Chris' Christian Blog

November 24, 2018

"November 24, 2018" 

Prompt: "What kind of Mom and Pop stores or restaurants still exist where you live? Do you frequent them as often or do you prefer the larger chains?"

I really don't know what mom and pop stores exist around here. I just moved here about a year ago and am still learning my way around. Barboursville WV is a suburb of Huntington WV, the second largest city in the state. There are thousands of stores here and I'm sure there are some mom and pop operations here. I just don't know where they are at. Now in the cities I moved from (Parkersburg WV where I lived for 25 years, and Clarksburg WV where I lived three years), there were three mom and pop stores within walking distance of my houses. I frequented them quite often, more out of convenience than anything else. However I feel that mom and pop operations are good and I hate to see them driven out by the chain stores. Chain stores will eventually take over and rule us. I'm glad I won't be around to see it.

"Prompt: Have you read any good books or articles lately? While reading the book/article did you discover something you didn't know before? If possible, include a link to the item."

I'm a student at Marshall University so naturally I have read new books recently and learned a lot from them. While I don't have links to the books because they were text books some of the books I read were "Paris of Appalachia", which talked about the small town feeling of Pittsburgh. I also read "Handbook of Appalachia", which discussed various aspects of Appalachia such as folklore, folk art, coal mining, and more. (I took Appalachian Geography for a science course this semester.) I also read a book called Mountain Masters, Slavery, and the Sectional Crisis in North Carolina)for this class. We each had to choose a book from the references page of Handbook of Appalachia, read that book and do a report on it. I chose this one because I hated the idea that one human ever owned other humans and thought maybe I could gain some insights into what drove slavery. I was always of the impression that it was economics and I believe free labor may have been the original motive. After reading Mountain Masters and comparing it to the slavery of the Hebrews in Egypt I began to realize that slavery was driven more by fear and prejudice than anything else. Slave owners in the south feared that the African-American population would run wild and commit heinous crimes if freed so they sought to control them with slavery. I found that repugnant personally but that was the predominant fear even among non-slave holding white southerners.

Other books I read include Smuggler Nation, which discussed the history of smuggling in the United States. I read it for "Drug Wars", my history 305 class. I also read "Happy Pills", which discussed the pharmaceutical industry and some psychoactive medications in the USA, particularly Miltown and Valium. The last book I read in Drug Wars was "Chasing the Scream", which gave me a whole new outlook on the "drug epidemic" in the USA and especially here in Huntington. I learned that the drug war was essentially started because a man named Harry Anslinger was put in charge of a minuscule government agency called the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The FBN barely had an operating budget and Harry knew Washington well enough to see that his agency and career were on thin ice. So he basically started the drug war to secure more and more funding for his agency. He went after mafia figures convincing Washington bureaucrats that they were public enemy number one. He cracked down hard on anything he thought people might use as recreational drugs. After all, the 18th amendment and prohibition had worked out so well why not try it with drugs? He knew drugs would come in regardless just as alcohol did during the Prohibition era. However he saw an opportunity to fund his career and convinced Washington to attempt to stop all drug traffic. Now we have cartels springing up in one country after another as traffickers fight for control of drug traffic. Anyway the whole drug policy is what is driving the "epidemic". If we would allow doctors to control drugs we could tax them, regulate the purity, and put cartels out of business. That however will never happen!

So yes, I have read some pretty interesting books and articles. I also took Comparative Politics where I studied the politics of several other countries and read two books for it. I also read several different journal articles for it and wrote a ten page research article about the government of Canada for it. The article required me to use at least ten sources. I read about 20 journal articles and used 11 of those along with some online sources and E-books. I don't like E-books because people can access them for free. If they read them for free us authors cannot get paid! However I wrote my paper. So to answer the original question I have done a ton of reading since the semester started in August and learned a lot from it. The only class I did not have a text book for was Management Information Systems (MIS-200), which was a class on Office 2016. We used an online program to learn it. The program is new and had some bugs but I still learned a lot. The link for the program we used is posted next. However you need to have a key from an instructor to register and use the program. If anybody wants to learn to use office or teach employees the basics of Office 2016 I recommend this program. It has some issues but I learned a lot from it. https://jasperactive.com/Login.aspx.

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