Here is my favorite junkyard of all time. It is located in La Fruto Colorado and I discovered it in April 2015 while traveling the back roads to from Santa Fe to Denver… (click on it to see a larger image) Continue reading My Favorite All Time Junkyard
From the title it is hard to determine where this post is going. We can be wrong about almost anything in this life and there seems to always be someone around to alert us of that fact. If we get something set in our minds that just isn’t true then we are the worst kind of wrong. But… that is not where this post is going. :) Finally, here is the full question, were we wrong to separate from mother England, especially through violence? Looking back with hindsight it is always easy to judge the past by today’s criteria. I … Continue reading Were We Wrong??
This is going to be one of those posts that wrenches my heart. It was one of the most tragic days of my life. When my mother abandoned my father leaving him with two very young boys we changed from a two-income family to one very low payed bread winner who struggled daily to make ends meet. Dad was never much of the communicator so he tried to shield us from all the problems he faced just getting by day-to-day. He never talked about his constant troubles with money and being so young I never realized what he faced in … Continue reading About Poverty… A Very Personal Story
Here is an afternoon thought to chew on….. Continue reading Cowboy Jihadists……
After the recent post about not judging the past by the criteria of the present, my heroes have been on my mind. The two most influential founders of our country were Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. They were the most … Continue reading Being a Writer… Jefferson Style
Some of the biggest problems today are caused by religious certainty. People who are very certain that their religion is better than all the others tend to want to impose the rules laid out in their Holy Book on everyone. They have little respect for the fact that some people are guided by other Holy Books, and other equally valid types of ideals based on values instead of beliefs. Unfortunately this concept has spread into the political arena where religious literalists often try to impose their religious standards on our nation. They fight important social trends, like the acceptance of … Continue reading Religious Certainty…
I can’t help myself with this one… it is too funny to resist… It would be a very tough choice deciding which side of the wall I wanted to reside Continue reading Too Funny To Resist…
LaVoy Finicum says the Feds won’t take him alive One of the armed protesters occupying a federal wildlife refuge in rural Oregon said he would rather die defending the building than be arrested by the FBI. Source: Oregon Occupier Warns FBI He’d Take Death Over Jail | TIME I guess that not all the nuts in the country are running for president. Some of them are waving the flag and the constitution in the name of getting “free” stuff and saying they will die rather than pay for it. Ok, maybe that is a little harsh, lets look at it … Continue reading Let Me See If I Got This Right?
Being the beginning of a new year I am going to try and get some things off my chest so maybe I won’t fret about them all year. This is one of those posts. Take it with an ounce of truth and a pound of jest. :) Maybe I should erase my “About Me” page here as it probably quickly pushes some people away from my blog site. If I made up a story about being a troubled teenager or maybe a struggling artist I would probably get more readers and especially more “likes”. I run across so many blogs … Continue reading Old Guys Just Aren’t Very Popular on the Web…
If strong enough, the storm of electrons and other charged particles from an EMP could disrupt the Earth’s magnetic field, disable satellites and the internet, ground all commercial aviation, silence telecommunications, and fry much of the electrical grid — catapulting our society back to the 19th century for months or years. Peter Pry, executive director of the federal EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security, told Congress this year that a major EMP could cause widespread “starvation, disease, and societal collapse” that could lead to the deaths of tens of millions of people. The Obama administration recently released a … Continue reading As If We Didn’t Have Enough To Fear…
I would really like to hear the words in the title of this post much more in the near future, at least from the wingnuts who have current control of the GOP. But in reality the title means that I will not be posting anymore about those yahoos until at least some of us have the opportunity to vote for or against them. It seems fruitless to worry about these guys grabbing control of our country and then driving it into the dust. I wish we had saner and wiser choices for the November presidential election but that just doesn’t … Continue reading I Am Suspending My Campaign..
