The mail plane flies into Meyers Chuck. Meyers Chuck is off the grid, with no roads or cars; just a sprinkling of houses on the water.

There are only two ways to get to Meyers Chuck, Alaska: by boat or float plane.

If you go by plane, you might hitch a ride on a de Havilland Beaver, circa 1958 — one of the planes that brings the mail every week. It comes in low over specks of islands and the forested Alaska coast, and curves into the protected inlet of Meyers Chuck, splashing down at high tide.

On the day we visit, a handful of boats are tied up along a floating mooring. Small wooden cabins are nestled among the trees.

Meyers Chuck is off the grid, with no roads or cars, and even by Alaska standards, it’s tiny. Summer is the busy season, when people boat up to their cabins and swell the population to 25 or so.

In the winter, that drops to about five, or sometimes even just two: Cassy and Steve Peavey.


Cassy Peavey, with help from her husband Steve, runs the post office in the town of Meyers Chuck.

Cassy Peavey, 74, is the postmistress of Meyers Chuck, and Steve, 79, is her husband. The Peaveys have heard the mail plane approach, and are waiting for us on the dock. Today, the plane is delivering about 90 pounds of mail and groceries to Meyers Chuck.

Together, Cassy and Steve haul the bags and boxes up the ramp from the dock and into the tiny post office, which is perched on pilings on the rocks.

Steve Peavey and some friends built this post office out of cedar two-by-fours; Cassy painted the wooden sign that hangs outside, facing the water, with Meyers Chuck’s wonderful, edge-of-the-country zip code: 99903.

Cassy has been postmistress of Meyers Chuck for 15 years, and this is her domain. "She’s the backbone of the community!" Steve says, proudly.

She gets busy opening the mail bags and sorting the week’s influx of bills, catalogs and magazines (including, on the day we visit, the fishing newsletter Spawning News).

By now, she could probably sort this mail with her eyes closed.


On Wednesdays, folks in Meyers Chuck flood the post office to pick up their mail. The office is small — a single room — and peppered with trinkets.

There are just 18 mail slots for everyone in town.

Every Wednesday, when the mail is sorted, Cassy hangs the American flag outside, and that’s the cue for folks to come by.

On this day, Darrell Lee is happy to see that his blackberry seeds have arrived in the mail. Bob Hunley swings by, and hurray! He’s finally gotten a much-awaited part for his generator.

No mail for Dave Perry today, but it doesn’t matter – a visit to the post office is a chance to shake off your solitude, see your neighbors, trade advice on outboard motors or comment on the weather. "Seemed like kind of a one-gust storm," Bob Hunley offers. "Seemed like we had one good gust there yesterday afternoon and then it just kinda fizzled out after that."

You can settle in by the crackling wood stove with a cup of coffee and one of the cookies or cinnamon rolls that Cassy will have baked that morning.


Darrell Lee, 54, puts up the American flag outside the post office — which signals that the mail has arrived in Meyers Chuck.

The mugs are right there, hanging on hooks on the wall. "Everybody knows their own," Cassy says. "There’s a couple of guys that are pretty touchy about people using their cup."

And if — like Gary Nielsen — you boat over to the post office in your skiff, and it’s hard for you to climb up on the dock, well, Steve or Cassy will bring your mail down to you. "Thanks, Steve! See ya next week!" Nielsen calls as he motors away.

Cassy keeps a jar of red licorice sticks on the post office counter (5 cents apiece), right next to a jar for residents to leave their $50 contribution for the annual community fund, to help with village upkeep.

She has just one rule at the post office: Please, no talking about politics.

"Yeah, I get talked to every once in a while," Steve admits.

Cassy nods: "I tell him, I say, ‘No! You stay away from that.’ ‘Cause I’m pretty much the boss."


Steve sends off neighbor Gary Nielsen after Nielsen had picked up his packages.

We’ve walked up to the Peaveys’ cozy home, just a few steps up a path from the post office, where Cassy offers tea and her famous cinnamon rolls.

The Peaveys reminisce about days gone by, when Meyers Chuck was a busy fishing town, filled with characters known by their marvelous nicknames:

Pipe Pole Slim.

Crackerbox Mack.

Wooden Wheel Johnson.

Logger Bill.

Two-Quart Bottleson.

Greasy Ed.

(Not to be confused with Greasy Gus.)

Now, those nicknames are a thing of the past.

Steve and Cassy Peavey share the sweet familiarity of two people who’ve known each other nearly their whole lives. They laugh easily, call each other "babe", and often finish each other’s sentences.

They met in school when she was 10 and he was 15, in Kasaan, Alaska, on nearby Prince of Wales Island.

