Update on Miley the rescued Husky

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guXVL-mMcbI

Includes a cute Chihuahua called Frankie in the story who became Miley’s friend. I watched an interview with her new owner today on Fox News.  Her dogs and her husband had died.  She was one of about 500 who applied to be Miley’s owner and says the dog has save HER.  She’s the one shown in the back ground taking photos and from the looks of her home, Miley is one lucky dog.

Maisie Dobbs mysteries

If I didn't belong to a book club, I'd probably never read fiction. But last year the group read "Maisie Dobbs," by Jacqueline Winspear, a mystery about the aftermath of WWI. For porch reading, my husband who reads less fiction than I do, picked it up this past summer, and liked it, so our daughter found 2 for him at a Marblehead (OH) used bookstore. I bought him 5 more for Christmas. There is another (the 11th) due in 2015 and I still need the 2nd and 3rd. http://www.jacquelinewinspear.com/novels.php

Much of our culture—books, movies, history—focuses on WWII.  We forget what a terrible tragedy WWI was—lives lost and countries realigned.  The series is interesting from that point of view.

http://collectingmythoughts.blogspot.com/2007/03/3601-only-7000-dead-and-wounded-today-i.html

Biblical archeology—list of resources

Bibarch.  http://www.bibarch.com/

  Seems to be a list of sources and links. Biblical archaeology, with its concentration on the Levant, deals with the study of the archaeology of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. Through biblical archaeology scholars gain a fuller perception of the events and the lifeways of the peoples described in the Bible. In biblical archaeology we reconstruct the lifeways of biblical peoples and learn of the cultural change, known as cultural process, in their civilizations.

Biblical archaeology review magazine  http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/magazine/

“Biblical Archaeology Review is a one-of-a-kind archaeology magazine that acts as a bridge between the academic study of archaeology and a broad general audience eager to understand the world of the Bible better.” Written for scholars and lay people, Christians and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Evangelicals and main line members. I signed on for a free e-book, but not sure of its direction or slant; included with e-mail updates.  I think the church library at UALC has this.

American Schools of Oriental Research http://www.asor.org/ 

Digital newsletter archives at the site. Publishes The Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (BASOR)  “a leader among peer-reviewed academic journals of the ancient Near East.”  Digitally you can read table of contents, abstracts and preview of the first page.  I could read this on JSTOR (if I’d up date my OSU record). Latest issue (in Dec. 2014) seems to be May 2014, and there are 2 issues a year.  Other features like archives of photographs. http://digilibtest.bu.edu/sth/archon-asor/index.php?p=digitallibrary/thumbnails&collectionid=32

This will be updated as I find more that interest me.

The Serenity Prayer—”enjoying one moment at a time”—don’t miss that!

God, grant me
The SERENITY to accept the things I cannot change,
The COURAGE to change the things I can,
And the WISDOM to know the difference;

LIVING one day at a time;
ENJOYING one moment at a time;
ACCEPTING hardship as a pathway to peace;
TAKING, as Jesus did, this sinful world, as it is, not as I would have it;
TRUSTING that You will make all things right if I surrender to Your will;

So that I may be REASONABLY happy in this life and
SUPREMELY happy with You forever in the next. Amen.
Adapted from Reinhold Niebuhr

Helman and the VA scandal

Oh my.  Do I really want to look into this expanded VA mess? It had all been swept under the table by removals and firings, and now Helman brings a law suit to get her job back, and someone unwraps the garbage. She couldn’t be blamed for the wait times, but could be fired for accepting improper gifts from lobbyists.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2886481/Judge-weighs-firing-Phoenix-VA-director.html

Sharon Helman was removed from her job after the Phoenix VA became the epicenter of allegations that veterans died while waiting to see a doctor

Judge also found Helman could not be fired because of the secret lists and long wait times, saying the VA did not prove that Helman was involved

House VA committee chair Jeff Miller said the ruling serves as a reminder that additional Phoenix VA employees must be held accountable

Dismissal was justified by acceptance of nine improper gifts from a lobbyist including airfare around the country and entry into amarathon

Other gifts were a trip to Disneyland for 'what appears to be six of her family members for an 8-night stay' and $729.50 for five tickets - and parking - to an August 2013 Beyonce concert

She continued to receive an $170,000 annual salary even though she was on administrative leave.

