It's Not Just Political - It's Personal!!!

911 Was Child's Play??

2011-03-25T20:16:00.000-07:00

Traces of Radiation too small to kill an Ant was detected yesterday, Thursday March 17th, at a California Monitoring station. It is said to have come from the damaged Nuclear Reactors in Japan. While the low level Radiation itself is of little concern, I can't help but take a more cautious view of the facts. It took less than five days for the Radioactive material to be carried on the winds, from its source to the shores of the West Coast.

The worst Nuclear accident in history thus far is of course Chernobyl. The interesting thing in that incident, worth observation is the fact that there was a large enough explosion to send microscopic Radioactive material so high into the upper atmosphere that it was able to be spread over a wide area by the fierce winds... and kill between 4000 and up to an estimated one million people. I mention this because even without reaching the upper atmosphere the Japanese Reactor material was still able to reach the American West Coast in a minimum amount of days... which makes me wonder...

What if Osama Bin Laden or his Henchmen decided to fill with Radioactive material and charter... an Airplane from any Foreign Country...only to Detonate it off the Coast of California...at the correct Altitude to be spread most effectively by those vibrant winds that blow from the West Coast all the way across America to the East Coast? Spreading the deadly particles all across America. That would make 911 look like Child's play.

September 11 was revealed by the 911 Commission to actually be Plan B... Plan A was to fly an Airplane into the Indian Point Nuclear Facility in Upstate New York. It was revealed that the only reason the plan was abandoned is because the Terrorists thought the American Government at the time was intelligent enough to have Surface to Air missiles installed around the facility to protect it...talk about overkill...or over estimating the dedication a Government would have for its people...So, they went with Plan B and down came the Towers.

An exploding Airplane full of Radioactive Material...over California... is a really destructive medium that could actually affect and kill Millions of people from one corner of America clear across to another...think about it...and then kiss your kids...and if you live on the West Coast...don't drink the Tap Water... don't let your kids drink it...and don't let the radioactive rain wet you...

This article was written by the Author of the newly released book titled "Shock and Awe on America" which can be bought in print or for Kindle at Amazon.com
Or can be read in part or downloaded in different E-book formats at Smashwords.com
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2012?

2011-02-26T07:36:00.000-08:00

Obama has sacrificed so much and so many for a second term.

When he and Michelle get there, will they think it was worth it?

The Problem Is that Most Democrats are Liberal Instead of Progressive

2010-10-26T06:26:00.001-07:00

Robert Reich Why Democrats Move to the Center, and Republicans Don't

Democratic presidents so much more easily intimidated by the "move to the center" rhetoric after midterm losses than Republican presidents.

Democrats think in terms of programs, policies, and particular pieces of legislation. It's easy to reverse course by compromising more and giving up on legislative goals. Bill Clinton never mentioned the words "health care reform" after the 1994 midterms.

Republicans think in terms of simple ideas, themes, and movements. It's far harder to reverse course on these (look what happened to the first George Bush when he raised taxes), and easier to keep them alive: Republican presidents just continue looking for opportunities to implement them.

Republicans are also more disciplined (ask yourself which party attracts authoritarian personalities and which attracts anti-authoritarians). This makes it easier for them to stay the course. Their base continues to organize and fulminate even after midterm defeats. Democrats, on the other hand, are less organized. Electoral defeats tend to fracture and dissipate whatever organization they have.

Republicans are cynical about politics from the jump. Political cynicism fuels them. Democrats are idealistic about politics. When they become cynical they tend to drop out.

Message to Obama: Whatever happens November 2, don't move to the center. Push even harder for what you believe in. Message to Democrats: Whatever happens, keep the courage of your conviction and get even more active.

Liberals have the short-term in mind, Progressives are focused on the long term.

Health Care The Christian Way...

2010-10-11T19:46:00.000-07:00

When someone says Health Care, Single Payer or Medicare, Republicans are immediately up in arms. They are of the strict understanding that the Health Care system which helps pay for those who cannot afford it, is bad and in recent times has been called a Socialist system...or Obamacare.

Well, what many do not want you to know is that there is already a system like that out there...it is called Medi-Share, and it is a real system by real Christians giving real care to those who need help to address their Medical needs.

"Medi-Share is a community of more than 36,000 Christians who follow the biblical model of sharing and paying each other's medical bills much like the early church did 2,000 years ago. And as a not-for-profit ministry that promotes healthy biblical lifestyles, participation is affordable."

See the Story at their website.

How does it work?

"Your fixed monthly share amount is used to match others healthcare costs. If you have a medical expense, Medi-Share participants will share your medical bills. In fact, since 1993 more than $490 million have been shared and saved leaving no medical needs unpaid for."

Their statement says..."Healthcare sharing ministries like Medi-Share are the only organizations to be exempt from the

regulations and costs of the recently passed health care bill. (Page 128, H.R. 3590 )"

I would love to let the Republicans/ Conservatives/Teabaggers/Birthers/Neo-Cons, know what real Christians think about Healthcare and why this is a great idea...as the Bible says it should be...maybe they would wake up and see the light...after all, What would Jesus do?

I feel I should also incluce this comment made by a visitor to my blog www.shockandaweonamerica.com
"James Lansberry said... I also recommend Samaritan Ministries (www.samaritanministries.org) that i've been a part of since 1996. Over 15,000/50,000 Christians sharing medical needs for $320/month or less per family"

This article was written by the Author of the newly released book titled “Shock and Awe on America” which can be bought in print or for Kindle at Amazon.com

Or can be read in part or downloaded in different E-book formats at Smashwords.com

Tyler Clementi and Christianity's Evil Intolerance Of Gay People

2010-10-02T18:19:00.000-07:00

Christians are normally tolerant people, except when it comes to the Intolerance of Gay people. This hatred and misunderstanding by them is in itself their right in America and they are exercising their ability to make decisions as they have been taught to. Therein lies the problem. “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).

The Christian religion and the Christian scriptures tout the intolerance of Homosexual behavior, indulgences and lifestyles. Writings in the Holy Bible, include Leviticus 20:13, which says..."KJV: (King James Version): "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them."

There are other parts of the Bible which teach that we should be against the Gay people among us, simply because the Bible says so. If you ask a Christian why they hate Homosexual people you will more times than most get one answer..."The Bible tells me so..." a phrase they learn as a child, in a song. Another example is this one..." Romans 1 :26, 27...26For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature, 27And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet."

I write this article simply because the Christian way of ridiculing the Gay community to the point of making them outcasts of the society and pushing some to the point of committing suicide, is just plain wrong and evil.

Tyler Clementi jumped to his death, off the George Washington Bridge a few days ago, his room mate and another friend are now being charged for possible hate crimes and could even be charged for manslaughter.
Raymond Chase hung himself recently...he was on of at least five suicides in the past few weeks, information that have come to light for most of us, since the interest in Tyler Clementi's suicide.

The predominant problem is bullying. Bullying of anyone causes them to think and do things that do not make much sense to the rest of us, but my interest in the subject right now is...where does the bullying start...who or what gives people the right or reason to bully others. I come up with only one answer....the Christian religion...in Romans, Leviticus, Mathew, Genesis and so many other passages in the Holy Bible.

If the Christian religion via its doctrines is being used as a weapon by these Bullies, and as the reason why they bully others, because the Bible calls for their Death, then we have to question the right of the Christian Church to exist if it causes members of the community to use its teachings to bully others into taking their own lives...as Death is called for by the Bible.

The Bible not only describes homosexual behavior as detestable, but it also calls for the punishment of those involved (Leviticus 20:13)...punishment by death. It is quite clear that the Bible and its teachings has long been the weapon of choice by those hateful enough to use it as such. This opens the question...should the Bible and its religion be afforded special rights under the law, to exist and to keep legally teaching and espousing the practice of shunning and bullying of Gay People, which sometimes result in the consequent death of these victims... these Gay people. ..as ordered and encouraged by the Bible?

ABAHT: The Last Word

2010-09-26T11:49:00.000-07:00

By Anne Lamott:

We must take on today's radioactive politics for the sake of my 1-year-old grandson.

I don't want to hear one more rude comment about John Boehner's skin. Who cares? I know someone who wears the same self-tanning unguent; who suffers from the same unfortunate conviction that this glow makes him look healthy, rather than uremic or malarial. And in Mr. Boehner's defense, he looks a lot better than a friend I'll call Bill, who on top of the orange additive look also has blotches and scales from sun damage. At least House Minority Leader Boehner knows to exfoliate, and for that I am grateful. Well done, Mr. Boehner.

Nor do I want to hear another judgmental word about Mrs. Palin, Mrs. Angle or the astonishing Miss O'Donnell. These women are the three finest natural comediennes to hit the national scene in decades. No one else has come close to bringing me the number of laughs that these gifted conservative women have. Every day brings new one-liners and mirthful observations from one of them, and these never fail to lift my spirits. In fact, some days Sarah Palin is the only thing that keeps me going.

But even as we enjoy the antics, we must hasten to the aid of our country. The reason has nothing to do with the minority leader's skin tone, or the three aforementioned Republican comediennes or, for that matter, Mitch McConnell's chin or John McCain's tiny anger issues, or C Street, or Rush or Cheney or Glenn Beck.

We must take on today's radioactive politics for the sake of my 1-year-old grandson.
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I was babysitting him on the night when Miss O'Donnell won the Republican nomination for senator in Delaware. The television was filled with footage of the incomparable O'Donnell and news of how she opposes masturbation and believes that scientists have successfully implanted human brains in lab rats. I could not have taken my eyes off the television for anyone else except my grandson, with his huge luminous black eyes and hair, his rosy brown skin, his toothy smile. But this toddler is so lovely, innocent and funny that he broke the spell.

Gazing at him, I realized how desperately important it is for there to be breathable air left when he comes of age, and perhaps the merest hint of an ozone layer.

I pray that the girls he dates someday will still be able to get birth control safely and easily, and that they will still have the constitutional right to choice. And if my grandson dates boys instead, that there not be institutionalized bigotry that shames him and his partner. And that the forces of social justice prevail, against all odds, so that he and this boy of his have the same rights as other married couples, so they can adopt children and make me a great-grandmother.

It's imperative that there are still safety nets like Social Security and Medicare when his children come of age, so that great-granny does not need to move in with them. And that the men and women in the White House have somehow managed not to nuke Iran, or lie their way into another war for oil or corporate profit, like certain people I could mention.

My grandson is half-Latino, and he looks like an illegal alien. If we do not fight the terrorist anchor-baby crazies in this election, who knows what kind of racist weirdness will become the law of the land? And then what will happen? He has no gift for producing papers of any kind. He accidentally eats them most of the time. He ate his stroller's bar-code ID tag at the airport last month. He ate a bit of the San Francisco Chronicle Sporting Green the other morning. He can't produce no stinking papers, because he's so busy recycling.

Plus he can only say one word, besides "Mommy" and "Da-da." It is "abaht," and it is all-purpose. I thought at first it might mean, "Thank you, Jesus," or "Down with the shah," or was even an effort to say the name of our president, in whose general excellence I still choose to believe.

It may well mean those things, but abaht also seems to mean that he loves strawberries, and that you should reread the book again now, or that the dog licked his face, and that he will so open this drawer, and he hates apple-flavored yogurt, and abaht! — throw him up in the air again. Or hand him the Matchbox Corvette. Please. Abaht. Now.

