Weekly Meanderings, 23 November 2019

Last updated on: November 23, 2019 at 12:07 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 23 November 2019 2019-11-22T16:04:44-06:00 Scot McKnight

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Hello from SBL, this year in San Diego, where I’ll be seeing folks like my friend and co-editor Nijay Gupta.

Sky boxes, wonderful!

Like many parents, Steve Simpson wanted to teach his son the importance of hard work along with valuable skills that can be used both on the job as well as in life. So two years ago, Steve, along with his son, Sky, started their very own small business.

Sky Boxes, a family partnership that primarily installs and replaces mailboxes, has helped the father and son spend some serious quality time together, all while beautifying their hometown of Carmel, Indianapolis in the process. It’s at time laborious, but Steve says it’s helping his son develop lifelong lessons in an environment where he can learn as he goes.

Sky has Down syndrome, so his father Steve says he’d been searching for a job that would allow Sky to have the best chance of success. “We have been looking for jobs for him that match his abilities rather than his disabilities.”

So two years ago, the Simpson boys began their entrepreneurial endeavor. The small, father and son operation has already managed to install or replace over 100 faltering or deteriorating mailboxes in their community – a service neighbors say they’re glad to have done. “I think it’s great that he’s getting out there and starting his own business and trying to find his way,” neighbor Dan Reichart told local Fox affiliate WXIN.

Those who want to get rich following the Poor One from Galilee:

I don’t know any other way to describe the report written by Sally Wagenmaker about the financial and governance practices of Harvest Bible Chapel during the tenure of former pastor James MacDonald.

MacDonald recently defended himself against the church action of declaring him disqualified as a pastor. He may have to write another Facebook post or ten with asbestos gloves to handle the fire in this report.

If interested in a blistering report about a megachurch in disarray, you must read it for yourself. Here are some spicy appetizers to help you decide:

Based on our law firm’s review of available information, we determined that a massive corporate governance failure apparently developed over several years at HBC, primarily due to the following factors:
• MacDonald’s powerful and subversive leadership style;
• His development of an inner-circle leadership group through which he could control HBC;
• His marginalization of broader leadership, particularly the former HBC Elders; and
• His other aggressive tactics that thwarted healthy nonprofit governance.
Directly resulting from such problems, MacDonald appears to have extensively misused HBC’s financial resources for improper financial benefit.

Ducks win!

DAX, France (Reuters) – The ducks on a small French smallholding may carry on quacking, a French court ruled on Tuesday, rejecting a neighbor’s complaint that the birds’ racket was making their life a misery.

The court in the town of Dax ruled that the noise from the flock of around 60 ducks and geese kept by retired farmer Dominique Douthe in the foothills of the Pyrenees, southwestern France, was within acceptable limits, broadcaster France 3 said.

“The ducks have won,” Douthe told Reuters after the court decision. “I’m very happy because I didn’t want to slaughter my ducks.”

The complaint was brought by Douthe’s neighbor who moved from the city around a year ago into a property about 50 meters (yards) away from the enclosure in the Soustons district where Douthe keeps her flock.

The dispute is the latest in a series of court cases that have pitted the traditional way of life in rural France against modern values which, country-dwellers say, are creeping in from the city.

In a court ruling in September, a rooster named Maurice was allowed to continue his dawn crowing, despite complaints from neighbors who had also moved in from the city.

Freddie wins!

Where we start in life doesn’t have to determine where we’ll go. We all have the potential for greatness. We just have to recognize it.

Few people understand this better than Freddie Figgers. Shortly after giving birth, Freddie’s mother abandoned him, leaving the baby in a dumpster. But he didn’t let his rough beginning define him. In fact, Freddie has become an incredible role model for success at 29 years old.

