Old Farts are easy to spot at sporting events; during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner, Old Farts remove their caps and stand at attention and sing without embarrassment. They know the words and believe in them.

Old Farts remember World War II, Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Normandy and Hitler. They remember the Atomic Age, the Korean War, The Cold War, the Jet Age and the Moon Landing. They remember the 50 plus Peacekeeping Missions from 1945 to 2005, not to mention Vietnam .

If you bump into an Old Fart on the sidewalk he will apologize. If you pass an Old Fart on the street, he will nod or tip his cap to a lady. Old Farts trust strangers and are courtly to women.

Old Farts hold the door for the next person and always, when walking, make certain the lady is on the inside for protection.

Old Farts get embarrassed if someone curses in front of women and children and they don’t like any filth or dirty language on TV or in movies.

Old Farts have moral courage and personal integrity. They seldom brag unless it’s about their children or grandchildren.

It’s the Old Farts who know our great country is protected, not by politicians, but by the young men and women in the military serving their country.

This country needs Old Farts with their work ethic, sense of responsibility, pride in their country and decent values.

We need them now more than ever.

Thank God for Old Farts!

From the article:

…Yet my enthusiasm for the NFL stars’ athleticism has been overshadowed this year by reports of far more prodigious athleticism demonstrated last April by the members of something called Operational Detachment Alpha 3336 of the 3rd Special Forces Group. Their contest took place in Afghanistan’s Nuristan province, far from the television cameras and the garrulous commentators. This twelve-man Green Beret team fought a seven-hour battle uphill in a freezing mountainous valley after being pinned down by a couple of hundred or more insurgents. They and a few dozen Afghans, whom they had trained, got out after killing between 150 and 200 of the enemy. Half of the Green Berets were wounded — four critically

Many have said that the greatest generation was the one in which our parents and grandparents fought World War 2. While I know this to be true, I also can’t take away anything from the current generation of US fighting men. While Terrell Owens and Payton Manning may be some of the greatest NFL atheletes today, they can’t compare to Staff Sergeant John Wayne Walding, of Groesbeck, Texas:

“We were pretty much in the open,” Staff Sergeant Luis Morales of Fredericksburg, Virginia, told the Washington Post, “there were no trees to hide behind.” In the course of the battle he was shot in the thigh while tending to a wounded team member. Then he was shot in the ankle. He kept on fighting. They all did, even Staff Sergeant John Wayne Walding, of Groesbeck, Texas, who saw a bullet nearly amputate his right leg below the knee. Walding is quoted, “I literally grabbed my boot and put it in my crotch, then got the boot laces and tied it to my thigh, so it would not flop around. There was about two inches of meat holding my leg on.”

With all due respect to Mr. Owens, he isn’t even in the same class.

Last December, my family decided we would go the airport and welcome home the troops who were enroute to their R & R leave from the war. I wrote about it in this post. While we have made several trips to the airport this year, maybe I can talk my wife into going again. I need to be reminded of greatness again.

May we one day call todays fighting men, one of the greatest generations.

Parowan is a town about 20 miles away from Cedar City and when I was a kid, this guy would write letters to the editor of the local paper, he would go on radio, and would predict the end of the world. I remember him coming into the halls at school and preaching the end of the world while all the students laughed. (OK, so we weren’t nice at that age.) Since moving away from home 14 years ago, I haven’t even thought about Leeland Freeborn in all that time.

Until today. The LA times has a story about him making another “prophecy” about President-Elect Obama. According to the story, he doesn’t think he’ll ever be president.

“I think that you should hear what my opinion about the Obama election is: that he will not be the next president. I said on my home page in August that if he lost to expect to see the ‘riots’ that 2 Peter 2:13 tells us about. He didn’t lose. But the story is not finished yet. I still think they may begin the riots before Christmas 2008, as I said.”

Since Mr. Freeborn is so familiar with the scriptures, he might recognize Matthew 24:11 which says “And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many.” And Matthew 7:20 which says “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” If Mr. Freeborn is measured by his fruits, he is not only off the beaten path, he is in the twilight zone. He has never been right yet. You would think that with the laws of probability that he would at least guess right by dumb luck.

So if you are reading this article by the LA Times and you’re thinking, “this guy is a fruitcake”, then I am here to confirm your suspicions.

Being a resident of Texas for about 16 months has been quite educational, but even I was surprised to see the lawyers grab hold of this one. You see, three days after the “incident”, I received no less than three letters from lawyers looking to help.

The Law Offices of [name withheld] has obtained information from Dallas County IT Services that you recently received a Dallas County Justice of the Peace citation. Our firm will handle your case by appealing the case from the Justice of the Peace Court to Dallas County Criminal Court of Appeals No. 1.

Note to self: Dallas county publishes all the traffic citations so that blood-sucking lawyers can solicit your patronage.

