Visual Thinking and Occasional Odds and Ends

The left is constantly coming up with ideas that seem great to themselves but look ridiculous to the rest of us.   What is worse is how these sillinesses are then used by the right to their advantage, thus sabotaging Democrats’ election chances. And this by the way is what happened in New York State this year.   Probably also in California.   So while overall the Democrats did well, they underperformed in NY and CA - thus losing control of the House.   Let’s take a closer look at one fund raising campaign by a left wing group.   The campaign tried to ramp up outrage over a trivial matter for the sake of fundraising.   No doubt the campaign worked, but in the end it adds to the list of things that to average folks make Democrats look ridiculous.   The group is Faithful America.   They are a   a left wing activist Christian group that wants to counter the influence of conservative Christian groups.   They raise money with on-line petitions...

Does God have a plan?   I just had to ask that of God when I ran into him at work sitting in a vacant office. I asked what brought him here.   And why is he wearing a shirt and tie?   He said he wanted to speak to me.   And regarding the outfit, he thought it was time to enter the 21st century.   The old robes and throne are so 12th century.   And doesn’t the shirt and tie make him more accessible?   He has asked Jesus to lead the effort.   One of the deliverables is to reorganize the angels, instead of choirs they will have teams.   He asked what I thought of the idea?   I thought it was a lousy idea. But I asked him won’t he miss the trappings of kingship?   Not really, the kingship thing gets tiresome.   All this bowing and scraping and no one will tell him if he has a bad idea.   Besides all the authorities favor flattening an organization.   That way he should get better cooperation across all levels. I told him ...

Let’s remember Martin Luther King by remembering state’s rights. For those too young to have seen the brutality of Southern police during the civil rights era, it is important to remember that a key argument used to keep blacks from exercising their rights was that it was that such matters were up to the states and not the federal government. Had these pronouncements been followed by a series of state laws protecting black citizens from the evils of Jim Crow, we could respect  states rights as a serious matter, but states rights has always been a lie. Used to suppress blacks - first under slavery and then under Jim Crow laws that created virtual slavery. And when Southerners found that the sovereignty of other states went against them, they asked for fugitive slave laws to help recapture lost slaves.  After the Civil War, the South re-established virtual slavery via an aggressive system of imprisoning blacks for minor violations of law - and then harnessing them as c...

Two of our founders with their true thoughts translated into  modern  idioms. Did we worry too much about tyranny and too little about effective government?   Did our fear of tyranny cause us to create a government doomed to failure?  I believe the answer is yes.   When we learn about our Revolution in school, the figure of George III looms as a tyrant in the background.  But he was not a tyrant.  He presided over a constitutional monarchy that ruled over a people who were among the freest in Europe.  Only the Dutch were more free.   By the second decade of the 19th century as the US population moved west, it was already clear that we needed to build networks of post roads and canals to allow commerce to flourish.  But the Democratic Republicans led by Jefferson opposed federal funding for internal improvements and in 1815 or so when the idea for a canal from New York to Ohio nearly received federal funding, the fu...

The Picture shows the Great Wall of China.  Like the great wall, our border wall will fail.   Millions of people come to the US each year, perhaps as many as 100 million.  Among them are birth tourists (mainly from China and Korea) regular tourists, businessmen and students.  They arrive at US airports, or drive over crossing points where their passports and travel documents are checked.  They also come by train (over the Canadian border) and even by boat.  None of these people came over the desert from Mexico.   The Boston bombers were legal immigrants, as were the September 11 terrorists.  So were the couple who did the shooting in San Bernardino, California.   But as much as the media present foreign born tourists as a threat, they are no match for the US born terrorists, usually Christian, some even veterans, who commit all manner of acts of terror from the Oklahoma bombing to shooting up churches to the recent shooting ...

This is about a small miracle.   No fireworks or obvious magic; still, it showed God’s favor.   It happened yesterday, Christmas Eve (day) in the Rockaway Shop Rite. Like many husbands, I was engaged in yet one more shopping trip to get one more thing for our Christmas Dinner.  I have been doing this on and off since last Thursday, shopping at the Costco and two local Shop Rites.  My wife was engaged in getting the house ready, baking cookies and making preparations for the Christmas Dinner.  I helped too, but my tolerance for disorder makes my work useless.  Monta would need to clean up after my cleaning.  So I do more of the shopping than anything else.   The search for meat was over.  After reading the recipe we had two choices for beef; after a bit of Googling, we settled on a top-round - supposedly more tender than a shoulder.  On Friday, I checked out the meat case to see where the top-rounds were.   With th...

On Christmas Eve in 1968, the crew of the Apollo 8 were asked to deliver a message to the Earth during a TV broadcast on Christmas Eve. Originally their mission was to be a test of the command module as they travelled in an elliptical orbit around Earth.  But because of the concern that the USSR would be the first to fly around the moon, the flight plan was changed so that Apollo 8 would leave Earth’s gravity and attain orbit around the moon.   Asked to say something, they had no formal guidance.  With help from a  reporter, and even more, the reporter’s wife, family and they chose a simple text from the Bible.  With this simple test, it was clear that all of mankind was included in what was an American achievement.  One can only imagine what might have come form different men - we might have heard gloating and boasting (sound like our president?) but the there, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders were dedicated to selfless servic...