It's a good word, so I say now to all like-minded people, abaht! Get involved now in this election. Abaht for Molly Ivins and Teddy Kennedy. Abaht — register voters, or send sane candidates a donation, or volunteer to make phone calls or address envelopes. It will greatly affect the next 40-some days, for you and this country and even this world.

I don't expect you to find the time to help make this world a better place solely for my grandson and his creaky and fabulous Nana. Do it also for your own incoherent paper-eating grandchildren, and nieces and nephews. Do it for the poor, the aged, but abaht — do it now.

God Let Them Down...

2010-09-19T11:26:00.000-07:00

The question that has always been at the forefront is ...Is there a God? The religious will hasten to reply, yes there is. When asked to produce or reference something that could prove God exists, the religious will tell a story from the Bible, Qur'an, Bhagavad Gita, Torah or some other religious text. Some will tell a story of something personal that has happened to them or something they were witness to that shows the existence of God is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.

There are yet more religious followers who will show the wondrous sights to behold around the world or the children they have been "Blessed" to have. They will recall seeing their newborns for the first time, and being convinced at that moment that God exists. Some will tell that God saved them when they were drowning, when their house was on fire, they will say they were carried on his shoulders when he left footprints in the sand. He saved them when they twisted their ankle and was falling down, while they were holding their Family's precious and priceless crystal heirloom handed down for generations...by giving them the swift, superhuman reflexes to grab onto a chair or the staircase. There are many stories.

Did God exist on September 18th, 2010? Why that day you ask? That is the day when a Church Bus from the Bronx in New York, had an accident on the New York Thruway...six people died and eight were injured...so far...Church people...Religious people. The dead included The bishop Titus White; his wife, minister Zelda White; and pastor Titus McGhie, among others. Now why would God do so many other wonderful things around the world, every second, and surely at that same moment, and not save the lives of these innocent, loving people, who Feared him more than most...and maybe those who are still hoping to survive and are fighting the injuries they sustained in the accident. Can I pray to God to help them get better? Surely I can. Were these people Witches and Wizards who God disliked and that is why they were not saved? I think not. Maybe they did not pray to the correct version of him, maybe they should have been Catholic Christians or Anglican Christians...maybe...but I think not.

There were bombings in Iraq on September 19th 2010 as well...37 people died...so far. Why did the Muslim version of God not save these people? Were they bad people who fell out of favor with the Muslim God? I think not. The mere fact that these things happen would be quickly explained by the "Faithful" as God working in "Mysterious ways". I think not...that's foolish. No matter what the reasons are ,put forth that these people deserved to die, I can honestly say...bullshit. No God planned these deaths. No God prevented these deaths. I hasten to remind you, there were "miracles" happening around the world while these people were dying...or so the recipients of those "miracles" would attest. The fact that these people died proves beyond any doubt that God does not exist...certainly not for them.

When 800,000 innocent people of the Tutsi tribe were being hacked to pieces during 100 days of carnage and death, by the Hutu tribe in Rwanda in 1994, and their flesh later being eaten by the animals there...God did not smile to himself and say...This is good...because he was not there...he was not anywhere. The blind faith that the followers of religion are encouraged to have is just that...blind. Faith in a God is not a good idea, there is a joke, that says you do not know hell until you know religion. It really is all just religious mind control, meant to keep you fearful of all the imaginative ideas ancient man invented thousands of years ago...for the peasants and slaves. If religious people take a good look at themselves, and see the contortions and weird rituals they are purveyors of, they would be embarrassed. It is being reported today, Sept 19th, that there are multiple children missing in California, they are suspected victims of a religious "End of Days" cult...we hope they will escape unharmed...maybe God can show up and save them...I know many are praying for that very thing. I remind you the "Millerites" had the same delirious "end of days idea" in the 1800's, when the world did not end, they spawned a few different Christian Denominations including the Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses.

I for one do not mind delirious people swallowing the religious ideas, but when the ideas influence different portions of the populace...like the Hutu machete gangs, or the folks in the Inquisition, the folks in the Crusades, The folks during the era of Christianization and when they influence our very children, to do stupid things in the name of some Fantasy God, it strikes too close to home to remain silent. George Bush spoke to God, and his decisions were based on his religious misconceptions, he and his friends made Billions... Jim Jones spoke to God, he killed everyone...David Koresh spoke to God, and the sex was good...Moses and Abraham spoke to God, I think they got land...God told Reverend Jones to burn Korans on 9/11, he got publicity...They all got something... This is my proof that God is just a Fantasy, and a business partner of sorts.

After the 19oo's, when we finally came out of the "Dark age of Ignorance" and started to invent things and understand Science and the Universe, many continued to deny that God was a Fantasy...they refused to explore the wealth of knowledge that became available to them around the world, that could disprove their acceptance of this religious mind control. They still do today...and play with snakes, perform rituals to their Gods, speak in "Godly languages...or Tongues" and generally spread the decay of intelligent minds.

It is time to stop...You can be a God to your own families...if you be good people and that is all you need to do...be good to each other, just for goodness' sake, and not a Fear of Gods. God let those people die on Sept 18th 2010 because God is a Fantasy, God let them down because God does not exist...but you do, so recognize the difference and live... don't subject yourself and your children to foolish religious ideas, instead... learn, research, there is a bright future ahead for the children, but it starts with us...don't be fooled by the religiously delirious amongst us.

There will be Prayer services today... September 19th, for those who died...they will pray to God...the same God who let their loved ones die needlessly. They will pray for all sorts of things, even praying that the deceased left wills with lots of cash...no I'm not being cynical, my Grandmother's priest closed her Bank account and withdrew over $100,000 from her account, less than a week after she died, so I know the depth of what I speak. Religious people will fool you, for many different reasons.

Jesus, our brother, not our God, who knew the folks were too stupid to understand the truth said it like this in Luke, Chapter 17, verses 20 - 21...20Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, "The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, 21nor will people say, 'Here it is,' or 'There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you." ...meaning it's all in your head...in your minds...it's just an idea, not a reality. Don't be fooled. Jesus did not start a religion, the corrupt Church did, after they murdered him and realized how profitable and powerful it could be for them. Learn, do the research, seek...for the benefit, and the future of your Children.

Is Religious Tolerance Destroying The Earth?

2010-08-19T08:52:00.000-07:00

The title is a question that has been asked for generations and is being asked in many circles now. Another one is "Are Religions profitable enough to us or should they be removed?" I am aware that through the ages Religion has been the biggest supporter of the poorest and neediest amongst us, but that has to be weighed against the high incidence of death that it brings with it now and has brought with it in the past.

Religion has always been like a good drug that has good effects and bad affects. On the one hand it cures the ills of Society while on the other hand it causes more deaths on a daily basis than poverty, in fact Religion is gravely responsible for much of the poverty it helps to alleviate around the world. In many countries the restrictions put on the communities by religion are the said rules that prevent certain conditions that are beneficial to the community. One major example is the restriction of women to become educated, which in turn keeps the whole community down. I am sure you have all heard the saying ...If you educate a man you educate an individual, but if you educate a woman you educate a family (community or nation) You also have had in the History of the Earth, many millions of deaths by Religious wars, The Inquisition, The Crusades, The era of Christianization, which spanned hundreds of years and by itself took millions of lives. The Holocaust was as much a Religious duty of Hitler in his eyes, as it was an act or attempt of Genocide. The Iraqi war is view by some to be some kind of twisted continuation of the Crusades by modern Evangelists because we had no reason to attack Iraq before first attacking North Korea and other Regimes who are hostile to us.

One has to decide if the good that Religion has done for the Earth as a whole outweighs the destruction it has done. Religion in my opinion is responsible for the Retardation of the Human race in its quest and destiny of becoming a Space-bound species. We do not have to look further than the Middle East region to see the destruction Religion encourages between one Religious group and the next. Hamas bombs Israel today and Israel retaliates tomorrow. The Kurds, The Shiites, The Sunnis are sometimes warring against each other, The Hindus and the Pakistanis wars and the list goes on... Religion can be seen as the most destructive force on Earth, barring Greed which is inexplicably linked and interwoven into the very fabric itself, of Religion.

We do not even have to go that far to see one Religious group's Bigotry against another, we need only take a look in our own back yard, at the newest religious controversy brewing in New York with the proposed plan to build a Muslim institution in the form of a 13 story building that houses a Museum and many other things...including a place of prayer for Muslims, and other Religions. I heard an interesting discussion on a radio program by Patt Morrison, where her guests were Firstly, The Acclaimed Author Sam Harris, co-founder & CEO of Project Reason; author of the books,The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation; his upcoming book out in October, is The Moral, and Secondly her guest the Acclaimed editor at the Daily Beast and internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions; his latest book is Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism In the Age of Globalization. There was a female caller to that program who brought to light the opinion that we could entertain the idea of banning the building of All Religious houses...for various reasons. Her charge was that the Methodist Church was refused a permit to build around the same area.

I would like to also ask the question of how far away from Ground Zero should Religious Buildings be constructed. Now bear in mind there is a Church within 2 blocks and a Mosque within 4 blocks of Ground Zero, so you have to use these existing buildings as the guidelines for your decision. Perhaps a ban should be placed from building Religious houses of worship any where within a 50 block radius from Ground Zero for ALL religious houses, or maybe for that matter on the entire Island of Manhattan. This is of course after the removal of all existing Religious houses of worship within the boundaries of Manhattan.

It is my humble opinion that 9/11 was a product of Global Religious tensions and it was only a matter of time before it occurred in the location and fashion that it was done. As Technology advances so too we will see this reflected in future attacks upon us. The Earth is being overrun by Religion and the Fanaticism it ultimately produces, this has a profound affect on the way our society thinks and acts toward each other, War being the approved and preferred method of engagement, rather than an engagement of minds and ideas. Because of these Wars, we are truly paying for the privilege of having Religion... with our Blood...literally, with dead and wounded people by the Millions. I think animal sacrifices was a better idea, instead of sacrificing innocent people... who are victims, termed "collateral damage" and soldiers in Religious wars. You see the craziness of Religion when you realize that Judaism, Islam and Christianity all come from the same source, and they share certain traits found in Hinduism as well. Obviously there will be many in agreement and many who disagree with my Building ban on Religion, but we should respect each other's right to have an opinion. I invite your thoughts to this dialog...

Ted Haggard Starts A Church!!! WTF??

2010-07-26T20:39:00.000-07:00

Ted Ted Ted...Ted Haggard Is Over Repentent? WTF?...Ted Haggard Is Over Repentent? WTF?...Ted Haggard Is Over Repentent? WTF? I must try to believe this...I must try...

I can't do this...I'm sorry...I cannot believe this guy is serious and he wants to make a comeback. You saw me repeating it...trying to make myself believe that he means it , that he is serious, that he thinks he made a mistake...he doesn't...he isn't...he doesn't think he did. He said...Tiger needs to play golf...Michael Vick needs to play football...Ted Haggard needs to LEAD a Church!! What The...!!! No....tell me Tiger needs to have multiple women...Vick needs to fight dogs...Ted Haggard needs to smoke Meth while standing with, by and in his man, only then will I be willing to hear that Ted needs to lead some gullible people. But, obviously anyone with half a brain would not believe him and will not support the idea, so lets see how this develops, it will be quite an interesting ride...and he already leads an army of 200...

Below is an excerpt from Stephanie Simon's article in The Wall street Journal.

