Evidence suggests that grief counseling may not be helpful. What a shock. Better talk this over with my therapist.

From the Danger Room…..

Huge news for real-life ray guns: Electric lasers have hit battlefield strength for the first time — paving the way for energy weapons to go to war.

In recent test-blasts, Pentagon-researchers at Northrop Grumman managed to get its 105 kilowatts of power out of their laser — past the “100kW threshold [that] has been viewed traditionally as a proof of principle for ‘weapons grade’ power levels for high-energy lasers,” Northrop’s vice president of directed energy systems, Dan Wildt, said in a statement.

From the Telegraph…

For more than six decades scholars have believed the scrolls originated with a different, ascetic Jewish sect called the Essenes.

The Essenes are said to have lived in the 1st Century, in mountains in Palestine, where they recorded religious practices on parchments.

But Rachel Elior, a professor of Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, claims the 930 scrolls were written by the Sadducees, a group of Jewish priests living in Jerusalem, and that the Essenes did not exist.

The article is mostly worthless because all that it amounts to is a he said/she said type of thing. The evidence for and against is not really gone into. On the other hand, I have always thought that the evidence for the existence of the Essenes was awful thin. So I was interested to see that a scholar got up and said the same thing (except in stronger terms than I would use).

This week’s rant is “Non-Compete Clauses for Churches? Makes Sense to Me.” The title tells you all you need to know.