Daniel Farrell

You’ve probably seen something on the news about the violence in Kenya since the election. If not then you should really follow a better news source(I suggest The Real News and/or CNN). This type of story is always more real when you have a personal connection to it. My friend Jake was over there doing photography work when all hell broke loose. To hear his story and see pictures head over and read his blog post about it. It’s a crazy and amazing story that includes getting attacked with a machete and being surrounded by an angry mob. I’m so relieved that he is home safe. Pray for peace in Kenya.

At my last count there were 23 people here for potluck last night! That is a record crowd! And the food was fantastic! Nothing is better than a house full of friends and lots of good stuff to eat and drink. Thanks everyone for coming out, we had a blast!

Life has been keeping on keeping on. Nothing has motivated me to blog recently. We got to hang out with friends a lot this past weekend. We went to Aimee’s show on Friday and hung out with the Underwood’s afterwards. Then on Saturday we went to Alisha and Casey’s housewarming party and had a blast! Both nights we stayed out past 1am. Us crazy kids.

Our Potluck has been great times. This week we will be celebrating Clint’s birthday and having a Tex Mex theme(he’s from Texas). Should be a blast if you want to come over Thursday at 7pm.

Work is work… it’s busy and sometimes overwhelming lately. Not worth writing about.

I’m speaking at church tomorrow. Which means it’s Saturday night and I’m at home working on the talk while my wife is out having fun with some friends. I’ll be talking about the mission of God and our part in it. It’s a topic that I really love, so hopefully it goes off well. I think I’ll turn it into an article as well and post it somewhere online if anyone wants to see it.

Update: It went pretty well. Nerves always are there, but I definitely felt more comfortable talking than I did last time I did this. My biggest thing is I feel like I need to slow down when I’m talking. I kept telling myself in my head to slow down… but I never really did slow down. Oh well. Here is the talk written up. It’s literally about 98% of what I actually said, I just did some slight improvs from it: Jan 13th Talk notes

I’ve been quiet on here about politics. The reason is that I’ve gotten angry about national politics on here in the past and want to avoid that. My political opinions are a bit strange generally. I recently took one of those online surveys of issues that match you with your top candidates. My top three came up as Mike Huckabee, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. I don’t think you could handpick answers that get that top three. The problem I normally run into is that no candidate ever talks about the things that I care about. So I thought I would take a few minutes and tell you what I think would solve America’s problems. Brace yourself.

National Security: Get our hands out of everyone else’s business and become self-sufficient and sustainable. That will mean cutting our dependence on oil from the middle east(and elsewhere) and cheap crap from China(and other sweatshop countries). Once we aren’t meddling anymore than 95% of their reason for hating us goes away.

Health: It’s generally talked about as health care, but it’s much larger than that. Our current system is disease care. Fixing our insurance system will not fix our problems. We need to move our food subsidy money out of meat and dairy and into healthier grains and fruits/veggies. We also need to move it to smaller organic farms and away form large factory farms. That will correct this(ht: SVN):

It will also make it so that cheap food is much healthier. If a decent salad was on the dollar menu but an okay burger cost $5(like a decent salad does)… then this country would be a lot healthier. Also we need to be more active. How about moving a large chunk of the automobile subsidies to subsidize bicycles and bike roads and lanes. Make it safe and cheap to get and ride a bike instead of a car. Now we are getting exercise much more regularly.

Once Americans are getting healthier instead of sicker the health insurance and doctors/hospitals issues would start getting better. To make it even better I’d advocate a law that prohibits you from advertising a drug that requires a prescription. The doctor should be telling you if you need to get on a drug, not commercials on tv. Throw in a law setting a max limit on the dollar amount you can sue a doctor/hospital for and we are in very good shape. For the finishing touches I would suggest state-level and state-sponsored cooperative health insurance plans.

Economy: Obviously my above thoughts already greatly change our economy. It will hurt some industries and help others. I’m totally fine with that. There are plenty of industries that we should want to put out of business(predatory lending, things that destroy the environment and promote unhealthy lives, etc, etc). We should also shape policies to favor small business and entrepreneurial ventures instead of large corporations wherever possible. There is much more economic stability in a metro-region if it’s economy is not 95% dependent on a handful of large companies.

There you go… that would be my plan for fixing America. I know that for many people that doesn’t touch on “their issues”. Sorry, but get your own blog and write about them yourself.