60 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 1-21-19”

  2. We watched the moon turn red tonight. Could see it from inside the house until about 10:30, then went out and watched the eclipse show until 11:00. Clear skies and very cold at -10°. Definitely warmer in the house, though the heating system is having problems tonight. (See prayer thread.)

    It looks very warm in that header, though!

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  4. We went out to watch the eclipse. It was cold, and there is ~1 inch of fresh snow. But at least the clouds finally moved away. I couldn’t get a good picture though, as I don’t have a zoom lens and the moon was rather small here. Mrs L is now watching on the desktop computer.

    I just don’t know how anyone can say this world was made by chance, yet we can predict eclipses for 100s of years in the future.

    Liked by 4 people

  6. We saw it here, too. My neighbor and I were on our front porches but our cell phone cameras didn’t cut it when it came to pictures. My (real) camera hasn’t been charged in some time so it wasn’t useful.

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  7. We too, watched the moon, but in our shirtsleeves as it was almost 40. SIL says it is to be almost 80 here in the Permian Basin. We finally got to do Christmas with youngest daughter and family.

    Liked by 3 people

  9. It’s too cold to be out looking at the moon.
    It’s too early for Peter, 6 Arrows snd RK to be up. AND
    Too late for Janice to go back to bed.

    Good morning anyhow
    Except for Jo.
    As always. Good night Jo.
    Up to fix breakfast now.

    Liked by 3 people

  11. Good Morning Everyone. I am in Baton Rouge. I will be in class all day today and tomorrow. I am traveling with a lovely woman who used to work in a field that has made her who I needed to talk to at this time. She has had some great suggestions. God puts the right people in our car at the right time. LOL
    BG’s father will be picking her up this afternoon. He is angry when he is on the phone with me and then he caves in the next breath Yesterday was his birthday so he got a call from her. He said she sounded subdued, but the defiance will probably wait for me to be present.
    We shall see.

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  12. Thankful, Kim, that you got to share a ride with a divine appointment. I have been praying for BG. I posted about your situation late yesterday on the prayer thread. I know of two other ladies who were in jail when they were younger and have put all that behind them. Also, I am doing the Bible study lesson reviews for inmates and most who commit to study God’s word do have changes in attitude which hopefully will mean changed lives when they are released.

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  14. There are some road closures here this morning. Some are due to ice from water main breaks. One is near the office, and I hope Art chooses to go a different route. Other closures are due to prep for the Super Bowl.

    Does anyone have special plans for this holiday?

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  16. So why didn’t anyone post about this blood-red moon before it happened, so I would have known to look for it? 😦 Last night I commented that the moon looked nearly full and maybe it would melt our snow, and my husband said wasn’t there an eclipse tonight? Or maybe that was last week? And that’s all I knew about it.

    I couldn’t have gotten photos anyway–our new windows have screens in top and bottom (had I thought of that possibility when we were talking about new windows, I would have asked about that specifically since it pretty much makes it impossible to get a good photo through the window–but we don’t really have any windows with a clear straight shot at something anyway, like we had in our last house from several windows) and I’m not stepping outside here until the ice is gone. But I would have looked for it had I known about it.

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  17. It was well below zero here and my husband went out to try to see the moon, since where we were watching through the window only showed black sky. The clouds apparently moved in and covered the moon. I did laugh when Chas said it was too cold to go out. 😀 Of course, we do the same with when it is too hot.

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  21. I heard about it on the news last week. But I thought it was last Sunday, and that I had missed it since we were under clouds for several days. The sun is shining today, though.

    I remember my first experience with a Midwest winter. It was December 1976. I had decided I needed a break from the norm and came from Tucson to visit my sister. After a few days of dreary, cold weather, the sun came out. My first thought was how warm it would feel, since in Arizona, when the sun comes out in winter it gets warm. Not so that day. It was -3 and I froze! There were two weeks of sub-zero temperatures, and the weather lady joked about a “warming trend” when the high was going to be 10 above. Ha-ha.

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  22. Let’s see, what will I do with my holiday … I know, I’ll go into work. 🙂 I have to do a(nother) homeless story today, the annual homeless count is coming up countywide later this week.

