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Another TSO classic, this one in Memphis.  I was at their show a year earlier, just not in the 3rd row.

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Here's a TSO classic with Jennifer "the voice" Cella..

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 Traditional..

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Merry Christmas to all..

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Time for a little seasonal spirit.

Happy Birthday, Us!

Despite all our warts we live in the best country ever designed by mankind.   America is a good and noble country, and yes, exceptional in history.   And there should be no confusion over the intent of our Founding Fathers.  Our continued survival and prosperity depends simply on sticking to those basic principles, which any human being is capable of doing no matter their race, creed or ethnicity.    

Happy Birthday to the land of the free and home of the brave.

MORE  7/5/14

To some the above must seem overly simplistic.   Yes, there are serious problems in America but the above statements are unambiguously true.  Americans of any color and background can change America for the better, or revert us to our roots, because we still have the ability to revise and correct.

Still, some of the smarter amongst us prefer verbosity in making a point.  Or maybe it's just that some of us dumber folks don't appreciate their exteneded prose.  For instance, one can weed their way through this piece from Jim Sleeper on Salon on how much America sucks in 2014, beginning with a reference to mass shooters, reaching the end without really knowing exactly what he wants to do to correct anything.

Such fogginess requires picking out a few fragments in the story to get a sense of the writer's sense, considering this is a story that includes the phrase 'we are violent and filled with rage' and mentions 'public derangement'.  In other words, America is sick.   So let's peruse.

On guns and mass shootings (bold added):

We haven’t yet understood the shots fired and heard ’round the world from 74 American schools, colleges and military bases since the Sandy Hook School massacre of December 2012. These shots haven’t been fired by embattled farmers at invading armies. They haven’t been fired by terrorists who’ve penetrated our surveillance and security systems.

With few exceptions, they haven’t been fired by aggrieved non-white Americans. They’ve been fired mostly by young, white American citizens at other white citizens, and by American soldiers at other American soldiers, inside the very institutions where republican virtues and beliefs are nurtured and defended.

First, the over 70 number was inflated but he used it anyway.  Second, Salon showed the pictures of eight mass killers to accompany the story then Sleeper said "with few exceptions" they are mostly white. Of the pictures shown, only 4 are "white".  They ignored the Navy Yard shooter, the new Fort Hood shooter and several other recent shooters of color (yes some people consider Hispanics as white when it comes to shootings), which is odd and should be a red flag about the coming narrative.

On the formation of our government, bold added again:

The creation of the United States really was a Novus ordo seclorum, a New Order of the Ages, a society’s first self-aware, if fumbling and compromised, effort to live by the liberal expectation that autonomous individuals could govern themselves together without having to impose religious doctrines or mystical narratives of tribal blood or soil.

With barely a decorous nod to The Creator, the founders of the American republic conferred on one another the right to have rights, a distinguished group of them constituting the others as “We, the people.”

This is probably the most flawed premise of his entire article and will be addressed more at the end.  But in general he diminishes the role of religion and belief in a Creator in conferring those very rights of freedom to the men who were forming the new republic, pretending they conferred to themselves.  That 'nod' to the Creator was one of the most powerful statements in the Declaration, because they were acknowledging that man DOES NOT confer such rights to one another--they come from above--which is why they were setting up their new republican experiment to protect such rights, which naturally protected against one or more groups becoming all-powerful.

By the way, all through the piece Sleeper refers to 'republican' to explain away the horrors of 2014 America, as if maybe he wanted people to confuse the small-r with the big R for effect.

On terrorism:

Abroad, meanwhile, thousands more shots, fiendish and celebratory, are being fired into the corpses of American national-security and nation-building projects by terrorists and fanatics we were told had been decimated. These projects cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives, limbs, homes and hopes, including those of American soldiers, contractors and idealists. Their sacrifices can’t justify retroactively what shouldn’t have been undertaken in the first place.

That's a pretty good jab at both Bush and Obama. It's also very popular now to say America should have done pretty much nothing after 9/11, mainly because these fanatics blinded by a certain religion (which he doesn't mention) have never given up on their barbaric causes and America doesn't like long wars. He doesn't say it, but maybe he thinks we had 9/11 coming due to our failed experiment. That would certainly justify the line of thought.

On economics:

A liberal capitalist republic has to rely on its citizens to uphold voluntarily certain public virtues and beliefs that neither the liberal state nor markets can nourish or defend. The liberal state isn’t supposed to judge between one way of life and another, after all; and markets reward you as a self-interested consumer and investor, not as a citizen who might put such interests aside at times to advance a greater good that self-interest alone can’t achieve.

