News, Entertainment, Enlightenment
Good decision is based William Lawrence Sr Cryptowit 4-9-21
Y xqlu jxu juhhyrbu vuubydw jxqj, rusqkiu Y qc muqhydw q mxyju ruqht qdt qc iyjjydw yd jxu rqsa ev jxu jxuqjuh, oek unfusj cu je jubb oek jxu jhkjx qrekj iecujxydw. Jxuiu qhu jxu sxuqf iuqji, dej Cekdj Iydqy.
Ehied Mubbui
Answer to yesterday’s William Lawrence Sr Cryptowit quote puzzle: A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.
Plato
Rabbits And The Rhythm of Jazz In A City That Never Sleeps
John W. Gilmore
The City that never sleeps awakes despite being bruised, beaten and injured by the Covid 19 Pandemic. With fewer people in the streets some of the businesses have shut down as you walk up and down Broadway and along the streets of the upper west side. Some of the restaurants have set up small seating areas open to the elements so people can sit in and eat. Things are diminished. The subway is on a different schedule The crowds aren’t as heavy, but life still goes on.
People are walking the streets and picking up food to go most of the time. Every so often a few people will pass you on a City Bike or bicycles of their own. There seems to be more E-bikes flowing up and down bike lanes set aside solely for their use. Some even have street lights set up for bicycles and the small, electric scooters that pass by every so often as people make it to their destinations.
Everyone is wearing a mask. Living together in the proximity of a city and caring about one’s neighbor has caught on as part of the milieu of the city and this city, where people are presented to the world as having citizens who are cold and uncaring, has proven itself, yet again, to care more for each other than groups of people located in many smaller cities, towns and rural communities when it comes to protecting them from the virus.
Walking down 107th street passing many people wearing various types of face covers we come to the entrance of Central Park, one of the largest urban parks in the US. We walk up a ramp and enter in. A jazz band is playing funky tunes close to, but not quite, the type of music you would hear on the streets of New Orleans. People are standing around tapping their feet, clapping. Some are moved to dance.
A couple whirls and twirls touch dancing. A few people find secluded corners where they dance with glee on this beautiful Easter Weekend. People are moved to share their time together to the beat of the saxophone, trumpet, trombone and a set of drums. It is a light shining into the darkness and the fear of a pandemic bringing hope and majesty back to this dynamic world class city.
The park is grand and beautiful. No matter what tragedy befalls the city and this nation, nature still stands out wonderfully with all of it’s winding trails, streams and rivers, birds and squirrels running free and doing the same things they have been doing for thousands or perhaps even millions of years. One man stands still holding seeds in his hand as the bravest of the birds fly down and pluck them up and as the squirrels approach them. People stand their watching, spell bound at the display of trust and comfort he had cultivated with these animals over a period of time. The city is masked, but not dead, as one might expect. People aren’t cowering in their homes.
Perhaps we all can learn a lesson from New York City. Many people are leaving the city. The Covid virus is still spiking. The city has been devastated, but there is still a vital energy and power that exists at the core of this city. In a class I took once at University of Creation Spirituality a teacher named Carl Anthony described it in a class on Urban Spirituality. He explained it as the power of humanity and the power of possibility that existed in every city because of the diversity, the history, the closeness, and the ability of people all living so close to create the atmosphere they wanted to provide experiences that will take every person to a higher understanding of what it means to be human and to learn the true meaning of joyful living.
This spirit–this spirit of life and resiliency in the face of pandemic, was what we experienced during this weekend trip to the city that never sleeps. It awakened the realization that no matter how dark and battered, no matter what experiences that we go through as we pass through the fire together, if we want to and if we will stay together, we will not only survive, but prosper. Like the Easter Egg that promises the hope of new life, or the empty tomb that represents the power of life over death, new life coming forth out of desperate circumstances is always a possibility.
Out of the egg, the shell of pain, suffering, and desperation holding the city in a tight grip of fear and despondency a new city can arise. A new people can arise, but we need to nurture ourselves and our society and protect the shell that surrounds it, the very thing that holds it altogether, until what is inside is ready to crack through into a new world and new way of being. That is what we need now, and that is what is happening as many people stand around a small jazz band in one of the largest urban parks in the country wearing masks, singing, dancing and remembering what the beautiful part of life really is. Togetherness.
