Worth County Compiling Disaster Reports for Drought

A sweltering heat wave has gripped the area and the governor has requested information so that he can declare disasters as needed. Various offices are completing damage reports and sending info regarding the drought to the governor’s office. Temperatures were in the 90’s and 100’s all last week with no end in sight for this week.
Mark Cadle of the Farm Service Agency said that they were trying to secure an emergency release of CRP land. Normally, most CRP land has managed provisions where they can be hayed only once every three years; Cadle said that the FSA is seeking the release of ground that was hayed last year. Cadle said that they were also seeking to get land released for grazing.
One of the difficulties is that the county must have a 40% shortfall in moisture over the last four months. While the county has received little rain in May and June, it still did not necessarily meet the 40% shortfall when March and April were added.

Dare Turns Into Theft Charges

A dare by friends turned into theft charges for Timothy Rippy. Information filed by Worth County Prosecuting Attorney David Baird alleges that on the night of April 20th, Rippy appropriated firearms and miscellaneous property including an AC-15 rifle and a Beretta .40 handgun owned by Tim Adams and Allen and Becky Cameron.
On May 2nd, 2012 at around 4:05 p.m., according to a statement provided by the Worth County Sheriff’s Office, Rippy came to the Worth County Sheriff’s Office and admitted that he had been dared by friends to load a large safe by himself onto his truck, a 1987 GMC. He did so and then broke into the safe with a torch. He wouldn’t say where the safe was, but said that two of the guns in question were seized by the Gentry County Sheriff according to the statement. The statement says that he returned a Model 88 Mav 12-gauge shotgun and a large amount of ammunition to the Sheriff.
Hearing is set for July 9th at 1:30 at the Worth County Courthouse.

Hay Bailer Catches Fire East of Sheridan

A hay bailer owned by Clint Larison caught fire Wednesday (June 27th) evening shortly before 7. Larison was haying for Rod and Debbie Bowers behind their home east of Sheridan when the bailer caught fire and Sheridan fire units and the Worth County Sheriff’s Department were called out. Larison was able to unhitch his tractor and drive it to safety. Nobody was injured in the blaze.

Blockton Woman Seriously Injured in Wreck

A Blockton woman, Sonia Lambson, was seriously injured in an accident Wednesday morning, June 27th. The Missouri State Highway Patrol reports that a 1999 Volkswagen driven by Lambson was southbound on 169 three miles north of Grant City when she crossed the center line, went off the east side of the roadway, struck a field entrance, and became airborne. Upon landing, the vehicle began overturning and came to rest on its wheels off the east side of the roadway facing north. She was taken to the Northwest Medical Center by the Grant City Ambulance. Lambson was wearing a seatbelt at the time of the accident.

Finnegan Reid Lehr

Finnegan Reid Lehr was born to Katie (Groce) Lehr Wednesday, June 27th. He is welcomed by older brother Creighton Davis. Grandparents are Jerry and Laura Groce, formerly of Grant City. Katie is a 1997 graduate of Worth County R-III.

Opinion: Are Americans Not Submissive Enough?

 by Sheldon Richman

Future of Freedom Foundation

If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought New York Times columnist David Brooks was having a laugh at our expense. Alas, Brooks means every word of his column titled “The Follower Problem,” as anyone who reads him regularly will realize.

 

“I don’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem,” Brooks laments. “Vast majorities of Americans don’t trust their institutions.”

 

Worse than that, he thinks Americans dislike all authority.

 

We live in a culture that finds it easier to assign moral status to victims of power than to those who wield power.… Then there is our fervent devotion to equality, to the notion that all people are equal and deserve equal recognition and respect.… But the main problem is our inability to think properly about how power should be used to bind and build.… Those “Question Authority” bumper stickers no longer symbolize an attempt to distinguish just and unjust authority. They symbolize an attitude of opposing authority.

 

I think Brooks is wrong, though I wish he were right. I see little real rejection of political authority. Too bad. We need it.

 

But let’s assume Brooks is right. Is anti-authoritarianism a problem? You’d have to be a nationalist devotee of intrusive government to think so. Who else would value mindless obeisance to political authority?

