Captive animals, this is what I think when I see a nose ring in an otherwise attractive woman. My rural background, I suppose. Also worn by bulls so they can be led around by paying attention to the pain. I thought it was cruel when I was a child--and now I wonder if the person just didn't have enough problems--had to add some.
The main objections I hear from Democrats about the wall they were in favor of in 2006, but not in 2017-18 (because Trump is president) are, 1) it won't work, 2) the cost, and 3) it's racist. Let's briefly touch on racism. Border security is not and never was, racist. If it were racist all security methods would also be racist. Even the locks on your doors and automobiles. We wouldn't have security at our northern borders or our airports if protecting borders were racism. During the Obama years, Border Patrol was apprehending illegals from high risk countries coming in from Canada (164 in 2011), and they weren't Canadians, most were recent Muslim immigrants to Canada.
If we judged government programs/policies by cost or whether they work, Head Start, which costs about $10.6 Billion in programing and $5.7 Billion in childcare (2017), would have been dropped years ago. No party will even touch that idea.
It was like pulling teeth to get an impact study (begun in 1998, data collection began in 2002, reported in 2010), but after billions and billions spent on Head Start since 1965, the final impact study showed some social and intellectual advancement in the pre-school years which was lost by the end of first grade. The final study, done by the government and analyzed out the wazoo, showed a huge workforce was paid, children had moderate to good day care, better health care, but the goals of the program were not met. The Head Start children on average did no better than the control group which did NOT receive all those benefits of a government pre-school. Even after a decade of study, the conclusion was--we need more study, more analysis, more explanations, and more money.
https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/opre/executive_summary_final.pdf
If high costs and no discernable results are good enough for Head Start for 50+ years, it should be good enough for at least a decade of border security.
On September 20, 2016, some 6 weeks before the most divisive election I can remember, I wrote in my blog,
“Hillary was speaking at an airport on Sunday in the same zombie voice and blaming Donald Trump for recruitment of terrorists [I had cited a comment Trump had made about a bombing by a Muslim in NYC]. She stated it as fact. Again, his off the cuff words are more important than her carefully planned actions which helped create ISIS and the explosive situation in Syria from her days as Secretary of State. She even said she has "contributed to acts" and current strategy. Not a good recommendation. Stop when you're ahead, lady. “
Mrs. Clinton contributed to the current mess in the middle east, yet Trump is being heaped with blame for withdrawing our troops from Syria. Obama went through 5-6 defense advisors, including some who didn’t see eye to eye with him, yet losing General Mattis is causing a veritable melt down on the Sunday talk shows. When Obama dumped Hagel, the NYT referred to it as an “itch” for change. The MSM always have us on the brink of a tsunami/hurricane/tornado/earthquake unlike any other. They keep Democrats and Never Trump Republicans in a constant state of anxiety and hatred. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/defense-secretary-james-mattis-to-leave-as-of-january-1-trump-taps-patrick-shanahan-as-acting-secretary-of-defense.print
According to Sharyl Attkisson, who has researched and tracked it, fake news is relatively recent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa7QvcKYGZA&feature=share
The fake news meme began with Obama about a month before the 2016 election and the media ran with it--aggressively fact checking every word Trump said or tweeted, but not his opponents. Then came the calls for Big Tech to fact check. Was it a campaign to shape our news, by labeling website and stories "fake?" Follow the money. The money behind the first story by a non-profit First Draft (shortly before Obama's speech) came from Google. Imagine that. The parent company Alphabet was all in for Clinton. And then the smear to blame the right for Hillary's failures by David Brock (former right wing gay journalist in the 80s and 90s who flipped to the progressives and became top Hillary supporter); particularly he blamed Bannon and Breitbart News. He began to pressure Facebook and other social media to label conservatives, alt-right. Actually, since Brock's been involved since 2012 in pushing Clinton on the Democrats, he was just covering for his own failures. He had transformed an ethics group to a partisan group and "resigned." Then H. Clinton, the queen of fake, jumps in--remember her fake video and false Benghazi stories? She starts demanding fake news investigations, like "pizzagate." Wants to protect our democracy and innocent lives. (David Brock's boyfriend owned the pizza store.)
So, keep watching. It's very revealing. Although Trump talks about fake news, the opposition, the never-Trumpers, those with TDS, actually started the meme, and Trump ran with it and called them out for bias and sloppy reporting. The leftist media finally tired of the Fake News when Trump took it over, and they declare it dead and owned by the right. She goes on to explain how political lackeys and reporters work together--aka blackmail, and she has records of 2009 Obama aide e-mails with reporters.
Today at the gym I heard about "They shall not grow old" a film about WWI using British footage, and by the magic of technology, massaged to make a wonderful retrospective. As far as I can tell it is/was available only Dec. 17 and Dec. 27, which means we have another chance. In Columbus it's at Cinemark on Bethel Rd., 1 p.m. and 4:00 p.m.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-they-shall-not-grow-old-review-20181215-story.html
2018 is the 100th anniversary of the end of that terrible war that wiped out a generation of European men. Americans entered it late, but the Ohio History Center has a fabulous exhibit.
