• The Maseno School in Kenya had problems finding energy and getting rid of waste. A group of students there realized that this was actually, to use a phrase from Wendell Berry, a solution neatly divided into two problems. And so now the Masero School turns its waste into energy. The kids are all right.
• Thanks to Peter for linking to this Russian Orthodox “Statement on Brother Nathanael,” the anti-Semitic and homophobic YouTube street preacher mentioned here recently. Short version: The guy is unwell and doesn’t represent any monastery or other Orthodox organization, and the church he claims to represent is appalled, saddened and frustrated by his manic “ministry” of hate.
• Flood geology and fossils (via James McGrath and Michael Roberts — anybody know the original artist and their site?):
• Think of this as a kind of point/counterpoint debate: Paul Bibeau proposes that we defund the Pentagon and pour all that money instead into Canadian indie rock. But Chris the Cynic offers a compelling case for, instead, building giant robots.
• The Flood Christian Church isn’t near where any of the rioting in Ferguson, Missouri, took place last week — but it was deliberately torched last Monday night and burned to the ground, “the glass storefronts on each side remain unscathed.” That’s the African American church Michael Brown’s family attends. Burning down black churches is an old and ongoing part of American society. Perhaps you remember President Clinton’s National Church Arson Task Force, an effort that was credited with reducing the number of such black-church burnings down to 670 over a three-year period in the late 1990s.
Ponder that for a moment: 670 in three years — a dozen four such incidents a week, every week. Now imagine a single story of a single white church burned down because its congregation was white. We’d all know the name of that one church, and we’d never stop hearing about this momentous, monstrous tragedy.
Todd Starnes makes a living fabricating indignities suffered by white Christians and promoting a narrative of “persecution,” but when a black Christian pastor receives 71 death threats and sees his church burned to the ground, Starnes’ et. al. don’t seem to care. Interesting.
• As Erik Loomis notes, Wikipedia’s list of “White American riots in the United States” is far from comprehensive, but it does provide a decent starting point for exposing the lie that “rioting is only something that black people do.” I’d also note that “riot” is an inadequate word for things like the mob terror that killed as many as 300 people in Tulsa in 1921.
See also Katie Halper on “11 stupid reasons white people have rioted.”
OK, then, this seems appropriate here:
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