"Once one of the most prominent church leaders in the U.S., Mr. Haggard confessed in a tortured letter, calling himself "a deceiver and a liar" who had long wrestled with desires he described as "repulsive and dark." He signed a contract promising to follow a path laid out by fellow clergy: to find a new career in a new state and to stay away from pastoral work.

Then, his wife at his side, Mr. Haggard left town.

He is back now. In a move that thrilled some of his former flock—and alarmed some of his fellow evangelical Christians—Mr. Haggard and his wife Gayle recently launched a new church in their backyard barn, a few miles from the enormous campus of his old congregation.

In two months of preaching with sacks of fence-post concrete at his feet, Mr. Haggard, who is 54 years old, has built a congregation of nearly 200 people. His church, St. James, has outgrown the barn and this Sunday moves to a rented community center.

Ebullient as ever, bouncing with energy, Mr. Haggard said he is back doing what he was born to do. "

I can't do this...I'm sorry...I still cannot believe, after reading the above excerpt, that this guy...this She Devil...Satan's Spawn...Satan's Whore... is serious and he wants to make a comeback. I'll tell you what he really does want...the endless streams of money the Church brings in...that's what he misses and wants.

Original Article at The Wall Street Journal.

One Road, Many

2010-07-18T14:33:00.000-07:00

America Dumbing Down?

2010-07-18T13:00:00.000-07:00

What does author Ashley Merryman, Harvard Musicologist Aaron Berkowitz and Two term President of The National Academy of Sciences and Editor-in-chief of Science Magazine Bruce Alberts have in common? They were all found in one place at one time…the place being The Charlie Rose Show, the time was July 15 2010. They were all there, along with Charlie, to discuss the declining state of American education.

Ashley told us of a Mr. Johnathan Plucker who, while in China discussing the differences between the American and Chinese education systems and approaches to teaching, spoke about our turning away from our traditional curriculum and methods of teaching and the embracing of the new “No child left behind” method. He explained this in some detail and when his words were translated into Chinese, he was indeed surprised and confused when everyone started laughing at what he said. When he inquired as to why they were all laughing, he was told that America is adopting the old Chinese methods of teaching while they are vigorously pursuing the old and traditional ways of American teaching.

This old American method being the art of using Divergent and Convergent thinking, letting the students gather “tactile” experience by actually taking learned knowledge and applying it in the field, thereby using the challenges given, to formulate solutions in a real and applicable manner, as opposed to just learning a bunch of facts and not being able to use and impliment them in the field…commonly known as Rote Learning.

Rote learning was looked upon by Mr Alberts as a retardant way of teaching. Rote learning is a learning technique which avoids understanding of a subject and instead focuses on memorization.
I may add my own two cents here and also include the adoption of teaching Creationism in the classroom, as anything other than a history lesson in Religious Activism and delirium gone wild, as also a retardation of the progressive education process and a throw back to the Neanderthal era. We shall soon have the students worshiping fire and images of Jesus on slices of pizza, to the delight of their delirious teachers and parents.

I can only come up with one example when thinking of the extended results of our current Rote Learning system, and that is to offer the image of George Dumbya Bush. He , in my honest opinion is the perfect outcome, of that type of non-intelligent, ” lack of thinking ” old Chinese Communist educational process of do as you are told by the Maoists…or die.

Welcome to America 2010.

In Colorado, The Old Media Lawyers-Up Against the New Media and Reaps the Wind

2010-07-09T07:34:00.000-07:00

Colorado’s top political blog has been ignoring stories from the state’s largest newspapers for more than a month. The move — which the website’s owners said has mostly gone unnoticed — was in response to a threatening letter sent by an attorney for the news organizations that accused the website of copyright infringement and demanded it stop posting excerpts of the newspapers’ articles.

The owners of the website ColoradoPols.com went public on Wednesday with a demand it received from three media conglomerates — owners of The Denver Post, the Colorado Springs Gazette, The Boulder Daily Camera and The Greeley Tribune, along with more than a dozen smaller newspapers across the state — and announced they’re not only happy to comply but will go one better, banishing any mention of the litigious news outlets from their website.

Colorado Pols co-founder Jason Bane in an interview Tuesday with The Colorado Statesman:

We’re replying, OK, whatever.

We’re going to stop linking to them and mentioning them at all because there’s no need to.

99 percent of the stories you can find anywhere else.

It’s not individual sites or individual blogs that are causing problems for other outlets. The hold they had on distribution is gone, and that’s never coming back.

The thing that’s gone that they’re never going to get back is control of distribution. Twenty years ago, if you wanted local news, you had to get your local newspaper or your watch your local news on TV. That ship has sailed and there’s nothing they can do to fix that.

Old media is so over....

The Death Of A Giant...

2010-06-26T16:30:00.000-07:00

The Atlantic Bluefin Tuna, otherwise known as Thunnus Thynnus, Northern Bluefin Tuna or Giant Bluefin Tuna is in danger of extermination due to the BP Oil Spill. Atlantic Bluefin Tuna are known to spawn in only two breeding grounds, one in the Western Mediterranean and the other is in the Gulf of Mexico. The specie is known to venture to different areas to feed but they are known to return to both their respective breeding grounds to spawn. In the past the Atlantic Bluefin Tuna have been threatened by commercial fishing, which are controlled to a certain extent by the local Fishing and Wildlife Authorities but now they are threatened by an enemy that they have no protection from…the BP Oil Spill and their Dispersants, both of which pose their own set of dangers to this prized and valuable fish and their delicate spawning cycles.
This type of tuna is said to be the most tasty of the species when compared to the Pacific Tuna, The Southern Tuna, The Bigeye Tuna, The Longtail Tuna and the Yellowfin Tuna. The Atlantic Bluefin Tuna is the most highly prized in Japan for Sushi, where it is a delicacy and one large Tuna in Jan 2009 was recorded as being sold for a record $173,000. A selling price of $100,000 is not uncommon, and represents a large and lucrative market for the Tuna caught in The Gulf of Mexico.
Each female Tuna is thought to produce up to 30 million eggs and these egg spawns are facing untold dangers from the dispersants being used in the spill. The eggs contain Fish Oil, and the Dispersants are known to affect the oil and cause the egg spawn to be lost.
There are only two large breeding grounds and when they are killed off in the Gulf of Mexico, there will remain only the one in the Mediterranean and we will lose many forms of jobs and various streams of income related to this Majestic Animal, which are known to reach a weight of well over 1000 pounds. After BP has cleaned up the Gulf, it is expected that we will not have an Atlantic Bluefin population anymore…

Modern Day Frankenstein??

2010-06-20T13:00:00.000-07:00

Right about now, it would be great if we could release into the Gulf of Mexico a vat of bugs that did nothing but eat gobs of oil and digest it into harmless smaller bits. Meanwhile, we'd power the cleanup vessels with microbes that swallow grass clippings or seaweed and spit out fuel, so we'd no longer need to punch holes in the bottom of the Gulf in the first place.

Such is the promise of synthetic biology, which, according to the people who have tried to explain it to me, is basically a marketing term for all kinds of research in which scientists tinker with biological bits to make useful things — sort of like living Lego blocks. The latest breakthrough in the field came a few weeks ago, with news that left headline writers torn between Genesis and Frankenstein: the biopioneer Craig Venter was said to have become the first to create life in the lab. What Venter did was replace the natural genome in a cell with a slightly modified synthetic one, which then issued the orders by which the cell reproduced — and brought science a little further into the realm of science fiction.

The gift of man-made life — biofuels made of algae, tumor-seeking microbial missiles — comes wrapped in a risk: What if the oil-eating bug mutates, as the horror-movie version inevitably does, and starts eating other things — like us? It's perhaps not surprising that when bioethicists describe synthetic biology, they sound like the characters in Jurassic Park. "When dealing with biological entities," notes Thomas Murray, president of the Hastings Center, a bioethics organization, "life has a tendency to find a way."

Accidents at power plants are bad enough. But a leak from a bioreactor could be worse, since bacteria can learn new tricks when you're not looking. Microbes excel at exchanging DNA, Murray notes — "like microbial French kissing." That bug we introduce into the ocean to sip the spill might end up swapping DNA with other living things. "We have a ways to go," he says, "before we can really know what risks we're running if we release these organisms into the environment."

All of which confirms the need for careful oversight, but we haven't proven very good at this. The crossroads of science and politics is a dodgy place. For proof, you have only to consider that for all the furor in the past dozen years, there's still no federal law banning human cloning; there's only, so far, scientific restraint. In 2001, President George W. Bush was condemned for politicizing science with his decision to limit federal funding for stem-cell research; in 2009 President Obama was praised for reversing it, even though his decision was arguably just as political. You can object to Bush's stem-cell decision because you believe embryos have no moral standing, or to Obama's decision because you think they do. But neither President should be attacked for "interfering with science," as though research — especially publicly funded research — should be immune from regulation. The left may have faith in the findings of think tanks, the right in the freedom of markets, but on this one, I want a more inclusive, expansive debate. Without public oversight, we are certain to wake up one day to news of some private breakthrough that rattles our bones: a human-animal hybrid, a cloned child, a fetus grown solely to harvest its parts.

As laboratories incubate new blends of man and machine — creatures whose creators used a keyboard — it seems mad to say that philosophy should not intervene. And indeed, when the news about Venter broke, Obama called on his bioethics commission to "undertake, as its first order of business, a study of the implications of this scientific milestone," including an assessment of "any potential health, security or other risks."

The path of progress cuts through the four-way intersection of the moral, medical, religious and political — and whichever way you turn, you are likely to run over someone's deeply held beliefs. Venter's bombshell revived the oldest of ethical debates, over whether scientists were playing God or proving he does not exist because someone re-enacted Genesis in suburban Maryland. Others dismiss the worry on the grounds that creating new forms of life is not the same as creating life. One doctor friend of mine suggested that "they haven't created life in any sense of the word, other than a person playing a cassette has invented the tape recorder."

People are bound to disagree about when scientists are crossing some moral Rubicon. That is all the more reason to debate, in public and in advance, where those boundaries lie — rather than doing so after the fact, when researchers are celebrating some technical triumph and the rest of us are wondering what price we will pay for it.

Time Magazine article written by Nancy Gibbs.

From Teeluck, The road to discoveries that are beneficial to mankind is littered with potential risks which can themselves become as large a threat as the threats they are designed to counter and indeed eliminate or make harmless. The search continues...as does the risks.

I...I Am... I Am God...

2010-06-18T07:11:00.000-07:00

2010 with Shaman, Kiesha Crowther (1 of 2) from Bob Keeton on Vimeo.

2010 with Shaman, Kiesha Crowther (2 of 2) from Bob Keeton on Vimeo.

Take from this what you will...and give it back...

STOP CIRCUMCISION NOW!!

2010-06-13T10:56:00.001-07:00

A 35-year-old mother was arrested for allegedly circumcising her 10-month-old daughter, police said. The LaGrange woman was being held in the Troup County jail with out bond, Sgt. Chad Mann told the AJC. She faces female genital mutilation and child cruelty charges, Mann said.
“A relative changing the baby noticed that she appeared to be circumcised,” Mann said.
The AJC is not publishing the mother’s name to avoid identifying the infant.
The baby was taken to Children’s Health care of Atlanta, where a doctor determined she had under gone some form of surgical removal of the clitoris, Mann said. The baby’s father was previously granted temporary custody, and he alerted authorities about the child’s injury, police said.

“She’s in perfect health, other than that,” Mann said.

