Wednesday, July 31, 2019
Christians and politics
Here's where a Christian world view differs with today's socialists in our government--they teach in our schools and proclaim in their power that because the founders were ordinary, sinful men with flaws, rulers in the 21st century are smarter, more righteous and more spiritual and able to take our God given rights and give them to the government.
"Christian Politics – The Source of Human Rights
Christian politics within a Christian worldview understands God as the source and guarantee of our basic human rights. Because we believe we are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26), we know that we are valuable. (This becomes doubly clear when we remember that Christ took upon Himself human flesh and died for humanity.) God grants all individuals the same rights based on an absolute moral standard.
The Declaration of Independence proclaims, “All men are created equal... [and] endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Two assumptions are inherent in this declaration: 1) we were created by a supernatural Being; and 2) this Being provides the foundation for all human rights.
The knowledge that human rights are based on an unchanging, eternal Source is crucial in our understanding of politics. If our rights were not tied inextricably to God’s character, then they would be arbitrarily assigned according to the whims of each passing generation or political party—rights are “unalienable” only because they are based on God’s unchanging character. Therefore, human rights do not originate with human government, but with God Himself, who ordains governments to secure these rights.
Our founding fathers understood this clearly.
John Adams, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1813, says, “The general principles, on which the Fathers achieved Independence, were the only Principles in which that beautiful Assembly of young Gentlemen could Unite... And what were these general Principles? I answer, the general Principles of Christianity, in which all these Sects were United... Now I will avow, that I then believe, and now believe, that those general Principles of Christianity, are as eternal and immutable, as the Existence and Attributes of God.”2
John Winthrop says that the best friend of liberty is one who is “most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion and who sets himself with the greatest firmness to bear down on profanity and immorality of every kind. Whoever is an avowed enemy of God, I scruple not to call him an enemy of his country.”3
Noah Webster wrote “The moral principles and precepts found in the scriptures ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws. These principles and precepts have truth, immutable truth, for their foundation.”4
Alexis de Tocqueville says, “There is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America; and there can be no greater proof of its utility, and of its conformity to human nature, than that its influence is most powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation on the earth.”5
George Washington, in his inaugural address as first president of the United States, referred to “the propitious smiles of Heaven” that fall only on that nation that does not “disregard the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained.”6"
Tuesday, July 30, 2019
Banned in San Francisco
Products or behavior banned by San Francisco.
- plastic bags,
- clove cigarettes,
- Coke machines,
- bottled-water machines,
- playing stickball in the street,
- playing chess in the street,
- pet stores,
- goldfish,
- masked balls,
- sling shot--illegal weapon,
- your dog sticking his head halfway out the window while you’re driving,
- toys being given away with Happy Meals at McDonald’s,
- traveling on city business to Arizona, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, South Dakota, or Texas,
- ride a Segway,
- package food with Styrofoam,
- declaw a cat,
- serve chocolate milk in schools.
- No one in government is allowed to make any contract with any company that uses tropical hardwood,
- no school is allowed to offer Junior ROTC.
- Don’t try to walk more than eight dogs at a time—even if they’re toy poodles and Chihuahuas
.
What’s good about Baltimore?
Baltimore Sun claims DC has more rats than Baltimore, so I looked at a site that compared both cities. Baltimore is losing population, DC is gaining, but in most demographics the two are comparable, with Baltimore having more single heads of household (usually a significant sign of poverty). But the comments were revealing; this one by William found a lot to like about Baltimore, white also noting the negatives. I just pulled out the positive.
“For starters Baltimore is a great independent city filled with rich history, great sports teams (present/ past), a variety of cultural foods and local delicacies all wrapped up in a place jokingly referred to as “Smalltimore”. The Under Armour headquarters is based out of here, not to forgot about the growing tech sector, the expanding neighborhoods of Harbor East and South Point, the excellent array of hospitals (John’s Hopkin’s, Mercy, and the University of Maryland healthcare systems) and colleges within the city with so much more; however, like every city there are pockets of good and bad, but with this city there are a lot more bad things than good.
Crime, corruption, pollution/ trash on the roads, jay walkers who will willingly walk in the middle of traffic during a rush hour, a majority populous who only votes for Democratic candidates who mostly are unqualified (the city doesn’t even have a Office of Ethics until 2019), and some of the worst infrastructure I've seen.
