Today I was thinking on what I was going to write when I saw yet another story about people thinking the “end times” or “rapture” will be this year.
Back in the 1970s, I used to joke that someone was going to write a book titled, Jesus Is Coming Back in the 1970s, only to publish a new and revised edition a few years later titled, Jesus Is Coming in the 1980s.
Little did I know that on January 1, 1988, Edgar Whisenant, a former NASA engineer, would publish 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988. Hundreds of thousands of books were sold or given away, creating a national frenzy.
There is actually a long history of this (think the Millerites who became the 7th day Adventists when they stopped predicting the day the world would end) you would think that Christ explicitly saying:
But of that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.
Matt 24:36
would have put an end to this but it hasn’t so the foolish and the grifters continue to play “the end is near” game.
When I saw that piece I tweeted out what I always say to those preparing for the end times and the great tribulation:
Just a reminder to all those mentioned in this piece who are rapture obsessed.
If you want to be properly prepared for the end time stop worrying about them & concentrate on being a good prayerful devout #Christian today as nobody is promised tomorrow#catholic#christianity
If you are practicing your faith properly then the end times will have no fear. So stop worrying about the world’s end times and live the type of life that prepares you for your own.
Less than one minute after I tweeted that out News broke:
The irony of this breaking one minute after I just wrote how we are not promised tomorrow is sobering https://t.co/6LlFBhXssL
For those who don’t know Bronny James is the son of LeBron James the greatest playing in NBA history who is currently active (I’d take Bill Russell over him as the Goat). His father is one of the richest and most famous athletes in the world. Thanks to his skill and hard word he has achieved great things ins sport and was in the posittion to give his family all the best of everything. It’s been widely assumed that he was staying in the NBA so that he could play his final year with his son after he was drafted.
I suspect he would give all of that up to reverse today’s breaking news.
I wish the best for young Mr. James and his family but let this be a big reminder that not a single one of us, no matter how rich, how connected or how famous is promised tomorrow so the best advice in the world remains this: Get Baptized, Go to confession! Get yourself right with God today because it may be too late tomorrow.
“Most times you can’t hear ’em talk, other times you can All the same old clichés, is it woman, is it man? And you always seem outnumbered, so you don’t dare make a stand.” Bob Seger, “Turn the Page.”
Those lyrics, from legendary Michigan rocker Bob Seger, may turn out to be prescient, because the Michigan House of Representatives, which has a Democrat majority, passed a bill in June that, among other things, will impose a hefty fine or imprisonment, if a person maliciously refuses to use another person’s preferred pronoun.
The bill, HB 4474, expands on a Michigan law that covers religion, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.
Newsweek noted that Dylan Mulvaney, a man who claims to be woman, said in a video a while back about people like me who misgender him, “I feel like that should be illegal, I don’t know. That’s just bad journalism.”
No, it’s not. Mulaney, an internet influencer who has done to Bud Light what Eric Idle’s S. Frog character did to Monty Python’s fictional Conquistador Coffee, is wrong, as he is on so many things, What I wrote in the previous paragraph is good journalism because it’s the truth. Sorry, wokesters, but men who “transition” into women do not have ovaries, do not have menstrual periods, and do not undergo menopause. Women who do the opposite do not have testicles, a prostate gland, or Y chromosomes. I could go on, but I don’t have to.
Some people need to simply follow the science.
Except, maybe soon in Michigan, if its Senate passes HB 4474 and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, signs it into law, following the science and speaking out about it might get someone like me fined or worse.
In her Senate confirmation hearing, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson could not–or in my opinion, would not–define what a woman is. But according to HealthyChildren.org, at around age two, toddlers know the difference between the two genders. Again, follow the science.
The headline of this blog post is colored red. How do I know? Because when I was at the age when I figured out what males and females are, my mother probably said something along these lines to me, “That color is red.” And that information was confirmed to me when I attended kindergarten.
Some things are that simple.
Well, it should be that simple. Transgendered people complain about being bullied. Well, bullying is wrong. I suppose Mulvaney considers it bullying when internet trolls visit his Instagram page and comments, “You’re a man.” Oh, a word for you trolls. Don’t you have anything better to do? Surely there is trash on a roadside near your home that needs to be collected.
On the flip side, in regard to gender, we are at a stage in America when someone says, “Dylan Mulvaney is a man” in mixed company–especially at work–it has to be spoken in whispered tones, sotto voce as the French say.
Being labeled a transphobe–phobe, by the way means irrational fear–can get many people in trouble on the job. Or maybe soon in Michigan, getting fined or being imprisoned. And it’s not an irrational fear to lose out on a promotion or getting fired for being deemed a transphobe.
I call that bullying.
As regular readers know, my wife was born in the Soviet Union, in Latvia. At school a number of decades ago, repeatedly, her teachers told her that Latvia, along with Estonia and Lithuania, voluntarily joined the USSR in 1940. Of course, that was a lie. Her parents knew it–and so did every adult in the Baltic States at that time. Yes, that includes the teachers. But my wife didn’t discover what really happened in 1940, beginning with learning of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, until she reached adulthood.
During my wife’s childhood, adults in the Soviet Union were afraid of the repercussions of telling the truth. So my wife’s parents never discussed the USSR seizing the Baltic States with her until Mikhael Gorbachev was the Soviet leader.
In the New York Sun,Dean Karayanis, reminded me that Soviet citizens faced prison if they were caught spilling coffee on a picture of Joseph Stalin. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the author of the Gulag Archipelago, spent eight years in the Gulags for criticizing Stalin in private letters, even though he took the precaution of using a codename for the dictator.
