A Point to Ponder

A government that’s run amok
It's citizens will surely fok!

~ Anne Animus

THE OLD PATHS

I liked the old paths, when 

Mothers stayed at home. 

Fathers went to work. 

Brothers joined the army. 

And sisters got married 

BEFORE having children.

Crime did not pay.

But hard work did,

And people knew the difference. 

Moms could cook. 

Dads would work. 

Children would behave. 

Husbands were loving.

Wives were supportive, 

And children were polite. 

Women wore jewelry, 

And Men wore pants. 

Women looked feminine.

Men looked manly, 

And children looked clean, decent

And well-groomed. 

People respected the truth, 

And disapproved of liars.

They went to church 

To find solid friendships 

While worshipping God.

Hymns sounded reverent. 

Sermons sounded helpful. 

Rejoicing sounded normal, 

And grieving was sincere. 

Cursing could get you into trouble. 

Drugs were for illness. 

The flag was honored. 

America was beautiful. 

And God was a welcome Presence

In all our lives.

We read the Bible in school, 

Joyfully celebrated Christmas,   

And quietly witnessed for the blessings 

Of knowing Jesus Christ 

With everyone we met.

To be an American was worth dying for. 

To be an American was worth living for. 

To utter treasonous thoughts was shameful.

I still like the old paths the best. 

~ Anonymous

What does the term

“The Alienated Jew”

mean to you, personally, 

and what effect might the phenomenon, if, indeed, it is a phenomenon, had on the development of Western Civilization and Current Events?

 

In this 15th century woodcut, Jews are depicted as murdering the child Simon of Trent. This "murder" is one of the sources of the Medieval blood libel: the allegation that Jews used Christian children's blood to make matzoh (unleavened bread) during Passover. The Jews can be recognized by the circular patches sewn on their clothing and by the money bags they carry.

[SOURCE: From a facsimile of Hartmann Schedel's Nuremburg Chronicle or Buch der Chroniken, printed by Anton Koberger in 1493. Both the Buch der Chroniken and the facsimile are located at Kenyon College.]

CONSUMERISM RUN AMOK?

Is more always better?

What does this say to you about the mentality that obviously drives the lower and lower-middle classes?

Do you APPROVE or DISAPPROVE?

Or Don't You Care?

The Determination to Serve

2/23/2015 [emphasis added]

The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve… —Matthew 20:28

Jesus also said, “Yet I am among you as the One who serves” (Luke 22:27). Paul’s idea of service was the same as our Lord’s— “…ourselves your bondservants for Jesus’ sake” (2 Corinthians 4:5). We somehow have the idea that a person called to the ministry is called to be different and above other people. But according to Jesus Christ, he is called to be a “doormat” for others— called to be their spiritual leader, but never their superior. Paul said, “I know how to be abased…” (Philippians 4:12). Paul’s idea of service was to pour his life out to the last drop for others. And whether he received praise or blame made no difference. As long as there was one human being who did not know Jesus, Paul felt a debt of service to that person until he did come to know Him. 

The chief motivation behind Paul’s service, however, was not love for others but love for his Lord. 

If our devotion is to the cause of humanity, we will be quickly defeated and broken-hearted, since we will often be confronted with a great deal of ingratitude from other people. But if we are motivated by our love for God, no amount of ingratitude will be able to hinder us from serving one another.

Paul’s understanding of how Christ had dealt with him is the secret behind his determination to serve others. “I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an insolent man…” (1 Timothy 1:13). In other words, no matter how badly others may have treated Paul, they could never have treated him with the same degree of spite and hatred with which he had treated Jesus Christ. Once we realize that Jesus has served us even to the depths of our meagerness, our selfishness, and our sin, nothing we encounter from others will be able to exhaust our determination to serve others for His sake.

~ Oswald Chambers - My Utmost for His Highest

Oswald Chambers (1874-1917)

The grave my little cottage is,
Where “Keeping house” for thee
I make my parlor orderly
And lay the marble tea.

For two divided, briefly,
A cycle, it may be,
Till everlasting life unite
In strong society.

~ Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

“O, Wind, if Winter comes, 

can Spring be far behind?”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Ode to the West Wind

We’re only here for a little stay.

Don’t worry.

Don’t hurry,

And be sure to stop,

And smell the flowers along the way.

~ Anonymous

"Just think of lovely things
And your heart will fly on wings"

Betty Comden and Adolphe Greene - Peter Pan 1954

Feeling a little low?

World got you down?

Are you snowed under?

Overwhelmed with with debt?

Just plain sick and tired of it all?

