You better watch out
You better not try
You better not shout
I'm telling you why
China's cause is coming to town
He's taking a bribe,
He's hidin it twice,
He's sellin out who's leftist and right
China's cause is coming to town
He adds votes while you're sleepin
And he says what you will like
His news reports are biased for him
So be controlled for all your life
Are you tired of politicians and news media lies and biases?
Do party bosses have to much power?
Are current political parties to extreme left or right?
Should politicians be elected based on their own positions and capabilities?
Is corruption and deception to common in politics?
Is the quest for political power more important than supporting the country and constitution?
Should keeping campaign promises be a criteria for reelection?
Could representatives and senators join to form a new moderate party?
Could representatives and senators join an existing minor party?
Should encouraging members to vote as they see fit be part of the charter?
Should the party be without a dictator?
Should primary elections be independent of political party?
Should committee membership be totally voluntary?
Should seniority give preference for committee membership?
Should House of Representatives and Senate debate and vote scheduling be member driven?
Should employers be penalized by unfair taxes?
Do wealthy people and corporations employ more people than people without excess money?
Should higher income people and corporations be taxed at a higher rate?
Do corporations have a vote in how much they get taxed?
Should taxes be less for people or corporations that employ people than those that do not?
Is a double or triple tax deduction for employer social security taxes paid a way to promote employment?
Should employer medicare taxes be included as a double or triple exemption?
Should employer government required medical insurance premiums count as an extra employer tax deduction?
Should any other government imposed expenses count as an extra employer tax deduction?
Is wages paid a better criteria for an extra deductions?
Would person hours of employee work be a good criteria as a tax deduction?
Would using wages paid as a deduction encourage excessively high salaries?
Which methods would be easier to implement to avoid corruption?Would encouraging employment help reduce poverty?
Do minimum wage laws raise prices?
Do uniform minimum wage laws discourage hiring youth and senior citizens?
Would a reduced minimum wage for young and old people provide opportunities for disadvantaged people?
Would using a high school degree as an indicator for increased minimum wage encourage finishing high school?
Would a high school certificate of attendance be sufficient for full minimum wage?
Should an additional lower age limit for full minimum wage be applied?
Would a reduced minimum wage for handicapped people provide more opportunities for disadvantaged people?
What age should be used as a criteria for encouraging employment of senior citizens?
Are youth less experienced than other people at work ethics?
Are senior citizens discriminated against in basic employment opportunities?
Would exceptional or experienced senior citizens be making minimum wage?
Do youth and senior citizens require as much income to support a family as others?
I had my first ever Facebook post taken down. We have received many anti trump Facebook post and I posted a reasonably neutral post comparing Biden and Trump and Facebook deleted it.
This is the image
It is your choice
Is it time to do away with political parties?
Do political parties lead to extremism?
Would electing politicians based on their own merit and views be better than party based?
Could a moderate middle of the road person ever be elected if they first need to show extreme views to win a party primary?
Should there be nonpartisan primaries with multiple rounds to reduce the number of candidates?
Should the winner require a minimum percentage of electoral votes?
What criteria should be made to become a candidate?
Would a petition with a minimum number of signatures be a good criteria?
Would a fund raising level be a good criteria to become a candidate?
Would multiparty debates including all candidates before primaries be a sufficient alternative?
Some politicians are suggesting alternatives to police for law enforcement and protection.
What are these alternatives?
Who does not like feeling accepted by others?
What does it take to show you accept another person?
Should you accept all behavior by another person?
If a child continually breaks glasses by throwing them on the floor, do you love the child less?
If a person engages in disgusting or immoral activities can you still accept them?
Should you accept the disgusting or immoral activities?
Can you accept someone if they define themselves by unacceptable behavior?
How do you show acceptance of a person while not accepting their behavior?
Can you receive grace or forgiveness without accepting it?
Is accepting a gift actually doing something to get the gift?
Can you experience heaven on earth without accepting God's grace?
Can you let God guide your life without accepting his guidance and grace?
Does everyone need grace?
Does everyone receive grace for wrongdoings?
Does forgiveness imply removal of punishment for wrongdoings?
Does forgiveness allow you to be closer to God?
Does forgiveness by God make it easier to forgive yourself?
Does forgiveness by God make it easier to forgive others?
Does grace help you change your behavior?
