Florida Black History guidelines

 

FLORIDA’S BLACK HISTORY GUIDELINES state that slaves often learned new things that gave them personal benefit. This is a well-documented but ironic historic fact. Former slaves that returned to African Liberia were received as highly skilled and leaders by the tribes that were indigeonous.  Venture Smith’s biography of living a slaves life is the story of a smart guy who learned so much about European tools, weapons, finances, and business that he bought himself and his wife and children out of slavery and established a refuge farm for other former slaves to learn. If someone refuses to accept Florida’s guideline, just ask this question, “Did colonialism allow Africans the ability to learn new things to benefit themselves?”  Because the Africans resoundingly agree with this.  Hated every minute of colonialism but picked up a lot of new techniques and learning from their European masters.  When the English left Nigeria, there was great celebration (like there was all over Africa with independence) but then everybody realized that very few people could make the trains work.  In fact, the Ibos from SE Nigeria, who had been on poor farms, managed to shinny up to the Brits and learn new skills.  A 10% minority of Ibo people ran up running everything.  And they were highly resented by Muslims and farmers from the SW where the soil was good.  A civil war ensued in the 1970s resulting in killing off half the Ibos.  Result, Nigeria fell even further behind.  Such resentments played out in Rwanda and all over Africa.  Similarly, chattel slavery from 1820 to 1860 was very cruel in the South, but unlike the Caribbean and Brazil, slaves often had opportunities to learn new stuff and made it pay.  And why was slavery different in USA?  Life spans were longer with no sugar fields full of mosquitos.  The country had a Christian culture that frowned on freeing elderly slaves who couldn’t sustain themselves.  Turningn the elders loose out in a forest was a death sentence and churches railed against the practice.  Third there was a lot of illegitimacy making half bloods, and masters and overseers felt guilty and made such offspring house slaves educating some alongside white children.  But laws and culture was against the freed slaves after 1865 because the poor anglos saw those slaves as rivals and demanded Jim Crow. I need to stop writing.  There’s much complexity to American slavery that the Democrat activists won’t listen to.

Trad wife

WHATSA TRAD WIFE? Guess some woman has a Utube called this.  She cooks, cleans, reads to kids with lots of humor and tips celebrating making a nest.  Feminists are going insane at her. Let me point out “Millionaire Next Door” of  2000 showed that vast majority of the rich in USA are unassuming people living modest lives.  Svetlana Mayer explains, “In Soviet Russia, there were rich people under communism.  Most of us barely survived, but there is always someone who can live on half what the public payment is and invest it.” Authors of MND found that 85% of millionaire men had stay-at-home wives, but not simply because they could afford it.  2/3 did that from the beginning. A good home manager, organizer, nurturing mom is a powerful advantage when a couple lives on a very small budget.  I was blessed to wed Shirley.  We started 5 businesses, not all successful, but we survived them all with her saavy and work. We bought old disaster houses which I re-engineered but she put the touches in.  They sold for awesome money.  I chuckle at how our church always looks over at her when a meal is needed. Nobody else cooks? Guess they are hooked on her dill pickles. We never ate out. Her picnics in the park, at the lake, were more fun.  3 kids of our own but we raised 9 teenagers and then another 4 mentor kids. Yes, I know, not everyone’s lifestyle. But we have had fun. 

NBA in terrible shooting slump

 BUD LITE WASN’T THE GREATEST CONSERVATIVE BOYCOTT, NBA WAS, according to Clay Travis. He wrote a rather lengthy article (WSJ??) last week.  Around the time of the millennium, viewership of NBA finals was 45 million and Super Bowl was 95 million.  Today, Super Bowl is 130 M and NBA finals is 11 M.  What happened?  First a series of scandals—players going into stands to beat up fans and throwing chairs at them, countless children sired out of wedlock, athletes involved in crimes, etc.  Then the came Michael Brown “Hands up, don’t shoot” fallacy, players sympathized heavily with criminals and activists, eventually wearing BLM and about 8 other leftist activist slogans on jerseys rather than their names.  A lot of us old OKC Thunder fans and others stopped watching. New Commish Silver is a flaming liberal who sees politics as something important, not just good basketball. He moved the NBA All Star game out of Charlotte one year because North Carolina's conservative legilsature  introduced a bill prohibiting trans men from invading girls restrooms.  Some on the left claim this NBA shunning by viewers is racism, but while the NBA has declined, Women’s NBA and college basketball have improved viewership smartly.  Yet, as Travis notes, you don’t hear a peep about the collapse of NBA viewing.. Most Sports announcers and commentators are flaming libs themselves. The media has kept this very hushed.  Watch any sports commentary show and half the news is about NBA, as if nothing unusual is happening.  Meanwhile, Baseball gets about 2 minutes out of an hour, almost uncovered, even in July when it is practically the only game goiing. And despite baseball successfully cutting game times by half and hour this year, they are rarely broadcast. Do the commentators even own a glove or a bat?

