A Pastor's Thoughts

Podcasts are audio or video files that are downloaded to a mobile device and listened to or watched.  Many can be listened to and watched on the web.  The name Podcast came from Apple.  Many years ago when Apple just had the classic MP3 player, Apple began supporting and listing Podcasts in their iTunes app.  The Apple Music player was called an iPod.  Also these sound files were usually regularly released like broadcast TV shows, so these files were called Podcasts. I use two different programs to listen to Podcasts on my devices.  I use Overcast and Pocketcast .  I used Pocketcast for years when Overcast came on the scene.  Overcast got great reviews, mostly because the developer was very well known in the tech community.  So I got it.  I switch between the two every couple of months.  The latest Pocketcast is very well done.  Both Overcast and Pocketcast work well on the iPhone and iPad.  Overcast has a web player, while Pocketcast has both a web player and a Mac downloadable app

Yesterday the Congress of the United States of America called the leadership of Twitter, a publicly held, private company, into a closed door session.  They asked Twitter, according to leaks, what they were doing to root out “fake” twitter accounts.  This comes from the news report that Russian actors used Twitter to a much greater effect than Facebook during the 2016 election. The first thing the American people need to understand is that most people in Congress cannot even spell Twitter.  As for knowing what it is and how it operates, they are clueless.  This is one reason the Deep State was caught with their pants down when President Trump started using Twitter to communicate with the American people. The second thing is that Twitter is the medium.  If someone goes to a rally and says that they want to blow up the White House, the government does not regulate microphones or speakers, they should have arrested Madonna.  The person committing the crime is responsible, not the medi

Apple released the iPhone 8 a week or so ago.  Apple will release the iPhone X on November 3, 2017.  This is part of Apple’s current annual release of updated phones with better screens, more battery life and a better processor.  I bought my iPhone 7 plus on release day in September of 2016.  I went to the Apple store and bought it.  When thinking about whether I need to update my phone this year, I need to consider a few things. First, is my phone functional or did I break it?  My phone is in good working order.  The screen is not cracked, the non-existent home button still works.  Volume and power and silent switches work.  Mechanically the phone is in good shape.  It took the IOS 11 and IOS 11.01 updates without a problem. The next question is this:  what do I use my phone for and will a faster phone with a better screen help me do these things? Podcasts:  I listen to many podcasts on my phone.  I listen to a mix of religion, politics and current events and tech.  A new phone

Today I want to a small gathering for and with a lady who turned 100 today.  She cannot get out of bed without help, but she can carry on conversations and eat by herself.  She is a real treasure knowing that she has served God for close to 80 years.  Some close friends and neighbors gathered in her bedroom and we talked and sang and ate cake.  She smiled and greeted everyone and it was a blessed time.  She is such an encouragement with her Bible always by her bedside. Some time ago I performed a funeral service for a great man of God who passed away at the age of 102.  On his 99th birthday this man rode his 3 wheeled bike around the block for a total of five miles.  I remember stories of him carpooling with may dad and they would talk about all the great things God has done and the work that needed to be done at church.  He served God for close to 90 years. These two amazing people remind me that God can and does use people at any time and at any age.  At today’s birthday party th

There is really only one way to make money in this world.  I am not counting taxes or donations.  The one way to make money is to sell things.  People sell items that are manufactured, people sell services and people sell ideas.  I am counting digital stuff as manufactured things.  Moving goods and services from one person or group to another and getting paid for it is how the world works.  When that happens, economists would say that a market is created.  A market exists when a seller and a buyer get together.  Multiple markets with many sellers and many buyers creates an economy and economic theories explain these things. Recently Procter and Gamble shut down their entire online advertising system .  They had been spending millions of dollars on data mining and online advertising on places like Facebook.  One day they just shut it all down.  After three months they saw that their quarterly sales figured had not changed at all.  Online advertising had done nothing for their business

Prior to being a pastor I was a believer in Jesus Christ.  I was raised in church and sought out a church every Sunday no matter where I was.  In other words, I consider myself a true believer in Jesus Christ and the Christian religion.  I am an exception in today’s society.  People who are willing to stand up and state that they are basing their lives on the teaching of Jesus Christ is rare. Many years ago, when I was a computer programmer, I worked with all sorts of people.  Buddhists and Hindus and even some Christians.  Most of the tech crowd were what I would call “casual atheists.”  This means that they never gave church or the Bible a second thought.  They go through life and never think about God.  If asked, many would say they believe in God, probably because they were taken to church as a child.  But any definition of this God could not be given by most of these people. One person I meant actually called himself an agnostic .  Agnostic is a Greek word which literally mean

