A(nother) Great Cartoon

Courtesy of Mother Goose and Grimm

Another Beauty With Brains and a Heart.

There are days I don't post but today is a rare two post day.

Former Bikini model Kathy Ireland is a lot more than a mature woman who once flaunted her body. She is much more. We need more like her.

Good Luck Mr. Bing

The Detroit News has wisely endorsed former Detroit Pistons great and successful Detroit Businessman, Dave Bing, as mayor of Detroit.


They give some very good reasons to support Mr. Bing

He has proven management abilities, and as a businessman in an extraordinarily tough and competitive industry, he has learned how to cut waste and operate efficiently.

That will be particularly useful, considering that three audits released last week found city departments can't account for tens of million of dollars in spending and revenue.

City Hall needs a thorough housecleaning, best delivered by someone whose independence is unquestionable.

Bing promises to focus on creating jobs; something he's actually done in the city.

He has invested his own money in economic development in Detroit, rebuilding the neighborhood around his steel plant and beginning a housing project on the riverfront.

I concur that, as far as I can tell, he is the bestl choice. He is probably best known for being a the sole bright spot on the floor of those days when the Pistons were lovable losers rather than a respectable team. His real success however is as a businessman. I wish more professional athletes (and other entertainers) would do what this man did; take his money and invest it in businesses that create jobs.

My enthusiasm is dampened however by this, it won't make a bit of difference. Dennis Archer was a decent man and I had a lot of hope for him when he replaced the biggest political slimeball in political history, Coleman Young (Racist, Crook, Socialist) as the mayor of Detroit. Mayor Archer was a relatively decent man (remember that saints don't survive politics) but he ran into the machine that governs Detroit including the Conyers family and Kilpatrick's family as well. These people own Detroit and it will be impossible to fix the city without prying it out of the hands of this, no other word for it, this local mafia that controls Detroit. If Mr. Bing wins, which is very possible, he too will have to deal with the same bunch of deeply entrenched crooks who will undermine him at every turn, just like they did Dennis Archer.


I sincerely wish him luck and Godspeed because, if he wins, he will need it.

The Corn Squeezins Won't Do It.

When my previous employer finally shut down a couple years ago I signed up for a course that would prepare you for "the growing future of Ethanol." By the time my name came up I already had a job and didn't see any point in going to another state for several weeks to train for a job I probably wouldn't get. Now I don't feel so bad about it.

Ethanol is not the solution. It never was.

Even California is giving up on it. When California gives up on a liberal idea you know it's a bad one.

Should we stop development and research on it. By no means. We need to explore every reasonable option but we can't go jumping on something that is totally unproven.

We just can't use it as an excuse not to drill. In spite of the thoughtlessly spouted and totally meaningless left-wing slogan We can't drill our way out of this, we really need to drill more of our own oil.

How Can You Not Get It?

Bill Maher doesn't understand what the Tea Parties are all about. He comes out and admits he doesn't know what we want. What a moron.

He says conservatives are like Husbands whose wife left them for a black man and are angry about it. Well he's the one who says the color of his skin somehow matters but anyway.

First off Mr. Maher, your victory is temporary. That election was not a final and eternal repudiation of conservative values, any more than 2004 was an eternal repudiation of liberal values. Your man complained about Mr. Bush running up the deficit, which he did, and now he is running up a deficit that makes Mr. Bush look like the conservative he pretended to be.

So far, to use a simile I have used before, the choice between the GOP and DEM is the choice between a head cold and Ebola. Both are diseases but one is likely to be survived and the other is deadly. For America and freedom the Democrats are like Ebola while the Republicans are the headcold.

To carry your analogy of a spurned husband now seeking revenge against the new man a bit further, the new man is a fast-talking shyster who leaves nothing but a trail of broken lives behind him. His middle-tax cut is nothing but a publicity gimmick as the public will find out when they file their returns in 2010. It's nothing but wining and dining to lead the befuddled woman into the bedroom.

When a drunk gets behind the wheel and zips up the exit ramp and heads the wrong direction down the freeway, and refuses to admit he is wrong, well you know what the results will be unless he is stopped. Obama is like that drunk. Catastrophe is inevitable.

That's why we're protesting.

