Where to give?

ANLM. They are in Portland, OR. 91% of donations in Rwanda go to the kids. There are about 3000 kids sponsored by ANLM and placed in schools. They have orphanages, a street kid feeding ministry and young men’s vocational training centers. The kids usually only eat on Mondays and Thursdays until they’re sponsored.

www.gfa.org. Buy a cow or a water buffalo or male and female goats, pigs, rabbits or chickens for a poor family to breed. GFA drills fresh water wells, feeds the starving, teaches the Bible, clothes the homeless and does huge amounts of disaster relief. 100% of the money you give goes to the poor since all administration folks are privately funded.

Learn From My Hero Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine, A True Political Entrepreneur and Inventor

On July 17, 1980, Ronald Reagan (another political entrepreneur) stood before the Republican National Convention and the American people to accept his party’s nomination for president of the United States. Most of what he said that evening was to be expected from a Republican. He spoke of the nation’s past and its “shared values.” He attacked the incumbent Carter administration and promised to lower taxes, limit government, and expand national defense. And invoking God, he invited Americans to join him in a “crusade to make America great again.” But Reagan had much more than restoration in mind. He intended to transform American political life and discourse. He had constructed a new Republican alliance-a New Right-of corporate elites, Christian evangelicals, conservative and neoconservative intellectuals, and a host of right-wing interest groups in hopes of undoing the liberal politics and programs of the past forty years, reversing the cultural changes and developments of the 1960s, and establishing a new national governing consensus. His ambitions were well known, but that night Reagan startled many by calling forth the revolutionary Thomas Paine and quoting Paine’s words of 1776, from the pamphlet Common Sense: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”!

American politicians have always drawn upon the words and deeds of the Founders to bolster their own positions. Nevertheless, in quoting Paine, Reagan broke emphatically with long-standing conservative practice. Paine was not like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, or John Adams.

Conservatives certainly were not supposed to openly speak favorably of Paine, and for two hundred years they had not. Conservatives had despised Paine and scorned his memory. And one can understand why. Endowing American experience with democratic impulses and aspirations, Paine had turned Americans into radicals-and we have remained radicals at heart ever since.

Contributing fundamentally to the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the struggles of British workers in the Industrial Revolution, Thomas Paine was one of the most remarkable political writers of the modern world and the greatest radical of a radical age. Yet this son of an English artisan did not become a radical until his arrival in America in late 1774 at the age of thirty-seven. Even then he had never expected such things to happen. But struck by America’s startling contradictions, magnificent possibilities, and wonderful energies, and moved by the spirit and determination of its people to resist British authority, he dedicated himself to the American cause, and through his pamphlet Common Sense and the American Crisis papers, he emboldened Americans to turn their colonial rebellion into a revolutionary war, defined the new nation in a democratically expansive and progressive fashion, and articulated an American identity charged with exceptional purpose and promise. Five feet ten inches tall, with a full head of dark hair and striking blue eyes, Paine was inquisitive, gregarious, and compssionate, yet strong-willed, combative, and ever ready to argue about and fight for the good and the right.

At war’s end Paine was a popular hero, known by all as “Common Sense.” Joel Barlow, American diplomat and poet, who had served as a chaplain to the Continental Army, wrote: “without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain.” And yet Paine was not finished. To him, America possessed extraordinary political, economic, and cultural potential. But he did not see that potential as belonging to Americans alone.

Reared an Englishman, adopted by America, and honored as a Frenchman, Paine often called himself a “citizen of the world.” But the United States always remained paramount in his thoughts and evident in his labors, and his later writings continued to shape the young nation’s events and developments. And yet as great as his contributions were, they were not always appreciated, and his affections were not always reciprocated. Paine’s democratic arguments, style, and appeal-as well as his social background, confidence, and single-mindedness-antagonized many among the powerful, propertied, prestigious, and pious and made him enemies even within the ranks of his fellow patriots. (Harvey J. Kaye, Thomas Paine and the Promise of the America)

Edward G. Gray

Tom Paine’s Bridge

Or, building a better world with iron

Several years ago, while teaching one of those history surveys that gallops across great events as if they were pebbles at Belmont, I asked my students to name a revolutionary. I had in mind Tom Paine—whose Common Sense we had just read—or perhaps Marx. I should not have been surprised by the answer I got: Bill Gates.