Later, when they were courting, Steve would row from Meyers Chuck to Kasaan to visit Cassy: 30-some miles, in a rowboat. Crazy, but true.

Steve shrugs and laughs. "Just a little stroll in the park!"

He grew up in Meyers Chuck, and he and Cassy moved back here as newlyweds 56 years ago, when she was just 18. "He drug me over here!" Cassy jokes. "He had me handcuffed!"

Steve used to work as a logger, felling trees and bucking the timber into logs. Steve and Cassy also fished commercially together for many years, and raised their two sons in Meyers Chuck. "I’ll tell ya, this was a great place to raise kids," Cassy says. "You stick your head out the window and whistle or yell and your kid usually says, ‘OK, I’m on my way home!’"

But now, there are no more kids living in Meyers Chuck. There used to be a school, but with no kids, it’s closed.

For a long time, there wasn’t even a telephone here. Finally in the 1970s, Meyers Chuck got a phone. Just one.

"It was fastened to a tree," Cassy recalls. "And you’d have to stand in line to make your phone call."

If that phone happened to ring, someone – probably a kid – would run to answer it, and relay a message.

"You’d hotfoot it down the trail to whomever’s house it was," says Mike Meyer, who was one of those messengers. "Tell ’em to call so and so."

Meyer grew up in Meyers Chuck, and family legend has it that one of his forebears gave the town its name. The "Chuck" part comes from a Chinook word. It means an inlet that fills at high tide.


Family photos can be found tucked away on shelves and adorning the walls in the Peaveys’ home, along with the family cat.

The people of Meyers Chuck are used to doing just about everything for themselves. Because they’re off the grid, they provide their own power. The Peaveys have a little windmill that spins out on the dock; others have solar panels. Water is piped down from a lake about a mile away via a water line built by the townspeople themselves in the ’80s. "Pretty darn nice," Cassy says.

In its heyday back in the 1930s, more than 100 people lived in Meyers Chuck, and the town was thriving, with a store, a barbershop, bakery, and bar.

By the time the Peaveys moved here, in 1961, it was smaller, but still humming.

"We had a little store here," Cassy recalls, "and of course the post office was here, and there was a fish-buying scow here. It was just really sweet. But it’s just slowly, slowly …"

"Slowly dyin’," Steve chimes in.

"Yep, slowly died," Cassy says.


Steve flips through old photographs of their family, pausing on a set of pictures of his son pulling out his own tooth. The back of the photograph reads: the dentist.

As much as she loves Meyers Chuck — loves that it’s so small and independent — at age 74, Cassy finds herself wishing they could move away.

She’d love to spend more time with her kids, and grandkids.

"Steve isn’t much of a family guy," she says. "He’d much rather just talk to the kids on the phone, and that’s good enough for him. I like to have those hugs once in a while."

Cassy has talked about retiring as postmistress, but, she says, "I was told if I closed the post office it would never open again. So it kind of puts a little pressure on me. It’d be criminal to change it, the way it is now."

Steve points out that there’s nobody who wants to take on the responsibility of running it. And so if the post office were to close, people would have to go by boat to get their mail over in Thorne Bay, 11 miles across Clarence Strait. "And 11 miles across the straits here would be impossible so many times in the wintertime," Cassy says.

So she figures she’s pretty much stuck.

Also, she knows that Steve has absolutely no interest in ever living anywhere else.

"Hell," he says, "I’d be just as satisfied to live my life out and die here. I mean, I’m not standin’ in line! But heck, this is a good place!"

When Steve Peavey says he can’t imagine leaving this tiny place, Cassy shakes her head, and whispers, "no, no, no."

But you can tell Cassy is concerned about their future.

Steve has had a stroke that’s left his left hand "pretty well devastated," as he puts it, and Cassy worries about how far they are from medical care.


Steve Peavey at home.
Elissa Nadworny/NPR
The Peaveys can’t think of anyone they know who’s managed to live out his life in Meyers Chuck, without having to move away eventually for health reasons.

Those questions hang over them, but right now, there are immediate things they need to tend to.

It’s summertime.

In the next few weeks, Steve Peavey plans to head out to Neets Bay, Alaska, for five straight weeks of salmon fishing on his boat, the Patsy. He fishes solo, managing it all on his own with his one good hand.

And Cassy? She’ll be home. This is the busy season at the post office in Meyers Chuck. She knows the people need her there.

Ohio recently enacted a new law to reform the way criminal statutes are written and interpreted in that state. That measure is a step in the right direction toward remedying the problem of overcriminalization.

