As I wrote about creating a hurricane emergency kit today, I realize that summer is about to come to a close. Most of the schools around here have already started (some start at the end of July). I’ve already purchased my back to school supplies. The summer camping articles and Squidoo lenses will start to drop in popularity, and fall and Christmas articles will start to gain steam.

I had a great time writing and updating camping articles. Summer is a lot of fun. I just uploaded all my summer pictures on the computer. While I didn’t get to go on a five-week summer adventure like I did last year, we still had some good times: going to the river, visiting the water park, barbecue on the Fourth of July, and Vacation Bible School. We also got to ride in a limo to dh’s college graduation, thanks to a limo company that dh’s business has as a client.

If you’re a writer, you might want to dust off some of that fall content. Especially if you write for Squidoo, which bases your lensrank partially on when you last updated your lens. At least Christmas is around the corner. Maybe, just maybe, if me and dh write enough, we’ll have the opportunity to visit my family for Christmas.

Yesterday, I made my guesses about who I think should/would receive the three Medals of Merit. I was right on John Huntsman with the charity medal. I really had no clue who he’d give the other two to, I just mentioned who I’d give them to. The other medals were given to C.L. Jackson (for Faith) and Albert Pujols (for Charity). I’ve never heard of Albert Pujols before; I guess he’s a baseball player that started a foundation to help people with Down Syndrome.

In case you have been out of the loop for a while, tomorrow is Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor 8/28 event. Already, crowds are filling up the Mall. It will certainly be an exceptional day.

Who will receive the three Badges of Merit that Glenn Beck will give away? I’m not sure, but I can always speculate. The three people that I’m listing here are either the people that I would give the medal to or I think that Beck would give the medal to. Or at least, these are the people that I’m thinking about right now.

Beck will give away three awards: one for faith, one for hope, and one for charity.

Faith: I don’t think that Beck will give the badge to him, but if I were to award the Badge of Merit for someone based on faith, I would give the badge to Franklin Graham. I’m not even sure if this guy is on Beck’s radar (although I think that he may have been on his show once), but Graham is a guy that tells it like it is. His father, Billy Graham, may have been the guy with the big crusades, but the elder Graham has since sold out. Franklin will make a statement based on his faith, and he won’t back down from it. When he appears on national television shows, he preaches the Word. He doesn’t seem to put his foot in his mouth and make really silly mistakes like Pat Robertson either.

Hope: This one doesn’t stand out to me, but I think that I’d give away the hope badge to Chris Gardner. He was the guy from The Pursuit of Happyness. He spent a period as a homeless man with a small boy to care for. He worked hard to get a job in finance. He is now a millionaire. Not only that, he seems like a good guy. He gives me hope.

Charity: Now, this medal is easier to guess. I think that Glenn Beck will give the charity badge of merit to John Huntsman. This man is a billionaire who plans on dying broke. He started his own cancer research center, and the people there even eat nice.

So there you have it. My guesses/wishes for the three Badges of Merit. We’ll see if I’m right tomorrow.

8/27, Divine Destiny, is available to Insider Extreme members. 8/28 is scheduled to be on CSPAN. It will also be on Sirius Radio. If for some reason CSPAN cancels coverage, you can get a free 30 day trial for Sirius Radio, listen on the Internet, and then cancel.

Living on West Coast time (Arizona does not have Daylight Savings Time), the events will be pretty early. 8/28 starts at 7 AM in the west. 8/27 is at 5 PM west coast time. If they broadcast the breakfast on Insider Extreme, I’ll be up really early.

I normally do not get up to listen to Glenn Beck’s radio program live (I usually listen to it on my iPod while I work at home), but I do plan on listening live tomorrow… sort of as a prelude to the weekend’s events. It will be a pretty busy weekend.

The Visigoths were once a strong people. They were one of the barbarian bands that contributed to the destruction of Rome. They eventually settled into what is now Spain. I’m guessing that they were a strong people at one point. However, they were divided after the death of the king. In their point of weakness, one of the Visigoth factions invited an Islamic general to “help”.

This Islamic general did a little more than help. He conquered the entire country.