We do not often think of Paine as a revolutionary inventor. But in a very real sense, that is what he believed himself to be.

A revolutionary? Yes, my students told me. After all, Gates had changed everything. And he did not do this by accident. He even wrote a book, The Road Ahead (New York, 1996), whose first chapter bears the very Trotskyite title “A Revolution Begins.” In that chapter, Gates reflected upon his achievements, the revolutionary looking back on the revolution. What did they know, he and Paul Allen, a couple of school kids tinkering with some funky machine at little old Lakeside School? Well, “We caused a kind of revolution—peaceful, mainly—and now the computer has taken up residence in our offices and in our homes.”

My students agreed. The PC had changed the world. For them, it was clear: things made history. It was a curious, if partly semantic, problem. Would this make Eli Whitney and James Watt more radical than Thomas Jefferson or John Brown?

I had not given the problem much thought until I recently started doing some research on Tom Paine. What drew me to Paine was his peripatetic life. I had finished a project about a traveler who was a contemporary of Paine’s and who led a similarly transatlantic existence. This phenomenon was something I wanted to explore further and Paine seemed the ultimate exemplar of the mobile eighteenth century.

As I started reading Paine, I found myself drawn in an unexpected direction, albeit one that in a weird way validated what those undergrads were telling me some years ago. Paine spent most of the final twenty years of his life pursuing answers to an extraordinary technological problem. The problem was simply this: how do you create a reliable, sturdy, weather-resistant bridge that can span rivers without impeding water traffic? What a mundane problem to occupy the author of The Rights of Man.

And yet the problem was anything but mundane. Paine’s world was a water world. Everything traveled more quickly and more cheaply by water. Where there were no rivers or seas there was little of anything else. What farmers and trappers and miners and other producers could bring to market depended on ready access to water transport. We do not generally think of the Connecticut River or the Schuylkill River or the James River as hugely important commercial arteries. But in the eighteenth century they were. If you stood on their banks in the right season, you would see logs bound together as huge rafts, fifty and sixty foot dugout canoes loaded with deerskins or dried fish, and small sailing craft carrying grain, livestock, or tobacco.

If you lived, say, in the far northwestern corner of Connecticut—hardly a remote place—you may as well have lived in Siberia. (Actually, you might have been better off in Siberia. The Russians had developed an enormous and well-traveled network of post roads—maintained by state-owned serfs—stretching from Lake Baikal in Siberia to St. Petersburg. Interestingly, these were more efficient arteries during the long winters when horse pulled sledges could glide across what would otherwise be wet, boggy terrain.). Getting anything to market—you would probably head to the river town of Hartford—would have involved a treacherous journey across barely maintained trails, usually unable to accommodate any kind of cart or carriage and all but impassible in the winter months. If, heaven forbid, you should stumble upon the swollen Housatonic or Farmington Rivers, you would hope to find a ferryman nearby and you would hope he knew and liked you and was happy to take a few pounds of grain or a few deer skins for his services. You would also hope the weather cooperated. Storms and spring ice made river crossings a deadly business.

Imagine a world without these problems. Imagine simply being able to carry your goods across a bridge. Sure, you might have to pay a toll, but you could travel when you wished, unimpeded by the comings and goings of ferrymen and foul weather. And you could expect, with a nice bridge across the Housatonic for instance, that others would be following you to market, perhaps now carrying large loads of corn and rye. And with those others now happily farming in northwest Connecticut, more people would be more dependent on roads and thus more inclined to band together to maintain them. Above all, if you could make rivers easy to cross you could open once remote tracts to European-style farming and if you could do that you could, in theory anyway, make more land available to more people. You could, to put it simply, help the cause of liberty.

This would all have been very agreeable to Tom Paine. He believed in property and he believed in the “projecting spirit,” that spirit of invention that seemed to inhere in the breasts of all men (this was, as far as I know, understood to be a distinctly masculine quality). He thus advocated the creation of a national system of copyright so that authors could, in effect, claim proprietary interests in their work. Not only would this afford fair remuneration, it would also—so Paine believed—spur creativity. Why create if you cannot serve yourself in the process?

