UCG Blog - Clint Says Blogging Milford

I wanted to let you know about another UCG blog. I put two of his posts below. The first is a spiritual one and the next is about one of his interests. You can view his blog here http://bloggingmilford.blogspot.com/.


Christianity in Motion (Blogging Jordan)

I'd like to call attention to this blog, published by five United Youth Corps members who are volunteering in a variety of social and research functions in Jordan this year.
It brings tears to my eyes thinking of it even now. These small kids, ranging from 5 to 15 were staring, teasing, taunting, and ridiculing our students as they sat on the bus, or when they walked between the bus and the store. I would chase them off, and they would be replaced by more kids doing the same thing. Although our students are mentally handicapped, they understood what was going on. Seeing the hurt in their eyes made it all the worse. I wanted to take each and every one of those kids and introduce them to the human beings that they were treating so cruelly, to show them that my students, my friends are people; wonderful, kind, and loving people. People that, sadly, live in a culture that hasn't yet learned to treat them with the respect that they deserve. We long for the day that this reality will be no more. Honestly we long for the day when they will be healed of their infirmities, but until that day comes, we have schools like the Bunyat that are striving to make this world a better place. They give skills and dignity to the students that they teach and bring understanding to the culture around them. I'm proud, for the short time I will be here, to be a part of something so wonderful.
I met Lena when she lived here in Cincinnati for several years before marrying Lewis VanAusdle. Lewis (and Emily Troyer, now Smith) came here for ABC in 2007, and Zach Smith was at ABC in 2006. I've never met Tine Banda, who grew up in Zambia, and studied in South Africa and in New York.I hope you find their personal reflections on their experiences and their mission as inspiring as I have!Matthew and Mary Ann Bates served at the International Baccalaureate School of Amman over this past academic year. They blogged about their experiences as well, and they also spoke to Mr. Kilough and showed some pictures on the August 7 edition of About Our Father's Business (available here).


First Snow and Climate Change
Yesterday our first significant snow flurries arrived! We had almost an inch on our patio table when I came home.When I was a teenager in the '90s, most religious folks (as well as many in the Church of God, including myself) seemed to be riding an anti-anti-global warming bandwagon. I wish I could remember why. I have my own theories.I've since taken a much more moderate view. I don't believe God would have given us instructions for caring for the earth if we couldn't make any impact on it. Nevertheless, an article like this gives me some pause.
A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.
This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.
So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.
So according to NASA, August was the hottest October on record. At least we can all agree that this crisis is man-made!