Posted by: rileydad | July 9, 2009

Liberal Femist Elitist Racist on Abortion

I know two posts in one day are a little much — and many of you have probably seen this — but I thought this should be publicized.

The Left always pretends to be for equality and calls pro-life Christians (among other things) biggots. Right from the horse’s mouth. The Sanger legacy of genocide continues :
“I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” — Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Read the whole story – retiring Justice Ginsburg lets the cat out of the bag

Posted by: rileydad | July 9, 2009

Fatherlessness & it’s fruits

Mal 4:6 And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.

Feminism, selfish men & the breakdown of the family have had a devistating effects on our culture.
Sadly, many Christians have accepted many of the same philosophical foundations — albeit in a less severe version — of the anti-family, hyper-individualistic, anti-child, hyper egalitarian, hedonistic world around them.
Even worse, whether its the 100 million plus orphans around the world, or the unborn scheduled for slaughter here, or the millions of kids & adults in broken homes needing the hope of the Gospel lived out in word, in deed, in power, and in service — we, in the church, ignore the cries of the fatherless while thinking we are super-spiritual & mature because of our emotions or having our theological ducks in a row . . .

Jam 1:27 Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, [and] to keep himself unspotted from the world.

Mic 6:8 He hath shewed thee, O man, what [is] good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

How much more pronouced are these problems in the third world, the inner city, the Delta. The fields are white for harvest but the laborers are few . . .
May God have mercy.
Statistics Regarding Fatherless and its Effect on Children and Families

Seventy-two percent of all teenage murderers grew up without fathers

Fatherless children are eleven times more likely then are children from intact families to exhibit violent behavior.

Eighty percent of adolescents in psychiatric hospitals come from fatherless homes.

Seventy percent of the kids now incarcerated in juvenile corrections facilities grew up in a single parent environment

Three out of four teen suicides occur in single-parent families

Compared to girls raised in homes where both parents are present, the daughters of single parents are 164-percent more likely to become pregnant before marriage compared to girls raised in homes where both parents are present,

53 percent are more likely to marry as teenagers

Compared to girls raised in homes where both parents are present, 92 percent more likely to dissolve their own marriages

The absence of a biological father increases by 900 percent a daughter’s vulnerability to rape and sexual abuse (often these assaults are committed by stepfathers or the boyfriends of custodial mothers).

Read the rest here.

Please forward to all pro-life Mississippians you know — we need help !

Please forgive me in advance if I am blunt and possibly a bit offensive. I do not mean to be accusitory. This is aimed as much at me as anyone.
I am rather passionate, as many of you know, about this issue. I am not discouraged, but I am a bit frustrated. This will be a little long & disjointed because it is/ was actually two e-mails that I started to send separately, but combined. The first part is urging you to get involved in the Pro-life/ Personhood effort & the second is a few prayer requests. If you do not have the time to read all this, please at least look at #6 under the prayer request & pray/ help as you feel led . . .

    Help Needed

A Referendum on US — Are we a People that Cares about Flags & Electoral Integrity, but don’t care about Dead Children, the Restoration of our Constitution, or the honor/ blessings of God ?
Mississippi is supposed to be one of the most pro life states in America. Getting 100,000 signatures to put a pro life measure on the ballot should be very doable.
(” The fields are white unto harvest, but the laborers are few”).

This is especially true when you consider that in 2000/ 2001 a rag tag bunch of Mississippians with no formal organization or money were able to collect enough signatures to get a measure on the ballot to protect our state flag. Do we care less about protecting babies ?!?!?

* For the record, I love the state flag & know that is stands for Christian liberty, but I would much rather live in a state that had an ugly, meaninless flag than a flag that represents honor & freedom while in reality it doesn’t exist **

While our little group has been striving & struggling to gather signatures, the Republican party has been quite efficiently collecting the signatures to get a voter ID measure on the ballot. Voter integrity is an important issue, but, again, do we care more about the right to vote than the right to life ?

Maybe the second comparison isn’t exactly fair. Unlike our little band working on the Personhood Amendment or the folks who pushed the “Save the Flag” effort, the people behind the voter ID initative have money & an existing statewide organization.
But, does our Father not own the cattle on a thousand hills ?
Does the Lord need an organization besides the Body of Christ ?
Is He limited on resources ?

