NYC sees largest increase in tuberculosis cases in 26 years; Spitting in God’s Face...more

A.S. Haley: Don't Get Drawn In
Your Curmudgeon, it is true, swore off getting involved in the current political miasma: there was nothing to be gained from trying to make one's voice heard in the welter of so much fake news and disinformation. I advised my readers to remain above the fray -- and that remains good advice.

However, there comes a time when the rule should be suspended, in the interest of keeping my regular readers confirmed in their course. And now, with President Trump's signing of the so-called "Omnibus Bill" -- a bloated monstrosity of legislative diarrhea if ever there was such a thing -- is the time to dive in and point out the facts which the mainstream media are withholding from the public.

The Omnibus Bill, pretty much everyone agrees, is a spending bacchanal -- there are few limits to what the Democrats want to spend money on, and supposedly likewise for the RINOs who are currently controlling the flow of legislation in Congress. Planned Parenthood?  It gets full funding, as always. The long-promised border wall? Only a stretch of fence is supposedly funded, and the President is supposedly barred from spending any of the fence money on his Wall.

Well, your Curmudgeon is here to tell you that what you read and see in the mainstream media on these points is all fake: it could not be farther from the Constitutional reality that our founders established in 1789.

You see, under the Constitution and Article I, it is Congress' responsibility to pass a budget -- which blueprint, if Congress wants its budget to become a Law of the United States, binding on the President and other branches, has to be in the form of a Bill (see U.S. Constitution, Art. I, Sec. 7)...

Spitting in God’s Face
Of all of the passages describing what the religious leaders and their crowd did to Jesus before his crucifixion, it’s the verses above that get to me the most. The description that makes me shudder...

March For Our Lives Student Protesters Leave Their Trash for Someone Else to Clean Up Pictures say it all..

NYC sees largest increase in tuberculosis cases in 26 years
...TB disproportionately affects foreign-born New Yorkers — accounting for 86 percent of all cases in the city.

Many of the infected city residents came from China, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, India or Mexico...

Here’s how you access the super creepy data Facebook has on you Since 2010, Facebook allows you to download an archive file of all your interactions with the network. It’s a 5-click easy process that your grandmother can do (more details below).

Inside the .zip, lies an ‘index.html’ page that acts as a portal to your personal data. Visually, it looks like an ad-free stripped down version of Facebook that’s actually quite relaxing.

As I’m trying to reduce my exposure to social networks, I decided to take a look at this info. By extrapolating the data of a single individual (me), I might be able to better apprehend the capabilities of the beast. In the end, it all comes down to what is tracked and what can be deduced from that....

You Can Forget to Be Irritated 

 ...Writing to believers in Corinth, the apostle Paul described this dynamic in the language of warfare:

The weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ (2 Corinthians 10:4–5)

Indeed, to work for one another’s joy (2 Corinthians 1:24) is to wage war for each other’s thinking and feeling.

Here’s how I’ve learned to apply this text to the daily issue of my attitude, specifically to irritation, and its ugly siblings (aggravation, grumpiness, self-pity, resentment, and more). Notice three elements in this passage: strongholds to be named, opinions to be destroyed, and thoughts to be captured...