Ain't Complicated

Which Is It, Mr. Romney?

Tuesday night I heard you say you’re going all the way to the White House.

And I think I heard you say you’re going all the way to the convention.

And maybe even something about being in it for the long haul.

(If the exact quotes were important enough to me, I’d google your speech then.)

Anyway, I just heard you say another bunch of cheer-inducing (there at CPAC) stuff.

Then you withdrew from the race for the Republican Presidential nomination.

So, Mr. Romney, the cheer-inducing stuff you said a few minutes ago — did you mean that more or less than what you said Tuesday night?

Just curious.

And, yes, you may change your mind about things.

Oh, and thanks for making a bunch more room for me in the Presidential race!

PS: As I was listening, I thought, “He’s launching his 2012 bid.” Am I right?

Known but to God

I’m not talking about the identity of the remains buried in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

I’m talking about the next President of the United States.

Only God knows whether it will be Obama or McCain or Hillary or Huckabee or Romney. Or Fred Thompson. Or Mark Roth. Or some other unknown-to-us.

Because God will set up whom He will.

McCain may be the Republican frontrunner who, after yesterday, has added to his Inevitability Quotient, but so was Luis Donaldo Colosio on March 23, 1994.

Hillary may have won the California primary, but so did Robert Kennedy.

Am I predicting an assassination that upsets the political applecart? 😯

Of course not. 🙄

God has all manner of ways of setting up whom He will, death by various means being only one of them.

The old stream media may think they’re setting things up.

The conniving politicians may think they’re doing the arranging.

The bloggers and radiotalkers may think they’re going to pull off something (though McCain’s successes yesterday, coupled with Huckabee’s, should put a damper on such thoughts).

The “powers that be” may be using all of the above — plus “tinkerers” who are “adjusting” all those electronic voting machines — to continue “running the show.”

But it’s the sovereign omnipotent God who’s doing the setting up and taking down.

I may not like the choice. But I submit to the Chooser and, thus, rest in His omniscient wisdom.

All glory and honor and praise and obedience and love to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords!

Dead: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

TM’s “founder” crossed the final bridge in this life:

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a guru to the Beatles who introduced the West to transcendental meditation, died Tuesday at his home in the Dutch town of Vlodrop, a spokesman said. He was thought to be 91 years old.

“He died peacefully at about 7 p.m.,” said Bob Roth, a spokesman for the Transcendental Meditation movement that the Maharishi founded. He said his death appeared to be due to “natural causes, his age.”

Once dismissed as hippie mysticism, the Hindu practice of mind control known as transcendental meditation gradually gained medical respectability.

He began teaching TM in 1955 and brought the technique to the United States in 1959. But the movement really took off after the Beatles attended one of his lectures in 1967 and visited his ashram in India in 1968, bringing along such famous friends as Donovan.

I wonder what he’s doing now.

Some 5 million people devoted 20 minutes every morning and evening reciting a simple sound, or mantra, and delving into their consciousness.

“Don’t fight darkness. Bring the light, and darkness will disappear,” Maharishi said in a 2006 interview, repeating one of his own mantras.

“Resist the devil and he will flee from you,” says the Bible.

“No one leaves Islam”

That’s what he said:

No one ever leaves Islam, according to a judge in Egypt who has cited Islamic religious law in rejecting a request from a Muslim convert to Christianity to be allowed to change his religious affiliation on his national identification card.

In a decision that forecasts more and more decisions being based on Shari’a, Islam’s religious law, Judge Muhammad Husseini has concluded it violates the law for a Muslim to leave Islam.

According to a report from Compass Direct News, the judge found that the convert, Muhammad Hegazy, “can believe whatever he wants in his heart, but on paper he can’t convert.”

After reading that, I wondered: “So what? Does it even matter?”

Then I read this:

The website, which said it took its name from Quranic descriptions of Christians and Jews, said Westerners don’t realize the significance of having a national ID card listing the carrier as Muslim.

“If you get caught going to a church while your religion on your ID is Muslim, that could get you arrested, questioned and tortured,” the commentary said. “The latest victim was a 27-year-old woman, Mrs. Sherreen, mother of two children from Alexandria, Egypt. She died at the police station on Jan. 3, 2008, after five hours of torture for refusing to renounce her Christian faith and come back to Islam.”

The website noted in Egypt, children of parents with Muslim IDs automatically are Muslims, and they are required to follow mandatory Islamic indoctrination classes, and Muslims cannot marry non-Muslims.

Chips, Dips, Lips

I know this is New York Times reporting, but still . . . .

Professor Dawson told me that he had expected to find little or no microbial transfer from mouth to chip to dip….

The team of nine students instructed volunteers to take a bite of a wheat cracker and dip the cracker for three seconds into about a tablespoon of a test dip. They then repeated the process with new crackers, for a total of either three or six double dips per dip sample. The team then analyzed the remaining dip and counted the number of aerobic bacteria in it.

[…]

On average, the students found that three to six double dips transferred about 10,000 bacteria from the eater’s mouth to the remaining dip.

Each cracker picked up between one and two grams of dip. That means that sporadic double dipping in a cup of dip would transfer at least 50 to 100 bacteria from one mouth to another with every bite.

[…]

“The way I would put it is, before you have some dip at a party, look around and ask yourself, would I be willing to kiss everyone here? Because you don’t know who might be double dipping, and those who do are sharing their saliva with you.”

😯

Choosing a President

There for quite a while, Hillary Clinton was considered the inevitable Democrat nominee.

No more.

And for quite a while, RudyG (I’m stumped on spelling his last name) was an apparent shoo-in for the Republicans.

Today he’s out.

And Fred Thompson supposedly could have the nomination for the taking.

He finally reached out for it. It eluded him. And he’s been out for a few days now.

Then there’s Mitt Romney, who really seemed to have something going for him.

That effort seems to have stalled out.

And John McCain had supposedly reached the end of his rope this past summer.

Now he’s the Republican front-runner.

For now?

I’m looking forward to seeing who God has picked out to set up as President.

And how will Christians react to His decision?

Generating Goodwill Generously

Or something like that.

Or this:

Cody Young parked his bike in the wrong place at the Goodwill store, where the rule is anything on the floor goes.

He didn’t have a lock and friends said they’d parked inside the store before. But this time, the black BMX bike was sold.

Goodwill officials say the youngster is going to get his bike back though, because the buyer saw a story in Salem Statesman Journal about the mix-up and called to make things right.

The buyer got the bike for $6.99 but Goodwill is giving them a $100 gift certificate for coming forth.

It’s not the first such sale mix up in Goodwill’s busy stores, officials said. Once, a janitor left a bucket and mop on the sales floor, and a store sold them the next day.

😯

Or maybe I mean this: 🙄

For sure this: 😀