lol wednesday

A great Titus 2 audio study

My number 1 goal as a christian is to do what God wants me to do.  God definantly has a plan for each of us but he also has instructions for women and men specifically.  One great book in the bible is Titus and specifically for women Titus 2.

Here is a audio bible study on it that is great for me.  Sometimes I listen to it every day!  It covers so much for older women and younger women and what Gods says for us.  It encourages me and reminds my of what my job is.


http://www.calvary-tricities.org/audio/titus/Tit005ch2a%20%20WE110707.mp3

The Hope Chest-Preparing Daughters for Marriage

There was a time that young girls were encouraged to dream and prepare for life as an adult.  Girls made linens blankets and collected the items they would need to set up their households when they married.    Adulthood was something to look forward to not to be avoided at all costs like people today seem to feel.

But why have girls given up on the precious tradition of the hope chest?  Or more accurately why have mothers stopped teaching there daughters to prepare for marriage?  Well I think there are two reasons for it.  The main reason is the feminist movement.  That's when you see the abrupt end of the hope chest in America.  Girls were told they don't need men or children.  That being a wife and mother was tantamount to slavery and only stupid women would actually want to be a homemaker or even consider getting married.  Still with all that poisonous propaganda women and men still get married and almost all American women have children.  Even some of the most strident of the feminist movement have ended up married.  So why don't we just admit the reality here that most of our daughters are going to get married and have children?

The other reason is political correctness.  Many people don't want to seem to encourage their daughters to marriage because that would just be horrible if they didn't chose to marry or have children!  Gasp!  How horrible! How judgmental!   And we wouldn't want to teach our daughters that there are real personality traits you should avoid in a marriage partner if you would like a happy life.  Most women my age and younger have never had a real conversation with their mother or father on preparing for married life.  This is a huge problem in our country when you look at the horrifically high divorce rates in America.  Even these self congratulating politically correct people would never say that they think their own divorces were fun or that if they could change the past they would not have married the person they ended up divorcing.


.  We should be bringing back the hope chest because it encourages our daughters to think about marriage and adulthood in a logical way.  It makes them envision what they actually want marriage to be like and let me tell you I have had some amazing conversations with my eldest daughter about picking a husband and what to look for in a life partner.  I think these are the most important things I can teach my children because guess what? Your an adult most of your life and I want my children to be prepared for that.  And the person you marry will be a huge factor in your future happiness.

My eldest daughter is almost 15 and about a year ago we started preparing her hope chest.  She made a list of all the things she would need to set up a household with my guidance. These times have led to some amazing talks about marriage and adulthood.   Now every weekend when I go yardsaling she comes along, whereas before she never wanted to, and she looks for items on her list.  She is excited to find amazing deals on cookware like Pyrex and corning ware and she is looking for new linens and cooking utensils.  I told her that it would be great if she is wealthy when she sets up her own house but most likely she will be like most young people and if not exactly poor not well off either.  So she will not be able to afford to go out and buy name brand nice things from the store.  But at yard sales you can get these things in new condition for a few bucks or less!

So slowly she is building up her hope chest and talking to me about life and growing up. It reminds me of something my father often said.  I'm not raising children I'm raising future adults, so my priority is to give them the skills to be successful in life.

lol wednesday

The Boys We Need

The other day I was paging through a 100 year old school music book looking at the songs they used to teach children when I came across one titled The Boys We Need.  This book was compiled before the illness of political correctness infected our nation and is blunt in its description of it's purpose.

Excerpt from the Preface:

These songs, which are of an exceptionally fine character, are of every description -- patriotic, humorous, ethical, instructive and devotional-- but are on a high moral plane.

This unabashed intention to instruct children on strong morals is a shock for those of us raised in the laze fare style that predominates parenting today.  It is seen as mean and judgemental to teach your children that there is a right and wrong way to behave.  And now we are witnessing the fruits of that philosophy come to harvest as young adults who have no sense of morality leave home and begin to operate in the world.  Violence, teenage sex, cruelty, and in your face vulgarity are now not just a fringe element in our society but an accepted norm.

I have watched my friends and peers grow up without any direction on what is the right way to live.  They struggled to figure out life and most ended up spiraling down into sad lives full of drugs, alcohol, and serial relationships.  All these destructive behaviors started in  middle and high school and were passed off by parents who just didn't care or excused the forming habits as "experimentation".  What absolutely deadly experiments some parents let their children explore!  If you suggested to these parents to hand their 14 year old a loaded gun they would be aghast.  But trying drugs/alcohol/sex at young ages is just part of growing up.