The baby is in her father’s custody, police said. Authorities are not releasing details about a possible motive for the mutilation.

“Some of the areas of the investigation are sensitive,” Mann said.

The baby’s mother was arrested Wednesday after noon. Her first court appear ance is scheduled for Friday morning.

DFACS officials told Columbus, Ga., newschannel WTVM9 that the woman also has three other children, but declined to say to release the location of them.

An estimated 100 to 140 million girls and women worldwide have been victims of female genital mutilation, according to the World Health Organization. Most of the procedures have occurred in Africa. According to the WHO The procedure has no health benefits, and can cause severe bleeding and problems urinating.

From Teeluck…I am appalled, ashamed and so freaking angry that the innocent among us are treated in such macabre and inhumane ways that it actually hurts to write this article. This “Satanic” practice of circumcision, practiced on both male and female victims Globally, by the delirious people who believe in Satan and this Satanic practice in some freaky way…is truly disgusting and should be outlawed around the Globe. To these perpetrators, it does not matter the horrendous affects it has on the innocent victims and the awful life the females face as a direct consequence…it is truly a step backward for Mankind…religion shows it’s dark and evil face in this practice. Let us bring awareness to this evil practice so in some way we can begin to push back against it... for the sake of it’s help less victims.

Many thanks to the Atlanta-Journal Constitution

Bayer Sold Aids Tainted Drugs In America

2010-06-01T07:47:00.000-07:00

This is not Political...It really is personal, and a clear and present Danger to you and your family...

We are constantly put at risk by these large Corporations who think more of their profits than how many of us are killed by their insane greedy practices...
We are now seeing a rise in the amount of lawsuits for bad drugs that have sickened or even killed the patients who used them!!

BE CAREFUL OF THIS ONE...

2010-05-17T08:40:00.001-07:00

I got this in the mail recently...beware...

Dear Friend,

I know this may come as surprise and sceptic to you. My Name is Mr. Zaki Ahmed, I am one of the officials in the Energy management board in Burkina Faso, West Africa.
We had a contract with Denmark through the Burkina Faso Danish Cooperation, which was signed on the 4th of June, 2009 on the Electrification of the Urban centres, offices and rural dwellers. The project has been executed, you can check on the website.

www.sonabel.bf

But, the main issue of contacting you is to intimate you that during the award of this contract, a few of my colleagues and l had inflated the amount of this contract and the OVER- INVOICED is being safeguarded under our custody.

However, we have decided to transfer this sum of money, thirty million Us dollars ($30million Us Dollars) out of this Country for disbursement. Hence, we seek for a reliable,honest and not greedy foreign partner whom we shall use his or her account for transferring the fund. And we agreed that the account owner shall benefit 30% of the total amount of money, 65% is for us here, and 5% will be used for miscellaneous expenses during the transfer.

If you are capable to handle the transaction without hitches and flaws, then we have confidence in the business and a risk free transfer from our side.
Please, make it TOP SECRET and avoid every channel of implicating us here thereby endanger our career.

Therefore, if you will not be able to handle it,please hold on your peace for our sake we are public servants. I pray to God for his providence for a smooth transfer, so that our retiring soon or later will be a better and blissful retirement life, as such we are very cautious towards actualising this noble venture. It can also be a once in life opportunity for you, because l know that we are going to see face-face, preferably come down to Burkina Faso and verify on the claim on the said amount of money in the bank. Besides, to discuss business and investment in your country at large, and thereafter sit together to decide on the means of transferring.

Do contact me immediately for more detail and clarifications.

Please, time is no longer on our side and hope to read from you urgently.

Zaki Ahmed.

zaki Ahmed (zakiahmedzaki@sify.com)

GLOBAL EXTINCTION? IS IT HERE? NOW? ARE WE SCREWED?

2010-05-09T16:02:00.000-07:00

"The Gulf Oil Spill: An Extinction Level Event?"
by Mike Adams

"Reports about the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill have been largely underestimated, according to commentators, including Paul Noel, a Software Engineer for the U.S. Army at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. He believes that the pocket of oil that's been hit is so powerful and under so much pressure that it may be virtually impossible to contain it. And Noel is not the only person questioning the scope of this disaster.

A recent story from the Christian Science Monitor (CSM) reports that many independent scientists believe the leak is spewing far more than the 5,000 barrels, or 210,000 gallons, per day being reported by most media sources. They believe the leak could be discharging up to 25,000 barrels (more than one million gallons) of crude oil a day right now. The riser pipe that was bent and crimped after the oil rig sank is restricting some of the flow from the tapped oil pocket, but as the leaking oil rushes into the well's riser, it is forcing sand with it at very high speeds and "sand blasting" the pipe (which is quickly eroding its structural integrity).

According to a leaked National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration memo obtained by an Alabama newspaper, if the riser erodes any further and creates more leaks, up to 50,000 barrels, or 2.1 million gallons, per day of crude oil could begin flooding Gulf waters every day.

When this disaster first occurred, the media downplayed it. BP spokespersons were quick to claim that the leakage was minimal and that crews would eventually be able to contain it. But as time went on, it became clear that things were not under control and that the spill was far more serious than we were originally told. (Gee, sound familiar? Remember Katrina?) Yet some of the media reports still seem more like press releases than actual reporting because they continue to repeat what the public relations cleanup crews (pun intended) would like the public to believe rather than what's actually happening. Reality, it seems, has a nasty habit of interfering with corporate spin.

Cap and trade becomes "cap and pray:" The New York Times yesterday reported that BP is working on a large containment dome that is intended to cap the leak and catch the escaping oil so that it can be safely pumped to the surface. Meanwhile, crews are said to be working on fixing the broken blow-out preventer valve that should have stopped the leak from happening in the first place, but they have been unsuccessful thus far.

Almost every report says that BP is doing everything it can to contain the spill and stop the leak, even though the company claims it is not technically at fault. According to an article from the U.K. Daily Mail, BP's CEO Tony Hayward recently responded to the cleanup efforts by explaining, "This is not our accident but it is our responsibility to deal with it." Swiss-based Transocean is the company that actually owned and operated the sunken rig. It manned the rig with its own crew and BP just leased it from Transocean (which makes you wonder why BP is so willing to take full responsibility for everything). BP says that it's working on a relief well, but that it could take up to three months to complete. Until then, the company is trying several different approaches to at least slow the leak and hopefully stop it altogether.

Mind you, almost all of the information about the spill from day one has come directly from BP which obviously has every incentive to downplay the true environmental destruction that could be caused by this oil spill. Even the word "spill" is incorrect. This isn't some ship of oil that spilled into the ocean - it's a "volcano" of oil spewing from the belly of Mother Earth herself. It's under extremely high pressure, it's spewing a huge volume of oil directly into the ocean, and there so far seems to be no human-engineered way of stopping it (short of setting off an underground nuclear bomb near the well site).

Addressing the unanswered questions: According to the CSM article, environmental risk models are normally performed for pollutants like crude oil, yet not one model has yet been released for this incident by BP or the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Many are wondering why this crucial information has not been made public. Could it be because the results of the model might seem too catastrophic? Neither has there been an adequate explanation given for exactly why the oil rig exploded... twice! Some reports indicate that the crews responsible for properly cementing the well casing didn't do it right. Others suggest that the oil deposit was just too large and under too much pressure for the equipment to handle it. (Be careful where you poke around the planet if you can't handle what comes out, right?) It's also important to note that, according to a recent New York Times article, Halliburton was actually the company responsible for all the cementing work on the rig, which brings a third party into the picture.

BP's federal permits allowed the company to drill up to 20,000 feet deep, but according to one of the workers who was onboard the rig during the explosion, drilling in excess of 22,000 feet had been taking place. This same worker is said to handle company records for BP, but BP has denied these allegations. BP has declined to comment, however, on other allegations that the spill happened because it chose not to install necessary deep-water valves which would have acted as a last resort seal of protection in the event of an emergency. Several other allegations include suspicions that the crews allowed gas to build up in the well bore and that the rig operator tried to detach too quickly from the well, causing a disruption. BP, Halliburton and Transocean have all indicated that they are continuing to investigate the situation. When companies investigate themselves, however, the truth rarely comes out.

The possibility of an extinction event? It's hard to say exactly what's going on in the Gulf right now, especially because there are so many conflicting reports and unanswered questions. But one thing's for sure: if the situation is actually much worse than we're being led to believe, there could be worldwide catastrophic consequences. If it's true that millions upon millions of gallons of crude oil are flooding the Gulf with no end in sight, the massive oil slicks being created could make their way into the Gulf Stream currents, which would carry them not only up the East Coast but around the world where they could absolutely destroy the global fishing industries.

Already these slicks are making their way into Gulf wetlands and beaches where they are destroying birds, fish, and even oyster beds. This is disastrous for both the seafood industry and the people whose livelihoods depend on it. It's also devastating to the local wildlife which could begin to die off from petroleum toxicity. Various ecosystems around the world could be heavily impacted by this spill in ways that we don't even yet realize.

There's no telling where this continuous stream of oil will end up and what damage it might cause. Theoretically, we could be looking at modern man's final act of destruction on planet Earth, because this one oil rig blowout could set in motion a global extinction wave that begins with the oceans and then whiplashes back onto human beings themselves.

We cannot live without life in the oceans. Man is arrogant to drill so deeply into the belly of Mother Earth, and through this arrogance, we may have just set in motion events that will ultimately destroy us. In the future, we may in fact talk about life on Earth as "pre-spill" versus "post-spill." Because a post-spill world may be drowned in oil, devoid of much ocean life, and suffering a global extinction event that will crash the human population by 90 percent or more.

We may have just done to ourselves, in other words, what a giant meteorite did to the dinosaurs."

http://www.naturalnews.com/028749_Gulf_of_Mexico_oil_spill.html

THREAT TO ECOSYSTEM

2010-05-01T17:31:00.000-07:00

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/01/oil.spill.geography/index.html

(CNN) -- There's no way to stop oily water from reaching land along the Gulf Coast, but experts will use tools both massive and microscopic to clean it up.
Oil-soaked sand on beaches in the eastern Gulf Coast can be scooped up with heavy equipment, but the grassy marshes in the Mississippi Delta can't be handled that way, said Ralph Portier, a professor of environmental sciences at Louisiana State University.
Along the Louisiana and Mississippi coast, "you're talking about a sea of grass, if you will," similar to the Florida Everglades, Portier said. "When it gets oiled, if you try and remove some of this stuff, you're going to do more damage than good.
"In Gulf Shores, Alabama, and Destin, Florida, you can do that, but not here in what we like to call the Redneck Riviera," the southern Louisiana native said.

Tides, wind and rain will drive the oil deeper into the marsh, down into the vegetative mat, making it impossible for humans to go in and clean manually, he said. But once the flow of oil is stopped -- and no one knows when that will be -- scientists will spread fertilizer to boost several species of microscopic plants that degrade hydrocarbons such as oil.
In areas of especially heavy oiling, millions more of these microbes, grown in laboratories, could be brought in as reinforcements, Portier said. In warm spring and summer weather, the light, sweet crude "will degrade in weeks to months," he said.
Asphalt-like balls of petroleum embedded in the marshes "will be a little more complicated," he said.