Some spots have been gentrified over the years, but there are far more depilated properties once you head north and west. There are great markets spread out throughout the city with one of the largest places smack-dab in the middle of the city. You can find all types of fresh seafood, goods, and even have services performed for reasonable prices. Shopping elsewhere has been more about going out to the county as Towson Town Mall, Arundel Mills, and White Marsh Mall’s have severed the area for decades. There is an array of retailers such as Brooks Brothers, J.Crew, and other haberdasheries if you’re looking for tailored goods - Hat’s on the belfry is a great hat shop for all sexes in Fell’s Point. Target is located on the East side of the city in the expanding Canton neighborhood, and more shops have been added over the last 4 years. There are great corner store markets, and some shoppers enjoy organic options offered from Whole Food’s in Harbor East. There is a lot more than I’ve named and there is something for everyone out there. If shopping isn’t your thing, there are plenty of neighborhood bars, seafood eateries, brunch spots, and high end dining options. If you’re looking for family friendly spots there are plenty scattered throughout the Inner Harbor and the residing neighborhoods. Not only is there great shopping there is world-class entertainment venues and more parks than most cities I’ve visited.
As for the entertainment side, the famous historic Hippodrome is a great spot to check out Broadway plays, or prepare for a night out at the Royal Farm’s area and see big name artists as they play in a remodeled arena; but, there is so much more! You can visit Ram’s Head Live! And see many bands year round in a much smaller area than DC’s 9:30 Club with unrestricted views of your favorite musicians or enjoy a concert overlooking the harbor at the MECU (formerly Pier 6) pavilion. Aforementioned sports in this city are played as some of the best examples of stadiums in the US. The Orioles at Camden Yards is consistently rated as one of the best stadiums to visit and the Baltimore Raven’s M&T Bank is a gem in itself. If you’re not about loud music and sports there is a multitude of museums and art exhibits - the Walter’s has one of the largest free collections I’ve ever seen. Or if you’re into street art, Graffiti Lane is a cool spot to see. ”
Someone named William at https://www.bestplaces.net/comments/viewcomment.aspx?id=E2864B95-262B-4692-849A-719AC3EFDBE5&city=Baltimore_md&p=52404000
June 27, 2019
Sunday, July 28, 2019
How Google manipulates voters--Dr. Robert Epstein
In 2020 all Big Tech are going all out to Democrats and there will be no way to trace it. Dr. Robert Epstein was a strong Clinton supporter in 2016, but is concerned that Google, Facebook and Twitter are manipulating the voter on a massive scale. Silicon Valley millionaires control our elections. Alphabet (parent of Google) was Clinton's #1 financial supporter.
Between 2.6 million and 10.4 million votes were manipulated in 2016. No paper trail.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4808035/googles-election
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4808464/dr-robert-epstein-recommends-private-search-engines-startpagecom-amp-duckduckgo-us-senate
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4808140/closing-statement-google-election-meddling
Epstein recommends private search engines Startpage.com & DuckDuckGo in U.S. Senate testimony about Google. I use DuckDuckGo.
The signs of Lakeside
These signs are political, but those who host them in front of their cottages refuse to call them that. For thousands of years the sign of the rainbow was about God's covenant with Noah, a reminder of His faithfulness. In recent years it's lost that meaning as it has been politicized and used for the LGBTQ agenda. When CEOs or college presidents are fired for saying “all lives matter,” which is Jesus’ message, when business people who believe in God’s plan for marriage are sued or threatened, when the science doesn’t matter and isn't real if it’s biology instead of climate, then, yes, the message is political.
I am pro-life, which is also Biblical, which is loving our weakest and most helpless neighbor, but if I had a poster of an aborted baby or a pro-life message in front of my Lakeside cottage, someone would be offended and say abortion is a political issue.
All science is based on God's truth, not fantasy, carbon taxes, and red tape to strangle business. The Bible does promote biology as truth, and not a word that humans control earth's destiny--except as caretakers. All lives matter to Jesus, but that phrase can get you fired if you say it.
Yes, we have no life without water, Lake Erie was formed by a melting glacier as the earth warmed. There are many images of water, God's covenant with Noah--the first rainbow--baptism, crossing the Red Sea, the River Jordan, etc. that are Biblical, but on this sign water has no Biblical meaning.
Friday, July 26, 2019
Serendipity strikes again
I had forgotten where I put the notebook, but a few minutes ago I was looking for something in my desk and there it was. On September 22, 2000, I had jotted down “Almost Famous,” a movie with 4 stars. “Fictional account of Cameron Crowe’s teen years with Rolling Stones," I wrote. Lennox 24, 4:50. Patrick Fugit (17) plays the 15 year old William Miller.” Then I added later—“very good, saw 9/22/00.” I had apparently flipped the notebook over and was writing on the verso of pages I’d filled earlier in the year.
Anyway, to make a short story long, I thought, “I wonder what happened to Patrick Fugit. I recalled he was a very good actor in that movie. In fact, the whole movie was good.
