With Texas in a severe drought and Hurricane Lee causing windy weather, fires are igniting all over Central Texas. In the month of September, over 36,000 acres of land and over 1,700 homes have been burned due to wildfires, making what may seem the worst disaster in Texas history. 
     During Labor Day weekend on September 4, a fire in Bastrop burned over 34,000 acres of land. The fire, which was likely caused by power line sparks destroyed over 1,600 homes and killed two people. The wildfire is the most destructive fire in Texas History. The fire was completely distinguished on Friday, September 30. The damage estimate for this fire alone is at an estimated cost of $250 million.

     A fire that broke out in the Mason Creek North subdivision in Leander started September 5. The blaze destroyed 11 homes and damaged nine. The fire wasn’t fully contained until Wednesday, September 7. During a press conference on Tuesday, September 6, Leander Fire Chief Bill Gardner announced that the fire was determined to have been stated by arson. A device was found that they believe started the fire. Four teenagers were reportedly seen fleeing the scene.

    When you hear about a fire in another city or state, people may feel bad, but it doesn’t hit nearly as hard when it happens in their own city. The Middle Brook Apartments on Cypress Creek caught fire Wednesday, September 7. It was contained within an hour. Although the fire started as a structure fire and is still under investigation, it scared an already weary couscous public.

     “It’s really scary that the fires are so close,” Abby Ho, sophomore, said. “You can be safe one minute and the next minute there may be a fire in your front yard.”

     A few days after the massive Bastrop fire was contained, another fire ignited. The Bastrop fire, or as locals are calling it “The Old Potato Road Fire”, began on October 4. No homes have been affected by the fire but about 50 homes have been evacuated by the Circle D Subdivision. The subdivision was also affected by the earlier massive Bastrop fire.

     As fires continue to burn helpless citizen’s homes, make sure to take precautions by following the burn ban currently in effect for Williamson County. The Declaration of Disaster was issued by County Judge Dan A. Gattis on Monday, September 5 that prohibits the “outdoor burning of any combustible material”, which include outdoor cooking of any kind and improperly putting out cigarettes. By not following the declaration, it can result in a fine up to $1,000, and possibly confinement in jail. If you see any smoke, fire or any other suspicious activity, be sure to immediately call 911. With the change in weather and much more rain, let’s hope that this the end of the wildfire season.

     The most infamous and sinister case was that Murdoch’s hackers accessed the phone of a missing girl, now deceased13-year old Milly Dowler, and that it may have hindered police investigation and the search for the girl.

     Murdoch and his associates claimed to be unaware of the phone hacks during a media committee meeting. It was later revealed that the hackers deleted several messages from Dowler’s voicemail in order to slow the incentive for police search and thus extend the life of the “missing child” story for News Corp to cover. This was just one of the incidents on the long laundry list accrued by Murdoch’s empire.

     Although the scandals aren’t entirely new, with longstanding controversy pinned on Murdoch bleeding out year after year, what makes these recent disgraces more potent is the extremity of them and that all of Murdoch’s accumulated misdeeds are now catching up to him.

     Over the past 50 years, Rupert Murdoch has constructed a massive news media conglomeration, starting after working for his father’s newspaper company. Since the founding of News Corporation in 1979, Murdoch has gone on to acquire The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, 20^th Century Fox Film and Fox Broadcasting Company, as well as most news outlets throughout his homeland of Australia. He has billions and billions of dollars to his name and employed his son, James, as chairman and chief executive under Murdoch’s board of directors.

     Former chief executive and former editor of News Corp Rebekah Brooks had also been involved in the case since 2002, when she was an editor for the company. She had originally claimed to know nothing about the phone hacking or the messages deleted from Dowler’s phone. In July of 2011, smack in the middle of News Corps’ downward spiral, she announced her resignation in a statement saying,

     “As chief executive of the company, I feel a deep sense of responsibility for the people we have hurt and I want to reiterate how sorry I am for what we now know to have taken place. I have believed that the right and responsible action has been to lead us through the heat of the crisis. However my desire to remain on the bridge has made me a focal point of the debate. This is now detracting attention from all our honest endeavours to fix the problems of the past. Therefore I have given Rupert and James Murdoch my resignation. While it has been a subject of discussion, this time my resignation has been accepted”

      In other words, it seems that her duties were relinquished to maintain damage control. Murdoch, on the other hand, faces serious charges, including millions of dollars in fines from various outlets. Murdoch’s News of the World was also closed this past July as a result of the scandal, and the courts have yet to reach a final decision on the fate of Rupert Murdoch and his staggering conglomerate.

     “Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius,” Apple stated in a eulogy of sorts on its website.  “Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor.  Steve leaves behind a company only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.”

