Life on Snow Hill

Everybody around the world knows who he was. He was a very popular entertainer and people around the world loved him. He had a lot of accomplishments, and all of the news media are talking about how great of a person he was and how much they will miss him. It would be comical if it wasn’t so serious, but everywhere I look, everyone is saying ‘rest in peace’.

Nowhere in Jackson’s life can I find that he ever came to know Christ. I won’t go so far as to say he lived completely for himself because he gave to charities and such, but even some of that was pretty controversial. What I will say is that he did nothing for the cause of Christ. According to my Bible, and according to his testimony, he is far from Heaven.

Hell is real. It is hot. Everything Jackson did here was temporal. Nothing lasted. Nothing he did will help him. Nothing. People will say that his influence lives on, and his spirit lives on in his music, etc. I don’t deny that. But it still will not help him. It will not help you, either.

Everyone, if all you live for is to satisfy the flesh, whether it be with music or anything else, it is all temporal. It has no lasting eternal benefit. I’m not against having fun, but if you’ve never been saved, you’ll end up with the same fate as this ‘great’ person.

If you are saved, our first priority ought to be to please God. I can’t think of much of anything about this person that pleased God. Especially his music.

I expect harsh comments, and will only censor vulgar or otherwise filthy language. Otherwise you may speak your mind. I reserve the right, however, to cut it off at any time. It’s my blog, my rules.

As much as I dislike him, he is the president of this great country. Because it is still a free country, and freedoms that I have are still protected, I’m going to voice my opinion.

Barack Hussein Obama doesn’t have the guts to stand up and be what he should be, and as elected, is supposed to be. Instead, he blames all of his problems on former president Bush. Now, I’m not going to get into the debate about whether or not Obama actually inherited problems from Bush. I wasn’t pleased with everything about Bush. I’ll leave it all at that.

However, nearly 5 months into the presidency, Obama is still blaming everything on Bush. Let’s recap a little bit, first looking at unemployment rates as an example.

During the first part of Bush’s presidency, unemployment was rising, and topped out at 6.5% in early 2003. Since then, it has gone down, bottoming out at 4.1% in October, 2006. Since January, 2007, the rate has been on a climb. Hmm…Isn’t that about the time when Democrats took over Congress? When Obama took office in January, 2009, unemployment was at 8.5%. For the month of May, it is at 9.1%.

Obama said earlier this year when he was pitching his stimulus package that if it wasn’t passed immediately that crisis would turn to catastrophe, the recession would last longer, millions more jobs would be lost and businesses would close.

That’s happened. But wait, wasn’t that stimulus package passed? It didn’t boost the economy, it made things worse. And he’s still blaming Bush. Man up, Obama.

Next up, Chrysler. Obama’s administration forced bankruptcy on them. Chrysler had made a deal with the UAW to freeze wages, promise no strikes and a few other things to save money and survive as a corporation. But no, they wouldn’t hear of it. Bankruptcy was demanded. A deal with Fiat was demanded. Chrysler wanted no part of it, but they were forced by our government.

Next up is healthcare. Obama is saying the same thing again – if we don’t act now, it’s gonna get real bad! Just like the stimulus package has rescued our economy from the pits of despair (Oh, wait. That was the fuzzy warm dreams the Obama supports had last November), and how our government has ruined social security, they’re going to save all of us from the insanely high healthcare costs. (Can you sense my sarcastic tone? It’s there in case you couldn’t tell.)

Imagine this – a government that controls healthcare. Say goodbye to most of the freedoms you enjoy today. Whatever the government decides is ‘risky behavior’, we will be banned from or our healthcare costs will be raised significantly. They’ll be telling us what kind of car we can drive, how far we can drive, what we can eat, and who knows what else. Do you jog frequently? Oops, might sprain an ankle – your rates go up. Do you eat out at restaurants? Oh, they use the wrong kind of oil – your rates go up. The businesses that will be mandated to provide this healthcare will be forced to fire people to save money and remain in business, contributing even more to the growing unemployment rate. By the way, the Obama administration saved or created 150,000 jobs over the last 100 days. I guess that would be cool, except there have been over 2 million jobs actually lost during that time.

Our government has already taken over a company (GM) and sold part of it to China. I’m anxious to see what all Obama and his administration can get their hands on before their time is up.

I haven’t even gotten into moral things like abortion and religious tolerance. Even without that, what I’ve talked about in this post sickens me to think Americans actually wanted this trash. I suppose you all still blame Bush too? Of course, he did make Katrina hit New Orleans. I forgot.

Today Becky and I are in Gatlinburg, snowed in with some of the most beautiful snow I’ve seen in a long time. We’ve stayed in our room in the resort and just taken it easy today and kept warm. All that was on TV of course was the presidential inauguration.

It was amazing the disrespect the media gave to President Bush and the praise they gave to our new communist president. Is that what I’m doing now in reverse? Maybe, but I am not a journalist and have appropriatly labeled this post as an opinion.

