Numerous things have gone wrong here, but I think everything is working again—the car, the garage door, the phone and the TV. Our son (manager of a dealer Quick Serve) put my car up on the rack and found a huge chunk of frozen ice and dirt in the wheel well hitting the tail pipe causing a loud noise, and he fixed the “low tire” dash light which had been on for 4 months and inflating the tire didn’t seem to fix it; then the garage door wouldn’t go down when it was 10 below zero, and our son stopped over, got a ladder and unplugged it (rebooted) and it started working (had not gone down during our 2 coldest, below zero nights causing the neighbors to call and remind us to close the door); then the phones stopped working with a message, “no line,” so I thought well, if it worked with the garage door maybe it works with the phone, so I unplugged it, and they started working; then the TV quit, so I couldn’t reach the plug and turned off the surge protector to reboot, and then everything quit even the cable box, but it was working this morning after rebooting. So the word of the day/week is “reboot.”
Thursday, February 26, 2015
I agree with John Kerry, the world today is less violent than the 20th century
John Kerry is wrong about a lot, but I think history proves him correct about the 21st century being safer than the 20th, at least so far, although we’re only 15 years into it. It's aggravating that conservative talkers and news shows jumped on that as somehow downplaying what we face now. Obama has still made a mess of things--we would have been much safer if he hadn't blown up the pull out from Iraq which allowed ISIS to expand, but at least in 2015, the world is safer than in 1970 or 1944.
"Our citizens, our world today is actually, despite ISIL, despite the visible killings that you see and how horrific they are, we are actually living in a period of less daily threat to Americans and to people in the world than normally, less deaths, less violent deaths today than through the last century." John Kerry
Governments killed their own citizens in the 20th century to the tune of about 100 million--and that's not counting the world wars--and there is nothing around today, not ISIS, Taliban or al-qaeda that can match the cruelty and killing of the Communists of USSR and China, the North Koreans who starved millions of their citizens and the National Socialists of Germany or the Turks who killed millions of Armenian Christians under their control. I think he said it poorly in light of the current news about various threats, but even a few months a go I blogged on this topic, and I think I was using conservative sources. The jihadists are trying to build up steam for their Caliphate, but so far are no match for the terror and crime of the 20th century. Because the Democrats are being eaten from the inside by their own radicals and Communists, Kerry probably doesn't dare mention the history behind those words, or that it was the president [Reagan], the pope [John Paul II] and the prime minister [Thatcher] who made the 21st century safer for all of us by bringing down the Soviet Union.
But, the 20th century looked pretty good and progressive until 1914, so maybe we’ll have to wait and see about it being safer today. So far, I think we are.
Collard greens soup and baked butternut squash
with a side of black beans and brown rice. That’s the sort of things I’m eating these days for lunch, along with fat free feta cheese (bleh) and fat free yogurt (also bleh). (Feta cheese is made with sheep's or goat's milk and it has a bold and tangy flavor. The cheese supplies key vitamins and minerals, but it can also be high in saturated fat and sodium.) The secret to my loosing weight is to not eat things I love and which will encourage my taste buds to ask for more. I’m a sucker for cheddar cheese, peanut butter, Fritoes and potato chips. My daughter has been known to accuse me of “grazing” at her house. Also cookies. Love cookies. I can avoid candy and cake with no problems. After a week of no weight loss, I finally see a little progress. I bought a pair of navy slacks Tuesday at VOA for $.50. They fit great and I think a touch of Lycra and a good brand is the secret to a good fit—like Docker’s or Talbot’s . I also bought Pendleton blue jeans for $.50 but they are still too tight. I didn’t know Pendleton even made jeans, but they are awfully nice. About a year ago I had given away all my 8’s and 10’s, so yesterday I took some cotton jeans of various colors and sizes, washed them, and put them in the dryer. They fit now. Usually I never put jeans in the dryer.
It wasn’t curried, but this is a possibility.
