Good Morning & God Bless To Every One !
Today is May 8, the 128th day of 2014 and there are 237 days left this year where it is another Blessed Day in the pleasure of our service for our Lord here at:
For God’s Glory Alone Ministries !!!
Today’s ‘You Can’t Make This Stuff Up Folks’!!!
New Mexico college spends $5 million on solar array to save $200,000 in utility bills! Santa Fe Community College has just unveiled a solar array that, it says, will save the college at least $200,000 a year on its utility bills. But the array, funded by taxpayers in a 2010 bond election, will cost $5 million. You don’t have to be a math major at the college to figure out it would take 25 years of $200,000 cost savings per year to reach the $5 million mark for the project to just break even; especially when you factor in necessary repairs, maintenance and/or replacement over that time period. I have to wonder how long a warranty it carries and what it’s actual life expectancy is before requiring costly upgrades or replacements?!?
A thought about big business:
“The biggest big business in America is not steel, automobiles, or television. It is the manufacture, refinement and distribution of anxiety by our own government.”
– Rick Stambaugh, 2014
So, What Happened Today In 1884?
Future President of the United States, Harry S Truman, is born
Harry S Truman is born in Lamar, Missouri. The son of a farmer, Truman could not afford to go to college. He joined the army at the relatively advanced age of 33 in 1916 to fight in World War I. After the war, he opened a haberdashery in Kansas City. When that business went bankrupt in 1922, he entered Missouri politics. Truman went on to serve in the U.S. Senate from 1934 until he was chosen as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fourth vice president in 1945; it was during his Senate terms that he developed a reputation for honesty and integrity.
Upon FDR’s death on April 12, 1945, Truman became the 33rd president of the United States, assuming the role of commander-in-chief of a country still embroiled in World War II. With victory in Europe imminent, Truman agonized over whether or not to use the recently developed atomic bomb to force Japan to surrender. After only four months in office, Truman authorized the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945. He and his military advisors argued that using the bomb ultimately saved American and Japanese lives, since it appeared that the Japanese would fiercely resist any conventional attempt by the Allies to invade Japan and end the war. The use of the new weapon, dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August, succeeded in forcing Japan’s surrender, but also ushered in the Cold War. From that point until the late 1980s, the U.S. and Russia raced to out-spend and out-produce each other in nuclear weaponry. After the war, the long-term and deadly effects of radiation fall-out on human beings were bleakly illustrated in pictures of the Japanese who survived the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Images and information released after the war regarding illnesses and environmental devastation related to nuclear weapons shocked the world and earned Truman lasting criticism for ushering in the possibility of complete global annihilation through nuclear warfare.
Although best known—and reviled by some—as the only president to choose to use nuclear weapons against innocent civilians in combat, Truman’s time in the executive branch was also notable in other areas. In 1941, Truman drove 10,000 miles across the country in his Dodge to investigate potential war profiteering in defense plants on the eve of World War II. After World War II, Truman helped push the Marshall Plan through Congress, which provided desperately needed reconstruction aid to European nations devastated by the war and on the verge of widespread famine. He also supported the establishment of a permanent Israeli state.
Truman was also known for his explosive temper and fierce loyalty to his family. In December 1950, his daughter Margaret gave a singing recital that was panned the following day in the Washington Post. Truman was so furious that he wrote a letter to the editor in which he threatened to give the reviewer a black eye and a broken nose. This was just one of many events that illustrated Truman s feisty, no-nonsense style, for which he was earlier given the nickname “Give ’em hell, Harry.”
Truman served as president for two terms from 1945 to 1953, when he and his wife Bess happily retired to Independence, Missouri, where he often referred to himself jokingly as “Mr. Citizen.” He died there on December 26, 1972.
Incidentally, Harry S Truman’s middle name really was just “S.” According to the Truman Library the “S” was a compromise between the names of his grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young.
