Blog Archives

Murder Rates in the United States

6/16/2016

Let me set the record straight with those Democrats who are running around touting that the U.S. has more gun-related homicides than any other country in the world. It's because of the size of our country. When it comes to the amount of murders per hundred citizens we rank behind 17 other countries like Honduras, Venezuela, Jamaica, Brazil, etc.

There have been more murders in Chicago over the last few years than there has been mass murders. Where's the focus? Out of the last ten horrific mass murders it makes up .000003% of our population. It isn't an epidemic. The death rate in Chicago is .0025%. Why aren't you screaming about what's happening in Democrat controlled cities like Chicago and Detroit? I guess that just goes against your narrative.

Hillary Emails

6/2/2016

Full disclosure…I hate Hillary. Why, because she and Bill have been lying their entire lives and that’s why the phrase: “Where there’s smoke there’s fire” is so applicable here. They’ve been involved in scandals throughout their politic careers. From strange land deals, Bill having sex in the Oval Office, and Hillary’s Benghazi and email scandal, it seems to keep coming with certainly no end in sight.

The focus of this article is regarding her emails and it will be short and sweet. First of all a report just came out from the I.G. (Inspector General), of the State Department that stated specifically that Clinton misled them as to the use of her own private email server. Witnesses from the I.T. department said they informed Secretary Clinton that her emails needed to stay on the .gov website for security and back-up reasons yet she told them pretty much to stay out of her business and that they could no longer say another word about it.

Why didn’t she want to use the government server? She could still have a private email address. Time and time again when asked about the scandal she and her cronies say that every Head of State used personal email they don’t mention the private email server which no one has ever used. They are clearly lying through omission. They have no legitimate response for why she needed a personal email server. Saying she set it up that way out of convenience is absolutely absurd.

I can only speculate why she didn’t want transparency but common sense leads me to believe it had almost everything to do with her conducting personal business for the Clinton Foundation. She was working getting donations and setting up speaking engagements for Bill and certainly didn’t want us knowing about it. She said she deleted around 30,000 personal emails which were close to the amount of business emails she sent out. Was she ever working? I’m not sure I’ve sent 30,000 emails in my life.

The F.B.I. is still investigating her which means there is a reason for them to use the huge amount of resources to see if she did something illegal. Think about it, if there wasn’t a case they would’ve dropped it immediately. It’s just my opinion but I think they will charge her on multiple counts; whether or not she serves jail time I don’t know but they will be felonies which would prevent her from being President. This is why I think they need to make sure and file charges before the election. This would leave Democrats in a horrible situation but they’ve always known it was a possibility. My guess is that behind closed doors the DNC has a Plan B; they’d better.

Diversity

6/2/2016

I realize this will upset some people but it's how I feel about an issue that I'm tired of hearing about (basically on a daily basis). I don't believe in celebrating diversity because it leads to and sounds a lot like adversity. I believe in celebrating how we're the same. Skin color and sexual orientation are a fraction of our beings so there's certainly a huge percentage of our lives that we can celebrate in having like mindedness. Should I celebrate being a white person who came from a small town? Should I get a group together to celebrate our diversity from big city folks? I doubt if the meetings would lead to better relations with northerners.

Some people reading this post do celebrate diversity in a variety of ways and they'll be mad at my opinion. I certainly don't hold negative thoughts towards you if you don't agree and I hope you'll do the same towards me. Our goals should be similar and that is to bring people together so that we can celebrate that we're pretty much the same thus having a greater ability to do what God wants and that is to demonstrate love towards one another. Can diversity be good? Components of it probably are but as for me, I think its celebration leads to division and is more harm than good.

Iron Sharpens Iron (Two Minutes to Read)

6/1/2016

Found in the Bible in Proverbs 27:17: “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” There’s so much meaning to this proverb but I’ll cover a few points that I think are most significant. I’ll discuss the spiritual aspect of this great Bible verse in a moment but its application is very broad.