Senate Bill 361, sponsored by Sen. Bill Seitz, R-Cincinnati, passed with the overwhelming support of the Ohio General Assembly and was signed into law by Republican Gov. John Kasich. The law requires the legislature to specify the degree of mental culpability in every future criminal statute and clarifies the default mental state that defendants must possess for criminal statutes where none is expressed.

To understand why this change matters, consider this scenario: Two customers exit a restaurant on a winter day and on their way out grab a coat hanging in the lobby. The first customer accidently takes a coat belonging to someone else thinking it was his and carries it out of the store. The second customer likewise grabs the wrong coat but takes it because he decides it looks better than the one he owned.

Both actions were identical, but only one customer should be, and likely would be, charged with committing a crime. This is because courts recognize there is a difference between carelessly picking up the wrong coat from a restaurant and intentionally stealing one off the rack. The first action is not a crime, but merely a mistake, while the latter is considered larceny. The action is the same in each example, but what criminal laws seek to prohibit is a person engaging in this sort of behavior with a guilty mind.

In legal terms, this is referred to as mens rea, which is the culpable mental state of the defendant. Criminal statutes have historically required proof of mens rea in order to secure a conviction. There are different levels of mens rea (often referred to as criminal intent): a person can act negligently, recklessly, knowingly, intentionally or willfully, and the law prescribes different punishments for each level of these mental states. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked, “Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.”

But while inclusion of mens rea in criminal statutes has long been recognized by the courts, earlier versions of Ohio’s law did not sufficiently require such a provision. In his testimony before the Criminal Justice Committee of the Ohio Senate, Robert Alt, president of the Ohio-based Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions, cited a report that was produced by the Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers which illustrated the lack of mens rea requirements in many criminal statutes. He stated that “of the 446 non-violent criminal offenses introduced in the 109th Congress, more than half (57 percent) lacked an adequate mens rea requirement,” and for those offenses that were ultimately enacted, “64 percent contained inadequate mens rea requirements.”

Perhaps even more troubling were older versions of Ohio law that attempted to specify the default mental state for criminal statutes where no mental state was provided. R.C. 2901.21(B) stated in pertinent part:

When the section defining an offense does not specify any degree of culpability, and plainly indicates a purpose to impose strict criminal liability for the conduct described in the section, then culpability is not required for a person to be guilty of the offense. When the section neither specifies culpability nor plainly indicates a purpose to impose strict liability, recklessness is sufficient culpability to commit the offense (emphasis added).
An Ohio court interpreted this law, however, to mean that if a criminal statute contained a requirement of mens rea for one section of a crime but not another, it should be presumed that the legislature intended the latter section to be a strict liability offense, that is, an offense whereby someone can be convicted by simply committing the act that constituted the crime under the statute even if he did so without any knowledge of the law’s existence or without any intent to violate the law or cause harm. This reading essentially erred on the side of strict liability for every criminal statute that was silent on the matter (not a requirement that the prosecutor prove recklessness on the part of the accused, as the statute seemingly provided).

As Vikrant P. Reddy of the Texas Public Policy Foundation noted, members of an Ohio family encountered the dangers of inadequate mens rea after being charged with violating a law, even though they had no intention to commit a crime. In 2008, the Stowers’ family home was raided by the Ohio Department of Agriculture and Lorain County Health Department for operating a retail food establishment without a license, a regulatory offense that does not involve obvious injury to the person or property of anyone. The Stowers did not know they needed to obtain a license and believed they were operating within the bounds of the law. No criminal penalty was enforced in this instance, but the family could have faced jail time for a mistake of law.

Because of cases such as this one, several public policy organizations urged the Ohio legislature to make significant reforms to the criminal justice system. The Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association, the Ohio Judicial Conference, the Buckeye Institute, the Manhattan Institute and the Texas Public Policy Foundation all endorsed the bill.

The new law has three key components. First, it requires lawmakers to include a mens rea provision for every future criminal statute. A failure to do so, under the new law, would render that future criminal statute void. This would not preclude the legislature from enacting a strict liability offense but would force the legislature to clearly express its intention to do so.

Second, the new law clearly corrects the judicial misinterpretation discussed above by providing that:

The fact that one division of a section plainly indicates a purpose to impose strict liability for an offense defined in that division does not by itself plainly indicate a purpose to impose strict criminal liability for an offense defined in other divisions of the section that do not specify a degree of culpability.
Third, when a future criminal statute contains an element of that offense related to knowledge or intent (“or to which mens rea could fairly be applied”) but fails to specify a degree of culpability (“nor plainly indicates a purpose to impose strict liability”), then it shall be presumed that the default standard is one of recklessness, meaning that a prosecutor must prove that the accused acted recklessly, at the very least, before the accused can be convicted of the crime set forth in that statute.

