Headlines over the Pacific Ocean

Hey, y'all ... Flying over the Pacific Ocean gives time to read a few international headlines I don't usually peek at. Here are comments on a few.

DU Take 1:

From The Nation (is that a British paper?), Sect 3B, Sunday, January 15. In an insightful article titled "Yr wrld n brif" on the tendency of our society to squeeze more into every moment while meaning and beauty get squeezed out, it seems long-treasured written texts are often most abused. Besides "The Odyssey" in haiku (3 lines and 17 syllables per sound bite) and terse texting (trs txtng), now you can get a Bible boiled down by a retired priest in Canterbury, England. Says The Observer writer Per Conrad:
"The original text," as the editor admitted, "is very often highly poetic and allusive." Such
obsolete graces have been replaced by bullet points that briskly enumerate "further
resurrection appearances" by the arisen Christ.
DU sez: If our third rock from the sun does not slow down a bit in the near future, we may all fly off for lack of anything sufficiently substantive to hold us down.

DU Take 2:

Front page articles from The Japan Times, Friday, January 13, 2006:
* "Bird flu confab faces global pandemic fear" I am going to have to go back and check the book of Revelation in the Bible to see if the profile may fit. Seriously.
* "Japan will deploy foreign spy planes in 2007" It seems that intelligence takes a lot of work unless it has to do with the origin of life, in which case the establishment says getting intelligent information is just rolling dice enough times. Hmm?
* "New 'dark energy' study pokes holes in Einstein's 'cosmological constant'." LSU astronomer Bradley Schaefer tossed a grenade into the universe expansion and dark matter debate, presenting new research to suggest that the force 'dark energy' exerts may have varied over time. But DU now predicts that, no matter what evidence might show up, the high priests of evolution mythology will continue to insist that all processes now acting have been exactly the same throughout all time past ("uniformitarian principle"). It is this uniformitarian principle that is used to define God out of the origins game. Keep watching on this one. Oh - and it is also interesting that the Asia Wall Street Journal put this article on the next to last page. I guess it if ain't money, it ain't page one even in the Asia version of WSJ.
* "Forests may emit a lot of greenhouse gas methane." This one could be a bombshell on the Kyoto accords for reduction of the planet's greenhouse gases. Forests had always been viewed as a "sink" for carbon dioxide (considered a "greenhouse gas"), but this study says they also may be a significant source for methane, also a "greenhouse gas." Kind of like "forest giveth and forest taketh away." I am still wondering if this is global warming is an overblown deal. Seems like I recall that some long-buried sediments suggest a past atmospheric CO2 content more than 10 times the present content. I'll have to keep watching this one also.