Does punishment help you change your behavior?
Can you receive both grace and punishment?
Can punishment be a form of grace?
Can you forgive yourself easier after paying the penalty?
What if someone else voluntarily pays the penalty for you?
What if God pays your penalty?
I have written a document describing how to edit a worksheet problem in Connect. MH Connect help is a little inadequate.
What purpose do prisons serve?
When you lock someone up for life do they still contribute to society?
What is the difference between a private resort and a prison?
Should prisons show the destruction resulting from crimes?
Should prisons be punishment?
Should prisons include treatment for mental problems?
Should any prison sentence be greater than 30 years?
Can people change?
Are prisons used to keep dangerous people isolated from society?
Would early released prisoners try to get even with those that put them in prison?
Is the threat of prison enough to prevent crime?
Would asking people nicely to not do bad things stop them?
Should there be more police to catch more criminals?
Should prisoners have an option of greater punishment in exchange for shorter sentences?
A few points from an article posted by U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice on https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterrence
1. The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment.
2. Sending an individual convicted of a crime to prison isn’t a very effective way to deter crime.
3. Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished.
4. Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime.
5. There is no proof that the death penalty deters criminals.
Does it seem that this article only refers to deterring new crime or new criminals?
How much crime does a person in prison commit?
What would a similar list be for preventing repeating of crimes?
Why do we have separate boys and girls bathrooms?
Is it for privacy of private body parts or is it emotional?
Do most people just want to do their business and get out of bathrooms?
Do boys and girls use different facilities in a bathroom?
What is transgender?
Does a boy feel they are a girl because:
Are all girls emotionally similar?
Are all boys emotionally similar?
Is it discrimination to control access to bathrooms based on body parts?
Is it discrimination to allow bathroom access based on emotions or feelings?
Is it discrimination to prohibit biological boys from competing as biological girls in sports?
Is it discrimination to allow biological boys to compete as biological girls in sports?
Does it mater that people can surgically have their gender parts changed?
Should government pay for someone having their gender parts changed?
Double blind trials.
A double blind trial for a drug or treatment, is where the real drug is given to half the people in the study and a fake sugar pill is given to the other half. This is because some people get healed when given the sugar pill. They have faith they will be healed and they are healed.
Why are double blind trials necessary to prove a drug or treatment works?
Why is it that the medical community does not in general believe faith can heal, but require statistics that a treatment works better than faith alone before it is approved?
How many people suffer in a trial by not receiving a real treatment?
Should trials compare among viable treatments instead of fake treatments?
Can faith that God will heal be as strong as faith that a sugar pill can heal?
Most proven treatments do not statically heal all patients so how much better are they than faith alone?
How much does a medical treatment cost versus a faith treatment?
Can doctors heal all patients?
Can faith heal all illnesses?
Do doctors help people even with their limited knowledge?
Capitalism vs Socialism vs Communism
Which economic system
Should all citizens have air conditioning and a color tv?
Should the sojourner be provided as much as contributing citizens?
Who pays for the care of the poor?
Do the poor need more than food, shelter and opportunity?
Should the provided care be paid voluntarily or forced?
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting.
In most of the Christianity does the Holy Spirit seam to be a footnote to the trinity?
So just what is the Holy Spirit?
Could it be related to a spirit of holiness?
28 “Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”, Mark 3:28-29
Why is blasphemes against the Holy Spirit so bad?
What is a blaspheme against the Holy Spirit?
Are the other names for the Holy Spirit useful?
Is the Holy Spirit what we receive when we accept Christ gift of forgiveness?
Does receiving the Holy Spirit move us from self centered control?
Does striving for wealth, possessions, power, or pleasure bring peace or love?
Is a spirit of peace and love really heaven?
Does obedience give peace?
Is hell a lack of peace and love?
Is hell really addiction to wealth, possessions, power, or pleasure?
“In the beginning, man’s spirit was the dominant force in the world. When he sinned, his mind became dominant. Sin dethroned the spirit and crowned the intellect. But grace is restoring the spirit to its place of dominion. When man comes to realize this, he will live in the realm of the supernatural without effort.” John G. Lake, The Power of the Name
And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. Mark 9:43
How do you separate training to discourage sin from hate?
Is encouraging people to not become addicted to "the works of the flesh", love or hate?
Is punishment for sinful actions, love or hate?
