It’s been said over and over by now,  texting has tremendously  impacted the English language, creating a new generation who purposely misspell words, use incorrect phrases or syntax, and are ignoring the proper lexicon of the Queen’s English. However, even more devastatingly, texting has tremendously changed interpersonal communication.

There is a generation that now would rather communicate via text message rather than to sit down and have a traditional voice to voice conversation. Now, it can be argued that it’s simply easier to send someone a text message, especially when multi-tasking in a situation where you cannot have a full phone conversation.

Now many others are will try claim that text messaging actually will save you time. Really? Is it that much quicker to “shoot someone a quick text” when compared to the traditional phone call? Well…the other day I took matters into my own hands…..scratch that into, my own thumbs.

I sent a text message to my wife to see what time she will get off from work and it took that conversation a total of 1:20 to complete. When I used my phone…..as a phone and called to ask the same question, and got the same answer, it took a grand total of 22 seconds.

Another benefit of calling over texting is you can get your intended message out correctly….the first time. When texting on most phones, there is the autocorrect feature, you know….that little thing that turns your misspellings into real words…in theory. But in most cases, the autocorrect will change one word to something else changing the context of the message. So, the recipient will ether be mislead, or will need more correcting messages to get the original message across.

This tech-based laziness is nothing more than a slower way to communicate, but is also leading to less and less interactions with other people, and could lead to a generation where no one communicates face to face leading all communication to text based interaction ether on a phone of computer. That day may be in the future, but the new push for texting is currently creating more and more headaches to do one the simplest thing in human nature, communicate with one another. . …..

Think about it! AMR 2/1/12

Have you ever wondered why carrying concealed just make good sense?  A Major Caudill, a retired United States Marine puts it this way:

Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another:  reason and force.  If you want me to do something for you, you have the choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force.   Every human interaction falls into one of those two catagories, without exception.  Reason or force…. that’s it!

In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion.  Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may seem to some.

When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force.  You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force.

The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220 pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gang banger, and a single guy on and equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats.  The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size or numbers between potential attacker and a defender.

There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These people who think we’d be more civilized if all guns were removed from society.  But, a firearm makes it easier for an armed mugger to do his job.  That, of course, is only true if the mugger’s potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat – it has no validity when most a mugger’s potential marks are armed.  People who argue for banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society.  A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.

Then there’s the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury.  This argument is fallacious in several ways.  Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser.

People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don’t constitute lethal force, watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst.  The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier, works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stonger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level.

The gun is the only weapon that’s as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weight lifter.  It simply would not work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn’t both lethal and easily employable.

When I carry a gun, I don’t do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I am looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be force, only persuaded.  I don’t carry it because I’m afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid.  It doesn’t limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only removes force from the equation…And that’s why carrying a gun is a civilized act!!

The greatest civilization is one where all citizens are equally armed and can only be persuaded, never forced! Remember, freedom is not free.

Think About It!     JCD    01-25-2012

The U.S. Postal Service is in dire straits.  It appears that Americans are just not using the USPS much anymore, and that is just a sign of the times. We have our email available on every office and home computer which gives us same day or at least two day conversation on most any topic, from business billings, product orders or just a friendly chat. Plus our email is also available now on all or Blackberries, Ipods, and many other hand held devices accessible from almost every location anytime of day.

The Postal Service said the other day that it will shut down almost half of its processing centers and largely eliminate next-day delivery for first class mail.  That’s on top of another 1-cent postage stamp hike that goes into effect this month.

It’s all part of an effort to cut $20 billion, yes that is billion with a b, in annual costs, staunch the flood of red ink and avoid bankruptcy.  Still, it is hard to see how charging more for worse service is a credible plan for success, and even if it were, the postal service has been down this road many times in the past. The entire show is no doubt to get congressional attention and promote efforts to divert more taxpayer funds to save a dying institution.

On the one hand, the USPS is weighed down by unions that control 85% of its workforce, impeding reasonable efficiency improvements as unions have been doing in private industry for decades. Example:  In paying postal workers to do literally nothing, thanks to labor agreements that require the service to keep workers on the payroll even when mail volume is low or machinery breaks down.

At the same time, lawmakers often scuttle USPS cost-saving plans that might affect their districts. After congressmen screamed, for example, the USPS cut the list of post offices it planned to close from 3,200 to a mere 162. The postmaster general had it right last week when he said “the USPS is in dire straits because we are expected to operate like a business but don’t have the flexibility to do so.”

But the solution isn’t to mindlessly cut costs or trot out more piecemeal reforms like the one working its way through the Senate, which will only prolong the agony.  Instead, we should follow the lead of many other countries and privatize the Postal Service. 