To be a great athlete it takes a coach who knows what he or she is talking about but it also takes other players to push and compete against one another to bring out the best. There’s no doubt in my mind that when new football players or basketball players join a team that it worries some of the people who are already there. They know they’ll have to compete for the various positions. If an individual doesn’t have to compete for their position more than likely they’ll never be as good as they could; it’s human nature.

This proverb is applicable to work as well. I’ve had to compete against fellow employees many times for a promotion. I like to think I’m very self-motivated but I have to admit I tried harder and I worked longer in order to get noticed. The bottom line is my co-workers made me a better employee; they sharpened me.

Based on what you’ve read so far you can see this awesome proverb truly does have broad applications but now I’m going to focus on the spiritual and most important reason the proverb was written.

There’s mutual benefit in the rubbing of two iron blades together as the edges become sharper making them more efficient in their tasks and comparably speaking the Word of God is a “double-edged sword” (Hebrews 4:12), and it’s with this that we are to sharpen one another. This is why it’s so important to have people in our lives who will sharpen us, those who will make us more effective at what we do in life personally, professionally, and spiritually. If we aren’t challenged how can we maximize our abilities?

We have a tendency to hang around like-minded people. This is good in a lot of ways because it makes life more comfortable but if we don’t have people around us who can stretch our minds a bit then we’ll remain stagnant…we’ll remain a dull blade and what use is a dull blade? Maybe the best way to look at it is we need challenging mentors/people in our lives who are knowledgeable about the word of God if we want to be a more effective tool for God. Shouldn’t our desire to be the best we can be for our Father?

I’ll wrap up with this and that is we need to be challenged because most people just aren’t good at pushing themselves to the level of significant growth on a personal, professional, or spiritual level; like I said, it’s human nature. This means we can’t be comfortable. If you feel at peace with where you are in your life that’s great but in most cases it just means you’re not growing. It’s your choice as to whether or not you’re okay with this. We need to be pushed. What I find amazing is that this proverb was written over 2,000 years ago and it’s still completely applicable today.

Shine (Two Minutes to Read)

6/1/2016

I was preparing for a Bible study one day and decided to do it based upon Matthew 5:16 where Matthew wrote: “Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.”

In contemplating the topic, I started thinking about how we can’t generate darkness. Meaning if someone asked what tools you’ll need to create darkness there isn't anything you can use to generate it. The only way we can contribute to darkness is to take something away that already exist, and that is light.

This thought process intrigued me because in order for us to affect darkness we can either shine a light on it which would make it disappear or we can pull our light away and allow darkness to show itself because it’s already there…we didn’t create it.

Then I thought about our responsibility to let our light shine and realized that Matthew didn’t say make your light shine; these words have different meanings. “Let” means you already have it and just need to release it; while “make” means to generate something yourself. So I thought about these words and realized I couldn’t “make” my light shine because I wouldn’t be able to light things up so to speak. I hate to say it but me without God is evil (darkness). I promise you that no one would like me if I succumbed to those dark sides of me. So how in the world could I be a light when everything inside of me is dark? Once again when you’re dark you can’t generate light.

Now here’s the good part…it’s not just me in my body anymore. Jesus told his disciples to not worry about him leaving because he was sending the Holy Spirit (John Chapter 14) to dwell within them; to guide and teach them according to the teachings he shared with them. When we become Christians we too get the Holy Spirit to reside within us; we become a Holy Temple. This is quite a responsibility so I’ll write about it another day; needless to say I’m often very embarrassed at the way I keep my temple up.

With the above in mind, we certainly have more light we can shine because of the Holy Spirit being within us but the problem is that we do exactly what I just mentioned and that is we don’t do a good job of keeping our temple clean. We try to hide things in the closet and close doors to certain rooms in an effort to limit the impact the Holy Spirit would cause our lives if we were to let go of the world and turn ourselves over to our Father.

This is why we can’t generate enough light to make the difference we should be making. When we limit the Holy Spirit’s impact on our lives we’re no longer effective for ministering to those around us…basically showing love to those around us which is God’s second most important Commandment. The scary part is when you think about what God said about bearing fruit and what happens to a tree that doesn’t.