"The microbial community will have to bite off little pieces and degrade them a bit at a time," he said.
There is no environmental concern with the technique because the microbes are not toxic and are native to the area, with different species thriving in fresh, brackish and salt water, Portier added.
"The question is what that long time frame will do to those plant species and what that will mean for habitat for seafood and migratory birds," he said. "Picture if the Everglades were being oiled, what a national tragedy that would be. And this area is even more fragile and productive."
The Gulf Coast is home to vast numbers of birds, animals and fish that need to be protected, said Tom MacKenzie of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Endangered sea turtles are due to come in to shore soon and lay eggs in the coastal sand.
"A whole generation could be affected," MacKenzie said.
Floating booms to block oil from coming in cannot protect the entire coast, he said, so crews are prioritizing sensitive wildlife areas, including nesting grounds for pelicans and butterfly migration areas.
"This has the potential to be truly devastating," he said.

The oil spill response team has recovered 23,968 barrels (1,006,656 gallons) of an oil-water mix, according to the Deepwater Horizon Joint Information Center. Nearly 70 boats, including skimmers, tugs, barges and recovery vessels, are being used to deploy booms and chemical dispersant, which makes the oil evaporate more readily.

GOD'S IDEA OF MARRIAGE AS QUOTED FROM BIBLE

2010-04-27T08:37:00.000-07:00

OUR KIDS CONSUME FLUORIDE, ASPARTAME, GROWTH HORMONES...ALL ARE POISONOUS

2010-04-25T14:18:00.000-07:00

We are consuming Poison...

What is even worse is that we are feeding it to our kids...
Read the warning label on your Toothpaste, It says if your child swallows more than a PEA SIZED amount of Toothpaste, call a Poison Control Center immediately, because the poisonous active ingredient is Fluoride.

Are We Seeing Human Evolution or Extinction?

2010-04-22T16:17:00.000-07:00

What is evolution? When and why does it occur? It is the way a living entity changes in order to survive or adapt to varying conditions. This occurs when conditions arise which threaten the entity in one way or another. I recently saw a documentary on The Doc Zone by CBC of Canada. It was called “The Disappearing Male.” The report showed that the human male is under the threat of extinction. “The Disappearing Male,” The Doc Zone, CBC TV,

When this happens, obviously, the human species as we know it will vanish. The remaining female population will adapt and evolve to compensate and become a new creature or die. Are we headed for extinction? The alarming answer is yes. It has been suggested by scientists that we are now experiencing the beginning of the extinction of human beings. All living entities devise ways to avoid extinction, knowingly or not, the question is —have we? Sperm count in humans is down by half over the last 50 years. Sperm abnormality has increased at an alarming rate. Testicular cancer has doubled in the last 20 years. It is important to note that the animal kingdom is also having similar problems, which suggests that we have a common denominator. This is toxic poisoning to varying degrees. In the Eastern Coastal region of the US, up to 80% of males of certain fish species are found to have changed to become egg bearing.

These problems have now been attributed to the use of synthetic chemicals on a massive and worldwide scale. One such chemical is Bisphenol A, or BPA, which was invented in 1891, and is used extensively in just about everything that has hard plastic in it, from CDs to plastic containers and even baby bottles. This chemical makes plastic products harder and stronger. It is an endocrine disruptor, meaning it disturbs the proper functioning of the endocrine system and the hormones which these glands produce. These hormones regulate our bodies’ functions. Testosterone is the main disrupted hormone that is of concern in the pending male extinction.

Another group of chemicals called phthalates are also raising concerns. These chemicals — produced since the 1920s — are used to soften plastic products like rubber ducks and other toys. What is frightening is that they are also endocrine disruptors.

Parents are overcome with panic and grief knowing that for the last 40 years or more they have been feeding their children with poisoned baby bottles, and they have let their children chew on rubber ducks, pacifiers and teething rings, for as long as anyone remembers, which may have altered their normal growth. The concern is that the chemicals seep out of the products and into the mouths of our babies, a hazard that has been suspected with BPA since the 1930s. When a pregnant mother has these chemicals in her system, it subjects her growing embryo to these startling problems.

The birth of males has dropped by 50% in some places of interest: places with high concentrations of these chemicals. Instead of a ratio of 1 to 1 between boys and girls, the ratio is now 1 boy to 3 girls in some of these locations. Male sexual development has been thrown out of whack because the function of testosterone is disrupted by these chemicals. Within the last 60 years we have invented 90,000 chemicals. As much as 80,000 are in use, while only 15% are tested for effects on adult humans and almost none is tested for effects on either growing children, embryos or fetuses. The chemicals are tested on adults and not on the growing bodies of infants, so while a chemical is deemed safe for adults, the babies who are exposed are more susceptible to harm, as their bodies’ resistance to these harmful chemicals could be hundreds of times less strong.

Sperm counts in most teenage men are half of what their fathers’ were and 85% of their sperm are found to be abnormal, leaving 15% of normal sperm. This means mankind is surviving on a sperm count of 7.5% of normal sperm, as compared with our forefathers’ sperm counts. Could we survive with any less? I think not. We have reached the edge, the brink of disaster. Long ago, sperm banks accepted sperm which had a standard volume of 60,000 counts per milliliter; that count has been reduced to 40,000, then 20,000 and they are now considering reducing the acceptance level to 10,000 per milliliter. Some birth rates in animals in polluted rivers have been found to be 90% below average, clearly showing they are affected as well. Testosterone controls the sexual development of our male children and when its functions are blocked by chemicals, they are permanently damaged, and the hormone cannot perform the tasks of fetal development that they were supposed to accomplish. Would-be boys cannot become boys. Embryos cannot change to boys and instead become a female fetus. The result is a mix of undeveloped or changed humans with various developmental abnormalities.

Plastics enhance our lives but unfortunately, they are poisoning our unborn children to the extent of bringing about human extinction. Up until about seven or eight weeks old, the embryo is neither male nor female. The embryo grows into a fetus at around that time, and it is the critical time when it is changing to a boy or girl. Sexual hormones, in particular testosterone, then take over and help determine if a child becomes a male or, by its absence or inaction, a female. When the chemicals interfere with this process, the result is abnormal development, both physically and mentally.

Some embryos develop into a male body but that is itself a physical change. Accompanying that physical change is also a mental change needed to make the human embryo a complete male or female. Things can go wrong. Some boys may not get the required corresponding male wiring in the brain; consequently, they have a male body with a female brain — in other words, a girl trapped in a boy’s body. This happens in reverse as well: a female body with a male wired brain — a boy trapped in a girl’s body. We see this quite often, in alarming numbers, in our modern, chemically poisoned society.

Things do not always go wrong in that simple way either; it sometimes gets really mixed up and complicated. For example, a boy may retain a girl’s genitals or breasts, or a girl may grow a boy’s genitals. We see this phenomena increasing as well. Soon there may not be enough traditional males with properly functioning genitalia and normal sperm counts to carry on the human species as we already survive on only 7.5 % of traditional levels. Is the species evolving or going to evolve to a point where a person will be able to impregnate her or himself? Hermaphroditism opens that door to a new possibility. We see it elsewhere in nature. It is a natural occurrence of some species after millions of years of evolution and threats to its survival. We see asexual reproduction in turkeys, sharks, starfish, bees and other species. It is not a new occurrence.

The emergence of such sexually diverse groups of people has a profound effect on society and societal development. Some may speculate that gay people and hermaphrodites are sometimes the results of these chemical interferences in the embryonic and fetal stages of a child’s development. Others may seek different explanations, including religious ones. I will leave that type of speculation up to you, as each person has his or her own ideas.

One thing is certain; we are threatened by something more devastating than any bomb, or any and all the plagues gone by, and our evolution may be the only way to survive. Since the 1970s, the drop in the birth rate of boys has resulted in as many as three million less boys being born and consequently, three million more girls and mixed sexes. With the invention of new synthetic chemicals and medicines, the problem grows even larger and finding solutions becomes more immediate, more urgent. Evolution may be our only way out of extinction, if we still have time.

Crazy Heart

2010-04-22T06:34:00.001-07:00

Judging from the book, this is not Movie of the Year material, even if it is a good vehicle to score Jeff Bridges an Oscar. I'm sure the screen play will prove to be an improvement. The book drags and could have greatly improved with some editing.

I don't take much of anything away from this above-average read except this hard-hitting medical advice from the surgeon who set protagonist Bad Blake's broken ankle:

Let me explain it to you this way. If it's simply a matter of life expectancy, you might decide that it was worth the gamble. You go on living the way you are, the way you seem to think the way you want to live, and then in a couple of years, maybe four or five angels lift you up into heaven with a lot of harp music in the background. That would be great. You've paid your money, you've taken your choice. You've traded ten or twenty years of your life for the right to live any damn way you choose. Good enough. The only thing is, it doesn't work that way. The kinds of stuff we're talking about here--emphysema, congestive heart failure, cancer, an extremely good chance of stroke-- are more debilitating than quickly clean and fatal. They will kill you, there's no mistaking that, but they're going to do it slowly, painfully, and humiliatingly. You're going to end up helpless as a child, in all probability.

There you have it: this reader overhears good advice from an unexpected source. I'm betting a bottle of beer or a package of vanilla ice cream this passage won't be in the movie!

Up in the Air

2010-04-12T23:09:00.001-07:00

A Movie for Our Times

Saw Up in the Air last night. Not a profound flick, but a timely one: the main protagonists are professional hatchet men whose time has arrived, due to our current economic recession. They are constantly on the move coast to coast (hence, up in the air) conducting lay-off routines for downsizing companies.

The strong parts of this film were certainly the cinematography, writing, editing, music and the casting. With respect to the last, the cast of George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, and Anna Kendrick certainly sold their part of the show. I bought them, anyways - hook, line and sinker. Trophy Wife, with her professionally-acquired telepathic talents as a clinical psychologist, saw through one character (yeah, I'm not disclosing) and anticipated the denouement. I, on the otherhand, was caught completely flat-footed.

Up in the Air definitely won't go on my Best 100 Films, but it is definitely on my DVD-recommended list. It will effect you. For example, I was awakened from my dreams this morning convinced that I, along with everyone I knew at work, had been fired.

I know: that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Baseball Breaks Out!

2010-04-06T07:36:00.000-07:00

I'm ready for Major League Baseball to start. That's for sure, having had my butt caught a rock and a hard place playing rotisserie fütbol in the English Premier League.

I'm not sure my L.A. Dodgers are ready, though. With their owners, Frank and Jamie McCourt caught in a vicious divorce - (even more of a rock and a hard place). They are more concerned about what happens to their multiple McMansions than what happens to The Team.

The L.A. Times predicts nothing higher than 2nd place for the Dodgers this year. I'm saying that for sure - unless the old, old Manny Ramirez shows up again.

If Manny shows up with a fork in his back, then Jamie McCourt, with her salary, should be made to play left field, either her or her driver she's sleeping with. I've heard of home wreckers before. But team-wreckers are another thing altogether.

Speed Kills?

2010-04-02T07:01:00.001-07:00

It is well known that South Korea is winning the broadband war for Internet speed. There are practical concerns that are out of our control. South Korea has a much smaller population and a much higher population density than we do stateside. Connecting the vast swaths of rural America is far more difficult and expensive than linking clusters of urban high rises.

But speed is dangerous and intoxicating.

A South Korean couple have gone on trial charged with allowing their baby daughter to starve to death while they played an online computer game. Prosecutors said they fed the baby once a day and left her alone for hours while they visited internet cafes. They said the couple were addicted to playing a game in which they had to raise a virtual girl.

