Halite (NaCl) crystals (Wikipedia)

What is it about human bureaucracies that causes them to “cherry-pick” whatever science suits them? Such seems to be the case with the FDA‘s latest recommendations on human salt intake – at least according to this blog entry on The Journal of Natural Food and Health. (Instead of its own photo of a salt shaker, I decided to use a photo from Wikipedia Commons (article, “Salt”), which you’ll find on the upper left.) I have to wonder if this is a temperamental thing – a matter of S_J culture using only whatever NT results make sense to it in terms of ensuring stability, ignoring the NT’s desire for competence, the S_P’s desire for freedom and the NF’s desire for authenticity in the process. (I’m using terms from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator grid, in the way Dr. David Keirsey does in his book Please Understand Me.)

According to the blog above, 1.5 teaspoons of table salt per diem for the normal person is the minimum – anything less leads to serious problems. The current FDA recommendation is only 1 teaspoon. While I think I ought to go to the local Burger King, get some salt packets and figure out how much salt is in one of them (in addition to how much salt they put on their food even before they serve it), really I have to agree with the blog: too little salt is no improvement over too much. There were historical problems, severe ones, in medieval Europe because people weren’t getting enough salt. (Much of that, as I recall, was due to the flooding of the Celtic salt pans during a phase of the changing weather patterns of the time.) And we have present studies confirming that severe problems can arise – making the arguments of some “natural food” proponents elsewhere who would claim that NaCl is a poison and unnecessary seem illogical. “Both sodium and chloride, the components of salt, are needed for digestion,” notes the blog. ”These elements form the basis of cellular metabolism and our only source of adequate intake is salt.”

As Jesus said, salt is good… as with everything else, of course, in moderation (meaning, within the design parameters of what the human person can take, no more, no less). And surely the individual appetite is the best judge in the long run of how much one needs – if it’s not been conditioned by hyperintake, of course!

- John Wheeler (יוחנן רכב הסופר)

The direct link to the video is here.

The direct link to the YouTube video is here.

Sauselito Canyon Vineyard Road

I’ve been thinking of a number of items to put on this blog but this one appeals to me more than the others as a beginning. It’s the daily photo from PhotoBotos.com and it reminds me of Napa Valley, CA., where I spent a couple of weeks housesitting and where I could easily have turned my back on the rest of the world for the rest of my life. Part of me wishes I still could. I love the climate and terrain there as I’ve loved it in few places. This area looks much the same, only even more interesting if possible… and it certainly seems considerably more remote. (The spelling really is “Saucelito” – I did a double-take and checked the spelling at the vineyard’s Web site. I’ll bet they get people confusing their name with that of Sausalito, the charming town near San Francisco, all the time.)

- John Wheeler (יוחנן רכב הסופר)

The Restaurant at the End of the... Beach?

Technically speaking, this collection of 130 photos has been put together from 2011-12-18 to 2012-01-11. It’s one of the nicer sets I’ve gathered from e-mails and other online sources (mostly the former).

On the left is one of the quirkier locations photographed – a restaurant that you can reach on foot or by boat depending on whether the tide’s come in or not. I wish I could go there (depending on what they serve, I doubt if they’ve heard of the biblical dietary laws there). In fact I wish I could go to a lot of the places featured in this series of photos (you know the drill: normal presentation here, slideshow presentation here, both on Photobucket).

Despite all that goes on in the world, there are still so many natural and human wonders in it and I regret that I’ll never see more than the tiniest fraction of them. Truer words were never spoken than those of the probable fellow ENFP, King Solomon, under his pen name as the Preacher (we ENFPs seem to be drawn to pen names more than most – it’s the frustrated psychodramatic actor in us):

(Ecclesiastes 1:8 RSV) All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

Which reminds me: I need to create a video of Ecclesiastes 1:1-9 as Suzanne Haik-Vantoura reconstructed the melodic rendition. It is one of my favorite passages, along with the rest of the book in the Hebrew Masoretic Text, precisely because it is so profoundly world-weary without expressing a loss of all hope (even despite the verbal despair here and there – Solomon was grieved but not psychotic).

A photo set like this overall reminds me of the truth of this passage also:

(Ecclesiastes 11:7 RSV) Light is sweet, and it is pleasant for the eyes to behold the sun.

Blessings in Jesus Christ (ברכות בישוע במשיח),
John Wheeler (יוחנן רכב הסופר)

Adversity (Despair.com)

This excerpt comes from my private diary (the all-too-apt Demotivator poster above comes from Despair.com):

3:52 PM 1/3/2012

(…) It’s one of those “count it all joys when you fall into various trials” days… I can’t remember the last time (decades ago, easily, maybe in my childhood) when I tripped headlong over something (a chunk of a sidewalk, in this case) and fell headlong and flat on my face. Yep, did that not long after noon while leaving with drinks from a nearby convenience store @ Bissonnet and Shepherd and headed toward the nearest bus stop north, breaking my glasses, getting a nosebleed, hurting (but not gashing or breaking) my right knee, gashing my nose and face, and hurting my big right toe pretty bad. That last doesn’t seem to be broken but I seem to have a way of getting that toenail whacked on one thing or another.

The people who stopped and helped me thought I might want to get stitches for the face but I know I can’t afford more hospital bills or loss of time. I put antibiotic cream and a bandage on the gash but even that combination looks kinda funky considering where the gash is (above and to the right of my left eye – apparently one of the nose pinchers of my glasses, now gone, caused that gash). And to top it all off, the one day when I needed my blood to clot its normal amazing speed, it didn’t – because I’d taken a children’s aspirin this morning.

