Today we were out shopping and I needed to get some lunch for my kids, so we stopped at Jack in the Box. They now have apple slices as a choice in their Kids’ Meals, and they don’t offer a toy. The manager explained to us that the changes were because of legislation that was passed in California. In some locations, it is illegal to give a toy to kids with a meal that has over a certain amount of calories, and this includes most “Happy Meals”.
The kids weren’t very happy that they couldn’t get a toy with their meal anymore. We don’t go to fast food very often; I’d rather get food at home most times. Even this past week, when we had to go straight from gymnastics to Vacation Bible School, I made my own “fast food” at home (one night I made fried chicken with carrots as a side; another night we had homemade Subway sandwiches with a peach as the side). I explained to them that the reason why they couldn’t have a toy with their food was because some people in government thought that they knew better than us and decided to make it illegal to give out a toy with their food. They thought it was stupid; I told them that when they get older and could vote, it was important to know who you were voting for, because votes have consequences.
If you have children and run into this new toy policy, when they ask why there is no toy, you can use it as a way to teach them that voting is important, and they need to pay attention to what attitude the people that they are voting for have towards “We the People”.
I keep seeing this ad pop up on my Facebook sidebar:
“ARIZONA: HUGE companies are giving out free baby stuff to moms with baby’s aged 0-4 years. E-mail required. Limited supplies. Act now!”
Seriously? Baby’s? Baby’s what? Which baby?
I realize that this ad is probably just someone writing this out of their home, or at least I hope so. The horrendous grammar really annoys me. I’m okay with really bad grammar or spelling mistakes in a message board post, but I know that someone is paying money to send me this ad day after day. You would think that if the author knew that they didn’t know much about grammar, that they would at least have a friend look at it? Perhaps not.
I spent most of the day away from the news today. I had school to teach, then I made dinner, went to church, and was asked to visit a friend. When I did sit down to catch up on the day’s events, I found out that Barack Obama announced that he believes that Israel should go back to their pre-1967 borders. These borders would exclude places like the Garden of Gethsemene, Jesus’s tomb, and other sites that are important to Christianity – not to mention that it would leave Israel virtually indefensible.
I need to be clear here: I know that some nutjob says that the rapture is going to occur in two days, but he’s wrong: the Bible says that no man will know the day nor the hour of the rapture, and if it was on that day, that would make God a liar (I have a longer article on May 21 at Associated Content); however, the events described in the book of Revelation are near. I have a video that I need to review in the next day or so – it’s amazing, I’ve been a student of the end times for 15 years or so, but I still need to review the specifics every now and then. The events described in the Bible are being set up today.
The other thing that I think that it is important to point out is that God will not abandon Israel. Obama may think that he’s stamping out colonialism, but he’s really spitting in the face of God. God will not let the Jews be wiped out. In the book of Esther, the king signed a decree allowing people to wipe out the Jews on a certain day. Mordecai, Esther’s cousin, asked Esther to speak to the king, her husband, on behalf of her people. Esther was afraid to approach the king, because doing so uninvited could result in her death. Mordecai’s response was that she needed to speak up; if she didn’t tell anybody that she was a Jew, she would not escape unharmed. He added “For if you remain completely silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish.” (Esther 4:14)
Those words ring true today. We cannot remain silent. I’m certainly no Esther. God has not called me to be a princess; I’m not famous or powerful. The only thing that I do have is this small voice. I will what little I can. I will warn the few people that will hear. God will deliver the Jewish people. The Arabs may look like they have the upper hand, but anybody that opposed God is a fool. Just like God delivered the Jews in Esther’s day, he will deliver the Jews in our time. We can either be for them, and God might spare us, or we can be against them — if you are against them, and you do not feel the repercussions in this life, be sure that you will receive them in the eternity to come. Even if you are saved and on your way to Heaven, you are not off the hook. Even Christians will gain or lose rewards based on what they do in this life.
I stand with Israel. I trust that God will protect them, even if he has to rain down a miracle to do so. I expect to have more on this in the future, after I look more into the subject. It may be in the form of an article; but I’ll post a link here.
I like the movie Forrest Gump. Towards the beginning of the movie, he remarks that “It’s funny what you remember…” He doesn’t remember being born, but he remembers his first pair of shoes. The saying is true though.
May 18 was the anniversary of the Mount Saint Helens Eruption. Now, my mom remembers the eruption as the day that we were pouring our sidewalks outside of our house. I do remember pouring the sidewalks, but I don’t remember the eruption on that day. We did pour the sidewalk that day; it was written in the cement.
What I remember was coming back from school after a field trip to Seattle with my Kindergarten class. We were at my Aunt Kathy’s house, and she mentioned that Mount Saint Helens erupted that day. When I told that story to my mom before, she reminded me that we poured the sidewalks that day.
Not so fast. While the big eruption occurred on May 18, there were some smaller eruptions that occurred prior to the big one. One of those occurred on May 7th. That day was a Wednesday. The eruption that I remember occurred in the beginning of May. That is the eruption that I remember.