“After receiving hundreds of hours of footage from the museum, whose archive is among the world’s largest, the first order of business for Park Road Post was cleaning the film up, removing dust, scratches, tears and other flaws.
Then there was the tricky question of timing, of getting footage that was hand cranked at a variety of speeds to all sync up to today’s 24-frames-per-second standard without looking speeded up or slowed down.
Next came colorization, a process that went to extraordinary lengths to achieve accuracy, including trips to actual footage locations to take thousands of reference photos. No detail, not even the color of a button, was too small to get right.
The same kind of meticulousness went into the soundtrack, where sounds like horses hooves and footsteps in the mud were layered in.”
Off to the gym before starting the real workout in the kitchen preparing for our Christmas Eve dinner. Coach Tyler sent an e-mail workout with squats, bridges and step jacks, which I won't do because I'll be busy.
"T’was the workout before Christmas and it’s made to be done in your house…
While your kids and family are perhaps stirring, like a not so little mouse…
Your exercise shoes are tied with great care…
And you know, that St. Nicholas soon would be there…"
I was listening to Benedict XVI's "Jesus of Nazareth; the infancy narratives" (2012, Random House) this morning and he noted St. Bernard's homily about Mary's Yes. So I just had to look it up, first in my books on spirituality of the middle ages, and then on the internet. Although his personality was a bit prickly, his writings are wonderful.
"The price of our salvation is offered to you. We shall be set free at once if you consent. In the eternal Word of God we all came to be, and behold, we die. In your brief response we are to be remade in order to be recalled to life."
https://www.piercedhearts.org/hearts_jesus_mary/heart_mary/annunciation_mary_fiat_st_bernard.htm
He also cited another idea, which I haven’t tracked down (I’d have to replay that part) that Mary conceived Jesus not through the womb, but through her ear (hearing the Word). I did find this citation. 'Through her ear the Word entered and dwelt secretly in the womb' (attributed to Ephrem, H. Mary 11.6). Something else interesting to look up.
https://www.grammarbook.com/grammar/whoever.asp
Rule 1. The presence of whoever or whomever indicates a dependent clause. Use whoever or whomever to agree with the verb in that dependent clause, regardless of the rest of the sentence.
Rule 2. When the entire whoever/whomever clause is the subject of the verb that follows the clause, look inside the clause to determine whether to use whoever or whomever.
I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat.
P.J. O'Rourke
“He was a daring, in-your-face iconoclast. A wild fornicator, he had many mistresses and a bastard son. A self-confessed thief who declared “the evil in me was foul, but I loved it.” St. Augustine, A.D. 398.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/augustines-good-and-evil_2741796.html
Nonprofit Organizations: There are 1,571,056 tax-exempt organizations, including:
1,097,689 public charities
105,030 private foundations
368,337 other types of nonprofit organizations, including chambers of commerce, fraternal organizations and civic leagues. (Source: NCCS Business Master File 4/2016)
How many of these non-profits, particularly the foundations which must choose which non-profits to fund, could survive the scrutiny that has been lavished on the Trump Foundation by people who hate the President?
People employed in the non-profit world wouldn't agree with me, but I believe we have too many, that they are too political, and too rich with too many getting their money from government grants, where you "dance with the one who brung you." Non-profits account for 9.2% of all wages and salaries paid in the United States and their share of GDP was 5.3% in 2014.
https://nccs.urban.org/data-statistics/quick-facts-about-nonprofits?
My Canadian cousin reported this in her Christmas letter. I didn’t know there was such a horse and this was reported in Bloodhorse magazine. https://www.bloodhorse.com/horse-racing/articles/229006/robert-bruce-rallies-to-arlington-million-victory?
Inside library story. We used to get a subscription to Bloodhorse at the veterinary library at OSU where I was the librarian, but didn't catalog it. One day to clear the shelf I put about 2 years on a small table outside the library with a sign, "Free to a good home." Someone put all the magazines on the floor and took the table.
"Non-Hispanic black women continue to be disproportionately impacted by abortion. In 2016, as in previous years, more African American babies were aborted than were born alive in New York City”.
I reported this on my blog some years ago and was told I was being racist for reporting it!
“Eighty years ago (November 17, 1938) Stalin ended the Great Terror, citing “local excesses” that had come to his attention. It wasn’t until two decades later that the KGB tallied the victims of the sixteen-month reign of terror at 1,334,360. Half were shot, and the rest sentenced to the Gulag. The Gulag itself continued to grow during and after the Second World War. It reached its peak of 2.5 million prisoners shortly before Stalin’s death. Of these, one out of five were women.”
https://www.womenofthegulag.com/
“Many hoped the Bolshevik Revolution one hundred years ago would usher in a new era of gender and class equality. Following the revolution, Soviet Russia declared “International Women’s Day” an official holiday, and “Marxist feminists” romanticize communism to this day. Women of the Gulag, both a remarkable book and a documentary film, highlights the disparity between the Soviet Union’s alleged gender equality and the reality of life for women under communism.”