 

Brooks disparages “our fervent devotion to equality” because it’s “hard in this frame of mind to define and celebrate greatness, to hold up others who are immeasurably superior to ourselves.”

 

Is he kidding? Is he really finding fault with those of us who fail to recognize greatness and superiority in “our political leaders”? (“Misleaders” is a better word.) Where, pray tell, is the evidence of either greatness or superiority in those whom Brooks has in mind? For some reason he doesn’t provide any. He just takes it for granted.

 

He quotes Dwight Eisenhower, who wrote, “Always try to associate yourself with and learn as much as you can from those who know more than you do, who do better than you, who see more clearly than you.”

 

That’s good advice, but is Brooks suggesting that our misleaders know more, do better, and see more clearly than the rest of us? Can he give us any reason for that assertion?

 

Presidents routinely interfere with our lives and authorize the mass murder we call “war.” Members of Congress do equally stupid things, such as passing bills authorizing unaccountable and ignorant bureaucrats to write inane rules about how to manage everything from medical care to the financial industry.

 

These people get elected not by demonstrating superiority, or even greater-than-average knowledge, but by their facility for setting the right mood for voters. Politics is theater, and politicians are actors. If one portrays a character that enough people find appealing, he or she gets elected.

 

Of course, that’s not all politicians do. They devote a good deal of time promising new ways to spend other people’s money — money that will be extracted from the taxpayers by threat of violence. They will also borrow money, which means they will create liabilities for future generations that have no say in the matter.

 

This is greatness? It’s ludicrous to read superiority into anything they do. Nefariousness and condescension are more like it.

 

Brooks fears the consequences of a general skepticism about authority:

You end up with movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Parties that try to dispense with authority altogether. They reject hierarchies and leaders because they don’t believe in the concepts. The whole world should be like the Internet — a disbursed semianarchy in which authority is suspect and each individual is king.

Again, I wish he were right. But he is far too optimistic. (He’d call it pessimistic.) Neither Occupy Wall Street nor the Tea Party have identified the root of our political and economic problems, and consequently their solutions are not anti-authoritarian enough. But at least they sense something is wrong systemically. That’s a start.

 

Brooks, on the other hand, thinks it’s not the leaders who need changing so much as those who distrust “their” leaders.

 

“We have to relearn the art of following,” he writes.

 

No we don’t. We need to learn the art of living free.

 

Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation (www.fff.org) and editor of The Freeman magazine.

Jack Remembers -- The Mother Lode

My best friend in grade school was Leon Johnson. He lived in a small house in town, was the oldest of four sisters and one brother. When I was in the fifth grade, we moved to a farm about a mile from town. If neither one of us had to work, Leon would ride out to our farm on Saturday. Back then there was no trash pick up, so people from town would come out to the edge of town to dump their trash. There was a trash dump down the road from our farm where we could always find a few pop or beer bottles and take them to a tavern on 40 Hiway at the Oak Grove intersection called Y Not Eat, run by a guy by the name of Wayne Thompson, who liked both of us. Although some places only gave one to two cents a bottle, Wayne gave us three cents a bottle, which was big bucks back then. We could buy a Polly’s soda pop or a Baby Ruth candy bar for a nickel, and a pack of Wing cigarettes for a dime.
One Saturday, here came Leon flying in the driveway on his bike hollering at me, “Jack come quick! Somebody dumped a huge pile of beer bottles down at the dump.” I jumped on my bike and sure enough, it was a gold mine. The mother lode. We were rich. He stood guard while I went back for the gunny sacks. They were so heavy we had to leave our bikes to drag and carry the sacks full of bottles up to the beer joint. It was hot summer time and we had to stop every hundred yards to cool off and talk about what we were going to do with the money.
Wayne came out to count the bottles and wanted to know if they taught reading where we went to school. He handed me one of the beer bottles and asked me to read on the bottom of the bottle. It said, “No Deposit. Non Refundable Plastic Bottle.” Wayne said, “Boys, it’s something new. Now take these bottles back to the trash dump where you found them. I just threw them in there earlier this morning.”
Jack can be reached at PO Box 40, Oak Grove, MO 64075 or jackremembers@aol.com. Visit www.jackremembers.com