1) Dr. Charles
F. Stanley's 30 Life Principles
The Unreasonable Will of God
Scripture: Luke 5:1-11
I. Introduction: Does God have a specific will for your life? Yes. The Father wants His children to submit to Him in small and big issues. The Lord’s commands often make sense to us. But how should we react when they seem illogical? We must obey Him no matter what. God does not require us to understand His will, just obey it, even when it seems unreasonable (Life Principle #5).
II. Peter’s Example
A. Jesus told the fisherman to move into deep water
and cast his nets in
broad daylight (Luke 5:1-11). The common practice on the Sea of
Galilee was to fish in the middle of the night and only in shallow water. As a
result of his faithfulness, Peter’s catch was so large that he needed help to
haul it in.
B. The miracle proved that Jesus was not simply an
itinerant preacher. Peter,
Andrew, James, and John left their nets and followed Him from that point on.
III. How does the will of God work?
A. The Father has a specific plan for your life.
B. You may consider yourself unimportant, but no
one is insignificant in God’s eyes.
C. The Father has equipped you to fulfill your
calling. He will never call you to something
and then not enable you to do it.
D. The Lord reveals His will in small areas and
larger ones. When you submit to God’s will in daily
choices, it’s easy to obey Him when faced with bigger decisions.
IV. Biblical Illustrations
A. God told Noah to build a huge boat. Noah may have wondered how he would pay for the
building materials—or feared looking foolish to his friends and neighbors. Yet
when the rain came pouring down and continued day after day, the naysayers were
the ones who looked like fools (Gen. 6:13-7:24).
B. Jesus delayed traveling to the home of Mary and
Martha when Lazarus was sick. Our
Savior could easily have traveled to His friend’s home in time to save his
life. Or He could have simply said the word and the man would have been healed.
But by waiting, Jesus had the opportunity to raise Lazarus from the dead. The
Son was able to glorify the Father and reveal His own power over the grave
(John 11:1-46).
V. Personal Examples
A. After my third year of seminary, I spent the
summer at a family lake house.
I had originally decided to work with home missions but sensed that wasn’t
God’s will. While I was at the vacation spot, a local church called me as
pastor.
B. The congregation also wanted me to teach three
courses at their Bible institute: sermon
preparation, preaching, and evangelism. God led me to accept their offer
despite my inexperience.
C. One time, someone wanted to build me an island
house. Just before construction started, the
Lord revealed to me that it wasn’t His will. I had to turn down the offer for
no apparent reason. Only later did He reveal why.
VI. How can you discover the will of God?
A. Open His Word and start reading. The Spirit will lead you by bringing a passage of
Scripture to your attention.
B. Ask God to speak to your heart. You may hear an answer quickly, or it might take
time before you are ready to hear His voice.
C. Watch how the Lord works through circumstances. He can speak to us through opportunities as well
as obstacles.
D. Listen to godly counsel. Wise people will advise you with wisdom from God’s
Word.
E. Be patient. If the Father doesn’t answer you immediately, take
it as a sign that you don’t need to know yet. He may be setting the stage for a
future blessing.
VI. Conclusion: Has God asked you to do something that seems unreasonable? Don’t argue with Him, worry about what people will think, or rationalize that your way is better. His plans for you are the best. They often lead to tangible rewards. But more importantly, you will get a glimpse of who Jesus is—loving, merciful, and faithful. Nothing can compare to discovering and following the Father’s plan for your life.
2) The 30-Day Reading List That Will Lead You to Becoming a Knowledgeable Libertarian by Robert Wenzel
What Soviet Medicine Teaches Us
In 1918, the Soviet Union became the
first country to promise universal "cradle-to-grave" healthcare
coverage, to be accomplished through the complete socialization of medicine.
The "right to health" became a "constitutional right" of
Soviet citizens.
The proclaimed advantages of this
system were that it would "reduce costs" and eliminate the
"waste" that stemmed from "unnecessary duplication and
parallelism" — i.e., competition.
These goals were similar to the ones
declared by Mr. Obama and Ms. Pelosi — attractive and humane goals of universal
coverage and low costs. What's not to like?
The system had many decades to work,
but widespread apathy and low quality of work paralyzed the healthcare system.
In the depths of the socialist experiment, healthcare institutions in Russia
were at least a hundred years behind the average US level. Moreover, the filth,
odors, cats roaming the halls, drunken medical personnel, and absence of soap
and cleaning supplies added to an overall impression of hopelessness and
frustration that paralyzed the system. According to official Russian estimates,
78 percent of all AIDS victims in Russia contracted the virus through dirty
needles or HIV-tainted blood in the state-run hospitals.
