Obama Gives the GOP a Lesson in Leadership - But did they listen?

To the victor the spoils!

President Obama has shown his mettle by accepting an invitation into the Great Obstructionist Party's Lions' Den, with the same amount of success as that Daniel come to justice in the Old Book to which Christians and others look to know to whom they must look to be safe.

From the tired old pachyderms in the pens on the right side of the Senate assembly hall, there was no change, except that their exploding veins to which the nation became attached during the Tea-Parties Madness has been transplanted by those with more elasticity.

That was a welcome change, and it is notable that they did not dent the armour of their enemy, mainly because when they charged at him with trunks flailing, tusks ready to gore, sounding all the beauty that is in the bellow of the blast, they set off in the wrong direction. Nothing is more conducive to getting nowhere than to be going nowhere, and that is where each and every one of them ended up.

The odds against Mr Obama were 100:1, despite which he played with them as a cat plays with a mouses. At last the US has a leader that can think on his feet in the great tradition of British Premiers, that face questions from all sides of the house in a weekly half-hour session.

Weere that to be adopted in the US, then not only the quality of the leaders would be hung out for all to see, but also the pusillanimity of the 'Don't Help Good Things to Happen When You Can Prevent Them' party would be exposed

Sensible people were not surprised that El Presidente - who does NOT walk on water - wrong-footed the big kids in the GOP's Kindergarten playgroup time after time and stood head and shoulders above his tormentors in dignity, communications, comprehension, and responses.

He needs to be seen against this kind of backdrop with regularity, taking on Democrats, Independents, and Republicans, to straighten out their distorted understanding of the main issues that face the nation and will do so for several years.

I marked the final score as 100 round to the man in the blue corner, and zero rounds for the red mob.

So, Barack Obama remains the Champion by a knockout from which the GOP might never recover.

Go America!

Next:

"Americans have a right to know why the GOP/RNC, hangers on, and fellow travellers hate America and Americans so vehemently that they believe that "We The People" are Gullible and Stupid enough to be lied to time and time again without finding out that liars deal in lies."

Life at the Moment .............

Yesterday, Pete, my youngest son, asked me via Facebook how the 'old man' and his bride were getting on. This was my reply to him:

Amos – My Favourite Scriptural Prophet

Amos – My Favourite Scriptural Prophet
By Ronnie Bray

It seems a bit odd choosing a favourite from the long list of seers and revelators that inhabit the Old Testament, but it might seem even odder that I have had a favourite one for many years.

He was not from a family that had a tradition of prophets, but was the owner of the finest sheep in Palestine and also owned a fig plantation, both endeavours brought peace and happiness to him.

And then, out of the blue, the call came to him. Although he excuses himself at first, like many others who having been called feel that they do not measure up to the responsibility concomitant to the high calling of being God's oracle to the inhabitants of the earth.

He lived in Judea but was called, or commissioned if you will, to preach to the Northern Kingdom of Israel, a duty that he undertook with the attention and care that were his hallmarks and that he applied to his commercial businesses.

Apart from those circumstances, what I find remarkable is that his message was a departure from the ritualism of Israelite religion - almost mirroring a similar change in Isaiah's later message - and it is evident that Amos was inspired to tell Israel that going through the rituals mechanically was not pleasing to El Shaddai.

What God wanted from his people was internal religion, so that whatever they did in obedience to the Mosaic Law, they also did from the bottom of their hearts, and the internalising of their faith was the authenticator of their love of and commitment to the God of Israel.

The second reason this prophet is my best favourite is because he introduced a new understanding of the social responsibilities that were placed on they as the Community of Israel and the People of God.

He speaks in a refreshingly straightforward manner of the need for social and commercial justice: a model that is as relevant today as it was six centuries before the birth of the Saviour Jesus Christ.

His was no simple reminder of the duty they owed to the God that had released them from bondage and settled them on land that he gave unto them in perpetuity provided that they obeyed his Word and kept his commandments. Unfortunately, they failed to live up to the standard that God determined were appropriate for 'a peculiar people, a royal priesthood,' and they were stolen from off the land and subsumed into Assyria, whither they were led naked as slaves.

That's what happens when God's People cease from hearkening to his message as delivered by his divinely appointed prophets.

The name of this prophet is itself a prophecy, for it is Hebrew for “to bear,” “to place a load upon,” “burdened,” or “burden-bearer.”

The prophet’s name is Amos, and he was chosen by God to prophecy, [7:14-15], possibly because he was of the common people and not of the school of the prophets, who by this time were prone to speak what the people wanted to hear rather than speaking God’s message.

