove ungodly influences, so you must remove yourself from the temptation. Paul urges us to avoid every kind of evil ( 1Th 5:22). When Joseph was enticed to commit adultery by his master’s wife, he fled immediately! ( Ge 39:12).
Do not lose your abhorrence of sin. Be diligent to keep any form of temptation out of your home, out of your relationships, out of your mind. You can do this only by maintaining your love relationship with God, recognizing that you are powerless to resist temptation in your own strength. You will not be able to walk closely with God unless you see sin as He sees it. Darkness and light cannot coexist. Run from the darkness to the light!
Mainstreaming Special-Ed
Tuesday, August 06, 2013
6:21 AM
Posted: August 5, 2013, 3:38 pm – Last updated: August 5, 2013, 10:51 pm
From <http://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=14866>
… I start with the proposition that the first thing to do is to repeal the Individuals with Disabilities and the Education for all Handicapped Children Acts. The matter should be returned to the states. Given the massive state education bureaucracies that probably will do little good, but it may make some experimentation possible. Surely there are a few places where the sentiment favors the proposition that schools are places for learning, and those who aren’t learning – either because they will not, or because they cannot – should be somewhere else. The remedy to the problems of the handicapped are not to cripple those more fortunate, and indeed that is counterproductive. It is a lot easier to divide a large pie than a small one, and without an educated work force you will not get large pies. While we are at it in this debate, it may be time to open the question of differential education: as production gets more complicated and demands more mental resources, nations which don’t develop their intellectual capital won’t have any big pies to distribute. As to what happens to those who used to contribute to the economy but whose jobs have been automated forever, that’s another discussion and one of great importance…
…if everyone is to have an equal education the standards must be kept really low. Nor can everyone be entitled to a shot at a world class university prep education: at some point they have to be weeded out so that the ones who may benefit from it can be taught…
Mainstreaming Special-Ed (Continued)
(From Jerry Pournelle’s blog, Chaos Manor)
Wednesday, August 07, 2013
6:25 AM
This exchange was in last night’s mail:
Childless Taxpayers Funding Schools
It is a common misconception that it is somehow unfair for childless people to pay taxes that fund schools. In fact, everyone who pays school taxes is simply re-paying the cost of their own education, with interest, after inflation, and generally in proportion to how much they benefited from that education.
Thanks,
Jim Melendy
With my reply:
Even those who went to private or religious schools? And why should it be federal? The old notion of local school boards which also controlled the school taxes made the best education system in the world at one time.
I’ve been thinking about this since. My answer was correct but insufficient.
First, there is in the “repayment” hypothesis the assumption that the education provided was worth paying for. Now some schools have alumni who clearly think the school was worth the investment. Most of them, though, were like my Christian Brothers College high school in Memphis, which gets substantial alumni support, are private schools whose pupils are there not only voluntarily, but at considerable expense. I do not know if any of the Memphis public high schools that existed when I was there in the 1940’s still exist, but I doubt that many of them get much alumni support; and I am fairly certain that few 21st Century public schools have grateful alumni associations. I suspect there are many advocates of certain LA public schools who would gladly help raze them to the ground.
One reason these schools are so awful is the subject of yesterday’s entry, the “mainstreaming” of severely handicapped students. If the justification of tax supported public schools is that they provide an education and are now collecting, with interest, for services rendered, then it’s pretty clear that requiring the paying customers to endure constant interruptions and absorption of teacher time by severely handicapped pupils who have been mainstreamed is theft.
Comes now the question of whose responsibility it is to do something for the severely handicapped. That is not an investment question. Perhaps it should be: perhaps the question ought to be, what education can we provide these children that will help them earn at least some of the money needed for their support? But if that is the question, it’s pretty clear that the answer will be training in skills appropriate to the handicap, and that is going to be quite different from what is taught to the general student body.
As to whose obligation it is, historically it has been the children’s parents with charity as first backup and the local community — parish or county – as secondary backup. It is certainly not part of the powers and duties of the Federal Government as detailed in the Constitution of 1789 as Amended.
Now it can be argued that the communities don’t do enough. They don’t meet the needs, and therefore it is up to the general government to be generous – not with its own money, of course, but with money forcibly extracted by the tax collector backup up by the BATF and Federal executioners if needed. Of course it is easy to be ‘charitable’ with other people’s money. It is easy enough for A and B to work together to determine what C must give to destitute D. That does not justify anyone having charitable feelings about the matter of course.
But the hidden question is, what has this done for the handicapped? Some benefit by mainstreaming. Indeed it might be shown that it is beneficial to the rest of the class to have some examples of handicapped people among them, so as to learn proper ways of treating them. Education is more than just book learning. But there are limits to that, and just about everyone who studies the situation objectively agrees, it’s easy enough to so saturate a class with mainstreamed pupils who really ought not be there as to detract from the education of everyone else in the class. This means that most of the students are not getting the education they need, and it is not a long leap to suspect that this will result in higher costs of training for employers, and over time a general lessening of productivity. And with lower productivity there are fewer resources to be applied to the good of the handicapped. It may be a great favor to those mainstreamed, but it is not necessarily a great favor to the next generation of students, handicapped or not.
Exp God, Aug 7 – Now!
Then another of His disciples said to Him, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” Mt 8:21
Often our struggle as Christians is not in deciding whether we should obey Christ but in obeying immediately…
…the concerns of this life were competing for priority with obedience to God.
Timing our obedience is crucial. Invitations from God come with a limited opportunity to respond. Some opportunities to serve Him, if not accepted immediately, will be lost. Occasions to minister to others may pass us by. When God invites us to intercede for someone, it may be critical that we stop what we are doing and immediately adjust our lives to what God is doing. Missing opportunities to serve the Lord can be tragic. When an invitation comes from God, the time to respond is now.
Exp God, Aug 1 – A Loyal Heart
…The question is not whether God is looking for His people, but whether His people are seeking Him…