Appliances

 

GAS STOVE KERFUFFLE IS JUST THE BEGINNING.  Richard Trumpka, Biden’s head of Consumer Product Safety announced this in January. But there are other regs on appliances you may not know about.  Furnaces.  Energy Dept. is insisting on rules for natural gas furnaces that essentially outlaw them or make them so large and complex that few homeowners will be able to replace.  Electricity costs 3 times as much as gas and this will get worse with EVs demanding much electricity.  Washing Machines. Amount of water and energy use has been reduced to the point of insufficiently cleaning clothes and encouraging mold.Repair costs will rise.  Dishwashers. Same deal—less energy and water use.  Manufacturers are being told to double the cycle time. Air Conditioners. New standards went into effect Jan. 1 and have increased cost by $1000.  EPA wants to ban the older, cheaper models because they are insufficiently climate friendly.  [You know, I think we should move EPA headquarters to Death Valley] Light Bulbs.  July 1, commercial retailers are no longer able to sell incandescent light bulbs. Newer LEDs will soon be the only ones allowed though they work less well with dimmers. [Energy Dept needs to relocate to Odessa, TX.  CPS just needs to go off-grid somewhere in the Aleutians]

Teaching the Spiritual dimension

 

TEACHING THE SPIRITUAL DIMENSIONS IN ORIGINS

            Geologists, Physicists and Biologists have investigated and found the earth came about as a planet 4.5 billion years ago after a Big Bang 14 billion years ago.  Why so? Well the Big Bang is supported by the continual expansion of the universe and categories of elementary particles found.  Geology examines depositon of rocks and deformation in earth forces. All point to very long times like the physicists say.  Biologists are supporters of Darwin’s Natural Selection as the origin of species and Miller experiments that brought forth amino acids, the building blocks of life.  Yet it’s just theory with problems.  Big Bang requires movement well in excess of the speed of light, whose absolute value is a physical principle. And the expansion indicates the need for 5 times more matter than what we see, hence the postulation of Dark Matter. Darwin’s theory has been shown to not generate enough mutation by a long shot. So everybody believes in evolution, but isn’t sure of its cause.  Yet this is all common in theorizing.  More to come. Science isn’t the “chiseled in stone” stuff many people believeTeachers often leave students with the notion that “It’s all figured out,” when in fact it’s a big room full of arguers.

             When I ask Christians what they think of creation, quite a few say they believe in a 6-day creation as Genesis describes. Well, except that there are 2 stories of the creation—something most folks don’t realize.  This first in Gen. 1 through Gen 2:3 is what everyone has in mind, but Gen. 2:4 says “These are the generations of the heaven and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the heavens and the earth.”-- quoted from the KJV so in good faith to traditionalists. Literally, one day.  Well, they say, the second passage is figurative, just a shorthand way of writing the creation story, not literally one day. Okay, but what of the firmaments?  You can’t just accept the 6-day thing without accepting the firmaments in the story of Gen. 1. 

            Ah, we are dumb moderns don’t know what a firmament is, do we? The KJV translators have translated it quite correctly from the Hebrew.  It comes from metalworking. And the technique has existed since at least 2500 BC.  A firmer is a hard surface on which metal is shaped.  Start with a once-melted blob of metal (think copper) and pound it with a hammer over the firmer.  The result is a metal firmament, which through the pounding process is further hardened.  But what if you want a curve to make the shoulder piece of a coat of armor or a cup or bowl?  Then the firmer is a hardened stump carved into a dome, with the curve you want.  The toughest, strongest piece ancients knew was a metal firmament. Thus KJV Genesis vs. 7 tells about God dividing an enormous water into two waters by using a firmament that was named the heavens.  That is, the heaven firmament is like an inverted bowl to which stars and moon and sun were attached.  Below this firmament was another flat one that held the land and the seas. 