Fig. 1. Applying principles advocated by Paine, the designers of the first iron arch bridge in the United States created a structure that is still in service. Historic American Engineering Record, National Park Service, delineated by Christopher H. Marston, 1992. Library of Congress.

Bridge technology was obviously not a new thing in Tom Paine’s America. The Romans had created great stone ones and Europeans continued to build stone bridges using what was basically a modified Roman design. In the new United States, small wooden bridges were most common. They required little specialized knowledge and far less labor than stone bridges. But above all, wood was far more abundant in North America than in Europe.

Wooden bridges had a number of problems though. One was simply that they decayed. Moisture softens all but the rarest hardwoods, exposing load-bearing timbers to wood-boring organisms that can, in a matter of months, turn them into sawdust. The problem is especially acute on the flat road surface where pounding wagon wheels and horse hooves combine with accumulated rainwater, snow, or ice to speed decay. By the early nineteenth century, American bridge builders had devised a solution to this problem in the form of the covered bridge, but other problems with wood remained.

One was that building a wooden bridge long enough to span more than ten or fifteen feet was extremely difficult. With a growing scarcity of long, hard timbers, bridge builders had to rely on supporting piers. Aside from inhibiting river traffic, these were extremely difficult to build. They usually required temporary parapets, built midriver, within which stone foundations could be constructed. But even the most robust piers were vulnerable to forceful flood waters and spring ice.

Paine was among a small group of tinkerers who recognized that the solution to these problems lay in an old material put to a new use. That material was, of course, iron. In the short term, iron lost no strength when wet, and it could be easily fashioned into light, readily transported arches, western architecture’s strongest element. The strength of the arch allowed bridge builders to span waterways without costly piers that inhibited river traffic. But above all, Paine and his fellow inventors saw few limits to the potential span of iron bridges. As long as the basic design was sound, the scale was limited only by the ironworkers’ capacity to fashion the arches.

The material’s first real trial came in 1779 when an ironmaster named Abraham Darby III completed the world’s first iron bridge over the Severn River Gorge near the town of Coalbrookdale in England. It was a spectacular achievement. The one hundred-foot arch eased the movement of labor, manufactured goods, and raw materials fueling the region’s booming industrial economy.

Great though the Coalbrookdale Bridge was, Paine recognized several drawbacks. The first was that it was made from a vast, semicircular arch, whose height made the design feasible only for rivers running through deep gorges—or for bridges with costly embankment towers. And second, it remained largely the work of a single, creative mind. There were no plans or instructions on how similar structures might be erected elsewhere. If more such bridges were to be built, they would have to be built by Darby. This is one reason it took a decade and a half for Britain’s next full-scale iron bridge to appear.

Paine’s ambition was to solve both of these problems. He believed the same basic design principles could be applied to a much shallower arch, fashioned from a “small segment of a large circle.” Such a shallow arch could span more than a hundred feet and required no more than five feet of vertical clearance. An arch was an arch. The same principles that applied to large segments of smaller circles applied to smaller segments of giant circles.

But perhaps even more innovative was Paine’s approach to the design and construction process. Instead of crafting a bridge in the way a joiner might a house or a wheelwright a wagon wheel—relying on experience and individual knowledge passed from one craftsperson to the next—he would begin with a design. And that design would be carefully tested, codified, and disseminated. Though he was a great advocate of individual patents, he would not seek one for his iron bridge. It was to become part of the public domain, accessible to all much like the uncannily crisp prose of his most famous pamphlet, Common Sense.

It was all very democratic and very much contrary to the closed and carefully guarded practices of the artisans and trade guilds in which Paine had once found his most loyal political constituency.

	Thomas Paine, engraved by William Sharp from a George Romney Portrait. From the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

This story, like much else in Paine’s life, ends in failure. Paine’s design never made it beyond a prototype exhibited near London. Paine eventually tried to persuade the American Congress to invest in an ambitious version, but to no avail. Nobody in the new American polity—an increasingly Christian polity—wanted to pay the price of associating with such an unapologetic skeptic. It would not be for another thirty years, long after Paine’s passing, that an actual iron bridge would be built in the United States.

