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Forty years ago today came the end of the childhood of my generation.

The space shuttle Challenger was blown to bits shortly after liftoff, taking with it the lives of seven of the best crew members that NASA has ever filled a mission with.

A few months earlier, I had read something fascinating: that those people who were old enough could remember where exactly they were when they heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor, and then when they heard about John F. Kennedy being assassinated.  And I wondered if there would ever be an event like that in my own life.

Challenger was such an event.  The first of too many.

Yes, I indeed remember that day forty years ago as clearly as if it were transpiring today.  I was eleven years old, going on twelve, in sixth grade at Community Baptist School in Reidsville, North Carolina.  I had ...

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I’m reading a number of stories regarding churches turning their nativity scenes into political statements about immigration agents enforcing the laws.  Namely, these churches are replacing Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus with signs saying “ICE was here”.  At least one church went all the way and has ICE agents surrounding the crèche with zip ties and weapons drawn.

Photo credit: Matthew McDonald

I would not want to visit these churches, because they are demonstrating that they have no grasp of scripture at all.

Here’s the truth of the matter: Jesus and his parents were never refugees or immigrants.  Joseph took his wife to Bethlehem because that was their hometown, and they had to take part in a census that had been ordered by Caesar.  They may not have been fully citizens of Rome (few in Roman territory were) but they were certainly 100% legal residents of the empire. ...

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Those were the last words radioed out by the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald.

It was fifty years ago tonight, November 10th, 1975, that the Edmund Fitzgerald  – at one time the largest vessel plying the Great Lakes – vanished off of the radar of the other ships in the area.  She went down in the storm, taking twenty-nine men with her to the bottom of Lake Superior.

I’ve written about “The Fitz” on a few other occasions, like for the thirtieth anniversary (has it really been twenty years ago tonight that I posted that?).  There’s really not much more that I could write this afternoon that hasn’t been said already.

I can share this though, as I have a few other times before.  The year after the tragedy, Canadian musician Gordon Lightfoot recorded and released his moving and haunting ballad about the ship and her crew.  “The Wreck Of ...

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There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth this past week about the latest antics of President Donald Trump.  The East Wing of the White House has been effectively destroyed, to make way for a new ball room.

Here’s the way the White House complex looked prior to the demolition of the East Wing:

The East Wing only dates back to the 1940s.  It really hasn’t done too terribly much, to be honest.  It’s become more or less the province of the first lady, though that’s never been a designated official capacity.  The East Wing can’t honestly be said to be part of the truly historic and traditional White House grounds.  And the White House has never been a static location anyway.  It’s been added to, remodeled and renovated almost since its beginnings more than two centuries ago.  America has grown and evolved (ideally for the better) and the ...

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Eighty years ago today, in the early morning at a place called Trinity in the desert outside Alamagordo in the New Mexico desert, a new star arose from the landscape.

It was not a natural phenomenon.  This unprecedented display of light and heat, brighter than two suns as one observer said, was a thing engineered by the minds of men.   It was seen for hundreds of miles in every direction.

“I am become death, destroyer of worlds,” project lead Robert Oppenheimer uttered when he beheld the culmination of years of research.  Physicist Kenneth Bainbridge perhaps summed it up better: “Now we are all sons of bitches.”

Man had at last seized the power of God in the palm of his hand.  The atomic age was upon us.  And nothing would ever be the same again…

Remembering the first nuclear explosion, July 16th 1945....

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Depending on who you listen to this was either legitimate corporate bungling on an unprecedented scale, or it was the greatest ever conspiracy by an American company against its customers.  There is no denying though: whatever it was, it worked.

It began in April of 1985.  Soft drink mega company Coca-Cola ehhh… “changed” the formula of its flagship product. “New Coke” was claimed to be much better than the original product  That is what all the advertising told us anyway.  I mean, even Bill Cosby swore and declared to us that Coke had been improved upon.  “The impossible has become a reality,” he assured us.

Bill Cosby wouldn’t lie to us, right?  Right?!?!?

People tried New Coke.  And the vast majority of them said that it tasted nowhere as good as the original product.  I remember it also.  It tasted more like Pepsi Cola.  In fact, if I had ...

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Over the weekend I watched Gettysburg, the 1993 Civil War epic film about the Battle of Gettysburg.  It’s one of my most favorite historical films, although at more than four hours long it’s really not one I can afford enough time to watch often.  But for some reason or another I felt led to see it again.

Maybe I sensed that I was needing to watch it anew.  That the time was coming soon to bring it up in conversation.  That opportunity comes tonight, after reading how President Donald Trump is restoring the name of seven military bases back to their original names that honored Confederate officers from the Civil War.  The bases had been re-named by the Biden administration to be more “neutral” or “politically correct”.  The venerated Fort Bragg became the vacuous-sounding “Fort Liberty”, f’rinstance.

Now, to be accurate about it, the Trump Administration is not ...

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President Donald Trump is making good on his promise to release all the documents pertaining to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.  This has been a LONG time coming for many, many people.  It bothered me in high school when I realized how much my government was holding back and it made a lot of my classmates mad too (this was right at the time the movie JFK was out).

But after sixty-two years since this collection began to coalesce, we’re finally getting a look at it all.

Here’s the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection’s main page at the National Archives.  A lot of stuff had been made public already.  But what you’re probably most interested in is what has been released because of Trump’s executive order.  That stuff started getting dumped a few days ago: more than thirty-three thousand pages across nearly twelve hundred ...

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The infamous “red speech” in Philadelphia, September 2022

Before I render a final grade for Joseph Robinette Biden’s term as president, let’s wind the clock back four years ago on this blog.  I predicted then that come January 2025 the United States of America would be in the worst condition it had been in, in half a century.

A bold forecast.  I swore then that if I was wrong, I would eat my fedora.  And I would have.  With A1 steak sauce.

I knew there was no chance of me getting it wrong.  Biden has certainly not let me down in that regard.

To everyone who voted for this fool: please don’t do that again.  Because of Biden and his disastrous policies I had to leave a job that I loved.  That’s my own particular tale of woe that came about.

And a few hours ago Biden “pre-emptively pardoned” ...

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I’m going to preface the remainder of this post by saying something which I probably didn’t do my best to get across in this piece.  Mainly, that what I’ve written about is a tragedy.  When any one person has wasted more of a lifetime than too many good people ever get to have, only to wind down his or her time on this earth with naught but pain and hurt inflicted upon others, that is not a thing to gloat about.  That is a very sad thing, indeed.
Time keeps on slipping into the future.  And for all his schemes and plans and plots over five decades, they have ultimately earned Joseph Robinette Biden not an iota of esteem or honor.  He had it all, and it has now come to nothing.
No, there will be no crowds waiting to enter the Joe Biden Presidential Library…

And that is ...

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