A trip to the library

I went to the library this morning to return a book that had been sent by mistake (same title as the one I wanted) and ended up spending a lot of money. It wasn't open yet, so I took a walk around the park for 10 minutes—it was a beautiful day and not cold, plus the land is flat there and doesn’t bother my bursitis.  Then  I went to Giant Eagle to do a little after x-mas shopping (always a shock since I usually buy groceries at Marc’s).  Then on to Macy's to check out some sales. While there I found a "little black dress" and used what was left of my Sept. birthday balance from my daughter. Now I need some place really nice to wear it. Libraries can be very expensive.

Liberal judge encourages violence

This liberal white judge is endangering people in the black community and police officers. These two thugs are violent, and should be off the streets to cool down. The excusers claimed the man who shot 2 police was just one crazy lone wolf; these two have also advertised their anti-social, irrational behavior and the judge is ignoring that and the law. What's her record on domestic violence or child abusers? Are they getting freedom after threats and violence? Devon Coley was freed by Judge Johnson without bail two days ago after making threats against NYPD. Travis Maye was freed after punching a police officer.

http://nypost.com/2014/12/25/judge-frees-another-cop-hater-who-punched-officer/

Criminal Court Judge Laura Johnson wouldn’t be ignoring threats and punches against women by their boyfriends—or would she?

 

http://nypost.com/2014/12/26/de-blasio-must-decide-by-new-years-eve-whether-to-appoint-anti-cop-judge/

When Harry met Obamacare

Harry Lewis writes: “After signing up for ObamaCare on Christmas Eve (ObamaCare forced the cancellation of my private health insurance), I now realize that people on public assistance waive virtually all of their privacy and autonomy rights as a condition of being eligible for public assistance. And ObamaCare treats you like you're on public assistance, forcing you to waive your privacy and autonomy rights to get health insurance. That's because of the "tax credits", really government subsidies, paid for by other taxpayers, that the poor are getting. That's the high price of the ObamaCare entitlement: millions of Americans surrendering their privacy and autonomy against their wills, whether they're poor or not. ObamaCare defines the deviancy of government intrusions down in a profound and shocking way, as millions more Americans are about to discover.”

When I was being interrogated by the ObamaCare representative over the telephone about my background as part of my application for new health insurance through the federal exchange, she asked me a series of intrusive and demeaning questions, i.e., are you an ex-con; are you an illegal alien, etc. (after she knew I was a lawyer) without ever asking me a key question: have you had health insurance before? That's an important omission. The Obama Administration doesn't want to collect that information, because it exposes how many Americans (like me) were stripped of their insurance as part of the ObamaCare debacle. Democrats then proclaim ObamaCare a success as part of a propaganda campaign that discloses only the number of people signed up, without disclosing how many sign-ups are casualties of ObamaCare's first phase: the forced cancellation of millions of private policies like mine. Even the Nazis kept scrupulous records of the number of concentration camp inmates they executed. Not so the Obama Administration with ObamaCare.


The omission also highlights the moral depravity of ObamaCare in two other important respects: Obamacare deliberately destroyed continuity of care, while lying about that destruction to those of the American people who already had health insurance and doctors. The Democratic Party lie: "If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor" and "if you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan", which they thought politically expedient, was a lie about continuity of care to those who already had a health plan and a doctor. As every health care professional knows, continuity of care is about keeping records of medical histories. Without a medical history, a physician is practicing medicine in the dark. That greatly increases the risk of medical malpractice, and of injury or death to the patient. The Democratic lie about continuity of care hugely increased the risk to patients of being injured or killed in the medical system because of the catastrophic destruction of continuity of care on a system-wide basis. The previously uninsured, of course, without a health plan or a doctor, bear no such risk.

Finally, health insurers know that people who have been insured before tend to be more responsible in their personal lives, and that there's a previously existing database of patient information that can be drawn upon to adjust risk in their actuarial calculations. ObamaCare's failure to ask about previous insurance makes a final, damning point: responsible behavior by patients doesn't matter in the veterinary health care system that ObamaCare has created. In veterinary medicine, the degree of health care the pet receives is determined by the budget of the owner, not by the pet itself.

Friday family photo, Christmas 1982

Gabby Hayes was his nick name—his beard was coming in white but his hair was still red. The cat’s name was Mystery and she lived to be 18. After that Christmas I became the shortest person in the family.