Email is one of those universal communication tools.  I remember back when I was working at Seagate making hard drives and an internal email system was installed.  My boss could now email me instead of calling me or talking to me.  Email became a way for people to cover their behinds because they now had a record of what they told someone to do. Early companies like prodigy and AOL gave people the opportunity to communicate with others users of the same system via email.  ISPs like Earthlink, AT&T and Comcast gave their subscribers an email account so the company could communicate with them.  When Google hit the scene with gmail, people now had an opportunity to have a personal email that was not dependent on an employer or a cable company.  Today there are a handful of email providers but the king is still, by far, Google. Today I communicate via email with various people and organizations.  Mostly email is used for notification and newsletters.  My denomination sends out repo

Every once in a while I am told of an app for my iPhone that I think “that would be pretty neat” so I get it.  Drafts is one such app.  I would put a link to the App Store in this blog, but Apple has removed to IOS App Store from desktop computers in their latest iteration of iTunes.  So any iTunes link I put to the drafts app would crash.  So, if you want to see this app and try it, open the App Store on your phone or iPad and search for Drafts. Anyway, the Drafts app is supposed to be “the place where text starts.”  That is their tagline.  A user opens the app on their iDevice and they are presented with a blank screen.  They can type or dictate any text they want.  When they are done entering text, they can close the Drafts app and the text will be stored or they can tap on the icon in the upper right of the screen and they will be presented with all sorts of options to send the text somewhere.  It can be sent to an iMessage or a SMS message, to any of the IOS apps on the phone, t

Identity answers the question: “Who am I?”  Community answers the question “Where do I belong?”  If we look back to the very beginning of the human race, the fist community or group was the family.  Adam and Eve had children.  Their children had children and generational families were created.  Today, one might say that the basic community building block is still the family.  Until a person goes off to school, at least in the West, the family is the basic group or community.  In places where there is close village life or tribal life, the tribe is the earliest group of community.  Once a person goes off to school, the divisions and groups form and some of them become communities. Not all groups are communities.  Groups are either forced or voluntary divisions of people based on some common attribute.  I, for example, am an American.  I would not say that I am in the American community, however.  A community it tighter than a group.  A community tends to be voluntary.  For a family, p

The homeless are a blight on any city.  That may seem like a harsh saying but the fact is, those who are homeless leech off those who work and pay taxes.  When I say “homeless” I  need to clarify.  There are a very small percentage of people who, through catastrophic illness or job displacement lost everything.  Through no fault of their own, they ended up homeless.  Many years ago I saw a man, who dressed up in a suit, held up a sign offering resumes to anyone who wanted them.  He would go into stopped traffic and put resumes on the windshields of cars.  I saw him every day for 3 weeks, then he was gone.  He was clearly in the camp of someone who was going to do anything to get back on his feet.  I have no evidence that he was homeless, but I would support that man. Earlier this week a car was pulled into my church’s parking lot.  In it were two homeless people.  They approached me and claimed that God had sent them.  They talked about their ministry and how they were going to be

The other night an award show giving awards to people who work on TV shows aired on TV.  I did not watch the Emmys.  I will not watch the Oscars, the Grammys or any other award show.  The main reason is simple.  As Ben Shapiro says, “people don’t like being yelled at, lectured and told they are wrong.”  The Emmys was nothing more than a replay of the DNC.  I have said this before and I will say it again.  Hillary sealed her doom, with my vote, when she said that I was in a basket of deplorables.  My view is shared by sales people all over the world.  You do not get a sale by insulting your customer. I am a customer of TV shows.  Their goal is to make shows engaging enough to grab my attention so that I will watch them.  As I watch them they will insert commercials selling things.  The more eyeballs watching a show, the higher price the networks can charge for advertising.  The primary revenue of TV networks, therefore, is advertising. When I was younger, various award shows were in

Jesus has been resurrected for about 12 hours.  He has appeared in a locked room with ten of the disciples (Judas is dead and Thomas is absent).  He offers them peace twice and tells them that they are being sent.  Jesus then breaths on them telling them to receive the Holy Spirit.  This is not John’s Pentecost.  Pentecost will come in 50 days when the permanent indwelling of the Holy Spirit will be given to all believers.  Right now, it seems, the disciples need wisdom, courage, strength and  these come through the Holy Spirit.  So this is just a foretaste giving power and ability to the disciples to carry on until Pentecost. Then Jesus tells them that if they forgive the sins of any they are forgiven but if they withhold forgiveness, forgiveness  is withheld.  As a protestant pastor I do not hold to the Catholic idea of confession.  In confession, priests can given penance and forgive sins or if they feel the confession is insincere they can withhold forgiveness.  Catholics and pro

