S.O.S.

S.O.S. - - Save our Ship, or Symbolism over Substance?

I received an email setting forth the top ten reasons why I should not go to a Tax Day Tea Party. Here is the email.

“Ten Reasons You Should NOT Attend Sioux Falls Tax Day Tea Party

by Dr. Allen Unruh
Sioux Falls, SD.

10. If you don't care about losing your retirement and think this is something that just happened by accident - and it will come back no matter what politicians do - you should stay home.

9. If you feel secure in your job and that you will always be growing in your income in spite of anything the government does - you should stay home.

8. If you don't care about the economic opportunities of your kids and grandkids because government security will provide best for them - even though Ben Franklin said, "He who would trade freedom for security will end up with neither." Ben Franklin was wrong and Obama is right - Even though maximum security is a prison, You should stay home.

7. If you think socialized medicine will provide much better care, even though you may have a "duty to die" all for the greater good, only bureaucrats know what's best for everyone - even if it means killing you. After all, your only justification to exist is whether you're wanted, needed, loved or convenient to bureaucrats. Even though socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don't need it and hell where they already got it." Other socialistic countries just haven't had the smart people like us to run it, and you're sure it will work this time. Socialistic countries just haven't had the right people running it. We have much smarter people who know what's fair for everyone. If you agree - you should stay home.

6. If you think paying for tatoo removals for gang members and building bridges for MicroSoft workers to go from one building to another, and a new rail road from San Francisco to Las Vegas are great ways to stimulate the economy - you should stay home.

5. If you feel like our Attorney General Eric Holder that "We are a nation of cowards," and deserve everything we have, then you should stay home.

4. If you agree with VP Biden that even if they think they have it right, there is a 30% chance they have it all wrong" it's worth the risk to trust the government with our money. After all, you're smart enough to make your own money, but you may spend it foolishly on things like food, clothing and shelter, while Government can spend your money much more wisely on you than you can by giving aid to foreign governments.

3. The #1 reason we have all these economic problems is that there jsut hasn't been enough money in circulation, and if the government just can keep those presses going whenever we don't have enough, it will keep us going indefinitely - If you feel that way, you should stay home.

2. If we just had bigger government, and more taxes, even though one in five people now work for Federal, state or local government, an all wise government really knows more than the people - after all government, of the people, by the people, and for the people, is an old fashioned idea. A much better system is government of the bureaucrats, by the bureaucrats and for the bureaucrats, if you agree - you should stay home.

1. And last, the reason we have an economic crisis is that you just haven't been patriotic enough. You haven't paid enough in your taxes, to support all these great government programs, or paid for everyone's right to own a nice house, 60 inch flat screen, and get FREE health care. If you will just work harder for all the suck hogs who deserve this because they were born in America, or walked over the border, then we will all live in utopia together - just keep working harder for the government, giving from the heart, from each according to his ability to each according to his means - if that's what you believe - you need to stay home. Even though Edmund Burke said, "All that's necessary for evil to triumph is for enough good people to do nothing." And Dante who said, "In times of economic and moral crisis, silence is not golden, IT'S YELLOW." And Thomas Jefferson who said, "The Power To Tax is the Power to Destroy." If you believe these people were just not as smart as the people we have in office now, then you should stay home. After all, eternal vigilance is simply too big a price to pay for freedom. These crazy early patriots gave their lives, fortunes and sacred honor for our freedom, and the penalty for throwing the tea into the water was DEATH. It's inconvenient in our schedule to take an extra hour off work to attend our protest. If you agree, then you should stay home.’

Now, after contemplating these reasons, my military mind, asked me what was really going on here. And, it appears, at least to me, that we are following the democrats and liberals in their continuous appeal of symbolism over substance.

What is really being done by putting together these symbolic tea parties? A man much wiser than me, once said something to the effect of, “The person who will not learn from history is doomed to relive it”. What does history tell us regarding the tea party?

Well, back in that day, the king of England was extorting huge amounts of taxes from the early settlers in the New World, for the goods they received from England. One of the examples was tea. Tea is a beverage that is well loved by the British. In my own experience I have found that followers of the British love for tea, and I differ…They love hot tea and iced coffee…I love hot coffee and iced tea. My paternal ancestors came from somewhere in the British Isles; they may well have decided from the great tea party on, that they were not going to drink a lot of tea; I don’t know, unfortunately I wasn’t around then to query.

Anyway, to return to our search of history and the symbolism of today’s tea party. By dumping the tea in the bay, the commodity would not have entered into the country, and therefore, the people would not have been liable to pay the taxes. The king of England, thought otherwise, and sent his army to set us straight. From this we devised the Declaration of Independence. And we fought a bloody war, to gain our independence from this oppression.

Today’s “tax day tea party” is supposed to symbolize rebelling against oppressive government, but is it? Unfortunately, government has already set in place the means to extract onerous income taxes from the people through the employers. I would find substance in the tea party idea, should we, the people, have the ability to refuse to pay the income taxes, but, alas and alack, we do not have that ability. Employers, do not want to face the onerous government by withholding withholding taxes from employees.