My concern is that these broken people are then passing their brokenness down to the inevitable children they give birth to.  These precious babies with all the potential in the world are raised in homes where they never know the joy of a fathers unconditional love or the security of a peaceful mommy.  Instead mommy is frazzled from working all day and then coming home to needy kids.  Daddy is who knows where.  The new live in boyfriend couldn't possible care less about these innocent minds that absorb every sad example of our new society. 

When I go out and observe men near my age or younger I notice that they dress like they are still children or worse like they are homeless.  Sideways hats, pants that show their underwear, loose dirty shirts.  Their hair is intentionally cut to look as if they are too poor to go to the barber and haven't bothered bathing in a week.  They use cursewords every five seconds and cultivate an attitude of annoyance with life.  I have had several men tell me that they don't want to grow up just yet. They want to be kids.  These guys think they are being clever but to me it just sounds sad for a 35 year old man to still want to be a teenager.  Adulthood used to be something to look forward to.  Now its something to be avoided and replaced with teenage dramas and attitudes.

This is especially destructive to our sons.  Most are not raised with their father in the home and never know what it is to be a man.  Their example of manhood is what they see in the media.  Men who are childish, violent, disrespectful of women and children, and view life as nothing more than the next sexual conquest.  And yet we then expect our sons to turn out any differently than what we allow them to see?

And then our sons are taught that boys and men are stupid and that women are so much smarter, kind, and mature. Watch any commercial and see the overweight stupid man bungling up life who must be rescued by well dressed skinny attractive women.  Yet you never see a commercial showing the reverse.  The message is clear, men should be nothing more than overgrown children that need constant reprimands.  Our cultures disrespect of boys and men has gotten so bad that it is now OK to outright attack them.  Shirts abound that state things like "boys are stupid"  "girls are clever, boys whatever"  "Throw rocks at boys" and on and on.  What would happen if boys started wearing shirts that said "throw rocks at girls"?  Their would be a firestorm of how that will lead to the abuse to girls and the t-shirt manufacturer would be sued out of existence.

If my  innocent sons watch these shows or read these shirts what will they think?  Will they view women and girls as friends that they should protect and show respect to?  Or do they see them as shrewish mean people who really despise what it means to be a man?

How can we expect our children to grow into functioning adults when we allow them to be saturated in a society that embraces every degradation to the human condition?  Our children are giving to us to teach.  So what are we teaching them?  Read the song and imagine what kind of parenting it takes to teach a boy to be what is needed.

The Boys We Need

Here's to the boy who's not afraid to do his share of work
Who never is by toil dismayed and never tries to shirk
The boy whose heart is brave to meet the lions in his way
Who's not discouraged by defeat but tries another day
The boy who always means to do the very best he can
He always keeps the right in view and aims to be a man
All honor to the boy who is a man at heart we say
Whose legend on his shield is this: Right always wins the day!

Refrain:

Such boys as these will grow to be the men whose hands will guide
The future of the land and we shall speak their names with pride!

What kind of boys are we giving to the future?

Economic Alert: If You’re Not Worried Yet…You Should Be

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/economic-alert-if-you%E2%80%99re-not-worried-yet%E2%80%A6you-should-be

For the past four years I have been covering the progression of the global economic crisis with an emphasis on the debilitating effects it has had on the American financial system.  Only once before have I ever issued an economic alert, and this was at the onset of the very first credit downgrade in U.S. history by S&P.  I do not take the word “alert” lightly.  Since 2008 we have seen a cycle of events that have severely weakened our country’s foundation, but each event has then been followed by a lull, sometimes 4 to 6 months at a stretch, which seems to disarm the public, drawing them back into apathy and complacency.  The calm moments before each passing storm give Americans a false sense of hope that our capsized fiscal vessel will somehow right itself if we just hold on a little longer...

I don’t have to tell most people within the Liberty Movement that this is not going to happen.  Unfortunately, there are many out there who do not share our awareness of the situation.   Debt implosions and currency devaluation NEVER simply “fade away”; they are always followed by extreme social and political strife that tends to sully the doorsteps of almost every individual and family.  The notion that we can coast through such a tempest unscathed is an insane idea, filled with a dangerous potential for sour regrets.

There are some people who also believe that the private Federal Reserve with the Treasury in tow has the ability to prolong the worst symptoms of the collapse indefinitely, or at least, until they have long since kicked the bucket and don’t have to worry about it anymore (the ‘pay-it forward to our grandkids’ crowd) .  I can say with 100% certainty that most of us will live to see the climax of the breakdown, and that this breakdown is about to enter a more precarious state before the end of this year.  You can only stretch a sun-boiled rubber band so far before it snaps completely, and America’s financial elasticity has long been melted away.

