The death of the Rev. Jerry Falwell marks a changing of the guard for religious conservatives that has been under way for several years. In the 1980s, Falwell mobilized millions of evangelicals. But today, younger Christians are becoming restive with the old style and focus. In fact, some pollsters say that more than 40 percent of white evangelical voters could be up for grabs in the 2008 election. Beyond the Wedge Issues Two months before he died, Falwell gave a televised sermon about global warming. It was vintage Falwell: grand, pugnacious and, he admitted, politically incorrect. Falwell said that the danger to society is not global warming, but the green movement itself. He worried particularly about evangelicals involved in the green movement: They were being distracted from moral concerns, such as abortion, gay marriage, violence and divorce. ‘It is Satan’s attempt to redirect the church’s primary focus,’ Falwell said in March to his 22,000-person-strong congregation at the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va. ‘I’m telling these guys they need to get off that kick,’ Falwell said, ‘because the idea is to divert your energies from the message and the mission and the vision of […]
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Former President Carter says President Bush’s administration is ‘the worst in history’ in international relations, taking aim at the White House’s policy of pre-emptive war and its Middle East diplomacy. The criticism from Carter, which a biographer says is unprecedented for the 39th president, also took aim at Bush’s environmental policies and the administration’s ‘quite disturbing’ faith-based initiative funding. ‘I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,’ Carter told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in a story that appeared in the newspaper’s Saturday editions. ‘The overt reversal of America’s basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me.’ Carter spokeswoman Deanna Congileo confirmed his comments to The Associated Press on Saturday and declined to elaborate. He spoke while promoting his new audiobook series, ‘Sunday Mornings in Plains,’ a collection of weekly Bible lessons from his hometown of Plains, Ga. ‘Apparently, Sunday mornings in Plains for former President Carter includes hurling reckless accusations at your fellow man,’ said Amber Wilkerson, Republican National […]
A Purdue University engineer has developed a method that uses an aluminum alloy to extract hydrogen from water for running fuel cells or internal combustion engines, and the technique could be used to replace gasoline. The method makes it unnecessary to store or transport hydrogen – two major challenges in creating a hydrogen economy, said Jerry Woodall, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue who invented the process. ‘The hydrogen is generated on demand, so you only produce as much as you need when you need it,’ said Woodall, who presented research findings detailing how the system works during a recent energy symposium at Purdue. The technology could be used to drive small internal combustion engines in various applications, including portable emergency generators, lawn mowers and chain saws. The process could, in theory, also be used to replace gasoline for cars and trucks, he said. Hydrogen is generated spontaneously when water is added to pellets of the alloy, which is made of aluminum and a metal called gallium. The researchers have shown how hydrogen is produced when water is added to a small tank containing the pellets. Hydrogen produced in such a system […]
One afternoon in February, Al Gore was waiting to board a commercial flight from Nashville to Miami, where he was to deliver the slide show that forms the basis of ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ his Academy Award-winning documentary on global warming. Gore was telling me about Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian chemist who won a Nobel Prize in 1977 for his insights into the thermodynamics of open systems, an intriguing subject that has very little to do with global warming. Every minute or so he flashed a microgrin at a passer-by without interrupting his oratorical flow. We had moved on to complexity theory, which Gore would really immerse himself in if only he had the time, and then to the concept of nested systems, which of course had been developed by the late psychologist Uri Bronfenbrenner, when a woman in a blazing orange shirt emerged from her flight, did a double take and cried, ‘Isn’t that AL GORE?!’ There was no ignoring this fan. As she came over to thank Gore for trying to save the planet, I saw that my bags were in the way. ‘I’ll move them,’ I said; and Gore, before he could think, said, ‘No, don’t.’ Six […]
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Imagine the Sunflower State without its sunflowers. That’s one of the dire predictions contained in a new report on global warming released by the National Wildlife Federation, which says the Kansas state flower could move north to other states in a few decades. Increasingly warm temperatures also could mean the end of the state tree, the eastern cottonwood, according to ‘The Gardener’s Guide to Global Warming.’ ‘Everything being equal, these plants won’t thrive and will shift north,’ said Patty Glick, the report’s author and senior global warming specialist for the National Wildlife Federation. While conditions could change, Glick and other say projected increasing temperatures also could wipe out cool-weather grasses, such as Kentucky bluegrass, and many fescues that cover lawns in the region. Some experts think global warming will cause temperatures in Kansas to rise an average of 5 to 12 degrees in the next several decades. The projection that the sunflower could fade from Kansas’ landscape surprised some experts and scientists. ‘This is a plant that has survived for eons,’ said Dennis Patton, a horticulturist with the Johnson County Kansas State University Research and Extension office. ‘It is hard […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
