You can now have your complete fill of Cranach posts: I moved the archives from the other site to a separate page on this one. Click on the “Archive of Old Site 2005-2007″ on the right panel and you will find TWO YEARS of posts, a total of 805 pages! That’s about 4 books worth.

(The regular “archives” section just archives this site, month by month. Also, the “archives” heading at the top doesn’t work. I don’t know why. Also the search function isn’t working for the separate and super-long page of pages of what I am calling “Lucas Cranach the Elder.” Can anyone tell me why or how to fix it? tODD?)

And thanks to my daughter Joanna, who was the first editor of World’s blog, I have learned how to add other features. Thanks too to Rich Shipe. He pointed out that if I open this site to some discreet advertisements by signing up with Google’s Adsense and letting them place their ads, I could probably earn enough to pay for this online real estate and this would be a not-so-expensive hobby. So I’m trying that. I tried to filter out any truly objectionable ads. Some of them that come up–for example, those about getting a Mormon wife (because I must have said something about Romney)–are kind of a hoot. And they probably won’t be as bad as some of those on my World site, for which I wasn’t even getting paid. You don’t think I’m selling out, do you?

Some of the rest of you might want to do likewise on your blogs. Just do a search for Google AdSense. It’s very easy, and you get a cut of Google’s billions.

A good discussion is getting started below, at the YHWH, El, & Golden Calves post. Michael the Boot is asking why God “needs” to be worshiped, going on to debunk original sin and other “old arguments.” Join tODD in helping him out.

Sorry–my grandson Sam got to my computer and typed the above. Since this is his first blog entry, I don’t have the heart to delete it. I wonder what he meant by six brackets, a semi-colon, and a backslash.

Last Thanksgiving he had just been born and I flew to Australia to see him. Now he and his parents are here with us. Here is Sam’s picture:

The “Washington Post” had a startling front-page headline this morning: Advance May End Stem Cell Debate. Two mainline scientific journals have published breakthrough and now accepted findings showing how ordinary skin cells can be turned back into stem cells. No embryos or human eggs are harmed in the making of these stem cells.

Says one scientist, “This is a tremendous scientific milestone, the biological equivalent to the Wright brothers’ first airplane.” Credit–and a future Nobel Prize–goes to James Thompson, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I predict that Pro-deathers will STILL call for the “harvesting” of developing infants. They have been using the prospect of commodifying, industrializing, and desacralizing human life for this noble humanitarian cause to give moral legitimacy to abortion. They will find a way to continue that line of propaganda.

Meanwhile, this breakthrough, which eventually will save untold numbers of lives, is something else to be thankful for!

A court in Saudi Arabia has condemned the victim of a gang rape to 200 lashes with a whip. Her seven assailants were sentenced to two years in prison, but she is also being punished for being out with a man not her relative.

There was a time when we acknowledged certain culture’s practices as “barbarian,” “savage,” or “uncivilized.” Now that we are supposed to be multi-culturalists, we are not allowed to use those terms. I hasten to say that many if not most cultures in less-developed and non-western parts of the world are highly civilized, full of restraint, courtesy, and a finely-tuned sense of what is appropriate. In fact, we postmodern westerners are often the ones who behave most like barbarians. So I prefer to use the word for individuals. But societies that legally punish not just the criminals but the victims are, literally, lacking in civilization.