Right now, many Mississippians are spending their summers & their money pursuing hobbies and entertainment with vigor. We can get thousands to show up to watch fireworks or listen to music or eat BBQ or otherwise be entertained. I like entertainment, but can we not give a little of our time & money for our unborn neighbors ?

We can get hundreds to come to an event to protest what’s going on in Washington with taxes, spending, and attacks on freedom. I dislike this as much as anyone — I have been involved in the Constitution Party/ freedom movement for two decades & even spoke at a TEA Party rally. But, God’s people not direct similar enthusiam towards protecting the rights of the unborn ? DO WE NOT KNOW THAT IF WE SILENTLY ALLOW THE SHEDDING OF INNOCENT BLOOD IN OUR LAND THAT JUDGEMENT WILL COME AND GOD WILL TAKE OUR MONEY AND OUR FREEDOM ?

********************************************************

I bring all this up as a appeal for you, Mississippi Christian, to get more involved, directly, in the Mississippi Personhood Amendment. We need people to give their money, their time, or (preferably) both. Or we will not get this done.

We do have a number of people doing all they can to help, and I am very grateful for that. And I do not mean to diminish the efforts of anyone who’s done anything to help — or beat up on anyone who can’t/ doesn’t feel called (?). Please forgive me if I come off this way.

But, consider the above, plus the fact that we have collected a total of about $5500 in donations. Of this, $5000 came from Michael Peroutka, who lives in Maryland.
Mr. Peroutka has done well in business, but there are people in Mississippi who can afford to give, too. (even if it’s only $20).

We are getting very tight on time to get all the signatures in. The Lord is blessing our efforts and our help is growing — but too slowly. We need more people, collecting more signatures (and getting them turned in) more rapidly. We need a greater sense of urgency. If you are working on this thank you. We need to push really hard the rest of the summer. If you would, please pass this on to everyone who is helping you.
* Also, if you have signatures, could you mail what you have in or e-mail us a count — by county — of what you have ASAP. We are trying to get a handle on where we need help.

Below are seven very specific prayer needs. If cannot get involved personally or give you would, please pray for these and pass this on to people who you know are pro-life & who are lovers of Christ who will pray.
** If you want to pray for/ help one specific thing or only have time to read one short part of this, please look at number six below.

    Prayer needed

We have several big pushes going in the next week to ten days and a couple of other things that we need prayer for.

1) Jeff Chamblee is going to try (again) today to set up a meeting with Buddy Smith at AFA. Please pray that he will meet with me and that the Lord would grant me favor with him. If we could get AFA on board it would increase the likelihood (humanly speaking) that we will get done by Oct.1

2) A mailer is going out to 8800 pro-lifers in Mississippi this weekend & an advertisement is going in the Baptist Record (circulation 96000) next week. Please pray that God would burden many people’s hearts with this and that He would raise up people to help with the work.

3) Please pray for more laborers in the field, prosperity & protection for those working.

4) Misty Snyder & Sandy Morris are calling on churches in Meridian & Hattiesburg this week. Please pray that the Lord would bless their efforts.

5) The three big PR pushes we are doing the next ten days will eat up all of the donations we have received to this point. Please pray that the Lord would provide more resources as needed and that He would raise up people with a desire to give financially if they are unable to help in other ways.
We especially need folks from Mississippi to give more (even in small increments). The bulk of our total donations (about 90%) has come from one person — out-of-state. And Personhood USA has kicked in thousands indirectly by paying for things as they were needed.

6) On a related note, please pray for the Zastrow family & the two people below who have been working on this full time. They are doing this as volunteers and have asked us for nothing (actually, they have given of their own resources).
Please pray that the Lord would meet their needs physically & bless them spiritually as they do this work.

And, if anyone wants to pray for someone specifically — or help meet the physical needs of someone who is loving God & loving their neighbors here in Mississippi, please consider Candice & Caty. They two young ladies working full time on gathering signatures and witnessing at the abortion clinic in Jackson.

These two girls are both from relatively poor Christian families. They want to be wives & mothers, but believe this is what God would have them do at this point in their lives. They are living out of their savings & driving an old junky car. Serving & working full time on behalf of their unborn neighbors these young girls are giving up their youth, their entertainment, their abilities and their talents — full time. And, they have asked for nothing but a place to sleep when they are in various towns around the state petitioning.