Irresponsibility, expressed by the
popular Russian saying "They pretend they are paying us and we pretend we
are working," resulted in appalling quality of service, widespread
corruption, and extensive loss of life. My friend, a
famous
neurosurgeon in today's Russia, received a monthly salary of 150 rubles —
one-third of the average bus driver's salary.
In order to receive minimal attention
by doctors and nursing personnel, patients had to pay bribes. I even witnessed
a case of a "nonpaying" patient who died trying to reach a lavatory
at the end of the long corridor after brain surgery. Anesthesia was usually
"not available" for abortions or minor ear, nose, throat, and skin
surgeries. This was used as a means of extortion by unscrupulous medical
bureaucrats.
"Slavery
certainly 'reduced costs' of labor, 'eliminated the waste' of bargaining for
wages, and avoided 'unnecessary duplication and parallelism'."
To improve the statistics concerning
the numbers of people dying within the system, patients were routinely shoved
out the door before taking their last breath.
Being a People's Deputy in the Moscow
region from 1987 to 1989, I received many complaints about criminal negligence,
bribes taken by medical apparatchiks, drunken ambulance crews, and food
poisoning in hospitals and child-care facilities. I recall the case of a
14-year-old girl from my district who died of acute nephritis in a Moscow hospital.
She died because a doctor decided that it was better to save
"precious" X-ray film (imported by the Soviets for hard currency)
instead of double-checking his diagnosis. These X-rays would have disproven his
diagnosis of neuropathic pain.
Instead, the doctor treated the
teenager with a heat compress, which killed her almost instantly. There was no
legal remedy for the girl's parents and grandparents. By definition, a
single-payer system cannot allow any such remedy. The girl's grandparents could
not cope with this loss and they both died within six months. The doctor
received no official reprimand.
Not surprisingly, government
bureaucrats and Communist Party officials, as early as 1921 (three years after
Lenin's socialization of medicine), realized that the egalitarian system of
healthcare was good only for their personal interest as providers, managers,
and rationers — but not as private users of the system.
So, as in all countries with socialized
medicine, a two-tier system was created: one for the "gray masses"
and the other, with a completely different level of service, for the
bureaucrats and their intellectual servants. In the USSR, it was often the case
that while workers and peasants were dying in the state hospitals, the medicine
and equipment that could save their lives was sitting unused in the nomenklatura system.
At the end of the socialist experiment,
the official infant-mortality rate in Russia was more than 2.5 times as high as
in the United States and more than 5 times that of Japan. The rate of 24.5
deaths per 1,000 live births was questioned recently by several deputies to the
Russian Parliament, who claim that it is 7 times higher than in the United
States. This would make the Russian death rate 55 compared to the US rate of
8.1 per 1,000 live births.
Having said that, I should make it
clear that the United States has one of the highest rates of the industrialized
world only because it counts all dead infants, including premature babies,
which is where most of the fatalities occur.
Most countries do not count
premature-infant deaths. Some don't count any deaths that occur in the first 72
hours. Some countries don't even count any deaths from the first two weeks of
life. In Cuba, which boasts a very low infant-mortality rate, infants are only
registered when they are several months old, thereby leaving out of the
official statistics all infant deaths that take place within the first several
months of life.
In the rural regions of Karakalpakia,
Sakha, Chechnya, Kalmykia, and Ingushetia, the infant mortality rate is close
to 100 per 1,000 births, putting these regions in the same category as Angola,
Chad, and Bangladesh. Tens of thousands of infants fall victim to influenza
every year, and the proportion of children dying from pneumonia and
tuberculosis is on the increase. Rickets, caused by a lack of vitamin D, and
unknown in the rest of the modern world, is killing many young people.
Uterine damage is widespread, thanks to
the 7.3 abortions the average Russian woman undergoes during childbearing
years. Keeping in mind that many women avoid abortions altogether, the 7.3
average means that many women have a dozen or more abortions in their lifetime.
Even today, according to the State Statistics
Committee, the average life expectancy for Russian men is less than 59 years —
58 years and 11 months — while that for Russian women is 72 years. The combined
figure is 65 years and three months.[1] By comparison, the average life span for men
in the United States is 73 years and for women 79 years. In the United States,
life expectancy at birth for the total population has reached an all-time
American high of 77.5 years, up from 49.2 years just a century ago. The Russian
life expectancy at birth is 12 years lower.[2]
After 70 years of socialism, 57 percent
of all Russian hospitals did not have running hot water, and 36 percent of
hospitals located in rural areas of Russia did not have water or sewage at all.
