was on my Sunday morning walk, flipping through the radio and came across a radio preacher who was in the midst of an impassioned sermon.  Caught my attention so I listened in.

He quoted some percentage of families who are currently on government assistance programs – which was the part that caught my ear, as I am a huge fan of families, and feel anything that harms a family must be acted upon.

I believe most hard-working, self-sufficient people who care about their families and self-worth don’t want to be on assistance. I know this because I myself was a recipient for a few months when a contract cancellation caught me unawares. After a few months of pocketburn I filled out the forms and received some aid that I’d been paying years’ worth of taxes to contribute to.

Even though I was fully entitled to the assistance and used it with the right spirit – as a temporary measure to feed my family until I was employed again – I still didn’t feel ‘whole’ again until I was able to get back on my feet. I thank my extended biological family and church family for this help, as the government assistance program was not equipped to help me find the type of work I contract for.

So I have empathy for those who are able to be gainfully employed but have a hard time finding work in an unexpected situation. I was not permanently disabled and had no mental or physical illness which prevented me from joining the ranks of taxpayers. At the time I just had a hard time finding a contract that would pay my bills on a long-tem basis. And I was sweating bullets the whole time, because I had already lost the house and was at risk of having no place to move to very very quickly. And although thankful for government aid, I was also frustrated with the meagre amount available which would certainly not sustain my family in the long run.

I also had a personal taste of how frightening and dis-empowering it is to be dependent upon “the state” for my family’s food. And my wife’s opinion of me shattered as well, casting doubt on her trust in me. It was not a good time for any of us.

So here I was, waiting to hear how this pastor would encourage his listeners and members in joining him to help pull folks off assistance.

Maybe a new church outreach program?

Teaming up with local stores and businesses to set up an internship and training for new skills?

Or, perhaps just setting aside a time of dedicated prayer to reach out to the hearts and minds of those who are under the crushing weight of government assistance’s thumb holding them back from reaching their dreams?

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o, sadly enough, the preacher railed about how inhumane ‘they’ were to be cutting government funding for federal assistance programs.

He never said who ‘they’ were but did spiral into a rant about how it’s the activists’ job to encourage ‘them’ to keep paying for family assistance in these hard times.

So sad that this pastor thinks it’s “someone else’s problem” (i.e. the activists) to make ‘them’ (I assume Congress?) come up with more fake money to pay for a program that is designed to keep people eating slop from the trough when the ranch hands find time to toss it in there.

I’d have hoped the pastor would have been more closely aligned with the word of God to take ownership of this issue and ask himself and his audience, “What can I personally do to help get these folks into a better place? Not starting with a different residence address for the people, but starting with a renewed state of mind and sense of purpose for them?”

The change of income and address will come with the change of heart and mind.

All the pastors I’ve known and loved have had a drive in their heart to find folks who are hurting and help them build the home and life their souls long for. Their churches grew naturally, not because they hungered for a mega-church but because they fostered a congregation that brought hurt and hungry in and helped them become people who themselves turned around to become helpers of men.

We can’t and shouldn’t depend upon any government agency to “give us” education, medicine, housing, or food for our households.  That’s simply asking too much for a system that we think should be “free” from tyranny.

By putting these items in any government agency’s coffer we remove our freedom from tyranny, for then what’s to say the leaders in the agency wouldn’t start holding back or applying funds for these things in ways we don’t deem fit? I think we’re already seeing the effects of that level of control even today.

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e’ll always have needy. That’s part of the human condition.

So the question is not, “How do we eliminate poverty?” – which is unrealistic and leads to ivory-tower thinking – but “Will you join me to help Joe and Jane and their kids get off the system?” – which is concrete and leads to immediate action.

And what am I doing to personally take ownership of “Joe and Jane and their kids”?

Well I have been active for a long time now, and you’re reading something here that continues along this path. I choose not to disclose my involvement with individual organisations or because I think this is something that is 1) between me and my maker and 2) an individual’s calling to follow, so my choices may not be your choices.

For instance, the three hours I’ve spent writing up this page may not be something you’d choose to do. But if even one person reading this is inspired to pick up an idea from here and move on with it, then my time is very well-spent. The best part of this is that I’ll never know who’s been lead by my words, and prefer to keep it that way 🙂

I don’t do this for recognition from my fellow man but as a thankfulness to my God who’s provided so much for my family. Other families would do well to turn their past need into a ministry for others, and this is my driving force here.

