The Thomas Chronicles

It’s been a few days since I last posted anything. As you’ve probably guessed, I’m on a Christmas/New Year’s holiday and I’m kicking back a bit. I have a few things swimming around my cranium but I don’t think I’m going to post anything of substance until after the New Year.

So, Happy New Year all you cyber readers!

Thomas

I’m back in Houston, Texas spending some quality time with my folks. They’re a loud, high energy bunch, and I love them dearly. Coming from a traditional Vietnamese family, I discovered on this visit that my kin had expanded some. Everywhere I turn I’m seeing little munchkins running about, mostly infants and some a bit older.

At one point in the festivities, I looked around at all the members of my clan and thought of the seeming incongruities created by living in America. My family are Americans through and through, and they have become Texans through and through. I imagine that from the outside to people unaccustomed to the incredible melting pot that is America, they might well scratch their noggin how one can be American, Vietnamese, and Texans at the same time.

All my brothers speak with a Texan twang. They do it unconsciously and they’d probably deny it if anyone were to point it out. My oldest brother actually sounds like a southern trailer park tow-truck driver over the phone.

I thank our Lord Jesus Christ that my family made it to these shores where they can have freedom and experience life in abundance instead of being left in the jungles of Vietnam to be killed or “re-educated” after the fall of Saigon.

How far we’ve come from those overcrowded boats and refugee camps to this night…

It is now morning and a hush has fallen over the city. There are thousands of men, women and children streaming into churches this day for the celebration of the birth of our Lord Jesus. They come from all walks of life. The rich. The poor. The Whites. The Blacks. The Hispanics. The Asians. The large and the small. The educated and the illiterate. The hungry and the fed.

The Kingdom of God is not about externals; whether you’re popular and well loved or not, whether you drive a brand spanking new car or a old rusted beater. It’s about individual souls making it home to their Creator God, and on this day over two thousand years ago, our Creator took on our fallen state and became a Man.

And, thus, hope entered our world on that day; it is the hope that we won’t be tossed to our fate into the grip of death, to deteriorate into the abyss eternally away from the Light and Love of God. We were offered a path home through Jesus’s sacrifice at Calvary, and that offer stands to this day.

Merry Christmas to all you readers. May the Lord bless you and keep you on this holy day, for as the song goes,

Joy to the world! The Lord is come.
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room;
And heav’n and nature sing,
And heav’n and nature sing.
And heav’n and heav’n and nature sing.

Yes, I was one among the throng of Christmas shopping zombies pacing the malls this afternoon. I find it curious around this time of year. The holiday consumer usually comes in one of two distinct dispositions.

A) The grumpy prune faced shopper (not limited to age, mind you) who examines the merchandise as if under a microscope. He’s not quite the “Bah Humbug” sort.

He’s the kind of man that muddles here and there, up and down the length of the mall out of a grim sense of duty to impart some Christmas cheer. Mr. A buys his presents carefully and dashes out to the parking lot as quickly as his feet will take him.

B) Mr. B is a different sort. Mr. B is actually a misnomer since Mr. B is usually a Miss or a Missus. She chipperily dances down the gleaming marble clad mall floor unable to contain her burst joy. Whether this is brought about by a thorough infusion of the Christmas Spirit or the simple joy of shopping with complete abandon I’ve never figured out.

Having slogged through high school algebra with dazed indifference, Ms. B gleefully calculates sales percentages with remarkable mental alacrity and precision. 15% Off Today! 40% Clearance sale. Everything must go!

Her euphoria never quiet settles until her head falls on the pillow after dinner.

After pacing the mallways and aisleways and with my head spinning in all sorts of strange ways, I exited the mall with two quaint paper bags into the parking structure. Second floor.

I looked to my left and saw the beautiful rainclouds reclining against the hillside going out toward Pales Verde. It was like a great billow of cigarette smoke. It reminded me of how my little brother used to blow these incredibly thick donut rings of smoke and how it lingered undisturbed in the air for a long moment before scattering, dissolving into vapor.

Except it wasn’t smoke on those hills and it didn’t look like an ethereal donut not even Homer Simpson would eat. I don’t know what brought up that memory actually.

Reaching my car, I dumped those paper bags in the trunk and grabbed my camera. I still use a manual 35-mm camera with a long adjustable lens. The stairs were only a few feet away from me and I made my way up to the roof of the parking structure.

On my way up I encountered a posse of blue and gray pigeons doing what they do best. Nothing at all. They were lined up on the ledge in a row, some asleep, some cooing or whatever. The rest of the roof was empty. The late shoppers haven’t gotten off work yet.

From there on top a shopping crazed mall, the view was even more incredible. I whipped out my camera, my lens long enough to be the barrel of a pump-action shotgun, and began snapping. (I know I should join the digital revolution at some point. I fully intend to. Honestly.)

