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Willard Says
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Commitment
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A Flag of Rags
In the final years of our imprisonment, the North Vietnamese moved us from small cells with one or two prisoners to large rooms with as many as 30-40 men to a room. We preferred this situation for the companionship and strength we could draw from our fellow prisoners. In addition to moving us to new quarters, out captors also let us receive packages and letters from home. Many men received word from their families for the first time in several years. The improved conditions were a result of public pressure put on the North Vietnamese by the American public.
In our cell was one Navy officer, Lt. Commander Mike Christian. Over a period of time Mike had gathered bits and pieces of red and white cloth from various packages. Using a piece of bamboo he had fashioned into a needle, Mike sewed a United States flag on the inside of his shirt, one of the blue pajama tops we all wore.
Every night in our cell, Mike would put his shirt on the wall, and we would say the pledge of allegiance. I know that the pledge of allegiance may not be the most important aspect of our day now,
but I can tell you that at the time it was the most important aspect of our lives.
This had been going on for some time until on of the guards came in as we were reciting our pledge. They ripped the flag off the wall and dragged Mike out. He was beaten for several hours and then thrown back into the cell.
Later that night, as we were settling down to sleep on the concrete slabs that were our beds, I looked over to the spot where the guards had thrown Mike. There, under the solitary light bulb hanging from the ceiling, I saw Mike. Still bloody and his face swollen beyond recognition, Mike was gathering bits and pieces of cloth together.
He was sewing a new American flag.
-- John McCain. From the files of Leadership.
See: Ps 85:1-10; 2 Th 1:4; Jas 1:12.
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Reward For Honesty
My son Jason's successes have come mainly in baseball, the most notable of which occurred in a single moment last summer. In the last three years, I doubt Jason has ever taken the field or the basketball court when he wasn't the smallest player on either team. Last summer, his lack of height was all the more noticeable because he was a seventh-grader playing in a seventh/eighth-grade league.
A fire-armed pitcher--more than a foot taller than my 4-foot-9 son--blazed a fastball right down the pike. I'm not sure Jason even saw the ball. Strike one. The second pitch scorched across the plate for a called strike two. The third pitch, unintentionally I'm sure, came right at Jason. He turned to avoid being hit and fell to the ground. His bat went flying. His helmet bounced off. The ball seemed to have skimmed his shoulder.
"Take your base," said the umpire.
Standing in the third-base coach's box, I was happy just seeing Jason alive, much less getting a free base. But now he was saying something to the umpire. What was going on?
"It didn't hit me," Jason said to the ump.
"Take your base, son," said the ump.
Our fans were most likely thinking the same thing I was thinking: Take your base, son. You've been wounded, soldier; your war's over. You're going home...
"But honest, it didn't hit me," Jason pleaded.
The umpire looked at Jason and out to the infield ump, who just shrugged. "OK," said the ump, "the count is one-and-two."
Should I intervene? Make him take his base? Jason was already digging in his cleats in the batter's box. I mentally shrugged and headed back to the coach's box.
The towering pitcher rocked and fired. A bullet right down the middle--the kind of pitch that would send the kid to the dugout. Instead, Jason ripped the ball into left-center for a stand-up double. Our crowd roared. The manager of the team in the field was standing a few feet behind me. He had no idea that the kid on second base was my son. He spit out his sunflower seeds and slowly shook his head.
"Man," he said, "you gotta love that."
-- Bob Welch, A Father for All Seasons. From the files of Leadership.
See: Ps 15:5: Ps 24:4: Lk 6:31.
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Indecision
Ronald Reagan had an aunt that was very kind to him and liked him a lot. She took him to the shoe cobbler and told the shoe cobbler that she wanted him to make a pair of custom shoes for young Ronald Reagan. And the cobbler asked, "Do you want square toes or round toes on the shoes?" And he hem-hawed around; he didn't know what he wanted. The cobbler said, "That's all right, see me in a couple of days and tell me and I'll make them for you." A couple of days later the cobbler saw him around town and he looked at him and he said, "Do you want square toes or do you want round toes on your shoes?" And Ronald said "I don't know." He said, "Well, come in a couple of days -- your shoes will be ready." And Ronald Reagan said when he picked up his shoes one shoe was square-toed and one was round-toed. And he said the shoe cobbler looked at him and said, "This will teach you never to let people make your decisions for you from this time on." And Ronald Reagan said, "I learned right then, make your decision; if you don't, someone else will."
See: 1 Kings 18:21
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But their finding validates other researchers who have said solar activity has a far greater impact on temperatures than human CO2 emissions.
This report from Zurich reminds us of another myth perpetrated by Gore. In his Academy Award-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," he contends the snowcap on Mount Kilimanjaro has retreated because of human greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet scientists have been telling a different story.
They say the melting on the 19,340-foot mountain has been going on for more than a century, beginning long before man accelerated CO2 emissions. They also report that temperatures at the top of Kilimanjaro never fall below freezing, so the reason for snowcap loss has to be due to one or more causes not related to temperature. A lack of snowfall is likely one of those.
Just as the Swiss researchers tried to soft-pedal their findings, the scientists who have studied Kilimanjaro also refuse to let the narrative unravel. They say the facts about the snowcap shouldn't be used to raise doubts about the official line that man is warming the planet. Nothing to see here, they say in effect, so move on.
Another sign that the alarmists' claims are falling apart is the statement made Monday by Gore at the global warming conference in Copenhagen: "Some of the models suggest ... that there is a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years."
While the chance that sea ice will disappear that soon is virtually nil, there's a 100% certainty that Gore was wrong.
"It's unclear to me how this figure was arrived at," said Wieslav Maslowski, a scientist from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School whose work Gore had misused. "I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this."
It wasn't the first time Gore has crossed into fantasyland. Last month, he announced on the "Tonight Show" that "the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees," when in fact it's no more than 9,000 degrees Celsius and might be only 4,000. Not even the sun is "several million degrees." Its surface — based on Gore's criteria — is a cool 5,550 to 6,000 degrees Celsius.
Then there's his movie, so full of scientific errors — at least nine of them — that a British court two years ago ruled it could be shown in secondary schools only when notes to balance its political bias were also presented in class.
Despite his poor stewardship of the facts and his refusal to debate the issue, Gore is still the go-to guy for most journalists who cover global warming. He's still identified as the climate guru who actually has something to contribute to the conversation.
The truth, though, is that Gore and so many others gathered in Copenhagen are propagandists. They know that the way to arrange the world economy to fit their preferences and require lifestyle changes in developed nations is to demand that governments do something about the environment.
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