Isn't it amazing that socialist government, while developing space exploration
and sophisticated weapons, would completely ignore the basic human needs of its
citizens?
"The
filth, odors, cats roaming the halls, drunken medical personnel, and absence of
soap and cleaning supplies added to an overall impression of hopelessness and
frustration that paralyzed the system."
The appalling quality of service is not
simply characteristic of "barbarous" Russia and other Eastern
European nations: it is a direct result of the government monopoly on
healthcare and it can happen in any country. In "civilized" England,
for example, the waiting list for surgeries is nearly 800,000 out of a
population of 55 million. State-of-the-art equipment is nonexistent in most
British hospitals. In England, only 10 percent of the healthcare spending is
derived from private sources.
Britain pioneered in developing
kidney-dialysis technology, and yet the country has one of the lowest dialysis
rates in the world. The Brookings Institution (hardly a supporter of free
markets) found that every year 7,000 Britons in need of
hip replacements, between 4,000 and 20,000 in need of coronary bypass surgery,
and some 10,000 to 15,000 in need of cancer chemotherapy are denied medical
attention in Britain.
Age discrimination is particularly
apparent in all government-run or heavily regulated systems of healthcare. In
Russia, patients over 60 are considered worthless parasites and those over 70
are often denied even elementary forms of healthcare.
In the United Kingdom, in the treatment
of chronic kidney failure, those who are 55 years old are refused treatment at
35 percent of dialysis centers. Forty-five percent of 65-year-old patients at
the centers are denied treatment, while patients 75 or older rarely receive any
medical attention at these centers.
In Canada, the population is divided
into three age groups in terms of their access to healthcare: those below 45,
those 45–65, and those over 65. Needless to say, the first group, which could
be called the "active taxpayers," enjoys priority treatment.
Advocates of socialized medicine in the
United States use Soviet propaganda tactics to achieve their goals. Michael
Moore is one of the most prominent and effective socialist propagandists in
America. In his movie, Sicko, he unfairly and unfavorably compares
healthcare for older patients in the United States with complex and incurable
diseases to healthcare in France and Canada for young women having routine
births. Had he done the reverse — i.e., compared healthcare for young women in
the United States having babies to older patients with complex and incurable
diseases in socialized healthcare systems — the movie would have been the same,
except that the US healthcare system would look ideal, and the United Kingdom,
Canada, and France would look barbaric.
Now we in the United States are being
prepared for discrimination in treatment of the elderly when it comes to
healthcare. Ezekiel Emanuel is director of the Clinical Bioethics Department at
the US National Institutes of Health and an architect of Obama's
healthcare-reform plan. He is also the brother of Rahm Emanuel, Obama's White
House chief of staff. Foster Friess reports that Ezekiel Emanuel has written
that health services should not be guaranteed to
individuals who are irreversibly
prevented from being or becoming participating citizens. An obvious example is
not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.[3]
An equally troubling article,
coauthored by Emanuel, appeared in the medical journal The Lancet in
January 2009. The authors write that
unlike allocation [of healthcare] by
sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person
lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if
25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now
was previously 25 years. Treating 65-year-olds differently because of
stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because
they have already had more life-years is not.[4]
Socialized medicine will create massive
government bureaucracies — similar to our unified school districts — impose
costly job-destroying mandates on employers to provide the coverage, and impose
price controls that will inevitably lead to shortages and poor quality of
service. It will also lead to nonprice rationing (i.e., rationing based on
political considerations, corruption, and nepotism) of healthcare by government
bureaucrats.
Real "savings" in a
socialized healthcare system could be achieved only by squeezing providers and
denying care — there is no other way to save. The same arguments were used to
defend the cotton farming in the South prior to the Civil War. Slavery
certainly "reduced costs" of labor, "eliminated the waste"
of bargaining for wages, and avoided "unnecessary duplication and
parallelism."
In supporting the call for socialized
medicine, American healthcare professionals are like sheep demanding the wolf:
they do not understand that the high cost of medical care in the United States
is partially based on the fact that American healthcare professionals have the
highest level of remuneration in the world. Another source of the high cost of
our healthcare is existing government regulations on the industry, regulations
that prevent competition from lowering the cost. Existing rules such as
"certificates of need," licensing, and other restrictions on the
availability of healthcare services prevent competition and, therefore, result
in higher prices and fewer services.
Socialized medical systems have not
served to raise general health or living standards anywhere. In fact, both
analytical reasoning and empirical evidence point to the opposite conclusion.
