Paul's Ponderings

Well, I have to admit that I missed out on all the excitement early last Friday morning. An earthquake, albeit a minor one, comes rumbling through our area, and I slept through it.
While I’ve talked to a lot of folks who were awakened a little after 4:30 a.m. Friday when their house started shaking, I never felt or heard a thing. I have to believe that the quake didn’t send many vibrations through the ground where I live, or least not any strong enough to jar me awake. It could be the fact that I live near the top of a pretty good hill, or it may have been the fact that my house is built entirely of concrete blocks that haven’t cracked or even settled in the 50-plus years it’s been standing. (An old friend, the late Dan Royse, told me not too long after I moved into my home that it was a stout one. Royse said that he had his wife, Audrey, were living in an upstairs apartment next to my house when it was being built, and it was the most well-built, strongest house he’d ever seen. “If a tornado comes through and damages your house, the rest of Columbia won’t stand a ----- chance,” he noted.)
But the main reason I’ve deduced that the quake didn’t rattle my house is my dog. If something happens like that, Logan is going to let me know. If it storms, and the wind starts shrieking or a big clap of thunder booms, the first thing he does is jump in my bed on top of me, and when a 127 pound dog jumps on you, you’re definitely going to wake up, and wake up fast. So if he slept through it, the quake must not have been felt in my house.
And, I have no regrets that I missed out on the 30 seconds of shaking, and I’m very thankful that the quake wasn’t strong enough to do any damage. I’ve manage to make it through a significant number of tornadoes (the few we’ve had here, plus a whole bunch while I was living in Oklahoma and Texas, including seven in the first six days after I moved there in late May of 1973), a few floods and one notable hurricane (while I was living in Virginia in the early ‘70s), so an earthquake, no matter how small, I can do without.
There was one somewhat ironic note to the earthquake. A lady friend of mine just happened to be visiting her aunt in California at the time, and heard about it on the news. She called me from the heart of earthquake country to see if we had any damages here.
If you read my column with any regularity at all, you know that I’m constantly railing about what kind of shape our elected officials have gotten us in through the outrageous legislation and regulations they have adopted, especially when it comes to dealing with illegal immigrants.
An e-mail I received from a friend the other day entitled “Disparity in Social Security” just emphasizes this outrageousness even more. Here it is:
If an immigrant is over 65 they can apply for SSI and Medicaid and get more than my Mom gets for Social Security and she worked from 1944 till 2004. She only gets $791 per month because she was born in 1924 and there is a catch 22.
It is interesting to note that the federal government provides a single refugee with a monthly allowance of $1,890 and they can also obtain an additional $580 in social assistance for a total of $2,470 a month.
This compares very well to a single pensioner, who after contributing to the growth and development of America for 40 to 50 years, can only receive a monthly maximum of $1,012 in old age pension and Guaranteed Income Supplement. Maybe our pensioners should apply as refugees.
Consider sending this to all your American friends so we can all be ticked off and maybe get the refugees cut back to $1,012 and the pensioners up to $2,470. Maybe they will then be able to enjoy some of the money they were forced to submit to the government over the last 40, 50 or 60 years.
Please forward to every American to expose what our elected politicians have been doing to the over-taxed American for the past 11 years.