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Parks and Recreation ending and I’ve never heard of it
“The writers worked hard to make sure that not one citizen of the fictional Pawnee, Ind.,was left with a dream unfulfilled. The finale, packed with inside jokes and guest stars, showed multiple flash-forwards of the characters through the years. The end result? Every character ended up exactly where they were meant to be, except about a hundred times better”
Net Neutrality is a "Solution That Won't Work to a Problem That Doesn't Exist"
Ajit Pai is an oustpoken opponent of expanding government control of the internet, including FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's plan to regulate Internet Service Providers (ISPs) under the same Title II rules that are used to govern telephone-service providers as public utilities. Under current FCC regulations, ISPs are considered providers of "information services" and subject to essentially no federal regulation.
Bye, bye internet freedoms
In a commentary, “Neutralize Obama’s Hijacking of the Internet”, Judi McLeod, the editor of CanadaFreePress.com, said “Forget NSA, the FBI, the CIA, and all warnings sent by Edward Snowden. They’ve got nothing on how Net Neutrality will silence you.”
“Someday in the near future when you type in the words “Islamic terrorists” in an Internet post, you will be knocked off the Net and find it all but impossible to climb back on again.”
Both ObamaCare and “Obamanet” submit huge industries to complex regulations. Their supporters say the new rules had to be passed before anyone could read them. But at least ObamaCare claimed it would solve long-standing problems. Obamanet promises to fix an Internet that isn’t broken.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/l-gordon-crovitz-from-internet-to-obamanet-1424644324
Stacy Dash hasn’t changed her mind
“I didn’t know anything about [Obama] when I voted for him in 2008. My choice to do so was purely because he was black,” she admitted. “Naively, I thought he would be the right person for the job but unfortunately it didn’t turn out that way. Obama had the opportunity to really unite this country in such a profound way, but instead he has done the opposite. We are so divided right now, everything has become about race, more than I’ve ever known in my lifetime.”
Stacey Dash, a black actress, was quoted in Huffington Post in 2012 as supporting Romney, and admitted to Fox News (and again today) that she voted for Obama because he was black and sincerely hoped he would bring the country together. Her Twitter account was swamped with hate. It’s hard for blacks to live outside the Democrat party. I’ve yet to see a conservative black guest/talking head on any show not say he/she voted for Obama with that hope. They are admitting those hopes have been dashed. (Pardon the pun).
An Iraqi-Assyrian speaks out after the burning of the Mosul public library
“When ISIS first attacked Mosul, we Assyrians living in America protested and begged for help. We have lived as a minority in Iraq for hundreds of years, we have faced oppression, but when ISIS came we knew this was unlike anything we have ever faced before. Far worse than anything Saddam himself could have imagined. People counter protested us said it was not America's problem, citing the Iraq war. This is nothing like the Iraq war and I think now people are starting to understand why it is our problem. This isn't some backwards, stupid terrorist group. The leader of ISIS is CIA trained; he is smart unlike anything I've ever seen in the middle east before, and he wants to establish a caliphate. He won't stop until he wipes out the US and other westerners off the map. Now, he may very well be in absolutely no position to do that ever, but at the rate he is going he will be strong enough to cause us a lot of problems very soon.” Commenter at the article on burning the library, a Christian church and a theater.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/isis-burns-8000-rare-books-030900856.html
“The library was looted in 2003 and the citizens of Mosul restored it. During the US led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the library was looted and destroyed by mobs. However, the people living nearby managed to save most of its collections and rich families bought back the stolen books and they were returned to the library, All Faraj added.”
I lay the ISIS problems—the killing, torture and building of the caliphate--at the feet of President Obama, who could have prevented all this loss by leaving minimal armed U.S. military in the country. ISIS flooded in even before our pull out which had conveniently been announced with a time table. And if he were a secret Muslim, what would be different? As it is, he is just another just-us social justice Christian.
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
Workout in the kitchen while you’re cooking
You can dance, or clean, or do brief workouts while waiting for the timer, or put things in less convenient places (that doesn’t sound like a good idea to me) and march in place. I started subscribing to this newsletter about 20 years ago. Always something interesting.
Patricia Arquette got it all wrong for several reasons
First of all, there is no longer a pay gap—and hasn’t been for a number of years. A 2009 report commissioned by the Labor Department that analyzed more than 50 papers on the topic found that the so-called pay gap “may be almost entirely” the result of choices both men and women make. In fact, in a number of cities, young college educated women are out-earning young college educated men. Someone should complain.
