~ Vision-4-Freedom ~
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~ Vision-4-Freedom ~
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UPDATE: Be thankful that you are free !
( The first Thanksgiving by:Jean Louis Gerome Ferris ) ------------------------------- Posted by: Robert Spencer - November 27, 2008 - 8:17 AM In past years I've written on this day that I'm thankful that there haven't been more jihad terror attacks on U.S. soil. I am thankful for that this year also, but this year's Thanksgiving comes in the shadow of the jihad attacks in Mumbai -- and we must not forget that their defense is our defense, their murders threaten us, they are facing the same jihad that we continue to face, although most Americans don't know it. Above all this year I am thankful that I'm still able to write this. Now that the UN has approved an "anti-blasphemy" measure that is in reality an obvious and crude attempt to restrict open speech about the Islamic jihad threat, we shouldn't take for granted that those who are threatened by Islamic supremacism and jihad will always be able to speak freely about that threat -- and that includes Americans as well. But this year, as hard a year as it has been in so very many ways, we have for the most part been able to do so (with the notable exception of some unlikely thoughtcrime states like Canada), and for that today we should give thanks, and hope and pray that we will continue to be able to do so long enough to turn back the tide of jihadist encroachment upon free societies everywhere. (Robert Spencer) Video: 2008 Thanksgiving Greetings
--------------------------------------- "It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favors." –George Washington, Thanksgiving Proclamation, 3 October 1789 ---------------------------------------
~ | When America Knew Who She Was | ~
"We'll fight to the finish this time, and we'll never have to do it again" Posted by Pamela Geller on Thursday, November 27, 2008 at 04:42 PM | Permalink --------------------------------------- Republican leader Andy Martin says this is a “time for national disunity” A president who will not release his birth certificate is an illegitimate official, Martin charges. Andy says it’s time for the Republican Party to slim down its playbook, and concentrate on the vital issues where Barack Obama is likely to stumble over the next two years. Martin calls for an “all-American Republican Party” for “all-Americans” with every American welcome and “no outcasts.” We must become the loyal opposition today, loyal to the Constitution and not to the pretender, the Emperor Obama I Martin says that a president who won’t release his birth certificate is an illegitimate leader...
ANDY MARTIN - (Executive Editor)
Andy Martin's blog and adjunct to his weekly commentaries for www.ContrarianCommentary.com
----------------------------------- THE HISTORY OF THANKSGIVING: By Gary North Thanksgiving Day is an old tradition in the United States. It had its origins in Plymouth Colony, in the fall of 1621, when the Pilgrims who had survived the first year invited Chief Massasoit to a feast. He showed up with 90 braves and five deer. The feast lasted three days. The first official Thanksgiving Day was celebrated on June 29, 1676, in Charlestown, Massachusetts, across the Charles River from Boston. Over a century later, George Washington proclaimed a day of Thanksgiving on October 23, 1789, to be celebrated on Thursday, November 27. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln officially restored it as a wartime measure. The holiday then became an American tradition. Lincoln was a strange contradiction religiously. He was a religious skeptic, yet he invoked the rhetoric of the King James Bible on many occasions. His political rhetoric, which had been deeply influenced by his reading of the King James, was often masterful. For example, when he spoke of the cemetery of the Gettysburg battlefield as "this hallowed ground," using the King James word for holy, as in "hallowed be thy name," he was seeking to infuse the battle of Gettysburg with sacred meaning, a use of religious terminology that was as morally abhorrent as it was rhetorically successful. It is the sacraments that are sacred, not monuments to man's bloody destructiveness. In that same year of 1863, he used biblical themes in his October 3 Thanksgiving Day proclamation. It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord. He went on, in the tradition of a Puritan Jeremiad sermon, to attribute the calamity of the Civil War to the nation's sins, conveniently ignoring the biggest contributing sin of all in the coming of that war: his own steadfast determination to collect the national tariff in Southern ports. In his proclamation, he made an important and accurate theological point. We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand, which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. This observation leads to the same question that Moses raised long before Lincoln's proclamation: Why is it that men become less thankful as their blessings increase? Less than a decade after Lincoln's proclamation, three economists came up with the theoretical insight that provides an answer. Marginal Utility Theory: In the early 1870s, Karl Menger, William Stanley Jevons and Leon Walras simultaneously and independently discovered the principle of marginal utility. Their discovery transformed economic analysis. They observed that value, like beauty, is subjectively determined. Value is imputed a familiar Calvinist theological concept to scarce resources by the acting