BALTIMORE, Maryland October 19, 2015 - If you want to know what is on the horizon for those in the uber left movement, you merely watch the headlines. For instance, we have known for a little over one year that the uber left is moving toward advocating a decriminalization of pedophilia. If you hadn't heard that, you are now educated. Now understand, in saying what I just said, I am not saying that every uber leftist is for decriminalizing pedophilia. But enough are that discussions of the decriminalization effort has begun to 'percolate'. Now, another future campaign has snuck into the headlines and it caught even me by surprise.
The uber left will, in the near future, begin to try to show that religious belief is medical condition needing treatment. Even someone professing Christian Faith while being a member of a mainstream Christian denomination such as the Roman Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, the Baptist Church, the African-Methodist-Episcopal Church, the Episcopal and Anglican Churches, and all of the Protestant denominations which fit under the umbrella of the word "Evangelical," are actually ill and in need of medical and psychological intervention. I'm not kidding. The news came late last week from scientists at UCLA and the University of York in the United Kingdom. The news confirms the coming uber left movement. At UCLA, scientists announced that when they directed magnetic pulses at a certain area of the human brain, the recipients of the magnetic pulses were far more likely to stop believing in God while at the same time becoming far more sympathetic to illegal immigrants. So, if you are a Christian, say, a Catholic or a Lutheran (as I am), you need medical treatment. If you oppose illegal immigration, get treatment. Isn't life good? Disagree with the uber left and you are not merely wrong in their eyes, you are sick. Obama has been like that all along. Although the scientists who authored the report did not say if the change in religious beliefs was permanent, they seemed to indicate that it, indeed, was a permanent change.
The finding was originally reported by in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. It was picked up last Thursday by The Daily Beast and its columnist, Abby Haglage. You can see Ms. Haglage's story at http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/14/this-magnet-could-change-everything-you-think-you-believe.html
USA Secret Service Now Guarding Trump and Carson
It was a break with previous policy when the Secret Service provided protection to then-Presidential Candidate Barack H. Obama in 2008. Until then, the Secret Service only guarded candidates for President after their political party had formally nominated them. But Obama told the Secret Service that he was receiving a large number of what his campaign team thought were credible death threats, and this prompted the Secret Service to begin guarding him long before the Democratic Convention. This time around, both Trump and Carson have reported receiving similar threats, and so beginning at once the two candidates will be guarded by the Secret Service.
It is Cold in the Eastern United States, But This is Par for the Course.
There was ice on my windshield just before dawn this Monday morning, and the thermometer which reads out on the dashboard said 35 degrees (Fahrenheit). Since it was the first real cold snap of the autumn, some newscasters included it in their hourly reports. The same newscasters also included the news that central and upstate New York received up to 9 inches of snow on Sunday. I had seen it snowing during parts of the Buffalo Bills home game against the Bengals.
But I have to tell you that even in Baltimore, a few miles south of the Mason-Dixon Line, snow isn't all that unusual in October. Many might recall that a World Series game scheduled in Baltimore in 1979 was snowed out, while then-Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn made national headlines at another Baltimore home game that year when he sat through the entire game in shirt sleeves even though temperatures were in the upper 30's. Back then Baseball was adding layers of playoffs onto the end of the season and critics scolded Kuhn and the Baseball Owners for being willing to play decisive games in the potentially deep chills of late October. Kuhn thought he could help mold public opinion by avoiding the appropriate winter gear. I was sitting about 25 rows behind the 'Commish' during that game, and I was dressed for the weather. But looking at Kuhn made me feel cold anyway.
Then there was the time in the middle of October when my father and I drove up to Scranton, Pennsylvania to attend the 'closing' on the sale of my dad's boyhood home. There had been Trotz's living at 218 Greenbush Street, on Scranton's north side, since 1917 when my grandparents rented a second floor apartment there. My grandmother was pregnant with her second child, and the owner of the home where they were living was selling the house. That apartment was very very small, anyway, and it was time for something bigger. Times were tight and Greenbush Street was within walking distance of the entrance to "The Marvin," which is what his employer's coal mine was called. Not so long after John and Anna Trotz moved into the Greenbush Street apartment, the owners of that house, who lived on the first floor, informed them that they were putting the house up for sale because they had found a farm up near the New York state line and were going to buy it. My grandparents scraped and scratched and came up with enough of a downpayment to qualify for a mortgage, and they thus became the proud owners.
The Trotz family grew from two children to six, and the youngest of the six, my dad, was now five years old when the unthinkable happened. The roof of The Marvin gave way at the place where John Trotz was working. A huge boulder in that roof fell on him, crushing his pelvis. He somehow survived for three days, but my grandmother and my Aunt Ruth recall those days as totally unbearable, such was the immense pain that he was in. That misery ended for the man who had come to this country as a very young man, having gotten on a ship in Gdansk Harbor in what was then Russia but is now Poland. In Europe he spoke seven languages fluently, but there was no work. In the USA he and hundreds of other young men who lived in or near the city of Suwalki found work as coal miners. It was hellish work then, mostly manual conducted in airless pits hundreds of feet under the earth, but he was raising a family on it and he and my grandmother had their eyes on a farm not far from Scranton. When he died, happening as it did in the middle of the Great Depression, it left his young wife and six kids - ages five through fourteen - to struggle with a mortgage and all of the other expenses. My grandmother and her oldest daughter found work in a cigar factory. The bank with the mortgage accepted interest-only payments for several years. Eventually, all of the children grew up and moved on. My father returned from World War II to find his home town wrapped in the Depression, made worse by the fact that those coal mines which had turned Scranton into a kind of boom town, all closed. He looked for work for almost a year before accepting his uncle's invitation to move in with his family in western Massachusetts, where he obtained work in a paper mill. Seeing that job, too, as a dead end, he moved to Baltimore and went to work for Martin Marietta because he would have a chance to use a skill he had learned at a technical high school - now a Junior College - in Scranton: drafting and tool design. He lived briefly with his sister in Towson. It was her husband - a German immigrant - who procured work for my father and his brother at Martins. My mother lived with her parents across the street.
On that October Day a few years back, he and I went back to Scranton to attend the closing on that house on Greenbush Street. My Aunt Ruth - the oldest of the six children - had stayed in the house until suffering a fall in her nineties. The other children had all agreed that the house should be hers in recognition for the years she spent taking care of their mother, who died at age 89 in the 1980's. After my Aunt's fall, she moved into a nursing home and the house became vacant. Now, a buyer was found. After the closing in mid-October, my father and I headed down Interstate 81. That highway moves across the tops of the Appalacian Mountains until descending at the small town of Pine Grove, north of Harrisburg. Anyone who has travelled that road from October to April has stories about the weather. On this October Day, the few snow flurries and showers in Scranton became a raging blizzard as we passed Wilkes=Barre. Traffic slowed to a crawl and many cars pulled off the road, unable to get traction. We continued on, but a trip that takes three and one-half hours in good weather took seven hours. By the time we reached Harrisburg there was no sign of snow and temperatures in Baltimore were near 50 that day. I was reminded of that day yesterday when a newscaster described a five-car pile-up on Interstate 81 in New York State. On a clear day the road can be as beautiful as any other in these United States. Autumn, especially, can be breathtaking when the trees that cover those mountains turn to gold, brilliant orange and a hundred shades of red.
It is when you must travel those roads when the weather is unforgiving that all of that beauty gives way to white knuckles and tense muscles. And did I tell you about the wind, howling out of the northwest? When that wind is packed with below-freezing temperatures and snow falling sideways that things get really fun.
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