It brought a smile to my face seeing one of my religious conservative friends question Trump's latest venture. He simply stated, "A politician selling Bibles is very disturbing on many levels." As my friend further elaborated in his comments, "it's wrong for anyone to manipulate people for money by using their faith," especially one that has such a xenophobic message as "God Bless the USA" stamped on the cheap leather cover. Most of us had a Bible given to us in our youth. I still have the black King James Bible my mother gave to me when I started Sunday School. Of course some of us preferred simplified texts like the New American Standard edition so that we don't have to wrestle with all that Olde English, but my mother didn't feel the language had to be diluted and sat with me to help decipher the anachronistic text. I never did read the Bible from front to back but I have read large sections of it, including all of the Books of Mos
For the past two weeks I got an inordinate number of hits from Hong Kong. They seem to be trailing off now. No idea why as whoever or whatever it is generating these hits wasn't looking at any posts. When I get hits from Singapore, which also seems a bit suspect, I see a number of corresponding hits on my posts. Maybe this is a legacy of the time my cousin taught at the American International School in Singapore? Blogger doesn't provide much in the way of analytics and I really don't want to spend time dissecting this. At least it is not coming from Russia or some Central Asian country, which had been the case a few years ago. This blog has morphed over the years. It went from an American history reading group in the wake of the collapse the NY Times reading groups, around 2010, to what is now a personal blog. The only person that still hangs around from that time is Trippler. The others have either moved on or passed away, like Chartres and Robert Whelan. We had