Sunday Sermonette: Ridiculous boasting
Chapter 8 is absurd. It gives Solomon a vast empire, including numerous tributary kingdoms, a marriage to the daughter of the Pharaoh, and a tribute from Hiram of 50 metric tons of gold. The reality is that Israel at this time was a minor domain consisting of a few villages. There really isn ' t any more to be said about this, it ' s complete bullshit.8 At the end of twenty years, during which Solomon built the temple of theLord and his own palace,2 Solomon rebuilt the villages that Hiram[a] had given him, and settled Israelites in them.3 Solomon then went to Hamath Zobah and captured it.4 He also built...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 8, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Xerox machine
2 Chronicles 2 is the same story as 1 Kings 5. There are some slight differences in language, which simply suggests that the chronicler was working from a different manuscript than the one that became canonized. (The title of this post is intended to be ironic because the point is, there weren ' t any copying machines, only human scribes whose copying was imprecise, whether accidentally or on purpose.) As usual, the numbers are ridiculous. The Tanakh seems to multiply everything by 10, approximately.2 [a]Solomon gave orders to build a temple for the Name of theLord and a royal palace for himself.2 He conscripted ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 18, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Spanish Stuffed Peppers – The Evolution of a New Recipe
My love affair continues with Sofrito, the Spanish slow cooked tomato-olive oil-mirepoix that’s a staple in a healthy Mediterranean diet. I now make it regularly, storing it in small jars in my freezer and searching for ways to incorporate it into the foods we make. For example, these stuffed peppers, a recipe I am proud to say I came up with all by myself. Well, actually, that’s not entirely true. I had a little help from my friends (and family). Let me tell you how it went down…
Last week, while at the market, a beautiful multicolored fresh pepper medley caught my eye. I knew I had a pound of lean g...
Source: The Blog That Ate Manhattan - November 28, 2022 Category: Primary Care Authors: Margaret Polaneczky, MD Tags: Meat & Poultry Rice Vegetables bell peppers corn fish sauce Flor de garum mexican recipe SOfrito Spanish Stuffed Peppers umami Source Type: blogs
Weekly Overseas Health IT Links – 15th October, 2022.
This article uses the one that divides providers into groups depending on the life cycle stage the clinic is at the given moment. According to this classification, medical providers fall into three groups:BeginnersGrowing clinicsWell-established providersHealth care providers are business entities, so their life cycle, like that of any business, consists of the early stage or launch, growth and maturity. At each stage, providers have different priorities and goals, and the choice of medical software solutions should be made accordingly.Medical software for beginnersThe launch phase can be tough. At this stage, the profits ...
Source: Australian Health Information Technology - October 15, 2022 Category: Information Technology Authors: Dr David G More MB PhD Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Plagiarism
It ' s a bit puzzling, but 2 kings 19 and Isaiah 37 are essentially identical. Isaiah is a bit player here, but he gets a whole book later on, and this chapter is in it. I ' m not into the weeds of biblical scholarship, but as I understand it the Book of Isaiah is cobbled together, apparently by three different authors, and one of them lifted this. As I said last time, there is no historical record of an outright defeat of Sennacherib in his Levantine campaign, but there is some indication that sickness in his camp may have discouraged him from actually entering Jerusalem. Just a reminder that until the last few chapters, ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 3, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Sketchy History
In Ch. 14 we get a lot of random, poorly explained factoids about kings of Judah and Israel, with several references to the full story being told in The Chronicles of the Kings of Judah and The Chronicles of the Kings of Israel. These books have been lost. This does not refer to the Book of Chronicles, which merely selectively recapitulates stories from the Torah and the Deuteronomic History without adding anything except a lot of genealogy consisting of nothing but lists of contextless names. It does contradict the Deuteronomic History in certain details, for example it offers yet a fourth version of the death of Saul.The...
Source: Stayin' Alive - July 17, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Digital mental health intervention by the World Health Organization (WHO) found to lower anxiety and depression, with improvements maintained at 3 ‑month follow-up
Conclusions: In this study, we found that a guided, digital intervention was effective in reducing depression in displaced people in Lebanon. The guided WHO Step-by-Step intervention we examined should be made available to communities of displaced people that have digital access.
The Study in Context:
Headspace Health acquires AI-driven digital mental health start-up Sayana
The landscape of digital mental health apps: huge unmet needs, quality concerns, app stores asked to ensure transparency
The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) shares discussion paper to help empower 8 billion minds via the ethical adoption of digital...