Rabbits And The Rhythm of Jazz In A City That Never Sleeps
Thing about the future William Lawrence Sr Cryptowit 4-8-21
P vdds strxhxdc xh qphts dc zcdlatsvt pcs cdi dc cjbqtgh.
Eapid
Answer to yesterday’s William Lawrence Sr Cryptowit puzzle: The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.
Abraham Lincoln
Protecting Livelihoods On Ballot May 18 In Pa
By Leo Knepper
Over the last year, Pennsylvanians have seen how unchecked power can impact every aspect of their daily lives. On May 18, voters will have an opportunity to ensure that checks and balances are added to the emergency declaration process. The primary election ballot will include two proposed constitutional amendments that will help protect lives and livelihoods in the future.
The Department of State, controlled by the Governor, has done its best to make the proposed amendments as incomprehensible as possible in an attempt to confuse voters. In simple English, the proposed amendments are asking voters to answer two questions. First, should disaster emergencies declared by the Governor be limited to 21 days unless the General Assembly approves an extension? Second, should a majority of the House and Senate be able to vote to end a declared disaster emergency?
By voting “YES” on the proposed amendments, Pennsylvanianians will be restoring checks and balances to the emergency declaration process. Voters will also ensure that future governors can protect lives in a disaster but will have to work with the legislature to address longer-term problems. These proposed changes will also ensure that future Governors must be able to justify the decisions they are making in the name of safety.
Governor Wolf has shut down businesses and entire industries at random under his authority to declare a state of emergency. He claimed that his administration would “follow the science” to develop policies. Data obtained by the Commonwealth Partners clearly shows that that wasn’t the case. For example, only 2.6% of COVID positive patients said they attended or worked at a Pre-K or K-12 grade school in the 14 days before testing positive for the virus. Yet, many schools still are not holding in-person classes.
On livelihoods, fewer than 3% of individuals reported visiting a restaurant in the 14 days before showing COVID-19 symptoms. Yet, Governor Wolf had issued drastic reductions in occupation limits and shut down indoor dining entirely on two separate occasions.
Many locally-owned bars and restaurants have shut their doors forever due to the Governor’s go-it-alone approach, and countless children have suffered severe disruptions to their education. By voting yes to the proposed amendments on May 18th, Pennsylvanians will ensure that local communities, small businesses, and our children’s education will be protected in the future.
Mr. Knepper is executive director of Citizens Alliance of Pennsylvania.
A good lie William Lawrence Sr Cryptowit 4-7-21
Hvs psgh hvwbu opcih hvs tihifs wg hvoh wh qcasg cbs rom oh o hwas.
Opfovoa Zwbqczb
Answer to yesterday’s William Lawrence Sr Cryptowit puzzle: A good lie finds more believers than a bad truth.
American Folk Saying
Ferde Grofe was born in 1892 in New York City and is one of the world’s great composers.
Among his works is the Grand Canyon Suite.
In 1950, he scored Rocketship X-M, a B movie starring Lloyd Bridges and Noah Beery Jr., that would one day be mocked on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
San Diego Teachers Betray Students
By Joe Guzzardi
Under the guise of “This is not who we are. America is better than this,” familiar elitist-speak currently spoken to excuse admitting thousands of Northern Triangle migrants, no accommodation is too generous for them. President Biden is the latest political potentate to unconvincingly utter the America-is-better-than-this refrain. But Biden has a long way to go before he matches former President Obama in his thinly disguised admonition of average Americans. Obama uttered the backhanded insult 46 times on issues ranging from the Affordable Care Act, voting and national security to immigration.
To gauge how much taxpayers are required to tolerate while underwriting an endless stream of affirmative benefits offered to recently arrived migrant noncitizens as they’re forced to play second fiddle, turn to San Diego, Calif. For more than a year, some 130,000 children enrolled in the San Diego Unified School District have been relegated to remote, online education. School administrators blame the COVID-19 pandemic, and have insisted that for the teachers’ personal safety, and in the best interests of their students, remote learning is mandatory.