Internet search: Found him. His latest movie—wait for it—is “Robert the Bruce” which was just released last month in Scotland.
Cast: Jared Harris, Zach McGowan, Emma Kenney, Melora Walters, Talitha Eliana Bateman, Anna Hutchison, Patrick Fugit, Kevin McNally, Gabriel Bateman, Angus Macfadyen, Mhairi Calvey, Diarmaid Murtagh, Shane Coffey, Anthony J. Sharpe, Gianni Capaldi.
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Happy Birthday, Carol
Never a snowflake, after high school graduation in 1955 Carol went into Brethren Volunteer Service and did incredible tasks for one so young, like doing church plant surveys in Denver, helping with clean up after flooding in Pennsylvania, teaching Sunday School and leading worship in Kentucky where she road horseback to services because there were no passable roads, and being a "healthy volunteer patient" aka guinea pig at NIH in Maryland. I wonder if she is one of the results cited in this article. https://clinicalcenter.nih.gov/about/news/newsletter/2007/oct07/newsletter.html
She was a survivor of childhood bulbar polio in 1949 and struggled with many health issues, but cared for many as a home health nurse in her last years.
Nunes: There is collusion between Russia and the Democratic Party
Here’s a summary of how we got to yesterday’s circus.
The DNC, the Clinton campaign, the foreign spy and the Trump haters within the Obama administration and deep state.
Tuesday, July 23, 2019
Blogger writes about Lakeside and the popsicle vendor
Monday, July 22, 2019
Soviet anti-American propaganda
is now just standard left wing drivel we hear every day.
“The Soviets had an entire “active measures” department devoted to churning out anti-American dezinformatsiya...
Here are some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons...
✔ There is no truth, only competing agendas.
✔ All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
✔ There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
✔ The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
✔ Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
✔ The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. Only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
✔ For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. Oppressed people are allowed to use violence; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
✔ When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.
We have become all too familiar with these principles as the years go on and we see them demonstrated by the left time and again.
Most were staples of Soviet propaganda at the same time they were being promoted by “progressives” (read: Marxists and the dupes of Marxists) within the Western intelligentsia...
This worked exactly as expected; their memes seeped into Western popular culture and are repeated endlessly in (for example) the products of Hollywood.
Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda. It takes a significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering, even for a lifelong anti-Communist like myself, to realize that there was a time (within the lifetime of my parents) when all of these ideas would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people - at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life.
The most paranoid and xenophobic conservatives of the Cold War were, painful though this is to admit, the closest to the truth in estimating the magnitude and subtlety of Soviet subversion.”
Moses Lambert
Lillian Boxfish takes a walk
Just finished "Lillian Boxfish takes a walk," by Kathleen Rooney (2017). It's a novel inspired by the life and work of Margaret Fishback who wrote ads for Macy's in mid-20th c. and was a published poet in her own right. I have no idea how old Rooney is (40-ish?), but she awfully good at speaking in the voice of an 85 year old. She's written a lot of books--I might be willing to try another one. Her method of telling Lillian's life story through a walk in Manhattan on New Year's Eve 1984 was fascinating. So if you need some more summer (or book club) reading, I recommend this title.
Guy's Club detour
The real "love it or leave it" is in the religion of woke
And he goes on to explain the emotional, physical and superstitions of Woke Totemism based on Emile Durkeim's description of primitive religions and compares classic totemism with today's rituals of multiculturalism.https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/08/woke-totemism
- The faculty email list exploded with vituperative attacks on her.
- Her works were characterized in scatological terms.
- The abusive language was justified as the prerogative of marginalized minority groups.
- White supremacy has excluded minorities from discourse in the past was the reason.
- Wax's published writings are the equivalent of a swastika or a burning cross.
- Students who invited her are fascists who could be violent and assault students of color.
- Departments sponsoring her lecture were denounced and one rescinded its contribution due to pressure
- Trauma counseling was suggested for students and faculty harmed by her lecture
- Faculty were encouraged to attend a conference on the state of being white as a grave threat to American democracy.
The virtuous victim (the members of the cult) may outwardly appear similar to Christ on the Cross, but they lack saving power or the will to do good. And this church will only get more shrill and angry.
Sunday, July 21, 2019
Of garage door and paint brushes, bursitis and AC
The van needs an oil change and a good cleaning of the seal around the rims because the tires are leaking. So I’ll need to make an appointment during my exercise routine. At 5:30 a.m. I went out to buy milk and orange juice and noticed the roads were being blocked, and then Giant Eagle didn’t open until 6 a.m. so I went to Get Go and got what I needed, and while returning home (in the dark) found still more blocked streets.
