This year I’m offering a 20% discount on ALL items in my music store!

DISCOUNT CODE: merry2011

Here’s how to get it:

1. Visit http://music.johnalbertthomas.com
2. Click “Buy Now” on any item you want to purchase!
3. Click “Have a discount code?”
4. Enter merry2011 and click “Apply”.
5. Click [Checkout] to finish your order, or [Add to Cart] to keep shopping.

The 20% discount applies to your entire order, so load up on great music for your piano-loving friends! NOTE: Code expires on Dec. 24!

As usual, shipping is FREE in the US and Canada!

After the walk all the families gathered in a circle with their balloons, each one marked with the name of a baby who is missed. During this solemn occasion they played my Now I Sleep CD, including “Fly Away” which was inspired by a balloon release.

It was a bittersweet time for those families who remember the pain of losing a baby and yet find encouragement in each other. I was honored to be there and to have my music be part of their healing. I really struggled to hold back the tears as I watched God using my talents to serve others in a way I never imagined. I pray that God continues to use it for His glory in countless more ways.

This song is performed in all black keys and has a beautiful oriental sound to it. The song was named in honor of the opening of Maria’s Big House of Hope, a special care center for orphans with acute medical needs.

To order sheet music:
1) Click here to visit the store.
2) Click on the Sheet Music link.
3) Select “Lullaby For Hope”
4) Complete your order.

Rearden heard Bertram Scudder, outside the group, say to a girl who made some sound of indignation, “Don’t let him disturb you. You know, money is the root of all evil – and he’s the typical product of money.”

Rearden did not think that Francisco could have heard it, but he saw Francisco turning to them with a gravely courteous smile.

“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Aconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

“When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor – your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?

“Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions – and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

“But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made – before it can be looted or mooched – made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.

“To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except by the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss – the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery – that you must offer them values, not wounds – that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best your money can find. And when men live by trade – with reason, not force, as their final arbiter – it is the best product that wins, the best performance, then man of best judgment and highest ability – and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

“But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality – the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

“Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants; money will not give him a code of values, if he’s evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he’s evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

“Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth – the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve that mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

“Money is your means of survival. The verdict which you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men’s vices or men’s stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment’s or a penny’s worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you’ll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

“Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

“Or did you say it’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It’s the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is the loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money – and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

“Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

“Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another – their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

“But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride, or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich – will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt – and of his life, as he deserves.

“Then you will see the rise of the double standard – the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money – the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law – men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims – then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

“Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

“Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it becomes, marked: ‘Account overdrawn.’

“When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world?’ You are.

“You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it’s crumbling around you, while you’re damning its life-blood – money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men’s history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves – slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody’s mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers – as industrialists.

“To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money – and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being – the self-made man – the American industrialist.

“If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose – because it contains all the others – the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money’. No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity – to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.

“Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters’ continents. Now the looters’ credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide – as, I think, he will.

“Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns – or dollars. Take your choice – there is no other – and your time is running out.”

from “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand

Location: Miller Piano, 539 Cool Springs Boulevard Suite 120, Franklin, TN 37067

The father of four children himself, Thomas mentioned to me that he was often moved to tears as he composed this music. He also said, “It’s difficult to explain, but sometimes it felt like I was watching myself compose. At the risk of sounding presumptuous, it honestly felt like God gave me the music in those moments at the piano and I got to participate (and worship) in His music project. It still leaves me speechless and humbled at times. So He gets the credit for the good in it.”  Each piece tells a different story, but all are composed and played with such love and gentleness that it’s impossible to pick favorites. This is obviously a very unusual album, but the bottom line is that all of the piano solos are quiet and heartfelt, offering feelings of peace and calm.

John Albert Thomas is offering free (or “name your price”) digital downloads of Now I Sleep from his site, www.johnalbertthomas.com, in addition to the CDs. The CDs contain two bonus tracks that are not included in the digital version as well as the 12-page booklet that brings even more meaning to the music. The two bonus tracks are Thomas’ arrangement of “Baby Mine” from the Disney movie Dumbo and “Scandalous Grace,” composed for a young lady on her 21st birthday. Now I Sleep is available from www.johnalbertthomas.com, Amazon, iTunes, and CD Baby. Recommended!

Kathy Parsons
MainlyPiano.com
5/30/11

Cozy Corner Concerts in Salt Lake City, Utah
$10 per seat (30 seats available)

TICKETS: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/171277

WATCH ONLINE: http://www.cozycornerconcerts.com/

Scheduled to perform: John Albert Thomas and Michele McLaughlin

Michele McLaughlin’s “Cozy Corner Concert Series” featuring renowned piano artists from around the world. These are in-home concerts, up close and personal around the piano with the artists in Michele’s living room. If you’ve never attended an in-home concert before, they’re a real treat. We love performing this way because it is so intimate and personal, the energy at these concerts is unlike anything else. They’re so much fun! Come share in these intimate and cozy concert experiences with Michele and her special guests.

Each concert has 30 seats available at $10 per seat. Shows start at 7:00pm, doors open at 6:30pm. Refreshments will be served. There will be a free CD giveaway, CD’s and sheet music will be available for sale, and you can mingle and visit with the artists during intermission and after the concert. Additional donations and tips are always appreciated.

We also broadcast these concerts LIVE on the internet. If you cannot come, but still want to watch, you can enjoy the music from the comfort of your own home. It’s the next best thing to being there in person. The broadcast can be viewed at www.cozycornerconcerts.com Help us spread the word about the broadcasts by inviting your friends to watch as well. We really appreciate the support

Come share in this intimate and cozy concert experience with John and Michele in Michele’s living room. Between their two beautiful styles and their haunting & captivating compositions, this will be a soul warming concert you don’t want to miss.

John’s music can be found at http://www.johnalbertthomas.com/

Michele’s music can be found at http://www.michelemclaughlin.bandcamp.com/

Additional concert details and videos can be found at http://www.cozycornerconcerts.com/

NOTE:

• Seating is general admission and is limited to 30 seats.
• Venue doors open at 6:30pm.
• There will be a meet & greet with the artists during intermission and after the concert.
• CD’s and Sheet Music will be available for sale.
• This is an “in-home” concert in a residential area. There will be plenty of parking on the street.
• Additional donations/tips are appreciated.

Second, and more obvious…2K years ago the most controversial man in history, Jesus, was crucified for claiming to be God, and then proved his claim by raising himself from the dead on the third day as promised. In the days that followed, He appeared to more than 500 people and the good news has spread till this very day. One good thing about that…He gave us the hope of resurrection and everlasting life.

Third, and least obvious…two years of hard work is culminating in the release of my new solo piano CD, Now I Sleep! Come back this Friday, April 22 for the official release!