I looked behind me across the breadth of the empty parking lot and beyond it a few miles stood downtown LA. It was covered in a blue-gray mist and a charcoal cloud hovered just above the skyscrapers. It was raining. I got a picture of that one too.

“Excuse me, sir?”

Huh? I turned and saw a security officer walking up the parking ramp.

“Hello,” I said.

He was a large man, well over six feet tall, with round gold trimmed glasses and a flat brim ten-gallon hat.

“Excuse me, sir. You’re gonna have to delete those pictures you took.”

“I can’t delete them. It’s a film camera. You don’t just delete those.”

When he got close enough for me to see the stubbles of his beard, I noticed that he was wearing the black foamed jacket of a county sheriff, the ones with the squarish patterns. He even had the straight pants with the single stripe on the sides.

I also noticed that he wasn’t smiling.

“Sorry, sir, but you’ve gotta take em out. You can’t take pictures up here or anywhere in the mall. You have to have permission from the mall manager to take em.”

“Aw come on, sir. That’s just damn shame. I mean, look at that view. How often do you see that in LA?”

He briefly glanced over to the hill where I pointed. The clouds where still there like a bubbled thought in a comic book. He grinned. He was still determined to destroy my pictures but he grinned. That was something, wasn’t it?

“Sorry. You have to take them out. You can’t take pictures up here.”

So he said.

I looked at my camera. I must have taken about five pictures up on the roof before the officer arrived. My camera said I’ve taken 23 pictures out of a roll of 24. Crap.

I sighed, lifted the hatch, and exposed all the film. I shrugged and apologized to the officer for my presumption and made my way down the stairs back to my car.

On my walk, I thought to myself, “Boy howdy, these guys are really on top of it.” He must have been called in by someone observing me from a camera. So far as I knew, the entire roof was devoid of people until he arrived. I was actually very impressed at the man’s professionalism and his calm courtesy. He was determined to destroy the film, but hey, he was just doing his job. That’s understandable.

Driving out into the setting evening sun, I caught a huge sign on the side of a building. It read, “Soma Medical Group.”

I thought of Huxley’s Brave New World and wondered if we had crossed some transom some time ago.

John Edwards is now the polling as the front-runner in Iowa. How is that possible, you ask? I blogged on such an eventuality a while back, but didn’t dream of Edwards stepping into the void. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could cancel each other out in an all out negative campaign and leave Jonathan “Hair-Cut” Edwards with the nomination. My friends and I discussed this, but I thought there was zero possibility of an Edwards nomination. Looks like I might have to reconsider.

A new InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion poll out of Iowa shows John Edwards leaping from third to first place in Iowa, and the GOP field ever-tightening, as the Jan. 3 caucuses approach.

The Democratic poll, taken from Dec. 16-17 of 977 Democrats who said they intend to participate in the caucuses, showed Edwards with 30 percent, followed by New York Sen. Hillary Clinton with 26 percent and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama with 24 percent.

Hey, stranger things have happened.

You might remember that this was how John F. Kerry got the Democratic nomination in 2006. He stood back and let Richard Gephardt and Howard Dean tear each other to shreds, and then, at the eleventh hour, Kerry strode in as the voice of reason. The moderate candidate in fact from the two extremes of the party. Whether or not Edwards can pull this off remains to be seen.

Keep in mind this is the same man curled the short hairs of his running-mate:

Edwards had told Kerry he was going to share a story with him that he’d never told anyone else—that after his son Wade had been killed, he climbed onto the slab at the funeral home, laid there and hugged his body, and promised that he’d do all he could to make life better for people, to live up to Wade’s ideals of service. Kerry was stunned, not moved, because, as he told me later, Edwards had recounted the same exact story to him, almost in the exact same words, a year or two before—and with the same preface, that he’d never shared the memory with anyone else. Kerry said he found it chilling, and he decided he couldn’t pick Edwards unless he met with him again.

Yikes!

Tom Petty’s last dance with Mary Jane comes to mind.

Seriously now. Do the Dems really want this man have his finger on ten thousand thermonuclear weapons?

Think about it, my friend.

— and shudder.

Related Post:

Bookworm Room: Are we willing going to let little Iowa determine the entire Presidential election?

Consider this:

We all knew it would come to this eventually, didn’t we?

According to a report by Reuters international news agency, department store Santas in Sydney, Australia, are being discouraged from saying “Ho-ho-ho” to children because, well, let’s just say it sets the wrong example for impressionable kids.

Any American kid who listens to rap music will recognize the word “Ho” immediately. It sprinkles from rappers’ mouths like snowflakes on Christmas morning.

Unfortunately, the meaning of the word “Ho” is decidedly un-Christmaslike. It’s become a slang term for a woman employed in the oldest profession of all.

At long last, Australian Santas are being asked to get their mind out of the down-under and stop assaulting children’s ears with irresponsible Ho-ho-ho-ing. They’ve been told to say “Ha-ha-ha,” instead.

