House hunting

Follow-up to this post

Home buying was a frenzied ordeal in 2020-2021. Demand for homes is still high compared to supply, so prices are still climbing but at a slower pace this year. 

If you want to buy real estate (or even move to a new rental), you're wondering if this year will be any better. Should we move now? Or should we wait until prices go back down to something like the values we saw before the pandemic? 

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According to this article, the short answer is that you probably should not wait for prices to go back down because that's unlikely. In addition to the high level of demand, there's a big spike in the cost of lumber (which will put pressure on both new home prices and renovations). Interest rates are expected to go higher later this year as well.

It's hard to game the market, so your buying decision will depend on how ready you are to make your move.

from The Atlantic 

Charity:water 5

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Scott Harrison not only started a new charity, but he also broke the mold of the usual charity business model. Potential donors may be suspicious of pleas from organizations that seem opaque. They often can't confirm that their donation is doing what they wanted it to do.

Charity:water tries to overcome that with these strategies:

1. Transparency - financial reports are published on the website
2. Tracking - using google and gps, the progress and results of all projects are viewable
3. 100% of public donations go totally to water projects in the field

That last one can only be done because particular donors have committed to funding the organizational costs. All salaries, office costs, etc., are funded by these donors. 

It's compelling for a potential donor who is touched by their mission to know that 100% of what s/he gives will be used in the field to provide water to targeted communities.

Meet Scott:

Charity:water 4

 (cont'd from yesterday's post)

This is the story of Tencia, a widow in Mozambique who bakes bread and supports three sons.

Making the bread to sell used to be a very slow business. She had to spend hours fetching water because Every bit of her bread-making process requires water: the dough mixture, washing hands, utensils, plates and bowls. “Without water it’s impossible to bake."

Still, she managed to make a yearly profit of $89.

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Then in 2010 charity:water partnered with World Vision to bring a brand new well right into the center of the community. Tencia now had all the water she wanted, and it eliminated many labor hours for her.

"She began baking and selling 40–50 loaves in a single day, doubling her profit from $89/year to more than $178!

"This is the difference that [accessible] clean water makes. Tencia isn’t just earning income for her family anymore, she’s building a better future. Water has given her the chance to dream and the means to make her dreams a reality."

(cont'd tomorrow)

Charity:water 3

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

When charity:water started up in 2006, there were about a billion people in the world without access to clean water. It's something like 800,000 now, still a huge number. 

They provide about 2700 people per day with clean water, or one every 30 seconds. Scott says he's heard "water is life" many times from those villagers. The website has stories upon stories.

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Fetching water is a woman's work in Africa, taking up to eight hours a day. "Young girls learn how to balance the weight of a water bucket, with a baby on their back, while boys their age are learning how to read in school.

One young boy decided that was unfair. He refused to do nothing while his mother and sister shouldered the burden of this work, so Devison started walking for water too.

"Devison wasn’t trying to be a hero or take a stand; he just wanted to do the right thing. He wanted his mom to have time to do more important things. He wanted his sister to be able to go to school too."

(cont'd tomorrow)

Charity:water 2

 (cont'd from yesterday's post)

"At 28 years old, Scott Harrison had it all. A top nightclub promoter in New York City, his life was an endless cycle of drugs, booze, models—repeat. But 10 years in, desperately unhappy and morally bankrupt, he asked himself, "What would the exact opposite of my life look like?" 

Working for a medical charity ship in Africa gave him the opposite of his NYC life.

He saw African women walking for hours every day to carry water home to their families. He saw children get sick from it. He got their water analyzed, and sometimes it was alive with disease-causing bacteria. 

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He found out what it would take to get clean water to these villages and became obsessed with making it available to millions who don't have it. A new charity was born - it's called "charity:water" and he's still CEO/founder today.

A natural promoter, he put his talents to work on a global project to accomplish something good.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Charity:water 1

 This week's content is from Thirst, by Scott Harrison

The Harrison family became Christian in the 1980's. The couple and their little boy, Scott, became active in their church, and they were all in.

Scott learned to play the piano, joining a band that played for events and clubs during his high school years. In New York after high school, he found a niche where he could monetize his drive, charm, intelligence, good looks . . as a club promoter.

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It was like making a living as a perpetual life-of-the-party. For ten years he immersed himself in celebrities, drinking, models, drugs, money. Ten years in, he wanted out.

A few months later, he was on a Mercy Ship. No luxuries, no glamour. No celebrities, alcohol, models, drugs, or money . . his lifestyle of indulgence was over.

(cont'd tomorrow . . the better way he discovered, making a difference in the world)

Cookie biz

This man really likes cookies. He's diabetic, so that could be a problem. But he created a small business out of the solution to that problem - he makes sugar-free cookies that diabetics like himself can eat.

