Nice way to end our day. President Obama singing "Amazing Grace."

Courtesy of Rolling Stone:  

President Obama attended Rev. Clementa Pinckney's funeral in Charleston, South Carolina on Friday and delivered a moving version of "Amazing Grace" in the middle of his touching eulogy. 

Rev. Pinckney was a state senator and one of the nine victims of the tragic shooting that occurred in the church where his funeral took place. "If we can find that grace, anything is possible," Obama stated to the congregation. "If we can tap that grace, everything can change." 

After a moment of solemn silence, Obama began singing "Amazing Grace" a cappella before the choir, attendees and musicians joined in for the performance. Afterwards, the president stated that each of the victims had "found that grace," naming all nine individually. "May God continue to shed his grace on the United States of America," he concluded. 

The President has some pipes. 

He could use a little more practice to help his singing, but damn when the man speaks......

Even for a die hard Atheist like me, I found that quite touching. 

A sea of blue.

Courtesy of ABC News:  

New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton called slain New York City Police Officer Rafael Ramos "a hero" and gave the officer a posthumous promotion during Ramos' funeral today. 

"The men and women who hear that blue and wear that badge, we know who Rafael Ramos was," Bratton said at Ramos' funeral. "He was a New York City Police Officer, and he was, he is a hero." 

Thousands of uniformed police officers gathered for the funeral at Christ Tabernacle Church, in the Glendale neighborhood of Queens, standing outside the church where it was broadcast on large screens. 

Bratton was just one of many high level government officials who spoke, including Vice President Joe Biden and New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio. 

Biden called the New York Police Department the finest in the world. 

"They were a part of New York's finest, and that not an idle phrase," he said. "This is probably the finest police department in the world, the finest police department in the world. They earn that praise."

I posted this partly to because I wanted to affirm the fact that for the most part I support the police, and I think what they do is both heroic and necessary to keep all of us safe.

My beef is not with the honest cop on the beat, and I do know they exist. My beef is with power hungry assholes and the over militarized police departments that are equipping their officers as if they expect to be invaded by China at any minute.

And yes I do realize that we live in a society with numerous citizens that are so heavily armed that the average police officer is ill equipped to neutralize them WITHOUT having access to the kind of weaponry one might expect to find during a zombie Apocalypse.

But that of course is a whole other argument for a whole other post.

And besides I thought that was what we had SWAT teams for.

But just like we should not lump all cops together we also should not excuse them for blaming the protesters and Mayor de Blasio for these murders.

And scenes like this of the police turning their back on the mayor while he gives the eulogy are inexcusable in my mind. You know I hate to disagree with Vice President Biden but it does not seem to me that the "best police force in the world" would behave in this manner.

Why you want a physicist to speak at your funeral.

My choice to give my eulogy.

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got. 

And at one point you'd hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever. 

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives. 

And you'll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they'll be comforted to know your energy's still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you're just less orderly. Amen. 

-Aaron Freeman.

In my most humble opinion this is so very much more beautiful and filled with hope than the words uttered by priests and ministers at funerals.

They make promises that most of us know to be false, while the physicist can tell us the truth in the most inspiring way imaginable.

(Source.)