We spent a couple of days in Branson Missouri this past week to get us in the holiday spirit. It is on the list as the third most celebrated Christmas in the country.  Silver Dollar City which is a theme park near Branson was advertised as have over 5 million Christmas tree lights and they were impressive indeed!  Almost worth all the hassle to get there and manage the hordes! Below are some pictures of the park.  The tree in the center of the town square  was awesome.  I took an iPhone video of it but it is too big … Continue reading Branson Christmas

Let’s spend the next couple of days forgetting about our political situation and look exclusively at other things…. I know I am probably showing my age here but when I thought of the phrase in the title above I thought of Bing Crosby’s 1943 song about soldiers in WWII dreaming of Christmas. But when I put the phrase to Wiki I discovered that it now has multiple references. Aside from that this post is actually about the contents of personal dreams and how they let me live out an alternate life. Yeah, this is a Walter Mitty type post.  :) … Continue reading If Only In My Dreams…

Saudi Arabia’s justice ministry plans to sue a Twitter user who compared the death sentence handed down on Friday to a Palestinian poet to the punishments meted out by Islamic State, a major government-aligned newspaper reported on Wednesday…. In January, liberal writer Raif Badawi was flogged 50 times after he was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for blasphemy last year, prompting an international outcry. Badawi remains in prison, but diplomats say he is unlikely to be flogged again. In 2014, a Saudi court in Riyadh sentenced three lawyers to up to eight years in jail after … Continue reading Poet’s death sentence ‘ISIS-like’

Biblical literalism as an interpretative method can be traced back to Martin Luther’s denunciation of the Catholic Church and his use of scripture to undermine their authority. Martin Luther’s democratic mission later combined with the tenets of the scientific revolution and fundamentalist politics to produce biblical literalism, the idea that the Bible is a series of testable assertions that can be proven or disproven and that a layman can read and understand the meaning of scripture. Biblical literalism is absurd, but it is simple. The fundamentalist is not interested in deeper truths, but rather weaponizing the Bible. A perfect example … Continue reading Weaponizing The Bible…

N It is interesting to see that even the Peanuts gallery can see that the vast majority of wars in my lifetime are religious in nature. Of course the Middle East is the hotbed for many of them. Maybe Lucy needs to open an office on Capital Hill… Continue reading Rethinking the Whole Religious Thing…

This editorial cartoon sums it up for me. I’m not crazy about Hillary but she certainly beats all the GOP alternatives right now. Continue reading The Latest GOP Debate

Thanks Gary Varel for making my morning…LOL… Continue reading Merging Two Media Events…. Halarious

As mentioned in the text on Wiki about House on the Rock, it probably is not well known outside of the Midwest. I have visited there on two occasions years apart and was equally amazed by the place each time.  Here is a little about the story of its creator the house. The House on the Rock, originally opened in 1959, is a complex of architecturally unique rooms, streets, gardens and shops designed by Alex Jordan, Jr. It is located north of Dodgeville, a city in Iowa County, south of Spring Green, Wisconsin and is a regional tourist attraction…. Both … Continue reading House On The Rock…

I was browsing through my photo archive and decided to pull out some pics from my Guadalajara Mexico trip of twenty years ago. (how could it be that long ago!!; seems almost like yesterday). I spent quite a lot of time there in the 1990s on business. The “America” in the category  is not just the United States but also includes Canada and Mexico. I love both of those countries as well as my own. I did it a little differently this time as I added some captions to indicate why I picked these particular pictures. As usual click on … Continue reading GDL…

A lot of Americans believe quite deeply that many of our societal and economic ills can be traced back to the crumbling institution of marriage. But even if you take that as an article of faith, “fixing” marriage is a problem with no ready solution…. Source:  Can America really ‘strengthen marriage’?. I admit I was drawn more to this article because of the graphic above than its subject but once I started reading I found that it appears no one really knows how to fix marriage. Not the Conservatives, not the progressives.  To many of our millennials and beyond it … Continue reading Strengthening marriage?

Before Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the angels proclaimed “peace on earth, good will to all people.” We imagine the scene as a silent night–all calm, all bright. But Matthew’s gospel tells a different story. A paranoid puppet king commit outrageous acts of terror when he heard rumors of Jesus’ birth. A hit was put out on every boy under the age of two. In a world ruled by people like Herrod, all was not calm. All was not bright. Folks kept their heads down in darkness, praying to make it through. Mary and Joseph were afraid, and for good … Continue reading The Christmas Story…. Of Fear

I saw a short snippet on the PBS Newshour a while ago about a drive to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name for several Princeton building because of his not rejecting racism strongly enough in his times. This is very much in line with my latest favorite words found in the title of this post.  It is easy to look to the past with the wisdom of hindsight but in my mind it is simply not valid to do that.  For you sports nuts out there this is often called “Monday morning quarterbacking”. It easy to see problems when you take them … Continue reading Judging The Past By The Criteria Of The Present..