New Year's Eve

"New Year's Eve"...Placing a cardboard hat on your head and a cardboard whistle in your mouth and making a dumb looking noisy fool of yourself...No thank you...Good night...Oh, by the way...HAPPY NEW YEAR !!!

Another Good Read

I'm looking forward to reading a brand new book tomorrow. It's non-fiction, has 12 chapters, is 365 pages long and the title is "Two Thousand and Eleven". And if it's anything like the book I read this year, the Lord will see me through the last chapter.

Merry Digital Christmas

Digital Christmas Story

Scruggs And Friends

Amazing

Nominally Normal

If you find yourself feeling strangely normal, you probably are...strange that is.

Where's The Line?

Becky Kelley - Where's The Line To See Jesus?

Grab A Shovel Instead

The fool grabs a stick and beats a dead horse.  The wise man grabs a shovel and buries it.

Thoughts Not Weighed

He who doesn't weigh his thoughts should seriously consider putting his mouth on a diet.

Bored Thoughts

I'm in the most danger when the thoughts in my head get bored and decide to take a walk in my mouth.

Past, Present, Future

If the future ain't what you thought it would be, it's because your past wasn't what it shoulda been.  Therefore, you best do what you gotta do today and do it right.

Almost

The distance between "almost stupid" and "almost smart" is exactly the same as the distance between your ears.

Do The Math

My neighbor has a cat that's just about the spookiest thing I've ever seen.  I'll bet I've scared that thing half to death seventeen times.  Guess the next time I do I'll have to get a shovel.

Expiration Dates

Ain’t No Expiration Dates In Heaven !!!

Who Me ?

I don't know why, but my neighbors keep saying I look like I just fell out of the ugly tree and landed in the stupid bush.

Balloon

Balloon:  Helium filled latex designed to teach a small child not to let go.

Toilet Paper Thoughts

I write all my thoughts down on rolls of toilet paper.  They come in handy....I'm forgetful.

Pessimist

Pessimist:  He who prefers whining to counting blessings.

Forgetful

Blessed are the forgetful, for we are blest because........................

Freedom

A bird never searches for a cage...unless it lives in a house with a cat.

Gothic Junk

No commentary required.

Demographic Profile

I try to be true to my demographic profile, but I catch myself cheating all the time.

Deja Vu All Over Again

"A revolution is coming – a revolution which will be peaceful if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough – but a revolution which is coming whether we will it or not. We can affect its character; we cannot alter its inevitability."
— John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Shhhhh !!!!

Don't tell anyone, but sometimes my mind is so quiet I loose it.

America Is Asleep

"Let China Sleep...For When He Wakes, He Will Move Mountains."
 — Napoleon Bonaparte

If we don't wake up soon, we shall be buried by the mountains being moved.
(X out Google ad for better viewing)

Spiritual Motivation

Until a child tells you what they are thinking, we can't even begin to imagine how their mind is working....


Little Zachary was doing very badly in math. His parents had tried everything...tutors, mentors, flash cards, special learning centers. In short, everything they could think of to help his math.  Nothing seemed to help.

Then, in a last ditch effort, they took Zachary down and enrolled him In the local Catholic school. After the first day, little Zachary came home with a very serious look on his face. He didn't even kiss his mother hello. Instead, he went straight to his room and started studying. Books and papers were spread out all over the room and little Zachary was hard at work. His mother was amazed. She called him down to dinner. To her shock, the minute he was done, he marched back to his room without a word, and in no time, he was back hitting the books as hard as before. This went on for some time, day after day, while the mother tried to understand what made all the difference.

Finally, little Zachary brought home his report card... He quietly laid it on the table, went up to his room and hit the books. With great trepidation, his mom looked at it and to her great surprise, little Zachary got an 'A' in math. She could no longer hold her curiosity.. She went to his room and said, 'Son, what was it? Was it the nuns?' Little Zachary looked at her and shook his head, no.. 'Well, then,' she replied, Was it the books, the discipline, the structure, the uniforms? WHAT WAS IT?'

Little Zachary looked at her and said, 'Well, on the first day of school when I saw that guy nailed to the plus sign, I knew they weren't fooling around..'

Lost And Found

One of my favorite pastimes as a young boy was going into the woods, getting lost on purpose, and then finding myself.

Fun

I've been having so much fun trying to figure out how many monkeys fit inside a barrell.

Sad Meals

Attention:  Families with "Happy Meal" age children have twelve months to move out of San Francisco.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — San Francisco’s mayor has vetoed legislation that would ban toys from fast-food children’s meals, though it’s still expected to become law.

Earlier this week, city supervisors passed the measure, which prevents toy giveaways for meals that don’t meet nutritional guidelines. Advocates have accused fast-food restaurants of predatory marketing to children and contributing to higher obesity rates.

The supervisors’ 8-3 vote is enough to override Friday’s veto by Mayor Gavin Newsom, who previously said he opposed the measure.

Newsom says that while the ban has good intentions, it’s parents — not politicians — who should decide what their children eat.

