God Saw You Getting Tired

God saw you getting tired
And a cure was not to be
So he put His arms around you
And whispered "Come to me."

With tearful eyes we watched you
As you slowly slipped away
And though we loved you dearly
We couldn't make you stay.

Your golden heart stopped beating
Your tired hands put to rest
God broke our hearts to prove to us
He only takes the best.

by Frances and Kathleen Coelho

Johnny Henderson Pruett

May 30, 1933 - January 27, 2016
Since you went away we've missed you every day.
The 23rd Psalm
23:1	The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
23:2	He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
23:3	He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
23:4	Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
23:5	Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
23:6	Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
Holy Bible King James Version

Miss Me But Let Me Go

When I come to the end of the road, the sun has set for me.
I want no rites in a gloom filled room. Why cry for a soul set free?
Miss me a little, but not too long; and not with your head bowed low.
Remember the love that we once shared, miss me, but let me go.
For this is a journey we all must take, and each must go alone.
It’s all a part of the Master’s plan, a step on the road to home.
When you are lonely and sick at heart, go to the friend we know,
and bury your sorrows in doing good cheer.
Miss me but let me go.

Amy Louise Kerswell

We have a myth propagated by the educators and passed around by those indoctrinated by them when they were SUPPOSED to be undergoing education instead.

This false notion is that a a four year degree is absolutely required to succeed in life.
 

So now we have a lot of uneducated drop outs strapped with educational loans they cannot repay and no prospects of anything in the way of gainful employment.

This is due to the change in the workforce landscape. Whereas once upon a time you went to the factory worked for 30 or so years. Retired and collected a pension.

Blue collar employment has been widely supplanted by white collar technical pursuits which have arisen largely from the advent of the information age.

When I entered the field, the only training programs were either military or at the PhD level. Now there are programs in every limp dick run by idiots technical school on the planet ...

And still there are closures and defaults and unfinished programs everywhere and not everyone gets a job due to their ending point skill set.

I was lucky. I was "hand trained" in a real world application where I was required to learn and perform in all aspects of hardware, software, and media where you were self sufficient or terminated.

Why then do 44 million educational debtors owe in excess of $1.5 trillion dollars in the United States alone.

Too much riff raff. Too much diploma mill. Too little education and hands on training. Little to no oversight.

Too many Educators are like the Nazis pillaging the Eastern European bloc.

Nobody guards the henhouse. They just exhaust funds and look to affix blame somewhere else when the well runs dry.
 

I maintain a blog which is for a subset of the population. This affords me the luxury of holding search engine companies accountable if they incur my wrath by thinking they are welcome anywhere and everywhere on my site.

Take google. They think it's such an honor for you to have them show up at your node that they may simply do whatever they choose on your site. My sitemaps outline the only places they may go but I sincerely doubt they even read them.

What about robots.txt ?

Ha ... what a joke.

While this may work for that multitude who values their traffic, alas I do not and when they tresspass into areas I deem off limits I try to fend them off politely.

Unfortunately, unable to take a hint they persist to the point that I just firewall as much of their network as I can.

I even include those collateral networks they bought and use for revenue streams and as alternate routes. You either stick to my sitemap or I'll make you go away. It's as simple as that.

You do not have my permission to run your custom code all over the place. Your bot is nothing to me and would just as soon firewall you as look at you in my logs walking all over my intellectual property.

Luckily, the really important stuff is password protected in the web server software. It seems that google has made contributions to Apache for which they are granted back doors in the product necessitating additional filtration scripting periodically.

However, it would seem that IP Tables hasn't received such contributions and thereby remains viable in the war against snooping and tresspass on the public domain.

I have had a number of people tell me how they can't find me in the search engines to which my reply is simply "excellent. glad to hear it". You see, some of us are private entities with content not meant for just anyone.

So if you don't like it good. It's a big internet out there.
 

One of the interesting things in the Bible is just how many donkeys find themselves in the picture.

In particular I was struck by the donkey Balaam is riding which encounters an Angel and is given the power to speak after being unjustly punished in Numbers 22:28.

Today is the Feast of the Ass and was a religious holiday observed by medieval Christians each January 14.

It celebrates the flight into Egypt by Joseph, Mary, and the infant Christ and the donkey which bore them in particular to escape persecution by King Herod.

This day also celebrates the various biblical stories which feature donkeys such as Palm Sunday and Christ's arrival in Jerusalem riding a donkey colt.

All of this gives me pause to consider the station of the donkey in matters of spirituality. Can an animal who appears in scripture performing essential duties for the people featured therein truly be "lowly" ?

After all, the work of The Almighty is something to which we all might aspire.
 

Back when it was okay to be a white male, Stephen Collins Foster was a popular songwriter who wrote much of those childhood standards we all sang in school.

He lived from July 4, 1826 through January 13, 1864 and was known as "the father of American Music" for his tremdous impact on the musical arts and lyricism in particular.

I remember those days in Blackfoot, Idaho and Virginia Beach, Virginia as some of the most formative artistically infused periods of my life and Stephen C Foster was part of it all.

Now with the democrats and progressives trying to rewrite correct history with their customized versions you don't hear too much from him or his music anymore.

Those "parlor" and "minstrel" tunes have been supplanted with with R Kelly wanting to pee on you and other standards reflecting the stupidity of pop culture innundating the masses.

It's a wonder that any American culture remains amid the hip hop and other drivel called (very loosely) "music".

Stephen Foster Memorial Day is an observance in the United States celebrating his life and legacy despite the sad events of late with the uneducated masses and persons supposedly being "educated" likewise being dumb as dirt despite their superiority complex and 3 educational degrees.