My wife is an avid watcher of TV, especially the ‘flipper’ shows where someone buys a house for $20,000 and puts some paint on it and then sells it for $40,000. To me, that very idea is WRONG on so many levels: It Gives People The Wrong Idea — It is kind of like sports in my mind where a kid decides that he will be a professional in basketball/football, you name it. He then spends literally all his waking hours playing that sport to the exclusion of everything else. As a result, he is totally unprepared for life when … Continue reading Destroying The Work of Past Generations..

This picture is not a terribly unusual site here at the homestead. We often see young deer come out of the woods behind our house to munch on the front yard. But what was unusual was the very warm February we had when the picture was taken. Now with the Ides of March just past we seem to be returning to something more normal. Didn’t have to use the lawn tractor snow plow at all this year. Continue reading My Misty Morning Friends

    I spent most of my life as a saver, some would have called me a penny pincher. I drove cars to the end of their life while I saw my neighbors buy a new one every three years or so. As a result, I accumulated enough wealth along with a pension from thirty years in the corporate world to not have to worry about my retirement years. That is until things got totally out of kilter. By kilter I mean when interest rates on savings and CDs went to zero almost a decade ago. I now have all this … Continue reading I’m Tired Of Funding The Economic Recovery

When I told you I was going to take some time off to re-think RJsCorner I had no idea of what was just ahead of me. The damage had already been done before I made the announcement so maybe that was a part of it.  I just returned from a three-day stay in the hospital for a “Subacute and Chronic Right Subdural Hematoma” otherwise know as a brain bleed and yes that meant brain surgery! It happened after a fall I took six days before while taking out some old barnyard fence at the homestead. More on that in tomorrow’s … Continue reading I Am Back And It Was Quite An Adventure..

I am going to take off a few days  to consider a change here at RJ’s Corner. I can’t see being able to continue on as I have for four more years.  Maybe I need to shut down the “All I Know” category where I talk about the political happenings of the day. Maybe I need to get more focused on other areas of interest.  To do that I need to just shut down completely and look at my options. I don’t see the possibility of just stopping blogging, so this isn’t a permanent hiatus just a change in directions. … Continue reading Give Me A Break…

This post is going to be about some uncomfortable facts for my GOP friends. It is about how the public workforce has shrunk and become more efficient than the private workforce. I’m sure that in the coming months all those department chiefs that CO3 has put in place and even CO3 himself will eventually come to realize that there are some very basic differences between public service and the private sector. Mr. Ryan has been putting out plans to dismantle our society’s safety net for years now. But he too often cloaks the facts with “improving” instead of eliminating. If … Continue reading The Public Work Force?

No, this post is not going to talk about taking revenge or seeking vengeance. Instead, it is about the idea of getting free information on what is going on in the world and particularly our country today. I think the old saying “you get what you pay for” is true in many areas of life including this one. I must admit up front that I am probably like most of the people in that I get at least part of my news from Internet sources. I used to get agitated when I clicked on a news article only to have some words to … Continue reading Someone Has To Pay..

 This snippet is for all my fellow bloggers out there, everyone else can just ignore it.   I have been looking into my blog stats lately and have discovered some interesting things. I am on WordPress and the general consensus is that it gets less traffic than Blogger because the Google search engine gives priority to its own app. But, what I actually discovered is that Blogger includes all the spambot hits as well as search engines who roam through the blogsite as a visit count.  Sometimes that leads to some rather gross inaccuracies.  As it turns out I guess is … Continue reading How accurate are your Blogger stats? – Not Very..

Jesus clearly told us to be our brother’s keeper but somewhere along the way we Christians unapologetically shunned that responsibility. During the first three centuries, Christians were very much their brother’s keeper. They often pooled their resources so that those neediest were taken care of. They not only cared for their own there is even documented evidence showing that they took care of those not even Christians.  But, of course, this is what Jesus did so they were just following his lead. The vast majority of Christian congregations today spend about 95% of what they gather on themselves or their … Continue reading When we Christians shun our responsibilities….

All of this conflicting rhetoric and division has many of us worried about the fate of our country but from the new “Quote of the Day” at the top of this blog, it sounds like that letting others think for us just might be the norm. I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.  –Alexis de Tocqueville 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville who wrote the now infamous book “Democracy In America” was a Frenchman who traveled our country in 1835 trying to understand what made America what it … Continue reading Letting Others Think For Us..

   I am a car guy, a good part of my TV viewing is the Velocity Channel where they routinely make and auction $200,000 to up to $4,000,000 cars. It seems almost every time someone goes to my favorite car builder it is to “fill in their collection”. They have most of the 60’s Cameros but need another to fill a hole.  Another show is where a guy runs around the country trying to find cars that his clients need for their collections. Car shows are no longer about the average guy rebuilding an old car in his garage, or at … Continue reading Making Stuff So Rich People Will Spend Their Money…

With this post I am going to go deeply into philosophy and speculate on just what is life. I couldn’t decide if this post belongs in the “That’s Life” category or “Crayon Marks” so I put it in both.  :) Man has spent ages trying to figure out what happens after we end our life on earth.  For Christians, Jesus tells us that our spirit leaves our body and goes to what we decided to call heaven. He tells us that marriages don’t count in heaven and we will live in one of the rooms in his mansion.  I kind … Continue reading What About The Soul??

  I may surprise you with this, but I am not against everything CO3 proposes. He wants to shake up things in Washington and so do I.  It is just that I wanted someone with the wisdom and tact necessary to do that job and he simply isn’t that person. One of the shakeups that I am adamantly for is term limits. I changed the quote in the header above to indicate that fact. Thomas Jefferson was well aware of those in the nation’s capital that stayed too long. Like everything else though, CO3 is all over the map on the … Continue reading Not Everything…

   I simply can no longer tolerate blah, blah, blah.  I don’t know if my age has anything to do with it, maybe it has been learned from my many hours on the Internet as Tom Friedman suggested in his book Thank You for Being Late. I will have much more to say about this book in a near future post but for now I want to limit my words about it to this current topic of blah, blah, blah. When I have to read something over 500 words or so I almost immediately start skipping. I didn’t used to … Continue reading All About Blah, Blah, Blah

This post is a first review of a book by David Brooks called the Social Animal. It delves into the basic nature of man. David Brooks is a writer for the New Work Times and is a weekly regular of The PBS Newshour so I have a regular exposure to him. He is the conservative voice that I most admire in these current crazy times I found this a pretty interesting book about a little known topic. There is a revolution currently going on in trying to further understand the human psyche.  The main thing discovered is that we are not … Continue reading We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know

I know that free-range chickens are now quite a fad especially when you hear stories about the other method of raising them. I don’t know but I guess people tend to think that they taste better because they have a variety of weeds, stones, and such to eat. Myself I prefer the $4.88 roasted chickens from Sam’s Club. :) This post is not really about chickens but a story about my youth. I was definitely a free-range kid.  I roamed the neighborhood, at least a couple blocks of it.  As long as I was home for supper I usually didn’t get into … Continue reading Free-Range Kids..

I just wanted to pen off some thoughts about the topic of fake news.  The foundation of this new executive administration seems to be alternative facts and of course that has its foundation in fake news.  You can say something that is widely known to be a lie and pose it as truth and have people believe it. I fear for our society if so many of us believe such blatant lies. There is a reason that the George Orwell book 1984 is now one of the most ordered books coming from Amazon is because there are so many parallels to … Continue reading Fake News & Fake Stats..