All my life I have heard and read so many people trying to disprove the Christmas story or aspects of it. Incredible amounts of resources and time have gone into such efforts. Frankly, such people are missing the point and wasting their time. While his birth is certainly a miracle, the fact that Jesus Christ lived at all is significantly more important than whether his birth story is embellished, or even a complete fable.
Thousands of people witnessed the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and many of them documented it. Besides the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John there are other writings including the Gnostic gospels. The first known writing about Jesus was in the first century from noted Jewish historian Flavian Josephus. He wrote: “Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man.” He went on from there. Josephus also wrote about Jesus’ brother James, “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ”. Josephus was born in 35 AD, was Jewish, and would later become a Roman citizen. So he wasn’t a Jesus follower (as they were called then) and had no agenda in promoting the story of Jesus.
Jesus didn’t start his ministry until he was approximately 30 years old. Prior to that he was little known outside his tiny village of Nazareth, and was mostly known there as Joseph the Carpenter’s son. The point is, by the time of his death and resurrection 30 years later, few beyond Mary, his mother, were present before or during the birth of Jesus. So it’s hard to imagine how the Christmas story came to be. The fact that it was inspired is indisputable and inspiring. But it’s details I have always maintained are not what’s most important.
He was born. And he did live. And his message to love one another and to forgive is a message that resonates and who can argue it’s importance?
So this weekend we celebrate his birth as we should. But remember his life, his message and his miraculous resurrection above all things. And honor him.
I welcome comments and am eager to hear different perspectives.
I am truly empathetic to those who have found this year to be a constant struggle. I am especially solemn in my thoughts for the nearly 300,000 Americans lost to this vile virus from China.
It seems like ancient history, though it was only 10 months ago that our nation was cruising along at break neck speed, with a growing, vibrant economy. We were making peace in the Middle East. Illegal immigration was dropping to remarkably low levels given the booming economy. The Wall was being built. And a President more efficient and effective in achieving his stated goals for our country than any in decades (perhaps ever) seemed well on his way to re-election in spite of the unprecedented opposition loaded up against him. Things were good and we had every expectation that they would get better.
But the problems that would mark this year as terrible in the eyes of many were all well on their way to combustion.
The year started with Democrats inartfully trying to impeach President Trump for essentially nothing. Sadly, all Democrats in Congress found zero need for Patriotism and national well-being in forcing through impeachment against a unanimous GOP opposing this embarrassing episode.
Corona Virus was already exploding in China. And the Chinese and the World Health Organization lied about its severity and subsequently enabled its escape into the world and our country.
Democrats fomented racial division by convincing the ignorant in our country that their President was a racist. And with the seed of hatred firmly planted racial battles infected nearly every major city on the U.S. after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Though called a murder by nearly everyone who commented on the incident, evidence that came to the public knowledge much too late indicated that Floyd had himself ingested a fatal amount of fentanyl along with 3 other illegal drugs. But this information came way too late and was not widely reported by an American news industry hell bent on pushing their own agenda.
Job losses from Corona virus lockdowns blew up the unemployment rate from record lows in February to over 22% in April. Cities and states around the country instituted policies prohibiting evictions and foreclosures. As a result 10s of thousands have not paid their rent or their mortgage in months. The catastrophe that looms when these eviction and foreclosure prohibitions comes to an end has not yet registered with the media or, it seems, politicians. It’s hard to imagine what’s going to happen.
And in a country that for decades has held life-long politicians at the same esteem level as that of a murderous pedophile has seemed to elect a life long politician who also seems to have a disturbing history of inappropriately touching and sniffing young girls to the office of President. The wisdom of putting a 78 year old DC statue into office during this difficult time will only be proven or disproven in time. Suffice to say, not even his supporters are enthusiastic about what Joe Biden might be or accomplish.
These dark and sad occurrences in our country belie the fact that this author individually, and in my immediate family has had a pretty awesome year.
First and foremost after nearly 7 months of negotiating and maneuvering we were able to achieve a life-long dream of mine in purchasing and moving into our house on a lake. While I’d never given up on this dream, I had come to the point in my life where I believed if such a home existed for me it would be somewhere in the boondocks far away from the higher priced homes and the big city. But as it turns out we’re only 20-25 minutes from Seattle, Tacoma, Bellevue and Snoqualmie Pass; otherwise known as the center of the universe…or at least…my universe.
We then proceeded to make the year all about improving our home; making it beautiful. Making it our own. We enjoyed the most spectacular 4th of July in my lifetime right on our own lake. And we enjoyed nearly daily walks on our 1+ acre property down to our lakeside. Needless to say, fishing and canoe rides occurred, frequently.
My wife and I were treated by her generous, loving adult kids to a trip to Disneyland to celebrate her milestone birthday at the start of this year. And we ended this year with a long, deserved, private get-away to the sun in historic St. Augustine, Florida. Two wonderful trips indeed. Both provided life long memories.