Paine blamed the initial collapse of the project on the French Revolution. It was that event that prompted his former friend, Edmund Burke, to publish a popular defense of hereditary rule. The greatest political pamphleteer of the time could not sit idly by. He abandoned the iron bridge project to compose The Rights of Man, a searing rejoinder to Burke. “The publication of this work of Mr. Burke,” he later wrote, “drew me from my bridge operations, and my time became employed in defending a system [of representative government] then established and operating in America and which I wished to see peaceably adopted in Europe.”

We do not often think of Paine as a revolutionary inventor. But in a very real sense, that is what he believed himself to be. Paine saw in bridge design a handmaiden of social and political change. In encouraging freedom of movement, bridges could free individuals to better themselves. They could free farmers and merchants and craftspeople to move freely through the countryside, and in doing this, they could free them to prosper and become true citizens with a vested interest in the political nation.

Further Reading:

Paine discussed his iron bridge activities in several letters but he said most about the project in his 1803 petition to Congress, reprinted in Eric Foner, ed., Paine: Collected Writings (New York, 1995). Paine’s remarks on copyright appear in a 1782 letter to the Abbé Raynal, reprinted in volume 2 of Philip S. Foner, ed. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York, 1945). The most recent and most complete treatment of Paine and his iron bridge appears in chapter 9 of John Keane’s Tom Paine: A Political Life (New York, 1995).

The Scales and Power of Justice are reasons, science and logic in defense of TRUTH, EQUALITY and LIBERTY created by intelligent, and peaceful words which represent the triumph over tyranny and prejudice. Corey K Katir

Today’s Wisdom!

An old man, a boy & a donkey

were going to town.

The boy rode on the donkey & the old man walked.

As they went along they passed some people

who remarked “What a shame the old man

is walking and the boy is riding.”

The man and boy thought maybe the critics were right, so they changed positions.

Later they passed some people who

remarked “What a shame…. he makes that little boy walk.”

So they then decided they’d both walk!

Soon they passed some more people

who remarked “They’re really stupid to walk when they have a decent donkey to ride.”

So, they both rode the donkey.

Now they passed some people

who shamed them by saying “How awful to

put such a load on a poor donkey.”

The boy and man figured they were probably right,

so they decide to carry the donkey.

As they crossed the bridge,

they lost their grip on the animal

and he fell into the river and drowned.

The moral of the story?

If you try to please everyone,

you might as well…

Kiss your ass goodbye!

CLEVER IDEAS WORTH KNOWING

Take your bananas apart when you get home from the store.

If you leave them connected at the stem, they ripen faster..

I didn’t know that!

Store your opened chunks of cheese in aluminum foil.

It will stay fresh much longer and not mold!
Peppers with 3 bumps on the bottom are sweeter and better for eating.

Peppers with 4 bumps on the bottom are firmer and better for cooking.
Add a teaspoon of water when frying ground beef.

It will help pull the grease away from the meat while cooking.

To really make scrambled eggs or omelets rich add a couple of

Spoonfuls of sour cream, cream cheese, or heavy cream in and then beat them

up.

For a cool brownie treat, make brownies as directed. Melt Andes mints in

double broiler and pour over warm brownies. Let set for a wonderful minty

frosting.

Add garlic immediately to a recipe if you want a light taste

Of garlic and at the end of the recipe if your want a stronger taste of

garlic.

Leftover snickers bars from Halloween make a delicious dessert. Simply chop

them up with the food chopper. Peel, core and slice a few apples. Place them

in a baking dish and sprinkle the chopped candy bars over the apples. Bake

at 350 for 15 minutes!!! Serve alone or with vanilla ice cream. Yummm!

Reheat Pizza

Heat up leftover pizza in a nonstick skillet on top of the stove, set heat

to med-low and heat till warm.

This keeps the crust crispy. No soggy micro pizza. I saw this on the cooking

channel and it really works.

Easy Deviled Eggs Put cooked egg yolks in a zip lock bag. Seal, mash till

they are all broken up.

Add remainder of ingredients, reseal, keep mashing it up mixing thoroughly,

cut the tip of the baggy, squeeze mixture into egg.

Just throw bag away when done easy clean up.
Expanding Frosting

When you buy a container of cake frosting from the store, whip it with your

mixer for a few minutes. You can double it in size.

You get to frost more cake/cupcakes with the same amount. You also eat less

sugar and calories per serving.

