New Year's Eve

Be careful . . .

Sunday Funnies

Quote of the Week

We say goodbye to 2 great players...

This combination of Associated Press file photos shows, Jack Klugman, left, speaking at the 62nd Annual Tony Awards in New York on June 15, 2008 and Charles Durning, right, during the 14th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards in Los Angeles. Klugman and Durning, both of whom died Monday, Dec. 24, 2012, Klugman at 90 in Los Angeles, Durning at 89 in New York, spent storied careers building catalogues of roles that classed them indisputably as "character actors." (AP Photo/File) Photo: Associated Press / SF
Read more:

My favorite quotes...

Jack Klugman

(On his show "Quincy M.E." (1976)):

"We were the first CSI. All these other shows just took what we did and made it bloodier and sexier. Our show was actually about something, we had a message and a moral. You can`t compare gold to tin foil. I was a one man CSI."

Charles Durning

"I would rather do a play because it`s instantaneous. You go on the stage, and you know whether it`s happening or not. Somebody asked me "what is acting?" And I said, "acting is listening." And if you ain`t listening, nobody`s listening."

 

Caturday

This holiday season was too...

T. G. I. F.

Ever think of going

horseback riding

this weekend?

Reincarnation

Derek Beres in his article, The Science of Reincarnation, writes:

Reincarnation is an attractive idea. That we only get one pass on this giant Ferris wheel can be cause for depression. Yet time and again, when exploring the numerous modalities of rebirth, from the law of karma to the hope of a better world beyond this one, we stumble into one glaring recurrence: By entertaining such philosophies, we inevitably waste valuable time wishing things here were different. Instead of changing our circumstances (or our attitude towards existence), we project our attention to some future destination.

The idea of rebirth is not new. Grave burials of Homo neanderthalensis date back to 200,000-75,000 BCE; ritual tools suggest reentry after being ‘returned’ to the original womb, the earth. Given that both hunting-gathering and agricultural societies (though, as Colin Tudge has suggested, they were one and the same before the advent of modern agriculture) relied on rebirth for grain and game, it makes sense that our forebears would believe our souls did the same. We plant a seed, it grows, flowers, dies, and the soil again rebirths sustenance during the next cycle. 

Joseph Campbell thought our original ‘birth trauma’—the moment we exit the womb before our lungs begin to work, which results in an intense grasping of air that can cause dizziness and blackout—served as a fitting analogy for what we encounter whenever suffering trauma. Every ‘threshold passage’ we walk through is another metaphorical exit from the womb, which gave rise not only to the idea of being born again in this lifetime, but from lifetime to lifetime as well.

As a metaphor, rebirthing is poetic, and can prove useful in grappling with our lives. Rites of passage and overcoming personal trauma are great examples of how one can be rebirthed. When treated as a ‘science,’ reincarnation is a relic of our primitive past that we cannot seem to evolve beyond. Still, our spiritual traditions cling to this archaic idea by pretending a discipline ill-suited for such topics provides ‘proof’ of transmigration.

What does The Bible say about reincarnation?

The concept of reincarnation is completely without foundation in the Bible, which clearly tells us that we die once and then face judgment (Hebrews 9:27). The Bible never mentions people having a second chance at life or coming back as different people or animals. Jesus told the criminal on the cross, "Today you will be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43), not "You will have another chance to live a life on this earth." Matthew 25:46 specifically tells us that believers go on to eternal life while unbelievers go onto eternal punishment. Reincarnation has been a popular belief for thousands of years, but it has never been accepted by Christians or followers of Judaism because it is contradictory to Scripture.

The idea of reincarnation first appears in Hindu texts, written about 700 B.C.  The Bhaģavad-Gita, the holy text of the Hindus, says:   

"…as the dweller in the body experiences

childhood, youth, old age, so passes he on,

to another body."

Hinduism and Buddhism share a belief in samsara (the wheel of life) and karma (the idea that future incarnation depends on the way the individual lived in his/her past life). The good are reborn into better lives and those who have not lived moral and charitable lives are reborn into lesser social classes or as animals. Those who achieve the highest state of spiritual development escape samsara, the cycle of birth and rebirth, and enter nirvana.

By the 5th Century B.C.E., many notable Greeks adopted the idea of reincarnation. Pythagoras believed that souls were reincarnated in various bodily shapes.  His ideas, along with the later teachings of Plato formed the Ancient Greek beliefs about reincarnation that souls originated in a celestial world, but through sin became human. Only through the purification of reincarnations could the souls return to their former state of purity.

What I find really curiously interesting is that no mention is made (by these originators of reincarnation) that we would be given a second chance here on earth.  Nirvana is mentioned as this may seem to indicate a spiritual essence of the body…

Well, ya know,

I was just wondering…

EDUCATION

Do we still have integrity?