Other Memorable Or Interesting Events Occurring On May 8 In History:
1541 – South of present-day Memphis, Tennessee, Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto reaches the Mississippi River, one of the first European explorers to ever do so. After building flatboats, de Soto and his 400 ragged troops crossed the great river under the cover of night, in order to avoid the armed Native Americans who patrolled the river daily in war canoes. From there the conquistadors headed into present-day Arkansas continuing their fruitless two-year-old search for gold and silver in the American wilderness;
1559 – An act of supremacy defines Queen Elizabeth I as the supreme governor of the Church of England;
1792 – Congress passes the Militia Act, requiring that every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years be enrolled in the militia. Six days before, Congress had established the president’s right to call out the militia. The outbreak of Shay’s Rebellion, a protest against taxation and debt prosecution in western Massachusetts 1786-87, had first convinced many Americans that the federal government should be given the power to put down rebellions within the states. The Militia Act was tested shortly after its passage, when farmers in western Pennsylvania, angered by a federal excise tax on whiskey, attacked the home of a tax collector and then, with their ranks swollen to 6,000 camped outside Pittsburgh. In response, President Washington, under the auspices of the Militia Act, assembled 15,000 men from the surrounding states and eastern Pennsylvania as a federal militia to march upon the Pittsburgh encampment. Upon its arrival, the federal militia found none of the rebels willing to fight. The mere threat of federal force had quelled the rebellion and established the supremacy of the federal government;
1794 – Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry, was executed on the guillotine during France’s Reign of Terror;
1794 – The United States Post Office is established;
1846 – Before the United States formally declared war on Mexico, General Zachary Taylor defeats a superior Mexican force in the Battle of Palo Alto north of the Rio Grande River. The drift toward war with Mexico had begun a year earlier when the U.S. annexed the Republic of Texas as a new state. Ten years before, the Mexicans had fought an unsuccessful war with Texans to keep them from breaking away to become an independent nation. Since then, they had refused to recognize the independence of Texas or the Rio Grande River as an international boundary. In January 1946, fearing the Mexicans would respond to U.S. annexation by asserting control over disputed territory in southwestern Texas, President James K Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to move a force into Texas to defend the Rio Grande border. Following his victories at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, Taylor crossed the Rio Grande and took the war into Mexican territory. During the next 10 months, he won four battles and gained control over the three northeastern Mexican states. The following year, the focus of the war shifted elsewhere, and Taylor’s role diminished. Other generals continued the fight, which finally ended with General Winfield Scott’s occupation of Mexico City in September of 1847. Zachary Taylor emerged from the war a national hero. Americans admiringly referred to him as “Old Rough and Ready” and was elected president in 1848. He proved to be an unskilled politician who tended to see complex problems in overly simplistic ways. In July 1850, Taylor returned from a public ceremony and complained that he felt ill. Suffering from a recurring attack of cholera, he died several days later;
1864 – During the American Civil War, Yankee troops arrive at Spotsylvania Court House, Virginia to find the Rebels already there. After the Battle of the Wilderness (May 5-6), Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Potomac marched south in the drive to take Richmond. Grant hoped to control the strategic crossroads at Spotsylvania Court House, so he could draw Robert E. Lee’s of Northern Virginia into open ground. Unbeknownst to Grant, Lee had received reports of Union cavalry movements to the south of the Wilderness battle lines. On the evening of May 7, Lee ordered James Longstreet’s corps, which were under the direction of Richard Anderson after Longstreet had been shot the previous day, to march at night to Spotsylvania. Anderson’s men marched the 11 miles entirely in the dark, and won the race to the crossroads, where they took refuge behind hastily constructed breastworks and waited. Now it would be up to Grant to force the Confederates from their position. The stage was set for one of the bloodiest engagements of the war;
1877 – The first Westminster Dog Show is held;
1886 – An Atlanta, Georgia pharmacist, John Pemberton, invents Coca Cola;
1895 – China cedes Taiwan to Japan under Treaty of Shimonoseki;
1914 – Paramount Pictures was incorporated by W.W. Hodkinson;
1919 – Edward George Honey first proposes the idea of a moment of silence to commemorate The Armistice of World War I, which later results in the creation of Remembrance Day;
1921 – Sweden’s Parliament voted to abolish the death penalty;
1944 – The first “eye bank” designed to preserve corneal tissues for transplants was established at New York Hospital;
1945 – At the end of World War II, both Great Britain and the United States celebrate Victory in Europe Day. Cities in both nations, as well as formerly occupied cities in Western Europe, put out flags and banners, rejoicing in the defeat of the Nazi war machine. The eighth of May spelled the day when German troops throughout Europe finally laid down their arms: In Prague, Germans surrendered to their Soviet antagonists, after the latter had lost more than 8,000 soldiers, and the Germans considerably more; in Copenhagen and Oslo; at Karlshorst, near Berlin; in northern Latvia; on the Channel Island of Sark—the German surrender was realized in a final cease-fire. More surrender documents were signed in Berlin and in eastern Germany. The Russians took approximately 2 million prisoners in the period just before and after the German surrender. Meanwhile, more than 13,000 British POWs were released and sent back to Great Britain. Pockets of German-Soviet confrontation would continue into the next day. On May 9, the Soviets would lose 600 more soldiers in Silesia before the Germans finally surrendered. Consequently, V-E Day was not celebrated until the ninth in Moscow. THE WAR WAS OVER!;