The 41-year-old man and 25-year-old woman were arrested in March, five months after reporting the death. Last month, a police officer told the Yonhap news agency they appeared to have "lost their will to live a normal life". He said they "indulged themselves online" to escape from reality.

The couple were said to have become obsessed with nurturing a virtual girl called Anima in the popular role-playing game Prius Online. The game enables players to interact with Anima and as they do so, help her to recover her lost memory and develop emotions.

An autopsy showed the baby's death had been caused by a long period of malnutrition. The couple are due to be sentenced on 16 April.

Flight

2010-02-19T14:48:00.000-08:00

FLIGHT, by Richard Lippold

Confident recognition of true merit in a work of art comes as a great source of satisfaction to the amateur critic, and my daughter and I experienced this thrilling sensation during our visit to New York City in 1962. The work of which I speak is Richard Lippold’s sculpture, “Flight,” which was completed shortly before our trip, in the Vanderbilt Avenue lobby of the new Pan Am building.

Even before entering the building, we were overwhelmed by the brilliant immensity of the sculpture as it first came into view from beyond the glass and granite wall of the lobby entrance. Composed entirely of gold and silver wire, “Flight” is an abstract geometrical design which rises from the center of the otherwise empty ground floor upward and outward to the extremities of the ceiling above the mezzanine surrounding it on three sides. These two levels, an exposed escalator at the rear of the lobby, and the enormous plate glass windows at the entrance afford an almost complete sphere of vantage points from which the sculpure is visible.

“Flight” might almost be referred to as architecture, for it is inseparable from the building, depending on it for its size and support. The wire strands—no two of which come into contact—are strung in the form of cones and wide ribbons, the latter spiraling in a half circle as they progress from floor to ceiling, The centerpiece is a large cone standing on end upon a foundation about ten feet long and half as wide. Anchored around this cone are four smaller cones and four ribbons of wire, and from this starting point they extend upward and outward until they fill the upper reaches of the foyer. Spotlights around the base of the work and in the ceiling are trained upon the whole so that the otherwise austere hall is dazzling.

Much of its fascination is that “Flight” becomes more mysterious with study. Technologically alone it is a masterpiece, and even the hastening passerby involutarily pauses to reflect upon the method of creation. Here is a work of genius in concept and skill. This is no assembly of prefabricated parts; it was given form where it stands, strand by strand. Contemplation of the difficulties involved in merging the wires, and in the fact that the slightest kink meant removal and replacement of the entire strand only serves to increase the marvel of the accomplishment.

As we began slowly to circle the sculpture, its tremendous power became apparent. The sculpture suddenly became alive, and we felt ourselves both led and followed by the ever-changing reflections of light as they sped along the wires, now straight, now undulating, now darting off at unexpected angles as new wires captured the rays. Entire expanses of wire which had heretofore been invisible insinuated themselves into our field of vision, and familiar surfaces unobtrusively slipped from view.

Being in the presence of this work of art was for us an emotional experience. The myriad paths made by planes across the heavens—some visible only as they fade into eternity, some never visible at all—have been given their monument. With motionless light and stationary wire, Richard Lippold has embodied the very essence of flight.

ARW
10/10/63

Somebody Bless Anderson Cooper...

2010-02-10T11:50:00.000-08:00

Somebody, everybody! bless Anderson Cooper for keeping our awareness focused on the still unfolding human tragedy that is our neighbor, Haiti. Hundreds of thousands (latest tally: over 230,000) dead and millions living in the rubble of Port O' Prince streets and the small villages surrounding. Thousands stumble through the days and nights there slowly being consumed by infection and death because the medical and food - water needs can not be met. It's the medications that are not available. Misery has become the only way of life. Accuracy of the death toll or relative news accuracy is no longer the point... the crushing loneliness in burying the unknown dead in mass graves or adjunct to existing graves... it all overwhelms me reading a quick CNN webpage. Like the endless misery and unbelievable cruelty of slowness to rescue and recovery replaying like Katrina... it just breaks the heart...
So, give what you can. I go to the Red Cross. A local hospital working there in Haiti now. Do what you can. And bless
Anderson Cooper.

Beach in Cornwall

2010-02-10T07:57:00.000-08:00

Captions Please!

Memories

2010-02-09T11:47:00.001-08:00

Dear Pat: September 24, 1963

The end is finally in sight! With two winters and two summers of school behind me, I have only one more winter to go before graduation.

Full-time, year-round school has been rather exhausting, especially at my age, but it has been a marvelous experience, and I have enjoyed it much more than I did when I was twenty years younger. Having new things to think about each day has been very exciting—much more so than everyday adult life usually is.

The number of older people going to college now is simply amazing. There have been at least one or two in their thirties, forties, or fifties in each of my classes, and there is even a woman in her eighties who has been a “coed” at least as long as I have. There is probably an even greater percentage of older people attending the night classes at the University.

Of the women I have gotten to know, most, like me, interrupted college by getting married. They have come back now to get their degrees because they are widowed or divorced, or they are preparing for the future. I would guess that most of these older people are planning to teach, but it is hard to tell, because I find that there are whole segments of the University population that I never even see, not being in the same college.

One rather unique aspect of school at this age is that I find my friends’ children are my classmates. I am trying desperately to graduate before my niece does. Incidentally, she gave me a University sweat shirt and pennant for Christmas last year, which tickled me to death. I wear the sweat shirt (at home) and have the pennant displayed in my bedroom.

Another unique aspect of school at this age—homework—is hanging over me at the moment, but I will keep you supplied from time to time with news of the college world. In the meantime, I will be looking forward to your news of the world outside.

Much Love, Anne (Aged 40)

2/9/10
ARW (Aged 86)

Make Beer for Man!

2010-02-01T07:28:00.000-08:00

Henry Miller said,

Keep your libraries, keep your penal institutions, keep your insane asylums…give man beer. You think man needs rule, he needs beer. The world does not need morals, it needs beer, it does not need your lectures and charity. The souls of men have been fed with indigestibles, but he could make use of beer.

That's what I say!

Your Real Friend

2010-01-31T16:59:00.000-08:00

The Rise of Dog Identity Politics

2010-01-26T19:46:00.000-08:00

by By John Homans in New York Magazine:

If Stella is aware of the forces sweeping her world, she shows no sign. My dog is on the floor in front of the couch, ignoring the kittens we adopted recently, partly to entertain her while we're at work. Her big brown soulful eyes are tilted up at me in constant implicit question.

Stella is an elegant creature, with a high-gloss black coat and the runway model's trick of looking simultaneously gorgeous and ridiculous. She is not, as a friend says, an intellectual, though I hasten to add, as any parent would, that she's of above-average intelligence, having learned the basic commands in the space of a week. Not that, as an excitable animal in seemingly perpetual puppyhood, she always follows them. While highly vocal, with a booming baritone bark and a complex secret language of whines and growls, she's not notably articulate. There's usually a thought-bubble hovering over her, sometimes describing an unambiguous desire - Want chicken! - but often containing murkier information. The closed captioning doesn't really work very well. Is she depressed? Angry at us for taking her back from the country? Jealous of the fact that the cats get to climb on the furniture? She's staring at me, waiting for me to figure it out.

Stella is mostly a Labrador - certainly in her goofball ways - but her splotchy purple tongue, curling scimitar tail, and brownish undercoat suggest Chow blood, and sometimes I think there's a hint of Staffordshire terrier (the dread pit bull) in her face. She's a mutt, though that's a word that's used much less now than it used to be. Stella is also the nexus of several imaginative vectors. She was a birthday present and little sister for our son, Charles; an echo of my childhood dog, also a Lab and mother of many mutt puppies who happily slept outside and hardly knew a leash; and a signifier of my occasional aspiration for a country life. From my point of view, she lives in a haze of nostalgia.

Stella gets enough time in the country to want more, and sometimes, despite the walks and runs and trips to the Tompkins Square dog run, I feel that she's just passing time till she gets back there. Guilt, along with plastic bags of dog poop, is pretty much a constant in an urban canine-human relationship. Is this any kind of life for a dog? It is a vicarious, low-level existential crisis (what does she need, what is she?) that her imploring eyes seem designed to produce.

The dog's eyes were designed to induce human concern, of course. A dog's attentiveness to humans is one of the central differences between a dog and a wolf, probably the determinative one. James Serpell, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says,

Dogs look at people. You can boil it down to something as simple as gaze patterns. With a hand-bred wolf, there are issues getting their attention. Whereas a dog is constantly monitoring the owner for clues on how to behave and what to do.

A dog develops attachments to specific humans, in ways that wolves won't. Whereas a wolf will try to solve a difficult problem itself (they are, apparently, brilliant at unlocking gates), a dog will quickly give up and look to its human to figure things out.

Serpell, a soft-spoken, sandy-haired Britisher in blue jeans, works in a slightly rickety Victorian on the outskirts of the UPenn campus in Philadelphia. He's head of the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society, which is underfunded in the current economic climate. The center has looked into how it might tap the Leona Helmsley fortune but without luck so far. Serpell's current work involves guide dogs. A small percentage of trained seeing-eye dogs lose their motivation to work after a year or so. "They develop a kind of learned helplessness," Serpell says. He's trying to understand whether it's some breakdown in the interaction between dog and owner or something intrinsic in the dogs themselves.

If learned helplessness sounds like an urban condition, it may be because the dog is more and more an urban species. Even in the suburbs, the dog's unleashed, unfenced, carefree outdoor life is largely at an end. The dogs are in the house, even in the bed. (The doghouse is now mostly for husbands.) There are no rules to this evolving, increasingly intimate arrangement, and it can give rise to a kind of canine identity crisis. Outside of its country context, the dog plays an ever more human role. Which can make things very confusing. Serpell notes a correlation with the depressing statistics in Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone.

We've seen a linear explosion in pet populations in Western countries over the past 40 years ... People are living more isolated lives, are having fewer children, their marriages aren't lasting. All these things sort of break down a social network and happen to exactly coincide with the growth in pet populations. I think that what's happening is simply that we're allowing animals to fill the gap in our lives.

There is a long and fascinating thread of research about the health benefits of dogs. It turns out that the dog is a kind of wonder drug, an all-around stress reducer. Pet owners recover at a substantially faster rate from heart problems than do non-dog owners. There are other kinds of benefits, too. A child raised with a pet is more empathetic than one who isn't. The dog - no secret here - is an excellent wingman. A 2008 study found that a man with a dog had a much better chance of getting a woman's phone number than one without. And the dog can even tell you whether or not you're a good person. A 1999 study found that people who strongly dislike dogs score significantly higher on the measure of anal character and lower on the empathy scale of the California Psychological Inventory, indicating that people who liked dogs have less difficulty relating to people.

Serpell is most excited about new studies on oxytocin and dog ownership. Oxytocin is the most important social-bonding hormone, present notably between mother and child but also in just about any interaction involving pair bonding, social affiliation, and trust. More specifically, it's involved with the gaze between infants and mothers. Researchers at Azabu University in Japan found last year that the dog's gaze at its owner increases the owner's oxytocin level.

No one believes, in his conscious mind, that the dog is a person. But that may not matter. The oxytocin study, while providing the key to understanding the myriad health benefits of dog ownership (oxytocin is a serious stress reducer) also makes scientifically clear what's obvious anecdotally: The dog is an honorary human, accorded many of the same considerations. It can be a surrogate child, brother in arms, solace of otherwise lonely urban lives. Serpell's central insight is that these kinds of social functions are at the center of the relationship of dogs and people.