This was picked out because it's true--Adams made the point over two hundred years ago that our republic was made for a moral and religious people--at least ethical--because that's the only kind of citizen that would protect us from eventual despotism.  And Sleeper does make a point later that religious Puritanism, although considered extreme, led to a restraint on unbridled capitalism that kept things together.  In other words, maybe there was more to this religion thing in the founding principles than he originally gave credit.

He goes on to point out our big foreign and domestic failures before sneaking into his final solution, again, bold added:

The question should prompt a quest for a political culture that isn’t too commercial and vapid and that isn’t held together only by demagoguery and delusion. No reconfiguration of today’s capitalism will be possible without something better than that. Yet no think tank, legislature or foundation can carry that quest or that reconfiguration to a just conclusion. Nor can an Occupy Wall Street that isn’t grounded in something deeper than its own noble effort to be the change it wants us all to make.

Nor can our “illness” be cured by champions of a new foreign-policy “realism” such as Robert Kagan, who urge us to face the inevitable challenges of a world where only willpower and force can sustain the liberal order that many Americans take for granted. That’s right as far as it goes, but it begs the question of where willpower comes from and what, within the liberal order itself, is sapping that willpower.

Well, it comes from the 'wellspring' of man himself, being divinely guided (whether he knows it or not) to live his individual life in such a way that upholds the republic.  Sleeper is looking only at men. 

He ends thusly (yes, bold added again):

In 2008, Barack Obama seemed to incarnate so brilliantly the promise of weaving our diversity into a new republican discipline — he even invoked Puritan and biblical wellsprings in some of his speeches — that many people ’round the world considered him a prophet who would satisfy their hunger for new narratives. Probably no national political leader ever can do that.

The narratives the world needs now will have to come from other prophets and leaders yet unsung. I do think that Americans will be strong among them, if only because we’ve had so much experience generating that hunger by generating the civic-republican-capitalist effort that has failed.

Congrats if you're read this far, or read Sleeper's essay. It was a chore, requiring two readings, yet wading through it all and boiling it down leaves this blogger with the same short summary posted up top initially. There's nothing wrong with the principles of America's founding or our founding documents--it's our ability to 'keep them' that is the problem.  Quite a bit of the problem with keeping them is rooted in a lack of faith, basic ethics and morality--as Adams so adeptly put it over 200 years ago.  Take all the shooters pictured in the article--and the ones not pictured--and ask yourself: how many were religious?   How many were dying for Jesus?  

As to the bold in the first paragraph above, "probably no national political leader ever can do that" after the mention of Barack Obama (and other men/women unknown) as 'prophets', this illustrates the disconnect for Sleeper.  No, Jim, there is no one man or woman on Earth that can lead us out of temptation or deliver us from evil.  And even the moral and religious can be sinful and tempted by power, if left to run things on their own.  That was sorta the point of building a republic in the first place.  They deliberately set it up to divide power and promote gridlock to prevent these Earthy "prophets" from leading us down a path to destruction.   Here we are today, 2014, with people criticizing the capital R-epublicans for saying no and preventing the prophet from saving us, but that's exactly as the founders intended.

Independence Day

A few things from the net themed towards the 4th.   Here's Michelle Malkin:

As we celebrate our nation’s 237th birthday, a crucial facet of American life has all but vanished. We have forsaken, in a systematic and deliberate public manner, one of our most fundamental duties: fostering civic virtue in each and every one of our citizens. What does it mean to be an American?

Politicians in both parties keep pushing to create a new “path to citizenship” for millions of illegal aliens. But if sovereignty and self-preservation still matter in Washington, citizenship must be guarded ferociously against those who would exploit and devalue it at every electoral whim.

My own dear mother was lamenting this the other day and mentioned it first when asked about what has changed the most over the years in her recollection of life in America.  She lived through World War II..

And this from Twitter..



God Bless America. 

Happy Easter

Happy Easter to all.   Hope you can spend it with those closest to you.  

Lot's of buzz about Google showing Cesar Chavez on their Easter doodle--Chavez was a devout Catholic and it's doubtful he would have preferred such a thing in his heyday--but his buzz phrase 'Si, se, puede' was Obama's victory slogan and Google is a major Obama supporter, so they made their choice of saviors. 

Speaking of the Catholic church, I'm not of that faith but I'm very much liking their new Pope, Francis..

