Sometimes I see bloggers cover all sorts of stuff at one time that they probly don’t want to turn into individual posts.  I understand it.  I could expand each of these into full length like one of those NASA meals—a steak dinner capsule, or such.  And they might be important, but I can’t make them seem that way because then someone will think I think they’re important.  Some of the I-don’t-know-how-you-have-time-to-write-blogs criticism does embed in a blogger’s psyche, diminishing a perceived gravitas.  Alright you haters, I know you want to tell me I don’t have any.  Go ahead.  Like the guy who recently wrote me, telling me that he thought I had a tumor in my frontal lobe—his words.

Here is a potpourri, cornucopia, chex party mix— I don’t know.  Overuse of the dash.  That I know.  Actually I like writing on these random mind chunks, so let’s get them out of our system together in no particular order.  Does it matter that they are or are not in the right order, when they’re just stream of consciousness-like?  I’m going to separate them by a centered stream of plus signs.  I think the word is “separators.”  Yes.

You can listen to sermons (free) at our church website.  More (4-8) go up each week.

The left is loony.  Their world is tilted by their narcissistic, unbiblical view.  But now they are bouncing off the rubber walls like tigger on steroids with all their different attempts to explain the tea-party’s excitement about Herman Cain.  They can’t have the tea-party like a black man, one with two black parents.  Really they can’t even have any black man be his own success without democrat help.  Why?  Because then the racist tea-party narrative loses its traction, which is, the tea party doesn’t like President Obama because they don’t like a black man.  Then they have their favorite candidate be a black man, who is more black then their guy.  When I say he’s more black, I don’t care and I don’t actually think he is more black.  His skin is more black, but that’s not what I mean, or what Thomas Sowell meant when he recently said that Cain is actually more black than Obama.  It’s just that his personal story is more black.  He grew up in the South.  He rode in the back of the bus.  He attended an all black college.  His parents were poor.  That story, the one that normally counts for something, but in the case of Herman Cain, it can’t, because he has tea-party type sensibilities.

If you read Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington, and you should at least once, you’ll read Herman Cainesque thinking.   The school of thought had a large following at one time until Washington died at a young age and the W. E. B. Dubois school captured the imaginations of freedmen.  Again, if you do read Up from Slavery, notice Washington’s account of the Dubois’ philosophy seen by him at that time hovering around the nation’s capital, when Washington made his famous trip there.

But back to the left and Herman Cain.  I’ve heard several explanations.  But before I mention those, a couple of things.  The strangest thing that I hear are black people themselves calling Herman Cain himself racist.  He’s racist against blacks.  What?!?!  That is craaazy.  Another one is that liking Herman Cain is racist.  Racism is about, um, race, isn’t it?  If you are a white racist, you really don’t like Herman Cain and you don’t want him as President.  The blackness of Herman Cain gets between him and white racists. So if you want him as President, that would indicate that you are, um, well, not racist.  Racism has definitely become a skewed insane tool if you’re a racist when you’re white and you want a black conservative to be your President.  The left is obsessed with race.  They love racism.  They want it to continue as the political tool they need it to be.

Alright, back to the weird commentary—they say.  Herman Cain is a cover for racists.  By supporting him, they can hide their racism.  Weird number two.   The racism that supports Cain is worse racism because it is a quiet, subtle style that hurts even more.  It is less overt, but more harmful.  How?  I don’t know.  My guess is that the pain is that someone can’t use racism as a political tool to play the victim any longer, so the pain is in that loss.  There is a tremendous power in hurt feelings.  Surely this is what Clarence Thomas knew he could accomplish by calling his confirmation process a “hi-tech lynching.”  He was using their tactic against them, jockeying for greater victimization than that of Anita Hill.   The third weird is that Herman Cain is nothing more than a well-placed plant, funded just enough by rich Republican donors to take away the racism charge.  A fourth one I’ve heard is that you know how bad the Republican candidates are—so bad that conservatives would vote for a black man.   Does that get to count as a racist statement?  No, of course not.  All the former is a weirdness on the level of a picasso-like blood shot eye free floating above its owner.