Last week, our metro Jackson coordinator, Cal, called & said the one of them whose car they were using had run into a major repair bill on the car ( more than it was worth). They bought a used car they could pay cash for & one of the girls took all the money she had been saving since childhood for college to buy this car so they could keep petitioning & witnessing at the abortion clinic in Jackson.

Cal told them he didn’t think they should do that & the girl said that this was what God had called her to do at this point in her life & she was honored to give all she had for Him.

If you would like to give something to help this girl pay for this car — or to help buy gas/ meals for them, please send a donation to Personhood Mississippi with a note that you want it to go specifically for this.
3095 Big Hill Rd
Ponototc, Mississippi 38863

* Also, if you are unable to go out petitioning yourself, and would like to offer a hot meal, a place to sleep, or some Christian fellowship/ a place to rest to anyone who is traveling the state working on this, please let me know.

7) Finally, a personal one. working on this has put a major financial strain on my family — while at the same time, my income at work has been reduced drastically. I really do not know how we are going to get this done and make it through the winter (when my income as a tractor salesman is non existent).
And I have pushed my wife and ten kids really hard (they are doing more work, more cheerfully, with less sleep/money than I would have dreamed possible)

Please pray that the Lord would continue to provide for our needs (particularly the pressing ones)

Thank you
Again, we need your help if we are going to make this happen

“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live.” Deuteronomy 30:19

Personhood Mississippi
Les Riley Sponsor
662-760-8695
personhoodmississippi@gmail.com
http://personhoodmississippi.com

Prior to the rise of Obama & company, the GOP had partial controll of the Federal government for a majority of the years in the previous three decades. They had complete controll of all three branches for at least six years in recent times. And they held a majority of governor’s mansions AND all three branches of the Fed gov at the turn of the century. (there was actually talk that the Democrats could never recover )

The leadership of the Religious Right had seen their strategy of incrimentalism, pragmatism, loyalty to the GOP, and a centralized/ top-down approach victorious. (and what great advances did we have to show for it ?)

It could be argued that the victory of Obama & Pelosi was created by these leaders & their strategy.
And I believe I can make the case (to wnayone who wants to ask with an open mind) that most of the Obama/ Pelosi abominations have their roots – directly or indirectly – in policies & principles enacted by Republicans (with Christian leades cheering them on).

Why then, are we so willing to follow these same leaders, the same party, same ideas & same strategy when their has been no repentance or even self examination ? Can new wine suddenly prosper in old wine skins ?

This is not rhetorical or meant to be accusitory . . . I would really like an answer (particularly from those who promote this approach).

Those in Mississippi who want a different approach can check this out :
http://www.mississippicp.com/

Great piece by Congressman (and former Presidential Candidate) Ron Paul arguing for a truly conservative foriegn policy approach.
False choice “Fight them over there or fight them over here”

I don’t know much about the “Southern Avenger”, but this was very good :

http://www.covenantnews.com/blog/archives/056686.html

Posted by: rileydad | May 20, 2009

Colorado Christians to Empty Foster Care Rolls ?

This is really awesome. If we want to shrink government & restore our culture, some folks in Colorado may be showing us one way to do it.

Project 1:27

God loves children. But for 80 years too many children and youth have been languishing in the U.S. foster care system. That’s too long. Over 120,000 of them are legally free for adoption and waiting for their forever homes and every year their numbers keep growing. It’s costing taxpayers $283 million a day! In 2005 there were 875 legally free children in Colorado. But something amazing started happening here: The Christian church started coming together, getting up out of their pews and helping. Now, great families from all over the state are stepping forward to adopt these children and youth in growing numbers. So much so, that Colorado now has fewer children and youth waiting in foster care than it did in 2005! Imagine a day when there are no more children or youth in Colorado waiting to be adopted. A day when there is a family waiting for every child or youth in need, and every child or youth has a family home. We believe that day is coming by 2014.

Won’t you help make history with us!