1950 – In Nebraska, a flood caused by 14 inches of rain kills 23 people. Most of the victims drowned after being trapped in their vehicles by flash flooding. (This raises questions concerning ‘Global Warming’ – In the 1970s the scare was raised by alarmist scientists & politicians that we were nearing a ‘New Ice Age’ and now they raise a scare because we’re causing ‘Global Warming’ which will devastate the Earth!!! You have to wonder which it was that caused such a flood in the 1950s, long before either scare? While politicians state the science is proven as proclaimed by our very own President Obama, it sure seems science seems to change for political purposes!!!);
1952 – During the Korean War, Allied fighter-bombers stage the largest raid of the war on North Korea;
1970 – During the Vietnam War, President Nixon, at a news conference, defends the U.S. troop movement into Cambodia, saying the operation would provide six to eight months of time for training South Vietnamese forces and thus would shorten the war for Americans. Nixon reaffirmed his promise to withdraw 150,000 American soldiers by the following spring;
1972 – In the Vietnam War, President Richard Nixon announces that he has ordered the mining of major North Vietnamese ports, as well as other measures, to prevent the flow of arms and material to the communist forces that had invaded South Vietnam in March. Nixon said that foreign ships in North Vietnamese ports would have three days to leave before the mines were activated; U.S. Navy ships would then search or seize ships, and Allied forces would bomb rail lines from China and take whatever other measures were necessary to stem the flow of material. Nixon warned that these actions would stop only when all U.S. prisoners of war were returned and an internationally supervised cease-fire was initiated. If these conditions were met, the United States would “stop all acts of force throughout Indochina and proceed with the complete withdrawal of all forces within four months”;
1973 – Militant American Indians who’d held the South Dakota hamlet of Wounded Knee for ten weeks surrendered;
1984 – During the (first) Cold War, citing fears for the safety of its athletes in what it considered a hostile and anti-communist environment, the Soviet government announces a boycott of the 1984 Summer Olympic Games to be held in Los Angeles, California. Although the Soviets had cited security concerns, the boycott was more likely the result of strained cold war relations due to America’s generous aid to Muslim rebels fighting in Afghanistan–and payback for the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games. A number of other Soviet Bloc countries and Cuba followed suit in boycotting the Los Angeles Games, which carried on without the presence of many of the communist world’s best athletes. China, however, participated in the Los Angeles Summer Games in its first Olympic appearance since 1952;
1988 – Stella Nickell is convicted on two counts of murder by a Seattle, Washington, jury. She was the first person to be found guilty of violating the Federal Anti-Tampering Act after putting cyanide in Excedrin capsules in an effort to kill her husband. Stella and Bruce Nickell married in 1976, shortly after seven people were killed in Chicago, Illinois from poisoned Tylenol pills. According to Stella’s daughter from a previous marriage, Stella had begun planning Bruce’s murder almost from the honeymoon. The Chicago Tylenol incident (which was never solved) had a lasting impact on Stella, who decided that cyanide would be a good method of murder. Stella, who stood to lose $100,000 if his death wasn’t ruled an accident, decided to alter her plan and tampered with five additional bottles of Excedrin and placed them on store shelves in the Seattle area. Six days later, Susan Snow took one of these capsules and died instantly. After her death was reported in the news, Stella called police to tell them that she thought her husband had also been poisoned. Nickell was given two 90-year sentences for the murders of her husband and Susan Snow. She will be eligible for parole in 2018;
1999 – The Citadel, South Carolina’s formerly all-male military school, graduated its first female cadet, Nancy Ruth Mace;
2004 – Former Iraq hostage Thomas Hamill returned home to a chorus of cheering family and friends in Macon, Miss. Hamill, a truck driver, was wounded and captured when his convoy was ambushed April 9, 2004; he escaped May 2 from a farmhouse about 50 miles north of Baghdad;
2009 – White House aide Louis Caldera resigned for his role in a $328,835 photo-op low-level flyover by an Air Force One jet above New York City that sparked panic and flashbacks to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks;
2013 – Three months after $50 million in diamonds is stolen at the Brussels Airport, more than 24 people in France, Switzerland and Belgium were detained, and a significant stash of the diamonds and stash recovered;
2013 – It was one year ago TODAY!!!
Number 3 of 50 beautiful pictures from 50 states
As I
A thought
There are no random acts of kindness, only intentional acts given the opportunity to happen. We have thought about kindnesses we can do. We have committed ourselves to acting in ways that are kind and beneficial. We have prayed for an opportunity to be kind. Then the opportunity presents itself and bingo! We act with kindness. Nothing random about that! This is true not just in deeds, but in words as well. More than trying to avoid poor speech, we are urged to use our speech to bless and help others to come to know Christ.
Brings a verse
Make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.
– Colossians 4:5-6
That takes me to a prayer
Father GOD, please forgive me for the careless words I have uttered this week. I understand that these careless words are twice sins — a sin once when I committed it and a sin a second time because I didn’t see the opportunity to be redemptive and helpful with my speech. Open my eyes Lord so that I may see those people you have placed in my path to bless. Through the blessed name of Jesus I pray. Amen
Until the next time – America, Bless GOD!!!