Source: SharpBrains - July 5, 2022 Category: Neuroscience Authors: SharpBrains Tags: Brain/ Mental Health Technology & Innovation anxiety depression digital mental health gratitude exercise mental-disorders positive self-talk post-traumatic stress stress-management well-being Source Type: blogs
Lebanon: Challenges and Successes in COVID-19 Pandemic Response
In Lebanon, COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations, and daily deaths continue to decline. This is an accomplishment worthy of celebration in the midst of hyperinflation, all-time high unemployment, nadir purchasing power, and a health sector on the verge of collapse. (Source: The RAND Blog)
Source: The RAND Blog - May 6, 2022 Category: Health Management Authors: Nasma Berri; Mahshid Abir Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: International Trade
The visit of the Queen of Sheba is well known and no doubt features in the Bible stories for children genre. However, the legends that have grown up around her in the Jewish, Christian and Moslem traditions are all built from very sparse material. In this telling, we never learn her name, where the heck Sheba is, or what any of the profound wisdom was with which Solomon dazzled her. Not that it particularly matters, but scholars believe that Sheba may be based on Saba, a people of the southern Arabian peninsula. It is interesting that Solomon, along with the narrator, take the idea of a polity ruled by a woman completely i...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 17, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Fantasyland
Chapter 9 starts with yet another repetition of the motif that has appeared maybe a hundred times since Exodus: God tells Solomon that if the people stay faithful to him, he ' ll reward them with great power and riches, but if they stray, he ' ll destroy them. Yeah, we got that.Then we get more absurd claims about Solomon ' s wealth and power. Hiram had given Solmon 120 talents of gold, which would be four metric tons. Sure. (That happens to be what the Queen of Sheba will give him in the next chapter.) This is despite Hiram, for some reason, not liking the cities Solomon had given him. Solomon then enslaves the Amor...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 13, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Architectural Digest
Chapter 7 describes Solomon ' s palace, which as I noted before is 4 times bigger than the Temple and takes almost twice as long to build. Make what you will of that. While the First Temple probably existed, the lack of archaeological evidence for it is not surprising since the Temple Mount cannot be excavated. However, no such excuse exists for this structure. Remains of a defensive city wall from about 1,000 BC have been found in Jerusalem, but this is not evidence for the existence of the palace as some people want to claim. In fact there is no archaeological evidence for the existence of a king Solomon; there are no in...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 6, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Construction Contract
The next couple of chapters describe the construction of the first temple. Most scholars think it probably existed, one reason being that it ' s destruction, which is described later, happened within perhaps a generation of whoever wrote this. However, as I have noted earlier, archaeological excavation on the Temple Mount is not possible, so it can ' t be confirmed by physical evidence. (Archaeological finds which some have claimed to be evidence for the temple have either turned out to be fakes, or are of dubious meaning.) In any case, it was highly unlikely to have been as grand as is described here, and we don ' t ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 30, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: The magnificence of Dear Leader
The first part of chapter four is basically an administrative directory -- the names of Solomon ' s cabinet officers and provincial governors. Since these events purportedly happened centuries before this was written, I have no idea why anybody is supposed to care about this list of names. The second part is like North Korean propaganda. Kim Jong Un bowled 300 five times in a row, wrote a symphony when he was five years old, that sort of thing. Just a reminder, which shoudn ' t be necessary by now, but according to the archaeological and historical evidence, Israel at this time was at most a collection of small ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 27, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Selective attention
I ' m certainly not going to let this blog get bogged down in discussion of the Syrian civil war. If you want to read reasonably detailed but succinct accounts there is this from the BBC, which uses data from various sources including the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights;The Council on Foreign Relations; and for a more international view, theInternational Institute for Security Studies. They are all in agreement on the main points. The war began with peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations in March, 2011, which the Assad government violently repressed, sparking widespread uprisings nationwide that quickly evolved int...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 10, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Congress Should Require TPS for Immigrants from Nations With Armed Conflicts
David J. BierSince 1990, the executive branch has had the authority from Congress to provide Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to people already in the United States who are from countries in which an “ongoing armed conflict within the state" exists. A bipartisan group in Congress wrote a letter to the Biden administration requesting that it designate Ukraine for TPS, and then they also proposed legislation torequire it to use its authority.Finally, the administrationhas relented (with the full details still to be filled in). But Congress should still recognize the procedural problem with giving total discretion to th...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - March 4, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: David J. Bier Source Type: blogs