Would you like to duplicate this in your state ? Find out more

Since watching Demographic Winter, I have felt compelled to write something that has been on my heart/ in the back of my mind for years. For several weeks now in my “free time” I have been chipping away  at  what will hopefully be a detailed, balanced article on the way Western Christians & Western culture look at children & prosperity vs what the Bible teaches & what Western culture/ strong economies  are built on.

Then, last week, I saw this article by Doug Phillips : The Return of the Child Catcher of Vulgaria. Which echoed & expanded on the ideas of an earlier piece that James McDonald had written for the Family Reformation blog. This is a good preview of where my thoughts are going with this piece.

Phillips begins :

Aha! They are here somewhere, I can feel it in my bones. There are children here, somewhere. This nose of mine has never failed me. And if there are children here my friend, you will die. . . . ha, ha, ha, ha!

I remember the first time I heard these words as a little boy. They came from one of the creepiest bad-guys ever to grace the silver screen — the famous Child Catcher of Vulgaria from the family classic, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Vulgaria was a land for the self-indulgent. It was a place where adults could freely roam, unencumbered by the annoyance and burden of children. The leaders of Vulgaria had grown so comfortable in their anti-child policies that the very sight of children — the very mention of them — could incite furor, rage, and terror with the governing elite.

That is why the Child Catcher was such an important figure in their society. With his net, hook, crooked black hat, odd funeral clothing, and protruding snozzola, he was the stuff of nightmares. As the principal henchman of the corpulent monarch Baron Bomburst, the pale and spindly child catcher had one simple mission — to locate and expose excess children lurking in the country.

Thankfully, you and I will never have to meet such a character. Right?

Welcome to the newly-formed “United States of Vulgaria.” All are welcome — except Christian, homeschool families with a “quiverfull” of children. Here politicians seek to fix their runaway spending policies by banning babies; television personalities gasp at the sight of “too many” children; and journalists target fruitful mothers for public ridicule and censure.

Read the rest –

And, from James McDonald’s article entitled “The Economy is Crashing Because of Children?” (it was prompted by an interview that George Stephaopoulos did with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about the Stimulus Bill & her claim that funding “family planning” would actually stimulate the economy because children are an economic burden) :

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family planning services. How is that stimulus?

PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children’s health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those – one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?

PELOSI: No apologies. No. we have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.

230px-robert_helpmann_child_catcher_As I watched this, I was reminded of the fictional Baron Bomburst, dictatorial ruler of the small country Vulgaria in the classic children’s movie  Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. As you may remember, the childish Baron Bomburst and his selfish wife despise children. They actually employ the Child Catcher to collect and exterminate children. You may remember one of his memorable quotes, “There are children here somewhere. I can smell them.”

Read the rest

And if you want more to wet your whistle, please see a couple of old pieces from this blog :

 

Posted by: rileydad | May 11, 2009

Tom Woods on “Obamanomics”

This is a bit of a departure from the normal fare on my blog, but the article I read was too good not to share with those who haven’t found it on their own. . .

Tom Woods, author of Meltdown, recently had a piece published on Lew Rockwell called, “Beware of Obamanomics“.  This is not some neo-con, pro-Republican/ anti-Democrat shallow tripe. In fact, in his writing Woods regularly refers  to the fact that in many ways the Obama economic policy does not represent “change”, but rather a continuation & expansion of the Bush fiscal & spending policy.

Barack Obama won the White House on a promise of “change we can believe in,” but his approach to the economic crisis has been more of the same, including continued bailouts of failed institutions

If you want to understand real free market economics & how we got into this mess, read Lew Rockwell. If you want to dispell notions you might be holding on to that the Stimulus Plan will do anything to “fix” the economy, please read Woods’ Beware of Obamanomics.
http://lewrockwell.com/woods/woods112.html

Here are a few highlights :

In 1920–21, the United States faced a grave economic crisis, worse than the first year of the Great Depression. Double-digit unemployment and a 21 percent decline in production over the previous twelve months greeted the new president.

That president, the now-despised Warren G. Harding, told Americans that the bust following the artificial, credit-induced boom of the war years had to be faced up to, and that no government, however wise, could make it disappear:

The economic mechanism is intricate and its parts interdependent, and has suffered the shocks and jars incident to abnormal demands, credit inflations, and price upheavals…. We must seek the readjustment with care and courage. Our people must give and take. Prices must reflect the receding fever of war activities…. All the penalties will not be light, nor evenly distributed. There is no way of making them so. There is no instant step from disorder to order. We must face a condition of grim reality, charge off our losses and start afresh. It is the oldest lesson of civilization.… Any wild experiment will only add to the confusion. Our best assurance lies in efficient administration of our proven system.

