Month: March 2011

Remarks on Job

The Whore of Babylon from russian illuminated ...
The W of B.

Accepting predestination and the sovereignty of God on the one hand is
not a reason not to act as though you can change things on the other.
Fatalism is never commanded in the Bible.

Job worked hard all his life to get into the situation he was, but
nevertheless when he lost everything, he said “the Lord giveth, the
Lord taketh away”. When he had his losses restored I would assume he
also worked and tried to make the best of what he had, even though he
would have acknowledged that it was a gift. He didn’t just sit back.

That’s why I’m not in favour of just sitting back and accepting the
Anti-Christ, the beast, the Whore of Babylon, the False Prophet, just
because these entities are prophesied in Scripture. We are to reject
the mark of the Beast, and not acquiesce in that mark being put on our
flesh. We are the sheep of another Shepherd, and our brandmark is
written on the fleshy tables of the heart.

The devil will always say, “you cannot change it, because even your God
has prophesied it. Go along with my plans uncomplainingly. If you
challenge what false prophets and wicked people are doing, it looks as
if you are complaining against the sovereignty of God” But this is not
the case, as the Word shows what believers are to do in such cases. We
should not be amazed and put to a crisis of our faith over it, but we
should act in whatever way we can to resist it. That issue of what
happens to faith is the true lesson of the Book of Job. As you can see
from the dialogue at the start happening in the halls of eternity
between God and Lucifer. Lucifer claims that Job only believes because
he has had the charmed life. His faith is of no value because he never
had any reason to doubt it. This is a central reason why God allows
Satan a lease over Job’s life for a season. The test of faith is
absolutely crucial.

In this day and age people’s faith is tested by godlessness in the
media, in the fact that the so-called scientific consensus is so-clled
rationalist, which means that basically society considered as an
acceptable credo only that which can be emoirically proven, and hand in
hand with that puts faith in a very low position – except for when
psychologists state that individuals can get some purely carnal benefit
from it. These days for a person to know God means they have to put
their faith against the sniggerings of know-all atheists from all
quarters. But in Job’s day people were not up against the so-called
rationalists and their fairy tales about evolution and billions of
years and a creator-free origin. People basically knew there was a God,
in that there were no serious voices in society voicing any other
possibility, and so the inner certainty of his existence was not a
difficult thing as today.

And yet God has always used faith as the basis for differentiating this
on his side from those who are not. Works were only ever acceptable as
the fruit of faith, but only faith ever pleased God. It is written that
“without faith it is impossible to please God; for he that cometh to
God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of them that
diligently seek Him”. So what do we have here with Job? Is the devil
right that Job’s faith is cheap? Or will he make a statement of faith
even after his comforts are stripped from him with all the severity
that the cleansing and trying fuller’s fire of God can muster?

Well, what says the tortured, inmpoverished Job with the rotting flesh,
the dead family?

“For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the
latter day upon the earth: and though after my skin worms destroy this
body, yet in my flesh shall I see God; whom I shall see for myself, and
mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed
within me.”-Job 19:25-27.

There we have it. This man, who has been blasted beyond measure, utters
with faith as strong as knowledge, a prophesy of Christ, and of the
Resurrection. And this testimony has gone down as among the most
beautiful words of history, a sentence of incredible value – worth more
than all his possessions.

He was not tried for ever because he did not need to be. After he was
shown to be of faithful integrity and the devil shown up to be a
speculating, fraudulent accuser, everything went back to the way it had
been before.

God was able to bring everything back to normal again.

And of course much more than “normal”.

Just as God is able to wipe every tear from your eye, and will do so one day, if He finds faith in you.

Best,

Uncle Davey
(publ. Sept 2006 on Usenet)

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EU’s “Most Dodgy” List, and how you can make a difference.

Ali Hassan al-Majid, hearing in Baghdad, Iraq ...
One man's terrorist is another man's hamburger stall customer...

The EU keeps a list of people you need to keep well away from. You’re not allowed to enter into business deals with these people. Not so much as a choc-ice should you sell or buy to them. If one of these people comes up to you and asks you what time it is, then you should give a refusal to answer, or at worst a misleading answer, and then immediately tell your local EU anti-dodginess enforcement officer about the contact.

If they come up to you and say “good morning”, they’ve already lied to you once. It can’t possibly be a good morning if you met one of them on it.

This list will go out of date almost as soon as it appears, so for the latest one head over to this place and get the latest list of total world scale hooligans to avoid.

Now that this is up on the EU’s site for public consumption, nobody in the EU has any excuse for failing to comply with sanctions. If you run a hamburger stall or a small taxi company, you could be liable if someone from this list buys a good or a service from you and you don’t tell them to get the hell outta here. So it’s up to you to ensure that the whole list is memorised the whole time, or at the very list look up people you are doing business with if you’re not sure about them or their organisation. Continue reading “EU’s “Most Dodgy” List, and how you can make a difference.” →

Slight change in the upload algorithm.

Image representing YouTube as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase

As those of you who are paying attention will have noted, after I got to film number 1000 on my YouTube site, I decided to apply a rule that the next film would not go up until the previous one had hit, or was sure to hit, 100. The result of this has been that I have uploaded now 1068 videos,  which is the rate of 10 per month. Prior to that I had 1000 videos in the course of 54 months, a rate which came to exceed most of the latter part of the time 20 per month. In other words it represented a halving of the upload rate. Interestingly, total upload views have remained stable.

The problem is that now I am still uploading video from last summer – already at the 20 per month rate I had a backlog to clear, whereas now I am producing video which is 7 months old and uploading video which is eight months old in the main. Occasionally I vary it by allowing brand new video to jump the queue, but in order to do something about the backlog, starting from the second quarter 2011 I am changing the ‘100 rule’ to the ’60’ rule, which means I can upload the next piece without waiting for the preceding one to hit 100. It only needs to hit 60. Hopefully that will do it.

If not, then having winter video in the summer and summer video in the winter is always nice for a change anyway, but it’s not as good as keeping it reasonably up-to-date.

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A Summer Prague

What this is is the first of about four or five Prague vlog videos all taken on a walk the same evening. One colleague took me back to Prague from outside in his car – we had been doing a due diligence out towards  the West – and I got out a while away from the centre so as to give myself the opportunity for a walk in the lovely weather. I came into the Andel area by tram, which is the part you see here, and then in the forthcoming instalments you’ll see how I walked home from Andel. And it is all in great light and in HD, with a selection of nice background tracks, as in this case, and some effects too now and again. This gives you some of the essence of Prague in the summer.

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Lost in France – (recent video)

I write ‘recent video’ rather than the term I used before ‘current video’ as it is something I uploaded about a month ago already and the backlog of keeping 2011 uploaded YT videos current on here is already bigger than I expected it to be, so I’ll be working on that between now and the end of March. Anyway, it’s video I took in early July, so the footage itself is more than 8 months old, and I did the post-production a good 4 months back, if I’m not mistaken.

It’s actually pretty bad of me not to have accelerated this one a bit, as it tells the story of how the French police rescued George when he ran away during our French holiday, and how the provincial French detectives used the knowledge that autistic children and animals follow the direction of the sun when they don’t know where to go to uncannily track and locate him, even before the dogs arrived from Tours, and while the helicopter circling overhead had no clues, as he was in a barn.

If you have or know anyone with autistic children, you should listen to this one, as it could come in very handy…

And chapeau bas to the French police. Even in a sleepy village, those guys are wide awake. As far from the Clouseau image as you could get.

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