Irrational belief in rhino horn power...

"IPSWICH, England — The Ipswich Museum contains many alluring and potentially theft-worthy items, including a spectacular 2,000-year-old gold-leaf Egyptian death mask on loan from the British Museum and a rare Hawaiian cape featuring feathers from the extinct o’o bird. But when two thieves forced their way in after midnight on July 28, they were seeking something else entirely.Never mind that their target, a large rhinoceros horn, was still attached to its owner, which had been standing blamelessly in the museum since 1907."

And now they are stealing horn from museums? For some reason the killing of rhinos for their horn so that some inadequate prick somewhere can pretend to be enhanced sexually with it enrages me. (yeah, what else is new?) Why is that? Could it be the stupidity of a totally irrational belief in rhino horn power causing the slaughter of thousands of people.... oops rhinos?

The demon hunter

An emerging Christian movement that seeks to take dominion over politics, business and culture in preparation for the end times and the return of Jesus, is becoming more of a presence in American politics. The leaders are considered apostles and prophets, gifted by God for this role.

I am not sure if to be worried or happy.  Perry must not become President.  I don't think that is likely if the Republicans nominate him, but the fact that he could be nominated is frightening in itself.  Like Richard Dawkins recently said:

" There is surely something wrong with a system for choosing a leader when, given a pool of such talent and a process that occupies more than a year and consumes billions of dollars, what rises to the top of the heap is George W Bush. Or when the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin can be mentioned as even remote possibilities." 

"For the past several years... the NAR has run a campaign to reclaim what it calls the "seven mountains of culture" from demonic influence. The "mountains" are arts and entertainment; business; family; government; media; religion; and education.

"They teach quite literally that these 'mountains' have fallen under the control of demonic influences in society," says Tabachnick. "And therefore, they must reclaim them for God in order to bring about the kingdom of God on Earth. .."

They are looking to gain control and remove the demons that are preventing the second coming of Christ.

Hoping Irene isn't too bad for my friends on the east coast.

Be nice to Vagabonde Irene!

Naked ladies. How do they do it?

These have been blooming all over Santa Cruz county over the last few weeks.  All at once.  How do they know?  How do they know when to bloom?  Some clock?  Some hormone?

Fwd: solutions

From my friend Vicky. 

Sent from my iPod

this is a cool letter from my friend Myles.

 

Our ancestors made it through the age of the dinosaur - I think we can make it thorough this.

We are not out of bullets - what we are lacking is a historical perspective.  When the world reacted with fear and pulling back in 1929 it exacerbated the problems and exacerbated, if not led to, a massive world wide depression.  Many of the wise heads have been saying, and I have been agreeing, that the turn around will happen if the government steps in and starts stimulating the economy with public works/repairs.  It is not sexy and it increases our debt but our debt can not be paid off if we are not paying taxes and unemployed people do not pay taxes.

Look at California where a minor increase in jobs has caused our debt to go way down.  What we have needed - all along and long before this crisis - is jobs.  That is a major reason why the Arab world is rebelling - jobs - they want jobs.  There is plenty to do.  Even I could come up with enough ideas ideas to keep millions employed.  If we put our heads together we could turn this mess into a bright future.

But we continue to recoil in fear and as we cower the walls fall around us - when we should be bracing the walls we are just staring in shock as they fall.  The so called conservatives among us need to be sidelined before they can get us all the way back to the middle ages where a tiny percent owned everything and nearly everyone else lived short hard lives in perpetual poverty.

I am looking at the bright side also - there seems to be a faint noise in the land of people realizing that we do not need this monster military.  In my opinion we could turn a large portion of that enterprise towards fixing our infrastructure - at least then we the people would have something when the dust cleared - instead of mountains of spent shell casings we could have fixed bridges and built new schools.  And the builders would actually learn something useful - as opposed to the latest method of killing each other they could learn how to work with concrete (I know... I know...)

As the some of the wise founders saw it, and I agree, we can fight when we need to fight.  We don't need to be constantly fully prepared for every war like contingency.  When the Canadians attack just give me 6 weeks of training and I will be able to pull whatever trigger they tell me to pull.  After all - our species has excelled at fighting for countless millennia.

Myles

August 2011 Young Eagles

It ended up being too foggy to fly kids on Saturday but I got the neighbor kids up in the air on Sunday.  The forecast was the same for both days, but all of the sudden Sunday after opened up big time.  A beautiful day to fly.  The two boys below got to fly.  I am sure these girls will come back, they and their mother are local to the airport and really wanted to fly.

 

Pissed off again.

The FAA is down to air traffic control only.  Congress, on a much smaller scale is stuck because of the same thing, desire to regain power in the Senate and Presidency.  Tens of thousands of jobs are put out because the Rethuglicans won't compromise at all.  The key sticking point is a Republican rider that makes it harder for air and rail workers to unionize.  They are shutting down thousands of jobs because they want to make it harder for workers to unionize.  How un-surprizing.  Obama has screwed up over the last few weeks working on the deficit.  It isn't a deficit problem... it is a recession and economy problem.  He has let the Republicans define the debate to be about the deficit when what he was handed was a recession and the need to recover.  The Republicans failed since Reagan to do anything about the debt when times were good and now are screaming about it now that we have to invest and pull ourselves to get out of this recession.  They know this.  They don't want the American people to realize we were driven here by their actions and inaction.  They want to regain the Senate and White House in 2012 at all costs.  Jobs and the American economy is a small cost to them.