But Seriously

Better to Give: Christmas 2011

I recently moved to a new home.  In the process, I discovered that packing is the primary reason that people hate to move--the second reason is unpacking.

There is nothing like a move to show you that you have too much stuff.

We began packing about 6 weeks before our move date.  The process began at a slow and leisurely pace. We identified things we wanted to give away and we would take a trunk-load to Goodwill, the ARC, or the Springs Rescue Mission as we identified enough to drop off.  The process seemed to be going smoothly until we took a serious look at our basement--the black hole of the house where everything seemed to end up if it was not used daily.

We discovered that we not only had too much stuff, we had shamefully too much stuff and there was no way we would be able to take all of it with us to our new home. To relieve our overstuffed state, we had a garage sale.  We sold a garage full of items--a bed, a treadmill, clothes that no longer fit, books, toys, old video games and movies.  Afterwards, we looked at our belongings: still too much stuff.

We filled a dumpster.  We filled a moving truck.  We still left some stuff behind.

I never want to be owned by that much stuff again.   I have not completely unpacked and I can see that I took too much stuff with me.  Worse, I can see "International Stuff Day," I mean "Christmas" coming around the corner.

Don't get me wrong, I love Christmas.  I love the reason we celebrate--the gift of Salvation through Christ Jesus.  I love parties with friends and family.  I love seeing delight in the eyes of my loved ones.  Christmas isn't the problem, stuff is.

Taking seriously Jesus' exhortation that it is "more blessed to give than to receive," I have decided to celebrate Christmas differently this year.  I want to do something radical and counter-cultural--no, I am not going to protest outside a bank--I also want to do something relevant. Who knows, you may want to join me.

This year for Christmas, I have a single Christmas gift request.  I want my loved ones to donate my gift to Children's Hope Chest.  I want to raise $1,000.00 or more for this ministry.

Children's Hope Chest feeds orphans, and that's good, but that's not all they do.  Much like Compassion International, they have child sponsorships, whereby you can meet the needs of a child in poverty and communicate with the child via letters to instill a sense of hope, but Hopechest does something else that is amazing.  Their operation in Russia actively rescues girls from the sex trade industry.  Do you know what happens to an orphan when they age out of the system in Russia?  They go to the street to look for their own job and housing.  Some of the young girls who age out in Russia are met on the street by men and women who promise them grand jobs over seas, but sell them as sex slaves.  Hopechest not only provides guidance for orphans who age out, they also actually rescue girls from brothels.

Imagine waking up Christmas morning.  Under the tree, you have a few small boxes or envelopes.  Instead of receiving some new sweaters, PJ's, ties, and maybe an electric razor, you open an envelope.  Inside the envelope is a note that tells you that $30.00 was donated in your name to feed a child.  The small box contains a note that says $100.00 was given in your name to get a girl out of a brothel.  $50.00 to support a care-point in Swaziland, $25.00 toward feeding kids in India and on and on it goes.  That's what I want for Christmas this year.  I want to try to raise at least $1,000.00 to save lives--after all, saving people is the reason Jesus came over 2,000 years ago.  Saving people is the reason for Christmas.

 Maybe, this month, you will look around your house and see if you too are "overstuffed."  If so, maybe you want to make this a year where you are more blessed to give than to receive--can I encourage you to request your gifts be given to Hopechest.org like me?  Maybe you have another favorite ministry--how much would you like to raise for them?

Some of my family are concerned that I won't have anything to open that day.  Let me assure you, I will be thrilled to open notes telling me how someone else was helped on my behalf.  I have never celebrated Christmas this way, but I am really excited (more excited than ever as an adult) for Christmas day.  Please, if you plan on giving a gift to me this year, give it through Hopechest and know that you not only brought me joy, you brought joy to someone in poverty too.

8 DIY Health Fixes: Men's Health.com

8 Ways to Ditch Drugs

Text Size

Aggressiveness. Hallucinations. Confusion. Stomach bleeding...Even spoken in the dulcet tones of TV drug hucksters, side effects sound scary. Or at least they should. "Anytime you take a drug, whether it's prescription or over-the-counter, you're accepting a certain amount of risk," says Sandra Kweder, M.D., deputy director of the office of new drugs at the FDA's center for drug evaluation and research. "If you take it regularly, that risk only goes up."

It's not just side effects you should be wary of. Many meds are costly and often aren't as effective as drug-free strategies. "Taking something doesn't always make you as healthy as doing something can," says John Abramson, M.D., a lecturer in health policy at Harvard medical school and the author of Overdosed America. "It's better to try a lifestyle modification first. That way you're actually trying to achieve better health, not just masking symptoms with drugs."

So we rolled up our sleeves and found eight popular medications that our experts say can be most readily dumped in favor of DIY strategies. Read on for a healthier, drug-free you.

via www.menshealth.com

Merry Christmas 2011

Arrests Made for Synthetic Drugs in Bath Salts

Law enforcement officials in St. Tammany Parish have arrested 21 people who allegedly sold synthetic marijuana and cocaine products after they were criminalized this summer. Most of them are owners of gas stations and retail shops.

Four others who are also owners and are accused of committing the same offenses remain at large, Sheriff Jack Strain said at a news conference Wednesday.

"There's no question that they know we're after them," added Strain, whose agency participated in the investigation alongside the Mandeville and Slidell police departments. "We'll continue that pursuit."

In mid-July, a law went into effect banning the sale, manufacture and use of bath salts frequently ingested as substitute cocaine as well as potpourri designed to imitate marijuana. The legislation -- which was in part a reaction to the numerous suicides blamed on, and the severe psychotic side effects produced by, the bath salts -- also made illegal the groups of compounds that go into making those substances. It carries penalties similar to the ones punishing the possession, distribution or use of authentic weed or coke.

via www.nola.com

Click the link to read the whole article. Take note of the list of businesses that are selling these covert drugs and, if you live in the area, do not give them your money.

