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Our Daily Thread 8-14-14

Good Morning!

On this day in 1248 the rebuilding of the Cologne Cathedral in Cologne, Germany, began after being destroyed by fire.

In 1805 a peace treaty between the U.S. and Tunis was signed on board the USS Constitution. 

In 1880 the Cologne Cathedral in Cologne, Germany was completed after 632 years of rebuilding. 

In 1896 gold was discovered in Canada’s Yukon Territory. 

And in 1945 it was announced by U.S. President Truman that Japan had surrendered unconditionally. The surrender ended World War II. 

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Quote of the Day

“I always root for the defense.”

Wellington Mara

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 Today is Ben Cissell’s birthday. From AmartianHD

And since it’s David Crosby’s birthday, a little hippie music.

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Anyone have a QoD?

35 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 8-14-14”

  2. Good morning, Nancyjill! You’re up early! It’s 5:30 in Houston and everyone’s still sleeping at my house.

    L. had a good first day of high school. It was just a half day, where syllabi were handed out along with class policies and ice-breaker games. Thanks to all who prayed.

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  6. I’ve been up since three…..I’ve now had my coffee and it is still dark outside. I’m starting a job today…this is going to be a change in routine…maybe you can teach old dogs new tricks 🙂

    So good to know L’s first day went well Ann…I remember being terrified on my first day of high school…so overwhelming…so big…soooo many students!

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  7. It’s Thursday. Chas doesn’t have to get up early on Thursdays. He was up at 6:45 anyhow. He had stuff to do, like take out garbage and have breakfast.
    Now, it’s just us, coffee, and the morning paper.
    The paper doesn’t take long.
    Sometimes, the blog does. I haven’t caught up on yesterday’s yet.

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  8. Roscuro, from yesterday.
    What is time, but a construct of man to record change?
    To say that time and space can change has no meaning until someone assigns one.
    I just thought it was a strange comment.
    Do either exist in eternity? I know.
    Nobody knows that, just us dumbkoffs quibble about it.
    But it’s interesting, anyhow.
    😉

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  9. We’re not starting homeschool until August 25, so Becca is busy enjoying these last few days of summer. I’m busy familiarizing myself with the new curriculum. I feel more confident about homeschooling than I did last November, when it was thrust upon me, but would so appreciate any and all prayers!

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  12. Kim is here. Yesterday was a whirlwind. Last week I discovered that in our accounting system we had over 1,800 active listings. In MLS we had just over 700. It wasn’t our other five offices that were the problem. It was this office, the corporate office. Yesterday I got us within 50 of being correct and found a few more reports I can pull.
    Our receptionist’s father died on Monday, and as he had been estranged from his family at his own choosing it has been a mess for her (an only child) to handle.

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  13. QOD: Do you think Truman made the right decision on dropping the bombs on Japan? There is a new show on cable called “Manhattan” it is about the scientists developing the bomb. I watched the first episode but haven’t caught any others.

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  14. QoD- While I don’t like the idea of nuclear bombs, Truman may have done right in dropping them. Yes, it meant hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. But wasn’t the estimate of military casualties on both sides a lot higher? And the war might have gone on for many more years while we tried to defeat the Japanese.

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  15. Chas, I wouldn’t say that time was purely a construct of humans trying to make sense of the world. Before humans existed, God set the limits of Daylight and Night, the length of the day/night unit and said that the sun, moon and stars where to be for marking “seasons and days and years”. He reiterated those set times after the Flood (Genesis 8:22).

    The mathematical units we use to measure time, are, I grant you, an artificial construct (I was reminded of that when I learned to count in Wolof, which is established around the first five digits: 6 is spoken as 5+1, 7 is 5+2, etc.). However, we humans are curious about those stars God set as signs and how their light gets to us. We know that the speed of light is fairly constant on the earth’s surface, but we want to know if that is true of outer space; but we have to use our math to figure it out.

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  16. Kim, definitely “Yes”. Japanese in those days considered death above dishonor. And surrender was dishonor. In some naval battles, specifically Philippine Sea, downed Japanese sailors refused rescue. They died to avoid the disgrace of being a prisoner.
    To invade Japan would have cost a million lives.
    However, if I had been president then. I would not invade Japan. It’s navy and AF were decimated. Just isolate the islands until they come around to peace. I probably wouldn’t even bomb anymore. McArthur was a terrible general, but Japan benefitted greatly from his administration.