Rush has reported that 46% of the nation voted against Obama…What would happen if that 46% was able to refuse to allow withholding taxes to be paid to the government? In my mind’s eye, that would be akin to dropping a complete shipment of tea in the bay, and telling the government we ain’t gonna take it no more

Interesting words from morning devotional reading

“The King [shall] say unto them on his right hand, Come then. . .shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me.” (Matthew 25:34, 41)

The existence of an objectively real right and left, with some men separated for eternal life on the right while their fellow man are set apart on the left for everlasting destruction, once was considered only a metaphor of speech. But that is not so. It is a fact.

Certain molecules exist in two forms, one being the mirror image of the other, which means they are related like a left hand and a right hand. If I hold my left hand to a mirror, what I appear to see in the mirror is a right hand. So it is with these molecules called isomers. Proteins are exclusively composed of L- (left-handed) amino acids. This is regarded as a unique characteristic of life -- that is, life as we know it, in a fallen creation. The whole purpose of life is to pass from the left, the sinful state to which we belong by nature, to the right, the place of grace. D- amino acids (those of the right hand) are never found in proteins, but in antibiotics which save endangered life.

There exists a right and a left not only in living matter. In 1957, the particle physicists discovered a basic asymmetry in the matter out of which our part of the universe is composed. Electrons emitted during the beta decay of radioactive nuclei such as cobalt 60 are predominantly left-handed. Their particle spin is coupled to their momentum like a left-handed screw. The positron is right-handed.

Nature makes an absolute distinction between right and left, just as there is an absolute distinction between the sons of light and those of darkness. Through repentance the latter can change to the former during their short life span on earth. Those remaining on the left will go to the lake of fire. Time is running out. Hurry!

Reaching Toward The Heights, Richard Wurmbrand, Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, MI, 1977, Mar 24

So easily, today, we forget what we knew yesterday. Richard Wurmbrand was a political prisoner of the Communists. His first book, that brought him into the forefront of our understanding was titled, Tortured for Christ. It is probably out of print, now, but it should be required reading for everyone who was born and raised in this country. Unfortunately, we do not understand political oppression, and with so many, today, crying out for gummint to have total control of our lives and livelihood, it is refreshing to read again, what a political prisoner had to say about being against the gummint cuz he believed in God.

Books I am reading this week:

Francis: The Journey and the Dream, Murray Bodo.

Church History in Plain Language, Bruce L. Shelley.

Guilty, Ann Coulter.

Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Thomas Sowell.

Food Packaging: It’s a trick worthy of a magician

Make a supermarket product look the same but actually contain less. That’s the kind of move that many companies are using to shrink popular grocery items like mayonnaise, ice cream, peanut butter and toilet paper, while keeping the price and packaging the same. The result: Consumers are getting less for their money. Approximately one-third of items at the grocery store have lost content since 2007, according to the Nielsen Co., which tracks market trends. Meanwhile, consumers last year saw food prices rise some 7 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Companies argue that, like consumers, they’re also trying to stretch a dollar; their manufacturing costs have gone up, explains food marketing expert Phil Lempert, editor of http://www.SupermarketGuru.com Factors like hurricanes, record cold weather and the rising cost of energy have driven up the cost of producing packaged goods. "When you're a food manufacturer, you either raise your prices even further or you take a look at putting less in the package and keep the price the same," Lempert says. Still, he agrees that "some packages are blatant rip-offs." For instance, he notes that coffee packages that may appear to be the same size "can have anything from 7.5 to 16 oz. of coffee, depending on the brand, and that's just not fair."

Content downsizing cuts across the grocery spectrum, influencing private labels and even organic products. "You especially see this with products like chips-organic or otherwise-especially when they're packed in airtight bags," says financial writer Jill Westfall, a contributor to Money magazine. Part of the problem, says longtime consumer advocate Edgar Dworsky, is that most consumers "aren't net weight-conscious, they're price-conscious, and the manufacturers know that. That's how manufacturers take advantage of customers. They do these tricks." Dworsky, a lawyer who's worked in the field of consumer protection for 31 years, monitors consumer news on his website http://www.ConsumerWorld.org and recently started a blog, http://www.Mouseprint.org that is focused on the fine print of advertising. "Manufacturers know that customers know the size [of a product] in the relative sense-when you pick up a large tub of margarine, which used to be 3 pounds but is now 45 oz.," you can't really feel the missing three ounces, he says. Some examples of downsizing are:

* Dial Corp. shaved its soap bars from 4.5 oz. to 4 oz.;
* The biggest jar of Hellmann's mayonnaise dropped from 32 oz. to 30 oz.
* A tub of Breyer's ice cream shrank from 56 oz. to 48.
* Skippy peanut butter now has an indentation at the bottom of its jars, causing the contents to drop from 18 oz. to 16.3 oz, even though the jar looks the same.
* Scott's toilet tissue kept number of sheets (1,000) but reduced the length of the sheets from 4 inches to 3.7 inches, making the roll 300 inches shorter.
* Kleenex tissues shrunk in width by two-tenths of an inch, which adds up to more than 300 square inches less per box.
* StarKist's Chunk Light tuna went from 6 oz. to 5.
* Froot Loops went from 19.7 oz to 17 oz.
* Apple Jacks went from 17 oz to 15 oz.
* Hershey's chocolate bar went from 8 oz to 6.8 oz.
* Country Crock spread from 3 lb to 2 lb 13 oz.
* Tropicana orange juice from 96 oz to 89 oz.
* Friskies cat food from 6 oz to 5.5 oz.
* Chips Ahoy cookies from 16 oz to 15.225 oz

Dworsky says that if shoppers spot a leading brand shortchanging them and it’s a recent development, they should check the other competing brands. Chances are, those brands haven’t changed yet and shoppers will get more for their money. He also encourages consumers to voice their feelings to manufacturers of their favorite brands. “Send a letter and let them know you’re not happy about them changing the product. Maybe at least they’ll send you some discount coupons.” He also recommends that consumers “shop by unit”—that is, check the price per unit posted on the shelf to see what they’re really paying for. Ultimately, though, once the top brands resize their packaging or contents, the other brands—even the private-label store brands—likely will change as well. And nothing seems safe. Even dog food has downsized. At the rate packages are being downsized stand by for the 11 egg cartoon.

[Source: AARP Geoff Williams article 17 Feb 09 ++]

Sunday reflection

Once Buddha was in a town where there was a conflict of warring theological views between the monks. some believed one thing and some another, and each of them believed that he alone was right and that all the others wrong. So Buddha told them the parable of the Rajah, the blind men and the elephant.

One day the Rajah called a servant, and bade him assemble, at his palace, all the men in the town who had been born blind. Then he commanded that an elephant should be brought in. Then the Rajah made one blind man touch the head of the elephant, another the ear, another the trunk, a tusk, a foot, the back, the tail, and the tuft of the tail; and to each one the Rajah said that he was touching the elephant.

When they had all felt the elephant, the Rajah said to them, "Have you all studied the elephant? bow tell me your conclusion." The man who had touched the head said, "It is like a pot." The one who had touched the ear said, "It is like a fan." And for the others the trunk became a plough; a tusk, a ploughshare; a foot, a pillar; the back, a granary; the tail, a pestle; the tuft of the tail, a besom. And each blind man thought that what he had touched was an elephant.

They began therefore to argue with each other and to quarrel, saying, "An elephant is like this" -- "No, it is like this" -- "I tell you it is not: -- and so on until, in the end, they came to blows.

That, said Buddha, is what men are like about the truth.

Just as each blind man insisted that the part of the elephant he had touched was the whole elephant, so men insist that the little bit of truth that they have seen and grasped is the whole truth.

It is extraordinary that any man should think that he has grasped the whole truth. Such a confidence can do no other than indicate an arrogance of spirit.

The world would be a more gracious place, if those who claim to worship God had something more of the wideness of the mercy of God and gentleness of the patience of God.

Daily Celebration, William Barclay Word Books, Waco, TX, 1972, pgs 71,72

BS is initials for...?

Ok, the Gannett mouthpiece for Sioux Falls came through with an online poll this morning that caught my attention.

"Should farmers be taxed if livestock emit greenhouse gasses?"

yes = 15.3%
no = 84.7%

at 9:39 CST

What a crock of bovine scatology!

I thought the constitution prohibited gummint from setting up or being involved in a religion.

Environmentalism is a religion. It is even beyond debate at this time.

The envriomentalist whakkos want to destroy capitalism, and the truth be known, get rid of all human life on the planet; except maybe for the "elect".

Isn't it bad enough that farmers are already unfairly taxed on their land?

Perhaps what we need to do, rather than adding more taxes on the farmers, let's end the subsidies that make up the CRP. Ain't there enough wealthy people who own land? Why do we have to keep giving them taxpayer money to not farm their land?

Is there a message in that program, that says we no longer want the land here farmed?

There is no doubt in my tired military mind, that there is a movement underfoot to erase what this country has been and is capable of being.

It is truly time for another "Boston tea party"; perhaps what we need today is a little bit different.

Rather than dumping tea in the harbor, maybe we should be mailing cow chips to every elected official at every level of gummint.

Environmentalism is a religion, and the surest way to gather converts is by use of martyrs.

Religion is always fueled by the blood of the martyrs.

Perhaps, to get environmentalism to really take hold, the proponents should just go ahead and lay down their lives for what they love. Any takers?

We gots snow agin

 

 

Would you believe that last week we had temps from 30 to the 50s? Just about all the snow had been melted, and the lawns were showing forth, perhaps a little brown in places, but still you knew it was the lawn.

Woke up this morning to find funny white things fallen from the sky, and the grass completely covered with this white stuff. Yeah, I know it is March.

It was 1996 when we had an ice storm in October, and the ice never left the ground until May. With lotsa snow in between. Spose, should not be concerned since this is South Dakota.