American society isn’t at that more frightening point yet. But Michigan just took a baby step in that direction.
Or maybe we are there. Remember that Seger song? “And you always seem outnumbered, so you don’t dare make a stand.” Well, I’m making one. Is anyone else with me?
Fortunately, the new Michigan “pronouns” bill will almost certainly be challenged in court on First Amendment grounds.
Which is another reason why I’m grateful for the 6-3 conservative majority on the US Supreme Court.
Back when I learned to code in the early 1980’s people who knew how to code were, in terms of the general population, kinda rare.
About 70% of the class who tried a Computer Science Major washed out because of the math and science involved and ending up with a job that was worth about $24K (the equivalent of $66K today) was par or even below par for the course. We were considered a BFD and had a pretty high opinion of ourselves.
Well after a while I decided I’d rather do other things than code and so I did but while I stepped away from my college major people poured into the industry, computers shrank in size and increased in power exponentially.
When I was looking to get back in the industry it seemed that everyone and their mother knew how to code and had been doing it in languages I had never seen before to the point where old Fortran coders like me in their late 40’s or early 50’s weren’t worth the investment when you could get a kid with now wife and family attachments for less money right out of college with all the new stuff fresh in their heads.
And that in a round about way brings us to the current nonsense at Twitter.
All these kids at Twitter seem to have a really inflated sense of self, not all that surprising given the way public education took a turn in the last few decades but they have in effect forgotten the reality of things which is namely this:
The pool of competent programmers has grown even faster than the processing power of computers over the last 40 years and you don’t have to be one of the richest men in the world to be able to tap into that pool and find a few thousand programmers if you need them.
Furthermore when you are one of the world’s richest men you can easily tap into a pool that extends far beyond America, let alone the blue areas of America.
Put simply while the supposedly bright people at Twitter who are considering leaving may have forgotten the laws of supply and demand Elon Musk hasn’t and if they think Twitter is suddenly going to go black because a bunch of them, even the majority of them choose to leave, then frankly their too stupid to be working at any company Musk owns.
I suspect those who choose to come aboard Twitter to replace these narcissists will be well rewarded for working hard and I suspect those who stay and choose to work hard will be even better rewarded.
This is the chance of a lifetime for a young programmer and if I was younger I’d consider it myself.
As for those leaving given the layoffs going on around the nation in the Biden economy I wish you the best of luck, you’ll need it.
Instalanche: Thanks Stephen, welcome folks take a look around. Same old blogging team but on a .blog account on WordPress. Check out some thoughts under the fedora, acceptable terms concerning abortion , some thoughts on election theft and of course if you like what you see here, consider hitting DaTipJar or subscribing to keep our writers paid as things have been quieter since our .com site has gone and our youtube channel banned though you can find my stuff on Rumble here
And of course the latest from our writers this week:
“First we must cross the river,” Benito was saying. “Do you believe me now when I tell you that you must not attempt to swim it, or even get wet from it, or must you try that too?”
“What happens if I just dive in?”
“Then you will be as you were in the bottle. Aware and unable to move. but it will be very cold, and very uncomfortable, and you will be there for all eternity knowing that you put yourself there.”
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle Inferno 1976
What was your first thought when you saw this:
CALIFORNIA: We’re now in a Flex Alert.
What does that mean? We all need to conserve as much energy as possible during this record breaking heatwave.
Here’s what to do until 9pm tonight: – Set thermostats to 78 – Turn off unnecessary lights – Avoid using large appliances
For many their first thought would be California’s new rules mandating electric cars by 2035 and how all said car owners are not able to charge under these rules.
My thought was this picture of North Korea:
And it struck me that the people of North Korea have no choice on who leads them and that to change the situation they are in, they have to risk their lives.
People in California don’t have that out. They have repeatedly voted for and allowed their state to become more and more a third world country. Moreover for decades people have warned them over and over that their policies would have this effect.
They ignored them.
What has happened in North Korea is a tragedy because it was done to the people there. What is happening in California is comedy because they have done it to themselves.
BTW if you want to know how it’s going to end, it will end like this:
Sir Humphrey Appleby: But if you knew they were crooks
Sir Desmond Glasebrook: We didn’t
Sir Humphrey Appleby: But you could have made enquiries..
Sir Desmond Glasebrook:You don’t make enquiries of that sort in the city. They seemed like decent chaps and decent chaps don’t check up on decent chaps to see if they are behaving like decent chaps.
Sir Humphrey Appleby:And ignorance is worth paying 14 million pounds for?
Sir Desmond Glasebrook:Ignorance is safety it’s not a crime to be deceived and it’s not our own money is it? [Turning to the waiter handing the him the check] Oh thank you.
Sir Humphrey Appleby:So What’s going to happen?
Sir Desmond Glasebrook: Well there’s only one answer. The Bank of England must bail out Philips Berrison. No publicity keep it in the family, and that way we get our money back.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: At the taxpayer’s expense.
Sir Desmond Glasebrook:Of course.
Yes Prime Minster A conflict of interest 1987
In the end California will ask the federal government to bail them out. It won’t be this year, it won’t be next year but within the next decade the state will be begging for a federal bailout to save them from the hole they dug for themselves.
Closing thought to all those who have fled California over the last decade: If you continue to vote for the left in the state where you fled to, all of these problems will follow you to where you are now.
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