The ordinance is slated go into effect in December 2011.

Zealot

An enthusiast consumed with uncontrollable enthusiasm.

The Good Old Days

If things weren't so bad and I weren't so old, I'd have no need for nostalgia.

Reduce Speed

Birthdays, at my age, are like those mile marker signs on the side of the road.  After you've counted sixty or so, you really don't give a hoot about keeping track anymore.  Now, for you folks way back there in your 50's (you know who I'm talking about), here's another roadside sign I suggest you pay attention to...

Salvation

Salvation:  When the future switches from being a threat to a promise.

Foreign Language

They say really smart people know Latin or Greek as well as English. 
I don't know nutten cept English.

How To Take Out The Garbage

Governor Cristie's explanation of how to take out the garbage in your new home that was left there by the previous owners.

Hmmmm ?

Food for everyone's thought.

54% of Voters Oppose the Health Care Plan.

54% believe the Tea Party movement has been a good thing for the American political system.

Right And Duty

God gave us a free will.  Use it wisely.  Go vote on November 2nd.  And remember, when you walk into the voting booth you will be performing the basic human right, the right to do as you darn well please.  And once you’ve cast your ballot you had better be prepared to perform the basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.   

Pick A Fight

When you get angry and frustrated the best course of action is to pick a fight with an inanimate object.  My favorite opponent is a bowl of ice cream.

Old And Lazy

I'm so old and lazy I'm puttin off dyin 'till day after tomorrow when I shoulda done it day'fore yesterday.

"To Done"

Don't you just hate people who are organized.  You know, the person whose desk has all the papers stacked in nice neat piles and has a closet full of clothes all neatly arranged in an orderly manner.  These are the people who are so organized they never need a "To Do" list.  They're so organized they just have a "To Done" list. 

Well, I have both lists.  The latest entry in my "To Do" list was twenty minutes ago and the latest entry in my "To Done" list was twenty years ago.

Faith Enhances Freedom

What the Founders Knew: Faith Enhances Freedom

By Thomas S. Kidd

The Tea Party movement seems conflicted about religion. Prominent Tea Partiers, including Glenn Beck, have steered away from the usual priorities of Christian conservatives: restrictions on abortion, gay marriage, and the like. But in other ways, we see evidence of religion's importance to the Tea Party: Beck's summer rally in Washington, D.C., focused almost exclusively on a return to America's heritage of faith, and a recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute suggested that Christian conservatives represent the core of the Tea Party.

This identity crisis reflects a deeper question about religion's role in public life: Does faith restrict or enhance our freedom? Some might believe that the Tea Party's emphasis on liberty over moral restrictions represents a repudiation of the traditional agenda of the Religious Right. But instead, the Tea Party may actually represent a return of religious conservatism to its origins in Revolutionary America, when the Founding Fathers universally paired religion and freedom.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the brilliant French writer who toured America in the 1830s in preparation for his magnum opus, Democracy in America, was struck by the difference between American and French notions of freedom. The American Patriots viewed religion as essential to freedom, while French radicals saw religion as freedom's enemy. Yet the French Revolution descended into massive bloodletting, and concluded with military rule under Napoleon, while the Americans successfully created and sustained a republic without horrific violence (until the Civil War, of course). Tocqueville believed that Americans' friendliness to religion made all the difference, for faith kept the worst excesses of liberty in check. In America, Tocqueville wrote, "freedom sees religion as its companion."

An adhesive force

The Founding Fathers considered faith and freedom as companions in several senses. First, they believed that religion seasoned freedom with compassion for one's fellow man. Absolute freedom would lead people into moral chaos. Founders such as James Madison and George Washington knew that people were naturally inclined to oppress their neighbor, because of what Washington called the "love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart." To Washington, the health — and liberty — of the republic depended on religion, which had a unique power to inculcate moral responsibility.

The Founders believed, secondly, that a respect for religious freedom and religious strength was one of the primary bases for American unity. Even Thomas Jefferson, personally skeptical about Christianity, saw faith as an adhesive force among the broad diversity of Americans. The Patriots had severed their historic connection to England, and the American government was far too small to create a sense of national commonality on its own. Where was a basis for their new civil society? Faith offered a solution.

Jefferson's first inaugural address in 1801 extolled Americans' "benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter — with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people?" Despite his own doubts about Christianity, Jefferson showed charity toward people of different faiths in his staunch defense of religious freedom, a cause in which he found his primary allies among evangelical Christians, especially Baptists, who bitterly remembered their pre-war persecution by several of the colonial governments.

Where God comes in

Finally, the Founders saw God as the basis for Americans' right to freedom, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights. Again, Jefferson the skeptic was not making some specifically Christian claim about freedom, but merely stating the widely assumed theological truth that our fundamental right to freedom and equality was based on our common creation by God.

The original Tea Partier, Samuel Adams, the organizer of the crowd that infamously dumped hundreds of chests of British tea into Boston harbor in 1773, took as strong a view of the connection between religion and liberty as any of the Patriots. Religion fueled virtue, Adams wrote, and "the public liberty will not long survive the total extinction of morals."