The unvaccinated

With the exception of meningitis, I had these plus scarlet fever.  Trust me, it’s not pleasant.

Lots of jolly eating this season

Christmas letters—I love them

Some people make fun of Christmas letters, the ones from friends you hear from once a year, but I love them. Monday we caught up with friends in Texas who had lived in Columbus only one year during a recession and her company transferred her here. He worked briefly for my husband (so it was probably 1994) while trying to find a job. When we visited San Antonio 20 years ago his former employer gave us a tour of the city. Their darling little pre-school boys whose school photos we got every year are all grown up with careers, homes and one is married. Hardly seems possible.

Now instead of school and sports we're reading about the frailties of their parents, assisted living, and Alzheimer's. Janice writes of her dad: "On one of his more lucid days he told me he was going to sit right there in his chair until God came to take him home. Amen." Praise the Lord, he still knows what is important and eternal.

Today I got my first Christmas letter from cousin Barry and his wife Rose Anne. We’ve connected on Facebook, although didn’t know each other well.  I’ve only met her once, in 1993 at a family reunion.  But from the photos of the grandchildren, I’ll need to be updating the genealogy database. Another Christmas letter (hand written) from cousin Sharon in Canada included photos of the homes of our ancestor in Lancaster, PA.

Why we continue pagan elements in our holidays

“So why not celebrate Christmas?  Many cite the pagan rituals that have crept into the practice of Christmas.  The Christmas tree, the giving of gifts, and the mistletoe among many other traditions do have roots in paganism.  If we go back to 4th century ancient Rome, we see a Christianity struggling to evangelize a pagan society.  One of the key ways those early missionaries evangelized the pagans was by taking pagan rituals and infusing them with Christian meaning.  Those missionaries matched pagan holidays with new Christian holidays to help the pagans make smooth transitions into Christianity.  There is nothing wrong with that.  It's a somewhat drastic method of missionary work where you help new believers to remain in their cultural context while allowing the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ to transform the cultural practices.  This allows people to remain in their "people groups" making "people movements" toward Jesus a much more likely possibility.  And what do we see as a result?  The ancient Christians succeeded, and the church grew by leaps and bounds.”  A lifestyle change for peace

Major Crimes can’t come up to the level of The Closer

I sat down to watch "Major Crimes" (spin off of The Closer) last night and immediately began to complain about the writing, acting, directing, location shots, story line, etc. In short, it stinks and I can't imagine how enough people like it to make it into the 4th season. My husband was enjoying it until I came in. He said, "Well, it seemed OK until you started watching.”

“Major Crimes follows the further investigations of the detectives in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Major Crimes division. The crime drama’s cast includes Mary McDonnell, GW Bailey, Tony Denison, Michael Paul Chan, Raymond Cruz, Robert Gossett, Phillip P. Keene, Jonathan Del Arco, Kearran Giovanni, and Graham Patrick Martin. “ Ratings.

How the IRS began covering up its wrongful actions in early 2012

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has released a scathing interim report detailing extreme political "bias" throughout the ranks of the IRS that led to it targeting conservative groups in response to the anti-conservative group rhetoric "being openly and loudly espoused by the President of the United States."

http://aclj.org/free-speech/house-oversight-report-confirms-irs-bias-targeting-icky-conservative-groups

http://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/December-2014-IRS-Report.pdf

Criminal behavior by the IRS affects everyone, destroys trust in the government. Too bad we can’t get protesters to go out and march about that.

Arrest related deaths

From the U.S. Bureau of Justice, “Arrest related deaths.”  42% of persons who died during an arrest were white, 32% were black, and 20% were Hispanic. ( 2003-2009). Of the 98 million arrests, 4,813 resulted in deaths, 40% of which were homicide. 75% of those who died were involved in a violent crime.

So why is homicide for blacks at arrest out of proportion to their population? The offending rate for blacks is 34.4 per 100,000 compared to 4.5 per 100,000 for whites. Based on that figure, it looks like whites are more likely to be killed by police while committing a crime than blacks.

http://www.justice.gov/search/all/death%20by%20arrest

Uniform Crime Reporting

There seems to be a definition and a code for every possible crime in this report. Criminal Justice Information  Services (CJIS) Division Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. . . User Manual.