RELAX. 

SIT DOWN. 

PUT YOUR FEET UP.

AND HAVE A NICE HOT 

CUPPA COFFEE.

And here you thought we couldn't possibly

sink any lower than we already did.

HAH! 

FOOLED YA, DIDN'T WE?

Nine Last Names of Distinction 

on the Brink of Extinction

Everybody knows them, but who WERE they?

Is your last name Miracle, Tumbler or Villan? If so, you’re a member of a dying breed. Just be happy you’re not a Bread or a Spinster, or you’d be presumed already extinct.

Unusual names have lingered for centuries, but did you know that they can become extinct? Any last name with under 200 “bearers” is endangered, and we’ve found some which have indeed died out. 

Do you have a rare last name on the verge of extinction, or is your last name extremely common? Build a family tree on MyHeritage.com and discover relatives with your last name you never knew existed.

Last names with less than 20 bearers:

 Sallow

Fernsby

Villin (Villan)

Miracle

Dankworth

Relish

MacQuoid

Loughty

Birdwhistle

Berrycloth

Tumbler

Endangered last names with under 200 bearers:

 Ajax

Edevane

Gastrell

Slora

Last names presumed extinct since 2011:

 Bread

MacCaa

Spinster

Pussett, Puscat and Pussmaid

Bythesea and Bytheseashore

So, why are so many names becoming extinct? Names linked to uncommon professions or geographic places are dying out slowly unlike the more popular Smith and Baker. Also, many last names were wiped out during war when young men died in battle taking with them the distinctive last names of their villages and hamlets of origin after which they'd been called.

Many of these were British names which, just like people, have migrated across the shores to America or Australasia, which means the names have moved to a new home. Other last names, like those from Eastern Europe, have become anglicized and are beginning to take over the traditional British names.

Do you have an endangered last name? What would you do to save it from becoming extinct?

See more at: http://articles.myheritage.com/9-last-names-brink-extinction/?lang=EN&utm_source=ppc_Taboola&utm_medium=ppc&tr_brand=1&utm_campaign=US_EN_WEB_ACQ_C&tr_ad_group=A4&tr_device=c&tr_position=All&tr_copy=A4_T1&tr_creative=A4_I1_Family#sthash.jN0c2J4r.dpuf

Care to Elaborate On 

Or Add Anything To 

This Statement?

How Jon Stewart [ne Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz] Turned Lies Into Comedy and Brainwashed a Generation

By Kyle Smith

February 15, 2015 - The New York Post [lightly edited by FT for emphasis and syntax] 

So Brian Williams goes out (for six months) humiliated and derided. Jon Stewart [ne Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz] goes out (permanently, one hopes) the same day, but on a giant Comedy Homecoming King float, with a 21-gun salute from the media, his path strewn with roses and teardrops.

Why?

Brian Williams lied about his personal exploits a few times. Jon Stewart [has been] unabashedly and habitually dishonest [during his entire career].

Though Stewart has often claimed he does a “fake news show,” “The Daily Show” isn’t that. It’s a real news show punctuated with puns, jokes, asides and the occasional moment of staged sanctimony.

It contains real, unstaged sound bites about the days’ events and interviews about important policy matters.

Stewart [as a journalist is both irresponsible and unprofessional].

He is especially beloved by others in the journo game. (For every 100 viewers, he generated about 10 fawning profiles in the slicks, all of them saying the same thing: The jester tells the truth!).

Any standard liberal publication was as likely to contain an unflattering thought about Stewart as L’Osservatore Romano is to run a hit piece on the pope.

The hacks have a special love for Stewart because he’s their [alter ego]. They don’t just think he’s funny, they thrill to his every sarcastic quip. They wish they could get away with being so one-sided, snarky and dismissive.

They wish they could skip over all the boring phone calls and the due diligence and the [pretense at] fairness and just blurt out to their ideological enemies in Stewart style, “What the f–k is wrong with you?”

Most other journalists aren’t allowed to swear or to slam powerful figures (lest they be denied chances to interview them in future). Their editors make them tone down their opinions and cloak them behind weasel words like “critics say.” Journalists have to dress up in neutrality drag every day, and it’s a bore.

Yet Stewart uses his funnyman status as a license to dispense with even the most minimal journalistic standards. Get both sides of the story?

Hey, I’m just a comedian, man. Try to be responsible about what the real issues are? Dude, that’s too heavy, we just want to set up the next d- -k joke.

Stewart is often derided by the right as having minimal impact and low ratings. That’s not true. He and Stephen Colbert ruled the late-night ratings among 18-to 34-year-olds for most of the last five years, though Jimmy Fallon has lately surpassed both.

