I loathe daylight savings. I’m sitting here with an eight-month-old baby boy who doesn’t know how to tell time — someone who, until this morning, was getting up during the (far too early) hour of 5. Now he’s getting up an hour earlier, because despite the best efforts of Paige and me, he can’t tell time. Our older two know they’re not supposed to get up before 7:00, and now we have to relax that rule because what their bodies think is 7:00 is really 6:00.
Besides the fact that I’m up way too early, here are some other reasons to dislike daylight savings:
— It kills people. I’ve read in several places that traffic fatalities are slightly higher during the week when we “spring forward,” and as far as I know that’s not balanced out by fewer fatalities when we “fall back.”
— It doesn’t save that much electricity. Even advocates of daylight savings say that it reduces energy usage by 3%. Granted, that’s a lot of power, but does anyone take into account the lost productivity for people whose lives are disrupted? Besides, energy is meant to serve man, not man to serve energy.
— It makes programming times and dates difficult. The content management system we built has to take into account the time change, because it runs a newspaper Web site and a 24-hour newswire. There are always users logged in at 2 a.m. on Sunday mornings (not many, but some).
— It’s hard to coordinate time with the rest of the world. Not only do you need to know how many hours they differ from GMT, but you have to know whether they’re on daylight savings (probably not). Again, at work we have people filing stories from all over the world, and they have to figure out the EST vs. EDT distinction.
— The daylight-savings junta says we’re doing this “for the children.” Whenever you hear that phrase, you know somebody is up to no good. Schoolchildren otherwise would be “coming home from school in the dark.” So it’s better that workers drive home in the dark? If the kids need daylight to wait for the yellow bus, adjust the time of the school day. Why do the rest of us need to adjust to them?
To save a small amount of electricity, we disrupt the entire nation and let people die on the highways. Smash your clocks!
Author: Eric Johnson
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Sola scriptura in the Bible?
Ken Shepherd is one of our frequent commenters, and I have appreciated his comments on these pages (especially on the Clowning for Christ discussion thread.) In response to RC’s entry about the pope retiring, Ken says, “I’m just a Protestant with a strong penchant for sola scriptura.”
Before I continue, I’ll say that some of my best friends are Protestants, as are practically all of my relatives by blood and marriage. I don’t mean to single you out, Ken, and I’ll delete this post if this is embarrassing. But since I suspect you won’t mind, I’ll ask you this: where in the Bible do you find sola scriptura?
I tried to find it, and was unsuccessful; that’s one reason I left Protestantism for Catholicism. You say, “Traditions are fine and good if they are based solidly on Scripture and are in accordance with the move of the Spirit in the Church.” That leads to a few more questions, like…
1. How do you know what is scripture, and what isn’t?
2. How does one determine an authentic “move of the Spirit,” as opposed to a move of the devil masquerading as the Spirit?
3. Who can authoritatively answer questions #1 and #2?
Again, this isn’t to attack you or anything. It’s one of those perennial questions, and it’s well worth discussing.
Iran caves on nuke inspections
Iran says it will stop enriching uranium, and will allow unlimited inspections of its nuclear program. (Let’s wait to see whether it follows through.) The U.S. has been pressuring Iran to do these things for months, and according to this AP story, the winner here is…France.
Do you think Iran changed its mind because of the 130,000+ Coalition troops on their border? Or the tens of thousands of courageous Iranians demonstrating against the repressive thugs who run their country? Nope — it’s all because of France, not to mention good, soothing, multilateral dialogue.
If you believe that words alone are enough to ensure peace in the world, you’d probably believe anything.
Apropos of nothing: Web hosting
At the risk of looking like an ass for interrupting the continuing coverage of judicially sanctioned murder, I’d like to ask you all for some help. At long last, I’m going to finish my master’s thesis, hopefully in the spring, and I need to get a new web hosting company to do it.
I need mySQL, PHP, Perl, and the ability to host at least two domains (plus all the regular stuff like e-mail accounts). Shell access would be quite nice, but I could live without it. I don’t need lots of bandwidth or disk space, and I do want to pay less than $10 a month. I’ve found one company, Lunarpages, that has such a plan, but I don’t want to jump in without knowing my other options. Can anyone else make a suggestion?