Selection of dogs for the performance of specific working tasks is certainly an important part of their evolution. But the fundamental work of dogs that has been in the background throughout has been providing people with companionship or social support.

As the relationship developed, specific canine qualities - the dog's gaze, its unending adolescence, its uncanny responsiveness to human cues - evolved, a process that Serpell calls "anthropomorphic selection". What was created was not, precisely, a human child, but it certainly was able to push some of the same buttons. According to one study, 84 percent of dog owners consider their animals akin to children - not a surprise, given all the baby talk. The British evolutionary psychologist John Archer has written, in critiquing Serpell's work, that the dog's ability to suck up human caregiving that could be going to human children while providing no evolutionary advantage makes them a social parasite. But possibly the stress-reduction effects, more than theoretical camp-guarding and hunting benefits, may have earned the dog's keep. And anyway, are you calling my dog a parasite?

The social-bonding brain chemistry leads to special treatment of many different kinds. These obsessive canine diet and training regimens are precise analogs of the little dictatorships that parents enforce over their children. One of the dogs in our circle gets fed raw chicken, which is currently the most fashionable canine diet; uncooked, the bones don't splinter. Another gets cooked chicken - often of a quality that would make a fine sandwich.

We are permissive parents. Stella gets dog food but also as many leftovers as she manages to beg. Strictly speaking, she's not allowed to eat chicken bones off the street, but there's a particularly good hunting ground on lower First Avenue where she often gets walked, and if she manages to snatch one, I'm much less inclined to stick my hand down her throat than I used to be. I know this is wrong.

These differences resemble nothing so much as the fierce little tempests over, say, Ferberizing, or co-sleeping, or bedtimes, though of course there's another dimension. Along with the concern for the dog's welfare, there also can be a kind of concern that maybe this relationship with the dog has gone a little far. It's a minor vice, like watching too much television, the kind of not-that-there's-anything-wrong-with-that workaday weirdnesses that are part of the modern urban experience. In the big city, you can do whatever you want.

When the dog was in the yard, it was easier to give the dog any old thing, treat the dog any old way. The dog could find a dead animal, or bury a bone, or chase a squirrel, do its dog things. In the apartment, Stella will dig fiercely at the carpet, making no progress, though at some point we will have to get a new carpet. The apartment is a far from perfect place for the dog. Still, they're camp followers of our microtribes, the only beings that fully understand the customs. And unlike children, they'll never reject them.

The dog is also associated with human damage, people who are lonely, people with trust issues, misanthropes (Hitler was a dog lover), people with lots of money who think, possibly accurately, that that's the only reason people could love them. Helmsley's little dog Trouble, the richest dog in the world, in her Florida redoubt, with her bodyguards, is the obvious example here. The only charitable cause specifically mentioned in Helmsley's will - her fortune has been estimated at $5 billion at the low end - was to "provide for the care of dogs". The document is testament to a moral impoverishment of mythic dimensions: the last bird the queen flipped at the little people. She outsourced the work of distributing the money to her trustees, who have so far not seen fit to bestow very much of it on canine causes.

As in Helmsley's case, a dog can be a last refuge for lost people. But everyone knows people for whom a dog is a chosen escape. In Caroline Knapp's remarkably honest book Pack of Two, she writes about her dog as a salve to her damage, more satisfactory than any person in giving her the kind of unqualified love she craves. She's open about her inner wounds - she'd written a previous, moving memoir about her alcoholism - and her dog, besides being a dog, is a tool for addressing such problems. There's a kind of therapeutic solipsism at work in this type of relationship, needs met and unmet. The dog fits perfectly into this sort of calculus because its needs are so simple. And of course, it doesn't know you're a narcissist. Ultimately, Knapp breaks up with a boyfriend about whom she'd always been ambivalent partly over issues surrounding her dog, which of course she is permitted to do, and she's a lovely writer, and no doubt the boy had many, many drawbacks. But really? Are those really the right human priorities?

It can be hard to remember, when the dog is in the house, staring at you with those eyes, that the dog is the dog. The phenomenon has lately reached a critical mass, partly because of cultural changes and partly because - surprise - it makes people money. Nowadays, there's a vast industry, trainers and books and TV shows, devoted to addressing this interspecial neurotic interchange. There's a great deal of dispute, however, about what the dog is. A trainer like Cesar Millan, the self-mythologized Dog Whisperer, has created an elaborate fantasy of the dog as pack animal, a creature that wants to know who's boss. His message is that the owner ought to act like the alpha dog of his imaginings: Be the pack leader. Though Millan is clearly a gifted communicator, in many mediums, ethologists like Patricia McConnell find this a simplistic view, and the dog is a very long way from the wolf pack.

And there's an even bigger industry trying to confuse the issue, because a dog that's partly a person gets a better - and more expensive - brand of dog food than one that isn't. In New York, there are dog bakeries, and haberdashers, and luxury kennels, everything that the marketing mind can dream up, a vast and ever-growing junkyard full of kitsch, with names ("paw-tisserie", etc.) that are more annoying than the products themselves, if that's even possible. Again, there's nothing wrong with buying your dog all this stuff - it's nothing more dire than a game of dress-up - though it's probably prudent to ask whom you're buying it for. Your dog doesn't care if it's wearing a funny hat, or traveling in a sequined dog purse. No one loses anything but their dignity. Treating your dog as a person is nothing more or less than an aesthetic error - one that is becoming ever more common. Dressed up, doted on as much as any infant, the dog has never had it so good. And the personhood of the dog - this chemical confusion in the brain - is a large part of what is driving the politics of dog.

Stella is what is known now as a rescue dog - definitely the most fashionable breed in downtown Manhattan nowadays. She may well have been on death row in some fetid cage in Tennessee. But our moral heroism is not of the highest order, by a long shot. She's not a middle-aged pit bull with a mean streak, or a retired greyhound, or a dog whose elderly owner had died, or any of the hard-luck stories that become SPCA statistics if not for the intervention of some saintly person.

She was a beautiful 12-week-old puppy at the North Shore Animal League America, the largest no-kill animal shelter in the world and one of the only places around where you can reliably find a puppy that's not a pit bull. In fact, our decision was hastened because another family was eyeing her. She's a rescue dog that anyone - except maybe one of those anal compulsives - would have rescued.

Dogs used to be a part of the farmyard ethic. The lucky ones got to grow up, and got all the love, and the others were dispatched with as little sense of tragedy as possible, though the suppression of empathy isn't easy work. Seamus Heaney's bitter coming-of-age poem, The Early Purges, gets at this sense:

And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown
I just shrug, 'Bloody pups'. It makes sense:
'Prevention of cruelty' talk cuts ice in town
Where they consider death unnatural
But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.

But we, or most of us, are a long way from the farm these days. What, though, should a dog's rights be? Not to suffer is the basic one on which pretty much everyone is in agreement, and where dogs are concerned, the last four decades are mostly a story of enormous progress. Canine suffering has been criminalized across the board. The vivisection cases that gave PETA its powerful boost a couple of decades ago are rarer now, partly because dogs are less desirable as research subjects. In many labs, they've been replaced with a breed of South American pig that is as docile and controllable as a dog, and shares more, anatomically - skin, heart valves, etc. - with people. A much better arrangement, except for the pig.

As often happens, the success in moving toward some of the movement's most basic goals has only increased the doctrinal conflict among various groups. They're empathy enemies, at each other's throats like so many packs of wolves. The rescue people don't agree with the animal-welfare people, and both can't stand the animal-rights people, as traditional dog regimes like the American Kennel Club try to hold on to their privileged positions. It's a struggle for the Future of Dog: a little like Russia in 1917, with weakened conservatives and radicals of many stripes, all trying desperately to invent a future.

The hospital takes your credit card in advance, possibly because, after a dog's death, questions of its worth arise: What was it? Why did I love it so much?

Famously, the touchstone of the animal-rights movement is Peter Singer's 1975 book Animal Liberation. The book's title seems evocative of some future peaceable kingdom, as if suddenly all the cattle and sheep and pigs and rats are going to be set free from their jails, wandering the streets like cows in India, grazing happily where they please, forever free from harm. On reflection, this doesn't seem likely. But if the animals are liberated, where will they go? Well, the strongest possibility seems to be that they'll go to the country: to that same happy farm where parents have always told children unwanted animals go. The guiding idea of Singer's book, and of the animal-rights movement in general, is to lessen animal suffering - that's an animal's overriding interest, according to Singer. And one way of lessening canine suffering is to lessen the number of dogs. Ingrid Newkirk, PETA's leader, seems to dream of a world in which pets have been abolished, and she is a particularly reviled figure among many dog people. Although PETA's mission statement includes language suggesting that each animal life is intrinsically valuable, the organization's actions describe a more nuanced picture. PETA kills a surprising number of the animals it takes in. In the decade beginning with 1998, PETA euthanized 17,000 animals - 85 percent of those it rescued.

Dog-rescue people oppose PETA and its ilk bitterly. They see numbers like this and think mass murder. Nathan Winograd, the leading no-kill advocate, is a particularly fierce critic of Newkirk's. His aim is to reform the shelter system, and he points to successes in San Francisco; Tompkins County, New York; and Nevada as evidence that it's possible to increase adoption rates, to find a home for every healthy pet. At bottom, he's accusing Newkirk of the same kind of fecklessness and waste and lack of responsibility that she sees in, say, factory farming. He's also, essentially, an optimist, believing that people are capable of being responsible for their animals.

Regarding human nature, Newkirk is a pessimist. In her view, we've botched this whole dominion thing, creating an Island of Dr. Moreau of animal horrors. So the best thing to do is to end our agency over animals, to disengage, build a wall around nature and stay on our side. The dog, in particular, is polluted by human influence. The animal-rights movement can seem as much about keeping humans free of guilt as keeping animals free of suffering, which is another kind of solipsism. (The rules are different on the philosophic frontier: For Singer, and for Newkirk, bestiality is not, in all circumstances, prohibited. "If it isn't exploitation and abuse, it may not be wrong," she has said.)

But Newkirk is certainly correct that pets complicate the animal-rights picture. If you want to disentangle humans from their carnivorous legacy, the dog's leash is going to get caught in the knot. The dog world is as red in tooth and claw as ever - but the red is mostly in the same industrial slaughterhouses where we get our meat. The vast dog-food industry is based on "meat by-products", that alarming euphemism. Of course, Winograd and a growing number of no-kill people have found a way to square this circle: vegan dogs.

In the animal-rescue world, each individual animal is sacred, each dog deserves its sunny day, and euthanasia, while perhaps safe and legal, should be extremely rare. These people are believers in the Universal Rights of Dog, extrapolated from the near-human status of their own pets. In another way, the animal-rescue movement is an offshoot of the civil-rights struggles of the sixties, a final frontier for universalist ideals. Animal rescue is also one of the opportunities of ordinary Americans for real heroism - and more and more, they've taken it. The dog's innocence amplifies empathy, because there's no ethical static, no human otherness to contend with. It's less complicated to love a pet than a person. The risk and conflict and cloak-and-dagger swagger that some of these missions entail can give lives a life-in-wartime meaning they otherwise wouldn't have. There's selflessness here, but just as in wartime, there's also addiction, the oxytocin mixing with adrenaline.