I’m sure you’ve heard other weird charges and you are welcome to share them.  After I wrote the above, the sexual harassment accusations from Jonathan Martin at Politico came out.  I won’t comment on them except to say that it seems that people must be afraid of Herman Cain now more than ever.

I ran track in high school and college.  I sprinted.  Never did I ever run any longer than 3 miles.  Every practice we warmed up with 1 1/2 miles, sometimes 3.  Then we would run 600s, 400s, 200s, and 100s.   I hated long distance.  Hated.  Last Monday I ran 4 miles.  I ran three on Wednesday and three more on Friday.  And I liked it.  If you don’t understand that, I think I can help you.  It took me until recently to understand how someone likes running long distance.  Here are my keys for running long distance, not necessarily in order.

1.  Don’t run fast.

I jog very slow.  Running fast is what causes me to get out of breath and want to stop.

2.  Get into a rhythm.

Some call this a pace.  Rhythm works better for me.  I use my arms to get into the rhythm.  I have my hands loosely clenched and my elbows tight and my arms rock.  They act as a pendulum for me as I run and this keeps me steady.

3.  Look down.

You might disagree. But I don’t look around.  I look down just in front of my feet most of the time.  When I look up, that sense of distance doesn’t work for me.  I don’t want to know how far I’ve gone or how far I’ve got to go.

4.  Think about something else besides running.

I think about something else totally and lose myself in it.  The running clears my mind for some really deep thoughts about important subjects, usually about God.

5.  Every 400 to 800 meters, take a deep, cleansing breath.

That breath is like a vacation.  Fill up your lungs, expand them.

6.  Don’t speed up if someone passes you.

You aren’t competing, except with yourself.  If someone passes you, don’t even let it interrupt your thoughts.

7.  Start slow.

I run the first mile slower until I get warmed up.  But also don’t start with four miles.  Start with a half a mile, move to one, then two, etc.

When I ran the four miles, I could have kept going except for time, but I also noticed some pain in the ankles, knees, and hips.  I was also chafing.   We’ll see what happens there.

If you haven’t liked running, I encourage you to try this strategy and see what it does for you.  You won’t need a gym membership to jog yourself  into shape.

Have you noticed a disconnect between the love for Tim Tebow from rank and file fans and those in the media?  Tebow has received more personal hatred than I have noticed for any professional athlete ever, even more than Michael Vick.  At the same time, there is more passionate love for Tim Tebow than I have ever seen for a professional athlete.  People love him with a white hot fan’s passion.  And now many other NFL players have shown him more disrespect than I have ever seen for a professional athlete, likely because of a jealousy, an envy that comes from a popularity that I don’t believe he has done much to engender.

Tebow wouldn’t be loved or hated if he wasn’t a good football player.  So it starts there.  He doesn’t come across to me as a self-promoter.  His fame has come because people like him.  They want to like him.  They want more football players like him.  That’s it.

Tim Tebow has the most dissected passing delivery in the history of football.  He is ridiculed for it.  The secular media resents him.  They don’t like his beliefs.  They want him to fail.  They would love for him to fail.  His standard for success is higher than others.  He’s played very little.  Many others have been give much more time than he to get good enough as a football player.  This all relates to a different standard because of his right beliefs, right beliefs that I, and many others, would share with him.

The secular news media hate Tebow like the secular new media hates other Christian figures.  They ridicule them. They target them.  In the secular world, this would be called bigotry.  They have a bigoted, prejudicial kind of hatred against him.  So now, even though I’m opposed to the Christian celebrity syndrome, and even for the idea of Christians playing pro football on Sunday or encouraging that, I am a big Tim Tebow guy.

One last thing.  About scoffing.  The world scoffs.  There is no problem with the left scoffing.   Hollywood scoffs.  Television scoffs.  Most comedians are left and scoff the right.  Scoffing doesn’t fit how the right thinks or works. There are only a few who get away with it—Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter come to mind.  I’ve long known that scoffing from the right toward the left would and could always be funnier and have much more material available, but it isn’t in the conscience or the DNA of the right.  But there is more scoffing and worse than ever coming from the left in my opinion.  We should all understand that this is how the left operates and they do so because of the intellectual and spiritual inferiority of their views.