The Blinne Blog

John Calvin on Alcohol

Jim West (author of Drinking with Calvin and Luther) wrote an interesting article on drinking and the Reformation. John Calvin's exegesis of Deuteronomy 14:26 was particularly interesting:

In a sermon by John Calvin on Deuteronomy 14:26, which is arguably the classic Old Testament text with regard to drinking alcoholic beverages, the command reads:

'And you shall bestow that money for whatsoever your soul lusts after, for oxen, or for sheep, or for wine, or for strong drink, or for whatsoever your soul desires: and you shall eat there before the Lord your God, and you shall rejoice, and your household.'

Calvin's exposition of this verse is interesting. He accentuates not only the glory of God but eating and drinking in the presence of the God of glory. When we drink wine or strong drink, we drink in the audience of the heavenly Vintner who expects us to enjoy his gifts.

Calvin also cautions us that Deuteronomy 14:26 was a crucial text of the fifth century Manichaean heretics who were dualists in creation. Their theology was that the character of the good God is a sufficient guarantee that he would not have filled the universe with things that man could abuse to his own damnation. They deduced that the material universe is not the work of God, but of the devil. And they employed as a rampart this same verse. Calvin wrote of them:

A certain sect of Heretics called the Manichees, which scorned God's law and the prophets, alleged this present text and such other like, to show that the God of the Old Testament as they blasphemously term him, was a God of disorder and such a one as kept no good rule. For why, said they, he laid the bridle upon his people's neck, and bade them eat whatsoever they like, and so as the meaning was to make them drunkards and gluttons, by encouraging them to eat and drink after that fashion. But the true God (said they) will have folk to be sober, whereby a man may see that the Law is not given from heaven"

Teenage Blaster Worm Suspect Arrested

One of the authors of the Blaster worm appears to be arrested. If it is true, I hope they throw the book at him. I hate virus writers. Teenage Blaster Worm Suspect Arested:

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The FBI on Friday arrested a Minnesota teenager officials said admitted to making a copycat variant of the devastating Blaster Internet worm, even as experts combed over data to hunt down the virus's creator.

Jeffrey Lee Parson, 18, of Hopkins, Minnesota, a middle- class suburb west of Minneapolis, was arrested on one count of intentionally causing or attempting to cause damage to a computer, according to a St. Paul district court clerk.
The arrest was the result of a joint investigation by the U.S. Secret Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Parson, who was described in the complaint as being 6-feet-4-inches tall and weighing 320 pounds is scheduled to appear before a magistrate judge in St. Paul later on Friday.

He admitted to creating a variant of the worm, according to a complaint filed in the Western District of Washington state, where Microsoft is based in the Seattle suburb of Redmond.

The U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington has scheduled a news conference together with the Secret Service and Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O in Seattle at 1:30 p.m. Pacific time (4:30 p.m. EDT/2030 GMT) on Friday.
Parson admitted modifying Blaster and creating a variant known by different names, including 'W32/Lovesan.worm.b' and admitted that he renamed the original code dubbed 'MSBlast.exe' 'teekids.exe,' after his online alias, the complaint said.
He also said he included a hidden Trojan horse program called 'Lithium' in the worm, leaving a back door so he could reconnect remotely to the infected computers later.

FBI agents interviewed Parson when they searched his home on Aug. 19 and seized seven computers.

Blaster and its variants are self-replicating Internet worms that bore into Windows machines through a security hole, harnessing them to launch concerted data attacks via the Internet on a Microsoft technical service Web site. Microsoft has been able to thwart the attacks by disconnecting the Web address from the Internet.

Versions of Blaster, whose original creator has not been found, cause infected computers to close down and restart frequently.

At least 7,000 "drone" computers tried to attack the Microsoft Web site, the complaint said.

The Internet addresses of infected computers were sent to the t33kid.com Web site. That site was traced back to Parson through Brian Davis, of Watauga, Texas, who leased Web hosting services to Parson, according to the complaint.

Davis told officials that he knew "teekid" had performed Internet attacks and written various Internet worms, the complaint said.

The t33kid.com site is registered to the younger Parson at an address in Hopkins, Minnesota. A phone number at that address is registered to R. Parson. A woman who answered the telephone at that house declined to comment and immediately hung up the telephone.

The alias also appears to have been used to deface the Web site of the Minnesota Government Finance Owners Association and there are messages from "Teekid" on message boards related to trojans, small programs that hackers plant on computers.

Blaster is believed to have infected hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide since it was released on Aug. 11.

Welcome to the New Blinne Blog

I am creating a new Blinne blog, blogger edition! This integrates the enetation comment system. I created a permalink.php file, an enetation template and a blogger template.

This does two things:

1. Allows for limited HTML editting of enetation comments.


2. Creates permalinks with comments in-line.

I have does this as a public service to the blogosphere. I am releasing my code into the public domain.

New report on academy sex assault

A sad day in the life of the Air Force Academy. Let's hope they clean up the mess.

New report on academy sex assault: "Aug. 28 -- NBC News has obtained early details of a report by the inspector general of the Defense Department looking into allegations of sexual assaults -- and the huge number of women who say they were raped while attending the U.S. Air Force Academy. The early results appear to be worse than anyone on the outside first feared and just as bad as some women on the inside had alleged."

Halloween IX: It Ain't Necessarily SCO

I commend the following document to you to show the kind of nonsense SCO is drudging up.

The amended SCO complaint against IBM filed on 16 June 2003 is, like its predecessor, a tissue of lies, deliberate distortions, and flimflam. Unlike its predecessor, this amended complaint has been brought to you by the generosity of Microsoft, who (on the evidence of SCO's 10-Q SEC filings) dropped at least six million dollars on SCO (plus a promise of five million more over the next three quarters) to help it make trouble for Linux.