When we tried to leave for church we discovered the roads were blocked because of a bicycle race and it was almost impossible to go west, but finally found an area with police directing traffic, but for probably the second time in our lives, we were late to church. I sat in the last row thinking I wouldn’t have to walk (limp) to our usual pew, but was fooled again since it was communion Sunday and I had to walk all the way to the front anyway. I skipped kneeling—figured I’d never get back up!
Leaving for our SALT group meeting at noon (lunch and Bible study) we discovered that the garage door wouldn’t go down. This had happened a few weeks ago and our son-in-law fixed it, but he’s at the lake. Bob called, and he told him what to do.
Our furnace was to be repaired this week, but there were 3 messages on the answering machine that the price for the part had gone up and did we still want to do it? Of course, you can’t reach them on the week-end. Meanwhile, we can only run the AC either full blast or off, so it’s on until it gets cold and we shut it all down.
But huge tragedy—Bob seems to have left several of his favorite watercolor brushes at the Rhein Center where he was teaching on Thursday, and didn’t notice it until we got to Columbus. He’s had those brushes over 50 years, they are top quality and would cost a fortune to replace. We’re hoping they didn’t get mixed into the general supply of brushes purchased at Wal-Mart for the kids’ classes.
One thing worked out. I had 3 empty honey jars, and on our way home from SALT, we stopped buy Steve’s home, turned in the jars and got 2 jars of honey.
And our daughter just called and said the 20” stove we had sitting on the porch at Lakeside has been sold. I had a sign tacked to the telephone pole, a man saw the stove, knocked on the door and asked jokingly if this was the Thompson cottage (people we bought from in 1988). Frank Thompson was a well known figure in Lakeside and taught generations of children how to swim—including the buyer. He’s going to move it in his golf cart.
Support for communism with our tax breaks
It seems there is no end to the misuse of the 501c3 classification of "nonprofit."
“Alliance for Global Justice supports numerous leftist causes with it's 501c3 status and "in recent years it has received grants from numerous labor unions like the AFL-CIO, the American Federation of Teachers, and the SEIU, as well as other 501(c)(3) nonprofits like the Proteus Fund, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the Tides Foundation."
These organizations/labor unions all support Communism this way.
Saturday, July 20, 2019
Recalling the old fans for hot Hoover nights
“I ordered the first fans from J W Cleary Co., Cols., Oh. (Mike Cleary now has 3 cottages in Lakeside) to raise money for the ’Friends Network” for the infrastruction repairs to Hotel Lakeside. We sold them in the beginning for 50 cents ea. Ordered a better quality (one with picture of Hotel) and sold for $1.00 each. Ted led the ”sales force” at the entrance of Hoover. He held the sales record selling more than 500 on a steamy hot Sat. Night when the OSU Band was appearing. After we ceased our fund raising effort, the Association ordered fans in bulk to use . The late Dorothy Knight helped me immensely with this project. It was fun and productive. Each dime earned was sorely needed to help restore the Hotel. Dee Grindley/”
Friday, July 19, 2019
Investments in early childhood nutrition
Recently it's been reported that use of a nutritional supplement in children (pre-natal through 2 years) has had a remarkable affect on their adulthood--intelligence, physical stature, etc.
"The Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama developed a protein-energy supplement (Atole) and a protein-free control supplement (Fresco), which were offered to pregnant women and young children in four villages; two matched villages each. The investigators followed up 1139 (69%) of 1661 traceable participants from an original cohort of 2392 children enrolled in 1969–77."
This isn't the first or last time we'll see women and children in 3rd world and developing countries used as lab specimens. Many studies are never reported because of negative outcomes or poor designs. Birth control pills were developed and tested this way, and God only knows what long term effects that had on African women and later women on welfare who were the original guinea pigs back in the 1960s. Vitamin supplementation and vaccines were other products tested by pharmaceutical companies in developing countries before being marketed to the west.
However, although most moms are not dieticians or scientists, I think we could have figured out in 1969 (when my children were little) that providing one child with protein while depriving the other, one might see a difference in brain, muscle, skeletal, and intelligence development.
I have great respect for the author of this article, but strongly disagree with the casual way the study was done on which the costs are based.
Here is an earlier description from 2018. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(18)30308-5/fulltext
Thursday, July 18, 2019
Lakeside 2019, Columbus Zoo Animals and Suzi Rapp
Photo by Kevin Sibbring, Lakeside president, who went to elementary school with Rapp in Upper Arlington.
Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Does Omar envision a New Somalia?
How can we know this? She has declared it in writing.
https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/terence-p-jeffrey/omar-end-capitalist-system-guarantee-jobs-housing-medicare-and-abortion?