Obama talks well and promises several good things. I’m just leary of how he plans to accomplish those things. Will he actually uphold and protect the Constitution as he has sworn to do? Or will he continue to tear it down as he has already proven himself to do? Time will tell. Will I continue to have the freedom to write and say whatever I want, or will that be taken away from me as has been done in other countries? Time will tell.

There are other things I’d like to write here, but they would be nothing but controversial, and I’m on vacation and am not in the mood. Maybe when I get back I’ll say what I really think.

This is a day that unfortunately goes unnoticed by many.  I just wanted to try to remind you, my loyal readers, to thank a veteran today.

You see, if it weren’t for our veterans, we wouldn’t enjoy many of the freedoms that we have today.  When our forefathers signed the Declaration of Independence, they began that quest for true freedom.  They paid a great price for it.

Our veterans have fought, bled and died, and have kept us a free and sovreign nation.  Had those soldiers not fought, we would no longer rule ourselves as a nation.  There’s no way of knowing which nation might occupy our land and rule over us had our soldiers not fought.  There’s no way of knowing which of our freedoms would be stripped from us.

I personally have never served in the armed forces.  Some of you may hold that against me, and that’s ok.  Others of you know that I have said that if I was ever drafted that I would go willingly.  Regardless, I am truly thankful for those who have served, both voluntarily and those who were drafted.

Tell a veteran thank you today.

I hadn’t thought much about this until my dad brought it up yesterday.  Lots of people world-wide are calling Obama the Messiah.  I did a quick little search which turned up page after page, news articles and blogs about him being the Messiah.  Just to be fair, I did the same search with Bush.  A few turned up, but not nearly as many.

I also found references to him and the ‘Promised Land’.

People view this man as a god.  They look at him as the answer to all of their problems.  And with them already calling him the ‘Messiah’ (which literally means ‘The Anointed One’), they’re just as ready as ever to accept the antichrist.

Am I saying that Obama is the antichrist?  No, but it isn’t a totally absurd idea either.  Either way, the people of this world are ready.  They will blindly follow the man that sets himself up as the antichrist, much as they are blindly following Obama.

You may ask why I say people are blindly following him now?  People have to be blind to not be able to see what kind of man this is.  I’ve talked about several different things that Obama has promised to do, which will inevitably make it even tougher for the common American family to make ends meet.  If he keeps those promises, he will hasten the moral demise of this country.  I’ll stop there before I get too fired up again…  If you haven’t already, you can look at some of my previous posts about Obama to get a feel for what I’m talking about.

Some of you may say I’m speaking prematurely about people blindly following him, since he isn’t behind the desk of the Oval Office yet.  Let’s watch the approval ratings during his presidency and see if I’m not right.  I hope I’m wrong…

I will concede that the majority of Americans wanted this piece of trash in the White House.  I will also say, with all confidence, that the majority of Americans have turned far, far away from God.  This nation is one that has turned her back on God for years, and now she is about to reap the harvest.

Here is what Americans have done.  They have elected a president who is anti-American, and who:

• Promises to negotiate with terrorists
• Promises to send hard-working Americans’ money to other people who will not work
• Promises to bankrupt the coal industry and skyrocket Americans’ utility bills
• Promises to keep killing innocent babies, born or unborn
• Promises to disarm them as much as he can

I could go on, but it somehow feels pointless.  Nobody cared about these things before the election – why should they now?  Does anyone care about freedom any more?

I think I’ve been pretty open about the fact that I can’t stand the muslim trash, Hussein Obama.  I’ve also been pretty open about the fact that McCain also was never my choice. (A possibility to vote for him as a vote “against” Obama, sure, but never my choice who I wanted for president.  My vote was not cast for McCain, for the record.)  I believe with all my heart that I voted for the right man for the job.  Did he have a chance?  No.  But my hands are clean and my conscience clear.  Don’t come running to me when your president doesn’t turn out to be what you ‘hoped’ he’d be on his platform of ‘change’.  I told you he was no good.

It’s time to get out and exercise our most important right as free individuals in this great country.  A lot of you may have already exercised that right through early voting – good for you!  For the rest of us, we must exercise that right.

Each election seems to become more important than the last, and this one is no different.  It may be even more important on a larger scale, just because of what is at stake.

Now, I’ll say up front that if people get nasty in the comments (if any comments are left in the first place), they’ll be turned off.  I won’t tolerate that here.  That being said, most of you, my loyal readers, probably line up with what I believe pretty well, so we probably won’t have a huge problem with that.  To the rest of you who may have found this post through a search engine, you’ve been warned.

I am whole heartedly, 100% against Barack Hussein Obama.  Some will call me racist just because I am against him.  Some will call me a religious bigot because I’ll say that he is a Muslim.