On the September 14 installment of “The Briefing,” Albert Mohler talked about a federal circuit court judge.  He was appointed by Ronald Reagan.  Recently this judge was interviewed and he said that most of the time, he no longer looks to the law or the constitution, but just uses common sense to decide cases.  This is not good.  America is a nation of laws and judges need to know those laws, or have staff who know the laws, and they need to apply the laws, not this so-called “common sense.” Every person on this planet is human.  That may seem like an obvious statement, but many people think that judges, or politicians or people in authority are special in some regard.  To hear people talk, they must think that when a person is appointed to a court as a judge, they put aside all their biases and follow strict guidelines found in the law.  This is clearly not the case. One of the main points of the Trump vs Clinton election was the idea that there was one opening on the SCOTUS duri

We live in a world, especially “western culture” parts of the world. Where things are changing.  This may be the most insane simple thing to say, but when it comes to free speech, things better not change.  Back when America was being born, the founders wrote a constitution which was all the powers of the government and what the government could do to you and things like that.  Then they wrote the Bill of Rights.  This amends the constitution.  It is the constitution from the people’s point of view.  It lists all the things that the people can do, and the government cannot, under any circumstances, stop them. The first amendment is very wide in scope and clearly important.  It is: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. America was founded by people

The other day I saw an interview with a woman who was in the Federal Justice Department.  She was hired during the President Obama administration.  She said that when she was hired, she was told to do everything she could to advance the cause of LGBTQIXYZ and same-sex marriage.  Therefore, she said, she would come to work, sit down at her desk and ask two question:  1) what can I do today to advance the cause of LGBTQIXYZ; and 2) what can I do to destroy the opponents of LGBTQIXYZ.  That was it.  For seven years, she saw that as her job.  Not upholding the laws or figuring out the best way to apply the constitution, but as an employee of the Justice department, she spent her employment, and my money, advancing LGBTQIXYZ causes. She had wanted to leave the day that President Trump won the election, but there was a meeting of the people in her section.  They were told not to quit “because there was no way to determine who would come in to replace them.  It would be unconscionable for s

The other day the national debt went over $20 trillion dollars .  That means every man, woman, child, legal or illegal owes the federal government $60.978.  When I saw that, I had to wonder what in the world they were spending that money on.  So I looked at congresses promises and it is all for welfare (food, housing, clothing, medical care), education and roads.  47% - 90% of the debt goes to welfare and "helping" programs. Simply put, the government is not getting their money’s worth.  Beggars and street bums are at an all time high in Alameda county.  There are random people building homeless camps in the corner of our church parking lot.  A couple right now are laying down and fast asleep on the back porch of our church.  With that much money, we could build housing that would equal the Hilton.  We could build rehab.  However, we would have to force people to go to rehab (no, no, no) and force people to live in these places.  Many of the people I have gotten to know are

Today Apple performed a 2 hour dog and pony show in the new Steve Jobs theater on the campus of the new Apple Park.  Apple announced a new Apple Watch that will allow you to listen to 40 millions songs (all at once?) when you phone is miles away.  The announced a new 4k Apple TV and they announced the iPhone 8 which is an upgrade from the iPhone 7 (no ’s’ models any more I guess).  They then announced the iPhone X (ten) and then they were done.  Then they gave iTunes 12.7 to everyone and this release of iTunes removed the App Store and the ringtone section.  iTunes is now a music and entertainment device. The direction that Apple is going is simple:  Entertainment.  Games and music and movies and TV shows on all ‘I’ devices and music management on the new iTunes.  If Apple becomes the music destination for the whole world, they don’t need to innovate anymore.  They just sit back and collect $99 a year for apple music and all the residuals for the various games that people now buy

Recently I heard a sociologist on one of the TV news programs talk about why young people join groups like ISIS and ANTIFA.  These violent groups that have no real ideology except to beat down opposition are very attractive to some people.  The sociologist concluded that these groups, and others, offer Identity , Community and Purpose .  Every successful group, country or organization has found a way to fulfill these three needs in people’s life. First I will look at identity.  Identity answers the question, “who am I?”  The deepest, most honest question that anyone can ask is this.  There is a degree of identity in every citizen of a country.  From a very young age, I could identify as an American.  I learned American history in school, memorized the pledge to the flag and the first verse of the Star Spangled Banner.  When I joined the military, it was drilled into me that my identity was American first and a Airman second.  I served America, they said, by being a good and dedicate

In Jr High I took a class on American Government.  It covered the basics of what constituted the American Government with its three co-equal branches.  It also covered my responsibilities as a citizen of this country.  My duty to pay taxes, vote and not commit treason.  In doing these things, I would be a good citizen. Recently Facebook announced that it uncovered tens of thousands of accounts that originated in Russia.  These accounts bought millions of dollars of advertising being positive and negative on various election issues in the 2016 election.  Some ads were pro-gun control and others were pro-gun ownership.  Some were pro-abortion and others were pro-life.  Some were pro-Hillary and anti-Trump while others were pro-Trump and anti-Hillary.  It seems from those who have studies these ads that the goal of this “fake news” was meant to sew discord and distrust during the 2016 election.  They did not seem to favor one position or one candidate, but cast doubt on all sides. The