Secondly, although I don’t see a lot of movies, I know they are based on the box office draw of certain stars. If the women aren’t a draw, they don’t get the lucrative contracts—and they all have agents who do the negotiating. In the movie I watched last night Diane Lane made $6,000,000 for this movie, more than what’s her name who played her sister, or the guy who was John Cusak’s buddy. She probably made more than Cusak, since in 2005 she was a bigger draw. Most actors will fall into the $10 to $30 an hour range with the large part of that is around $16 hourly. That’s a long way from $6,000,000 ten years ago. Tom Hanks made about $800 for a film he was in in 1980.
And third, Meryl Streep (net worth $45 million) sitting in the front jumped up and stole her thunder, grabbing the camera’s attention, and thus the nation’s. What is the pay difference between Streep and Arquette? Is it fair? Why always compare women to men. Why not women to women? There are great pay gaps there. Nancy Pelosi is worth millions and Tina who works the cash register at Panera’s will probably never have much more than she has now. Patricia Arquette (net worth $24 million) sure makes a lot more money than veterinary medicine librarians—all of them put together.
“Women don't get equal pay in America, says actress Patricia Arquette, and she blames the Founders. "To every woman who gave birth, to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else's equal rights," Arquette said in her Oscar acceptance speech. "It's time to have wage equality once and for all. And equal rights for women in the United States of America." The supposed pay gap has been largely discredited, but never confuse a liberal (especially one from Hollywood) with facts. Worse, Arquette went on to blame the men who fought to secure Liberty and who authored our Constitution. "It's inexcusable that we go around the world and we talk about equal rights for women in other countries when we don't have equal rights for women in America," Arquette lectured. "And we don't because when they wrote the Constitution, they didn't intend it for women." In the Heritage Foundation's Guide to the Constitution, Tiffany Jones Miller explains, "Contrary to popular belief, the United States Constitution of 1787 is a gender-neutral document. Throughout the original text, the Framers refer to 'persons' -- as opposed to 'male persons' -- and use the pronoun 'he' only in the generic sense. The word 'male' did not even appear in the Constitution until the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868." In other words, Arquette suffers from something common to men and women on the Left: ignorance.” Patriot Post, Daily Digest, Feb. 24, 2015
Monday, February 23, 2015
Must love dogs the movie
Watching this 2005 movie—and it sort of looks familiar. Maybe I saw it? Diane Lane and John Cusack, and a story about internet dating for 2 divorced people. I guess fashion doesn’t change much in 10 years if everyone wears jeans. Hoodies and big loopy scarves. Can those really be 10 years old?
Sustainability on the campus
“Sustainability” is a key idea on college campuses in the United States and the rest of the Western world. To the unwary, sustainability is just a new name for environmentalism. But the word really marks out a new and larger territory. As an ideology, sustainability sets forth demands to curtail economic, political, and intellectual liberty as the price that must be paid now to ensure the welfare of future generations.”
50 shades of grey--if you’re naked it’s sadomasochism, if you’re not naked, it’s just violence
Judith Reisman has written a number of studies and books on the damage that Alfred Kinsey’s sex research did to society. The wide acceptance of Kinsey’s claims, she contends, has contributed to a degradation in morality, teaching sex in schools and the expansion of pornography. She traces the mommy porn of 50 shades back to him.
http://www.wnd.com/2015/02/kinsey-blamed-for-50-shades-mommy-porn/
She accuses Kinsey of child sexual assaults in his “research.”
“One of the main things would be for us have a congressional investigation of Kinsey, to see where people were so completely lied to, how this began,” she said.
There have been previous, unsuccessful attempts at such investigations, she said.
The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University is getting millions of tax dollars, she said, at minimum $21 million in recent years.”
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/dec/30/entertainment/la-et-kinsey-films-20101230
Gershon Legman, the original compiler for Kinsey's pornography collection, revealed that
Kinsey's not-very-secret intention was to "respectabilize" homosexuality and certain sexual perversions ... He did not hesitate to extrapolate his utterly inadequate and inconclusive samplings to the whole population of the United States, not to say the world ... This is pure propaganda, and is ridiculously far from the mathematical or statistical science pretended.[5]
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/776356/posts
http://www.whale.to/b/reisman3.html
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/19/nih-funds-study-men-dont-like-use-condoms/
Lent Day 6–The 2nd temptation of Christ
I usually don’t copy an entire story/meditation, providing a link instead. But for this one, it was so appropriate to power grabs of today, I hope Father Robert Barron won’t fault me for providing the whole thought. You can receive these by e-mail.