And you know exactly why we are protesting. You just don't like it and would rather fantasize about having final and absolute control. The tea-parties painfully remind you that you don't have a final victory. What are you going to say as they grow larger and larger?

So Sorry

Last week I intended to do a post or two that just never happened. Real life seems to get in the way of blogging.

Tax day was not a disaster for me and I did alright, unlike a few people I know.

Wednesday morning (tax-day) I had a bit of a nasty surprise. It was about 4:15 AM I was working 3rd shift in the guard shack and opened a fire-door to go to one of the out buildings to check locks, temps and take meter readings. About ten feet from that door is a large drain and nosing around that drain was a skunk. It turned, used its defense mechanism and ran. I had to leave my jacket outside of the guard shack but couldn't do much about my trousers. When the office staff saw me Friday afternoon I was the target of some teasing from the VP and seems that everyone in the plant seemed to know that I was obliquely blasted by skunk. I guess I shouldn't have told the janitor about it. (Thank God it wasn't a direct hit or, even worse, that I didn't actually step on it and get bitten.)

Then Friday I was working second shift and I dealt with possibly the worst truck driver I have ever dealt with. He could barely speak English (which I am told is not all that unusual in some areas). I told him to take his truck to a certain spot and wait for instructions and so he drives on through and heads for the first available dock, which was not what I told him. Furthermore he was followed by another car that was not authorized to be in that area. I first called shipping and told them what was going on, and they said OK, they were going to put him there anyway, then I went to see what that other car was about; it was the owner of the truck monitoring the driver. I asked if he was a trainee and was told the driver had been there for 20 years but just wouldn't learn. After watching him spend half an hour trying to line his truck up with the dock I began to have my doubts and the owner got out and got the truck in place for him. OK, drivers sometimes have problems, but then another truck came in and I directed him to the same spot I directed the first guy to and told him to wait for instructions, which he did.

A few minutes later, here comes the UPS truck and I open the gate to let him in and a look of amazement appeared on the UPS driver's face and I turned around and here comes our genius, moving way too fast in high traffic area with a posted speed limit of 10 MPH. Also clearly posted is DO NOT PROCEED UNTIL CHECKING WITH GUARD. That's so nobody leaves until everything is right. Well he almost hit the UPS truck and headed down the truck lane toward the exit and the main road. Part of what I am supposed to do is check their paperwork and make sure the trailer doors are secure. His were wide open. I run after him yelling "Stop! Stop!" and I hear a horn. I turn and it's the now exasperated owner of the truck saying "I'll take care of it!" I watch them leave thinking it's over. No such luck.

About two hours later as the shipping crew is leaving, I am standing by the crew gate letting them out and I hear a "Hey!" It's our hero standing at the truck gate. The head of shipping just happened to be there so we walked over and he needed his doors opened and a new seal. The shipping chief said OK and we let him back in. This time he managed to park his truck relatively quickly and they had to completely unload and reload his truck. Why? He dropped his cell phone in the very front of the trailer and needed it. That took a half-hour or so and as he left the shipping head looked at me and said "I've seen em even dumber." I couldn't imagine it but he has more experience. I sat in the guard shack and watched him fiddle with his wheel locks, which took him another 45 minutes, but he was outside of my gate, he was no longer my problem. Our logs said that he had originally left almost 4 hours before he finally got his load of our product on the road. I'm glad it wasn't a hot shipment that was in a big hurry.

What hit me though was how badly he spoke English and I just kept wondering "Where is this guy from?"

Missed Easter

I failed to post on Easter Sunday as I planned. I will still give you videos I planned to use to celebrate the Resurrection of our Lord, Who entered time and space, became part of history, a true man and still God, and personally declared that He was mankind's only hope. His resurrection is the greatest miracle in history.

He Came He Saw He Conquered by Petra






The Victor by Keith Green

The First Step to Triumph.

I don't know when it began but it was long ago, probably before God created man and maybe before He created the universe. No time frame is given. An angel, a mere created thing, named Lucifer challenged God. God is a cosmic tyrant. God is a bully. We can do fine without him in charge. God could have snuffed Lucifer out but instead He took the challenge, a challenge that was played out here in our physical world.

