A blog about Religion & Faith, Personal Journals, and Health & Wellness.
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Maybe you asked the question wrong? *Birthers* the New Hate Word. Buying Forward. Maturity Truth and Stories. Breaking News: Mexico proposing it's own border wall! God's Miracle In Albania Explanation for Crop Circles Found! Insanity or Demonic Possession Obama cruel to animals!!! October 07 November 07 December 07 January 08 February 08 March 08 April 08 May 08 June 08 July 08 August 08 September 08 October 08 November 08 December 08 January 09 February 09 March 09 April 09 May 09 June 09 July 09 August 09 September 09 October 09 November 09 +Christ is Risen+ 
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September 1, is the start of the Liturgical Church Year and also the Day of the Protection of the Environment. His Holiness Bartholomew Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople or as he is known to the media the "Green Patriarch" has issued a letter calling on all peoples to together and work to give up the greed, fear and ignorance that is driving the entire Earth to environmental ruin.http://goarch.org/en/news/N...
I was at Bakersfield College this morning and I noticed that some vandal had gone around and knocked down many of the signs advertising the Inter Varsity Club. Which is a legal club on campus for Protestant Christians and had posted the signs in accordance with BC rules. A Good Samaritan and I took the time to pick them back up.
One day at a busy airport, the passengers on a commercial airliner are seated, waiting for the cockpit crew to show up so they can get under way. The pilot and co-pilot finally appear in the rear of the plane, and begin walking up to the cockpit through the center aisle. As you may have noticed I am being stalked by a little troll. This to as they say shall pass. In the mean time I apologize for the disruption this is causing. Here is a link to a helpful article on dealing with trolls;D http://www.consumersavvytip... A Troll Free Zone.
Well prayers are answered and as usual God in His wisdom so far above mans foolishness chose a mysterious way to do so. See for yourself. - Plumber "We repair what your husband Fixed." During his visit to the United States the Pope met with President Clinton. Instead of just an hour as scheduled, the meeting went on for two days. Finally, a weary President Clinton emerged to face the waiting news media. The President was smiling and announced the summit was a resounding success. He said he and the Pope agreed on 80% of the matters they discussed. Then Mr. Clinton declared he was going home to the White House to be with his family. In the past week I had to again remove comments from Random when they turned into mere hate attacks on Christianity and personal libel against myself. Even though I made it known that I did not wish to converse with him further and put a block on him. He found away around the block and tried to spam me into submission. Now I am watching the same thing occur on HM blogs. The bully this time is Sioux and the victim is HM. While I agree with Sioux about the wrongness of HM's position,but trying to bully a blogger when he has made his position about not wanting your comments is just the same kind of stalker behavior that Random pulls. That is why his comments are no longer permitted on my blogs. Everyone who post here must respect the other persons boundaries. I am not saying you can't disagree with them ,but if your comments are not acceptable to the other person, then post a blog representing your own opinions. To try to continue to force yourself on someone is an act of violence.
I came across this article that gives a link and explains an on line site that helps provide emotional healing for people suffering from having committed or been involved in an abortion. This includes the fathers, friends and relatives of the victim. http://www.orthodoxytoday.o...
Now for something completely different. I was just had the weirdest panhandling request of my life. A fellow stops me and I thought he was going to ask for change. Instead he says that he has a pair of scissors and wants my help to remove his leg cast. I told him that was something that required trained medical personal and directed him to the hospital. Anyone else have any strange panhandler encounters?
We have been flooded with pro-homosexual propaganda ,but were are the voices of those who refuse to be bought? Here is a link to a video they don't want you to see: http://www.afa.net/prop8vid... JACK (age 3) was watching his Mom breast-feeding This is a pod cast from Live Science that discusses the idea that some people seem to have that science and faith are mutually exclusive. http://www.livescience.com/... This link addresses the myth that Church attendees are less educated. The man noticed that his fuel gauge was on "empty". Soon after, the man's car began to sputter, and he finally turned off of the road and called AAA auto club on his cell phone. As he was waiting for gas to be brought to him, The Man began cursing God saying, "Why have you let me down, God? Why have you forgotten me?" The next week, the very same man was driving the very same car to work. The man noticed that his fuel gauge was on "empty"...again. Again the man cried out, "Oh God! Please, PLEASE give me enough gas to make it all the way to work on time...I CAN'T be late!" The man continued driving, expecting the car to start sputtering any second. Yet the car continued to operate...five miles...ten miles...even fifteen miles. Now the man could see his place of work. He pulled into the driveway and found a spot near the very front of the parking lot where he parked his car. He gradually released his tight grip on the stearing wheel and finally stopped holding his breath, allowing himself a hugh sigh of relief. As he pulled the keys from the ignition and began to open his door he said to himself: "Lucky for me I had enough gas!"