Another, exactly as typed grammatical errors and all:

No office visit necessary – Just Call – We accept all Major Credit Cards

How many attorneys do this work? Well one letter said this:

Why hire [name witheld]: Nine dedicated and experienced attorneys with offices in Dallas and Houston representing motorists across Texas!

And my favorite:

We are here to help you!

Now I know that there are times when you need an attorney to represent you. But the fact is, I was going too fast. There is no need to appeal this to criminal court.

What’s wrong with accepting a little personal responsibility?

Huh?

Last time I checked, that wasn’t one of the purposes of prison. A quote by her attorney takes the cake:

“There’s nowhere she can go to be alone. There’s nowhere she can go to get peace,”

Maybe she should per her debt to society just like every other criminal.

A couple of years ago, I was doing this exact thing with my GPS.

I was travelling from the Boise, Idaho area to a little town called Halfway, Oregon. If you look carefully on this map, you will see that the best way is to go to Baker City, then hang a right.

Well the GPS decided to take me off the freeway at Huntington, then take a long dirt road up the side of the Snake River.

Now in the best of times, this would have been bad. There is nothing quite like driving on a dirt road for 40 miles. In my case, there were a couple of factors that made my situation precarious. First, the check engine light came on the the engine started to sputter a bit. Second, there was no cell phone service. Third, no one knew where I was. Fourth, it was getting dark.

I don’t know if you remember or not, but there was a news story about a little family from San Francisco that got lost near Grants Pass, Oregon in the middle of a blizzard. They stayed where they were for a couple of days, then the husband took off to find help. Authorities found the wife and baby alive, but the husband didn’t make it. Well, that news story happened about a week before this trip.

So let me summarize, no cell phone, car running badly, 40 miles from anywhere, winter, no one knows where I am, I’m all by myself, its getting dark, and somebody else just died doing the same thing. Fortunately, the car made it to Halfway and I was saved. But I will never blindly trust a GPS system ever again. There is nothing that compares to just using your head that God gave you.

In a nutshell, this is the theory

But we CAN have an impact on gas prices if we all act together to force a price war.

Here’s the idea: For the rest of this year, DON’T purchase ANY gasoline from the two biggest companies (which now are one), EXXON and MOBIL.

If they are not selling any gas, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit.

There are two primary problems with this strategy:

Problem #1: people aren’t going to wait for gas to be much lower before they switch. For example, if everyone stopped buying gas from company A and B , then companies C, D, and E have no incentive to lower their prices, because the demand for their product just increased by a factor of 20%. So they will raise their prices 20 cents to keep up with the demand. In the mean time, companies A and B that have no demand will lower their price, say 20 cents or so. Now we have some companies that have gas for 40 cents more than the others. Most people aren’t going to pay the difference; they are going to switch back. Now the demand will swing back to the lesser price companies, switching the demand back to them. Then the reverse will happen.

This of course is theoretical, in real life, the price difference would be much less. It would only take a 5 cent difference between companies before people switch over to the cheaper price.

Problem #2: automobiles aren’t the biggest consumers of petroleum products. I’m not sure what the percentage is, but I’ll bet that automobiles only account for 25% or less. So if you are a company like Fedex or American Airlines that consumes fuel in the millions of dollars per year, 5 cents a gallon difference probably just saved you $75,000 a day. The stockholders in those companies aren’t in it to make a political stand, they just need a return on their money so that they can retire without working at McDonalds till they’re 80. They aren’t going to have a lot of patience for loosing that much money.

That doesn’t account for all the non-vehicle forms of petroleum products like the fertilizer people, the PVC and vinyl people (flooring, house siding, pipe’s, laundry baskets, etc), and many others.

The answer to the gas price problem isn’t some temporary creative boycott stunt, it is to increase the supply in a real and permanent way. That means more drilling and more refining capacity. To have more drilling capacity means that the drilling companies need fewer obstacles put in place by the government regulators.

Unfortunately, with the lack of real political leadership by either major political party in this country at the moment, the problem is not going to go away anytime soon.

I guess I’m not alone. See this video clip.

From their website here:

For the past several years as I’ve been traveling around the country, I’ve been approaching soldiers in the airports and thanking them for serving for us. On several occasions I have noticed that it felt a little awkward for both of us. There are several reasons, some of which I am even just now learning as I produce this film and talk to more soldiers. But they have always appreciated being thanked, and I have always felt better having expressed my gratitude.

I started to think that it would be nice if civilians had a gesture or sign that they could use to say “thank you” quickly and easily without even having to approach. I did some research and found the sign that we are now using.

Is this limited to the military? Not at all. If you look around you I’m sure that you’ll find lots of people who are serving their communities, from local to global. If you appreciate their service, give them a sign. Say “thank you.”