In fact, friends invariably called the 28-year-old Farook a “very nice person,” while his landlord even described him as a “very gentle person.” He enjoyed working on old cars and shooting hoops. For her part, the 29-year-old Malik was seen as “a good girl” and a good student who aspired to be a pharmacist. Before dressing in austere Islamic clothing, she was even viewed as a “modern girl.”… By all accounts, that switch was piety. They simply got closer to their religion, immersing themselves in Islamic scripture… We saw the same transformation in the Tsarnaev brothers of Boston, who were … Continue reading The Root Cause of Much of Today’s Terrorism
In fact, religion is invariably a tangle of contradictory teachings — in the Bible, the difference between the harshness of Deuteronomy and the warmth of Isaiah or Luke is striking — and it’s always easy to perceive something threatening in another tradition. Yet analysts who have tallied the number of violent or cruel passages in the Quran and the Bible count more than twice as many in the Bible. There’s a profound human tendency, rooted in evolutionary biology, to “otherize” people who don’t belong to our race, our ethnic group, our religion. That’s particularly true when we’re scared. It’s difficult … Continue reading How Well Do You Know Religion?
Here is a thought that all us “mature” folks need to realize going into this new year. But even more so it needs to be learned by those at the other end of the message. Life teaches each of us lessons. Whether we use them to become better people is up to each of us. Continue reading Some Thoughts Going Into This New Year..
Here is wishing you all a Happy New Year filled with promise and hope. Yeah I know it is a presidential election year so it will be a dirty one but here is hoping that you will be able to ignore as much of that as possible but not so much as to not be able to come to an informed decision this coming November. Continue reading Happy New Years!!!
I want to close out this years post with another InSearchOfAmerica gallery. This one is of the Great Sand Dunes National Park in southern Colorado. We visited there in April and I became fascinated with the place. How could such a huge pile of sand end up in the middle of the Rocky Mountains? They say it is because of the specific wind and water flows between several mountains in the area. Since the park is many miles away from any major city it has an impressive display of stars one clear nights. Included in the gallery below is a … Continue reading Sand Dunes of America..
Here it is the end of another year and time to look back to how I spent it. So here goes: Blog wise I made a decision about mid year to start things over again. It might not have been too obvious to some of my readers here but I abandoned my old blog of five years and moved it here in order to start fresh. I also wanted to incorporate the five blogs I was then running into one and to do some basic changes. With that decision I left 300+ hard won followers on the old site. Some … Continue reading Looking Back…
I was astounded when I heard that a Supreme Court Justice made the type of comments shown above during a Supreme Court hearing recently. Yes, I know it was Scalia and he is anything but for affirmative action or minority rights but still… Maybe the Supreme Court is just not “supreme” right now? Kind of like the “Dred Scott” period… What scares me the most about any of the GOP presidential candidates actually getting into the White House is that they would be able to add more like Alito, Scalia or his “friend” Thomas to the bench and turn everything … Continue reading So Much for the “Supreme” Court..
It used to be that the voters would pick their representatives; but nowadays the representatives pick their voters. As we saw in Florida, some districts are drawn with purely partisan motivations so that if a candidate wins the primary they essentially win the seat. Florida is not an isolated case and there are districts around the country that are so irrationally drawn (just look at this image of IL-4) that it would be comical if it didn’t have such dire consequences…. The common thread among all of these obstacles is that they were enacted by the major parties to keep … Continue reading Nowadays Representatives Pick Their Voters..
After some serious adjustments in my thinking I kind of find myself frequently asking what day it is. Without the job to define my life, each day seems to fold into the next. Holidays are just another day to us retired folks, especially those of us without any children or grandchildren for visits…. I am generally one of those who struggle to get through this time of year but not so much this year. Maybe the warm weather is helping… maybe it was the 5 million lights at Branson recently.. Fa La La Continue reading Never Get A Day Off…
Just outside of Lexington Kentucky is my favorite historical village called “Pleasant Hill Shaker Village”. I simply can’t get enough of that place. Whenever I start feeling tension for whatever reason I think of escaping there for a few days. I think I have been there about a half a dozen times now but have really lost count. Staying in the actual rooms where Shakers lived is a fantastic feeling. I almost sense their presence there. Shaker Hill brings out my creative juices. I have probably taken 500 pictures there but every time I go I find another undiscovered place … Continue reading Pleasant Hill — Revisited (again_
RJ's Corner - Having My Say 