Maybe you've wondered why business owners often complain about government regulations, when those regulations (especially in food businesses) help keep us safe. 

He explains that there's something he calls "excessive regulations" that do nothing but frustrate his efforts. 

Exceptional 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Why do so many Christians forfeit their right and privilege to vote? Here's just a couple of possibilities.

Sadly, confusion and apathy abound where "misinformation" reigns. It's harder now to know for sure what the truth is regarding any number of things. You'll have to think things through; that is, start with your convictions and patiently research selected issues you care about. Don't vote on a question you know nothing about.

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Long ago, my mom told me that Christians shouldn't get into politics because it's "dirty." Often, it is, and she had plenty of company in that opinion.  But it does not follow that we should abandon the field of public policy to selfish power lovers.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German pastor in WWII, felt he had to do something to oppose the Nazis in his country. He said, “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless.”

Chenyuan says that Christians in other countries are praying for us to do what's right, to raise our voices.  We're here with exceptional freedom in an exceptional country for such a time as this.

from Stream 

Exceptional 1

Chenyuan Snider grew up in China, is non-white, and now lives in the U.S. According to critical race theory, that means she must be suffering from inevitable racism. But, no.

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On the contrary. She is, she says, "overwhelmed" when she thinks of the privileges she has as an American citizen. As one who had years of personal life experience in the two cultures, she offers her perspective to Americans who can only theorize about what it's like to live in China. She's on a mission to open their eyes and tell her story.

As a fellow Christian, she's horrified that about half of us don't exercise our minimum civic responsibility to vote in elections. We have a right to engage with government policies, to organize on behalf of what we believe to be right. The Chinese don't. They are helpless to influence the direction of their government when it moves against their values.

Because ". . we have both power and opportunity to influence a political outcome, to remain silent would welcome the flourishing of evil in our society . . ."

from Stream

(cont'd tomorrow)

MLK distorted

Martin Luther King's most famous quote is probably:

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Who could disagree? Racism actually is to judge people by the color of their skin, to give approval to one race over another for no other reason than color.

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Robert Woodson, dedicated for many years to helping troubled neighborhoods, says that MLK's legacy has been corrupted:

"Dr. King, who sought full participation in America, would never have indulged today’s grievance-based identity politics, whose social-justice warriors use race as a battering ram against the country. 

"Yesterday’s values prepared blacks to walk through the doors of opportunity opened to them through civil rights. Family, faith, character and moral behavior were all crucial to their victories. 

"Today’s social-justice warriors trade on the currency of oppression, deriding the concept of personal responsibility and always blaming external forces. I can think of no better way to instill hopelessness and fear in a young person than to tell him he is a victim, powerless to change his circumstance."

from Carpe Diem

Rose Ensemble

Committed to "preserving and performing sacred and secular early [American] music," the Rose Ensemble has a good reputation with classical music fans.

Enjoy this performance of a 19th century song written by Jeremiah Rankin, abolitionist and minister of Washington D.C.'s First Congregational Church.

In remembrance of Martin Luther King.

Mind work theft

Follow-up to this post:

Good new ideas are essential to business and science. America spends a lot of money on R&D to find the best ideas to improve products and processes. Good ideas resulting from mind work are called intellectual property (IP), protected under U.S. law. Those laws also protect the work of artists.

American government (under both the current administration and the previous one) prosecutes IP theft cases and sometimes has enough proof for conviction. In the case of Charles Lieber, they may have suspected that he sold information to the Chinese, but they only prosecuted on the charge of lying to the government because they had conclusive evidence for that.

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It is widely believed that "Chinese government-endorsed economic espionage and IP theft is real and will grow, including via sophisticated efforts to infiltrate US science institutions and top universities." Like Harvard.

Lieber himself said that other countries “always want something from you. . . . A lot of countries, money is what they have in excess. . . . That’s one of the things China uses to seduce people.”

from AEI

Mama Grizzly

Follow-up to this post

A "Mama Grizzly" showed up at her school board meeting last September to protest sexually inappropriate books in her son's library. She is part of the move among parents of school kids across the country who had no idea that schools would stock their libraries with material like this.

What happened after she protested? 

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Fairfax County Public Schools pulled the books and started investigating. They decided the books are fine and put them back in school libraries after Thanksgiving.

According to the Executive Director of The American College of Pediatricians, a movement of this kind has been going on since the 1990's. “They are trying to awaken kids sexually. I think that’s what people don’t understand . . they want to awaken them early. And then they want to teach them about consent and normalize the idea of child sexual consent.”