    We had a lot of wind last night. I burned one of those prefab logs in the fireplace but it may have been beyond its shelf life (it’s been sitting here for a while, I actually haven’t used the fireplace much — maybe not at all — during the house projects in the past two years). It burned a little and then began to smolder, stinking up the house. I poked at it and tossed water on the hot spots and it finally went out but I left a couple windows open to air things out. It’ll be a mess in there to clean up but I’ll worry about it later.

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  24. One disadvantage to being in the city is that the night sky is not clearly visible, so no viewing of the eclipse for me.

    This assignment schedule is ridiculous. I have four assignments, two of them group projects, requiring submissions in the next week. I also have an all day class and three clinical shifts in the same time period.

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  25. Roscuro, that is a tough schedule – praying all will fall into place at the right times.

    We didn’t bother to look out – we’d seen the last eclipse of the moon and taken pictures and it was still very cold out.

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  26. We have pickets in front of our building today, apparently some striking teachers have taken issue with an Op-ed (as in opinion) we ran (written by a public school teacher). Other op-eds that ran the same day in the same section voiced differing views.

    Teachers want “fact-based” news, their signs say.

    Honestly, people have completely lost the ability to think straight.

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  28. Thus the next few years could be ugly (uglier than the last few) with the (shocking, really) resurgence of socialism as a valid option and the collapse of responsible journalism that’s now fueled by partisanship and social media posts, whether true or not.

    I’m really feeling disheartened at the landscape I’m seeing around me. 😦

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  30. DJ, among the things that come through my FB feed are articles from a national news publication. This magazine often will publish two simultaneous opinion pieces on a political story, one from a conservative and the other from a liberal viewpoint. On the conservative opinion posts will be liberal supporters taking the publication to task for being biased toward conservatives. On the liberal opinion posts will be conservative supporters taking the publication to task for being biased toward liberals. It is darkly humourous.

    I have time for very few news articles, much less opinion pieces, these days, and no time for watching viral clips nor for reading commentaries on the viral clips. I am not missing anything.

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  31. No holidays here, in fact none this entire term. Yesterday was tiring. I am using the singles van and lose it when someone else needs it, so I walked to school and then walked across centre to pick it up at the end of the day. Someone needs it this evening so I need to find a ride to Bible study. They needed my aide in day care as someone left, so no help. I am just praying that they hire someone for day care so my aide comes back, otherwise she may be needed there for a month.

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  32. “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
    — H. L. Mencken

    Liked by 2 people

  34. Donna @ 3:15, “20
    I agree, we have creeping socialism. I do not agree that it will turn us to Christ.
    1. No nation survives socialism. The thing that made America great was individualism and toxic masculinity. When we depend on someone else -government- to take care of us we becomes subjects. Witness Venezuela. One of the richest countries in S. America, socialized beyond hope. Blood will be spilled before .it changes, if it ever does.
    .
    2. AS for it turning us to Christ: Christ always has his, who m he has set aside. But the culture is now Anti-Christ. I have said before, we don’t need a revival. i.e. We don’t need an evangelist like Billy Graham. We need Elijah. What I’m saying here is that our culture has gone too far. It is possible that a person can be born again, join a church and still believe that it is only right to grant marriage to same sex couples. Someone may be a Christian and think that a woman should decide what to do with her body. We are on the verge of making entrance narcotics legal and providing assistance to those who become addicted.

    This is a small list of things that are evidence of a turning away from God in our nation.
    Not a ’50’s type revival. A transformation. That will be hard.

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  35. Donna, @ 4:08, Re my previous discussion. Just another part of the same problem.
    If you can’t trust your news sources, who can you trust?
    There has been slants on the news for generations.
    But lying is a new phenomenon.

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  36. Chas, I’m not sure I agree that individualism made America great–it definitely brings its own problems and is as much “weakness” as “strength” (e.g., we don’t do a good job respecting or caring for our elderly people).

    Otherwise I agree with you.

