The leftist USA Today reports on Obama’s tough response to terrorist attacks in New York, New Jersey and Minnesota.

Excerpt:

A high-level presidential directive signed Wednesday puts climate change at the center of decision-making on national security, requiring agencies to consider current and future climate trends in all “relevant national security doctrine, policies, and plans.”

President Obama has long argued that climate change is a national security issue, and the White House trumpeted the memorandum as an “historic step to address the national security implications of climate change.”

But the policy changes are mostly evolutionary, following no fewer than three executive orders directing federal agencies to take climate change into consideration when adopting policies.

The eight-page presidential memorandum carries the same force of law within the federal government as an executive order, and its policies will carry over into the next administration unless explicitly rescinded by the next president. In fact, the first agency implementation reports required under Obama’s order aren’t due until February — the month after Obama leaves office. It also sets up a panel, headed by the president’s national security adviser and chief science adviser, to catalog data on climate change and its effects — and giving intelligence agencies more of a role in analyzing climate data.

We have real problems with real Islamic terrorists, and the President is concerned with global warming. I guess Obama’s top campaign donors didn’t get enough taxpayer money from “stimulus” grants to their (now bankrupt) green energy companies (e.g. – Solyndra) the first time around. I can tell you this: when I go to a shopping mall or walk around downtown, it’s not the global warming monster that I am afraid of: it’s the radical Islamic terrorists. Why doesn’t our government understand this?

Other countries DO understand this, though.

When the UK sees terrorist attacks, they do their job – protect the public from terrorist attacks.

The UK Telegraph reports:

Britain’s top spy has warned that terrorist groups like so-called Islamic State pose a “persistent threat” that is set to last a “professional lifetime”.

It comes as intelligence agencies are set to recruit more spies, with MI6 said to be getting another 1,000 staff over the next five years.

In a rare public appearance, Alex Younger, the head of MI6, insisted Britain had made significant improvements in the way it tackles terrorism but admitted there was little sign of the “enduring” danger disappearing soon.

[…]Asked if the terror threat from groups like IS and al Qaida had reached its apex, Mr Younger said: “I would like to be optimistic about this but we have got quite long experience of this phenomena now and I see it very much as the flip side to some very deep-seated global trends, not least of all globalisation, the reduction of barriers between us.

“It’s a function also of the information revolution and the capacity for ideas to travel. It is fuelled by a deepening sectarian divide in the Middle East and there are some deep social economic and demographic drivers to the phenomenon that we know as terrorism.

“Allied with the emergence of state failure this means that, regrettably, this is an enduring issue which will certainly be with us, I believe, for our professional lifetime.”

Last year’s Strategic Defence and Security Review said £2.5bn was being invested in security and intelligence agencies with an additional 1,900 staff to ensure they have “the resources and information they need to prevent and disrupt plots against this country at every stage”. 

I wouldn’t have a problem paying taxes to a government that actually believed that it was important to not let terrorists kill me. But clearly my taxes are being wasted by this administration. They have been so clouded by fanciful faith-based ideology that they are incapable of doing their jobs.

A new discovery of an ancient text fragment was reported in the Associated Press, of all places.

Excerpt:

The charred lump of a 2,000-year-old scroll sat in an Israeli archaeologist’s storeroom for decades, too brittle to open. Now, new imaging technology has revealed what was written inside: the earliest evidence of a biblical text in its standardized form.

The passages from the Book of Leviticus, scholars say, offer the first physical evidence of what has long been believed: that the version of the Hebrew Bible used today goes back 2,000 years.

The discovery, announced in a Science Advances journal article by researchers in Kentucky and Jerusalem on Wednesday, was made using “virtual unwrapping,” a 3D digital analysis of an X-ray scan. Researchers say it is the first time they have been able to read the text of an ancient scroll without having to physically open it.

“You can’t imagine the joy in the lab,” said Pnina Shor of the Israel Antiquities Authority, who participated in the study.

[…]Scholars have believed the Hebrew Bible in its standard form first came about some 2,000 years ago, but never had physical proof, until now, according to the study. Previously the oldest known fragments of the modern biblical text dated back to the 8th century.

The text discovered in the charred Ein Gedi scroll is “100 percent identical” to the version of the Book of Leviticus that has been in use for centuries, said Dead Sea Scroll scholar Emmanuel Tov from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who participated in the study.

“This is quite amazing for us,” he said. “In 2,000 years, this text has not changed.”

The article mentioned the Dead Scrolls, which were earlier copies of some of the Old Testament books that we have today. In this case, there was a long gap between these early Dead Sea Scrolls documents, and the earliest copy that we had prior to the Dead Sea Scrolls. How much had changed in the period in between?

This article from Probe Ministries explains:

The Dead Sea Scrolls play a crucial role in assessing the accurate preservation of the Old Testament. With its hundreds of manuscripts from every book except Esther, detailed comparisons can be made with more recent texts.

The Old Testament that we use today is translated from what is called the Masoretic Text. The Masoretes were Jewish scholars who between A.D. 500 and 950 gave the Old Testament the form that we use today. Until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947, the oldest Hebrew text of the Old Testament was the Masoretic Aleppo Codex which dates to A.D. 935.{5}

With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we now had manuscripts that predated the Masoretic Text by about one thousand years. Scholars were anxious to see how the Dead Sea documents would match up with the Masoretic Text. If a significant amount of differences were found, we could conclude that our Old Testament Text had not been well preserved. Critics, along with religious groups such as Muslims and Mormons, often make the claim that the present day Old Testament has been corrupted and is not well preserved. According to these religious groups, this would explain the contradictions between the Old Testament and their religious teachings.

After years of careful study, it has been concluded that the Dead Sea Scrolls give substantial confirmation that our Old Testament has been accurately preserved. The scrolls were found to be almost identical with the Masoretic text. Hebrew Scholar Millar Burrows writes, “It is a matter of wonder that through something like one thousand years the text underwent so little alteration. As I said in my first article on the scroll, ‘Herein lies its chief importance, supporting the fidelity of the Masoretic tradition.’”{6}

A significant comparison study was conducted with the Isaiah Scroll written around 100 B.C. that was found among the Dead Sea documents and the book of Isaiah found in the Masoretic text. After much research, scholars found that the two texts were practically identical. Most variants were minor spelling differences, and none affected the meaning of the text.

One of the most respected Old Testament scholars, the late Gleason Archer, examined the two Isaiah scrolls found in Cave 1 and wrote, “Even though the two copies of Isaiah discovered in Qumran Cave 1 near the Dead Sea in 1947 were a thousand years earlier than the oldest dated manuscript previously known (A.D. 980), they proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of the text. The five percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling.”{7}

Despite the thousand year gap, scholars found the Masoretic Text and Dead Sea Scrolls to be nearly identical. The Dead Sea Scrolls provide valuable evidence that the Old Testament had been accurately and carefully preserved.

Now, if you listen to skeptics, agnostics and atheists, you would think that nothing in the Bible is reliable, because the stories were supposedly changed over time, and sometimes intentionally. That’s the message that popularizers like Bart Ehrman sell to a public audience that is hungry to dismiss the Bible. He likes to talk about the supposed distortions that have crept in, because all we have are “copies of copies of copies of copies”. But if you take a look at the hard evidence, rather than Bart’s rhetoric, then you get a very different picture of what really happened.

I think this is an exciting opportunity for people who dismissed the Bible as hopelessly unreliable to think a second time about whether there might be a message in there that tells us who God is, how he has interacted with people in the past, and what he expects from us today. For those who are open to the demands of a two-way relationship with the Creator, the Bible is the place to start.