This kind of subservience and humbling is what Christianity is all about, and what most of us fall short of in our daily lives.  Pomp and ceremony might make followers feel warm and fuzzy in its tradition--and tradition is fine--but it does nothing to move the faith forward or make people understand it.  Martin Luther left the church of Rome for this very reason.  At the same time such things can be dangerous in this world, so hoping for the best.   But then again, we all have a destination.   

Rice to McCain: See ya in the Hearings

The Times covers Susan Rice's defense of her flawed 'talking points' (she throws the intel community under the bus) by offering a tease at the end:

Ms. Rice said Wednesday that some statements by Mr. McCain about her were “unfounded.” “I look forward to having the opportunity at the appropriate time to discuss all of this with him,” she said.

In other words, you'll see me in the confirmation hearings, you addled old cracker.

Maybe by then she'll have an answer as to what she actually knew about the incident at the time as opposed to whether she was just a know-nothing supplied with erroneous talking points to push a narrative, and if so, why she was sent out to five Sunday shows to push that narrative on the American public.  One can hope.

Anyway, since today is Thanksgiving it's traditional to express thanks for all our blessings, of which the McCloud ranch has certainly seen its share, as has America at large despite any recent setbacks.  As to a timely message, it's hard to top this one.

Saturday on the River

Some random photos of the downtown air show last evening as the city wraps up "Memphis in May" with a performance by the Memphis Symphony and the Bar Kays.  It was warm, but the wind was blowing--and for once they got it done without any severe weather warnings...

 

There was a lot of police presence, even in the water.   But nobody was in a fighting mood.  People were just enjoying the freedom to come downtown, watch some airplanes and listen to some music and enjoy the beginning of summer, all courtesy of the sacrifices made by our fallen heroes. May those sacrifices never go in vain.

Thoughts

On this day of good news the country sure needs some. It's amazing that in 2012, with a black president, the United States stands teetering on a racial divide. In the news, it appears they've captured some white suspects in the indiscriminate Tulsa shootings, a good thing.

But notice the description of the neighborhood found in this CNN story:

"For a white male to come that deep into that area and to start indiscriminately shooting, that lends itself for many to believe that it probably was a hate crime," Blakney told CNN.

This made me think of the brouhaha at National Review Online, where editor Rich Lowry has fired writer John Derbyshire for opining--on a non-affiliated blog--about similar things:

(10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.

(10b) Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.

First, Derbyshire sounds like a guy who has never lived in the south. Second, his rules are overly harsh and judgmental, but like all such things they are based on vague truthisms. Notice the Tulsa pastor's apparent amazement that whites would be venturing so 'deep' into a certain part of their own city, which seems to confirm the Derbyshire generalization.

Of course the irony is that the poor victims didn't discriminate and were apparently responding to the shooter(s) as any normal human being would respond to a stranger asking for directions. Afterwards, the citizens living in the area were terrorized by the shootings every bit as much as the DC area was when John Allen Mohammed and his sidekick were shooting random people of both races while the FBI was frantically looking for a composite white guy.

But random racial crimes are seemingly becoming more frequent. A rash of stories have dotted the back pages of newspapers for over a year regarding flashmob attacks in cities all around the country, lately in places like Minneapolis, Baltimore and St. Louis. These attacks are not occurring deep in black neighborhood or in areas where blacks are massing for concerts, rather in the downtown entertainment sections common to most cities. Most of the victims seem to be white people. So following Derbyshire's rules 'non-black' people should desist attending downtown entertainment areas under the premise a flashmob might show up. Or just about anywhere. So much for generalizations.

With the Tulsa shooting, the Martin shooting, flashmobs and planned Occupy events we can all guess the likely future--saturation coverage of violence. If it bleeds and is politically correct, it leads.

In times like these we need calm and sober leadership more than ever. What we've seen so far is a leader self-identifying with certain victims and another chastising Americans as cowards for not wanting to discuss the issue. But there's always hope for tomorrow.

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What's going on in Syria? Are innocent people still getting mowed down by a tyrant?

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What's going on in Africa? While the Muslim Brotherhood meets at the White House stories are suggesting that radicals have virtually taken over the heart of the continent and some are worried they may align themselves with al Qaeda. Of course 'some' does not yet include most in the American media.

Also, don't we have troops over there looking for a crackpot Christian-based tyrant? No news on that operation either.

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NBC says they have fired the 'veteran producer' who apparently mis-spliced a 911 call recording to make George Zimmerman appear even more racist than their previous stories and cable commentator had already indicated. That's good, but can't they name names? Maybe they're trying to protect him and family and will release it later but at the same time, maybe they didn't fire anyone at all.