     Jobs was born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955, and was subsequently adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, who promised his birth mother that they would send him to a university when the time came.  Growing up in Cupertino, California, Jobs received his diploma from Homestead High School.  During his high school career, he would frequently attend after school lectures in Palo Alto at the Hewlett-Packard Company (better known as HP), where he was eventually hired for a summer job, getting to work with Steve Wozniak.  In 1972 Jobs enrolled into Reed College in Portland, Oregon, fulfilling the promise Paul and Clara Jobs made to their adoptive son’s birthmother, however, Jobs dropped out of college after a semester.  After dropping out of Reed, Jobs still audited classes at the Portland college, sleeping on the floors of friends’ apartments, and living off of the money he received from recycling Coke bottles and the free weekly meals given out at the local Hindu Hare Krishna temple.  It wasn’t until autumn of 1974 that Jobs returned to his home state of California, where he got a job working at Atari, reuniting with Wozniak as his coworker.  After two years of working at Atari, which was interrupted at one point by a trip to India wherein Jobs was immersed in and later converted to Buddhism, Jobs and Wozniak left Atari, having bigger plans in mind.

     Together with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, Jobs brought Apple Computers to life in 1976.  Two years later, in 1978, Mike Scott from National Semiconductor was brought on to the team as CEO, inaugurating what would turn out to be troubling years for the still rising computer company.  Jobs replaced Scott with John Sculley in 1983 as Apple’s CEO, pulling the new member of the team from Pepsi-Cola with a single question: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”  Sculley later turned out to be almost no better than Scott, described as rather temperamental in the way he interacted with his fellow employees.  And after what Sculley deemed to be insufficient performance, Jobs was released from his position at Apple in May 1985.

     After working with Apple for a number of years, even introducing the Macintosh line of computers in 1984, revolutionizing the way the world thought about personal computers, Jobs was fresh out of work in 1985, founding NeXT Computer that same year.  NeXT was later purchased by Apple for $429 million in 1996, thus bringing Jobs back into the fold.  During NeXT’s lifetime, Jobs was also involved with Disney and Pixar, of which he was a significant investor, to the point of being listed in the credits for Toy Story just before returning to Apple.  It was in 1993 that Sculley was at last forced out of Apple after the company’s years of eroding value; he was replaced by Gil Amelio, who was in turn replaced by Jobs as CEO of Apple upon his return in 1996.  Wasting no time, Jobs hit the ground running in once again revolutionizing the computer world: in 1998, the iMac was finally introduced, sparking a greater interest in personal computers; in 2001 the iPod and its complementary iTunes are both unveiled; in 2007, after changing the company’s name to Apple Inc., the iPhone and iPod Touch are both brought on the scene, the former of the two really kicking the smart-phone movement into top gear; in 2010 the iPad, Apple’s first ever tablet computer, is shown off and put on sale that April.

     Finally, after a legacy of computer production and innovation, which one could argue began when he constructed and even sold his first computer at the age of 16, Jobs announced on August 24, 2011 that he would be officially resigning as Apple’s Chief Executive Officer.

     Jobs career with apple from 1996 to 2011 was unbelievably successfully, yet his time was interspersed by frequently occurring health issues and consequential though temporary leaves of absence.  Now, though Apple said goodbye to one of its pioneer and long-time leader as its CEO, Jobs still remained as the chairman of Apple’s board of directors.  Hours after the announcement of Jobs’s resignation, Apple’s stocks dropped by as much as five percent and Walt Disney’s by 1.5 percent, admittedly less of an impact than was originally expected subsequent to the resignation of Apple’s poster-boy.

     Despite no longer being Chief Executive Officer of Apple Inc., Jobs still had a pull in Apple’s administrative side.  This influence was shown when Jobs’s request that the already planned process of executive succession be followed as was, thus naming the up and coming Tim Cook as Jobs’s replacement.  Cook has held significant positions in computer companies such as Compaq, IBM and Intelligent Electronics, yet it may be his accomplishments while working for Apple that may have truly caught people’s attention.  One of Cook’s most notable achievements at Apple was when he created a groundbreaking plan to shut down factories and warehouses worldwide in order to cut down on manufacturing, thus reducing cumbersome inventory, significantly increasing the company’s net profit and streamlining supply chains.  This feat earned him a promotion to Chief Operating Officer in 2007.  Cook has also sat in as acting CEO of Apple on at least three prior occasions: once in 2004 during one of Jobs’s bouts with pancreatic cancer, in 2009 while Jobs was out due to a liver transplant, and once more in January 2011 when Jobs’s most recent medical leave was approved by Apple’s board of directors.

     Despite some fears of Apple employees and fans alike, Cook affirms that nothing will change from how Jobs left things, not even with the company coming under new management.  With Tim Cook at the helm of this highly prestigious and global corporation, one can only guess where Apple may be headed after the guidance and leadership given by Jobs is replaced by that of Cook.