            Here’s the picture.  The universe was like a vast waters within which earth, a flat disk, sealed to a bowl-shaped sky, floated submerged.    The heavens have tiny holes, the stars, which leak and that is where rain comes from as it forms clouds first.  This was the common understanding of what the world was like throughout the Middle East 4000 years ago.  What people thought they knew is perhaps how God talked to them.  Obviously He couldn’t start with a lecture on Quantum Field Dynamics to shepherds.  Yet if you believe a literal Genesis 1, it means you accept it all. An inverted bowl sky is hardly good science today.  Yet maybe God was really interested in sin, death and faith far more than proving what the world looked like. The moral story is what God’s word is all about. Men are sinners from birth.  Even the universe’s laws have been changed by sin

            Secular scientists would hardly care,  but believing Christian scientists do. There are several possible explanations.other than accepting a flat disk earth. Was God clever enough to talk in accurate science poetic language that some ancient shepherd would understand? When He talked about the firmament of heavens was He talking about the barrier between the physical universe and the spiritual domain, but shepherds still think it meant the sky? Or is the answer locked in a prehistory absorbed into all things? Surely Adam was an enterprising fellow who might have noticed a recently split rock with a sharp edge.  He could have attached it to a stick and fashioned an axe.  Then felling a tree, he noticed that there were rings which he could reason, form each year.  Hence the tree might look like it had been alive100 years—but it was only created a week ago Tuesday.  How does Adam explain such things?  Well, he figures that God has embedded a “prehistory” in the tree.  Those narrow rings thirty years earlier indicate drought. (Fun to speculate, isn’t it.)  Indeed He had to have put a prehistory in all of nature that we can track and use it for whatever purpose we can find.

            Like finding oil.  Current oil evolution is thought to start with dead critters settling in the sea so rapidly that they don’t rot fast enough—what’s called a reducing environment. Organic matter forms in a layer.  Heat and pressure then cause a cake of cooked organic matter called a bitumen.  Then with more heat and pressure done over the right amount of time, the blob of organic material yields oil and natural gas.  The gas rises rapidly and often manages to escape ultimately into the air.  The oil most often is trapped in an impermeable rock (tiny porous spaces that don’t connect well to each other.  By process, the permeability increases and the oil migrates into a porous reservoir rock.  Oil company geologists don’t give a fig about Darwinism and the selectivity of species.  They just have a prescription that, if done with modern science, allows us to find oil in one out of 3 wildcat wells--or even better. Old timers who just followed trends found oil in an oily area about once in 12 holes.  “Russian drilling program” of blind random jabs into the earth find oil far fewer times. So the science, or whatever you want to call it, works. “Works” is all Conoco-Phillips cares about.

            Likewise, Christians who work as scientists postulate theories based on facts, not spiritual beliefs. Many have settled on this.  The Genesis story is allegorical in its science.  Ps. 90: In the Lord’s eyes a thousand years are as one day and a day as a thousand years.  Maybe each day in Gen. 1 is several million years. Whatever the case, the 4^th law of thermodynamics states that entropy (a measure of disorder) either remains unchanged or increases in each reaction.  Hence Death is a law of nature. And that is where God, who exists in the spiritual realm, steps in.  The laws governing tiny sub-atomic particles say the states they occupy come about by chance, probabilistic chance. Who watches or determines their outcomes? Quantum physics says there can be nobody.  It is just probability, an indeterminate thing. (The winner of the lottery is just a chance thing.) Faith says otherwise. God is guiding the outcomes. Then God, the author of the play, steps into the play (an unheard of thing!) to change the outcome. Hence any scientist who really considers himself an careful thinker, needs to consider that there might be a spiritual dimension, and a Being capable of making a world of stunning beauty in its laws as well as its scenery (and quite unobservable by normal methods of science). A Creator Being, far higher than all the creatures of the world could even grasp. Would such a Being, be a Cosmic Saddist, such as the God of  Islam, who just watches mankind writhe and go down to hell, or the God of Judeo-Christianity who comes bearing hope for sin and a relationship with Himself?  That’s what we need to teach.