Reheating refrigerated bread

To warm biscuits, pancakes, or muffins that were refrigerated, place them in

A microwave with a cup of water. The increased moisture will keep the food

Moist and help it reheat faster.
Newspaper weeds away

Start putting in your plants, work the nutrients in your soil. Wet

newspapers,

Put layers around the plants overlapping as you go cover with mulch and for-

Get about weeds. Weeds will get through some gardening plastic they will not

Get through wet newspapers.
Broken Glass Use a wet cotton ball or Q-t IP t o pick up the small shards of

glass you can’t see easily.

No More Mosquitoes

Place a dryer sheet in your pocket. It will keep the mosquitoes away.

Squirrel Away!

To keep squirrels from eating your plants, sprinkle your plants with cayenne

pepper. The cayenne pepper doesn’t hurt the plant and the squirrels won’t

come near it. (Wonder if this works with rabbits? Sure gonna give it a try)

Flexible vacuum

To get something out of a heat register or under the fridge add an empty

paper towel roll or empty gift wrap roll to your vacuum. It can be bent or

flattened to get in narrow openings.

Reducing Static Cling

Pin a small safety pin to the seam of your slip and you will not have a

clingy skirt or dress. Same thing works with slacks that cling when wearing

panty hose. Place pin in seam of slacks and … At DA! … Static is gone.
Measuring Cups

Before you pour sticky substances into a measuring cup, fill with hot water.

Dump out the hot water, but don’t dry cup. Next, add your ingredient, such

As peanut butter, and watch how easily it comes right out.
Foggy Windshield?

Hate foggy windshields? Buy a chalkboard eraser and keep it in the glove box

of your car When the windows fog, rub with the eraser! Works better than a

cloth!

Re opening envelopes

If you seal an envelope and then realize you forgot to include something

inside, just place your sealed envelope in the freezer for an hour or two.

Viola! It unseals easily.

Conditioner Use your hair conditioner to shave your legs. It’s cheaper than

shaving cream and leaves your legs really smooth. It’s also a great way to

use up the conditioner you bought but didn’t like when you tried it in your

hair.

Goodbye Fruit Flies

To get rid of pesky fruit flies, take a small glass, fill it 1/2′ with Apple

Cider Vinegar and 2 drops of dish washing liquid; mix well. You will find

those flies drawn to the cup an d gone forever!

Get Rid of Ants Put small piles of cornmeal where you see ants. They eat it,

take it ‘home,’ can’t digest it so it kills them. It may take a week or so,

especially if it rains, but it works and you don’t have the worry about pets

or small children being harmed!

(This will definitely try!!!)

INFO ABOUT CLOTHES DRYERS

The heating unit went out on my dryer! The gentleman that fixes things

around the house for us told us that he wanted to show us something and he

went over to the dryer and pulled out the lint filter. It was clean. (I

always clean the lint from the filter after every load clothes.) He told us

that he wanted to show us something; he took the filter over to the sink and

ran hot water over it. The lint filter is made of a mesh material .. I’m

sure you know what your dryer’s lint filter looks like. Well …. the hot

water just sat on top of the mesh! It didn’t go through it at all! He told

us that dryer sheets cause a film over that mesh that’s what burns out the

heating unit. You can’t SEE the film, but it’s there. It’s what is in the

dryer r sheets to make your clothes soft and static free … that nice

fragrance too. You know how they can feel waxy when you take them out of the

box … well this stuff builds up on your clothes and on your lint screen.

This is also what causes dryer units to potentially burn your house down

with it! He said the best way to keep your dryer working for a very longtime

(and to keep your electric bill lower) is to take that filter out and wash

it with hot soapy water and an old toothbrush (or other brush) at least

every six months. He said that makes the life of the dryer at least twice as

long! How about that!?! Learn something new everyday! I certainly didn’t

know dryer sheets would do that. So, I thought I’d share!

Note: I went to my dryer and tested my screen by running water on it. The

water ran through a little bit but mostly collected all the water in the

mesh screen. I washed it with warm soapy water and a nylon brush and I had

it done in 30 seconds. Then when I rinsed it .. the water ran right thru the

screen! There wasn’t any puddling at all! That repairman knew what he was

talking about!

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