About 522,000 Americans in that age range watch “The Daily Show” on an average night, but that means many millions of occasional viewers, with millions more watching clips online.

To a key audience, he was a strong influence. Longtime Cooper Union history professor Fred Siegel says his students constantly came to him repeating Stewart’s talking points.

College students, of course, are both little acquainted with realities of adult existence and walled off from conservative views, so they’re the perfect audience for Stewart’s shtick, which depends on assumptions that are as unquestioned as they are false.

This week’s “Daily Show” segment in which Stewart defended Williams was distilled, Everclear-strength Stewart. It was as amazing as watching Barbra Streisand run through a medley of her greatest hits in only seven minutes: In this little chunk of error, cliche, preening and deception Stewart managed to pack an example of just about everything that is unbearable about his style. It bears close study. 

Stewart made some mild jokes at the anchordude’s expense, interrupted with insufferable Jerry Lewis-style mugging, baby talk, high-pitched silly voices and the inevitable reference to whether Williams was “high” (authority figures getting high: always comedy gold to the campus audience).

Stewart slipped in a line of blatant editorializing: “Being caught is punishment enough, no?” Really? Why? If so, argue it, don’t just point the sheep in the direction you want.

Williams is a news anchor. A guy whose three main skills are being good-looking, an ability to read the English language out loud and seeming credible. To put his case in Stewart-ese: “If you want to be considered a trustworthy source of facts, maybe try NOT LYING!!!”

Declaring that media coverage of Williams’ lies was “overkill,” Stewart then built a wedding cake of bullcrap, layer after layer of untruth.

His first move was to change the subject. He used a variant of the rhetorical fallacy known as the “tu quoque” argument, or calling out alleged hypocrisy. Taken to its endpoint, tu quoque (“you, too”) reasoning means no one would ever slam anyone for anything because, hey, we’re all imperfect.

Tu quoque-ism is a generally meaningless gotcha game that can, of course, be turned right around on Stewart: Hey, Jon, you really think you’re the guy to call foul on nuking media personalities who have made misstatements?

In high dudgeon, as though the thought weren’t already a cliche we’d all seen many times on Twitter and Facebook, Stewart declared sarcastically, “Finally, someone is being held to account for misleading America about the Iraq War.”

Then came the inevitable gotcha sound bites: News figures discussing intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s WMD program. Why such a bizarre tangent into an unrelated matter? Because in Stewart’s mind, and those of his viewers, everything has to be the fault of an evil Republican, preferably George W. Bush.

Near the end of the segment, Stewart declares, with the prototypical combination of blustering self-righteousness and sarcasm that crystallizes his appeal to the college mentality, wonders whether the news shows will now start examining the “media malfeasance that led our country into the most catastrophic foreign policy decision in decades.”

Then (using comic bathos) Stewart cuts to more newscasters making apparently trivial points about Williams’ lying. Stewart’s logic is this: The media can’t report negatively on anything anymore, because they dropped the ball on Iraq.

Stewart doesn’t actually believe that: It’s just a cheap gambit meant to get his buddy Williams off the hook by minimizing his serial lying. If Stewart were a public defender, he’d be even funnier than he is as a comic.

What judge or jury could fail to burst out laughing if a defense attorney said, “I have no rebuttal of any of the charges against my client, but lots of other people not in this courtroom are guilty of stuff, too!”

I look forward to the next time a Republican assistant municipal treasurer in Dirt Falls, Idaho, says something awkward about race and Stewart says “I forgive this guy given that the actual vice president of the United States once said of Barack Obama, ‘I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.’”

Let’s look at the media reports on Iraq that Stewart is arguing make Williams’ untruths pale in comparison. Problem: Those reports were not lies. Journalists trying to figure out whether the war was justified called up credible experts with experience in the field and passed along what they said. As a more honest version of Stewart might say, “Dude. That’s not malfeasance. That’s Re. Por. Ting.”

Stewart added that “it’s like the Bush administration hired Temple Grandin to build a machine that kills the truth.” Even the audience of devotees seemed to find this simile baffling.

The idea that “Bush lied” is itself a lazy, ill-informed and false statement.

As Judge Laurence Silberman, co-chairman of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, wrote in The Wall Street Journal last week, essentially no one in the Washington intelligence community doubted the major report that Iraq had an active WMD program in 2002.

The National Intelligence Estimate delivered to the Senate and President Bush said there was a 90 percent certainty of WMDs. Democrat George Tenet, the Clinton CIA director who continued to serve under Bush, said the case for WMDs was a “slam dunk.”

