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_
I have always been a U.S. history reader since my first years of exposure to it from a gruffy old farmer/teacher in the public school system. He taught me that if you want to really understand something you need to get as close to the source as you can. Learn what the founders thought. During the years since that time I have read extensively about the people around the forming of our nation, most particularly Jefferson, Washington, and Madison. Learning about their lives and how they thought gave me an insight into what the country was meant to be. It … Continue reading Redemptive Violence…
My prayer for this holiday season is that all the religions of the world finally agree to coexist with one another and not try to force their individual beliefs and dogma on the rest of us. If only we could all quit killing each other in the name of our particular version of God this alone would go a LONG ways toward world peace that we all seemingly pray for.. Peaceful Coexistence Not War.. Continue reading My Prayer For the Season…
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
RJ's Corner - Having My Say 