Five year olds don’t pay attention to big events in the news. On May 18, the highlight of my day was pouring the sidewalks in our front yard. On May 7, going to Seattle was a big deal, but for some reason, my Aunt’s announcement also became attached to the memory of that field trip.
Sometimes when you reread a book that you haven’t seen for a while, you take something more out of it. I noticed something about liberty and the Soviet Union today as I was reading through The Century. The Soviets were starting to see small tastes of freedom around 1987 while Gorbechev was in power. At the time, he promised that he was going to restore history. They were going to let the truth be known about the Soviet’s past.
It seems as if the United States is trying to do the exact opposite. Michelle Obama mentioned it herself as she was on the campaign trail:
History is history. We might see it in a new light as time marches on (as I did by rereading this portion of the book), but it doesn’t change.
There’s a lot of kids, teenagers, and young adults that don’t understand history. For some, it’s a subject that people learn in school for the test and forget about it. I personally think that it’s important though. If we remember history, we can see patterns. We can see how history repeats itself. On a personal level, it can help you make decisions to help your family survive, or at least do a little better. It can also help you decide who to vote for.
I don’t want my history changed. I want to read about both the good and the bad parts.
While I was going through my storage shed the other day, I ran into some old books from 1900, including two of the volumes from America’s Story for America’s Children. They must have been my great-grandmother’s or something. I’m pretty excited to have found those books again. The books are interesting reading, and they haven’t been through any of the revisionism that some historians have participated in in the last few decades.
We can’t let history be taken away from us or from our children. That is one of the steps that the Soviet Union took when they took their citizen’s liberty. That is one of the steps that would be taken as our liberty dies.
The twenty-second season of Survivor is winding down. I know that it’s over already, but I maintain a few Survivor web pages that I’ve been updating. I’m almost done. Summer break will be nice.
During the Survivor Reunion today, Grant said that Survivor was a reflection of who you were on the inside. I think that to some degree, that’s true. While contestants can probably skew their play style a bit, the most manipulative of the bunch (Russell Hantz) have those tendencies in real life. Survivor might magnify the flaws that people have, much like a child typically won’t lie to you unless doing so will either get them something or will get them out of trouble. A few really good people have been through Survivor as well, as I discovered when I created my Survivor Winners page. Some people, like Yul Kwon, are very smart. Some have gone on to start charities (most of those were very likable in the game).
Like Survivor, our personalities come through (although we can fool some people for some amount of time). We can play the game with integrity, or lie and manipulate when it is convenient for us. We can use other people, or we can do the right thing.
Throughout our lives, potential scenarios pop up where we have to decide to do the right thing, or do the wrong thing because it is more advantageous to us. Sometimes we have to choose ahead of time to do the right thing.
I’ve met a lot of really cool people in my life. Some of them are quite well-known. Others are not as well-known, but they still have their own pages in Wikipedia. I’ve lived next door to a couple of these people.
I am a writer. I’m not really into celebrities, but I write about people a lot. I write quite a bit about politics. There is a line that I have to draw. While I might tell a nice story about how I locked myself out of my room once and my (now well-known) neighbor helped me get back into my apartment, I wouldn’t tell the world where someone’s kid went to day care (unless they wanted me to tell others). I wouldn’t reveal information that you would expect to be confidential. That’s not right.
We have to live our lives with integrity. Unlike Survivor, life lasts a lot more than 39 days. It’s not my job to be a gossip columnist. I don’t need to stab people in the back to get ahead.
I’ve been rereading The Century lately. I long for the days when our country had freedom (although I really only caught the tail end of it). Reading this book, which chronicles the 20th century, gives me hope.
I see so much of ourselves in this book. The financial struggles of the 1930s (although I think that we probably are faring somewhat better), the communists and radicals of the 60s, the loss of face from the 70’s, the corruption. We survived it all, because Americans woke up. The World War II generation worked hard in war then got their freedoms back. Reagan replaced Carter. The people rejected communism.
We have tough times ahead. But maybe we will get through it.
I saw Herman Cain on Beck today. He rocks. I pray that perhaps he is the Reagan that we have been waiting for.
The other day I started re-reading History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I read the abridged version last year, but this is a very difficult book, and I probably missed some information. Besides, there are many chapters that were cut out of the abridged version; I wonder why they chose to cut out some of the chapters, like the sack of Rome. Wouldn’t that be an important chapter?
I learned how to highlight in my Kindle for iPad (yay!) and I ran into a paragraph that was worth thinking about:
The native Caledonians preserved, in the northern extremity of the island, their wild independence, for which they were not less indebted to their poverty than to their valor.
Right before Rome started to decline, they had enlarged their territory about as far as they were going to go, with the exception of Britain. This area of the world was full of tribes that loved freedom. Gibbon said that they had “the love of freedom without the spirit of union.” Rome eventually overtook most of these tribes, with the exception of Caledonia. These people preserved their freedom.