What can you do, if you’ve read this far and are interested in empowering people go from needing help to being able to help those in need?

If you are religiously-inclined…

Speak with your leader(s) to see if your organisation has ministry or programs to reach out to the needy. Join in helping whatever way your heart leads you.

Some faiths believe in “missionary outreach” to minister to the hearts and souls of those who are hurting. Reaching out to local city and neighbourhood families is probably one of the most important things a faith-based organisation can do. I feel if a religious community reaches out to provide aid to people across the globe but neglects the needs of those within a 30-mile radius of its physical location, then something’s wrong with the focus of the group.

If your organisation has no program, petition to see who might feel aligned with you to start a new one.

If you aren’t religiously-inclined…

See if there are charitable organisations that help people who are out of work, uneducated, or otherwise just need help finding a way to earn their own income on their own.

Some internet sites exist which allow folks to wish for, and grant wishes for others. This is an interesting – if possibly risky – way to assist directly if one doesn’t trust the leadership of charitable organisations.

Things can be done however where you can directly impact the lives of others and as a result directly teach them they can stand on their feet, on their own, without permanent assistance from any agency or group of people.

Regardless of our attitudes about faith, there is something we can all do.

This is to oppose any government activity that assumes the position of providing funds for, and selecting a family’s farmer, doctor, place to live, or teacher. These actions must be done by the heads of each individual family unit (i.e. whoever runs the show under the roof where the children live) and not by the collective.

It is up to you and me to keep this power out of the hands of oligarchy and into the hands of household leaders, where they can teach the growing men and women they also can have this power as well – but they must be willing to work to attain it and be ready to fight to keep it.

Exactly 8 months ago today my truck’s odometer rolled to 266,666.  That’s pretty impressive.

Today it rolled to 277,777 🙂 more impressive!

Even more impressive: This means that this year I’ve averaged 1,388.875 miles per month.  I’m really happy about this because last year I was averaging between 2,500 and 2,800 miles per month.

This means it’ll take longer for me to reach my million-mile goal for the truck but that’s ok.  Spending $334 a month on fuel is better than $600 a month 🙂

As I get older, with more experience, I see that news is like time.  No, not Time the pretend-news magazine, ‘time’ as in ‘what time is it’ and ‘are we there yet are we there yet are we there yet’.

Attention to news is a relative thing, unique to every  individual, just as the awareness of time is keenly attuned to every one of us, fitted like a fingerprint on our hands.

What’s news to one is noise to another, or even not present at all.  Just as time appears to slow down or speed up for a given person depending upon the circumstances, a news item’s  importance grows and shrinks for a person depending upon the circumstances.

Given this, the “5 w’s” (who, what, when, where, why) of a given event is important only if the eye of the beholder thinks it’s important.

Today’s selection of news has changed drastically  in the lifetimes of those who’ve ever actually used rabbit-ears, so the possibility of finding “important” news has increased to a level that was only dreamt of by science-fiction writers in the days of those telescopic tinny things.

Old TV with rabbit-ear antennae. Actually the TV’s back then had two antennae physically attached to them – one for ‘VHF’ (Very High Frequency’) channels and another for ‘UHF’ (‘Ultra High Frequency’) channels. When one changed the channel, one also had to usually move the antennae around to get a clearer picture. So it was actually a good thing that those TV’s didn’t have remote controls.

Today’s information world means we can choose when, where and what we wish to know about – a big difference from having to wait until 6 and 10 pm to get the dose of TV news, with a newspaper in the morning and possibly in the evening on the way home from work.  With smartphones we can even get news pushed to our pockets as it is being published.

In the days of rabbit-eared TV’s we had radio news – a medium older than TV – which was very close to today’s smartphones with regards to having an omnipresent information channel to hand, but news broadcast was limited to the channel and time restrictions of the broadcasters.  And it wasn’t until the late 1980’s-early 1990’s that we had affordable units that one could actually comfortably carry in a pocket (remember hip-hop 80s-style ‘boom-boxes’, all?).

gnarly dude, totally rad

For radio news, the selection, like TV and print, was limited to the editor’s choice of items, so even though we could tune into an all-news channel on the AM spectrum it was a hit-and-miss effort regarding getting news about our actual interests.  Fr international or long-distance news we either received it filtered through a local radio station physically present in our area, or invest in expensive ham radio equipment if we wanted to listen in to far-away places during real-time coverage.  No, not ham as in bacon, ham as in “amateurish” or “incompetent” (i.e. “ham actor”) – a popular label spread about which seems to be  mainstream media’s attempt to discredit news sources outside of their domain.