At two days old, Freddie was adopted by Nathan and Betty Figgers, whose love and support made all the difference for him growing up. Freddie had a knack for tinkering from a young age, and proved to be surprisingly intelligent for a little boy. At nine, he received his first computer. It didn’t work, but that didn’t discourage Freddie. He had it up and running after fixing it himself, and went on to nab his first job as a computer technician at 12.

At 15, Freddie started his own cloud computing services. The idea came to him when an Alabama car dealership lost all their customer files after a tornado hit. To prevent this from happening again, Freddie helped them back up their information on a remote server… from his own backyard.

One of Freddie’s proudest innovations, though, was the special shoe he created for his father. Nathan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease during Freddie’s childhood. As such, his memory began to fail, but his son came up with a brilliant way to keep him safe. Freddie created a device to insert into Nathan’s shoe, which would serve as both a GPS tracker and a two-way communicator.

“I could pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey dad, where are you at?’ and he doesn’t have to do anything, just lean down and talk into his shoe and I can track his location,” Freddie explained. “That program was very successful and I had a company reach out to me out of Kansas and they bought the program from me for $2.2 million.”

Kids win!

MANILA (Reuters) – A group of secondary school students in the Philippines has found a way to convert poo from stray dogs into a mixture for bricks, aiming to rid city streets of excrement and potentially even lower construction costs.

As part of a research project, eighth graders in the Payatas district north of the capital Manila gathered and air-dried dog faeces, which were then mixed with cement powder and moulded into rectangular “bio bricks”.

“Our streets will really be cleaned up,” Mark Acebuche, the students’ science class adviser, told Reuters. He hoped local government or corporations would sponsor the students’ research to help upgrade production.

Dog ownership in the Philippines is unregulated and rules on taking care of pets are only loosely implemented, leading to a large number of stray dogs.

The students say their “bio bricks” are ideal for sidewalk pavements or small structures like backyard walls. Each brick contains 10 grams of dog poo and 10 grams of cement powder, and has a faint odor that the group says will fade with time.

Pro-life Dems:

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, just won reelection in a state President Trump won by 20 points in 2016. One might think that national party leaders would be falling over themselves to replicate his secret sauce, but the key to Edwards’s victory—his pro-life beliefs—is instead seen as a poison pill by most Democratic elites. Indeed, progressives elsewhere will soon be working hard to defeat longtime Chicago-area Congressman Dan Lipinski because he dares to espouse similar anti-abortion views.

The pro-life Democrat is now an endangered species. The 2020 election cycle may well determine whether Edwards’s triumph in deep red Louisiana is the last of its kind—a bit like how Martha, the last living passenger pigeon until her death in 1914, lingered on for years in a Cincinnati zoo after the rest of her species had gone extinct. At the presidential election level, pro-life Democrats currently have no good options. Former Vice President Joe Biden may be trying to win through the so-called “moderate lane,” but he scrubbed out his last vestiges of moderation on abortion in June when he renounced the Hyde Amendment. The Hyde Amendment is a federal budget rider that has long prohibited the use of tax dollars for elective Medicaid abortions. Biden supported the amendment for decades. His flip-flop moved him into agreement with the rest of the Democratic field, a group which (with the exception of Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who has voiced opposition to some third-trimester abortions) has embraced no abortion limits of any kind.

The Democratic primary electorate is not so extreme, however. A February 2019 Marist poll found that 34 percent of Democrats identified as “pro-life.” A 2018 Pew poll found 21 percent of Democrats saying that abortion should be “illegal in all/most cases.” (That number rises to 38 percent among blacks, a key constituency in the Democratic primary process.) Even in a liberal bastion like New York, where Governor Andrew Cuomo lit the Empire State Building pink after signing a bill ensuring abortion rights through all nine months of pregnancy, a Marist poll found that 71 percent of New Yorkers felt that abortion should be banned after 20 weeks unless the life of the mother was at risk. That is not so surprising if one remembers that the right to life movement had its roots in New York, where in the pre-Roe 1970s, Catholic Democrats rallied against the liberal abortion laws championed by Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller.

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