Best Menopause Question Ever
Q:
How many women with MENOPAUSE does it take to change a light bulb? Woman's Answer: One! ONLY ONE!!!! And do you know WHY? Because no one else in this house knows HOW to change a light bulb! They don't even know that the bulb is BURNED OUT!! They would sit in the dark for THREE DAYS before they figured it out. And, once they figured it out, they wouldn't be able to find the #&%!* light bulbs despite the fact that they've been in the SAME CABINET for the past 17 YEARS! But if they did, by some miracle of God, actually find them, 2 DAYS LATER, the chair they dragged to stand on to change the STUPID light bulb would STILL BE IN THE SAME SPOT!!!!! AND UNDERNEATH IT WOULD BE THE WRAPPER THE FREAKING LIGHT BULBS CAME IN!!! BECAUSE NO ONE EVER PICKS UP OR CARRIES OUT THE GARBAGE!!!! IT'S A WONDER WE HAVEN'T ALL SUFFOCATED FROM THE PILES OF GARBAGE THAT ARE A FOOT DEEP THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE HOUSE!!
IT WOULD TAKE AN ARMY TO CLEAN THIS PLACE! AND DON'T EVEN GET ME STARTED ON WHO CHANGES THE TOILET PAPER ROLL !! I'm sorry. What was the question? Health Care workers have long been facing persecution for their beliefs in our secular culture. Thank God there is now a proposed bill that will attempted to protect what is supposed to be their Constitutionally protected right form coercion to perform acts heinous to there faith. This might also help protect non health care workers from being persecuted for not going along with the homosexual agenda. http://www.washingtonpost.c...
Famous author discusses vampires as a metaphor, sham biblical scholars, and new directions in life. http://www.firstthings.com/...
Cookie Monster is one of my favourite characters. Being that we are now in the 21st Century, he has evolved from the bugged eyed gluttonous blue haired monster of the 1970's to a real technical guru.
This is great. I watched it twice already and wouldn't mind a third. That is unusual for me. http://www.hulu.com/watch/2...
Yesterday I posted a Onion News farce that portrayed John McCain as a Rambo type character.http://people.bakersfield.c... This is not an apology for that. Funny is funny and if you can't make jokes about politicians then a lot of comedians would be out of jobs. It did get me to thinking that Sen. McCain's experience gave him a character building opportunity that few of us pampered types ever get. I was never a POW or even a Veteran of a foreign conflict. But as part of my duties in the Air Force I was given Aircrew Survival training and Escape and Evasion. The details of that training is classified ,but the experience was humbling and a point of growth for me. An American POW does not become a civilian at the point of capture and free to sit out the War. He is still an American Combatant with a duty to resist the enemy to the best of his ability, support his fellow American and Allied POW's and if possible escape and return to friendly forces. The POW will be scrutinized by his superiors to see if he willingly aided the enemy or committed treason at anytime of his capture. The Air Force training at the time I was trained, realized the incredible psychological war that would be brought to bear on the POW and realistically advised against playing "John Wayne". They admitted the limits of a single humans strength to resist torture, isolation, peer pressure, and other tricks of the enemy to get you to do something as pointless and sign a untrue document that the enemy could use for propaganda. In face of this an American POW is trained to resist as much as humanly possible and think not only of himself ,but the welfare of your fellow POW's and your Country. Sen. McCain lived that situation for real from 1967-1973. I won't go into the details ,but during that time he broke he broke under torture and signed propaganda. He also refused the enemies offer of early reparations for himself, because of his fathers position; unless they freed his fellow prisoners with him. As I said this experience can build character ,because it is humbling and forges bonds with your fellows that only some one who has been tested could truly understand. McCain's political career is stamped with it. Sen McCain has always shown a stubborn independence from party politics. In a country were we have been brain washed to believe that there is no truth and the desires of the individual reign supreme; it is good that there are a few, stubbornly moral people who can still think for themselves and go against the peer pressure of the conformist.
 Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies at 89
Sunday, August 3, 2008
MOSCOW: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose books chronicled the horrors of the Soviet gulag system, has died at age 89, his son said Monday. Stepan Solzhenitsyn told The Associated Press his father died late Sunday of heart failure, but declined further comment. Solzhenitsyn's unflinching accounts of torment and survival in the Soviet Union's slave labor camps riveted his countrymen, whose secret history he exposed. They earned him 20 years of bitter exile, but international renown. And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person's courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire. Beginning with the 1962 short novel "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," Solzhenitsyn devoted himself to describing what he called the human "meat grinder" that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually. His "Gulag Archipelago" trilogy of the 1970s left readers shocked by the savagery of the Soviet state under the dictator Josef Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe. But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person ? Solzhenitsyn himself ? survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice. The West offered him shelter and accolades. But Solzhenitsyn's refusal to bend despite enormous pressure, perhaps, also gave him the courage to criticize Western culture for what he considered its weakness and decadence. After a triumphant return that included a 56-day train trip across Russia to become reacquainted with his native land, Solzhenitsyn later expressed annoyance and disappointment that most Russians hadn't read his books. During the 1990s, his stalwart nationalist views, his devout Orthodoxy, his disdain for capitalism and disgust with the tycoons who bought Russian industries and resources for kopeks on the ruble following the Soviet collapse, were unfashionable. He faded from public view. But under Vladimir Putin's 2000-2008 presidency, Solzhenitsyn's vision of Russia as a bastion of Orthodox Christianity, as a place with a unique culture and destiny, gained renewed prominence. Putin now argues, as Solzhenitsyn did in a speech at Harvard University in 1978, that Russia has a separate civilization from the West, one that can't be reconciled either to Communism or western-style liberal democracy, but requires a system adapted to its history and traditions. "Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth's surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking," Solzhenitsyn said in his speech. "For one thousand years Russia has belonged to such a category..." Born Dec. 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk, Solzhenitsyn served as a front-line artillery captain in World War II, where, in the closing weeks of the war, he was arrested for writing what he called "certain disrespectful remarks" about Stalin in a letter to a friend, referring to him as "the man with the mustache." He served seven years in a labor camp in the barren steppe of Kazakhstan and three more years in internal exile in Central Asia. That's where he began to write, memorizing much of his work so it wouldn't be lost if it were seized. His theme was the suffering and injustice of life in Stalin's gulag ? a Soviet abbreviation for the slave labor camp system, which Solzhenitsyn made part of the lexicon. He continued writing while working as a mathematics teacher in the provincial Russian city of Ryazan. The first fruit of this labor was "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," the story of a carpenter struggling to survive in a Soviet labor camp, where he had been sent, like Solzhenitsyn, after service in the war. The book was published by order of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was eager to discredit the abuses of Stalin, his predecessor, and created a sensation in a country where unpleasant truths were spoken in whispers, if at all. Abroad, the book ? which went through numerous revisions ? was lauded not only for its bravery, but for its spare, unpretentious language. After Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, Solzhenitsyn began facing KGB harassment, publication of his works was blocked and he was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union. But he was undeterred. "A great writer is, so to speak, a secret government in his country," he wrote in "The First Circle," his next novel, a book about inmates in one of Stalin's "special camps" for scientists who were deemed politically unreliable but whose skills were essential. Solzhenitsyn, a graduate from the Department of Physics and Mathematics at Rostov University, was sent to one of these camps in 1946, soon after his arrest. The novel "Cancer Ward", which appeared in 1967, was another fictional worked based on Solzhenitsyn's life: in this case, his cancer treatment in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, then part of Soviet Central Asia, during his years of internal exile from March 1953, the month of Stalin's death, until June 1956. In the book, cancer became a metaphor for the fatal sickness of the Soviet system. "A man sprouts a tumor and dies ? how then can a country live that has sprouted camps and exile?" He attacked the complicity of millions of Russians in the horrors of Stalin's reign. "Suddenly all the professors and engineers turned out to be saboteurs ? and they believed it? ... Or all of Lenin's old guard were vile renegades ? and they believed it? Suddenly all their friends and acquaintances were enemies of the people ? and they believed it?" The Stalinist era, he wrote, quoting from a poem by Alexander Pushkin, forced Soviet citizens to choose one of three roles: tyrant, traitor, prisoner. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, an unusual move for the Swedish Academy, which generally makes awards late in an author's life after decades of work. The academy cited "the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature." Soviet authorities barred the author from traveling to Stockholm to receive the award and official attacks were intensified in 1973 when the first book in the "Gulag" trilogy appeared in Paris. "During all the years until 1961," Solzhenitsyn wrote in an autobiography written for the Nobel Foundation, "not only was I convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared that this would become known." The following year, he was arrested on a treason charge and expelled the next day to West Germany in handcuffs. His expulsion inspired worldwide condemnation of the regime of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Solzhenitsyn made his homeland in America, settling in the tiny town of Cavendish, Vermont, with his wife and sons. Living at a secluded hillside compound he rarely left, he called his 18 years there the most productive of his life. There he worked on what he considered to be his life's work, a multi-volume saga of Russian history titled "The Red Wheel." Although free from repression, Solzhenitsyn longed for his native land. Neither was he enchanted by Western democracy, with its emphasis on individual freedom. To the dismay of his supporters, in his Harvard speech he rejected the West's faith "Western pluralistic democracy" as the model for all other nations. It was a mistake, he warned, for Western societies to regard the failure of the rest of the world to adopt the democratic model as a product of "wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension." Some critics saw "The Red Wheel" books as tedious and hectoring, rather than as sweeping and lit by moral fire. "Exile from his great theme, Stalinism and the gulag, had exposed his major weaknesses," D.M. Thomas wrote in a 1998 biography, theorizing that the intensity of the earlier works was "a projection of his own repressed violence." Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev restored Solzhenitsyn's citizenship in 1990 and the treason charge was finally dropped in 1991, less than a month after the failed Soviet coup. Following an emotional homecoming that started in the Russian Far East on May 27, 1994, and became a whistle-stop tour across the country, Solzhenitsyn settled in a tree-shaded, red brick home overlooking the Moscow River just west of the capital. While avoiding a partisan political role, Solzhenitsyn vowed to speak "the whole truth about Russia, until they shut my mouth like before." He was contemptuous of President Boris Yeltsin, blaming Yeltsin for the collapse of Russia's economy, his dependence on bailouts by the International Monetary Fund, his inability to stop the expansion of NATO to Russia's borders, his tolerance of the rising influence of a handful of Russian billionaires ? who were nicknamed "oligarchs" by an American diplomat. Yeltsin's reign, Solzhenitsyn said, marked one of three "times of troubles" in Russian history ? which included the 17th century crises that led to the rise of the Romanovs and the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. When Yeltsin awarded Solzhenitsyn Russia's highest honor, the Order of St. Andrew, the writer refused to accept it. When Yeltsin left office in 2000, Solzhenitsyn wanted him prosecuted. The author's last book, 2001's "Two Hundred Years Together," addressed the complex emotions of Russian-Jewish relations. Some criticized the book for alleged anti-Semitic passages, but the author denied the charge, saying he "understood the subtlety, sensitivity and kindheartedness of the Jewish character." Putin, Yeltsin's successor, at first had a rocky relationship with Solzhenitsyn, who criticized the Russian president in 2002 for not doing more to crack down on Russia's oligarchs. Putin was also a veteran of the Soviet-era KGB, the agency that, more than any other, represented the Soviet legacy of repression. But the two men, so different, gradually developed a rapport. By steps, Putin adopted Solzhenitsyn's criticisms of the West, perhaps out of a recognition that Russia really is a different civilization, perhaps because the author offered justification for the Kremlin's determination to muzzle critics, to reassert control over Russia's natural resources and to concentrate political power. Like Putin, Solzhenitsyn argued that Russia was following its own path to its own form of democratic society. In a June 2005 interview with state television he said that Russia had lost 15 years following the collapse of the Soviet Union by moving too quickly in the rush to build a more liberal society. "We need to be better, so we need to go more slowly," he said Following the death of Naguib Mahfouz in 2006, Solzhenitsyn became the oldest living Nobel laureate in literature. He is survived by his wife, Natalya, who acted as his spokesman, and his three sons, including Stepan, Ignat, a pianist and conductor, and Yermolai. All live in the United States. Despite his belief in a separate political and cultural fate for Russia, Solzhenitsyn's works continue to inspire people of all nations and cultures in the fight for human dignity and the right to hold unpopular views. His belief in the power of conscience, and of courage against all odds, speaks to readers beyond the narrow limits of ideology and politics. "It is we who shall die ? art shall remain," he wrote in his 1970 Nobel lecture, which he was not allowed to deliver. "And shall we comprehend, even on the day of our destruction, all its facets and all its possibilities?" ___ Correspondent Jim Heintz in Moscow contributed to this report
This question came up while I was reading one of the other blogs. So let's discuss the issue. Should posters on this site at least be residents of Kern County, or former residents. Or should the site be open to anyone?
This is a reply to HM's post about homosexual's in the military. Sodomy and Adultery are crimes in the Uniformed Code of Military Justice. HM is also dishonoring the memory of all Americans killed to defend the right of free expression by suggesting this is what they died for:
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