Amos prophesied during the reign of Uzziah, King of Judah (787-735 BC), and Jeroboam II, king of Israel (790-749 BC), 1:1.

It is thought by some that Amos had probably known both Jonah and Elisha, and that his work may have briefly overlapped the work of both. Isaiah and Micah are also thought to have begun their work about the time Amos was closing his work.

During the reign of Jeroboam, Israel enjoyed the greatest period of prosperity enjoyed during its 200 year history. Israel was, however, obsessed with brazen idolatry, gross immorality, swearing, stealing, injustice, oppression, robbery, adultery, and murder.

Amos held them to account for their wickedness and spiritual poverty “but unfortunately, though there was much wealth in the nation, there was little wisdom. Feasting and banquets took the place of religious endeavour. A spirit of greed ruled society. Corruption of justice was a common sin. Might became right. Land seizure was an everyday crime. The landlords had all the legal machinery at their command to oppress. The result was that the rich became richer and the poor became poorer.

With scornful indifference men lived “at ease in Zion” (6:1). Love of luxury prevailed, as prior to the downfall of Rome, and the breaking out of the French Revolution. Religion lost all its vitality, and morals were completely ignored.

Insincerity and dishonesty, corruption and licentiousness, criminal extravagance and blind assurance took such firm holds of the wealthy, arrogant voluptuaries, that they became heathen in everything but name.

Central messages of the prophecy of Amos included:

1. Israel’s apostasy and wickedness would bring certain destruction. 5:2
a. Amos was most probably the first of the prophets to declare the certain destruction of Israel.

2. The throne of David would be restored in a later time over a world on Nations. 9:8-15
a. This was fulfilled when Christ was raised up to sit on David’s Throne. Acts 2:29-37
b. David’s literal throne was typical of the spiritual throne where Christ would rule and reign at God’s right hand over a spiritual kingdom. John 18:36; Luke 17:20-21
c. Christ would sit and rule on his throne at the time he was to be a priest on the throne. Zechariah 6:12-13

Amos’ writing is pure, classical, vivid, rhetorical, grave, original, picturesque, simple, striking, rustic, bold, lyrical, and rhythmical. There are elements of repetition, questions, and exclamations, but his sentences are short, uninvolved, and always regular, well–balanced, and flowing.

His writing shows him to have been a man of affairs [not an untutored rustic], being full of first person accounts of his messages and visions (5:1; 7:1-9; 8:1; 9:1).

He marked a departure in spiritual attitudes that seem to put him on the road to the kind of religion that was to expected when the Messiah would come in person to restore what was going to be lost, and to prepare Israel for life outside the physical restrains imposed by the Mosaic Code, when having fulfilled its purpose, it would be laid aside in favour of the New and Everlasting Covenant as contained in the fullness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Farewell To Time – Almost
By Ronnie bray

It has always been a mystery to me how identical twins could set off on separate journeys, one from Cape Canaveral to London and back, and the other from Cape Canaveral to the far side of Mars and back with both returning to the Cape at the same point in time with one having grown older than the other. If you feel tempted to enlighten me, I should warn that whatever you say I will not understand. It is quite beyond me.

I have plodded my pedestrian way through life in the company of four dimensions, the first, one-dimensional, which cannot exist, the second, two-dimensional that is as impossible as one-dimensional, because even a faint pencil line on paper has a depth although it is measurable only in zillicrons or micronanosecobytes, or something. The third, three-dimensional, is probably the only true dimension, since the first and second all exhibit three measurements, if you know how to measure properly, and the fourth-dimension is something dreamed up to kick start a failing interest in science fiction, and posits time as a separate dimension from things we can measure with a ruler or micronanosecobyteometer (available at all good hardware shops).

Now ‘String Theorists’ announce that our universe and everything anywhere else has at least – note the guarded conservatism – eleven dimensions, and possibly as many as twenty-six, but holes bored ready for more if and when they posit them, some of them either represent time of various types, or else prove that time does not really exist.

Put at its simplest, and according to the Official String Theory website, “A ‘string’ is a one-dimensional object, meaning that if you want to travel along a string, you can only go forwards or backwards in the direction of the string, there is no sideways or up and down on a string. The string can move sideways or up and down in spacetime, though, and as the string moves around in spacetime, it sweeps out a surface in spacetime called the string worldsheet, a two-dimensional surface with one dimension of space and one dimension of time.”