Government actually cut its budget during the crisis. There was no fiscal “stimulus.” The Fed looked on passively. And by the summer, recovery had already begun. According to today’s textbooks, that wasn’t supposed to happen. But it did.

President Barack Obama’s approach to the present crisis couldn’t be more different. Once in office, the candidate who had run on “hope” began speaking in apocalyptic terms of what might happen to Americans if vigorous government intervention were not undertaken. At the very least, we might experience an extended slump rivaling the Great Depression. Just look at Japan, Obama said in his first press conference as president. Japan “did not act boldly and swiftly enough,” he said, “and as a consequence they suffered what was called the ‘lost decade’ where essentially for the entire ’90s they did not see any significant economic growth.”

As usual, unfortunately, our president draws the wrong lesson from history. Japan acted too “boldly” and “swiftly.” Tens of trillions of yen in stimulus packages, combined with propping up failing companies, lowering interest rates to zero, and much additional intervention besides, had nothing to show for it other than making Japan the most indebted country in the developed world. Keynesians desperate to find some reason that their entire slate of proposals failed to elicit a response from the Japanese economy try to argue that Japan didn’t nationalize its banking sector fast enough. But when Japan did start nationalizing its banks, it then endured the two worst years (1998 and 1999) of the whole “lost decade.

RileyDad note : I am working on a piece about the new documentary “Demographic Winter” and how the anti-child mentality that has taken root in the “developed world” is not only destroying our culture, but is one of the root causes of the ongoing economic slide. In Demographic Winter, Japan is pointed to as one example that having less than a replacement rate of children will eventually cripple an economy. According to one of the demographers interviewed, Adam Smith — the father of modern economics — believed that growing populations lead to prosperity & declining/ aging populations produce depressions.

Back to Woods :Shortly after taking office, President Obama urged the Congress to approve a “stimulus” package amounting to $787 billion in order to (he said) restore the economy to health. In his first news conference as president, Obama warned that a failure to pass this bill “could turn a crisis into a catastrophe.” “I can tell you with complete confidence,” he continued, “that a failure to act will only deepen this crisis as well as the pain felt by millions of Americans.” (For the projected deficits resulting from Obama’s spending plans, see Fig. 1.)

 

Fig. 1
deficits
Source: Washington Post; CBO, White House Office of Management and Budget

But, fashionable superstitions notwithstanding, government spending – that is, draining resources from the productive sector and devoting them to arbitrary projects – cannot improve the economy. It can only make things worse. So blinded are Keynesian economists, from whom Obama takes his inspiration, by the view that prosperity is attributable to “spending” per se that they predicted a return to depression conditions when World War II spending came to an end. And indeed in 1946, the year after the war ended, the budget was cut by two thirds. But instead of reverting to depression, what occurred instead was the single most robust year the private economy has ever seen.2

What the economy really needs, contra Obama, is not government “stimulus” spending to try to revive it as it is. We should not want to “stimulate” what should now be obvious to everyone was an unsustainable economy. That only encourages it to continue along a false path whose inevitable abandonment in the future will be all the more painful thanks to our insistence on propping it up now. As we’ll see, what the economy instead needs is a market-driven restructuring, in which bubble activities shrink and resources are reallocated into lines of production that conform to what consumers want and can afford.Woods Continues by explaining : 

 

Where the Bust Came From

How, after all, did we get into this slump? The key culprit is the Federal Reserve and its loose monetary policy.3 The new money created by the Fed under Alan Greenspan in the years following 9/11 went overwhelmingly into the housing market, inflating prices to unheard-of levels (see Fig. 2). According to the faulty conventional wisdom that rapidly took hold, this rise in prices was a sustainable phenomenon that would persist into the future, not an artificial bubble destined to burst. The so-called experts told Americans that their homes were bound to appreciate, that a house was the best investment they could make, and that flipping houses was a sure money-making opportunity.