One nice thing about Ham Radio culture and followers is that the genre spawns books like “22 Radio and Receiver Projects for the Evil Genius” which was the closest thing we had back then to hacker technology (please see my comments about “Hackers vs ‘Evil Internet Bad Guy'” on my “About The Monkey” page).

So today, we can select news of our choosing – still limited within the scope of the publisher and presenting medium and technology, but as close as we can get to actually being in a given place an time when an event occurs.  That’s a very powerful thing for news consumers and very scary for news hunter-gatherers whose job it is to grab attention away from ‘puter and mobile device screens.

If you’re interested at all about who and what is controlling information presented as ‘news’ in the popular media outlets, the article I’m linking to, and the site it is based from is a very good source for this. type of information  It’s not sensationalistic or conspiratorial – rather, it’s well thought-out and covers a lot of ground.

I especially like the concept presented in the article relating to a possible future of news collection and dispersion:

What may be more likely is that a new ecosystem could spring out of current networks of professional and amateur news organizations, using the cheap or free infrastructure of the Internet to create traction.

Tom Glaisyer, a Knight Media Policy Fellow at the New America Foundation, for example, envisions the emergence of a connected world of public service publishing based around libraries, community groups, and journalism schools, many of whom are already active participants in publishing to local communities. Such a vision relies on the idea that the majority of newsgathering will fall to more dispersed sources, some of them professional journalists and many of them not. “These will be new information institutions, and look very different from what we had in the past,” says Glaisyer. Context and analysis might as easily come from experts in the field publishing their own material as from news organizations.

Read more here at the original link from the Columbia Journalism Review, entitled “Signal and Noise”, written by Emily Bell: http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/signal_and_noise.php?page=1

Ah haha the King is no more.  And a good thing, too.

Given everyone’s visceral response to the Creepster, I can only imagine the concept was sold to Burger King powers-that-be-signing-contracts at a very very high level.  And those contracts were probably legally binding for a set period of time.

That’s the only reason I can think of as to why Plastic Vouyeurman has been around this long 🙂

It’s not just me who thinks this de-throning was a good thing – at the links below are a collection of

• more news about this and
• an editorial from the Atlantic

But a word of support (sort of) here:

• an editorial from TheStreet.com

I’m not a fan of Christine O’Donnell.  Neither am I a detractor.  I simply haven’t taken the time to find out about her.

However, a story that came across my news stream got my attention.  The news source was rather sensationalistic, stating that she’d burst off an interview with Piers Morgan on 17-Aug-2011, upset by the interviewer’s sexually-focused questions.  I did some searches to get some better (i.e. less emotional) sources of information and came across a follow-up interview.

If one watches the follow-up interview (linked to below) , one would see there was no emotional outburst and rushing off the set, but a rather professional response to someone who has no intent of staying on point.

When she asked the host if he didn’t think he was being a “a little rude”, and the subsequent dialogue between them, I saw no tantrum-throwing and certainly no “storming off the set” in the closure of the original interview.

Particularly telling is the question she asks of the host, (and I’m directly quoting) “Well, don’t you think that if you’re a host, if I say, ‘This is what I want to talk about’, that is what we should address? ”

He pauses, then responds, “Umm, not really, no”.

It was at THAT point she knew it was time to go – not because she wanted to avoid answering a particular question, but because she knew she had been baited-and-switched.

Granted, she knew who she was dealing with when she went into the interview, which is probably why she DIDN’T have an emotional outburst but responded firmly and quickly.  Kudos to her, regardless of her political stance.

I’d have walked out as well, particularly if it was true – as she states in the follow-up interview – that he was overrunning the time slot by continuing to stray off-target and causing her to be late for an already-booked meeting.

http://www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/news/christine-odonnell-says-cnns-piers-morgan-would-not-stop-trying-to-talk-about-sex-081811