This comes after a report from Great Britain, where Santas have been asked to slim down, since the jolly old elf’s morbid obesity sends another bad message to children. Never mind that a steady diet of reindeer meat is high in saturated fats. The jolly fat man will have to find a polar price club that specializes in veggies and yogurt, if he wants to spend time with kids.

And consider this account

Recently I went to do some Christmas shopping in the local stores. I don’t believe that I have ever been so insulted in all my life.

Only two stores had any mention of Christmas. All others were advertising the holiday season which is totally secondary to anyone who believes in the birth of Christ.

How about this one?

Here in Seattle, the phrase “Merry Christmas” has been largely expunged from public discourse. Haltingly and awkwardly, we wish each other happy holiday; we talk vaguely about a holiday season; we plan parties that by all appearances look like Christmas parties, but we never call them such. This despite every indication that Christmas, at least the consumerist trappings of it, is alive and well. Every Starbucks sign hawks a peppermint latte; the sound of Barbra Streisand belting out “Jingle Bells” can be heard all over town; whole city blocks are lit up like, well, like Christmas trees.

…

So it came as no small surprise when the very people who are supposed to be stormtroopers in the so-called war against Christmas — college professors — leapt to the defense of a North Seattle Community College staff member who was chided for referring to “Christmas cookies” in a recent e-mail message.

…

What finally tore our attention away from the crush and grind of late-quarter workload was the original sender’s apology message, sent to all staff and carrying the subject line, “Holiday Cookie Order Apology.” In the tone of someone clearly being asked to apologize for behavior for which there is no need to apologize, the sender lets us know that, in sending out her cookie order form, she had not been “trying to highlight, segregate, discriminate, or diminish any specific religion.”

Reading the news sometimes feels like walking through the Twilight Zone, minus Rod Serling’s sharp-voiced intro.

Just another note on Al Gore’s zany antics. As you are probably aware, our former Vice President has become a veritable “prophet” of Global Warming.

Vanity Fair in their Green Issue a few months back, literally had a semi-serious/ semi-humorous comic of the “prophet” Al Gore pacing on the breadth of the earth in monastic robes. Beneath him raged the fires of Dante’s nine circles of Hell.

Instead of people being tortured and eternally being devoured by their deadly sins, like greed, avarice, and so on, the “sinners” were guilty of polluting. They were the auto industry CEO’s, the non-recyclers, and those horribly selfish SUV drivers! Of course, President Bush and Vice President Cheney was down in there. I don’t remember, but I think they were the ones being devoured by the Devil at his frozen ground floor.

And so the eco-prophet is back at it again. Along with his usual sneer at the country that bred him, America, he added a little something extra this time at the Bali conference.

Al Gore savaged the US government’s “obstructing” attitude and urged delegates at the UN conference on climate change to ignore Washington if necessary to pursue the “moral imperative” of a new global regime.

“My country is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali,” the former US vice-president told 2,000 of the 12,000 people attending the conference on Thursday. “[But] over the next two years the United States is going to be somewhere it is not now.”

The Bali meeting is trying to reach an agreement to start negotiations that will culminate in 2009 with a new global deal to tackle climate change. The US is due to elect a new president in November 2008 and the majority of the frontrunners have a more proactive attitude to climate change than the Bush administration.

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— Read Part 1

The cartoon of Global Warming persists despite all. So much so that the EU is risking an all out trade war with the US.

“The Association of European Airlines (AEA) has warned that implementation of this plan [to impose a carbon-dioxide charge on flights that cross EU airspace] could lead to a trade war between the US and the EU, according to the Times.

It seems the EU has gotten tired of the consistently defiant attitude displayed by the world’s major environmental culprit.”

The world’s major environmental culprit?. The EU seemed to have conveniently forgotten that China has surpassed the US in the level of pollution earlier this year.

Isn’t funny how China is treated as the golden child who can do no wrong? They enslave millions of people in concentration/ labor camps. They are more destructive to the environment in their attempts to catch up to the US than any other country in the world. And I’m not just talking about CO2 emissions. Personally, I think it’s because the EU (and the US for that matter— Can you say leaden toys?) has sunk their billions upon billions into China and they don’t dare threaten China with a burp and a pointy stick for fear of losing that investment.

It seems whatever their intentions, the environmentalist’s every proposal means punishing America and it means the decimation of the American middle class. There is just no getting around it. Europe will remain at their status quo level of prosperity. Despite signing the Kyoto Treaty, the Mediterranean Sea is becoming stagnant from all their pollution and the corral reefs around the Aegean are dying.

Also, I’m not sure, but I’ll wager that most of the provisions under the Kyoto Treaty are not rigorously enforced in any of the signed nations. Oh, I’m sure that the state can fine a company into oblivion for violating the treaty, but it doesn’t really have to. It’s only if a company strays from the party line, you see, or if they want something inconvenient done. Under ordinary circumstances, it would be called extortion, except in this case it’s called saving the environment.

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