bierkergaard

I have a true love/hate relationship with lifting weights. On the love side, it is good exercise, will probably increase or maintain my mobility and strength as I age, and it allows me--along with running--to more fully enjoy food and drink. I am one of those people who works out so that he can drink and eat more. I am never going to be one of those bodybuilders that eats tuna or chicken breast every day. I don't want to be a Spartan on 'roids. On the hate side, boy do I dislike trudging down to the basement when the couch and books are beckoning, to heave weight around for 40 minutes three days a week. I am never happy to do it, only joyful when I have finished. When our tenant broke the lease, I spent 5 weeks painting and rehabbing the place so it would look presentable to new prospective tenants. I was putting in 10-12 hours or more each successive Saturdays and rationalized that I needed both time to recover and time to prepare for these Saturdays so I jettisoned the...

Acts 17   Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in him, when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry. "The one positive statement that Socrates seems to have made is a definition of virtue (areté): "virtue is knowledge." If one knows the good, one will always do the good. It follows, then, that anyone who does anything wrong doesn't really know what the good is." (Richard Hooker) If there is a philosophical idol today that parallels the philosophical idol of ancient Athens, it is this: With the acquisition of knowledge, humanity can be good. That is, our evil is a result of ignorance. What a contrast to Paul's statement in Romans 7 that although he knows the good, he does not do it. Like all philosophical musings, there are pragmatic consequences to what we believe. What starts out in the Ivory Tower doesn't stay there...the Ivory Tower--the human mind--is an idol factory...John Calvin wrote, “the human mind is, so to s...

A friend who is a bookseller/bookstore owner posted a copy of this article on FB of how Amazon is practicing a form of legal espionage by proxy in having consumers use a smart-phone app to scan prices at retail stores, then the consumer goes to Amazon and buys the product, be it a book or another good, at a lesser price. If the consumer has Amazon Prime, then there is free shipping. Often, there is no sales tax on the purchase. If I understand Bezos correctly, Amazon is not against sales tax per se but wants the federal government to establish some protocols and processes which makes sense because it is essentially is interstate commerce. Amazon is mining such data for its price points. Because the profit margins for Amazon are so low, Amazon makes up the difference by selling a lot of stuff. He, like many retailers, especially bookstore owners, are rightfully concerned about Amazon's leverage and sway over the book-selling business. Simply, there is no way that a hard copy books...