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The Masters final round is today. Golf nirvana. A lot was expected out of Tiger Woods, who hasn't won a major tournament since he was attacked with a nine iron in his front driveway several years ago. He won on tour 2 weeks ago, but this kind of stuff can't help....



The Tour may fine him, although they'd have to fine everyone who ever wacked a club into the ground or tossed it as golfers are prone to do. So they probably won't. But the role model thing is pretty much gone. President Obama weighed in on the Augusta National club not admitting women; will he weigh in now on unsportsmanlike conduct?

Oh well, it's a beautiful day in Augusta and Memphis. Life goes on despite the headlines. Family is coming over for an Easter dinner so this post will mark an end to concerns over current events and the direction of our country and transition to some needed fellowship this afternoon. Peace out and best wishes for a great Easter.

Reverend King

Today is the King holiday, the celebration of a religious man who spoke out for civil rights in a non-violent way using scripture to make his point.  As seen in his "Letter from the Birmingham Jail" (My Dear Fellow Clergyman), Reverend King believed that equality was very much a biblical tenet.  Indeed, Black Liberation Theology takes some of its roots from King's ideology.

Yet for some reason today he's more often referred to as "Doctor" King rather than a reverend.  Maybe that's an attempt to respect his educational achievements but it's almost as if the modern narrative seeks to reduce the faith-based aspect of his message and instead concentrate on its largely political by-product: "social justice" (not all reverends or Christians believe as King did on the definition of social justice within our system). However, the popular definition lines up much better with mainstream liberal orthodoxy, even to include projecting King's blessing of Occupy Wall St. and the like.

It's true King's use of Christianity wasn't just fodder for a sermon, it was in part an appeal to the white (predominately Christian) majority to see the plight of the Negro from a biblical perspective.  Ironically, secular humanists today see no problem celebrating King's legacy while taking no issue with his worship of an invisible sky man.  For instance, we're told that one cannot cherry-pick the Bible, ie, if referencing Matthew one must also defend the anti-homosexual passages of Leviticus, so perhaps the Reverend King would find it harder to promulgate his message in today's world.  Theoretically, at least.

Christmas

No hint of snow here, but we can't handle it anyway.  Meanwhile, in the spirit of the day, here's CNN exploring how other religions perceive Christmas:

Two days before Christmas, Imam Mohamed Magid, the executive director at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, preached about Jesus at Friday prayers. "We live in a country with a majority of Christians, where Christmas is a major holiday... It's a reminder we do believe in Jesus. Jesus' position in Islam is one of the highest prophets in Islam," Magid said, adding that Muslims view Jesus as a prophet on par with Abraham, Moses, Noah and Mohammad.

Often when he says the name of Mohammad or Jesus in conversation, Magid adds the Islamic honorific "Peace be upon him" after his name. "Jesus is a unifying figure, unifying Muslims and Christians," he said. The Quran, the Islamic scriptures, makes specific mention of Jesus and of his mother Mary. "It's very interesting that there are many places where the prophet (Mohammad) is quoting Jesus."

Which if nothing else seems to suggest AD 700 circa evidence of Christ's existence.  CNN continues...

Magid said Muslims believe many of the same things about Jesus that Christians do: Jesus was born of the virgin Mary, he lived a sinless life, he raised the dead, and he preformed miracles. He also said many Muslim scholars believe that Jesus will one day return to the earth, using the Christian vocabulary of "the Second Coming."

Well sure, if by "same things" they mean everything aside from the very reason we have a "Christianity"--the divinity of Christ.  Muslims believe Christ was just another prophet along the path to the 'one true prophet', Mohammad.   Their view of Jesus would be like a Christian person saying Mohammad was just a man who wrote a book and talked about Jesus, but wasn't the one true prophet chosen by Allah because Christ filled that role 700 years earlier and warned his disciples about false messiahs to come.  One might think the reaction could be a bit extreme.

If CNN really wanted to explore some differences between the faiths they could have explored this story out of modern day Iran in comparison to the Biblical story of the stoning of Mary Magdalene:

Authorities in Iran said Sunday they are again moving ahead with plans to execute a woman sentenced to death by stoning on an adultery conviction in a case that sparked an international outcry, but are considering whether to carry out the punishment by hanging instead.

Yes, Iran stoning this woman under Sha'ria law inspired by the Koran is about punishment, Jesus pardoning Mary was about forgiveness.  But the latter represents the very heart of Christianity.  Jesus was said to have died for the sins of mankind so we might all be saved.  His dying on the cross was to allow our entrance to heaven, even after sin.  On the contrary, forgiveness doesn't seem to be a central theme of Islam, whether they believe in Jesus or not.

