Tom King's Blog, page 8

Mothers and Daughters Forever?

My Facebook buds post stuff like this (above) all the time. And there's a kind of truth to it, but they leave out the tough bits. A daughter is always her daddy's little princess (unless he's some kind of psychopath or a complete jerk). Her relationship with her mom is always somewhat problematic. Beginning sometime around puberty, mothers and daughters find themselves at cross-purposes. It's biological. God put this "I have to get out of here" gene into all children so that a kind of madness...

A Broken Record....

Shoes left behind at Auschwitz.Humans want so badly to believe that we are basically good and perfectible if we just have the right laws, the right leaders and the right government. The fallacy of this was clearly demonstrated in the Old Testament. God meant it as a history lesson. The Children of Israel were given a promised land flowing with milk and honey, located right on all the best trade routes to insure prosperity. They were given perfect laws to govern their behavior. Had everyone ob...

I Hate Digital Tyranny

YOU HEARD ME GOOGLE


So apparently Youtube has joined forces with Google and Microsoft in a plot to make videos unwatchable from my beloved Firefox Browser. In the past week, Youtube went from requiring extra clicks to watch its videos to simply refusing to play videos at all unless I switched to Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge. This does not make me love either Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge and it carves one more negative notch on my list o' gripes I have with Windows 10. I don't like either...

What Love Is Not

Love is not, in and of itself, immortal, nor is it some self-existent feeling, that lodges inside you; that is something you either "have," as in, "I have love for you," or that you do not have, as in "You've lost that lovin' feelin'." Love is something you create through committing relentless acts of love. It is not something you can suddenly acquire, like a headache, a cold or a new pair of shoes. That sort of acquired love is more like the song that goes, "I've got the hots for you!" ...

The Government Will Save Me!

On Rescuing Democrats in a Hurricane

Texans impacted by Hurricane Harvey are not out of the woods yet, but Texans are coping. We are a sturdy, stubborn and innovative people.  I saw a picture this morning of a half-submerged house where the family had staked out camping tents on the roof and had food and water and camp cooking stuff up there with them waiting out the flood waters. THAT is how Texans behave in a crisis.

I remember stories from Hurricane Katrina of volunteer fir...<![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]>

Bipolar - Just Get a Little Self-Control

I posted something about bipolar the other day and was shocked to get back two of those "it's not real, they just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get a little self-control responses. God help the people who said that. It's like telling someone with cancer to just grit their teeth and stop having cancer.

That attitude, all too common in the Christian community is just so entirely wrong that I can't find words to express how appalled I am at that attitude. I've worked for 40 y...

Taking Advantage of the Good Samaritan

We've all heard the saying, "No good deed goes unpunished."  It sounds true but it's not. Most good deeds, if not rewarded, have positive consequences or at least don't hurt the good deed doer. An unfortunate trend in charity is toward making sure the person in need "deserves" the help. We don't want to cast our pearls before swine, Jesus said.

But Jesus wasn't talking about doing charitable acts when he said that. He meant, if someone didn't want to hear you preach at them, you should s...

Why Do Americans Think We're the Best Country In The World?

 One last comment as the Fourth of July winds down. I saw a list of questions on Facebook today that were supposedly asked by people "of the world." I think it was written by a liberal Democrats and was supposed to show what arrogant stupid boors the rest of the world thinks we Americans are. One of the questions was:
"Are you Americans just surrounded by food?"  Well, that was easy. I was in my kitchen putting away my groceries at the time.
 " You bet! " I shouted at the stupid...

Manspreading Crime Wave Hits Europe

This is a setup. The guy's obviously a metro-sexual male fake
feminist poser and traitor to his fellow males. No self-respecting
guy would sit like that and make the ladies uncomfortable.Me? I'd
get up and hang on to the strap so the ladies would have plenty of room.
Trigger Warning:  The contents of this article could melt a snowflake or inadvertently educate the ignorant, so don't stand too close while reading. Let's rate this one PG-13.

Okay, apparently if a guy sits with his legs at all...

Uriah Heep and the Rise of the 'umble Robot

Robot slavery is becoming all the rage. Everybody from Amazon's Alexa to Google redundantly named "Google" personal robot to Mayfield's Kuri, Ubtech's Lynx, LG's Hub robot, Panasonic's Robot Egg, Emotech's Olly, and Mattel's Aristotle, has rushed a personal robot slave to market in the past couple of years. I even worked on Olly's startup sequence myself when they were doing the early programming. 

I wonder do we really need to create artificial intelligences and then allow ourselves to b...