A Cato Institute report finds the consistent result of privatization of mail service abroad has been improved productivity and lower costs, without decline in quality.  “Selling anything less than privatization as a solution to the Post Service’s problems would constitute mail fraud.”

It’s too bad that our two liberal thinking Senators don’t agree.

Think About It!     JCD   01-18-12

Finally, Congress has done something worth while for our returning veterans from war in Iraq and Afghanistan.  New hiring tax credits will now encourage employers to hire veterans.

The “VOW to Hire Heroes Act” was pulled from a much larger jobs bill that has been stalled in Congress. Somehow, with bi-partisan support, this much needed piece of legislation was taken out of the jobs bill, and passed into law.

There are about 240,000 veterans of the middle-east wars who remain unemployed, while a total of 850,000 veterans overall are out of work.  That’s a shame.  And to compound the problem, it is estimated that more than 1 million other service members, now on duty, are expected to return to civilian life by 2016. Most people agree with the nations leadership that “No veteran who fought for our nation should have to fight for a job when they come home.”

This new law allows a company to claim a tax credit of up to $2400. if it hires veterans who have been looking for work for at least one month.  The maximum credit is increased to $5600. for hiring veterans who have been searching for work for at least six months. And employers may be granted a $9600 tax credit for hiring out-of-work veterans with service oriented disabilities.  The new law also provides job training to help returning vets return to work.

An official of the Department of Defense said that the agency will also expand its other programs to help returning veterans. “Combat is incredibly tough business, and we are finding that the human toll on a 10-year veteran, the physical and mental toll, it is incredible.”

Phillip Burdette, head honcho of the Office of Wounded Warrior Care and Transition Policy said “As we end the war in Iraq and wind down in Afghanistan, we are absolutely planning for returning service members.”

When you see any active duty service man or woman, be sure and shake their hand and thank them for their service.  And if you can hire a returning veteran from Iraq or Afghanistan, please do so. It will be a real service to them and will pay monetary dividends for you.

Thank About It!     JCD    01-11-2011

For many years now, our Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly has made donations of taxpayer dollars to several non-profit organizations.  The Assembly has given donations to the Central Area Transit System, The Kenai Peninsula College, The Economic Development District, The Small Business Development Center, and The Tourism and Marketing Council. These donations have been made by the Assembly from the General Fund of the Borough.

Then in the last election the Assembly asked voters to approve this practice by approving an addition to the sales tax of .1% to fund these donations.  The voters, you and I, turned them down with a resounding No!

Many have felt for years that the Assembly had no authority as a Second Class Borough to make these donations at all, even though the Assembly and Mayor hid them under their authority in Title 29 to fund “Economic Development”. One would certainly have to interpret that term in the broadest of sense of the word to say that most of these organizations primarily foster economic development.

Discussion of many Assembly people indicates that not only will they continue funding these organizations, regardless of the recent vote against an increase in taxes to do so, but they are now in the process of approving another non-profit organization to receive funding of Borough tax dollars as well.

This Ordinance, now being heard by the Assembly, would grant $100,000 of Borough tax dollars to the Kenai Watershed Forum headquartered on Funny River Road.  Although, the Ordinance says this $100,000 donation is to support culvert restoration projects the organization can actually spend the money in any way they see fit. In-fact, the Ordinance states that established borough procedures and requirements for assisting economic development proposals will not apply to this grant.

First of all, why would the Assembly even think about paying no attention, at all, to their constituents who just voted to disallow a tax in crease to be used for funding non-profit organizations?

Secondly, why would Assembly people have the audacity to not only continue their donations to these non-profit organizations but to immediately consider adding another? Thumbing their noses at voters.

Thirdly, even without voters saying “no” to this practice how could any Assembly person, in their own mind, vote to donate our tax dollars to organizations not even under Borough jurisdiction, each with their own board and agendas, and over whom they have no control?

Unbelievable!   It is definitely time to put some new common sense people on our Borough Assembly.

Think About It!      JCD    12-21-11

You know, with all the troubles in the world today and all the problems we face across our nation, we need to sit back during this special time of the year and take the time to count our blessings. Sometimes we seem to take our wonderful Kenai Peninsula for granted and just don’t take time to appreciate the many small things that make our community such a great place to live.

Just one of the really nice little things about our Twin Cities area, are all the Christmas decorations we pass by everyday as we drive around. Not only is it a pleasure to ride around our residential areas at night and enjoy the multitude of homes that have been extensively decorated with Christmas lights, scenes and décor, but both Kenai and Soldotna City officials always make Christmas delightful with all of their lighted decorations.

In Kenai you are invited to enjoy the brightly lighted street light decorations that are erected each year the entire length of the main highway. The Eric Hansen Memorial Park is especially nice with its many lighted trees and structures.