With home prices rising in tandem with people’s stock portfolios (another bubble), Americans felt wealthier than they really were. They made consumption decisions on the basis of those faulty estimates that they have since come to regret. Some business enterprises that began or expanded under the conditions of the boom could continue profitably only as long as the boom lasted and consumers’ artificially stimulated excess spending went on. With reality now reasserting itself – that is, with easy credit no longer so readily available, and with people now making their spending decisions in light of the decreased wealth they now realize they have – the market is trying to clear away these bubble activities, so that their resources can be made available for use by the real wealth generators in the economy.

Fig. 2Source: Financial Wisdom, http://www.newfinancialwisdom.com/median-home-prices-inflation-adjusted; data from Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance

home-prices

The market, in short, is trying to move consumers away from personal finance models based on indebtedness and too much (and/or the wrong kinds of) consumption, and toward more saving and a sustainable level of consumption. To accommodate this shift, labor and capital will need to be reallocated out of some sectors and into other ones. “Stimulus” spending only disrupts and confuses this purgative process, by misdirecting resources into arbitrary projects and artificially stimulating politically favored industries at the expense of the economy’s healthy and productive sector. Obama’s program for recovery, such as it is, looks instead to reinflate the bubble, keep the spending spree going, and give still more artificial stimulus to debt while providing disincentives to save. It refuses to allow the market to correct the unsustainable excesses in the economy. “No scheme which has ever been devised by them has ever made a collapsed boom go up again,” said William Graham Sumner in 1896. Nothing in the historical record since then has altered that verdict.

The Federal Reserve, meanwhile, acting on the basis of the same economic principles laid out by the president, is likewise trying to repair the economy by engaging in more of what caused the problems in the first place. On March 18, 2009, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announced it would purchase up to $300 billion in long-term government bonds, with the intent of lowering mortgage rates and other rates on consumer debt. It also declared its intention to purchase up to $750 billion in mortgage-backed securities guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Instead of allowing the market to restructure along a sustainable path, the Fed instead seeks to keep home prices inflated, prop up the securitization model (on which the market is trying to render its negative verdict), and encourage more borrowing and debt.

“Stimulus” Spending Doesn’t Work – Or Make Sense

On a more basic level, the jobs that government creates are unprofitable – that is, they consume more resources than they produce. If that weren’t true, then the profit-seeking private sector would be funding them already. In fact, it’s impossible for government to know whether it is engaged in profitable, productive activity, since it lacks a profit-and-loss mechanism whereby it can calculate whether it is making efficient use of resources. “Stimulus” packages therefore drain the productive economy of resources in order to subsidize money-losing ventures. Because these money-losing ventures get resources shifted to them, fewer resources are available for use by the productive economy; and since the government sector uses resources less efficiently than the private sector, the net result is a decline in wealth – a fact no magical “multiplier” effect can overcome.

The more sophisticated Keynesians will come back with the argument that government stimulus can kick-start “idle resources” that weren’t being employed in any production process anyway. But how can it do that? Our idle resources include, for instance, some of our automobile production capacity, some construction capacity, some of our financial services sector, and the like, as well as a wide variety of types of labor. Now Obama’s stimulus package includes (for example) money to weatherize 2 million American homes. How can weatherizing homes put these and only these idle resources to work? It can’t, of course. And are there enough unemployed weatherizers to take these jobs, or will we be drawing labor from its current uses in the private sector? The question answers itself. In other words, the weatherizing job will have to draw from already employed factors of production, thus redirecting them to a less urgently demanded use than the one the market was already employing them for. That does not create “stimulus.” It destroys value and wealth. And if the claim is that the money spent on weatherizing homes will eventually trickle down, somehow, to the unemployed workers in these other fields, it is hard to take such a crude mechanism seriously.

If we did happen to have enough unemployed weatherizers to weatherize people’s homes, then why would we need Obama’s stimulus package to force laborers and customers together? If prices were allowed to adjust freely, people wanting their homes weatherized would find the weatherizers on their own, and thus the effort to “stimulate” these transactions would become superfluous

If I don’t stop myself here, I’ll end up posting the whole piece. So I’ll just recommend again that you click on this link & read the rest :

http://lewrockwell.com/woods/woods112.html

OOPS !
In the age of the internet, a sensationalistic story can be broadcast around the word before all the facts are availabe. I try to avoid this, but I’m afraid I get caught up in it as well . . .