While we might have preferred a higher standard of culpability, requiring the government to prove that a person acted recklessly in violating a statute, rather than convicting someone based solely on a theory of strict liability, is a significant achievement and provides some measure of protection to innocent parties who simply made an honest and reasonable mistake about a law. As Justice Robert Jackson famously stated in Morissette v. United States:

The contention that an injury can amount to a crime only when inflicted by intention is no provincial or transient notion. It is as universal and persistent in mature systems of law as belief in freedom of the human will and a consequent ability and duty of the normal individual to choose between good and evil.
Ohio’s new reform is an important step forward to deal with the proliferation of laws which lack adequate mens rea provisions and unfairly criminalize ordinary behavior that an average citizen would not consider blameworthy and, hence, might not even recognize was wrong, much less a crime.

Here’s hoping other states will take similar steps to restore faith in the justice system.
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Why was there even a need for King James to produce a Bible? King James I of England authorized that a new translation of the Bible into English and it was finished in 1611, just 85 years after the first translation of the New Testament into English appeared by William Tyndale, in 1526. That, and the fact that King James I did not like the Puritans very much or their Geneva Bible. It may well have been because of jealousy that King James I ordered a new translation of the Bible; a revised version; the King James Version. So it was ordered in 1604. Part of the reason may have been the copies of Scripture that they had may have been corrupt as some were obviously poor translations. That answers the “why” the King James Bible came to be, by who translated it? Does it compare with other translations of today?

The Translators

To be honest, we don’t know very much about the men who translated the King James Bible. We do know from their writings about this project that they were completely dedicated to this in a way that nothing else in their life mattered, and “out of many good ones, one principal good one” by using the Textus Receptus line. King James I appointed fifty of the nation’s finest language scholars and approved rules for carefully checking the results. They would have to check each other and be very diligent. The King insisted on Rule # 6 which stated, “No Marginal Notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the Hebrew or Greek Words.” The King James Bible I have contains the Hebrew, Greek, and the little bit of Aramaic in the margins so I can easily see what the original word was. Other great features of the King James Bible that I have (and many do) are the words in italics. The words that are italicized are words that are not in the original manuscripts, and I am glad to know that. Wouldn’t you want to know when the translators inserted a word? I would.

The Charge Given Translators

King James I was the one who oversaw that the new translation would be as accurate as possible, and so part of his edict was that a “uniform translation, which should be done by the best learned men in both Universities, then reviewed by the Bishops, presented to the Privy Council, lastly ratified by the Royal authority,” so that there would be no errors to be found. That is why the king had the very best of English scholarship available and poured in tremendous resources to ensure they got it right. Can you imagine having all 50 scholars agree on one translation for every word by using other sources, including the Textus Receptus? Any dissension or division would have quickly throttled the project but to see it done is less than a decade is remarkable. The product was greater than they had imagined. Indeed, it was as the king who opened with the words, “To be read in the whole Church.” With that charge and the king’s rigorous rules, it is amazing that a masterpiece of such magnitude was created.

Conclusion

Of course, no translation is perfect but the main things are the plain things and that is the requirement of repentance and faith, just as Jesus said (Mark 1:15), and even though the translators got a few things wrong, the main body of work is solid. One example is the stigma of slavery, and so the translators inserted the word “servant” where the Greek said it should be “doulos” which is slave. That is a major difference because a servant worked for wages while a slave belonged solely to the master. For us, we are said to be slaves of Christ as the Apostle Paul writes, “he who was called in the Lord while a slave, is the Lord’s freedman; likewise he who was called while free, is Christ’s slave” (1st Cor 7:22, NASB), so the NASB seems to be better at translating the Greek and the Hebrew. Other than the mistranslation of servant, most of the King James Bible is solid and what we have is reliable.

ARTICLE BY JACK WELLMAN

Jack Wellman is Pastor of the Mulvane Brethren Church in Mulvane Kansas. Jack is also the Senior Writer at What Christians Want To Know whose mission is to equip, encourage, and energize Christians and to address questions about the believer’s daily walk with God and the Bible. You can follow Jack on Google Plus or check out his book Teaching Children the Gospel available on Amazon.

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If all is legal and proper ok, but I protect myself from scams by insisting
that any costs or fees come out of the balance first.

If all is legal and proper ok, but I protect myself from scams by insisting that any costs or fees come out of the balance first.

POWER FORMULA:

P=I^2*R

AMPERAGE FORMULA

A*v=w

If all is legal and proper ok, but I protect myself from scams by insisting that any costs or fees come out of the balance first.

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