We face dark days in America today. Many of us love freedom; but how much do we love freedom? Do we love freedom so much that we are willing to suffer the consequences of our own actions? Do we expect someone else to come to the rescue when our exercise of freedom doesn’t work out as we expect? If we truly want to keep our freedom, we need to be in the position to be free. Over the next few years, when the government will inevitably make spending cuts, we need to take this time to exert our freedom. We need to have an attitude of “okay, I see that you can’t afford to give unemployment benefits for more than a month; but I’m going to do my part to save so that I don’t get caught in too much of a jam.” “I know that the government has to cut back on food stamps for the poor, but I’m going to help out and give to my local food pantry so that these people don’t go hungry.” “I realize that the government can’t afford to send rescue helicopters out to the mountains to find me if I get lost while hiking in the mountains, but I either bought some insurance or I’m willing to take the risk.”
The Caledonians were not wealthy, but they were brave. They were willing to fight for their freedom. They weren’t willing to roll over and make compromises. When the enemy arrived, they fought back.
Whenever Americans say things like “oh, I know that on average, more people drown in bathtubs than die from terrorist attacks (a fact), but I still think that it’s okay to be photographed naked or have someone feel me up; it’s for safety” or “I have to fly and do what they tell me to; it’s for my job” then we lose freedoms. When people sue a company because they were too stupid to watch their step and slip on the floor, they’re helping us lose our freedoms. When people put their financial interests ahead of the interests of freedom, we’re forging our own chains. It’s time to start standing up for our freedoms like the Caledonians.
Sometimes it seems as if we are re-entering the Dark Ages. You know, those years where the only people that knew how to read were monks in monasteries? The years where even kings didn’t know how to read, and the few people that did know how to read weren’t very good with grammar?
My husband showed me a headline written by CBS.com yesterday. It said something along the lines of “Osama bin Laden was Vane.” Were they trying to tell me that Osama bin Laden wanted to foretell the weather? No, they had made a spelling mistake. I can forgive this in someone’s personal blog; I don’t really mind it if someone posts something like this on Facebook (although I might roll my eyes), but CBS.com? Don’t they have people to proofread these things?
This isn’t the only time I’ve seen poor quality copy coming out of an organization that you would expect to be professional. The AP released an article about a week or two ago that my husband pointed out had spelled Endeavor five different times in one article. Are you kidding me? I’ve also seen mistakes in books that I’ve read, although that usually happens less frequently.
I don’t have a problem with people spelling the Middle East words differently. If Fox News wants to change the way they spell Osama to Usama, I don’t really care. Words like Al-Qaeda and Qadaffi are really just our interpretation of Arabic, and technically do not have an official spelling. When a professional organization can’t figure out how to use the right version of “vain”, that disturbs me.
If professional organizations want to retain credibility, they need to first learn how to spell correctly. CBS and AP should be able to publish error-free copy. In these days of scarce jobs, if whoever they have in their office can’t spell correctly and know how to use homophones correctly, perhaps they need to find someone that can.
Last night, I watched the debate (really late, because my husband wanted to take me out to see Atlas Shrugged Pt. 1 for an early Mother’s Day gift). Here are my thoughts on all the candidates:
Herman Cain: I LOVE Herman Cain. Okay, I’m not going to leave my husband for him or anything, but it would be a dream come true for me to see this guy win. I have never been a registered Republican, but I might just consider changing my party alignment from Constitution Party to Republican just so I can vote for this guy in the Presidential Preference Election. The only thing that I didn’t like about his answers was that he was in favor of Mitt Romney in the last presidential election. The choices last election season pretty much stunk though, so I can’t hold it against him too much.
Gary Johnson: I don’t like this guy at all. He has some pretty good business sense, but he is in favor of abortions being legal until the fetus is viable. He’s in favor of legalizing drugs as well. If he said that was a matter that should be left to the states, like Ron Paul, then that probably would be an okay answer. He’s a little too liberal on social issues for me.
Ron Paul: He’s Ron Paul. You pretty much know what to expect from him. He said that he would have been able to capture bin Laden with his policies though — I don’t think so. Some of the information that we received was from Iraq (which he was against) using waterboarding (which he is also against). Like Glenn Beck, I think he’d be great as Secretary of the Treasury, but I don’t really want to see him in charge of foreign policy… although with the exception of bin Laden, I think he’d still do a better job than Obama.
Pawlenty/Santorum: I could hardly tell these guys apart. They seem like your typical politicians. Pawlenty is a little more liberal socially, and Santorum is more conservative socially. They’re both for states rights. Maybe they’d be able to solve this mess that our country is in, but they seem as boring as snot. I’m sure that I’d vote for them if they were up against Obama in the 2012 election, but I can’t get excited about either of them.
So that’s the hour and a half debate in a nutshell, from my perspective.
Teachable Moment at Jack in the Box
. Towards the beginning of the movie, he remarks that “It’s funny what you remember…” He doesn’t remember being born, but he remembers his first pair of shoes. The saying is true though.
. The Soviets were starting to see small tastes of freedom around 1987 while Gorbechev was in power. At the time, he promised that he was going to restore history. They were going to let the truth be known about the Soviet’s past.
. I read the abridged version last year, but this is a very difficult book, and I probably missed some information. Besides, there are many chapters that were cut out of the abridged version; I wonder why they chose to cut out some of the chapters, like the sack of Rome. Wouldn’t that be an important chapter?
