Category Archives: Opinions
Storing food when there’s no space
During the past two years when I stocked up on grocery staples, I ended up with canned foods and dry goods stored in three different places around the house.
I’d have to check all three places to be sure I grabbed the green beans with the nearest expiration date. Pasta was the same. Worse was when I discovered that I 
wasn’t having spaghetti for dinner after all because I’d used the last of the pasta and only thought I had one
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VA to tackle care for long COVID
The Department of Veterans Affairs has just published “Whole Health System Approach to Long COVID,” a holistic guidebook for the treatment of veterans suffering with long COVID. It’s estimated that 2 percent of the U.S. population will develop long COVID, which equates to 24,000 to 42,000 veterans.
The VA was the first to realize that recovering from COVID didn’t mean it was gone, that a long version was emerging, bringing with it extended illnesses. They opened 20 long COVID programs and dug into research where they looked at those who still had vascular and heart disease a year
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Will the Fed’s plan work or leave us fed up?
Well, according to the newspapers, the Fed went ahead and did it: They raised interest rates by three-quarters of a percent.
What does that mean to you? Hundreds, or probably thousands of dollars down the drain if you’re carrying some credit card debt or have a variable rate 
mortgage, or if you need to buy a house or get a car loan.
The noble motive behind the Fed’s move — which to me seems to benefit the bankers very nicely and hurt everybody else — was to bring inflation under control.
Inflating the cost of borrowing money is supposedly good because it will cause unemployment to go up (real people to
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Courier Letters to the Editor
Dear Editor,
We live in the greatest nation ever. One thing I love is we have the freedom of speech.
Your paper is one of the few whose readers haven’t contributed some biased, narrow-minded rants. It’s good to see a paper whose contributors know how to properly present their opinion or opinions in an adult manner, not acting like angst-filled children.
People who write their opinion sometimes rant and rave over their subject. Use name calling for whatever they’re against. So childish it’s unbelievable! It’s as if
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Dedicating or hesitating?
I attempt to keep my eyes and ears open to learn about the Holy Spirit and human behavior. In my spiritual journey, the situations I’ve encountered through counseling and teaching have graciously allowed me to see the importance of walking in humility through the awareness of God’s presence.
I’m not implying that I’ve arrived at a spiritual plateau where God and I float through the clouds together, but I do believe we can be as close to Him as we desire to be. To be honest, the more I discover about His written and specific will, the more I realize I have hardly scratched the surface of pleasing Him.
I’ve learned that our rebellious human nature loves being independent while God is constantly trying to reveal to
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Sign up for free college courses
In an attempt to keep brain cells active this winter, I have signed up for a college course. The good news is that it’s all online and it’s free. The other good news is that it’s sponsored by a major university.
It’s called Open Courseware, and I found my class on the internet. Yale, Harvard, MIT, Stanford and many others have “massive open online courses,” also known as MOOCs, and their main purpose is to provide learning opportunities. You have to appreciate MIT especially. They make
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Asking an expert about economic anxieties
The stock market took a nosedive last week because everyone panicked over the revelation that inflation had jumped by a whopping one-tenth of 1 percent in August.
Seems pretty crazy to me.
So I thought it would be a good time to check in with my favorite economist, the esteemed author of “Baptists and Bootleggers,” the only non-football Clemson person I know who is famous enough to have his own Wikipedia page, Bruce Yandle.
In addition to being a Dean Emeritus of Clemson University, he was once executive director of the Federal Trade
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Homeless vets still need help
Right about now the weather is cooling off. Or, if it hasn’t, it soon will. Before we know it, hard winter will be upon us. As of this year, there are 38,000 homeless veterans who will be living outside in that weather.
Homeless people make up 7 percent of the population, but 13 percent of the homeless population are veterans. Over half have a disability. Nearly three-quarters have substance abuse problems. Fully half
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Are we in control or being controlled?
There is much to be desired when it comes to spending time alone.
It’s only been in the last few years that the floodgates of voices have been opened to everyone at any time. Yes, we can see there have been written scrolls from thousands of years ago, and books were printed around the year 1200, but this information was not widely circulated.
Through the years, printing continued to expand and when newspapers became available, the masses were given a new realm that would inspire and influence their thinking. Take for example, in the early 19th century, when
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Bidding farewell to Queen Elizabeth II
It’s easy for us Americans to make fun of royalty and all the flummery that props it up, but it does make me sad to mark the passing of Queen Elizabeth II.
So what does that have to do with Pickens County, and why should you care?
Well, for one thing, I’m pretty sure that the majority of residents of Pickens County, myself included, can trace their ancestry back to Great Britain. So it’s our heritage.
Of course, many Pickens Countians, myself included, can also count among their forefathers some who fought the redcoats sent over by Elizabeth’s fourth great-grandfather, George III.
But we’ve been friends with the Brits for quite a while since then, so I say best wishes to the new monarch, King Charles
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