Tara Bannow, reported in the Des Moines Register, the following:

The dean of the University of Iowa College of Education announced her resignation Monday following a flurry of reports last week that high-ranking UI officials had ordered the destruction of records pertaining to faculty and staff dissatisfaction over her performance.

Margaret Crocco has served as dean of the college since July 1, 2011. In an email to faculty and staff Monday morning, Crocco, who did not immediately return a call seeking comment, wrote that she had submitted her resignation letter to Executive Vice President and Provost P. Barry Butler effective December 14, and he had accepted.

“It has been a privilege to serve as dean of the College of Education,” Crocco wrote. “My goal has always been to advance the best long-term interests of the College. Over the last eighteen months, we have accomplished a great deal. I trust that the implementation of our new Strategic Plan will serve the College well in addressing the changing landscape of higher education in this country.”

Butler will announce an interim dean later this week, according to a UI press release.

“It is remarkable what she has been able to do during her short time as dean,” Butler wrote in a statement. “Especially in terms of raising public awareness about the College of Education, throughout Iowa and nationally.”

The resignation follows reports that Butler and other high-ranking UI officials ordered the destruction of comments left in the 2012 CoE Working at Iowa survey, in which faculty and staff members criticized Crocco’s performance. All seven members of the college’s Faculty Advisory Committee resigned last Friday following reports of the actions by administrators.

WOW, is pretty much all I can say at this point…

It find it incredulous that College administrators would want to keep this hidden, but I also find it admirable and with much integrity exhibited that not only did the Dean resign but all of the members of the Faculty Advisory Committee as well.

I do think that a good argument was made concerning the fact that comments made on evaluations should remain private and be the topic of a private performance evaluation; however,  Colleges are not private as they educate our children and future leaders of our country; and, to hide evidence of performance by one’s peers as well as by one’s students is to condone that same behavior from our students and graduates.

That my friends is unethical and lacks integrity.

One would hope that educators would set better examples…

FEELING SAFE

Security SNAFU’s

of 2012

The year started off with the FBI raiding the cloud file-sharing and storage Megaupload site, based in Hong Kong and founded by 38-year-old New Zealand resident Kim Dotcom, on content piracy charges to the tune of $175 million. And that action, supported by the U.S industries which hailed it as bringing down a big fish that was devouring their intellectual property, has triggered a year's worth of lawsuits and retributions from all even remotely involved.

For February, right in the midst of a conference call the FBI was having with its agents and law-enforcement officials overseas at Scotland Yard, cybercriminals hacked their way into the phone conversation, recorded it and posted it online. The conversation was about hackers facing charges in the U.K. The group Anonymous took credit for the intercepted call. The FBI said it appeared likely the cybercriminals may have hacked into a law-enforcement official's email to get the information for the conference call dial-in.

Then in March, at least 228,000 Social Security numbers were exposed in a March 30 breach involving a Medicaid server at the Utah Department of Health, according to officials from the Utah Department of Technology Services and Utah Department of Health, which theorized that attacks from Eastern Europe bypassed security controls because of configuration errors. In May, Utah CIO Steven Fletcher resigned because of it.

In April, The Federal Communication Commission fined Google $25,000, asserting the search-engine giant impeded an investigation into how Google collected data while taking photos for its Street View mapping feature. The FCC maintained in a report that Google "deliberately impeded and delayed" the investigation for months by not responding to requests for information and documents.

As far as the month of May was concerned, hackers claimed to have breached the systems of the Belgian credit provider Elantis and threatened to publish confidential customer information if the bank did not make an extortion payment of $197,000. Elantis confirmed the data breach but said the bank will not give in to extortion threats.

In June, The University of Nebraska in Lincoln acknowledged a data breach that exposed information of more than 654,000 files of personal information on students and employees, plus parents and university alumni. The information was stolen from the Nebraska Student Information Systems database; a student is the suspected culprit.

Now,

let’s take a look

 at the

second half

of the year.

July witnessed Symantec inadvertently crippled a large number of Windows XP machines when it shipped customers a defective update to its antivirus software. The security firm acknowledged the problem that impacted users of its Endpoint Protection software.

In  August, Knight Capital Group said electronic-trading glitches in its system caused wild price swings in dozens of stocks and would likely result in a $440 million loss to the brokerage firm, one of the biggest players in the U.S. stock market. The New York Stock Exchange canceled trades in six stocks that experienced the most pronounced price swings of more than 30% of their opening price one morning.

As far as September was concerned, websites of broadcaster Al Jazeera were knocked offline as its Domain Name Servers were attacked. A group called Al-Rashedon claimed responsibility, displaying a Syrian flag and large red stamp reading "Hack."

