Talk about mottos this one sounds like it  should take its place beside A chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage”.  That one was from the Hoover campaign of 1928. You remember that one; it was just before the great depression hit. (I don’t know why they call it “great”; there was nothing great about it.) The title here is from an email put out by the Obama re-election committee. I have the honor (if you want to call it that) of getting these emails on a regular basis. Here are some excerpts from a recent letter: Friend — …. … Continue reading Where everybody who does their fair share gets a fair shake…..

  Is the first amendment dead except for those who control the money?? Here is a new definitions of the Golden Rule “Those who have the gold make the rules”. Sad, Sad…. Continue reading So Much for Peaceful Demonstrations…

I have taken this picture probably a dozen times over the last twenty years. It represents an almost perfect symmetry to me. Continue reading Pleasant Hill Attic…

Here is another post on the words of James, the brother of Jesus. Who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom.  But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth.  Such “wisdom” does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic.  For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice.  As James indicates not all “wisdom” comes from God. Be very careful … Continue reading James, The Brother Of Jesus….About Heavenly Wisdom and Humility

  Money and women are the most sought after and the least known about of any two things we have. -May 20, 1934  Will Rogers Oh Will you sage from the past!! But I guess the mystery of money and women even outdate you.  It has probably been going on since Adam and Eve. My mother abandoned my father, brother and me when I was about nine years old so I was never around women much during my formable years. Due to my timidity, something that I have definitely gotten over since then, women remained a mystery to me well … Continue reading Money & Women….

Source:  Cain: God persuaded me to run for president – USATODAY.com. Looking at the source article you might be expecting me to talk about how God is involved in politics but I won’t go there. God has much more sense than to get involved in the kind of stuff that is going around today. Instead I am going to talk about government spending…. Here are some words from the reference article: During his speech, Cain also criticized President Barack Obama for canceling the space shuttle program — a decision actually made by President George W. Bush— as NASA shifts its … Continue reading I Was For It Before I Was Against It

It looks like the super committee is, like the rest of congress, is in a partisan gridlock. As the cartoon to the right portrays the Republicans have taken a pledge to not put any additional taxes on their super rich supporters. They prefer to put the burden the poor and middle class with any deficit reduction plans. Of course this will not fly with the Democratic members of the committee so there is the usual gridlock. When they set up the supper committee they said that if the committee did not come up with a resolution to reduce the deficit then there … Continue reading Its Probably a Good Thing….

I kind of doubt it……Will freezer burn ruin the country instead?? Continue reading Frozen Turkeys

  “When you are satisfied, you are successful. For that’s all there is to success is satisfaction.”  July 29, 1928 Will Rogers I recently visited a place I have been to on about five other visits. I can’t seem to get enough of the totally relaxing atmosphere of this place. It is called Pleasant Hill Shaker Village and it is near Lexington KY. One of the Shakers mottos of life is Put Your Hands to Work; and Your Hearts to God When I recently came across the above quote by Will this phrase came to mind.  The Quakers were a … Continue reading The Definition of Success….

Continue reading Leaves of Fall…

Source:  10 great places to experience the simple life – USATODAY.com. It’s not uncommon at Shaker Village to see a pair of oxen laboring in the field or a blacksmith in period clothing shoeing a horse. It’s a delightful step back in time and “a testament to the simplicity of the Shaker lifestyle,” van Ogtrop says. “Plank-and-stone fences lace together nearly 3,000 lush bluegrass acres where a community of Shakers once lived, worked and worshiped.” It’s great to see Pleasant Hill get this national attention. It is number 2 on the list of 10 great places. Here is another picture … Continue reading 10 great places to experience the simple life – USATODAY.com

“The Bible speaks with remarkable frequency of ‘bearing.’ It is capable of expressing the whole work of Jesus Christ in this one word… Therefore, the Bible can also characterize the whole life of the Christian as bearing the cross. It is the fellowship of the cross to experience the burden of the other. If one does not experience it, the fellowship [one] belongs to is not Christian.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer Bonhoeffer described faith without works as a dead faith and therefore worthless. Let us all take to heart these words and the words of James, the brother of Jesus, in our … Continue reading Bearing our Burdens for Others….

But every one of us write our own history. If it sounds better the way we want it than the way it might have been why that don’t stop us any more than an amber light. -September 17, 1933      Will Rogers I think that this is one of those saying that is probably more true now than when it was in Will’s day. If I remember the figures correctly about 50% of the resumes in the job world contain embellishments or outright falsehoods. And of course the number one cause for traffic accidents today are people running red … Continue reading Writing Our Own History….

Source:  Obama college loan plan aims at an old voting bloc – Boston.com. Everybody in Washington seems to be apologizing to each other.  In Washington they just generally figure that one hatred offsets the other and they are both even. -January 25, 1935  Will Rogers The above article is about a new tact that President Obama is now beginning to use. He will basically provide via executive orders do what he can to help relieve the problems we are in.  It seems that the Republicans are dead set of stopping him for gaining any ground via the congressional process so … Continue reading Maybe He is Starting to Lead??

Looking back at the prosperity of the Clinton years of the 1990’s I’d say we’ve lost a lot of ground in this country. Are our best days behind us? They don’t have to be but given the current circumstances they might well be. If we cannot put aside our hatred of other political persuasions and creeds we may have peaked. The “us” vs. “them” mentality  that is so pervasive today is a very destructive thing and as a result it just might be all down hill from here. If we can’t get past these things then even I might live to … Continue reading We've Lost A Lot Of Ground In This Country….

source:  Silence is My Leading – QuakerQuaker. One of the most fascinating things I find from Quaker religious practices is their unprogrammed worship. That is where they spend time simply sitting and waiting for a message from God. This activity, or should I say inactivity, is unheard of in most other forms of religious practices. From the source article I have found that there are two distinctively different feeling about what is to be accomplished by this “waiting”.  Here is a quote from that article: For the Activist silent worship is a means towards an end.  That end is the … Continue reading Silently Waiting for God…..