The religious conservatives of the Tea Party surely have not abandoned their traditional emphasis on the way that morality should limit freedom. The culture wars are hardly dead. But if, in this election cycle, they highlight liberty's roots in religion, the Tea Partiers may help us recall Tocqueville's older notion that freedom and faith are companions.

Thomas S. Kidd is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. He is the author of God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution.

America Lost

The television manufacturing industry began in the United States.  So how many televisions are manufactured in the United States today?  According to Princeton University economist Alan S. Blinder, the grand total is zero.





Thank you Monty

Monty Pelerin's World

An Avalanche

I don't agree with this guy very often, but I do when he says, "I don’t believe in standing in the way of an avalanche.”

Responsibility Gene

The "Responsibility Gene" can be detected in the human body at a very young age.  As the child grows so do the numbers of this gene depending on simulus from the surrounding environment.  However, this gene disappears completely during middle school years and reappears soon thereafter.  It must be noted however, that there are many well documented cases of this gene never reappearing.

Restore America

Stop worshiping the Democrat and the Republican.
Let none other be heard among us,
Than those of a good citizen,
An open and resolute friend,
A virtuous supporter of the rights of all mankind, born and unborn,
An eternal defender of the Constitution and its founders,
And a believer in God Almighty.

Why Government Programs Don't Work

"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there'd be a shortage of sand."
— Milton Friedman

Vicious Circle

The epitome of a vicious circle: Working at the unemployment office and getting laid off.

Don't Forget Not To Forget

You know that as you grow older you'll forget what's in your mind. 
Just pray you never forget what's in your heart.

Dead End Dreams

Dreams of the heart without goals are like dreams of the night without morning.

Sit Down And Shut Up

Watching this video makes you wonder what Mr. Christy might have done had he been a member of our UN delegation today when President Ahmadinejad of Iran said "9/11 was work of Americans to save Israel"?

I can just see Mr. Christy getting out of his seat, walking up to the podium with a micrphone, pointing his finger and saying, "How bout you and me stepping out back and having our own private debate with no witnesses?" Or, maybe he would have quietly got up and left the Assembly, walked down the hall to the offices of the Israeli delegation, stuck his head in the door and said, "Sic em".

Probably the only governor in the country who doesn't need a bodyguard.

Who Made The Wind Blow?

To be more specific, "Who made the wind blow in the right place and at the right time?"

"And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and God caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all the night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided."
Exodus 14:21

Search And Research

Beware !!!
Google is not the road to research. 
It's just a short cut.

Longevity

It's a scientific fact that men live longer if the learn how to eat right, learn how to exercise right, and learn how to say "YES DEAR" right.

Gates And Doorsteps

The "Gates of Heaven" are just up the street.  The "Doorsteps of Hell" are just down the street.  Which way will you go when you leave?

Common Sense With A Backbone

When Mr. Christie takes off his coat you're in for a lesson in good old fashioned common sense fortified with a lot of backbone. Hang in there and watch it all.  The ending is the best.

The Difference Between A Democrat And A Socialist

Listen to the past to repair the present to insure the future.

Know Which Way The Wind Is Blowing

I liked "The Gospel of Wealth". But I am wary of the person who wrote the article.

David Brooks graduated from the University of Chicago in 1983 as a self-professed "liberal". Soon thereafter he was offerred a job with "National Review" and declared being converted to conservatism. He became an admirer of Milton Friedman, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, but in later years advised that the Republican Party must distance itself from the conservative principles that had arisen during the "Reagan era".  He claimed that these outdated concepts had served their purposes and should no longer be embraced by Republicans in order to win elections.

Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Brooks argued forcefully for American military intervention, proclaiming that American and British forces would be welcomed as liberators. When the Iraq war took a turn for the worse he began tempering his earlier optimism about the war.

In the spring of 2005 Mr. Brooks became an admirer of Barak Obama and soon thereafter published a column in The New York Times, entitled "Run, Barack, Run", urging him to run for president.  Now that things are going rather badly for the Obama administration, Mr. Brooks writes a very flattering article about David Pratt that could well have been written by a "TEABAGGER". And I am extremely skeptical of Mr. Brooks when he devotes an entire op-ed piece to a well known and respected evangelical preacher, yet in in late 2003 he came out in favor of same-sex marriage in his New York Times column. He even equated the idea with traditional conservative values: "We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity.

"Beware the mariner who sails only with the wind, for seldom does he reach his desired port of call.  However, he who also sails against the wind shall reach his destination consistently."

Sky High Prices

I went grocery shopping with my wife the other day.  She picked up a package of steak and complained about the high price.  Then she picked up a package of bacon and again complained about the high price.  Finally, after she picked up a package of drumsticks and complained about the high price I said, "Just imagine how much higher the prices would be if cows and pigs and chickens could fly".

One More Thought:  The price of milk would be rediculous.  How do you milk a flying cow?

Have And Have Not

Maximize what you have. 
It minimizes what you don't have.