Somehow an enormous gap has developed between the values of public school officials and parents in this country. Parents have been blindsided.

From Epoch Times

Meta

Facebook has rightfully lost steam because it's lost the trust of the public. So attention is being re-directed to Meta, its new parent company and Mark Zuckerberg's new vision. 

That vision is, ta-da, The Metaverse: a virtual reality where we will be able to live and do what we can't in our real world. If you saw the movie "Ready Player One," you've seen the concept.

When you want to escape your dystopia because you feel helpless to change things, fear not. You can escape to the Metaverse where everything is cool. 

Or not. In the movie, corrupted human beings still control the escape universe. Kinda like Facebook?

If we're all going to live VR lives, let's hope Meta is not the guardian of that universe.

from MSM

Battery range+

Number of miles you can drive an electric vehicle on a single charge has always been a concern for EV enthusiasts. New EV models have a range of 100-500 miles, while Tesla's Model S currently stands at 350-400 miles.

Battery technology innovation, critical to the future of EV's, is intensely pursued by a number of companies.

Our Next Energy (ONE) just tried its system in a Model S and had great results, what they think is a world record for EV range on one charging. 

Pays $8+ billion

Is Elon Musk living on the charity of average taxpayers? Certainly not. His intense work ethic, risk tolerance, intelligence and good ideas earned his wealth for him. But an American senator says he's "freeloading."

Actually, it's sort of hard to believe she made that ridiculous claim . . because this year he will pay the government over $8 billion dollars in taxes, a number too big for most of us to even imagine. That contrasts with her income ($174,000/year) which is taken entirely from taxpayers. He pays taxes, she receives taxes.

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His companies provide jobs and income to over one-hundred-thousand taxpaying employees.

His tax bill is complicated, for sure, and apparently he paid none in 2018. But the senator's claim is short on facts and misleading.

Envious people are bothered at seeing others do well even when it does them no harm. This might be envy, coming from an unreliable political partisan. 

from Forbes

Shopping cart

Did you go shopping today? Are you a good person? Someone suggests that these two Q's are related! It's the shopping cart test.

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How so, you ask? "The act of returning the shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test for whether a person is capable of self-governing and would do the right thing even when it is not expected of them.

In/out of state

Lots of people have been moving in the last year, some to take new jobs and some because they can do their current job from a more appealing location.

So some states had a net loss and some a net gain. Vermont gained the most new people, and New Jersey lost the most.

Here are the rest.

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Curriculum 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Hillsdale College in Michigan, "pursuing truth" since 1844, can be trusted to create a worthy curriculum for the teaching of American history, civics and government in grades 7-12. Their reputation is well established for being on "top" lists for best teaching, value, innovation.

"In history and civics classes, American students should have one aim above all: to understand what they have received, i.e., their inheritance as Americans" (from their website).

“The teaching of honest history and an accurate account of civics is the key to forming good citizens. The Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum has been carefully designed to do just that, providing parents, teachers, and schools not with what they should oppose, but with a solid curriculum they can wholeheartedly endorse for all of America’s children.”

Their goal of their free curriculum is to pass on to students an accurate picture of America's past . . in contrast to the goal of the 1619 Project which is to "force white people to give up whiteness," a racist social engineering project.

Curriculum 1

Teachers often bring into their classes material which goes beyond the official textbook. Instead of just reading about historical figures, for example, a diary or book written by that person adds depth. Students gain understanding about the person and a feeling for the era when they go beyond the textbook.

This teacher enriched his classes with documents and literature from the time of slavery in America. 

Frederick Douglas lived during the 19th century as a slave and then as a free man, writing and speaking about his experiences. The class read his graphic, unfiltered autobiography. They got the message from one who actually lived the life.

"Jim Crow" laws were passed in the American South (after the outlawing of slavery) to keep the black and white races separated in public places. Specific examples are researched and discussed in class.

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Advocates for the "1619 Project" curriculum originating at the New York Times claim that the history of American slavery has not been taught in U.S. schools, hence their material must be used. But it's not so -- 1619 propaganda is far from the only option.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Lying for pay

Follow-up to this post

A big federal case was resolved in a trial by jury last month: Harvard University professor Charles Lieber, Chairman of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, was convicted of lying to the U.S. government.

Wuhan University of Technology (yes, that Wuhan) paid him $1.5 million to create a nanoscience research lab there. They also paid him $50,000/month. But when asked to disclose any foreign banks/financial arrangements, he hid his deal with China so he could receive U.S. grants to fund projects at Harvard.

According to the prosecuting attorney, "He lied to the IRS about the money he was paid, and he concealed his Chinese bank account from the United States. The jury followed the evidence and the law to a just verdict."

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from CNN