The short answer to this question at least to those of us who love our neighbors as the Lord taught us is an emphatic YES The longer answer follows: Going to war should be the very last thing we do when we have a conflict with another nation. But at least with our last two wars that does not seem to be the case especially in Iraq. We seemed to rush into the invasion of that country long before it could ever have been deemed necessary. We allowed our president to feed us an untrue line that we were in … Continue reading Is Technology Making War Too Easy??

Reflections of Canada – RJ Walters (all rights reserved) Continue reading Ottawa Canada July 2011

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” Mark 12:28-31 Continue reading The Greatest of God’s Commands

  Source: The 10 Biggest-Selling Drugs That Are About to Lose Their Patent – DailyFinance. I am one of millions of us seniors who is on some very expensive prescription drugs. I currently spend over $1,000/year on Plavix alone. But that is about to change. In May 2012 Plavix will lose is patent exclusivity. That will open the door for an inexpensive generic. The above article show ten high cost drugs that are in the same situation. To the right is also a mention of this from Money magazine in April 2011. I have had it pinned on my bulletin board … Continue reading Hello Plavix Generic…..

Here is a quote from Jim Wallis over at Sojourners that will be the foundation for this post. Since the Occupy Wall Street movement began, the talk about inequality has been greater than I can remember it being for a very long time. This has been the elephant in the room in our discussions about the economy that nobody wanted to say out loud. In the last hundred years, there have been two peak periods of great inequality in American society—just before the Great Depression, and in 2008, right before our current Great Recession. And in the mysterious and secret … Continue reading Inequity in the U.S.

  Christ, in sending the [people] to the scriptures, sent them, not merely to read them, but carefully to search and ponder them. And did he not say, “Read the scriptures,” but “Search the scriptures.” … Their meaning is not expressed superficially or set forth in their literal sense, but, like a treasure, lies buried at a great depth. And those who seek for hidden things will not be able to find the object of the search if they do not seek carefully and painstakingly. – St. John Chrysostom Homily 41 (John 5:39-47), A.D. 390 From Wikipedia John Chrysostom (c. 347–407), Archbishop of Constantinople, was … Continue reading Don’t Just Read But Search & Ponder….

The above title is something that many people espouse to live by.  But in my opinion you can’t just go with the flow in your retirement life. At least not the way I perceive it or at least not in the beginning. Going with the flow is allowing things to happen without much outside intervention. When we enter your retirement life each of us needs to have some plan on what we are going to do and what we hope to accomplish. Without that plan going with the flow could mean getting up every morning, watching TV all day and … Continue reading Just Go With The Flow….

Source:  Column: We don’t want an America ‘made in China’ – USATODAY.com. Let’s subtitle this post to “When Buying American Meant Something”. There are some rather disturbing things about the source article above. It seems very strange that a U.S. supplier would lose out to the China competitor for the glass used in the new Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site! If there is anything that should be American made it would be at that site! Yet the business went out of country, although through several intermediary U.S. companies, because PPG Industries could not afford to pay the … Continue reading We don’t want an America ‘made in China’…

Continue reading Barns – Waterford Mill, Maryland

Now that I am finally a Medicare beneficiary I want to take a look back at the trip to get here. I will also be looking at how we do our healthcare relative to the rest of the industrial world. Let’s begin this journey. I have learned from experience that healthcare needs definitely increase as you get older.  I joke that I think my warranty expired when I turned sixty.  I am sure that I have been to the doctor more in the last five years than I had for the previous sixty combined. When I started out my adult … Continue reading The Cost of Healthcare….

There should be a tax on every man that wanted to get a government appointment or be elected to office. In two years that tax alone would pay our National debt. – Will Rogers  March 22, 1925 I have to go back to my hero Will Rogers for answers to many of life’s problems. Given that we are in the middle of the primary season for president and the congressional stuff will be starting soon this seems like an answer to more than one problem. But I guess I should also include the following Once a man has held public … Continue reading The Answer to the Debt Problem…

Source:  Editorial Cartoons – USATODAY.com Photos. Continue reading Way Too Narrow For Me Too…

This was a picture taken recently during our Canadian vacation. We were staying in a small motel right on the river. It was a mystical place.     Continue reading Sunset Over the St. Lawrence River – 2011

And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink,  I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, … Continue reading If You Are a Christian There Are Consequences To Inaction…..

Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.” –Steve Jobs — Continue reading Follow Your Inner Voice….

I guess everybody who has looked at any news source yesterday know that Steve Jobs, one of the founders of Apple Computer, passed away this week of pancreatic cancer.  He was only 56 years old.  Steve was definitely not one who was afraid of pushing the envelope of life and particularly our technology life. In that regard he was a hero of mine. I myself pushed the status quo a few times in my technical life but nothing compared to him. In 1970, when Steve was fifteen years old, I started out my career as an electric engineer. Then in … Continue reading Here's to you Steve….

Source:  Military retirees say benefits hard-earned – USATODAY.com. The news in the article above came as somewhat a shock to me.  I often hear that the military pay is substandard; that we are forcing our soldiers to live in poverty. The graph to the right seems to go against those words.  It seems that being a federal employee including ones in the military that your compensation is well above those in the private sector.  In fact being in the private sector is putting you at the bottom of the total compensation ladder in this graph! I certainly appreciate the comments … Continue reading Federal and Military Employee Compensation…