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Showing posts from 2019

Is Your Bible Wrong?

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This may come as a shock, but if you are using a modern English translation of the Bible, the Old Testament that you are reading has been intentionally corrupted.  It is not the version that Jesus and the Apostles used.  I will reveal who corrupted it and why in a bit.    Nearly all modern English translations of the Old Testament are based on the corrupted Hebrew Masoretic text, including the KJV, NASB, NIV, ESV, etc. I believe that the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, were written by Moses in paleo-Hebrew aka proto-Sinaitic, and I agree with Dr. Douglas Petrovich, Dr. David Rohl and others that Hebrew was the world's first alphabet. We have evidence of this alphabet in use in Wadi el-Hol and elsewhere around the time of Joseph prior to the Exodus. To quote Dr. Rohl: "...it took the multilingual skills of an educated Hebrew prince of Egypt to turn these simple first scratchings into a functional script, capable of transmitting complex ideas and a flowing

Unintended Consequences

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People will always do what are in their own best interests.  Free market capitalism has been successful largely because it takes advantage of this fact of human nature to serve the needs of others through the profit motive.  However, when this is done artificially through government edict, history is replete with  government policies creating disastrous outcomes.   For example, colonial Delhi, India wanted to eradicate cobras in the city, so they offered a bounty to people to hunt the cobras, which worked at first, but then people started breeding cobras to continue receiving the bounty after the wild cobras were gone.  The government then removed the bounty, and people set their cobras free, resulting in an even larger cobra problem.  This is called the Cobra Effect.  There are myriad examples of the unintended consequences of government policies, from seat belt and airbag laws making it more dangerous for pedestrians, to payday lending laws driving up interest rates, to anti-price g

Due Process and Our Rights

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Should felons be allowed to vote?  Should non-violent felons be allowed to own firearms?  Are red flag gun laws unconstitutional?  Who defines mental illness?   I'm going to answer all of those questions and more in this video from a Constitutional perspective.  If you haven't watched my previous video "Who Decides What is Constitutional" I would recommend watching it as well.  I'll put a link to that video in the description. A quick history lesson - the Constitution, in Article 1 Section 8, provides a very specific list of what the federal government is allowed to do.  The Bill of Rights was added later at the insistence of the anti-federalists to specifically prohibit the federal government from acting in certain areas, just in case the federal government went off the rails and started operating illegally - outside of Article 1 Section 8, which it unquestionably has.  In the Bill of Rights, all citizens are granted certain protections, which after the Civil

Why Are We Fat?

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This is a topic I've discussed before, but it's so important that it bears repeating.  The Standard American Diet is killing us.  In 2019, a  staggering 75% of the American population are either overweight (BMI > 25) or obese (BMI > 30), projected to be 85% by the year 2030.  If you are overweight or obese, you are almost certainly insulin resistant.  Other risk factors for metabolic syndrome, which is derived from insulin resistance, include abdominal fat, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, low HDL cholesterol, or high triglyceride levels.   Insulin is the body's "fat storage" hormone and the higher your insulin levels, the fatter you will be.   The "Standard American Diet" has produced this epidemic over the past several decades.  In 1954, only 15% of the American population was overweight or obese.  Insulin resistance leads to pre-diabetes which leads to type 2 diabetes.  As of 2019, 60% of Americans are either diabetic, or pre-diabetic. 

Renpho Bluetooth Smart Scale Review

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We purchased the Renpho Bluetooth Smart Scale over a month ago and I wanted to report our experience with it.  We have been very impressed with this scale, especially for the price.  It has been a very reliable scale.  What is particularly impressive is the amount of data that it automagically provides based on nothing more than your weight and the electrical contact pads.  You do need to be barefoot for the scale to work properly, though it will work with socks too, just perhaps not quite as accurately.  It will weigh you with shoes, but you don't get any other data other than weight if you do that. If you use it properly, it provides you a wealth of data that it tracks over time for you, via an app that you install.  When you setup the app you create an account, so it maintains your data when you log back in even if you lose the app.  The data points that it tracks include: Body Weight Body Mass Index (BMI) Body Fat Percentage Body Water Percentage Skeletal Muscle Fat-fre

Synology DS1019+ NAS Review and RAID Primer

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As a geek, and someone who has worked in information technology for over 25 years, when I find a cool technology solution, I like to share my findings and experiences with other geeks.  I've used RAID arrays for nearly my entire career, which are redundant arrays of independent disks.  This is where you configure multiple hard drives in an array to provide for enhanced capacity, speed, redundancy, or all of the above.  Traditionally speaking, there were multiple ways to configure your RAID arrays depending on what you're trying to accomplish, I'm not going to cover them all because this can get very long but the common RAID configurations have traditionally been: RAID 0 which uses data striping across disks, which provides greater capacity and speeds up data access, but provides no redundancy.  If one disk fails, all data is lost. RAID 1 provides data mirroring, but no striping, so the capacity is that of half the disks, but if a disks fails, no data is lost, and the bad

Freedom vs. Censorship

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I remember listening to a news story in 1993 on NPR about how a previously scientific and educational global network called ARPANET was being opened up for commercial use.  I thought to myself- this is going to change the world.  I had a 386 PC at the time running Microsoft Windows 3.1, with a 2400 baud modem, and was very familiar with the world of dial-up bulletin board systems (BBS's), and the larger networks like CompuServe, Prodigy and America Online, all of which I tried out to see what they had to offer.  Early systems like Usenet and Email allowed inexpensive global communication and the exchange of ideas and information that would come to revolutionize the world as we knew it. In 1997, my friends and I founded the fourth Internet Service Provider in Evansville, Indiana, and we grew it into a business that helped thousands of people take their first steps onto the Internet and many businesses launch their first web sites so they could present their products and services