And in spite of all this, at this writing, we have more money in the bank than either my wife or I have ever had. No, we’re not rich. But we are very fortunate and very grateful.
We have been blessed by God.
I can’t believe we’re the only ones to enjoy a terrific year in spite of all that has transpired. My joy and enthusiasm has been significantly quelled by the knowledge that so many have struggled in our country and around the world. But my prayer for you is that you, like me, can find the gems that allow you to offer gratitude this Thanksgiving to God and all those for which you have received blessings.
It’s not as hard as you may think to be grateful during a year when so many tears have been shed. After all, the first official national day of Thanksgiving was declared by President Abraham Lincoln for November 26, 1863 while our nation had been at war with itself for over three years. Six-hundred thousand Americans would die by the time this conflict finally ended in April 1864. Yet, in spite of such horror and turmoil Lincoln found the ability to say “To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.“
Have a Happy Thanksgiving, and my you and your family be blessed, as have we.
In having completed my reading of Roger Stone’s 2013 Book The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ I expanded my vast knowledge of the murder case of John F. Kennedy rather substantially. And I say this knowing I am already an expert on the subject. I have read and watched so many of the Kennedy conspiracy books and tv documentaries and movies. I have visited Dealey Plaza and walked throughout the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository building. And I’ve written extensively on the subject including Here is why Oswald is Not the Shooter https://mschuettblahblahblah.com/…/here-is-why-oswald-is-n…/ and Oswald Did Not Shoot JFK https://mschuettblahblahblah.com/…/oswald-did-not-shoot-jfk/
Stone has been in the news a lot in the past year because of his connection to Donald Trump and the indictments he faces from the Mueller Investigation. He has been a Republican operative since the 1960s.
The book is well written, and really pulled me in. But it never closed the sale on me. I do believe Lynden Baines Johnson had knowledge and possibly involvement in the assassination of our President. But Stone didn’t prove it. He just made my unverified suspicions stronger.
According to Stone Johnson hated John and Robert Kennedy and the Kennedy brothers hated him. This is not news. But Stone gets deeper into Johnson’s history and character than I’ve ever read. He alleges that Johnson furthered his political career through 7 murders he orchestrated prior to becoming Vice-President. He strongly infers Johnson was corrupt and profited from the Vietnam War thanks to his close associations with Bell Helicopter and Brown and Root. This is also not news in having been claimed in Oliver Stone’s movie JFK thirty years ago.
Stone also does a good job of defending the alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald; who in my opinion is clearly not responsible for Kennedy’s death.
Stone names Malcolm Wallace as the shooter of Kennedy. But he loses credibility because he also alleges a second and possibly third shooter but never names them. Wallace died in 1971 in a car crash (suspicious) near Pittsburg, Texas.
Stone identifies a large number of persons with connections to the Kennedy assassination who died suspiciously near the time of the Warren Commission Report and 14 years later prior to testifying before the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
The book is a great read. If you have an interest in these things go pick it up at your local library, like I did. And while a good book, it’s not a conviction for the clearly diabolical, and power hungry LBJ.
Maybe someday all the files can be released (President Trump?!!!) and we’ll get some answers to this 56 year old crime.
The Seattle Times newspaper has joined the whiny call of liberals all over the country in calling for the elimination of the Electoral College used to choose our nation’s President.
As part of their argument for this voter disenfranchisement of their reader’s the Time’s Editors erroneously point out that the need which created the Electoral College in our Constitution in 1789 no longer exist. They correctly point our that it was part of a compromise to encourage smaller agrarian southern states to join the union when they were afraid of being dominated by the more populous northern states. That need for preventing domination of smaller states by larger states still exists. The geography has changed. But look no further than the 2016 election map results to see how dominating urban centers could be in our Presidential elections if not for the Electoral College.
While red indicates the counties that voted for Trump and blue indicates the counties that voted for Clinton, Clinton won the popular vote.
Time magazine reported that Trump won 2649 counties nationwide, while Clinton won 503. Were the U.S. to rely on the popular vote for electing our President the vast majority of the country would be serfs to the oligarchs in New York and Los Angeles.
I believe in the individual rights and liberty granted me by the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. And I defend those rights. It’s amazing to me why Democrats continually want to give away those rights. They want to give away our 2nd Amendment Rights to have guns. They increasingly want to eliminate our first Amendment Rights to Free speech by suppressing what words we can say and what hats (MAGA) we can wear. They want to continue to defile the intent of the 14th Amendment by giving away our citizenship to the children of illegal aliens born within our borders who maintain citizenship in the countries from which their parents came. They want to eliminate first Amendment Rights to religion by ostracizing those who practice it, especially Christians.
And because they don’t like Donald Trump they want to eliminate the Presidential voting rights of 95% of the country.