Yes, we hear about gender equity from our college students and leftists in business and government.
“Joseph Stalin was responsible for the deaths of over 20 million people. Yet today in America, teaching on the crimes of communism is so bad that almost one third of Millennials think President George W. Bush killed more people than this Marxist mass-murderer. Those who are familiar with the history of Stalin’s Soviet Union might recall the name of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his iconic Gulag Archipelago. Fewer still know that the majority of those who experienced—and survived—the Gulag were women, and it is their experiences, their memories, that must be preserved and shared to ensure the next generation understands the consequences of Stalin’s failed collectivist policies and his horrific disregard for human life.”
No, I had no recollection. I guessed several trips, like to Pennsylvania. Then to Columbus, Indiana where we stayed in an old restored hotel. No. That wasn’t it. And he kept describing—we’d walked through a woods. He had no idea why it had popped in his mind, but he was so sure. Must have been on one of our architectural tours. So I opened the blog—and there it was July 25, 2005.
“The 1886 Crescent Hotel is old, creaky, and supposedly visited by ghosts, but we had a beautifully restored room, and the group enjoyed a fabulous morning brunch in the delightful dining room. The gardens host many weddings--one the night we arrived.”
http://collectingmythoughts.blogspot.com/2005/07/1295-north-west-arkansas-thursday.html
Published on Christmas Eve in the Wall Street Journal since 1949 written by the late Vermont Royster and it has been published annually since
When Saul of Tarsus set out on his journey to Damascus the whole of the known world lay in bondage. There was one state, and it was Rome. There was one master for it all, and he was Tiberius Caesar. Everywhere there was civil order, for the arm of the Roman law was long. Everywhere there was stability, in government and in society, for the centurions saw that it was so.
But everywhere there was something else, too. There was oppression — for those who were not the friends of Tiberius Caesar. There was the tax gatherer to take the grain from the fields and the flax from the spindle to feed the legions or to fill the hungry treasury from which divine Caesar gave largess to the people. There was the impressor to find recruits for the circuses. There were executioners to quiet those whom the Emperor proscribed. What was a man for but to serve Caesar?
There was the persecution of men who dared think differently, who heard strange voices or read strange manuscripts. There was enslavement of men whose tribes came not from Rome, disdain for those who did not have the familiar visage. And most of all, there was everywhere a contempt for human life. What, to the strong, was one man more or less in a crowded world?
Then, of a sudden, there was a light in the world, and a man from Galilee saying, Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.
And the voice from Galilee, which would defy Caesar, offered a new Kingdom in which each man could walk upright and bow to none but his God. Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. And he sent this gospel of the Kingdom of Man into the uttermost ends of the earth.
So the light came into the world and the men who lived in darkness were afraid, and they tried to lower a curtain so that man would still believe salvation lay with the leaders.
But it came to pass for a while in divers places that the truth did set man free, although the men of darkness were offended and they tried to put out the light. The voice said, Haste ye. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness come upon you, for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth.
Along the road to Damascus the light shone brightly. But afterward Paul of Tarsus, too, was sore afraid. He feared that other Caesars, other prophets, might one day persuade men that man was nothing save a servant unto them, that men might yield up their birthright from God for pottage and walk no more in freedom.
Then might it come to pass that darkness would settle again over the lands and there would be a burning of books and men would think only of what they should eat and what they should wear, and would give heed only to new Caesars and to false prophets. Then might it come to pass that men would not look upward to see even a winter’s star in the East, and once more, there would be no light at all in the darkness.
And so Paul, the apostle of the Son of Man, spoke to his brethren, the Galatians, the words he would have us remember afterward in each of the years of his Lord:
Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.
--------------------------------------------------
“Vermont Connecticut Royster (April 30, 1914 - July 22, 1996) was an American journalist whose career at The Wall Street Journal spanned half a century. Royster was no ordinary journalist, he studied literature and classical languages—Latin and Greek —and his writings reflected these influences. He tackled the issues that affected people in their everyday lives with thoughtful insight, touching on the essentials of life. He had an unfailing faith in the American people and in the greatness of the United States as a country blessed by God. His Christmas and Thanksgiving editorials, reprinted every year since Royster wrote them, continue to resonate with people's desires for freedom, peace, and prosperity in a world filled with challenges.”https://uts.edu/news-and-events/615-in-hoc-anno-domini
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt0xprEaJfU
Different standards for Clinton who had a bevy of lawyers, and Flynn who was told he didn’t need to have a lawyer present.
No one believes Cohen—especially not Democrats—the day before.
So far, the Mueller investigation has been bank fraud, and lies, and collusion is not a crime, but none has been found.
The head of the FBI can’t remember anything, and still doesn’t know anything, showed no curiosity, can’t corroborate anything. And this guy was head of the FBI? In his mind, he’s always right. The book was a joke—a very high opinion of himself. An amnesiac with incredible hubris.
Posts
All Comments