Photo by Lisa Hendey
Having failed at his first attempt to tempt Jesus in a direct and relatively crude way, the devil plays a subtler game: "The devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a single instant."
This is the more rarefied, more refined temptation of power. Power is one of the greatest motivating factors in all of human history. Alexander the Great, Caesar, Augustus, Marcus Aurelius, Charlemagne, the Medicis, Charles V, Henry VIII, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Nixon, and Kissinger - all the way down to your boss at work. These are all people who have been seduced, at one time or another, by the siren song of power.
We notice something very disquieting in the account of this temptation: the devil admits that all the kingdoms of the world have been given to him. He owns and controls them. That is quite a sweeping indictment of the institutions of political power. But it resonates with our sense that attaining high positions of power and not becoming corrupt is difficult to do.
It might be useful here to recall the two great names for the devil in the Bible: ho Satanas, which means the adversary, and ho diabolos, which means the liar or the deceiver. Worldly power is based upon accusation, division, adversarial relationships, and lies. It's the way that earthly rulers have always done their business.
A tremendous temptation for Jesus was to use his Messianic authority to gain worldly power, to become a king. But if he had given in to this, he would not be consistently a conduit of the divine grace. He would be as remembered today as, perhaps, one of the governors of Syria or satraps of Babylon (and do you remember the first-century satrap of Babylon?)
No, Jesus wanted to be the one through whom the divine love surged into creation, and so he said to Satan, "It is written: 'You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him alone shall you serve.'"
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Mayor Coleman compared to President Obama
If you want to understand former Mayor Giuliani’s remarks about President Obama’s love for country, just compare Obama’s speeches about the U.S. with our Mayor Colman’s. He recently gave his 16th state of the city address (doesn’t plan to run for a 5th term), and frankly, I’ve never heard such a cheerleader. Maybe Mayors just talk differently than Presidents, but I’ve never thought the President liked us or the country. I think I said that in 2008. Even when President Obama talks about things he really shouldn’t be taking credit for, he doesn’t sound sincere and even when he isn’t wagging a finger at us, I feel like he is.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/02/20/obamas-white-mother-and-other-awkward-efforts-by-rudy-giuliani-to-explain-himself/ (Misleading headline alert)
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/02/19/state-of-the-city.html
At one time Coleman had his eye on higher office, but his wife had some problems with alcohol, and he decided he was more needed at home. However, some years later they did separate and divorce.
The polar vortex is back
If this was a bulls eye, I think it would be Columbus.
Our streets were finally cleared around 3 p.m. yesterday, now the snow has melted on the sidewalks and condo street, but more cold to come.
“NOAA’s Weather Prediction Center writes that the dangerously cold outbreak is surging south thanks in part to an appendage of the polar vortex. “There are indications that this could be some of the coldest weather since the mid-1990s for parts of the Southeast U.S., Mid-Atlantic, and central Appalachians,” it wrote. “An eddy of the polar vortex will add to the potency of the surface cold front, thus creating a deep layer of bitterly cold air.” . . . the week’s record-breaking cold is not just Arctic, but Siberian air that has been trudging across the North Pole and into North America — leading many to refer to the outbreak as the “Siberian Express.” ”
Our church Haiti mission team got out of Columbus on schedule last night and out of Miami on schedule this morning.
The non-measles outbreak is taking lives—EV-D68
“CDC and medical experts state that measles is very dangerous: for every 1,000 cases of measles there will be approximately 2 deaths. But the death risk among serious cases of EV-D68 may be several fold greater: at least 14 associated deaths reported among 1,153 cases.” Sharyl Attkisson
Saturday, February 21, 2015
Net Neutrality—I don’t like the idea. And you?
“Those favoring net neutrality claim to fear that, without government intervention, Internet service providers might "discriminate" among users or content providers or may block access to web sites. In this view, government must intervene to prevent such discrimination or blocking from occurring.