God is both absolute love and absolute justice. The rebels say that absolute love and absolute justice cannot co-exist in one being; love only forgives and justice only punishes. He had to be one or the other. The cross answered that dilemma. At the cross absolute love and absolute justice meet and become one. That is part of the meaning of the cross.

Satan is running out of options as the world that he is (temporarily) master of is collapsing around him. God's vindication is approaching. The cross appeared to be a disastrous and tragic defeat but was in fact the first step to absolute triumph. It appeared that all was lost but it was only the start of God's answer to Lucifer/Satan.

Here are two videos of Christian musicians describing the horror and hidden triumph of that day. (Both of which were recorded in the 1980s)

It Is Finished by Petra



And also here is Too Small a Price from Don Francisco.


One of the saddest things is reading blogs by "modern Christians" who criticized Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ as a sadistic blood bath. (Mel Gibson is by no means a perfect man, but that movie was the achievement of a lifetime.) That so-called bloodbath is at the heart of our faith. It was the end result of all sin and it showed our sin in all its true horror. When he was being challenged for Antisemitism, Mr Gibson was asked "Who crucified Jesus?" and he truthfully answered "I did." That is the only correct answer and it is the answer for all of us as well. Every single man and woman who ever lived (except Jesus Himself of course) crucified Jesus; He is the only true victim of human history and He is the only true victor, as the world saw a bit later.

04-09-09

Is our society guided too much by our feelings and not enough by our brains? I have mentioned before that I was at one time fascinated by dreams and their interpretations. When I was 20, 21 or so I read two books by Dr. Ann Faraday called Dream Power and The Dream Game, which by the way are two of the most useful books in the study of the content of dreams that I have ever read . . . so far as the study of dreams go. Her social, moral, and philosophical content, however, was nonsense. Simply put she said that our inner conflicts were born of a struggle between the topdog (which is enforced on us from the outside and seeks unnatural control of us) and the underdog (which is our natural self that is good, wise and, as far as she is concerned, almost infallible.) She came right out and said we should stop thinking with our heads and start thinking with our hearts and you will live longer and be happier. Oh such sound advice. Listen with your heart, you will understand. Or so said Grandmother Willow in the movie Pocahontas. Of course you should listen to your heart because it does catch things that the mind misses but veto power belongs to the head, not the heart. Also keep in mind what the Bible says: The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick, who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17:9 NASB). To completely trust the heart is to trust human nature, and we all know where that leads.

Listen with your heart, think with your head, and you will more than understand.

I guess this kind of goes with the idea that you have to use both faith and reason to see clearly, as one or the other by itself will lead you astray.

On a much more serious note Atlas Shrugs has some very troubling videos taken from hidden cameras inside an American mosque and what she hears is troubling. It includes a seven year old girl referring to her husband. We don't tolerant pseudo-Christian sects when they practice polygamy and especially child marriage - why should we tolerate it from other religions? The fact that they are from the 3rd world is irrelevant. If they want to live here they need to live by our laws.

Also take a look at DG Counter Terrorism blog. It's worth while.

And it's Thursday so how about a memory. This goes back to when I was six or seven years old and I used to watch it religiously. Can you guess which Star Trek character was based on a character from this show? (supposedly by some accounts.)



What can I say? I was six years old at the time.

Space Is Strange

When Nihilist Doug Adams wrote his nihilistic but amusing Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy he described a galaxy where nothing was as it appeared and everything was a little strange. He is wrong about life having no purpose, and the purpose of the universe is not the number 42 as his book insists, but he is right about the strangeness of space.

I mean look whats up there.

This Nebula looks like an eye.




This Nebula looks like a hand



Yes the universe is a strange place. Far stranger than any astronomer thought it was in middle of the twentieth century. Who could have anticipated that space really was a canvas painted by the Supreme Artist. Such beauty was unanticipated.

04-03-09

Will be working 30 of the next 56 hours so I leave you with this as an apology.


I also stumbled across this list of supposedly useful, some freeware, some you pay for, programs that could potentially be dangerous. I found it while tracing a bizarre bit of spyware on my computer. There may be some innacuraccies in the list but I would still look it over and compare anything on it to what you might have. I found one that I stopped using a year ago but never removed completely as I should have.