Want to guess that the real estate agents stay away from these facts: Half of the housing loans are for investors, 60 subprime lenders are in operation, 90 percent of family income-tax filers are single parents, and 90 percent of the jobs are held by non-residents.

Are you ready to hear a somewhat bizarre, somewhat surprising, and somewhat unsettling tale?  Well ready or not, here it comes. Some of you may be more familiar with the history of the electric chair than I was prior to conducting some research. But for those of you who don’t know anything about the origins of “old Sparky”– brace yourselves.

The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection (continued)

Daily Advertiser
Thursday, November 22, 1787
[James Madison]

To the People of the State of New York:

Former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele made news recently in combination with conservative radio host Laura Ingraham when he criticized the NAACP and its relationship with Planned Parenthood. According to Steele, the latter organization used “abortion to eliminate and limit the number of African Americans.”

When the Titanic vanished beneath the Atlantic in the early hours of April 15th, 1912, she left a terrified mass of over sixteen hundred people behind her, gasping for breath and thrashing around helplessly in water temperatures well below zero. It was almost an hour before their cries were drowned out by silence. Yet the Titanic disaster raised voices that have yet to be silenced to this day.

“We have absolute faith in the Titanic. We believe that the boat is unsinkable.” This was the response of the White Star Line’s Phillip Franklin to a crowd of frenzied news reporters in New York. During the night, all sorts of sensational rumours had begun to surface about the new liner, and Franklin was in full damage control mode.

The people shivering in the half filled lifeboats could hardly believe their eyes and ears. In front of them, the largest moving object ever built was sagging helplessly into the ocean like some puppet with its strings cut. Row upon row of lights blazed at a madly slanted angle on the dark black mirror of the Atlantic. Up above, a string of pathetic distress rockets soared skywards, exploding in showers of pale white sparks that no one heeded. And, incredibly, from across the water came the sound of jaunty, upbeat music.

The luckiest ones died without even knowing it. A torrent of surging, ice cold seawater roared through the forward cabins containing the single men, drowning many of them in their bunks. Others were awoken by the long, grinding jar that shook clothes hanging on coat hooks and made glasses fall from nightstands. Stepping out of their bunks and reaching for the light switch, many men found a terrifying trickle of incoming water flowing across the cabin floor.

In the entire emotional roller coaster that is the Titanic disaster, few stories have aroused more anger and indignation than the departure of company chairman, Bruce Ismay, from the sinking ship. He left a foundering ship in a lifeboat, while literally hundreds of men, women and children were still left on the decks. In light of recent events in the Mediterranean with the Italian cruise ship captain, his story still has the power to simultaneously engage and enrage people; it remains a heavily charged emotional lightning rod to this day.

Consider the following scenario. You have a sinking ship, four hundred miles from the nearest land. The only responding rescue ship will not arrive for four hours, and the ship will not stay afloat for half that time. The water temperature is twenty eight degrees Fahrenheit. Anyone attempting to swim for it will freeze to death within minutes.

It is the late evening of Sunday, April 14th, 1912, and the North Atlantic is as still as the surface of a darkened mirror. The clear, moonless night sky up above is packed with millions of twinkling, benevolent stars. In short, it is a beautiful evening.

It was the biggest single building project on the planet since the pyramids of Giza. For three years, more than fifteen thousand sweating, swearing Irishmen laboured to bring it to life from the very mud of Belfast. It grew through freezing winters and searing hot summers. As it grew, it loomed over the entire city skyline.

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The now notorious ban of incandescent light bulbs, mandated by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, is about to make 100-watt traditional incandescent bulbs a thing of the past with the ban taking effect beginning January 1, 2012.

Ironically, it was on December 31, 1879 that inventor Thomas Edison gave the first public demonstration of his revolutionary incandescent bulb.

Importantly, Edison wasn’t the first inventor to work on such a lamp. British chemist and inventor Humphrey Davy demonstrated the principle of incandescent lamps as early as 1802 by passing a current through a strip of platinum. But while this set the stage for future development, the Davy lamp was expensive, produced only weak light for a short time, and was not practical.

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Putting up a stove is not so difficult in itself. It is the pipe that raises four-fifths of the mischief and all the dust. You may take down a stove with all the care in the world, and yet that pipe won’t come together again as it was before. You find this out when you are standing on a chair with your arms full of pipe, and your mouth full of soot. Your wife is standing on the floor in a position that enables her to see you, the pipe and the chair, and here she gives utterance to those remarks that are calculated to hasten a man into the extremes of insanity. Her dress is pinned over her waist, and her hands rest on her hips. She has got one of your hats on her head, and your linen coat on her back, and a pair of rubbers on her feet. There is about five cents’ worth of pot-black on her nose and a lot of flour on her chin, and altogether she is a spectacle that would inspire a dead man with distrust. And while you are up there trying to circumvent the awful contrariness of the pipe, and telling that you know some fool has been mixing it, she stands safely on the floor, and bombards you with such domestic mottoes as, “What’s the use of swearing so?” “You know no one has touched that pipe.” “You ain’t got any more patience than a child.” “Do be careful of that chair.” And then she goes off, and reappears with an armful more of pipe, and before you are aware of it she has got that pipe so horribly mixed up that it does seem no two pieces are alike.

The receipt was on the floor of an Angeli’s County Market parking lot, located in the greater Denver area of Colorado. An alert fan of this columnist passed it along. This particular item got the desired attention. It speaks volumes about today’s cavalier attitude toward “public assistance,” what we used to call simply welfare — not only for the extravagances bought with other people’s tax dollars, but for the sheer arrogance of allowing such a blatant illustration of inappropriateness to slip through a customer’s fingers:  six cold-water lobsters, two porterhouse steaks, and five cases of Mountain Dew, the only purchases on the ticket, are shown paid for in food stamps.

Irrespective of party affiliation, most Americans today simply accept welfare. Many families are so addicted to government handouts, they scarcely are aware how much largesse comes to them from the labor of their fellow citizens. Somewhere along the line, “government money” lost its logical connection to “the people’s money.”