until lately, I felt comfortable. Now the sidewalks are emptier and certain categories of crime are rising, challenging Seattle’s recent history as an unusually safe city.
I remember being able to sit at Westlake Park at 11 p.m., waiting for a bus under the enchanting metropolitan night. Never being accosted by an aggressive panhandler or screaming souls off their meds. I wouldn’t do it today.
The new crime problem affecting citizens and hurting small businesses doesn’t have complex sociological roots. It’s because of City Hall. In addition to lax prosecution, especially of a core of repeat offenders, the mayor and City Council are to blame.
Actually I blame the voters who choose to go down this path, like the good folks in Portland who now have a choice between a sitting mayor who has coddled rioters for months and a challenger who thinks he hasn’t coddled them enough.
Granted national politics are involved here and to some degree they let this go because they didn’t want to hand the president an issue in a election year, but who willingly let’s their city be destroyed and their business’ looted to give a slight advantage to a candidate who is already likely to win your state?
To a person like me the very idea of it is insane, but then again to a person like me the very idea that California and the people in it continue to voluntarily vote themselves into 3rd world status is as insane as the folks in Seattle and Portland willingly electing activist who have supported thugs or the people of NY state and city willingly electing people who have devastated their state.
There are always those who profit off of these decisions and I’m sure those people like basically being feudal rulers who can push around serfs. I would think that Californians would be upset by this but of course if you were educated in a public school in California you likely have no idea what that reference is.
Bottom line the deepest of blue states are committing suicide and I see only one person offering a solution:
Posted: October 12, 2020 by datechguy in Uncategorized
There has been a lot of speculation on the Position of Joe Biden on increasing the number of justices on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Quite a few Democrats have come out in favor of this but Joe Biden has not only refused to publicly state his position on it but he has gone so far as to state the voters don’t deserve an answer to that question.
Now the position of Democrats in general and Joe Biden in particular seems pretty clear to me, but it might not be so for others so as a former programmer let me express it in the form of an early form of computer codeing namely an If / Then / ELSE statement.
IF
Joe Biden is Elected President of the United States
THEN
Increasing the size of the SCOTUS is a needed reform that Democrats in General and Joe Biden in particular, support.
ELSE
Increasing the size of the court would be a usurpation of power that Democrats in General and Joe Biden in particular, oppose.
END IF
Or to put it another way the Democrats are in favor of “court packing” as long as they are the ones doing the packing.
(1) The Supreme Court shall be limited to a maximum of 9 sitting justices
(2) This amendment shall be allotted twelve months from the date of passage for ratification by the states with a single extension of twelve months if requested by single any member of congress.
I’d make the Democrats who don’t want to say if they will pack the court vote on this amendment and I’d make every Democrat House and Senate Candidate be forced to have a position on this issue ASAP
Here is the text if you can’t read the screen shot:
“The Holy Bible is available in almost every language on earth: the Episcopal Conferences take care of the continuous updating of the translations. In order to have access to the latest Bible version, kindly consult the website of your Episcopal Conference. ”
Seriously you’re the vatican and you TOOK THE &(#$(@(% BIBLE OFF YOUR WEB SITE! You actually think it’s more important to carry a 13-year-old document by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace available for visitors than the Bible?
What on earth is going on in Rome?
And about a week later I noted that the Vatican had restored the Bible to their web site but did not make it visible to people looking for the Scripture:
So the question on the floor is this: What on earth is going on? If you are still referring people to the local sites and not providing a link to the Bible, why put sacred scripture back up if you’re going to make it tough to find?
Two logical answers come to mind
A charitable suggestion would be that people realized that even though they wanted people to go to local sites for scripture, every single document on the Vatican site since it went up that had existing links to the former online scripture became dead once it was pulled. Fixing all those links would be an expensive, time consuming and frankly herculean task. So given the choice between fixing those links or putting scripture back up without a direct link to it they choose the latter. If I had been their tech advisor that’s certainly the advice I’d have given to fix the problem.
A much less charitable explanation would be that the Vatican didn’t like the blowback from pulling the Bible but didn’t want to link to it, so they put it back up without a direct link to allow a spokesman to say “Of COURSE sacred scripture is available at our site, we just prefer you to use our local sites translation.” or in other words: “Beware of the Leopard!”
Here is the screen shot from that date of the page in question
Well there has been a development.
Yesterday I was reading my daily scripture from the Vatican site I ended up clicking not on the back button to get to the reference page of the bible but on the keys of Peter which took me to the front page of the Vatican Web site which I haven’t visited in the three years since those posts.
I thought I’d poke around as I was curious if there had been any change to operation “hide the bible”. You will note that on the front page there is no link to the Bible so most people who might visit looking for it might use the search function
And of course if you did a search for the bible using the Vatican search engine it would to my complete and utter lack of shock, avail you naught.
However I remembered that the Bible had been kept under Archive under Francis rather than linked on the home page as it once was. So on the front page of the Vatican Site I clicked on Archive.
On the Archive page there was a link at the top that said “bible” which was a good sign but there were to other things that jumped out at me.
w of course I remembered that the Bible was on the Archive site if you were going to the Vatican site and didn’t know it was there you might have to do a search for it.
Before we click on the bible link I want to note the addition to the Catechism of the Catholic church link which based on wayback machine searches was added between July 17th and Aug 11th of 2018 meaning that from that date people going to the Vatican site wanting to find that official church positions on various subjects by checking the actual Catechism of the church were dissuaded from doing so at least if you are a person who speaks English because if you read Italian.
or Spanish
Or French, Portuguese , German or even Latin the Vatican Catechism has no such disclaimer. Why it’s almost as if there is a direct effort to keep English speaking folk in general and American in particular unsure of the actual teachings of the church if they wanted to find it online.
Not that they would have found the Catechism anyways as you can see from this result from the Vatican Search engine anyways, but we digress..
Well once we are on the page we can now click on the Bible link and lo and behold we have a different page than before!
While we still have the disclaimer that we had before asking you to look elsewhere we also have a direct link to the Bible online were a person can actually click on it and read it at the Vatican site.
Yeah you still won’t find it in the search engine and yeah you have to know to click on the “archive” link to get there but this still a vast improvement on the whole “Yoo Hoo Bible” game that the Vatican was playing before.
But I still miss the days when we these words from Christ…
Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No.’ Anything more is from the evil one.
Miranda:Ummm that was incredible. Was it good for you?
Fletcher: I’ve had better.
Liar Liar 1997
Of all the tips you have read so far this is the one that the two of us have the had the most trouble keeping.
On Radio there is a kill switch or if you know you are dealing with something that can cause grief you will have a seven second delay to allow the engineer, to keep something off the air that will get you in trouble. Marriage is the one other place where that can be most useful.
A seven second delay between the time you think something and the time you decide to say it aloud can be one of the best ways to keep a marriage strong.
The most obvious application is during an argument when someone will blurt out something that they instantly wish they could take back, or in a social setting when one might embarrass one’s spouse but believe it or not it’s OUTSIDE of such situations that this rule is most applicable.
A lifetime of watching sitcoms has had a bad effect in the sense that the idea that a conversation ends with a “zinger” might seem to be the norm, but the reality is that while that a good thing if your goal is to get a laugh from millions of viewers if your goal is a good relationship such a statement to your spouse is more likely to cause grief and not just grief the type of grief that doesn’t get expressed right away and is stored ready to be remembered as a grievance at a time of trouble perhaps even at a critical time.
This is your spouse not your “straight man” and there’s a reason why you haven’t quit your day job to go on tour.
It might take some practice, but getting that kill switch “installed” in your head will pay dividends for years to come.
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