I was giving a bible study at work one day and there was a buffet table in our conference room and it had about a foot of space on the bottom and it was completely dark underneath it. I had a few people take a look to verify. Then I took a small mirror and bent down next to the table and held the mirror to where it was facing the ceiling lights and then I tilted the mirror a little bit and it completely lit up the bottom of the table. Once again I had a few people verify. Some others came up as well just to see how much light it generated.

I then went on to explain a few things to consider about my demonstration. One is that we don’t have a mirror unless we have the Holy Spirit. Without the mirror we’d probably just absorb some of the light but not be able to do anything with it.

Another thing to consider is that God doesn’t want us holding our mirror right back to him because he doesn’t need the light; he has plenty! All he wants us to do is reflect his light in those dark places…this glorifies God. This is why Matthew 5:16 says “Let your light shine.” We don’t have to create the light because we don’t really have anything to offer without the Holy Spirit being our mirror. The light we’d generate on our own would be about as effective as pointing our flashlights at the sun.

One last point, if we turn our mirror completely towards the world, we’d have the back of the mirror facing towards God so we’d have no light to share. We have to be in the world (tilting your mirror) but we can’t be of the world where the mirror would only reflect darkness to an already dark place.

So get out there and LET your light shine!

The Great Potato Famine

6/1/2016

This terrible famine (1845-1852), was due to a disease of the potato and it affected all of Europe but hit Ireland harder than most places causing around a million people to die and over a million people to leave the country (this was a quarter of their population). The main reason people left is that for most farmers in Ireland, potatoes were their only crop.

The economic impact of this famine reached pretty much every household in Ireland because the Nobles couldn’t collect taxes from properties that were no longer inhabited which meant they had to decrease their staff (armies, household, etc.). They could no longer buy a lot of things which hurt local merchants. Without these jobs they became part of the exodus.

Anyhow, a short article that I hope will remind you about what you learned in school all those years ago (at least for some of you). I for one can’t imagine what these poor people went through. In my opinion this is one of the most tragic events in history.

John Denver (1943-1997) Four Minutes to Read

6/1/2016

Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr., later changed his name to John Denver because a music promoter said his name wouldn’t go over well in the industry. He was born in Roswell, New Mexico, and his dad was an Air Force officer who set three speed records and earned a place in the Air Force Hall of Fame.

Because Denver's father was in the military the family moved a lot making it difficult for him to make friends. Constantly being the new kid was agony for him as he had become introverted. At the age of 11, Denver received an acoustic guitar from his grandmother and it became his best friend and it changed his life forever. If you’ve never heard the song he wrote called: “This Old Guitar” it’s beautiful. In his third year of high school he stole his father's car and ran away to California to visit family friends and begin his music career. His father flew to California to bring him back and Denver unhappily returned to finish high school.

He learned to play well enough to perform at local clubs by the time he was in college. He attended Texas Tech University in Lubbock and sang in a folk-music group called "The Alpine Trio" while pursuing architectural studies. Denver dropped out of the Texas Tech School of Engineering and moved to Los Angeles, California, where he sang in clubs.

In 1969, John Denver released his first album for RCA Records called "Rhymes & Reasons." Two years prior, Denver made a self-produced demo recording of some of the songs he played when he’d perform in the clubs. He was run off of more than one sidewalk after a show while trying to sale his music. He included in the demo a song called "Babe I Hate to Go," later renamed: "Leaving on A Jet Plane." The man who helped John produce his demo brought the unreleased "Jet Plane" song to Peter, Paul and Mary and their version of the song hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100. This was a huge feather in his cap. Of course John Denver also had his version go to the top of the charts as well.

Although RCA did not actively promote the Rhymes & Reasons album with a tour, Denver himself embarked on an impromptu supporting tour throughout the Midwest, stopping at towns and cities offering to play free concerts at local venues. When he was successful in persuading a school, college, American Legion Hall, or local coffee-house to let him play, he would spend a day or so distributing posters in the town and could usually be counted upon to show up at the local radio station, guitar in hand, offering himself for an interview. He was basically an overnight success twenty years in the making. :)

After several months of this constant low-key touring schedule he had sold enough albums to persuade RCA to take a chance on extending his recording contract. He had also built a sizable and solid fan base, many of whom remained loyal throughout his career. RCA didn’t know just how much to get behind him because he looked and sounded different. They didn’t know if there was a market for Denver but they certainly found out there was.