The argument for a nationwide popular vote rests on the myth that such a change would allow for 1 person, 1 vote. It’s a myth because of the human nature of group think and self-interest. Blacks tend to vote one way. Whites tend to vote another way. Men tend to vote a certain way. Women, Jews, Christians, Catholics etc. etc. A national popular vote would put our nations Presidency strictly in the hands of urban voters. More specifically it would put the Presidency strictly in the hands of New York and Los Angeles.
Thank God the Founding Fathers found the compromises necessary to create the Constitution. A lot of people in Wyoming, Delaware, Montana, Alaska, North and South Dakota and Vermont might resent only having a single representative in the U.S. House while California has 53, New York has 27, Texas 36, Florida 27, Pennsylvania 18, Illinois 18. Only 6 states make up 41% of the House. 15 states have 3 or fewer House Representatives. More than half the states, 26, have a total of only 77 Representatives or less than 18 percent of the House’s 435 members. As such the more populous states have a gigantic voting advantage over the less populous states.
If this isn’t all about hating Trump and its about 1 man 1 vote why wouldn’t they argue against our bicameral Congress? Why not eliminate the Senate? After all the small states get 2 votes there, same as the more populous states. To properly understand the wisdom of the Founding Fathers you have to understand the balance they had to achieve in order to form a more perfect union.
Ultimately this is a silly argument because eliminating the Electoral College would require a Constitutional Convention and ratification of any Amendments by 3/4 of the states. Fortunately, as pointed out here, a majority of the states are small and even if such a Convention took place and even if an Amendment were adopted (both of which are highly unlikely) there are not enough idiots who think we live in a Democracy throughout the smaller states to commit political suicide and totally disenfranchise their voters. It won’t happen. And we can thank God for it.
We’re placing this video from the January 2012 Republican Presidential debate here for you to watch to be reminded that Democrats perpetrating a hoax on the American people in Presidential election years is nothing new.
In this clip you see former Bill Clinton staffer, ABC News corespondent George Stephanopoulos grill eventual Republican nominee Mitt Romney about the Constitutionality of birth control. In watching the video it should be obvious Romney’s utter confusion as to why the question was being asked. You also see Stephanopoulos refusing to let Romney get away from the question without the ardent Democrat extracting from Romney an admission that the right-to-privacy, as determined by the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade abortion decision should be overturned.
Stephanopoulos was on a mission. And only in viewing that which followed in the national press does it become clear what his mission was.
It should be noted that not at that time or since has there ever been an effort by Republicans or anyone else to take away a woman’s right to contraception medicines or devices. Which explains why Romney was so stumped by the question and by Stephanopoulos’ ardent pursuit of an answer.
What this question spawned was the Democrats claim of a “War on Women”, which became the overriding theme of President Obama’s campaign against Romney in general and Republicans specifically. It was a lie. It was never true that Republicans were waging a war on women. But the effects of the campaign undoubtedly turned many female voters into Romney haters and helped secure four more years in the White House for a Democratic President that had done very little to deserve re-election.
Fast forward seven years to 2019. At the dawning of the 2020 Presidential campaign Democrats were in high gear touting the alleged conspiracy President Trump and his campaign had partaken in with Russia to win the 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton. To listen to Democrats and the mainstream media (MSM) Trump’s impeachment was inevitable. He was treasonous, they claimed. Then the Mueller report came out and some air was let out of their balloon. The Mueller report completely exonerated Trump and his campaign on any claim of Russian collusion and said insufficient evidence existed to charge obstruction of justice for a crime it said never took place.
What remaining air was left in their collusion/impeachment balloon disappeared entirely when the report’s author Robert Mueller appeared before Congress and testified in such a way as to make clear he had little hands on involvement in his own report. Subsequently, it became clear that the report exonerating Trump and his staff was put together by Mueller’s investigative staff which was assembled almost entirely of Democratic partisans. And still, they couldn’t pin anything on Trump.
So, the collusion conspiracy lie died suddenly. Its death being fully complete when during the Democratic Presidential debates on CNN not a single moderator asked, and not a single candidate spoke of the Russian allegations against Trump.
So, what’s dominating the news now? Trump is a racist! He’s not only a racist, he’s a white supremacist encouraging white supremacy groups all over the country. The claim is so pervasive that Trump is even being blamed for mass shootings that occurred over this past weekend. The fact is that mass shootings, mental illness and sometimes the hatred that triggers them is an American phenomena dating back decades before Trump ever entered the public eye.
It’s time to make the Democrats pay for the lies that they perpetrate. Though Trump is guilty of incendiary language at times; and though he’s an egotist and a blow-hard his actions as President and long before prove decisively that he is not a racist or white supremacist.
It’s my fervent prayer that the lemmings who vote Democratic election after election will finally see that the party of the KKK and of Jim Crowe and of Socialism is a party hell-bent on power and control and that merely lying about a person’s character is but a small but necessary step in achieving their ultimate goals.
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