Today I started posting news items for Blogger News Network (BNN)

Today I started posting news items at BNN, being the Blogger News Network (not BNN of Dutch disrepute) under call sign trojan0505. I debuted with Saddam's second trial, which seemed a worthy cause for the occasion.
The marines are no longer angry at me (cheers!).
I've been half the day off line due to Greek technology still being wonky (perhaps those infamous copper cables again), which I must admit feels strangely cut off from the rest of humanity. Winter has finally arrived in Greece, just before Christmas. Not nearly as bad as the U.K. though, which is reporting fog (once again poor continent cut off!) and Colorado has vast masses of snow to celebrate a white Christmas in style; but apparently it's not nearly as pleasant as you might think when you're snowed in and nowhere to go. This may still happen in Greece too - well, it happened last year anyway - there's no saying. So much for the trivialities (my cousin, who's doing some artwork for the Ad Swap for me (?), is going to love this item).

In between I prepared a piece about higher matters. Seemed atmospheric for Christmas:

Astronomers of Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope have looked at the first stars that formed after the big bang. They aren't anything like stars known today, nor anything else for that matter. Some are a thousand times larger than our sun and very, very bright. Actually, they may not be stars at all, but early black holes, inhaling gas and exhaling radiation, thus forming the earliest galaxies. The objects are 13 billion light-years away, the time when the events took place, and are clustered in mini-galaxies. Cosmic figures are beyond human imagination ...

Which reminds me of an article on the site of Discovery Institute, "Priest of the Cosmos", a review by Messrs Gonzalez and Richards of the book "The Day without Yesterday: Lemaitre, Einstein and the Birth of Modern Cosmology". The book touches on the life and work of Belgian priest and cosmologist Georges Lemaitre.

It also recalls the sad way in which religion by today's secularists is set apart as lacking in reason and scientific thinking, as if there never were Scholastics and natural philosophy for instance. The book by Thomas Woods "How the Catholic Church built Western Civilization", on which I did a review on these pages only few months ago, reminds us of the accomplishments of the Catholic Church in this respect and how much we owe Catholicism. The example of Galilei is often brought forward as a prime example how the church suppressed the advance of science, but it is never explained this trial happened in the first place because Galilei couldn't prove what he said. If that isn't pretty scientific thinking, I don't know what is.