If you don't live in the area, check out the article to see what these covert drugs look like so you don't accidentally take a bath in synthetic marijuana or synthetic cocaine.

Texting Lingo Every Parent Needs to Know (from FOTF)

Texting is everywhere. It seems that kids can text before they can even spell--but some of those misspelled and nonsense texts are actually codes. The article below describes some of the kinds of codes used in texting and links to a tech dictionary for text abbreviations. I did not copy the whole FOTF article, so click the link at the bottom of the page if you want to read it.

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Assuming your son or daughter has a cell phone, do they text?

 

The Pew Research group recently concluded that most teens prefer texting to talking - with a third of them sending over 100 messages a day.

 

Tolerance for this type of behavior varies by family, of course, but almost no parent would knowingly permit their son or daughter to text crude, lewd or obscene messages.

 

But what about more vague or coded communications?

 

It takes a deft and alert parent to stay up to date on texting lingo, especially since the lexicon is constantly expanding and often doesn't make any logical sense. For example, if your child happens to text "420" to a friend, you better be prepared for a serious talk.  That's because texting "420" is the equivalent of asking if the other person has pot - or wants to get high. Apparently "420" is a universal symbol for the use and appreciation of marijuana.

 

Online tech dictionaries can help get you up to speed (click here), but the proliferation of coded sexual texting is enough to make your head spin.

via www.focusonlinecommunities.com

 

Remembering Echo

Summer is almost over and a lot has changed in our lives.  We left the house where we were robbed and we are in the process of buying a new house to start life in a new place.  We will miss our church family and our friends, but we are enjoying this new beginning.  Sadly, as the summer began, we said goodbye to one of our dogs.  Echo, our chihuahua, suffered from encephalitis and passed away in May.  I would like to tell you what a sweet little dog he was, but in reality, he was a stinker.  He had an attitude and he wanted a lot of attention (don't we all).

We went through a lot with that dog.  He was about 6 months old when we were robbed in our home.  He went from being a very mellow chihuahua to (almost) that twitchy, paranoid chi stereotype.  After the home invasion, we had to watch his diet carefully--he was prone to low blood sugar.  We had him almost 4 years.  It wasn't quite enough.  The encephalitis came on quickly and severly.  Unfortunately, we were unable to save him.

We are sad to lose little Echo.  After the loss, we looked through our pictures to find what we could of him for my son.  I made a slide show of all the pictures and videos I could find.  You can watch it below.

 
I still miss the little guy. 

Jury Finds New Hampshire Man Guilty in Deadly Home Invasion - FoxNews.com

Assistant Attorney General Peter Hinckley displays a photograph of the Cates family while reaching for a machette allegedly used to kill Kimberly Cates and severely injure her daughter, during the first day of Steven Spader's trial Hillsborough Superior Court on Oct. 26, 2010 (AP).

NASHUA, N.H. -- A 21-year-old man who admitted killing a New Hampshire mother and maiming her daughter in a savage machete and knife attack in their home was convicted of murder Friday, after jurors rejected his claim he was insane at the time.

via www.foxnews.com

Like A Condom, The First Amendment Can't Always Protect You - HUMAN EVENTS

Among the criminal laws apparently broken by Assange is 18 U.S.C. 793(e), which provides: 

"Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, (etc. etc.) relating to the national defense, ... (which) the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates (etc. etc) the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same (etc) ... 

"Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both." 

As is evident, merely being in unauthorized possession of classified national security documents that could be used to harm this country and publishing those documents constitutes a felony. 

There's no exception for albinos with webpages -- or "journalists." Journalists are people, too! 

Depending on the facts adduced at trial, there are about a half-dozen other federal laws that might apply to the WikiLeaks document dump, including 18 USC 641, which provides that any person who "receives" or "retains" a "thing of value of the United States" knowing "it to have been embezzled, stolen, purloined or converted" is also guilty of a felony, punishable by up to ten years in prison. 

Classified information is valuable government property. 

via www.humanevents.com

Finally, someone clarifies the issue. Wikileaks' problems have nothing to do with the 1st Amendment and everything to do with the possession and dissemination of government property vital to our national defense.

Frosty Christmas Web

via imgur.com

Why don't I ever see cool stuff like this when I have a camera handy?

Drugs Disguised as Bath Salts

At least one young man in St. Tammany Parish and another in St. Martin Parish committed suicide shortly after getting high from ingesting a synthetic chemical sold as Cloud Nine High Quality Bath Salt and White Dove, law enforcement officials warned Monday.

View full sizeRamon Antonio Vargas, The Times-PicayuneCloud Nine bath salts

A pack of the product costs no more than $20, and some people inject or snort it to experience a euphoria similar to the one associated with the amphetamine known on the streets as "speed." However, the psychotic side effects it produces are unusually severe, St. Tammany District Attorney Walter Reed and Sheriff Jack Strain said during a news conference called Monday to alert the community about the substance.

via www.nola.com

Obama Justice Department Rocked by Investigation Findings

The implications found within the 144 page report issued by the non-partisan U.S. Commission on Civil Rights regarding the investigations into the New Black Panther voter intimidation case from 2008 appears to strongly indicate a cover up initiated by figures within the Obama Department of Justice, and quite possibly the White House itself.  Within the context of this cover up, are found accusations of intimidation and non compliance 

within the Department of Justice throughout the comprehensive investigation.

 

via newsflavor.com

FULL REPORT HERE:

http://www.usccr.gov/NBPH/CommissionInterimReport_11-23-2010.pdf