In Soldotna, the street light decorations this year are outstanding and the new Kenai River Bridge with its colored lighting fits right in with the Christmas season. Lighted trees at the Soldotna Wye and around the police and fire stations are very easy on the eyes. Even the Vistor’s Center has outlined their building with the lights of the Christmas season.

And speaking of community wide celebrations of the season, one would hope that you were able to take the entire family to “Bethlehem Re-visited” on the K-Beach Road. The Baptist Church built a most delightful reproduction of the village where Christ was born with stables, live animals and many shop owners and visitors dressed in the full costume of that era.

So, as you finish your shopping, greet and visit with friends and enjoy the many staff and organizational parties of the season, remember to take time to enjoy all the lights and decorations that make our Kenai Peninsula such a great place to live.

And as you gather with family around the tree on Christmas morning, read aloud again the Christmas story and enjoy all the dishes on the Christmas dinner table, take time to reflect on the blessings we all enjoy everyday by making the Kenai Peninsula our home.

Think About It!      JCD    12-21-2011

Most people on the Kenai Peninsula have no idea it even exists especially if they are late arrivals, but the Kenai Moose Research Center has been in operation since 1968, when it was funded and built by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

The facility is tucked away into the rolling hill and lake country of the northwestern Kenai Peninsula. It’s a least an hours drive on gravel roads from Sterling, but easy to spot from the air if you are with a pilot who knows what he is looking for. Four, one-mile square sections, enclosed with sixteen miles of tall fencing, each with a landscape of trees, meadows and small lakes. It’s a farm like setting with the lab and research facilities, bunk house, a care-takers cabin and lots of ranching paraphernalia.

The facility was built because wildlife managers and biologists needed to know what makes a moose healthy and how much food it takes to keep him that way. Al Franzman arrived on the scene way back in 1972 and spent his life working and directing activities at the Kenai Moose Research Center and his experiences with our Alaska moose would and have filled a book or two.

It’s tough for a biologist to dog the heels of a wild foraging moose to watch exactly what it eats or to closely monitor the pregnancy of a cow moose.  So early on Franzman and his fellow biologists figured out that they had to bottle feed moose calves and condition them to human contact. Over the years, researchers from Norway, Sweden, Russia, Canada and other American states have worked on projects at the center.

The only way to really find out what a moose is eating and how much, is to watch it and over the years the hundreds of hours bottle feeding moose calves has paid off big time. These cultivated moose are very human friendly so researchers can stay with them all day and all night long if need be and watch them forage and browse like a wild moose. Without bottle raised animals you just could not do those kinds of studies.

More than 250 scientific paper based on research at the center have been published on all of the pioneering work accomplished; how to capture moose using drugs, studies on moose-habitat relationships, and various was to evaluate moose physical condition. Studies, as well, on moose response to an environment changed from a mature spruce forest to one with crushed trees and the resulting growth of new small bushes generated for moose browse. Predator control, especially on black bears, has been studied and controlled for maximum moose calf survival.

Al Franzman and Charles Schwartz have published a very interesting and scholarly book edited by present and former directors of the center entitled “Ecology and Management of the North American Moose”. The highly regarded work has authoritative chapters on moose populations, reproduction, behavior, mortality, habitat, feeding, nutrition, diseases, husbandry and hunting. It is a book well worth the reading and virtually all made possible by the Kenai Moose Research Center located right here on our very own Kenai Peninsula. What a great investment in time and money.

Think About It!       JCD    12-14-2011

Government data shows that over 240,000 veterans of the so-called wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are unemployed and cannot find work. In fact, it’s a sad fact that over 850,000 veterans overall are right now out of work.

Now to compound the problem the Obama Administration reports that one  million other service members are expected to return to civilian life by 2016.

No veteran who fought for our nation should have to fight for a job when they come home.

The good news is that the VOW to Hire Heroes Act was passed by Congress and signed into law last month. It is a small piece of a much larger socialist jobs bill promoted by Democrats that has stalled in both houses of Congress.

This new law allows a company to claim a tax credit of up to $2,400 if it hires veterans who have been looking for work for at least one month. The maximum credit is increased to $5,600 for hiring veterans who have been searching for work for at least six months. And employers may be granted a $9,600 tax credit for hiring veterans with service-related disabilities. The new law also provides for job training to help vets return to work.

Combat is incredibly tough business, and the military is findng that the human toll on a 10-year veteran, the physical and mental toll is incredible. 

A salute to Congress for agreeing in both houses to come up with these new hiring tax credits for veterans returning from action in both Iraq and Afghanistan is certainly in order.

And those tax credits should be excellent incentive for businesses and companies across our nation to put our veterans to work.

Think About It!