A pummeling hailstorm of news items and international developments have made the first half of 2012 almost impossible to track and analyze.  The frequency at which negative information has surfaced is almost dizzying.  However, a pattern and a recognizable motion are beginning to take shape, and, I believe, a loose timeline is beginning to form. 

At the end of January, I covered the incredible nosedive of the Baltic Dry Index (a measure of global shipping rates that signals a fall in global demand) to historic lows.  I pointed out the tendency of stocks and the general economy to crash around 8 months (sometimes a little longer) after the BDI makes such a dramatic downturn.  Mainstream analysts, of course, attributed the fall to an “overproduction of ships”, which is the same exact excuse they used when the BDI collapsed back in 2008 just before the derivatives bubble burst.  It would seem that the cable TV talking heads were wrong yet again, as the international market facade quickly evaporates right in line with the BDI’s almost prophetic knack for calling an economic derailment in advance.

Here are some of the most important reasons why every American should be prepared for much harder days, especially before the end of 2012:

The European Union Is Officially Dead In The Water

Stick a fork in er’, the EU is done!  We are talking about full scale dismantlement, likely followed by a reformation of core nations and multiple collapse scenarios of peripheral countries.  The writing is all over the wall in the wake of the latest election results in Greece and France, where, as alternative researchers have been predicting for some time, the battle between the government spending crowd and proponents of austerity has reached a fever pitch. 

The Greeks and the French are royally pissed over draconian cuts in public programs and the destruction of pensions which have been a mainstay of their economies for quite some time.  They are also furious over being sold off like collateral to the IMF and World Bank.  Rightly so.  Like the American taxpayer, the taxpayers of floundering EU nations are wrongly being held responsible for the financial mismanagement and fraud of their governments and global banks which have remained untouched and unpunished for their trespasses.  The problem is, the voters of both countries are signing on to the socialist/quasi-communist bandwagon in response.  In Greece, the Left Coalition Party, a splinter group of the traditional communist party, has now taken a primary position of power:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/07/us-greece-idUSBRE8440DG20120507

In France, voters have elected socialist Francois Hollande (a Bilderberg attendee), whose latest promise is to spend France into recovery through his “pro-growth agenda”:

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/french-president-elect-hollande-won-t-difficult-obama-195617064.html

I have no doubt that the elections of the EU are as manipulated by elitists as they are here in the U.S., and I’m sure false paradigms abound.  Have Europeans forgotten that it was overt government spending that set them on the path to calamity in the first place?  Or, are they like Americans; just desperate for any change in the ranks of leadership?  One would think that they would take note of the problems here in our country and realize that electing a socialist to replace another socialist is no way out of economic hardship.

Former officials like Nicolas Sarkozy may have claimed to be distanced from the socialist ideal, but, as with all globalist puppets, their actions did not match their rhetoric, and they have always supported policies of centralization and big government.  The French and the Greeks have essentially replaced closet collectivists with outspoken collectivists, and will see NO relief from the crisis in the Euro-zone as a result of the political reordering.  In fact, the stage has now been set for a volatile chain of dominos.  Germany, which is the only economy left holding the EU together, has been unyielding on austerity cuts.  A conflict between France and Germany is now inevitable.  Neither will compromise their position, and I can see no other eventual result than a reexamination and perhaps abandonment of the EU charter. 

How does this affect America?  Being that international banks and corporations have forced our countries into interdependency through the engineered chicanery of globalization, any collapse in Europe is going to strike hard around the world, but the worst will hit the U.S. and China.  Which is probably why China is disengaging trade away from the U.S. and the EU and focusing on other developing nations:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/08/us-china-economy-trade-idUSBRE84702N20120508

If you thought the Greek rollercoaster was a pain in the neck for investment markets, just wait until the whole of the EU is in a shambles! 

Spain is next in line, with a 25% official unemployment rate and a massive black market economy forming.  As I have been saying for years now, when governments disrupt the financial survival of the people, they WILL form their own alternatives, including black markets and barter markets.  It is about survival.  The Spanish government does not care much for these alternatives, though, and has now banned cash transaction over 2500 euros in a futile attempt to squeeze taxes out of the populace through digitally tracked payment methods:

http://thedailybell.com/3814/Spain-Bans-Cash

Another major concern for Americans is the fact that Europeans are inching towards an abandonment of the dollar.  Francois Hollande has openly called for an end to the dollar’s world reserve status, and with a majority backing of the French people, he could easily make this happen, at least where France is concerned.  All it takes is for a few key countries to publically and completely drop the Greenback and the dollar’s reputation as a safe haven investment will be quashed.  This could very well happen before 2012 is over.