In October, typically the month for mischief, hackers again grabbed 300,000 records from Northwest Florida State College computer systems, including names, Social Security numbers and bank routing numbers of students, teachers, staff and retirees, the school disclosed, saying the data breach apparently occurred between May and September, resulting in the identify theft of at least 50 employees.

For November, Twitter sent notices of an attempted hijacking to China-based foreign journalist and analysts just hours before apologizing for resetting the passwords of more users than necessary in a recent break-in of accounts. Twitter provided no details on the hacking but some, including Voice of America, speculated it may have been a censorship crackdown associated with China's Communist Party.

And, so far in December, secret information on counter-terrorism shared among foreign governments may have been compromised in a massive data theft by a senior IT technician for Switzerland's intelligence service, known as the NDB. According to news reports, Swiss authorities said the IT technician, arrested last summer for alleged data theft, apparently downloaded terabytes of classified intelligence material onto portable hard drives, and carried them out in a backpack.  To read about all the SNAFUS

BOY,

DO I NOW

FEEL

REALLY  SAFE!

Merry Christmas

From our family to yours . . .

Merry Christmas!!!

Finding Self

Who am I?

Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Jr., is an American literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual. He was the first African American to receive the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship.

Born: September 16, 1950 (age 62), Piedmont

Movies and TV shows: Finding Your Roots, African American Lives, Faces of America, Looking for Lincoln, America Beyond the Color Line, A Conversation with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.More

Education: University of Cambridge, Yale University, Yale Law School, Clare College, Cambridge, Potomac State College of West Virginia University

Awards: MacArthur Fellowship, American Book Award, Jefferson Lecture, Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.

Skip's New Series:  "The African Americans:  Many Rivers to Cross."  It airs in the Fall of 2013 and will be a 6 hour series.

For more than 30 years, Henry Louis Gates Jr. has been an influential public intellectual with a distinct style, that I personally witnessed this past weekend, helping all of us who were in the audience understand complex genealogical concepts.

Henry Gates, known by me as "Skip" is best known for his research tracing the family and genetic history of famous African-Americans. "There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees," I heard him say. "My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree."

Charlemagne

Skip has traced the roots of prominent Americans like Oprah Winfrey and celebrity Yo-Yo Ma  and now the Hutchins/Pegram family tracing our roots back to Charlemagne. 

Charlemagne (pron.: /ʃɑrlɨmeɪn/; French pronunciation: ​[ʃaʁləmaɲ]; c. 742 – January 28, 814 at Aachen), also known as Charles the Great (Latin: Carolus or Karolus Magnus) or Charles I, was the founder of the Carolingian Empire, reigning from 768 until his death. He expanded the Frankish kingdom, adding Italy, subduing the Saxons and Bavarians, and pushed his frontier into Spain. The oldest son of Pepin the Short and Bertrada of Laon, Charlemagne was the first Emperor in Western Europe since the fall of the West Roman Empire three centuries earlier.

Skip told us his goal in this work is twofold: "First, to show that we're all immigrants, and secondly, that we're all mixed — that we all have been intermarrying, or interrelated sexually from the dawn of human history."

But, is a genealogical connection who we really are? 

Or, all that we can be? 

Will be become great because our ancestors were? 

Will that give us the hope that we need to aspire to great achievements like they did?

Skip told the Hutchins family that “…we were as white as white can be…  that we had no mixtures of other races and cultures in our DNA…” And, while I found that interesting, I also found that sad because I like the idea of being “mixed-up” with the rest of the world.

But still as I continued to wonder, this did not tell me who I am only from whence I came.

So, who am I?

I am a:

1.      Male

2.      Husband

3.      Father

4.      Brother

5.      Cousin

6.      Uncle

7.      Nephew

8.      Divorced

9.      Remarried

10.  Over 60

11.  Well educated

12.  Veteran

13.  60’s survivor

14.  Southerner

15.  Over 6 feet tall

16.  Over-weight

17.  Have heart disease

18.  Cancer survivor

19.  Liberal thinker

20.  Cat owner

21.  World traveler

22.  Writer/blogger

While this list is still very much incomplete is this who I am?

At times, I find myself very compassionate and submissive and at other times I find myself hateful, angry, and vindictive. 

According to the Meyers-Briggs Personality Profile, I am an INTJ.  INTJ’s are typically found in 1% of the general population and can be best described as “builders of theoretical models and concepts.”

www.reflectionsinthoughts.blogspot.com

According to the astrological signs, I am a Scorpio, since my birthday falls on Halloween.

According to my personal beliefs, I am very spiritual and religious showing my appreciation in the way I live my life regardless of what my DNA shows.

But, is all of this enough to fill the emptiness inside that we all eventually feel and attempt to fill as we grow older and attempt to discover who I really am.