A couple of days ago, I posted a piece about a 16 year old homeschool boy who had been arrested under the PATRIOT Act. I may owe my readers an apology. As Paul Harvey would say, I should have waited for, “the rest of the story“.

According to Fox News, the mother of the boy who said she didn’t have any idea why her son had been arrested, knew about some activities that her son was involved in that might have made him a target.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,519570,00.html

  When a North Carolina woman accused the federal government last week of abusing the Patriot Act to imprison her teenage son for allegedly making bomb threats, the mother’s allegation caused quite an uproar, including calls to free 16-year-old Ashton Lundeby.“His mother knew that he was making calls, because she’d come on the microphone when he was talking and tell him not to do any bomb threats because the house was going to get raided,” the student told Wired News.

An Australian college student who told Wired News that he tipped off the FBI about Ashton said Annette Lundeby knew exactly what her son was doing.

Annette Lundeby admitted to Wired News that she knew Ashton had been making “really funny” prank calls, and that he’d made bomb threats, and that he’d received money for some of the calls — but she said it was all just a joke.

“Tyrone” allegedly moved on to bigger things, according to Wired News, which says he began calling in bomb threats and pretty soon was being paid for them via a PayPal account.

Videos of him doing so, often with profane and offensive language, are on YouTube.

Ashton Lundeby was charged under a long-standing law against making threats, and “this charge is unrelated to the Patriot Act,” the statement says.

Bloggers on both the left and right of the political spectrum had come to the boy’s defense, calling him a victim of government oppression, prompting the U.S. Attorney’s office to issue a statement Thursday refuting the mother’s claim.

Last week the boy’s mother, Annette Lundeby, went on local TV and called her son’s arrest a violation of the Constitution. She said Ashton, who’d been home-schooled and lived in a house full of American flags, was innocent, and that others had “hacked her son’s IP address.”

But a new report by Wired News suggests that, not only was the teenager an online superstar in rogue tech communities for his prank phone calls, but his mother may have known all along that the boy was conspiring with others to make bomb threats.

Lundeby, known online as “Tyrone,” allegedly had progressed into selling his services as a threatmaker, charging schoolchildren from across the country $5 apiece to place threatening, Internet-based phone calls that would cause administrators to shut down their schools, Wired News reports.

“I heard the prank phone calls he made,” his mother, Annette Lundeby, said in the Wired report. “They were really funny prank calls.”

On top of that, the U.S. Attorney’s office handling the case says her story about abuse of the Patriot Act was false.

On March 5, FBI agents took Ashton Lundeby into custody at his Oxford, N.C., home and placed him in a federal juvenile facility in Indiana, where he remains on charges he made bomb threats against Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., and other schools.

This is not to dismiss or lessen legitimate concerns about the growth of the “police state” mentality in general or the abuses of the misnamed PATRIOT Act in particular. We must continue to stand up & speak out against these. But, I — and all bloggers — need to be more dilligent in making sure we give all the facts and both sides of the story.
There are plenty of real outrages and abuses to get upset about. We need to keep the tea bags, torches, tar & feathers in reserve for them. Also, it is important to focus on foundational principles at least as much as particular violations or conspiracies. 
Sensationalistic stories & conspiracy theories may be good for selling DVD’s and increasing traffic to sites/ blogs; they might even be good to forment revolution; and, specific, legitimate outrages certainly have their place in giving people a rallying point and serving as real life examples of the foundational issues / principles we are trying to explain. But they are no substitute for the real need.
Worshipping God in Spirit and in Truth. Living out our faith. Learing to apply not only the principles of liberty, but the wisdom of God’s Word to ALL of life. Speaking out for truth. Serving & loving our neighbors. Laying the ax to the root. Hearing the cry of the fatherless — and responding. Restoring the Foundations. And working for Christian liberty at the state & local level. These are the foundations for lasting reformation.

We do not need merely to stoke the fires of unrest. We do not need revolution built on shaky foundations that will likely only lead to more tyrrany in a different form.
We need the WHOLE Gospel of Christ to come again to our land in Word and in Power — and for God to grant us repentance, revival, and reformation.

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