Denver’s career started taking off in 1971 as his albums became huge successes with number one hits like: Take Me Home Country Roads, Leaving on a Jet Plane, Sunshine on my Shoulders, Annie’s Song, I’m Sorry, etc. He had the signature look of long blonde hair, round glasses, embroidered shirts, and buckskin jackets. Like the Grateful Dead would experience years later, his fan base would travel for miles to hear him play and travel from one concert to another.

Denver was a huge advocate for the environment. One of my favorite songs of his is “Calypso” which was the name of Jacques Cousteau’s (famous water explorer and conservationist), boat. I can’t begin to cover the amount of his humanitarian projects but Aids and Hunger were some of his favorite causes.

He accomplished great things beyond music like his works with the Muppets and the movie “Oh, God” with George Burns. His annual variety Christmas shows on ABC were record breaking for them achieving up to 60 million viewers during one episode; about 10 times better than their average shows generate now. He hosted the Grammy Awards. The Olympic Committee asked him to write a theme song for the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. Because of his skiing prowess, ABC asked him to be a commentator for skiing events. He loved flying airplanes and was very involved in promoting NASA and their aerospace programs; he won the “NASA Public Service Medal” in 1985.

John Denver was married to his first wife Annie for around 14 years. He wrote the song “Annie” while riding on ski lifts. They adopted two children. Six years after Denver got a divorce from Annie he married an actress from Australia and they had a girl. They divorced after five years and John never remarried.

After all those years, Denver never moved from his home in Colorado. The last few years of his life he struggled with a drinking problem and was caught driving drunk a few times in his small community and was involved in a drunk driving case before he died.

At the age of 53, Denver crashed his plane into the Pacific Ocean. He was an accomplished pilot and could fly practically anything even a Lear Jet. He was flying a test aircraft at the time and was doing touch and goes at the Monterey Airport. This is where you don’t actually land the plane but instead you touch the runway with your wheels and immediately take off again. This is a required test in case a pilot attempts to land and sees something on the runway. He wasn’t supposed to be flying at the time because of a suspended license due to his alcohol problem but fortunately they didn’t find drugs or alcohol in his system when they found his body.

Here are some of Denver’s many accomplishments:

For 31 years straight he came out with an album. No one in the music industry has been this productive.
He wrote three books, one being his autobiography.
Album of the year for “Back Home Again.”
He was the AMA’s Pop/Rock Artist of the Year in 1975 and became Favorite Country Male Artist one year later and CMA’s Entertainer of the Year. A lot of people in the country music industry were mad about this because he wasn’t exactly seen as the typical country artist.
He won Emmy’s and Grammy’s and is in the Grammy Hall of Fame and Music Writer’s Hall of Fame. He’s also won awards for his poetry.
The last album he cut in 1997 was called: “All Aboard” and was geared towards children. It was a hit as well and he won another Grammy for it.

I didn’t cover a fraction of his accomplishments but I at least tried to remind you what a diverse superstar he was. His personal life wasn’t as great as he was a workaholic never spending enough time with his family and friends. His seemingly non-stop touring and music production gives us great insight into why he wasn’t around much. He wasn’t a wife’s dream but he was a record label’s dream.

I was a huge fan of John Denver’s and I can’t count the number of times I’ve listened to Annie’s Song, Back Home Again, Grandma’s Feather Bed, Matthew, Sunshine on My Shoulders, This Old Guitar, etc. In a world filled with artists who all sound the same, I feel blessed to have been around to hear John Denver.

Murder Rates in the United States

Hillary Emails

Diversity

Iron Sharpens Iron (Two Minutes to Read)

Shine (Two Minutes to Read)

The Great Potato Famine

John Denver (1943-1997) Four Minutes to Read

Author: John Mann

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