Did you see this by Giorgio Milos?

Have I mentioned Intelligentsia lately? OK, coffee buffs, what’s the best coffee you’ve tasted?

My Top Five: Intelligentsia, Chestnut Hill, DoubleShot, Five Senses [Perth area], Stumptown.

Coffee is extremely complex chemically and physically, each green bean containing around 500 aromatic and flavor components. And that’s just for starters. Roasting increases that count three-fold, the heat creating entirely new components while also intensifying the elements present prior to roasting. Length and temperature of the roast ultimately determine how fully the raw bean is transformed. Wine, considered among the most complex and nuanced beverages, has but 300-400 components. In tech terms, coffee is data rich, bursting with sensory information that taste alone can’t process.

Preparation method wields considerable influence over how our senses experience coffee. Espresso sits at one end of the spectrum, its mix of water temperature, pressure, and time producing a highly concentrated, viscous liquid awash in complexity. At the other end of the range are methods like French press and brewed, which don’t extract coffee as fully as espresso, and as a result don’t carry as much sensory data. In sonic terms, these methods produce more mid-range, less treble and bass.

Experiencing all that coffee has to offer is a two-way street, involving roasting and preparation dynamics on one side, and on the other how attuned our senses are to the data that coffee transmits. If you’ve done a formal wine tasting, you’re probably familiar with this idea. Tasting as applied here is a misnomer, by the way, because it suggests that only one sense is involved.

Here are basics on how our senses work, and the role each plays in processing coffee’s rich data. We’ll go in order of processing speed, fastest to slowest.

I can’t understand any business not opting for this, but so far only about 33% have said they’d drop insurance coverage when the new National Insurance (Obamacare) begins … and this, my friend, will be the moment when America becomes a national health care country.

Three years before the new health care law takes full effect, a survey of employers has found 30 percent of them are thinking about dropping coverage, in part because most employees will have an alternative — government-subsidized insurance exchanges.

McKinsey & Company commissioned a survey of 1,329 private sector employers in February and found that three out of 10 respondents who said their companies offered employer-sponsored health insurance said they would “definitely” or “probably” drop coverage in the years following 2014, the year the Affordable Care Act takes full effect.

“The employer knows there’s no reason to provide private, expensive coverage if there’s free options available from the government,” said John Goodman, of the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas.

Workers in the exchanges making all the way up to more than $90,000 in income would get generous federal subsidies. For lower-wage workers, the government would pay almost the entire cost of insurance.

“For a $12,000-dollar health insurance plan, if you make about $30,000 a year, the government pays about $11,000 of the premium,” Goodman said…. [Read more...]

Pacifism or Christology?

We’ve had several good discussions here lately which were triggered by Who Is My Enemy?: Questions American Christians Must Face about Islam–and Themselves, by Lee C. Camp.  Those conversations, though, left me thinking we had paid insufficient attention to the core issues underneath Christian pacifism debates, and perhaps not just in these conversations, but in evangelicalism in general.

What I mean is, before we can talk intelligently and fruitfully about Christian ‘just war theory’ or ‘pacifism’ or even Christian involvement in military or police work, which are clearly not the focus issues of the New Testament’s witness, I think we need to look more deeply at our Christology and the central doctrines that Christ himself gives us, in word and deed, and look for whether there is anything in these core doctrines that speak to these secondary issues, or at least shape our thinking about them and what is at stake with such things.  Such a discussion will, by definition, have us treading upon some of the most powerful teachings and themes of the entire New Testament witness.

What do you think?  Has Western Christianity intentionally or unintentionally changed the cross from a virus to a “once-and-never-repeated” phenomenon?  Do you see God’s intent with the cross as being more isolated to Jesus or viral—the intended symbol of king and people alike?  How central is our cross-bearing to being Christ’s follower or representing him accurately and powerfully in the world?  Is the cross-bearing to be a 24-7 pursuit or only when we do evangelism, as some have suggested? Is the cross more like the Mona Lisa, or the first Seed of a new kind of human in the world?

Specifically, I’m thinking we’ll give one post each to Cross (Christ’s and ours), to Resurrection (his and ours), to Love (his and ours), to Incarnation/Character (his and ours), to Story/Strategy (his and ours), and maybe one to Kingdom (his and ours).  In all of this we will be asking what it means to be a disciple of this most unique King, and a citizen and ambassador of this most unique kingdom.  For those of us who are persuaded by Scot’s thesis in The King Jesus Gospel, and I am one, this will be an exercise in seeking to allow the story of Christ—as the gospel—to shape us more than anything else. [Read more...]