Amish......So much for that "Witness" movie.....

We weren't supposed to notice that you were shopping for wireless phones,(which do require electricity, you know), at the Walmart store yesterday?

You'll have to dress differently, if you want to blend in.

How about those Mesquite BBQ Pringles and that pack of Pampers in your shopping cart there, 20-something Amish dude?

Pringles,(especially the Mesquite BBQ ones), and Pampers aren't particularly plain, now, are they?

Are those.....AMISH Pampers decorating the parking lots of rural America?????

Putting a sheet-metal housing around the "cockpit" of your tractor, adding a back seat, and using that tractor to drive the family into town to dine at the Bob Evans is NOT tilling the fields..... what you've done is convert the tractor into a CAR, and I'm pretty sure that driving cars is an activity that is not in strict accordance with the Pennsylvania and Ohio Amish Association bylaws.

Even if that car only goes 25 miles an hour.

Now I don't give a ratsass if the Amish have electricity or cars....but they're getting assistance, (y'know, food stamps, vouchers, WIC...), based on the claim that their lifestyle is impoverished

enough to qualifye them for aid in order to feed themselves and their kids.

So how is it they're shopping for PHONES?

It's the fact that they're cashing in on their POSE, their image, that I resent.......

Did you know that a lot of these guys are breeding and selling draft horses that pull HUGE amounts of cash at the annual draft horse auctions?

Last year I watched Amish guys selling their horses, matched Belgians and Percheron pairs going for more than $100,000 per pair.

That's more than I make in a year.

And I bet they didn't pay taxes on it.

They buy up HUGE spreads of land, with all the cash they haul in from horseflesh and expensive "HandBuilt Amish Furniture"... it's hard to find public record of the property ownership and hard to know how much property tax they actually pay.

They are big in high-profit-low-overhead puppy mills, hidden away in the deep rural back on these spreads.

Nobody knows they're there, until a bag or two of dead puppies turns up in a ditch at the end of a road between corn-fields.

Eventually, this 6-figure plus un-taxed illegal operation will get busted down by county deputy sheriffs,($22,500), and Humane Association volunteers,(free, and they donate money and time too), there will be a slap on the wrist penalty, and then Amish dude will re-start his operation way back on yet another one of these huge spreads of Amish family land.*

Bet he knows how to use a cell phone as well as I do, too.

*I'm not kidding about this. I've been in on these busts, two of which were the SAME GUY, a year apart, on two different locations in two separate counties. The conditions were beyond what can successfully be described in a blog. It's impossible to put the smell alone into a blog, and the screaming horror of the dogs has to be felt to be understood.