     Now, Apple has bid its longtime builder and innovator Steve Jobs goodbye forever.  A day after the release of the iPhone 4S, Steve Jobs passed away.  In a statement from Jobs’s family, it seems he “died peacefully,” though little to nothing has been said about the cause of death.  However, despite Jobs’s habit of keeping his health issues quite hidden from the media – just one of the fruits of his naturally secretive side — it seems to be almost of little surprise that this founder of Apple passed away when he did.

     In this time of both mourning and rebirth for Apple, it may be wise to remember a quote from Steve Jobs himself: “Death is very likely the single best invention of Life.  It is Life’s change agent.  It clears out the old to make way for the new.”

     Though this discovery seems unimpressive and inconsequential at first glance, the claims of considerably authoritative news networks (such as the Jewish Chronicle, and the well-known British Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC) have kindled such a flame of interest in these thin, credit card-sized sheets of metal.  Ever since March, the story of the Jordan Lead Codices have been bent and twisted into something more akin to folklore than anything else.  Since the publicity of these books has been relatively recent, it would be almost moot to relate the history of reports made in the past few months; therefore, it would be more prudent to analyze the codices themselves and weigh their claims.  After all, why take such bold claims at face value?

     Ever since the first publications of these metal books, very few scholars have been allowed access to the artifacts, but the majority of witnesses have stated with competence that these ringed books are outright frauds; quite frankly, there are pieces of this story which can be debunked without having the items in your own hands.  However, before analyzing any aspects of a product, one must first have a good understanding of what they’re actually looking at.

     These Jordan Lead Codices consist of 20 or more piles of five to 15 leaves of cast lead, each one being ring-bound into books.  The lead of these items has been supposedly Carbon dated to around the year 30 CE, making them incredibly significant to Christians today, since that timeframe is quite close to the year the historical Jesus of Nazareth was crucified (that event being sometime between 27 and 30 CE).  Moreover, the plates of some of these books seem to depict not only Jewish symbols (such as one clear instance of a menorah), but also messianic imagery (figures depicting a messiah-figure), making them even more significant when considering the era they are supposedly from.  Finally, the plates are inscribed with near untranslatable Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic text.

     Now, let us nitpick.

     Firstly, as rogueclassicism.com puts it, the idea of these books being made of “cast lead” should cast some doubt on these metal plates.

     “I would be very happy if anyone can point me to an example of a cast lead codex of any kind from any period.  As far as I’m aware, this would have been utterly unprecedented at the time,” says Rogueclassicist of the aforementioned website.  “Even Roman military diplomas (in bronze) were incised. Of course, if these ‘books’ were so important, one has to wonder why such a malleable medium such as lead would be used.”

     Second, the fact that the lead is clocked at two millennia means little to nothing.  The significance of this is that the earliest source of the New Testament today (a fragment of the Gospel of John, found in Egypt, smaller than a playing card) is dated to only a few decades into the second century CE, several years after the narrative which this particular story is to have taken place.  Therefore, if these codices were truly from or around the year 30 AD, and if they were truly the products of the earliest Christians (and that’s already a lot of “if”s), then they would be even more important than the Dead Sea Scrolls.  However, it does not take a genius forger to steal ancient lead from an old burial site or from the ruins of a city, hammer it flat, then scratch some writing in it; in other words, even if you draw a mustache on the actual Mona Lisa, it’s still not Da Vinci’s handy-work.

     Third, as for the symbology of these leaves, each impressed image is highly suspect.  To be brief, the images are either from coins that far postdate when the books were to have been created (such as a face that is supposedly Jesus Christ, but which looks suspiciously like a coin depicting the Greek god Helios), or simply badly done (such as the impression of a crocodile, which looks almost like a children’s toy).  The menorah on one leaf also means nothing, given that such a symbol is not exclusive to the first century.

     Fourth and finally, the text pressed into the metal is silly.  There are several points making the writing highly suspect: the codices are claimed to be written in code, but what one calls “writing in code,” another calls unintelligible gibberish; many Greek lines have actually been traced to inscriptions on burial sites having nothing to do with the alleged time or context of these books (perhaps the text was acquired while thieving the lead); and the Aramaic uses a mix of ancient and far more modern script, comparable to reading a King James Bible said to be from 1611 printed in Helvetica.

     All in all, these points should at least cast some doubt on these books.  Though, given the fact that these codices have been shown to only a select few, and since the stories publicizing them have been so varied, I reserve the right to be utterly and completely wrong.  However, even if all things considered are simply “misinterpreted,” it is important to always remember that if the lead book isn’t what it says it is, then it’s probably just Mona Lisa sporting a mustache.