John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and Joe Biden all looked at the intelligence and voted to authorize force. Sen. Jay Rockefeller argued strongly for the war. Then, years later, when it wasn’t going so well, he published a highly politicized report ripping Bush.

There is a serious case to be made against the Iraq War, but it’s a lot more complicated than the playground taunt, “Bush lied about WMDs.” (“Hey, I’m a comic, you expect me to do serious? Please welcome our next guest, Henry Kissinger!”)

Yet another lie on top of that is the absurd implication that the news media were too soft on Bush. The only way you could possibly consider the media to be too conservative would be if you were an extremist well to their left, which Stewart [most certainly] is.

During the Iraq War buildup, even as overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress authorized the use of force, 59 percent of the sound bites aired by the evening newscasts were antiwar, 29 percent pro-war.

To take another of innumerable examples, in 2006 Bush had about the same approval ratings that Obama suffered in 2014. The network news both commissioned far more polls when Bush stood to suffer, and reported on the Bush results far more.

Again, this isn’t close: The score was 52 to 2, as in 52 mentions of low Bush approval ratings versus two mentions of (even lower, at times) Obama approval ratings.

In every Gallup poll this century, more Americans called the media “too liberal” than “too conservative.” The numbers were 45 to 15 in 2003, the year of the Iraq invasion. In 2008, as Obama was being elected, it was 47 to 13. Last fall it was 44 to 19.

Thanks to polemicists and clowns, the myth that “Bush lied” has caught on, and now a majority of Americans believe it. Stewart-ism won the day.

Liberal comics make things up, liberal journalists chortle and praise and internalize the lies.

Before you know it, if you point out that Bill O’Reilly’s audience is just as well informed as NPR’s (as a Pew poll found), or that Sarah Palin never said, “I can see Russia from my house” (that was “Saturday Night Live”), you’re just a buzzkill.

Brian Williams has become a joke for telling lies, but Jon Stewart is a liar for the way he told jokes.

http://nypost.com/2015/02/15/how-jon-stewart-turned-lies-into-comedy-and-brainwashed-a-generation/

“Am I My Brother’s Keeper?”

2/15/2015

None of us lives to himself… —Romans 14:7

Has it ever dawned on you that you are responsible spiritually to God for other people? For instance, if I allow any turning away from God in my private life, everyone around me suffers. We “sit together in the heavenly places…” (Ephesians 2:6). “If one member suffers, all the members suffer with it…” (1 Corinthians 12:26). If you allow physical selfishness, mental carelessness, moral insensitivity, or spiritual weakness, everyone in contact with you will suffer. But you ask, “Who is sufficient to be able to live up to such a lofty standard?” “Our sufficiency is from God…” and God alone (2 Corinthians 3:5).

“You shall be witnesses to Me…” (Acts 1:8). How many of us are willing to spend every bit of our nervous, mental, moral, and spiritual energy for Jesus Christ? That is what God means when He uses the word witness. But it takes time, so be patient with yourself. Why has God left us on the earth? Is it simply to be saved and sanctified? No, it is to be at work in service to Him. Am I willing to be broken bread and poured-out wine for Him? Am I willing to be of no value to this age or this life except for one purpose and one alone— to be used to disciple men and women to the Lord Jesus Christ. My life of service to God is the way I say “thank you” to Him for His inexpressibly wonderful salvation. Remember, it is quite possible for God to set any of us aside if we refuse to be of service to Him— “…lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified” (1 Corinthians 9:27).

Oswald Chambers c. 1905

A Feline Valentine

A cat can offer much bound to enchant. 

Felines, ever charming, but capricious

Eventually –– no matter how you rant ––

Lenient, strict, indulgent, or judicious ––

It seems the little fuzzball will prevail.

No worthy feline ever lets you win.

Even so, the smartest never fail,

‘Tis certain, to enchant you while they sin. 

So easily do cats cast spells beguiling

Foolish folk enraptured by their antics

Only laugh when cats deserve reviling 

Letting felines prove their fans romantics.

Letting pussy get away with mischief

Yields ire-dissolving mirth, and thus a missed tiff. 

~ § ~

Post Script

Nothing can break up a human spat

Faster than a charming household cat.

And little else can more acutely grieve you

Than when the darling sickens, and must leave you.

~ FreeThinke

In loving memory of Priscilla (June, 2004 - January 12, 2015)

Rest in peace, dear little friend. 

You were very much loved and always will be.

~ § ~