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  17. We know that the speed of light is constant in outer space because of radio transmissions from satellites. e.g. our communication with our astronauts on the moon, and space vehicles that have gone far away.

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  18. Kim’s QoD: There is a sense in which all acts of war are expressions of human depravity. The facts that we die and we can cause others to die, that we suffer pain and can cause others to suffer pain, are inescapable results of being sinful people living in a fallen creation. Sometimes, in the act of keeping law and preventing harm, we must hurt or kill individuals; but it should never be gladly and, although hatred comes naturally to us, never in hatred for another human.

    In the context of WWII, I would not say that Truman did anything specially atrocious. Bombing civilians was, tragically, a part of the war. Hitler pounded the city of London to break their morale – the German V-1 and V-2 rockets caused terror to Londoners in the ending months of the war. The British firebombed Dresden. The American firebombing of Tokyo caused more death than Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together. Truman’s orders were based on the best advice he had and there was no glee in his announcements. To use a nuclear bomb to start a war would be pure evil – to use it in the course of a war may be perceived as a necessary evil.

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  19. Chas, those instruments are all relatively close, I.e., within our solar system. If the universe was created to hold the earth, to give man a place to live, it would stand to reason that the rest of the universe is constructed around the earth – and science seems to be confirming that hypothesis. Not in the simplistic idea that the sun and stars revolve around the earth, but in the more detailed idea that the physical web of space, time, and matter is stretched out to the right dimensions and consistency where the earth, its solar system and its constellations are located. The little I know of the theories of relativity would fit very much within that hypothesis.

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  20. From Edward Klein’s book Blood Feud. p. 52 concerning Valerie Jarrett and Obama.

    “If Obama was successful in winning reelection, he would be only fifty-five years old when he left the White House. He’d be a young man with a long career still in front of him. Maybe not elective office, but in prestige, influence and power. What was he going todo with all those years? What was he going to do with all his talent? What was he going to do about his vision for America?”
    ‘Was he prepared to cede control of the Democratic Party to Clinton, an undisciplined, unprincipled man who didn’t share Obama’s vision for America And who was angling to return to the White House on Hillary’s coattails?”

    1. That is correct in that Obama isn’t going away. We’ll have him for a long time.
    2. Clinton wants to get back on Air Force One.
    3. I don’t see what choice Obama has. He certainly won’t support a Republican for President. But Valerie will think of something.
    4. I doubt that Obama will have any more prestige and power than Carter. Maybe he should pound some nails. 😆

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  21. It’s helpful to remember the times when assessing something like the atomic bomb being dropped. Every time my father visited Hawai’i, he pointed to the pink Tripler Hospital sitting high on a hill and obvious for anyone with eyes: “They built that hospital to care for the casualties from the invasion of Japan. We’ve always been thankful that didn’t happen.”

    The hospital wasn’t built until 1948 . . . .

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  22. Part of me (a big part) wants to say it is always wrong to knowingly kill civilians in war.

    Another part says that sometimes the enemy truly leaves you no choice. You don’t knee a guy in the groin, but if he has your arms pinned behind your back, you may not have a choice.

    Whenever I’ve read books that include looks at the Japanese mindset, particularly how it played out during the war, I’m left with “I don’t see what choice we had.” Two important ones: Unbroken and No Surrender (Onoda).

    If I were president during such a crisis, I would like to say I would be on my knees before God, pleading with Him. “We have this atomic bomb, and it will end the war. But it seems wrong to use it. Please, please give us another way. Help me to see a better alternative.”

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  23. Probably necessary (Truman’s decision), yet horrific, nonetheless. And all the effects of a nuclear bomb or radiation on human beings — and all life forms, talk about a scorched earth — weren’t fully known at the dropping of that first bomb, either.

    Now we know — and righty shudder. In the years since, the world’s ‘super-power’ nations have shown a healthy & wise fear of ever resorting to those weapons.

    Much more worrisome in our era is that they can so easily fall into the hands of individuals or groups that have nothing to lose and everything to prove. 😦

    Like the creation of the Frankenstein monster, nuclear weapons have the capacity of destroying us, their ‘creator.’ We have only so much control over them — less and less control, actually, as time goes on and as the technology proliferates.

    Thoughts like those make me flee again and again to God’s sovereignty.