In a nutshell, here is why I am against this sorry excuse for a human:

• He is all for killing innocent babies.  Not only during pregnancy, but even after a baby is born alive after an attempted abortion.  That is infanticide.
• He, at the very least, has socialist tendencies.  He will redistribute the income of the American people, and promote laziness as a byproduct of that.  He has also said that he will place such restrictions on the coal industry with the purpose of bankrupting it because he is a tree hugger.  This would, in his own words, “necessarily skyrocket electric bills.”
• He is anti-2nd Amendment.  He may talk ‘pretty’ about it, and make himself sound like he’ll back the 2nd Amendment, but any time anti-gun legislation has come up, he has voted against gun owners.  If he’ll restrict our 2nd Amendment rights, that opens the doors for him to restrict other rights without opposition.  An example of this is that he kicked all of the reporters for papers who endorsed McCain over him off his plane.  He wouldn’t even let them report on the campaign at all without getting the information second-hand.

In short, he’ll begin taking away our freedoms.

Now, I’m not for McCain, either.  He isn’t as 2nd Amendment friendly as I’d like him to be.  He is, however, against abortion.  He is for capitalism.  There are several things that I don’t agree with about him, however, at the same time.

Here is my conundrum.  I voted for Bush.  Twice.  He was better than the alternatives, for sure, but I’m disappointed in a lot of the things he’s done.  I don’t want to experience that same disappointment with McCain, and I’m sure that I will if I vote for him.

If, however, I vote for an independent candidate, that is, as far as the outcome is concerned, the same as voting for Obama.

So, do I put in a vote “against” Obama, or do I put in a vote “for” someone else that lines up with my belief system more?  It is a tough choice for me.  I honestly don’t know of anyone else I can really vote “for” without writing someone in, and that would be even more of a vote for Obama.

See, the problem with voting for an Independent or a write-in is that 99.9% of those who are against McCain, are for Obama.  So that leaves those who could potentially vote for McCain.  If the rest of the votes against Obama are spread out among several candidates, Obama will have the majority.

So, again, do I put a vote in “for” someone I agree more with, and have a clear conscience no matter who gets in, or do I put in a vote “against” Obama in an attempt to simply keep him out of office in hopes for a better America?

If you live in East Tennessee, you’ve heard by now of the shooting at Knoxville Center Mall.  It makes the 3rd shooting in the Knoxville Center Mall in the last year, and the 3rd deadly shooting in the Knoxville area in the past year.

At the very least, it is becoming obvious that violent crime is becoming more common in East Tennessee.  It’s a sad, but true fact.

The media is already asking people in the area how much ’security’ they are willing to put up with in public places.  They’re not coming out and saying it, but they are implying measures such as metal detectors and searches in public areas, much like the security checkpoing in an airport.

What is the answer?  To me, it is simply to continue to allow private citizens the right to protect themselves with arms.  I may sound cold-hearted when I say this, but the fact is that this store employee chose to risk his own life by not taking the necessary steps to be able to defend it.

Others say it’s to abolish weapons altogether.  We see how well that worked in the UK – all of the law-abiding citizens are defenseless now to the violent crime that is still on the increase.

I’m not promoting vigilanteism (is that even a word?), but I am certainly promoting the idea that each individual is given the responsibility and has the right to protect his or her own life and the lives of his or her children.

There isn’t really much I can say about the events of September 11, 2001 that hasn’t already been said time and time again.  I will say, however, that in my 27 years of my time here on earth, that was the most horrific day of my life.  I was nowhere near New York, DC or Pennsylvania when those jets went down, but the mere idea of our country being under attack was unheard of to me until that day.  Sure, I’d seen the Oklahoma City bombing, and the deal with the bomb at the Atlanta Olympic games, but this was the largest scale concerted effort of anyone launching an attack on my country in my lifetime.

I still remember the morning it all happened.  I remember the faces of the people around me, and the shock and disbelief they portrayed.  I remember the fear and panic that set in on everybody that day.  I remember how everything seemed to just stop in this country, and focus on this event.

Those terrorists got what they wanted that day (Well, except for their 72 virgins or however many it was their god promised them), but they haven’t seen the last of us…

As most (if not all) of you know, there was some fairly heated discussion on a recent post I wrote about the Knoxville Church Shooting.  It made me think of this cartoon that I saw a while back, found again on this website (to give some credit – sadly I’m not sure where it came from originally).   –edit – Thanks to Hunter in the comments below, the image comes from http://xkcd.com/386/

In my younger days I used to debate, argue and all out fight sometimes over different things on the internet, whether it was on a blog, message board or other interactive communication platform.  As a lot of us know now, nothing productive ever comes of it.  Most people are there to simply argue, whether they actually believe what they’re saying or not.  I whole-heartedly believe there are a lot of people out there just to argue for the sake of arguing – nothing more.  They simply take the other side of an issue just for the fun of being controversial.

Sometimes this is a healthy thing – it can force people to fully think about things they’re saying, or to back up why they believe what they do.  Honestly that is one of the more helpful things I learned from never-ending flame-wars.  But again, for the most part (and this is the biggest lesson I learned) these things are just that – a never-ending flame-war.  Nobody wins, everybody loses.

I got sucked into it in the aforementioned post.  I didn’t intend for it to turn into an argument, but I sort of expected it to, if that makes sense.  In other words, I wasn’t going to let the possibility of it stop me from speaking my mind and saying what I believe.  But I guess that’s how they all start, huh?