“The FBI UCR Program is a nationwide, cooperative statistical effort of over 18,000 city, university and college, county, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies (LEAs) voluntarily reporting data on offenses reported or known. Since 1930, the FBI has administered the UCR Program and continued to assess and monitor the nature and type of crime in the nation. The program’s primary objective is to generate reliable information for use in law enforcement administration, operation, and management. However, over the years, UCR data have become one of the country’s leading social indicators. Criminologists, sociologists, legislators, municipal planners, the media, and other students of criminal justice use the data for varied research and planning purposes.

The FBI UCR Program prepared this manual to assist LEAs in reporting crime statistics via the NIBRS. It addresses NIBRS policies, the types of offenses reported via the NIBRS, and guidelines for an agency to become certified to submit NIBRS data to the FBI.”

Example 2, Acting in Concert
A domestic argument escalated from a shouting match between a husband and wife to an aggravated assault during which the husband began beating his wife. The wife, in her own defense, shot and killed the husband. The responding officer submitted one incident report. The LEA should have reported this information via the NIBRS as two separate incidents because the husband could not have been acting in concert with the wife in his own killing. The LEA could have submitted one incident involving the Aggravated Assault perpetrated by the husband and the second incident involving the killing. This would have allowed the maintenance of the original incident number for record keeping purposes at the local level and simultaneously satisfied reporting requirements for the NIBRS.

Hate crime classifications are difficult:

Example 5
A 51-year-old black male wielding a tire iron attacked a 29-year-old Japanese-American male. The victim suffered severe lacerations and a broken arm. The incident took place in a parking lot next to a bar. Investigation revealed the offender and victim had previously exchanged racial insults in the bar; the offender initiated the exchange by calling the victim by a well-known epithet used against the Japanese and complained the Japanese were taking away jobs from Americans. The offense would be reported as 14 = Anti-Asian based on the difference in race of the victim and offender, the exchange of racial insults, and the absence of other reasons for the attack.

Do minorities not want safe streets and neighborhoods?

Harry Lewis comments:  “The Politico article about NYC Mayor de Blasio's current political troubles is revealing. The Democrats interviewed, including David Axelrod, repeatedly assert that because NYC no longer is majority white, a new paradigm of policing is necessary. So Democrats think racial minorities don't want effective law enforcement and safe streets? Instead, they want criminals coddled, and crime victims unprotected? This is condescension and cynicism rooted in deep racism and contempt for racial minorities.”

“De Blasio allies often point out that the city has changed since the days of Giuliani. Blacks and Hispanics are now in the majority. The so-called Giuliani Democrats have largely passed away or moved. The same coalition that elected Obama also swept de Blasio to an outright win in the 2013 primary, helping him avoid a runoff.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/bill-de-blasio-113755.html

At one of Ohio’s elite colleges, Oberlin, which admitted black students as early as 1835 when they must have been made of tougher mettle than today, there’s a movement to suspend the grading system for black students—I think it’s the trauma of all the recent protests (which have mainly been made up of the Occupy Wall Street crowd). That’s the left’s idea of being progressive.

http://redalertpolitics.com/2014/12/16/oberlin-college-students-ask-professors-exempt-students-color-exams/#!

Did you know

Susan Douglas vs. Donald Sterling

A University of Michigan professor, Susan Douglas, published an article and also tells her students in her classroom that Republicans are bad, she has the research, and she hates them.  She keeps her job at a state university supported by Republicans' taxes. Yet Donald Sterling, like Douglas a Democrat, who makes many black men wealthy with jobs as athletes in a private business tells his black mistress in a private conversation he doesn't want her hanging out with black men.  I’m guessing Tiger Woods didn’t want his white mistresses hanging out with black athletes either. For that Sterling loses his athletic team.

Which one has more influence on the minds of young people?  I'd say the professor. She has published five books on American history and I can only imagine the nasty slant. “She has lectured at colleges and universities around the country, and has written for The Nation, In These Times, The Village Voice, Ms., The Washington Post and TV Guide.” [her bio]  Not a single person was hurt by Sterling's racism, but Professor Susan Douglas maligned half the nation.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/394724/u-michigan-department-chair-we-should-hate-republicans-katherine-timpf

http://www.debbieschlussel.com/71095/donald-sterling-racist-nba-owner-is-dem-donor-but-black-nba-players-racism-unnoticed/

http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2014/12/18/um-prof-apologizes-anti-republican-column/20611377/