individual. Other things remaining equal, including tastes, the individual imputes less value to each additional unit of any good that he receives as income. This is the principle of marginal utility. This can be put another way. We can say that each additional unit of any resource that a person receives as income satisfies a value that is lower on that individual's subjective scale of value. He satisfied the next-higher value with the previous unit of income. This provides a preliminary solution to the original question. I call this solution the declining marginal utility of thankfulness. People look at the value of what they have just received as income, and they are less impressed than they were with the previous unit of income. They focus on the immediate, "What have you done for me lately?" rather than the aggregate level of their existing capital. They conclude, "What's past is past; what matters most is whatever comes next." Modern economic theory discounts the past to zero. The past is gone; it is not a matter of human action. Whatever you spent to achieve your present condition in life is no longer a matter of human action. The economist calls this lost world "sunk costs." There is a major problem in thinking this way. It is the problem of saying "thank you." The child is taught to say "thank you." He is not told to do this because, by saying "thank you," he is more likely to get another gift in the future. He is taught to say "thank you" as a matter of politeness. The problem is, we look to the present, not to the past. We look at the marginal unit of economic decision-making and not at the aggregate that we have accumulated. We assume that whatever we already possess is well merited. Then we focus our attention on that next, hoped-for amount of income. As economic actors, we should recognize that the reason why we are allocating our latest unit of income to a satisfaction that is lower on our value scale is because we already possess so much. We are awash in wealth. We are the beneficiaries of a social order based on private ownership and free exchange, a social order that has made middle-class people rich beyond the wildest dreams of kings a century and a half ago. Or, as P. J. O'Rourke has observed, "When you think of the good old days, think one word: dentistry." About half of the Pilgrims who arrived in Plymouth in 1620 were dead a year later. The Indians saved the colony by showing the first winter's survivors what to plant and how to plant it in the spring of 1621. The Pilgrims rejoiced at that festival. They would say that they were graced and happy to be alive. Ludwig von Mises wrote somewhere that Charles Darwin was wrong. The principle of the survival of the fittest does not apply to the free market social order. The free market's division of labor has enabled millions of people to survive today, who would otherwise have perished. So, give thanks to God tomorrow, even if your only God is the free market. You did not obtain all that you possess all by yourself. The might of your hands did not secure it for you. A little humility is in order on this one day of the year. Sources: Lew Rockwell | Lifehack.com - November 26, 2008 ------------------------------------ COMMENTS: G.P.K.Pillai [ Joined on 11/08 ] [ Posted on November 27, 2008 ] The first day of thanksgiving took place in 1637 amidst the war against the Pequots. 700 men, women, and children of the Pequot tribe were gathered for their annual green corn dance on what is now Groton, Connecticut. Dutch and English mercenaries surrounded the camp and proceeded to shoot, stab, butcher and burn alive all 700 people. The next day the Massachusetts Bay Colony held a feast in celebration and the governor declared "a day of thanksgiving." In the ensuing madness of the Indian extermination, natives were scalped, burned, mutilated and sold into slavery, and a feast was held in celebration every time a successful massacre took place. The killing frenzy got so bad that even the Churches of Manhattan announced a day of "thanksgiving" to celebrate victory over the "heathen savages," and many celebrated by kicking the severed heads of Pequot people through the streets like soccer balls. The proclamation of 1676 announced the first national day of thanksgiving with the onset of the Wampanoag war, the very people who helped the original colonists survive on their arrival. Massasoit, the chief invited to eat with the puritans in 1621, died in 1661. His son Metacomet, later to be known by the English as King Phillip, originally honoured the treaties made by his father with the colonists, but after years of further encroachment and destruction of the land, slave trade, and slaughter, Metacomet changed his mind. In 1675 "King Phillip" called upon all natives to unite to defend their homelands from the English. For the next year the bloody conflict went on non-stop, until Metacomet was captured, murdered, quartered, his hands were cut off and sent to Boston, his head was impaled on a pike in the town square of Plymouth for the next 25 years, and his nine-year-old son was shipped to the Caribbean to be a slave for the rest of his life. ------------------------------------
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Proverbs 29:27 -
“An unjust man is an abomination to the just: and he
“The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception; (If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging!) --------------------------------------- Read More: Terrorist's Bill of Rights ~ | back to top | | blogsite | ~
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