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  24. Well that was strange. Just as I finished that last post I heard the most horrible yowling and crashing sounds.

    Apparently another black-and-white cat decided to invade Annie’s front porch. She chased him down the steps (his fur was standing straight up on his back) and dashed underneath my Jeep for cover.

    Just hope Annie didn’t get any bad scratches or bites, we’ve been the vet’s for treatments for those before. They can be nasty.

    Fallen creatures in a fallen world.

    No more war! Someday …

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  25. Did you know that a woman with a camera can usually get fairly close to a butterfly on a flower, but a 65-pound collie can instinctively brush right past the coneflowers and disturb the butterflies time after time, sure that her owner must be coming outside to play with her?

    She isn’t doing anything wrong, and I don’t blame her, but she’s a really bad photography assistant. (OK, I finally got a species I’ve been trying to get for days. But I had to shut the dog inside first.)

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  26. I suspect that the Bomb prevented WW III. Russia knew that the interior, not just Poland and Ukraine, would be devastated by another war. They cared about Moscow. They weren’t afraid of the post WW II armies.

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  28. It doesn’t help when you are a citizen of a nation that chooses to go to war and are against it yourself, when you learn all the moderates in your military were thrown out in a coup.

    That’s what happened in Japan in 1936. The senior military argued they weren’t prepared for a war and didn’t want to go and if they did go, they would not win.

    One side didn’t like that answer and got rid of them all. Shocking.

    I only learned about the coup in the mid-1990s, when I was 40 years old from Let the Sea Make a Noise.

    Be careful who your leaders are.
    But you know that.

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  31. Stopping by to say hello. I am trying to catch up after son went back to school/work yesterday. I have a writing assignment due today so I am trying to finish it up.

    I don’t have a good answer on Kim’s QofD. War makes me sad. It becomes necessary because of the fallen world we live in. Only God knows how things could have turned out otherwise. My two cents isn’t worth a dime on that question. Did Yogi Berra say that? I just made that up, but it sounds like him. More fun to consider than war.

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  34. I guess it depends on what kind of relationship you have with your boss. I’ve had bosses I’d consider friends. Put another way, does a boss lose all rights ever to ask a favor? Certainly it should be stated somehow as a favor that you can say no to. For me personally, I’d feel quite comfortable saying “no” to a request for a favor from a boss, as to a request to a favor from everyone.

    But then, I’m the kid who once finished an art project early and I was bored, and my teacher asked if I would like to wash her classroom door, and she showed me a bucket that was already filled with soapy water and a sponge. But hey, she asked if I wanted to, and I didn’t, and so I told her no, I didn’t want to. I wasn’t rude about it, I just answered her question. She did seem surprised, and later when I told Mom, she said I should have done it. (Mom didn’t act like I was being naughty, just not as polite as I should have been.) But I still am that way. If I’m bored in art class, and you ask if I want to do something that I don’t want to do, I’m still going to tell you no, I don’t want to. Ask if I could do it as a favor to you, and I might tell you, “I’m actually enjoying just sitting here doing nothing. But if there’s some reason it has to be done today, I can do it.” In other words, if you are doing it as a way to let me use my boredom more profitably, that’s quite OK, I don’t mind being bored. But if you really need to have it done, then I will do it . . . but don’t word it as a way to do me a favor, because as a matter of fact it isn’t something I’d “like” to do. (I never have liked getting my hands dirty, and getting them in dirty water is even worse. I’ll do it if you want me to . . . but not as an eager “Oh boy, I get to help the teacher!” thing.)

    But I’m probably rambling. 🙂 I think a boss should be “allowed” to ask a favor, and an employee should be “allowed” to turn it down, with no hard feelings on either side (and no special favors or slights on either side) whether the favor is granted or not. Employer-employee relationships are first of all human relationships, and in my opinion they function best when there is at least some level of friendship involved. So, if my boss needs to get her car to the shop over our lunch break, or I need to get my car to the shop over our lunch break, as long as my boss is a woman, I don’t see a problem with either one of us asking for a ride, or a problem with declining if it isn’t convenient this particular day.

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  35. If the boss says “Do this” then you do it. If the boss says “Do me a favor” then you ask whether it’s a polite command or a favor that doesn’t require your doing it. Of course, if you’ve worked for that boss long enough, you know whether the “favor” is a command or a request.

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