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  37. Lying is not a new phenomena. It is as old as the devil (John 8:44). The use of yellow journalism, which uses sensationalism and exaggeration to boost sales, has a long history in the U.S. Orson Welles’ film Citizen Kane was a thinly disguised portrayal of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, and both that film and many other films of the same era show the lengths journalism went to sell a paper; for example, Frank Capra’s films ‘Mr Smith Goes to Washington’, in which the main character is slandered by the newspaper owned by a tycoon he dared to cross, and ‘Mr. Deeds Goes to Town’, in which a journalist is assigned to get a good scoop on the town’s newest millionaire. But decades before Joseph Pulitzer and Hearst went head to head in the newspaper selling business, Dickens noted in his American Notes that newspapers printed such scurrilous attacks on political opponents that no decent man would want to get into politics. The Bible doesn’t lie: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

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  38. Chas – I would say that it was real masculinity, not toxic masculinity that helped build America. Some liberals may think that any masculinity is toxic, which is obviously not true. There is a kind of toxic masculinity that does indeed exist, but it is not the kind that God ordained man to have. As some have mentioned, it seems to exist among those men who didn’t have a good male role model to show them the way.

    As for the push to legalize drugs, it is not to say that doing drugs is moral and good, but because our current so-called War on Drugs is not working. It is less expensive, and thus less a drain on the taxpayers, to treat addiction rather than incarcerate those with drug problems.

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  39. Chas, I didn’t mean socialism would turn the nation to Christ — rather, it would remind believers and the church of what is truly important in this world and we would flee more to Christ (as opposed a secular leader).

    Liked by 1 person

  41. The nation may be on its way “out,” so to speak. So be it. Sad, but God is sovereign and (as a friend likes to say) it is what it is.

    Revival within the church, however, could come as a result. Look at the Christians under siege in China. Let the culture be what it’s going to be. As for us … We come to better know our true identity and purpose in this world. It’s not to elect the next best candidate.

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  42. Cheryl – You wrote yesterday about how Misten would sometimes sleep curled up in a circle. Heidi does that, too! Her back paws will be up to her chest, with her front paws crossing around them. It is so cute!

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  43. I figured Chas was saying “toxic masculinity” tongue in cheek, so I included that in my agreement with him. A culture that attacks healthy masculinity–or simply lacks it–won’t be healthy. Inner-city America is a good example of this.

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  45. Socialism and Communism are not the same thing. Socialism precedes Karl Marx and Co. by many decades – British born Robert Owen, who lived from 1771-1858, was an early socialist, and the U.S.A., Indiana specifically, was actually the site of one of his socialist experiments. Also, the history of Venezuela does not start and end with its recent government. Venezuela has never, like much of the Spanish Americas, found a balance since its beginnings as a colony sucked dry of all resources by its Spanish overlords, and there were many crises and revolutions, involving bloodshed, in the country long before the socialists ever came to power. Historical perspective is a valuable thing.

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  46. Does Journalism Have a Future?

    In an era of social media and fake news, journalists who have survived the print plunge have new foes to face.

    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/28/does-journalism-have-a-future
    ___________________________________

    … Even veterans of august and still thriving papers are worried, especially about the fake news that’s risen from the ashes of the dead news. “We are, for the first time in modern history, facing the prospect of how societies would exist without reliable news,” Alan Rusbridger, for twenty years the editor-in-chief of the Guardian, writes in “Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now.” “There are not that many places left that do quality news well or even aim to do it at all,” Jill Abramson, a former executive editor of the New York Times, writes in “Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts.” Like most big-paper reporters and editors who write about the crisis of journalism, Rusbridger and Abramson are interested in national and international news organizations. The local story is worse. …

    … If journalism has been reinvented during the past two decades, it has, in the main, been reinvented not by reporters and editors but by tech companies ,,,

    … Do editors sit in a room on Monday morning, twirl the globe, and decide what stories are most important? Or do they watch Trump’s Twitter feed and let him decide? It often feels like the latter. Sometimes what doesn’t kill you doesn’t make you stronger; it makes everyone sick. The more adversarial the press, the more loyal Trump’s followers, the more broken American public life. The more desperately the press chases readers, the more our press resembles our politics. …

