neverendingstory

“You take away Kraft out of Altria and you are left with a balance sheet that is extremely strong,” said Charles Norton, portfolio manager at the Vice Fund, a mutual fund that invests in tobacco, gambling, alcohol and military contractors. Altria is the fund’s biggest holding. “It’s just a cash cow. The free cash flow on this business is just tremendous.”
from the New York Times, January 31, 2007.

Such bold rich and greedy men sharing their fatal personality flaws with an indifferent majority. What can we do as a people or even a nation when those in control operate on such a philosophy ? Wealth accumulated via the slow death of those hooked by peer pressure or advertisements. Oh well. It is our choice after all. They didn't put their lethal products in our mouths, nor did they light them for us. It was our weak will that brought the cancer, the breathing tubes, a premature death. Besides, we sanction cigarette sales...we elect the politicians who accept oral favors from lobbyists. National Government looks the other way while the state governments fight for the health of the commenwealth. Let us turn our jaded eyes on epidemics festering within, after all they're a byproduct of our own inability to resist temptation and sin. And if it makes money, by all means, invest.

I look to the great Martin Luther King Jr. to wipe away the filth I feel from reading a truth broadcast every day on every station from here to Timbuktu.

All I'm trying to say is our world hinges on moral foundations God has made it so! God has made the universe to be based on a moral law...

This universe hinges on moral foundations. There is something in this universe that justifies Carlyle in saying,

"No lie can live forever."

There is something in this universe that justifies William Cullen Bryant in saying,

"Truth, crushed to earth, will rise again."
There is something in this universe that justifies James Russell Lowell in saying,

"Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne.
With that scaffold sways the future.
Behind the dim unknown stands God
Within the shadow keeping watch above his own."

MLK Jr. from Rediscovering Lost Values