What makes a person valuable?
Do people judge others so that they can say they are more valuable than others?
Do any of these make a person more valuable?
On a scale from 0 to perfection is anybody anywhere near perfection?
On a scale from 0 to perfection is anybody an absolute zero?
Does being loved by God give us value?
If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing. 1 Corinthians 13:1-3
Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified. Galatians 2:16
For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. Ephesians 2:8-9
On my desktop one indispensable widget/plasmoid is the photo slideshow picture frame. I was a long time user of OpenSuse KDE and really liked the desktop picture frame. It showed my family pictures in random order, you could move back to a previous image, you could open the image in an editor to rotate or touch-up the picture.
I have been trying Linux Mint because more applications are supported on the Ubuntu base. I had read good reviews for Cinnamon desktop. The Cinnamon photo frame had some shortcomings. It did not allow navigation to prior images or editing. The desktop widgets did not allow locking and were often moved when clicking on windows above them. The windows above were difficult to resize because you could not grab the border over a desktop widget.
I checked on line and it looked like the Mate version had a better widget so when I updated to version 20 I chose the Mate desktop. After installation I find out the desktop widgets were removed. I am a little cautious about blindly following online application download instructions. So I ended up writing a simple bash script to use ImageMagick Display as a slideshow.
Most all of the pictures are jpeg or png. After some tweaking and trial and error this is the script.
#!/bin/bash cd $HOME/Pictures while true; do find . -iregex ".*\.\(jpg\|gif\|png\|jpeg\)" -print0 | shuf -z | xargs -0 display -delay 1000 -resize 1200x900 -geometry 1200x900-10-40 done
This works reasonably well and is independent of desktop environment. It only requires ImageMagick be installed. A summary of the commands:
while true; do # continue to repeat the commands before "done", This is optional.
find . -iregex ".*\.\(jpg\|gif\|png\|jpeg\|bmp\)" -print0 # search for files ending in one of the listed extensions and output them separated by null characters '\0'. The -print0 allows spaces in file names. You could optionally pipe an ls -R * output to a file command and use sed to select image files but this is slow.
| shuf -z # send the find output to a command to shuffle the order randomly separated by '\0'
| xargs -0 display ... # send the output of shuf to the display command, again separated by null characters
display -delay 1000 -resize 1200x900 -geometry 1200x900-10-40 # Display the images with a delay of 10 seconds, resized to fit in a 1200 by 900 pixel rectangle, placed in a window 1200 by 900 pixels located 10 pixels from the right edge and 40 pixels from the bottom of the screen.
done # end of the commands to be repeated
Now the image file name is displayed on the title bar. A left click will bring up a menu where you can go back to a previous image with File --> Former. Then you can Transform-->Rotate Right or Transform-->Rotate Left or Transform-->Crop. Then quickly File-->Save. Unfortunately you need to find the file to overwrite it.
An alternative is to right click "Image Info" which will give you the full path to the file which you can edit in another program. The picture will hold until you close the information window.
Another advantage of this over a widget/plasmoid is you can pop the picture the the front without having to "show desktop" by clicking on it.
Are Violence, Crime, Drugs, Gangs, and Mobs the primary causes of systemic poverty?
Can these suggestions act to reduce poverty?
What can government do to help reduce systemic poverty?
Is the NATIONAL NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH a beneficial program?
Would reducing police funding help reduce poverty?
Would giving money to poor neighborhoods be an efficient way to reduce poverty?
Would giving money to poor neighborhoods increase crime (embezzlement)?
You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. (Exodus 20:17)
A more modern equivalent phrase could be Keeping up with the Jones' .
Why did God save this commandment to be the last one?
Is this commandment a cause of evil actions?
Is this commandment based on internal thought more than actions?
Can you covet and be satisfied with what you posses?
Are you happy if you are not satisfied with what you posses?
Is it a sin to be wealthy?
Is it a sin to be greedy?
Should someone who works hard obtain more possessions?
Can working hard all of the time improve your satisfaction with life?
Can coveting create hatred for those with more possessions than us?
When do you have enough?
How do you judge if you have enough to be satisfied?
Can a focus on God reduce reliance on possessions?
Can a focus on serving others reduce desire for possessions?
Do more possessions make you a better person?
Do possessions make you happier?
Can sharing possessions allow people to posses less for themselves?