The string worldsheet is the key to all the physics of the string. A string oscillates as it travels through the d-dimensional spacetime. Those oscillations can be viewed from the two-dimensional string worldsheet point of view as oscillations in a two-dimensional quantum gravity theory. In order to make those quantized oscillations consistent with quantum mechanics and special relativity, the number of spacetime dimensions has to be restricted to 26 in the case of a theory with only forces (bosons), and 10 dimensions if there are both forces and matter (bosons and fermions) in the particle spectrum of the theory.

That reminds me of the lad who went home from Sunday School and who in answer to his mother’s question as to what he had learned there, said, “Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt and when they got to the shores of the Red Sea they all climbed inside this massive space ship and zoomed to the moon before Pharaoh’s soldiers could bring them back.”

“They taught you that at Sunday School?” gasped his flabbergasted mother.

“Not exactly, mother. But if I told you what they told me, you’d never believe it!”

Some String Theorists are saying that time might not exist, and I although I have tried to accommodate such a thing, my mind rejects it totally, and for sane and sensible reasons.

Let us, for the sake of advanced scientific research, say that time does not exist. There is no time except that which mankind has imposed on itself in order to sell clocks, watches, and calendars. Yet despite our rejection of time as the blatant commercialisation of human life by horologists, chronologists, calendar printers, and almanac writers, the notion of time is not so easily dispensed with, and I will explain why.

When I neglect to wear my wristwatch I become anxious to know at what point the day is at; when I wake in the night I glance at the illuminated clock to see how much of the night is spent; and if I feel the white hot fangs of hunger pangs gnawing at my vitals, I survey one of the many timepieces we keep ticking away to see if it is time to eat. Yes, I am timebound, I confess. Being forced to work for a living made me nervous about time, and my army service made me increasingly so, and such habits are probably unbreakable.

But what of the effects of time on beings that have no understanding of time, clocks, watches, sundials, henges, dolmens, gnomons, calends, zodiacs, lunar phases, seedtime, or harvest? Chanticleer knows only that dawn is breaking. He does not differentiate between summer and winter light, nor does he take into account daylight savings schemes. He is a mere photomaton: an engine initiated and propelled by the appearance of illumination without reference to his own will or cravings.

Wise people place blackout curtains over the cages of their captive birds at night to fool their little prisoners into believing that night has fallen. They are easily fooled and fall silent until their gaolers raise the curtain to illumine their confined worlds.

However, dogs are of a different order. My two beauties, although highly intelligent - one has her PhD and the other one is cramming for her masters – neither own nor use timepieces. Yet they have unerring senses of time, regulated by our habit of feeding them more or less at regular times each day.

Each evening, Frankie comes to notify me that it wants but thirty minutes until the dish goes down, and if I am tardy with their morning sandwiches, I receive pathetic and insistent attention from a pair of brown eyes that would melt a turnip. She comes to my side, lifts her paw to touch my leg, and looks straight up into my eyes. She knows it is ‘time’ for her dinner. I suppose that when you get two meals a day, plus treats, that you keep a close eye on the time.

They never look at a chronometer yet they know when it is sandwich time – 9 30 am – and dinner time – 8 pm – and treat time – 5 pm. How do they do it? Like people, dogs have biological clocks. Their internal clocks keep time and tell them when it is time to eat, or pile into the rig for a trip to the Dog Park. These clocks are not acquired, transplanted, donated, nor bought from eBay, but they are there and they work. They are natural, and necessary to maintain their canine digestive systems replete with nourishment.

So just consider for a moment what would happen if theorists discover that time does not exists? Besides the obvious benefits of no one ever being late for anything again – how can you be late, or early, if there is no time? – it would throw our dogs into confusion. Not only that, but we wouldn’t know when it was time to feed them or time to feed ourselves, so the whole blooming lot of us would starve to death.

Railway, airport, and bus timetables would be inoperative, because they are all time-based, and if there is no time, then the bases are done away with. There are other arguments that point to the existence of absolute time in our universe, some of them are complicated, but all I need to convince me that time exists is a pair of beautiful brown eyes and an intent look on the face of our Border Collie.

Gotta go. Belle is telling me it’s time to play!

Copyright © 2006 – Ronnie Bray (The Yorkshire Traveller)

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Yorkshire Traveller

Call me Ishmael. But, if you do, I might not answer, because I am The Yorkshire Traveller, wending my way through life and observing as I go the conditions of the human race, its hopes, dreams, aspirations, and disappointments, perhaps offering some balm to ease suffering, as my own has been eased. Pretentious, moi? Yes, but, hey, I mean well! 

YT