And that leaves a chasm of brutal honesty nobody wants to acknowledge.  If indeed Islam does not accept Jesus as divine they are left to believe he was at worst a liar and at best misguided, rendering the entire religion based around his existence as a fraud.  After all, there's only one true prophet.  Nor can Christians believe there was anyone beyond Jesus of any religious significance, since Christ claimed to be 'the way, the truth, and the life', nobody coming to the Father but through Him.  That's fairly absolute.

CNN suggests that by recognizing Christ, Islam is the most ardent believer in monotheism of all religions. Not really.  Most Christians also believe Mohammad existed and formed Islam, they just believe he was at best misguided, or at worst, a liar.   Not somewhere they were likely to go--especially on Christmas--after all let's face it, the rationale behind the Belief Blog was likely not to create fatwas against Anderson Cooper but to create a vehicle for subtle condemnation of conservative Republican Christians on behalf of the one true leader.  But it's not something the Pope would admit either, on Christmas or any other day.   And as long as the divide exists, so will the trouble.  

Side Tracks

I've posted this version before, but it's a favorite..



 And another..

 


 Merry Christmas to all. Thanks for reading.. 

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As the comments section alludes, that's Joel Hoekstra, currently playing with Night Ranger. 

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Getting into the spirit...

On Columbus

With each passing year he seemingly becomes a more reviled figure in the history of western civilization. Here's one assessment of a man for whom we celebrate today's holiday. He was just as human as anyone else, but also intelligent, devoted and courageous, going where no European man had gone before. As the writer states, it was the Europeans who 'discovered' the rest of the world in the middle ages; the inhabitants of the West Indies discovered Columbus--and the rest of the world they never knew existed--when he sailed up...

They [the crew] could stand it no longer. They grumbled and complained of the long voyage, and I reproached them for their lack of spirit, telling them that, for better or worse, they had to complete the enterprise on which the Catholic Sovereigns [Isabel and Fernando] had sent them. I cheered them on as best I could, telling them of all the honors and rewards they were about to receive. I also told the men that it was useless to complain, for I had started out to find the Indies and would continue until I had accomplished that mission, with the help of Our Lord.7

Columbus was in some ways the beginning of the enlightenment period, as his journey was like a capstone of the Reconquista of al-Andulusia and an end to the western expansion of the Muslim caliphate. Had Ferdinand and Isabella not come back to power when they did Columbus doesn't set sail and America--and maybe the world--is probably a different place today.

Fourth of July

Happy July the 4th. Yes, technically it's "Independence Day" (even if a guy wandering the beach in California can't find many bubble heads that know from whom) but there's nothing wrong with either description so long as the meaning remains.

The evil Fox News has a feature today about true meaning: little known facts associated with the holiday, including this one about the Pledge of Allegiance:

Our Founding Fathers Would Not Have Recited the Pledge: Another patriotic tradition that gets a lot of attention, particularly around this time of the year, is the Pledge of Allegiance. The Pledge did not exist during our Founders' lifetimes -- something that is very clear when looking at its text. The Pledge was written over a century after America's founding in 1892. It was also written by a socialist -- Francis Bellamy, whose original text was: "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." According to our Founders, the states are not indivisible, but very much the opposite. In fact, when ratifying the U.S. Constitution, some states, such as Virginia among others, specifically declared the right to secede from the Union should they feel it necessary just as an extra precaution to make sure that that state right was understood. Our Founders took their states rights very seriously and considered the U.S. Constitution to be a compact amongst the sovereign states so that any state could secede if it felt the federal government had become oppressive. So, if not with a pledge, how would our Founding Fathers begin meetings and celebrations? The answer: most likely with a prayer. In fact, the very first resolution brought before the First Continental Congress, and immediately passed, was the declaration that they would open every meeting with a prayer.

Imagine a man-on-the-street quiz on any of that. But yep, there are probably more than a few state constitutions that would fall within a violation of the Separation of Church according ACLU types due to mentioning reverence to a deity--including the Declaration itself. It's amazing nobody has tried to have these documents amended or removed from the schools.

As to the pledge--many know the roots. While the founders might not have cottoned to a pledge I see nothing wrong with the amended version. They added "under God" and "the United States of America", which addressed the state sovereignty issue while reminding the socialists that the phrase 'endowed by their Creator' wasn't actually referencing the federal government.

Side Tracks

Happy Independence Day weekend, all.

Memorial Day

Saying thank you is good but doing more is better. Click on pic for info on the Wounded Warriors Project (just to name one).