SCO, having willingly made itself a sock puppet for the boys in Redmond, therefore becomes the first company other than Microsoft to have its utterances admitted to the gallery of infamy that is the Halloween Documents.

There follows the usual point-by-point takedown. Unlike SCO's claims, this analysis is based entirely on public information which third parties may verify by chasing links or through their local library.

Autism is Not Posession

CNN.com - Autistic boy’s death at church ruled homicide - Aug. 26, 2003

MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin (CNN) — An 8-year-old autistic boy who died at a prayer service where church members tried to heal him of “spirits” was suffocated, the medical examiner’s office said Monday.

This struck a little too close to home for me. My own son has autistic tendencies. Note the pastor’s attitude here (yuck):

Ray Hemphill — a pastor at the storefront church and the brother of head Pastor David Hemphill — was arrested early Saturday on suspicion of child abuse and is awaiting formal charges, authorities said. Ray Hemphill led Friday’s prayer service, his brother said.

David Hemphill told CNN that Terrance and his mother had been attending the church for about three months.

The adults formed a circle around the boy and placed their hands lightly over him as they prayed for him, David Hemphill said Sunday.

”[They] were just praying for him and asking God to deliver him from the spirit that he had,” David Hemphill said. “The little boy had spirits in him, and we was asking God to deliver him.”

Evangelicals Poised to Take Over the Church [of England]

Want to see what all this business of pushing homosexuality gets the Anglican communion? Read the Daily Telegraph article (as blogged by the Religion News Blog) quoted below:

Evangelicals poised to take over the Church: Evangelicals, dismissed as a vociferous minority by senior liberals during the Jeffrey John affair, are now poised to take over the Church of England.

A new study suggests that, if current trends continue, evangelicals will make up more than half of all Sunday church worshippers in 10 years' time, up from about a third now.

As they grow quickly, Liberals and Anglo-Catholics continue to decline, says Dr Peter Brierley, a former government statistician who heads Christian Research.

Moreover, all but a tiny proportion of the new breed of evangelicals will be theologically conservative, viewing sex outside marriage, including homosexuality, as outlawed by Scripture.

According to the new analysis, they are consolidating their grip on the Church's income, contributing a significant amount of money to church funds.

Also, half of all ordinands training to be the next generation of clergy are attending evangelical colleges.

The combined effect could be to provide the evangelical wing of the Church with an unprecedented power base as long as their numbers are reflected in the membership of the General Synod and the Church's leadership in future years.

Dr Brierley's projections are expected to alarm liberals, who have portrayed them as fringe fundamentalists whose influence is out of proportion to their numbers. His analysis indicates that, based on several national surveys by Christian Research, about 35 per cent of churchgoers in 1998 were evangelicals and that proportion could rise to half by 2010.

Of this, he estimates, just eight per cent will be "broad" or "liberal" evangelicals, who are relaxed over issues such as homosexuality. The remainder will be mainstream or charismatic hard-liners.

Another survey, detailed in this year's Religious Trends handbook, indicates that the total giving of evangelical churches is already about 40 per cent of the Church's national income.

The latest Church statistics show that for 2001 the total income of parishes was £650 million. Evangelical worshippers put an estimated £250 million of that into the collection plate.

Their financial muscle was demonstrated during the crisis over Canon Jeffrey John, the openly homosexual cleric who was forced by evangelical pressure in June to withdraw as the Bishop of Reading.

Many evangelical parishes, which include most of the largest and wealthiest in the country, were planning to withhold a significant proportion of the quotas they pay to central funds if Canon John had been consecrated.

"These figures show that mainstream evangelicals are a larger group than most others already, and they are still growing," said Dr Brierley. "If these trends continue, they could become the largest group in the Church within a decade."

His findings belie comments by liberals like the Dean of Southwark, the Very Rev Colin Slee, who said in July that Canon John had been forced to stand down by a minority who made "a noise out of all proportion to their size".

The Rev Giles Fraser, the vicar of Putney, admitted that liberals could have underestimated the influence of "fundamentalist" evangelicals, and it was worrying for the future of the Church.

"The truth is that they have learned the techniques of marketing, how to sell something," he said. "It's a very simple message. But it's like selling soap powder. I think that way of simplifying and marketing is verging on idolatory - putting God into a box."

Gordon Lynch, a theologian from Birmingham University, said that Dr Brierley's analysis was too simplistic and did not allow for shades of opinion and people's changing views. He conceded, however, that socially conservative evangelicals were becoming a "considerable influence".

"They represent one of the few groups in society where people who are drawn to that kind of social conservatism can actually find a home," said Dr Lynch.

"Perhaps the Conservative Party used to provide a kind of structure for those people, but it seems to do that less and less now. So there is a danger that the Church does drift towards an increasingly conservative position."

Schwarzenegger goes after conservative voters

Schwarzenegger goes after conservative voters:

Trailing the Democratic front-runner in the latest poll for governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger planned to stride boldly into the territory of his leading Republican opponent and court support from the conservative wing of his party.

How's he going to do that?

Hackers cut off SCO Web site

Hackers cut off SCO Web site:

This weekend, a denial-of-service attack took down the Web site of The SCO Group, which is caught in an increasingly acrimonious row with the open-source community over the company's legal campaign against Linux.

Do not incur the wrath of Linux zealots.

A New Kind of Spaming

I'm back. The summer has been a busy time and my blogging went on hold. I did receive two comments from postal code and whois, a couple of "people" whose URLs were commercial web sites. It looks like there are some autocommenters of pages that are listed by -- I suspect -- Google. Just a warning to fellow members of the blogosphere to check their comments and expunge the spam. I left the comments but deleted the URLs. Given the topic, it was ironic that this post was spamed. :-)