Both Islam and Christianity try to win converts. Christians haven’t always been very kind in their evangelizing. Some rulers have tried to force their subjects to convert to Christianity or die. However, most of the time, Christians try to convert subjects through missions. Forced conversion is a perversion of the Christian faith. None of the original Christian followers (prior to Constantine) tried to force conversion through the sword.

Islam, however, has not been above forcing conversion, even from the start. Mohammad was a military general. Moslems try to convert through force, even to this day. Ask Christians in Islamic countries if they have freedom of religion. Hardly.

Countries that show weakness in the presence of Islam are eventually conquered. Just ask the Visigoths.

Today, America is showing weakness in the presence of Islam. Moslems attack the World Trade Center, and what does America do? We help them build a mosque right next to Ground Zero by sending a supporter of Hamas off on a fundraising trip. We tell everyone that Islam is a religion of peace. Our president bows to Islamic leaders, and calls the Koran a “holy book”.

The Cordoba Center is named after the city of Cordoba, where the Moslems transformed a Visigothic Cathedral into a mosque after they conquered the city. Is the name a message to other Moslems? If we learn from history, it seems that weakness in the presence of Islam could place us in the same position as the Visigoths.

Most of the kids in my neighborhood have already started school for the year. Our church started school Monday; some kids started on the 11th, and some really crazy schools started at the end of July. We’re still on summer vacation until September 8th.

No matter when you’re starting school this year (or if you already have), if you are choosing to homeschool your child, you might want to check out The Old Schoolhouse’s Online Homeschool Expo. It runs from October 4-8, and it should be pretty exciting. There will be guest speakers, door prizes, and fellowship. Best of all, it doesn’t matter where you live, if you can get online, you can attend!

Some of the guest speakers include Zan Tyler, Dr. Jay Wile, Jeannie Fulbright,Carol Barnier, Diana Waring, Todd Wilson, Davis Carman, Kim Kautzer, and Lee Binz. The theme this year is “Celebrate Homeschooling”. If you homeschool, you have a lot to celebrate. The freedom to let your kids have a couple extra weeks of summer while everybody else is already working, for example. The freedom to teach about the Founding Father’s without a lot of progressive propaganda. The freedom to spend time with your kids. The freedom to fit education to your child’s needs and abilities. You probably have your own unique reasons to be thankful to be homeschooling.

Between now and midnight on August 22nd, you can save $5 off the price of the Expo. Right now it’s $19.99. With this, you’ll get more than $200 in free eBooks, plus an mp3 copy of the sessions.

This year, there will be special teen sessions, plus there will be an emphasis on writing. Although my little boy is only going to be working on writing letters this year, my daughter, on the other hand, needs to start writing more. Over the summer, she’s learned that writing can be valuable… I told her that she can keep any money that she makes from designing t-shirts, but she’ll need to know how to write to do that work. No matter what level your child is at, I’m sure that he or she does a lot of writing too.

If you sign up early enough, you’ll be able to attend the preconference shows with Dr. Jay Wile, Jeannie Fulbright, and Kim Kautzer. They will take place on August 24th and September 1st.

If you’re like me and need to Tivo everything to fit it into your busy life, you might prefer the October Expo to Go instead. Tickets for that will be $14.99 if you order this week.

Tickets sell out (at least to the live event), so if you’re interested, then you might want to think about signing up as soon as possible. The Old Schoolhouse is a Christian organization; I like that, although perhaps the leftist visitors that I had at my blog a few weeks ago might not.

In case you didn’t catch the link earlier, you can find out more at Schoolhouseexpo.com. Or click on the picture at the top of this post.

Let your homeschooling friends know too!

When the debate was raging with regard to the health care bill, Sarah Palin remarked that she feared that nationalized health care could lead to death panels. Obama said that was crazy talk. Never mind that other countries that have nationalized care routinely deny drugs that are too expensive… or that the Netherlands actually encourages the euthanization of certain kinds of infants who would live a severely handicapped life.

Recently, an FDA Advisory panel voted against recommending the drug Avastin for use with breast cancer. They cited “effectiveness” as the reason, but many believe that the real reason is “cost effectiveness”. The drug costs $8,000 a month. A couple of recent studies claim that the drug will extend life for about one month; previous studies concluded that the drug would extend life by five months or more.