Recently I heard a talk from a man who was now married, living on a ranch with his 2 young boys.  He said that he was an alcoholic and had given up drinking.  He had been clean and sober for 12 years.  He no longer slept around, he no longer watched meaningless TV shows, he no longer bought everything he desired and he had given up sugar.  His conclusion was that after giving up all of his vices, his life was pretty boring. This man then referenced a book by George Eliot called Middlemarch .  This book follows two people.  One seeks fame and fortune and the other just wants a family in a home with a good job.  The conclusion is that people who follow the simple life can find great happiness.  The book also states that people who used to have many vices and who remove them, need a time of readjustment as they find their happiness in simple things. Today, in high schools and colleges all over America there are people who want to make their mark on the world.  When I worked in various

I was raised, and taught that the world was full of countries.  Countries were determined by their forms of government, their names, their language, their culture and the borders.  For reasons that I cannot fathom, the progressive left in America wants too change its form of government, its culture and its borders.  In fact, many on the progressive left want to have no borders.  Hillary Clinton and John Kerry have both stated that they envision a world where there are no borders and we are all one large country.  No doubt, Hillary would be in charge of this one large country. One thing a true country with true borders must do is monitor and even limit who comes into that country.  That limitation is called an immigration policy.  Every country on earth has an immigration policy.  When Barak Obama, the president who took an oath to uphold the constitution of the United States, decided that he did not like part of the constitution and the laws that came from it, he created DACA.  He cr

Another BBC series on Netflix is Foyle’s War .  Detective Foyle was in World War I.  After that war, he became a policeman and rose to the rank of DCI.  Then World War II broke out and he elected to stay in his small town, keeping the peace, even in wartime.  He enlists the help of a female soldier from the motor pool  as his driver. The main conflict on the show is when Foyle’s police investigations conflict with the work of the war effort.  When someone in the military commits a crime, Foyle will be told to stand down because this accused soldier is important for the war effort.  Other times, he must conduct an investigation during air raids and bombing raids.  In one episode, the Germans bombed a residential block.  When the rubble was cleared, a man with a knife in his chest was found.  Foyle conducted an investigation into his murder during the cleanup effort.  Foyle even investigates a murder during Dunkirk. In another episode, a very wealthy, American, aircraft manufacturer

That would be Microsoft Windows.  I hate Microsoft Windows (hate speech?). I hate it because Microsoft as a company, has no real direction on where they are going or what they want to do.  I have worked at Microsoft in the past and the political infighting and lack of direction made for very unproductive days.  I was told, very clearly, that Bill Gates designed Microsoft to have multiple department working on the same projects.  Mr. Gates loves departments to compete against each other and actually form animosity toward each other.  The result of this, when I was there, was total lack of trust for co-workers.  I was also told that people who had been there five years or more would do anything, and they meant anything, to preserve their employment because they were vesting stock options and well on their way to be a millionaire.  Chaos reigned as people would destroy other people’s work, erase hard drives, lie about other people and do whatever they could to make other people look bad

There is a show on the BBC that is on American Netflix called Father Brown.  It takes place in 1955 in England, so World War II is still fresh in their minds.  Father brown was in the infantry in  World War I, then became a priest and was a chaplain in World War II.  Now he is an overweight, blading, gentle priest in a small British town. The humor of each episode is that when a crime occurs, the police are notified and Father Brown is usually already there for some other reason.  So Father brown gets involved.  The police jump to conclusions, arrest the wrong person and Father Brown, amateur sleuth, pokes around and figures out the truth and the police look foolish. Once he was arrested for obstruction of justice, during his time in the jail, he figured out who sabotaged the town race and solved the crime.  The district police gave him a commendation, so now the local police tolerate him better. In this show, having a priest as a main character is interesting.  He is not present

The Discovery TV network has a channel called Discovery ID.  It is all about the dark underbelly of human life.  They have shows about famous murders, serial killers and homicides.  One such show is called Homicide Hunter with Lt. Joe Kenda.  Joe Kinda was a homicide detective in Colorado Springs, Colorado in the 1980s and 1990s.  He claims to have solved 400 homicides.  This is easily my favorite show on TV. I like it because each hour episode is a mini-documentary on a single homicide in Colorado Springs.  It is narrated by Lt. Joe Kenda, who looks to be in his 60s and is retired.  He takes the audience through the initial homicide report all the way through to the end.  Usually the show ends with discovering who the killer is. The outcome of the arrest and trial is stated as an epilogue.  To see into the mind of a detective is fascinating and to see how people lie and hide to avoid police involvement.  Kinda is also a snarky smart-ass and I enjoy that. We live in a society whe