Sunday Funnies

Quote of the Week

(CBS News) One outspoken advocate for strict gun laws demanded action from the president Monday. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said President Obama isn't vigorously enforcing background checks on gun buyers. He criticized Mr. Obama for not naming a permanent director for the agency that enforces gun laws. CBS News talked to the mayor, and pointed out that many millions of Americans disagree with gun control.

Pro-gun Dems talk gun control; GOP largely silent
Gun rights case could be headed to Supreme Court
Mental health care in U.S. questioned amid another tragedy

Bloomberg: Lots of people think we shouldn't have speed limits. We still have speed limits. Lots of people think we shouldn't have public schools. We still have public schools. Lots of people are against a lot of different things. A democratic society, you have to come together and what a majority of the people want, and every time somebody's on a poll the majority of people want sensible gun restrictions.

Pelley: And in your opinion, sensible gun restrictions would include what?

Bloomberg: No guns in the hands of minors. No guns in the hands of criminals. No guns in the hands of people with psychiatric problems. No guns in the hands of people with substance abuse problems. No guns in the hands of people that we put on the "no-fly" list. We won't let you fly, but we'll sell you a gun. What kind of craziness is this?

Pelley: So why is this your problem?

Bloomberg: Why is the murder rate around the country...I'm an American! What's your question?

Pelley: Why is this Mike Bloomberg's crusade?

Bloomberg: I live in America and I'm a human being. I don't know what your religion teaches you, mine teaches you to take care of each other. In America, read the Constitution, we're all equal and we're all Americans.

Pelley: But what do you say to those who would make the argument that the guns are already out there...

Bloomberg: Fine, let's get them off the streets...

Pelley: ...that we've lost this war, that there are three million AR-15s made in America already out there.

Bloomberg: Think of what you said. I'll give you a list tomorrow of the 34 families who had somebody in their family killed tomorrow, do it by the end of the day. You really want to call them up and say: "It's hopeless, we're just going to keep killing more and more people"? Do you want that for your kids? I don't think so.

Watch this interview with Scott Pelley on the CBS evening news.

Caturday

After the week I've had,

I need another beer...

T. G. I. F.

Relax with a drink, even if alone...

Goodbye 26

Taking on the NRA

A week ago today, 26 lives were taken by a lone gunman in Newtown, CT. This was an event more horrific than others because 20 of those lives were innocent young boys and girls between the ages of 6-10.  The 6 adults are gone because they tried to protect the children.

For the last week and not really meaning to sound callous, we, the American public, have been inundated by the media with redundant news reporting of this unimaginable event; however, none of that reporting will change these events nor will it bring these children back to their parents; although, that is exactly what we all would like to happen.

For the last week, a Nation has shed tears as well mourn the loss of these children who are now safe as they can be, cradled in the loving arms of their Creator.

I understand the need to ask questions and the need for closure, but we need to move on and let those who need to mourn do so in private.

The second amendment (passed in 1791) to the US Constitution, giving us (Americans) the right to bear arms, states:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary

to the security of a free State, the right of

the people to keep and bear Arms, shall

not be infringed.

Definition of militia (n)

mi·li·tia   [ mə líshə ]   

soldiers who are also civilians: an army of soldiers who are civilians but take military training and can serve full-time during emergencies

reserve military force: a reserve army that is not part of the regular armed forces but can be called up in an emergency

unauthorized quasi-military group: an unauthorized group of people who arm themselves and conduct quasi-military training

Synonyms: paramilitaries, reservists, local militia, mercenaries, territorial army, soldiers, guerrillas, soldiers of fortune, legionnaires.

We have debated and will continue to debate the true meaning of this amendment regarding whether or not our truth, decades later, accurately reflects the intent of our Founding Fathers.

We continue to believe that Americans have the right (as Americans) to protect themselves and their families from harm.

And, we continue to believe that our local police, our military (if necessary), our National Guard (if necessary) are directly tasked with the responsibility of protecting those to whom they have been sworn to serve.  However, these forces cannot be everywhere, at all times or 24/7.

So, what are we to do?

Should we reach out to our well regulated militia and/or to each other because we have the right to bear arms?

Should we pass laws regulating the sale of firearms; and, is that Constitutional?

The NRA (National Rifle Association) is the most powerful lobby in Washington, DC and according to CBS This Morning spent a total of 17 billion dollars on lobby efforts to influence the Congress and Senate to protect our full understanding of the 2^nd Amendment. 

This is a lot of money…

Is there really anything that we can do that will prevent something like this from happening in the future?

There is not – no matter how bad I want it to be yes and no matter how many committees or task forces are set-up to study the issue.

The one absolute that exists in America is

the fact that one can get anything that

one desires as long as one has enough

money to pay for it.  This absolute, my

friends, cannot be legislated away. 

No matter how much we want

to take on the NRA…