Some fear that this could be the start of “death panels” in the United States. Will other recommendations like this follow? Perhaps we will see more cases, like what happened to a woman in Oregon a year or so ago, where a $50 suicide pill was recommended because the state health system refused to pay for the $4000/month treatment that would keep her alive.

Of course, right now, if you have the $8000 a month to pay for the drug, paying for it yourself would be an option, even if the insurance company refuses to pay for it any more. I’m sure that in the future, that will be perceived as unfair. After all, why should the rich have access to life-saving care when nobody else does? Eventually, that option will probably be taken away from the rich (you can’t let them have an unfair advantage, after all).

Preventing illness is going to become more important than ever. I recommend Underground Wellness.com as a resource for learning how to live a healthier life.

Yesterday, I wrote about Cabaret. How that time period in the Weimar Republic was one of decadence. While many Germans may have attended the cabaret as a means to escape the harsh realities of life, the average German was not living like the cabaret performers.

In the Dragonlance Chronicles, a lot of time is spent on the pendulum of good and evil. If you get too far on either side, life is not balanced. While I believe that there is a flaw to this theory (true good is not self-righteous like the kind presented in the books), there is a truth to it when it comes to human nature.

In the movie Cabaret, the actors lived decadent lives. Their lives reflected a perversion of what most people find decent and good. The decadent entertainment was an escape from the difficult realities of life in Germany at the time. This could be seen as the “evil” side of the spectrum.

Germany didn’t stay in its state of hedonistic decadence. The Nazis came along. The average German didn’t see the Nazis as evil murderers at the time, and they weren’t, at first. They came along to clean up the population. They wanted to eliminate the decadence that was present, replacing it with a healthy, moral people. We know that in the process, they removed the Jews and those that didn’t fit in with their paradigm, primarily by sending them off to concentration camps.

There has to be a balance between running wild and doing whatever feels good, and forcibly making everybody comply to your standard of “good” by any means necessary (to the point of gassing dissenters). That is a state of freedom with self-restraint. Complete freedom without restraint leads to Weimar; forcibly conforming others to your standard of good can lead to Nazism.

I watched Cabaret last night in order to try to understand more about the Weimar Republic. The cabaret in the movie was an entertainment establishment of moral decadence. While many people turned to the cabaret in the movie as a response to the despair in the world around them, it’s likely that most of the people were not actually as deep into immorality as the people in the movie. This is apparent when the main characters take a drive out into the countryside, where the “good” people of Germany sing patriotic songs (unfortunately with Nazi leaders).

We see the Nazis duke it out with the Communists. One of the main characters remarks on how they would use the Nazis to get rid of the Communists, and then they would control them. We know from hindsight that it didn’t work that way. In fact, most people that were performers in the Cabaret not only did not control the Nazis, but were sent to concentration camps.

The movie is an interesting look at what the Germans were reacting against. I still want to learn more about that time period, especially if we are repeating the mistakes of the past.

I just discovered today that Amazon.com is offering free Amazon.com Prime Membership for students with Amazon Student. I believe that it is for college students only. All you have to do is enter your grade level, .edu email address, and major, and Amazon will give you a year of Amazon Prime membership. Amazon Prime membership allows you to have FREE 2 day shipping!

I am really excited about this, because my husband is a law student. I am always winning Swagbucks, but I always try to wait until I get $25 in Amazon.com gift cards before I can place an order to get the free shipping. With Amazon Student, I don’t have to wait until I get the $25 for free shipping, I can just order when I have enough gift cards saved up for the one item that I want.

When I ordered The Overton Window, I ordered several books with it, including Lives of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence and Wives of the Signers. Since The Overton Window was on pre-order, I had to wait about a month to get my other two books, because my shipment was waiting for Beck’s book. I won’t have to do that any more.

Now if only I could find enough time to read the books that I have. I have enough Swagbucks for American History in Black & White, but I still have other books that I haven’t read yet. That darned Glenn Beck for recommending so many good books! I may need to buy some curriculum at Amazon in the next couple of weeks though. At any rate, when I’m ready to order, I can get free two-day shipping. If you’re a student (or share an Amazon.com account with one), so can you.