But the dismal failure of socialized medicine to raise people's health and
longevity has not affected its appeal for politicians, administrators, and
their intellectual servants in search of absolute power and total control.
Most countries enslaved by the Soviet
empire moved out of a fully socialized system through privatization and
insuring competition in the healthcare system. Others, including many European
social democracies, intend to privatize the healthcare system in the long run
and decentralize medical control. The private ownership of hospitals and other
units is seen as a critical determining factor of the new, more efficient, and
humane system.
Yuri N. Maltsev, senior fellow of the Mises
Institute, worked as an economist on Mikhail Gorbachev's economic reform team
before defecting to the United States. He is the editor of Requiem for Marx. He teaches
economics at Carthage College.
Notes
[2] CRS Report for Congress: "Life Expectancy in
the United States." Updated August 16, 2006, Laura B. Shrestha, Order Code
RL32792.
[3] Foster Friess, "Can You Believe
Denying Health Care to People with Dementia Is Being Considered?" (July 14,
2009). See also Ezekiel J. Emanuel, "Where Civic Republicanism and
Deliberative Democracy Meet"
(The Hastings
Center Report, vol. 26, no. 6).
[4] Govind Persad, Alan Wertheimer, and Ezekiel J.
Emanuel, "Principles for
Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions" (The Lancet,
vol. 373, issue 9661).
3) Roger’s Rangers Rules or Plan of Discipline by Major Robert Rogers
Rule #5
If you have the good fortune to take any prisoners, keep them separate till they are examined, and in your return take a different route from that in which you went out, that you may the better discover any party in your rear, and have an opportunity, if their strength be superior to your, to alter your course, or disperse, as circumstances may require
4) 52 Weeks to Preparedness by Tess Pennington
Week 5 of 52: Pet Care
Our furry friends are more to us than just pets, and for many of you, they are a precious family member. Caring for them during a disaster is extremely important. You need to know that when an unexpected storm occurs, many of our animals face anxiety just as we do. Knowing how your pet will react before, during and after a storm is the first step in ensuring their safety. Making sure that you anticipate your pet’s needs during an emergency because it will help them cope with this disruption into their daily routines. Also, have a pet survival kit and a pet first aid kit set aside for your pet, as this too ensures their safety.
Preps to buy:
- Extra
harness, leash, and/or carrier
- ID tags
with your contact information
- 1-2 week
supply of food for all pets (if not already bought in week 1)
- 2-5 gallons
of water for each pet
- Pet first aid kit
- Current
vaccination and medical records for each animal (contact your
veterinarian).
- 2 weeks
worth of medication for each animal (if applicable). Note: Pay attention
to the expiration date and routinely rotate medicines to ensure they are
not wasted.
Action Items:
1. Decide if your pet(s) will be going to an animal hotel, sheltering in-place with the family, or staying at another home. Make arrangments before the disaster is imminent.
2. If you haven’t purchases a pet survival kit, make your own. In addition to the items listed above, you will need the following:
a. Cat litter/pan or doggie pads
b. Can opener
c. Food dishes
d. First aid kit
e. Additional supplies required for where the pet will stay.
3. Ensure that your pet’s vaccinations are up to date.
Note: If pets do not have their shots up to date, then pet hotels will not accept them.
4. Get a rescue alert sticker. It will alert rescue workers that a pet is inside the home. When displaying this sticker, ensure that it is placed in an area that is visible to rescue workers.
5. Verify that ID tags are up to date and securely fastened to your pet’s collar. Attach the address and/or phone number of your evacuation site (if possible).
Note: If your pet gets lost, his tag is his ticket home.
- Make sure
you have a current photo of your pet for identification purposes to
include in with your family emergency photos.
- Ensure you
have a secure pet carrier, leash or harness for your pet so that if he
panics, he can’t escape.
6. Have a current photo of your pet to include with your family emergency photos.
7. Be sure to have a pet carrier, leash, or harness, if you pet is prone to panicking.
5) 110
Rules of Civility & Decent
Behavior in Company and Conversation by George Washington
#13 – Kill no Vermin as Fleas, lice
ticks &c in the Sight of Others, if you See any filth or thick Spittle put
your foot Dexterously upon it if it be upon the Cloths of your Companions, Put
it off privately, and if it be upon your own Cloths return Thanks to him who
puts it off.
#14 – Turn not your Back to others
especially in Speaking, Jog not the Table or Desk on which Another reads or
writes, lean not upon any one.
#15 – Keep your Nails clean and Short,
also your Hands and Teeth Clean yet without Showing any great Concern for them.
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