Imagine, then, the shock parents must have experienced when they learned that SDUSD teachers would be instructing young migrants in person at the San Diego Convention Center where they’re currently housed. In other words, teaching in person is okay, but only if the students are foreign nationals and not San Diego’s kids. During his interview with the national media, Reopen California Schools founder Jonathan Zachreson said that the confirmed COVID-19 infection rate among the alien children the SDUSD teachers will be instructing is 9 percent. But among the San Diego students the teachers have betrayed, the infection rate is a microscopic .0018 percent.
In its statement to the press, the San Diego County Office of Education wrote, “We also have a moral obligation to ensure a bright future for our children,” an apparent reference to the migrants. The SDCOE didn’t mention concern for the San Diego students whose futures have been harmed, perhaps irreparably, by the county’s year-long stay-at-home order.
On April 12, San Diego schools will – tentatively – shift to hybrid learning while the in-person migrant program will remain active through July. Shortly after SDUSD officials confirmed the April 12 return date, teachers immediately pushed back. An internal union email that Voice of San Diegoobtained showed the teachers are hedging on the April 12 date, and suggested that classroom conditions are not yet safe for returning. The email read, in part, “Any date for a required return is a projection and not set in stone.” To restate the obvious: the teachers and their union throw up flimsy objections to educating San Diego’s citizen children, but don’t hesitate to sign up to instruct Mexican and Central American migrants.
The SDCOE stressed that its illegal immigrant education program will emphasize English as a Second Language and social-emotional learning opportunities, a direct slap in the face to San Diego’s enrolled thousands of limited English speakers and special needs students.
Statewide, California’s quality of education has been in freefall for decades. Within living memory, the 1960s, California had the nation’s most efficient and most admired K-12 public school system. But in 1978, Proposition 13cut property taxes and, as a result, slashed counties’ available funds for school construction and upkeep. Today, California has more than 6.1 million students enrolled in nearly 11,000 campuses. For more than a year, the majority have been denied an in-person public education, a lost school year that can never be recovered. But for frustrated, furious parents to realize that SDUSD teachers’ priority is educating unaccompanied, illegally present foreign national asylum seekers while their children’s academic needs are neglected is a burdensome reality to cope with.
In his press release, California U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R) sided with the parents. Said Issa: “The decision to provide in-person instruction to illegal migrants is outrageous and parents have every right to be angry.”
Summarizing, SDUSD teachers refused to return to their contracted jobs until, first, they were vaccinated; second, they received more money, and third, COVID cases fell. The teachers have been vaccinated; they and their California’s K-12 peers got $15.3 billion as their part of the American Rescue Plan Act, and cases have plunged. Yet, the teachers brazenly refuse to go back to their San Diego classrooms, but willingly will provide education to illegally present minors. Such is the state of things in California, and in today’s Washington, D.C., where the illegal immigrant is preferred to the citizen.
Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
Humans are amphibians William Lawrence Sr Cryptowit 4-6-21
N tbbq yvr svaqf zber oryvriref guna n onq gehgu.
Nzrevpna Sbyx Fnlvat
Answer to yesterday’s William Lawrence Sr Cryptowit puzzle: Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
C. S. Lewis
Groupon Selling Nike, Which Means Nike Is Not Selling — Groupon, the website that lets merchants move underselling merchandise, is offering Nike products. Just do it? Just sayin.
We will not do it, for what it’s worth. Nike uses slave labor. Nike — and Coca Cola for that matter — support slavery.
Slavery is a bad thing.
Simon Peter came along William Lawrence Sr Cryptowit 4-5-21
Tgymze mdq mybtunumze – tmxr ebuduf mzp tmxr mzuymx. Me ebudufe ftqk nqxazs fa ftq qfqdzmx iadxp, ngf me mzuymxe ftqk uztmnuf fuyq.
O. E. Xqiue
Answer to yesterday’s William Lawrence Sr Cryptowit puzzle: Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head.
John 20:6-7