Those opposing net neutrality fear that the greater threat to Internet freedom arises from giving the government the power -- or, more accurately, the government arrogating unto itself the power -- to determine whether private Internet providers are discriminating among users or content providers, or to force Internet providers to carry content they may prefer not to transmit. This fear is enhanced by the knowledge that net neutrality's "discrimination" prohibition is inherently vague, and, therefore, that the range of bureaucratic discretion is inherently large, if not unbounded.”
http://www.cnet.com/news/why-net-neutrality-is-incompatible-with-internet-freedom/#!
“You want a Department of the Internet like we have a Department of the Interior and we have a Department of Internal Revenue Service?” Beck asked. “This is it. You like your health care? You couldn’t keep your health care. You like your Internet?”
Obama refuses to stop the NSA telephone record program, despite the recommendation of his own Board
“The Administration has not implemented the [Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight] Board’s recommendation to halt the NSA’s telephone records program, which it could do at any time without congressional involvement. Instead, the Administration has continued the program, with modifications, while seeking legislation to create a new system for government access to telephone records under Section 215.” http://www.pclob.gov/newsroom/20150129.html
The Board stated, "the Administration can end the bulk telephone records program at any time, without congressional involvement." EPIC [Electronic Privacy Information Center] and a broad coalition have repeatedly urged the President end the NSA's bulk record collection program. Previously, EPIC petitioned the Supreme Court, with the support of dozens of legal experts, arguing that the NSA program was unlawful. (Jan. 30, 2015)
The PCLOB is an independent agency within the executive branch established by the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007. The bipartisan, five-member Board is appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. By statute, the Chairman serves full time, but the four other Board members serve in their positions part-time. The PCLOB’s mission is to ensure that the federal government’s efforts to prevent terrorism are balanced with the need to protect privacy and civil liberties. http://www.pclob.gov/about-us.html
He says he’s not a parody of a preacher, but he could have fooled me
I got an e-mail today from the Church of Stop Shopping Choir and its '”preacher” Rev. Billy describing their protest at Monsanto and Ferguson. Wikipedia is a biased source on just about everything, but I didn’t want to devote a lot of my time to this actor/character/charade, so this is what it says, although I’m not sure if he is a parody of a Christian pastor, or a wing-nut environmentalist-activist:
“Bill Talen (born May 25, 1950) is a Dutch-American Calvinist Minnesota-born, Franconia College-educated actor who moved to New York City from San Francisco in the early 1990s, where he had originally created a character that was a hybrid of street preacher, arguably Elvis, and televangelist called Reverend Billy. This character was performed in various San Francisco alternative theater venues, where Talen had earned a considerable reputation as both a performer and a producer (Life On The Water theater, the Solo Mio Festival, Writers Who Act, etc.) In New York, Talen began appearing as Reverend Billy on street corners in Times Square, near the recently opened Disney Store. Times Square had recently begun its transformation from a seedy but lively center of small-time and sometimes illicit commerce—and also of New York theatre—to a more gentrified and tourist-friendly venue for large companies like Disney and big-budget stage productions like The Lion King. Whereas other street preachers chose Times Square because of its reputation for sin, Reverend Billy's sermons focused on the evils of consumerism and advertising—represented especially by Disney and Mickey Mouse—and on what Talen saw as the loss of neighborhood spirit and cultural authenticity in Rudolph Giuliani's New York.
Talen's chief collaborator in developing the Reverend Billy character was the Reverend Sidney Lanier. A cousin of Tennessee Williams with an interest in avant-garde theater, Lanier was then the vicar of St. Clement's, an Episcopal church in Hell's Kitchen that doubled as a theatrical space, where Talen was working as house manager. Lanier encouraged Talen, who was suspicious of religious figures after rejecting the conservative Protestantism of his youth, to study radical theologians and performers; of these, Talen credits Elaine Pagels and Lenny Bruce as particularly strong influences. Though Talen does not call himself a Christian, he says that Reverend Billy is not a parody of a preacher, but a real preacher; he describes his church's spiritual message as "put the Odd back in God."
Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir is a non-profit organization that includes Talen, director Savitri Durkee (who is married to Talen), a 40-member choir, and the Not Buying It band.”
Posts