    … The problems are well understood, the solutions harder to see. Good reporting is expensive, but readers don’t want to pay for it. The donation-funded ProPublica, “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force,” employs more than seventy-five journalists. Good reporting is slow, good stories unfold, and most stories that need telling don’t involve the White House. The Correspondent, an English-language version of the Dutch Web site De Correspondent, is trying to “unbreak the news.” It won’t run ads. It won’t collect data (or, at least, not much). It won’t have subscribers. Like NPR, it will be free for everyone, supported by members, who pay what they can. “We want to radically change what news is about, how it is made, and how it is funded,” its founders state. Push-notifications-on news is bad for you, they say, “because it pays more attention to the sensational, exceptional, negative, recent, and incidental, thereby losing sight of the ordinary, usual, positive, historical, and systematic.” …

    Liked by 1 person

  47. https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/425970-america-the-new-socialist-frontier

    America: The new Socialist frontier

    _____________________________

    It seems that socialism is like an infectious disease that everyone has to get ill of to develop immunity. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed out, “For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.”

    This dead dog, expelled from Russia, acquired a new life in the United States and regained vitality to become a living lion within the Democratic Party.

    The 2018 Democratic victory in the midterms brought new Marxist arrivals to the House of Representatives who are interpreting the elections as an endorsement of socialist policies. They dropped all the pretenses — no liberals, no progressives — they are proud Marxist-Leninists driven by the ideology and committed to converting this country into the United Socialist States of America.

    This militant crowd is comprised of uninformed and misinformed people looking at themselves as unfortunate, underpaid, underappreciated victims of capitalism, overwhelmed with jealousy that there are people who are everything they are not.

    They are the face of new Democratic Party – “We have been naught, we shall be all.”

    The Democratic Party explicitly casts itself as an inheritor of Marxism. The Democrats’ demands are almost total inversion of the Constitutional arrangements and traditional American values. …
    __________________________________

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  49. I remember as a young person, reading a biography of Simon Bolivar, who was considered the liberator of much of South America, including Venezuela, from the Spanish. Bolivar was greatly inspired by the works of the founding fathers of the U.S. and sought to pattern his revolutions in South America after the North American pattern, including constitutions and democratic elections. He lived to say that those who fought for freedom in South America had plowed the seas. The will to follow the pattern of the United States of America was there, but it simply did not work. The history of the colonies was different, the cultures were different, the languages were different, and the same methods were ineffective. Now, some have tried to say in the past that the one culture, language, and race was inferior to the other, and the disorder in South America was inborn, genetic – racism as its most insidious and persuasive.

    But the Bible paints a different picture. It says all humans are made in the image of God (Genesis 9:6), it calls all humans descended from Adam sinners (Romans 3:16), it says that it is only the mercy of God which prevents us all from being consumed (Lamentations 3:22). When a nation prospers, as Israel, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, and Rome at once prospered, it is because God has willed for them to prosper, and when they are destroyed in punishment for their sins, for all nations sin, it is because God is just (Daniel 2:21, among many more). The Bible says that those from all nations and languages will be among those redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ (Revelation 7:9-10). There is total equality with God. There is a warning in Revelation to the Church about priding herself on her status: “thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked” (Revelation 3:17). Even the Church can fall into the trap of thinking themselves better than those around them, instead of as sinners redeemed to a life of service.

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  50. Scary thing to me is that so many young people actually believe socialism is a good alternative to the current system.

    I also agree the only hope is another “Great Awakening”.

    Liked by 4 people

  51. DJ @ 6:23, 1) the article is confused, as it talks about socialism by quoting Solzhenitsyn’s famous quip about communism, 2) Russia’s current form of government isn’t exactly ideal and journalism is dead, literally, as journalists investigating government corruption generally winds up murdered.

    Liked by 1 person

  53. roscuro, there is a relationship on the continuum

    Communism and socialism are economic and political structures that promote equality and seek to eliminate social classes. The two are interchangeable in some ways, but different in others. In a communist society, the working class owns everything, and everyone works toward the same communal goal.

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  54. The journalism article, very long, sorry, was more about how technology has changed the field and the loss of traditional news sources in the past 2 decades. Not saying there aren’t worse situations (that’s not what the article was about), but it’s the situation the west is current facing.

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  55. From one of our recent editorials:

    _______________________

    Last month, California Rep. Ted Lieu said, “I would love to be able to regulate the content of speech; the First Amendment prevents me from doing so.”
    ________________________

    Yikes.

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  56. Oldest son went to Europe with us when he was young and impressionable. He came back a Socialist. But the pendulum is swinging back. Slowly.

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