Now I know what the phrase “I shoulda stood in bed” really means. And I’m reminded why I always look DOWN at the treacherous sidewalks, streets and curbs of Houston. I’ve saved myself from many a fall that way over the years. Anyway, I got taken home by the people who helped me and I bandanged my gash after putting Neosporin on it. Presently my big right toe still hurts but not as badly as it did. My right knee hurts some but isn’t quite as still and I can move it without problem. And I think I’ll keep the gash as a “battle scar” should that be necessary and depending on how it heals – just to remind me to be more careful about my physical surroundings. (As the saying goes, “That‘s gonna leave a mark.” )

Well, we’ll see about the wisdom of doing the last bit (as I’m not at all into “macho” things such as keeping scars just because I can). I haven’t checked the wounds to see how they’re doing yet. It’s still not all that easy to get around on my foot, although no longer unreasonable to try. For the moment it’s resting comfortably on the floor in stocking feet. How well it would fare if I tried to go by bus to the grocery store or to where I bought my glasses (the second being the harder job in its way), I’m not sure. But if I do go out an about in the next day or two, I’ll definitely be looking with double care at the ground before me.

The Christian ENFP (modified from Haas)

Physical adversity is meant to teach the Christian, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth”. Particular circumstances surrounding such adversity can also teach, “Blessed are the poor (beggars) in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Being meek and being humble aren’t the same thing, even though the Hebrew idioms behind the Greek of Matthew are rather similar in spelling (and difficult to distinguish in meaning heretofore even by the specialists). Humility has to do with the Holy Spirit – and our need for it. That “existential thought process” shows us who we are, who God is, and the vast difference between the two. Meekness has to do with bearing affliction in the here and the now and the physical, patiently. Such people can be taught God’s way. (The RSV of Psalms 25:9 is inconsistent, reading “humble” there whereas it uses “meek” elsewhere.)

Humility has to do with the dethroning of the Ego from its normal exalted position. Meekness has to do with one of the cognitive processes of the innermost Self, specifically what the Jungian school of psychology calls Extraverted Sensing (Se). This chart (left) from a recent entry on another blog illustrates what this trial should help reinforce in me, an ENFP with a particular order of natural thought processes and having the down-payment of the Holy Spirit within him.

- John Wheeler (יוחנן רכב הסופר)

One Euro Coin (from Wikipedia)

As the winds of change continue to blow across the eurozone, there are many articles discussing the crisis. One that I found via Facebook (that is, via someone else’s posting) is worth keeping handy for future reference.

The BBC News article is very much to the point. Look for the problem in Europe not to be as insoluble as the article makes it out to be, however. There is always a solution to merely human problems if there is sufficient political will backed by whatever is required to impose that will. The only question is who will bear the brunt of its imposition. The article seems to assume the logical framework now in operation in the European Union and the eurozone will remain much the same. I wouldn’t count on that (the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation, among others, have much to say about that point). Look for the framework operating in Europe, and in the whole world as well, to change radically in the years ahead!

Blessings in Messiah (ברכות במשיח),
John Wheeler (יוחנן רכב הסופר)

Book Art 07 (Framed)

I couldn’t pass up reposting this blog entry if I tried (thanks, LJR, for pointing me and the rest of your contacts on Facebook to it)!

I never cease to be amazed at people who can come up with things like these. If I may wax eloquent about the philosophy of science for a moment: every work of art like this, and many more outstanding still (and many less so, for that matter) stands as a blistering refutation of the concept of the naturalistic evolution of man. I can’t do art like this but I’m a lifelong poet-composer and writer in both non-fiction and fiction; no pressure or combination of pressures from natural selection, mutation, recombination or any and all of the other mechanisms invoked can explain how works of human art (his kind or mine, for example) arise and for what purposes.

No animal, no matter how intelligent in terms of problem-solving ability, can do something as technically hard as this, unless the task is pre-programmed into it by instinct. And no animal is driven to do something even this complex by the metaphysical perspective that lies behind art of every kind.

Why go off on that tangent? Partly because I saw just yesterday an article in a recent National Geographic magazine about “Whales” – and their alleged evolution. (The cover article is called Russia – Ten Years After.) Granted, there has been a change over time in how the structurally related creatures looked and how they adapted to aquatic life. But even the examples put forward as being allegedly transitional stages – such as a fossil earbone – strike me as completely unconvincing. One stage of something as tricky to optimize for working in air or water as an earbone couldn’t “just change” into another on its own (if it worked, it would tend to stay the same, not change!) – on its face each stage looks like something that a supremely creative (and to a large extent, highly whimsical) Artist and Engineer made. But there are common threads – as there are (in their own way) in the artwork of the particular artist whose work is featured above (Brian Dettmer).

Blessings in Jesus Christ (ברכות בישוע המשיח),
John Wheeler (יוחנן רכב הסופר)

It’s taken me a long time indeed to get this video created, and much longer than I would’ve liked to get back to creating videos of this sort. But being squeezed between work requirements and health issues as I increasingly am, I realized that I can do just two basic things: my work as a consultant for the Living Church of God, and my work in preserving and promoting The Music of the Bible Revealed – which includes making videos like these. (This is a repost from my blog LCG Scribe.)

Blessings in Messiah (ברכות במשיח),
John Wheeler (יוחנן רכב)