Think About It……. November 30, 2011

** Last year, 2.6 million more Americans descended into poverty. That was the largest increase in poor folks since the US government began keeping statistics on this back in 1959.
** Back in the year 2000, 11% of all Americans were living in poverty. Today,  it is 15%.
** More than 20 million US children rely on school meal programs to keep from going hungry.
** One out of every six elderly Americans now lives below the federal poverty line.
** Today, there are over 45 million Americans on food stamps.
** According to The Wall Street Journal, nearly 15% of all Americans are now on food stamps.
** In 2010, 42 percent of all single mothers in the United States were on food stamps.
** The number of Americans on food stamps has increased 74% since 2007.
** It is projected that approximately 50 percent of all US children will be on food stamps at some point before they reach the age of 18.
** More than 50 million Americans are now on Medicaid. Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid. Today, its every one out of every 6.
** One out of every six Americans is now enrolled in a government anti-poverty program.
** The number of Americans that are going to food pantries and soup kitchens has increased by 46% since 2006.
** It is estimated that up to half a million children may currently be homeless in the United States.

Now, hold on.  We simply must ask ourselves: how could the most sophisticated, most dynamic, best capitalized, high tech enhanced capitalism in history produce such an outcome?

The answer is simple: Capitalism doesn’t give you what you want. It gives you what you deserve. And it usually does so with such a long delay that few people connect cause with effect. Instead, they rant and rave. They blame the rich. They call for more regulation. More distribution. More handouts, subsidies, and bailouts. They demand that the feds ‘do something!……..not realizing that the feds — more than anyone else — are responsible for their misery:

-The feds tricked them into spending more than they could afford — with artificially low rates and EZ credit.

-The feds loaded them up with mortgage debt — thanks to their federally subsidized mortgage industry.

-The feds practically invented sub-prime mortgage debt; and directed lenders towards the poorest and most vulnerable parts of the society.

-The feds enticed old people into complete dependence — with the Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare programs.

-The feds led the young into debt too — with easy student loans that effectively transferred money from them to the education industry.

-The feds jimmied our health-care system into such a mess that Americans now spend 45 times as much as the Cubans…and have the same life expectancy.

-The feds’ funny money system caused the export of millions of good jobs to emerging markets in foreign countries.

Rise up, ye debt-trodden masses! Rise up against your real enemy: the federal government. You have nothing to lose but your chains.

Think About It!       11-16-2011

Sometimes, as life goes on day after day in our country, we fail to realize just how life has changed in the America we knew just a few short years ago. I think it’s kind of like putting a frog in a pan of cold water and then beginning to heat the water on the stove.  We know that if the water was boiling the frog would immediately jump out when he felt the hot water but right now he likes the cold water that he is used to and by the time it slowly heats to a boil he is cooked. Well….the cultural water in our country is slowly rising to a boil, in many areas.

For instance, right now Americans in this country are facing the new “Hate Crimes Law” which President Obama recently signed into law.  The new law will allow Attorney Eric Holder to force the Boy Scouts to allow openly homosexual Scout leaders.  The new law will allow the Federal government to criminally prosecute your pastor for reading Bible passages which teach that the homosexual life style is wrong and stop them from commenting or speaking out publicly on sexual morality. The new law can now be used to force schools, even religious and private schools, to teach the Homosexual Agenda to young children.

Obama and his legal team have now come up with their new “Media Diversity Doctrine.” It doesn’t need congressional approval so Obama has created a “Media Diversity Czar” at the FCC. They can now force News-Talk radio stations to program under the so called “Fairness Doctrine” which is totally anti free-market and a program that never worked 30 years ago. It will, once again require equal time for all radio programming. Schedule an hour of Conservative talk and an hour of Liberal talk must follow.  Hundreds of Christian radio stations will be required to give equal time to Atheists, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians or any other group calling itself a religion, even if they refuse to pay for their program time.

Hundreds of Obama appointed Federal Judges will now feel free to rule like Judge David Hamilton did. He ruled that the words “Jesus” or “Christ” can not be uttered in the Indiana State House but the name of “Allah” can be invoked at any time.

Obama Care is now law and is being used as a weapon to overturn even the most minimal restrictions on abortion – including partial-birth abortion and all prohibitions against taxpayer funding of abortion. Many leaders feel that eventually, Obama Care will force pro-life doctors and hospitals to perform abortions whether they like it or not.

The anti-Christian Left is now working to end Christmas as a national holiday in America. Many national leaders feel this so-called “Christian Controversy” “has become the centerpiece of the cultural war between traditional Americans and secular progressives and that outside of the “War on Terror,” this cultural war is the most important thing happening in the country today.”

Maybe it’s time to pass a national law that totally eliminates any reference to God from every area of American public life.  And who knows? A law like that may not be too far down the road.

Think About It!     JCD   11-23-11