... you can talk about anything you want.
(The photos were taken last weekend, when we were in NYC.)
June 8, 2014
At the Retail Space Café...
... you can talk about anything you want.
(The photos were taken last weekend, when we were in NYC.)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
18 comments:
So, what I want to bring up is the peculiar "optics" of Mr. Obama's Rose Garden appearance with Sgt. Bergdahl's parents. I do not think even Bill Clinton would act that familiarly with a married woman in her husband's immediate presence.
So, what gives? Surely nothing real, but what the heck caused either of them to act that way?
It was a very odd sight.
I didn't watch the video. Maybe Obama can do things Bill can't precisely because there's never a whiff of adultery about him.
Okay, I watched this. I didn't see anything.
Look again. It is the husband who looks to be the stranger in that threesome.
If I were having a wedding these days, I would make a no smartphones at the ceremony rule. I went to a wedding, and half the people were holding up phones to record the ceremony. It was very distracting and made it harder for people to see. One woman was recording with, I kid you not, a small laptop! (Are these people ever going to look at these files? Really?) Then after the vows, the couple prayed silently together while a song played. The people in attendance were invited to use the time to pray for the couple. A man, who had been surfing the Internet on his phone throughout the ceremony, and woman in front of us immediately turned around in their seats to get the wedding party in the background and started taking selfies, tons of them. They would mug for their phones, take pictures, then look at their phones to see if they got what they wanted, then do the same over and over again. It was bizarre, like having been transported to a smartphone obsessed future where people lacked all self-awareness.
Wonderful couple though, so the important thing, the uniting of the two people in marriage, was perfect.
Great story, Freeman. You should get paid for your vignettes.
You know, I wanted to wade into the discussion of "true believers" vs. "non-true believers", and the way in which my belief results in outward deeds.
But Jesus strongly suggested that I not trumpet my good deeds, so I guess I have to stay silent.
“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.
“So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.
But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
Game of Thrones is the best series ever. The Sopranos and Breaking Bad had only one or two cliffhangers. This series has literally dozens of cliffhangers. (Inside joke to those who watched tonight's show.)..".....
Hagar- I thought the same thing. Why is the president walking arm-in-arm with this guy's wife while the hapless husband tags along like a hairy third wheel. I just chalk it up to the fact that Obama has no sense of propriety. Do you recall during the 2008 campaign when Bush, McCain and Obama attended a ceremony at the WTC site? The men were given roses to put on the memorial. Obama stood awkwardly, then tossed the rose like he was making a wish. Bush and McCain both leaned down and placed the rose reverently. Lots of times Obama comes across as some foreigner who really doesn't know what Americans believe or how they act, like when he calls soccer "football", or pronounces words like Pakistan and Taliban and corpsman. Other times he seems to conduct himself with deliberate antipathy for societal norms. I chalk that up to the insidious influences of his hippie-dippy mother, his America hating racist religious leader, and the anti-American fervor of the leftist/progressive democrat party. In short, sometimes he's clueless, other times he's just an asshole.
@Freeman Hunt:
People who use their mobile devices while at a wedding are hopeless boors, the kind of halfwits who, despite news reporting of traffic accidents and fatalities as a result of the practice, will continue to text while driving.
Well, being foreign born and raised myself and referring to football as American football to distinguish it from the real thing, I don't quite know about that.
However, I do not like having strangers touch me or stand too close, and in most clips I have seen of Obama, he seems to share that sentiment. He is not a natural glad-handing politician. But here, all of a sudden, he is handling this woman as if she was his faithful wife of 30 years and more, and it is jarring.
Thanks, SJ. I guess the point is that the people we are hearing from are not the right examples of the true believers.
@Ann,
there's a double-bind here.
The people who are really good examples tend not to spend a lot of time bringing attention to their example. (Mother Theresa doesn't advertise her order, but the size and scale of the religious order that she heads makes it kind of hard for the world to avoid noticing.)
For those whose work is smaller and less-noticeable...or even those too accustomed to just doing it, and not noticing how out-of-the-ordinary their charitable work is...they tend to follow the instruction of Jesus. Even without thinking about it.
I, myself, don't know how typical or atypical my religious practice is. And I only recently turned my "philosophical acceptance of the Creed as true" into "trying to actively live the life of a believer".
It's a big, messy subject.
And as we both noticed, it is really easy to get more noise than light on the subject of "true believer".
(I thought that "true" contains an implied "true to something". As in "true to form" or "true to ideal", in the sense of believer. Or "true to life", in the sense of story/art. Or "true to Creed", in the form of religious teaching.
But the users of the English language have transmuted the word "true" into a simple adjective, sometimes used to denigrate the word it modifies. As is the case in "true believer".
Which confuses me.
But languages are messy, inexact things...as people who study legal principles, or translations of religious writings, ought to know.)
Are blacks pushed so far outside of Madison that they never turn up in pictures of there?
They're almost always in your NYC pics,...
Or, rather, your pics of other (less racist) places,...
@Crack It's pretty noticeable around here that white people and black people tend to congregate in different places. White people tend to express dismay about this. But my photos aren't the best test of who's where. I usually avoid including people in the photos I post on the blog, but in NYC people are continually walking by and it's not really an option.
That said, I have no idea what's the race of the man in my photograph.
Refugees are a big problem world-wide, lots of hand-wringing and throwing resources at it. The illegal immigration situation in the U.S. is either a case of criminals or refugees; if criminals, the solution is obvious, and if refugees, there is a UN organization tasked to deal with it.
At what point does the ingress of refugees from Central and South America become a United Nations issue? Ecuador has 56,000 refugees, 80% Columbian, 70% in urban areas. The UNHCR has a program aimed at this population.
Post a Comment