QE3 Is The End

Here is the bottom line; U.S. growth is a theater of shadows.  There has been no progress, no recovery, only the misrepresentation of statistics.  Millions of Americans have fallen off unemployment rolls because they have been jobless for too long, which lowers the unemployment rate, but does not change the fact that they are still without work.  Durable goods orders are dropping like an avalanche.  U.S. credit has been lowered yet again by rating agency Egan-Jones.  With China making bilateral trade deals in numerous countries on the condition that the dollar be dropped as the primary purchasing mechanism, and with the EU turning to economic mulch, the currency’s safety is nonexistent.  Traditional investors who cling to the idea that a falling Euro spells dollar strength will be sorely disappointed when the currency is suddenly being rejected in international currency markets.

The Federal Reserve has already stated that any signs of “relapse” into recession (the recession that we never left) will be met with all options on the table, including QE3:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/12/us-usa-fed-idUSBRE83B1KD20120412

I believe that QE3 will probably be announced this year (due in large part to trauma from Europe), and, that this will trigger a mass movement by foreign nations to drop the dollar as the world reserve.  QE3 will be the straw that broke the camel.  How exactly this will play out socially and politically, I do not know (I could take a good guess though).  But, the technical results are predictable.  The Fed will respond to the lack of treasury purchases by ramping up fiat printing in order to cover the ever increasing costs of the government machine.  The Greenback will immediately lose a large portion of its value, at least in terms of imported goods, causing inflation in prices.  Oil and energy prices will skyrocket if OPEC follows suit (which they will, though the Saudis may still honor dollars for a time).  Doing any traditional business will become nearly impossible, and price inflation will dominate the lives and the minds of average unprepared citizens.            

The amount of time that it will take for these difficulties to unfold is also not clear.  We are operating in uncharted territory, and dealing with a collapse scenario on a truly planetary scale.  My best advice is to assume that the avalanche will move fast.

While markets in our country have seen only mild disruptions so far this year, their solidity is predicated on a host of props and costume pieces, any one of which could pull the rug out from under America’s suspension of disbelief if it strays but a little from the illusion.  As long as the dollar holds, stocks can be infused with bailout juice through major banks.  So can major companies and even desperate state governments on the verge of bankruptcy.  The Dow will remain relatively friendly, and day traders and the public will remain happy.  As soon as the dollar comes into question, all bets are off…

Does This Mean Doom, Or Just Another Bad Day?

The real beginning of today’s collapse is tied to the events of 2008.  The pace of it has been deceptive, but also, in a way, it is a gift.  Over the past four years, I have personally seen the awakening of thousands of people that may have never had the chance if the system had gone into full spectrum breakdown right away.  The question now is, how much longer can the U.S. wobble along on one wheel?  In my view, and from the evidence I see in markets at the moment, not much longer. 

It is hard to set aside any expectations that the next leg down will be easy to digest for the populace.  The reality of our predicament is starting to hit home.  All the tax return checks have been spent.  The credit cards have been maxed.  The new cars have been sold off and traded in for ghetto-mobiles.  The good jobs have been replaced with Taco Bell slavery.  A trip to see The Avengers is now the family vacation.  And, the distractions of reality TV just aren’t buttering our bread anymore.  It’s the little things at first that really signal the financial mood of a society, as well as reveal the more vital and looming issues just over the horizon.

All indicators suggest that this year will be unlike any other before.  In 2008, we saw the first trigger events for the collapse.  In 2008/2009, we saw the creation of the bailout culture, setting the stage for inflation and dollar disintegration.  In 2010, we saw the first bilateral trade deal cutting out the dollar between China and Russia, which is now the template for trade deals all over the globe.  In 2011, we saw the first downgrade of the U.S. credit rating and the crisis in the EU become epidemic.  In 2012, I see not just another difficulty to add to the mountain, but a culmination of all these detriments to produce something entirely new; a vast and subversive realignment forcing many of us to take a more aggressive stance in the fight for an economically and socially free America.

Financial disasters have always been a convenient catalyst for a host of even more frightening obstacles, including civil unrest, and blatant totalitarianism.  This is the cusp.  It is one of those moments that people of later generations read about in awe, and sometimes horror.  The “doom” is not in the event, but in the response.  What we make of the days approaching determines the darkness that they cast upon the future.  It is a test.  It is not something to be dreaded.  It is something to be seized upon, and dealt with, as great men and women before us have done.  At the very least, we know that it is coming.  That, in itself, could well seal our success…

Autumn Leaves - Harp Guitar

I found this lovely peice and was facinated by the intrument. I is so soothing after a day of celebration.