Some of the most vivid images in the aftermath of Katrina were of dogs - on roofs, in the water - awaiting rescue or struggling to survive. After the catastrophe, Barack Obama spoke of an - empathy deficit - but there was no deficit when it came to the animals. An army of animal rescuers descended on the city, and their work is legend in the animal-rescue community. But among some locals, their intervention was further proof, if more was needed, that not enough value had been placed on human residents.

The rescuers have done their work remarkably well. Twenty-five years ago, some 12 million dogs and cats were euthanized, according to the ASPCA. Now the figure is between 3 and 4 million, about half of them dogs. Partly thanks to public education about rescuing dogs, a much lower percentage of dogs taken into the shelter system are eventually euthanized. And both because of the effectiveness of spay-neuter programs and the fact that dogs seldom are permitted to run loose, there are many fewer adoptable dogs. In many places on the East Coast, the demand for rescue dogs exceeds the supply - which means that, one way or another, the red states are supplying more and more of our dogs. A flood of dog refugees like Stella are coming from points south and west and places like Puerto Rico, where there are more-traditional dog cultures.

What the blue states are exporting to the red states is, often, ideology. It's the same town-country conflict Seamus Heaney wrote about, on a gigantic scale. Newkirk, along with Wayne Pacelle of the Humane Society of the United States, advocates strict, mandatory spay-neuter laws across the country, along with much stricter regulation of breeding. Pacelle is the silky pony of the animal-rights world, a Yale graduate who looks tremendous in a suit. The Humane Society of the United States is blessed with a great name, and partly because of its well-publicized raids on puppy mills, it has a massive fund-raising footprint and $125 million to spend, which can buy a good number of small-state lobbyists (the HSUS too has been trying to get its share of the Helmsley fortune). But Pacelle drives many dog people nuts because they see him as an enemy of traditional dog cultures, possibly an animal-rights ally of PETA masquerading as a friend of the dog: a wolf in sheep's clothing. Janeen McMurtrie, a Minnesota dog trainer who has a widely read blog called Smartdog's Weblog, says,

The biggest problem with HSUS is that they hide their goals so well. I have clients who are avid dove hunters and they've given them money.

Here, too, there is a sense that the ground is shifting, that the World of Dog may be on the verge of irrevocable change. The spay-neuter laws that Pacelle and Newkirk advocate, while no doubt reducing the numbers of dogs that have to be put down every year, have the potential to change the dog itself. James Serpell:

The thing about mandatory spay-neuter is that those who are most willing to have their dogs spayed or neutered tend to be responsible people. And often, their dogs also happen to be nice animals in temperament. So what you're doing essentially is taking those dogs out of the breeding population.

McMurtrie echoes Serpell's concern:

It's hasn't gotten widespread enough yet. But if it did, it could be catastrophic.

The ancien regime is also having its troubles. On an October weekend, the American Kennel Club held a "Meet the Breeds" event at the Javits Center. There were some 160 breeds represented, along with booths for every conceivable dog accessory and dietary regimen: organic behavior aids, chewable dog toothpaste. The idea is to connect breeds with their ancestral homelands. Behind the Cavalier King Charles spaniels is an oversize photograph of a castle surrounded by woods.

The borzois lounge on pillows in a tented area, long and elegant but probably not the brightest bulbs, like the czars who bred them.
A man in a tartan kilt holding a shepherd's crook stands with a small pack of Shetland sheepdogs, alert, confident creatures, like little collies. The dogs don't herd sheep so much anymore, the man tells me, though sometimes they're used to herd geese on golf courses.

There are an abundance of pure-breed horror stories. Bulldogs have terrible breathing problems (I heard one make the characteristic throat-clearing grunt as he was being led around the hall), and most have to be born by Caesarean. Several breeds - the German shepherd, for instance - are prone to crippling hip dysplasia, partly the result of a stylistic preference for a lowriding profile. Breeders say few AKC shepherds are suitable for police work. The Cane Corso has a head as big and square as a good-size TV. The dignity of a dog beneath its madcap form is the elemental canine joke, seemingly an unspoken dog-breeding tenet. Once the unshakable empire of the dog world, the AKC has been shrinking over the past couple of decades, partly because of competing registrations and partly because this Victorian fantasy - these working dogs that haven't worked in decades - seems increasingly distant from the modern world.

There are still dogs in the world that work, and their owners are the ones who have the most contempt for the AKC's dog dreamworld. Working-dog people tend to describe their own dogs in terms of sometimes heroic anecdotes, supernatural feats of tracking, an intuitive comprehension of human aims. I talked to a sheep farmer at the farmer's market who described an incident where one of her Border Collies listened to a conversation she was having with one of her employees on a walkie-talkie, discerned instantly where the flock had escaped, and ran half a mile to cut them off.

But in the city, where can all those remarkable energies go? Here the dog is a bumpkin, pursuing its questionable aims (chicken bones, butt-sniffing) [LMFAO!] with earnest zeal. Who is Marley, of Marley & Me, but Jethro from The Beverly Hillbillies, cheerfully blundering through life, not realizing his country ways don't make sense. But outdoors, it's a different matter. Off the leash, finding the high ground to survey the landscape, paw cocked, or blasting through deep snow in a way people (or too many dogs, for that matter) can't manage, Stella is profound.

Working-dog people also look with contempt on the pampered lives of city dogs. There's no suffering, sure - but what else is there? No sheep to herd or birds to hunt or sleds to pull. Nothing to manifest the excellence of their character. In an ethic based on avoidance of suffering, nobility (which used to be a rather important concept in the dog world) isn't possible. On the other hand, these people can seem like Civil War reenactors, clinging to a relationship to nature that makes less and less sense. The dog wants to take us back - but for the most part, there's not a way to get there.

In a footnote to one of his poems about the deaths of his dogs, John Updike wrote, "Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house," a sensationally cruel observation because there's truth in it. The dog's mortality is never far from an owner's mind - it's the central flaw in this best-friend business. No one is ready for their dog to go. And the dog doesn't know where it's going - the dog joke turned into a tragedy.

At the Animal Medical Center, on East 62nd Street at the river, these issues often come to a head. Susan Phillips Cohen, the director of counseling at the center, helps people make sense of this bad bargain. A small, cheerful, white-haired woman (she's a cat person, actually), Cohen goes person to person in the hospital's waiting room, gauging the emotional distress of the pet owners who come in. She says,

We don't consider old age a disease here. We wanted to be the place that didn't say, 'It's a 10-year-old dog, there's nothing we can do.'

The Animal Medical Center is right on hospital row by design. "They wanted it to be on equal footing," says Robert Liberman, the chairman of the board, whom I ran into in the lobby. He tells me about studies undertaken in collaboration with Sloan-Kettering. On a plaque in the lobby, there's an A-list of donors - Fanjuls, Kissingers - but pride of place goes to the Vincent Astor Foundation. (The neglect of Mrs. Astor's own dogs in her senility was one of the drivers of the case that led to the conviction of her son for taking advantage of her condition. Though one can't help but wonder whether, if some of the love the dogs received had been diverted to Tony, things wouldn't have gotten quite so out of hand.) Liberman has so far failed to extract any of the vast Helmsley bequest. "It has not been easy," he says.

Upstairs, in the rehabilitation center, there's a working animal, a yellow Lab, being treated by two young technicians. The dog, maybe 9, has nerve damage from an infection in her back. One of the women has a pair of electrodes pressed to the dog's haunch, stimulating the muscles. The other is massaging its chest. "Reiki", she says. They're all lying on a heap on a mat, and the dog seems as happy as a dog can be. Across the room, a black Lab named Radar with a mysterious muscle condition has just finished a workout on a treadmill in a water tank. Outside, their owners wait on a bench. Says Cohen,

It really is family. It's not exactly that they think they're human, but the choices they're going to make, the protection they're going to give, the nurturing they feel they owe, is the same as for a family member.

What Cohen tries to do is clarify the issues in people's minds, which is not easy, given the confused place of the dog in many urban people's lives. It brings up all their stuff. Cohen continues,

They realize at this moment how many of their eggs they've put in this basket. How did I get here? Why didn't I have children? I hate my job. Because you had someone to come home to who appreciated you just the way you are.

The hospital's position is "to be as accurate and honest as we can be about what we can do,"she says. The impossible calculus of dog years and human dollars is left up to you - and the possibility is always there that you could max out your credit cards over a weekend and still walk home with a bag of ashes. A friend recently took a 10-year-old dog with bleeding in its intestines to the NYC Veterinary Specialists, an animal hospital on 55th Street. The doctors told him that removing the tumor they'd discovered would give the dog a 90 percent chance of survival. And thus they were trapped in a cascade of escalating medical decisions - five days and several procedures later, the dog was euthanized. The bill was over $14,000. They're heartsick over the loss of the dog, of course, and the money too - and furious at the hospital. But at what point, once you start, can you turn back with your dog? One lesson: A hospital that makes money on procedures may not be the best one to tell you when it's time to pull the plug.

The Animal Medical Center, too, takes your credit-card number in advance, possibly because, in the aftermath of a dog's death, questions of its worth arise: What was it? Why did I love it so much?

All our stuff, indeed. On our way downstairs, we passed a room where I'd had a previous dog euthanized. It's actually, if such a thing exists, a fabulous place to have a dog put down, at least for the human - the dog, no doubt, would rather stay at home. There's a view out over the dark swirling waters of the East River and, on the other side, a sward of green, dog paradise.

Scout was a West Highland terrier, Angela's dog when we met, an exuberant, somewhat cantankerous creature, beloved companion of our New York youth, unwitting enabler of our prolonged adolescence. He was 14 and tired when we had to bring him there, after a tumor and a torn ligament and a winter of rather expensive medical wrestling with a stubborn breathing problem, all this along with taking care of our young son, who'd displaced him in his princely status, poor thing. I put a rubberized smock over my lap - one is never quite free of a dog's elimination needs - and told him about his happy afterlife on that lawn across the water, which I didn't believe a word of and he at any rate couldn't understand - that same human gurgling he'd heard his whole life. The vet gave him an injection to put him to sleep, another to stop his heart. And that was Scout, whoever he was.

Before we took him in, a vet asked, with wide caring eyes, "Is there anything else you want to do?" We did, of course - the hospital's high-tech armamentarium, its MRIs and minimally invasive techniques, a hospital they'd be happy to have in Darfur - but we didn't.

How much is your dog worth to you? It's a hard question to answer.

Right, Stella?

In the early hours of the morning.

2010-01-26T05:41:00.000-08:00

Last night while at work I was in surgery on the third floor looking out the long length of windows lining one side of the main hallway down at an empty parking. That segment was empty because it mainly serves outpatient services and several doctor's offices. I was lost in thought about nothing particularly important but I did notice a single car pull into the parking lot. A man dressed in casual clothes got out and began strolling around seemingly impatient about something.

Maybe its a statement on the demands, or lack of them, of my job but I was frankly fascinated with that person and why was he essentially walking around his car so I continued to watch. Minutes went by and the guy eventually just leaned up against his car and looked off into the distance. My empathy may have been working overtime but the guy looked lost and alone.

Right before I was about to leave another car drove up with a women jumping out and rushing up to the lonely guy. They embraced and their kiss afterward was not one of friendship but of lovers. I know, I should have walked away giving the people some sort of privacy but something was going on down below me. They were both distraught and clearly anxious, their gestures as they walked around each other only to fall back into each others arms shown a hopelessness that oozed a harsh sadness.

As the drama played out something was decided with the lady grabbing the man's hand then embracing him only to rush back to her car and quickly drive away. The man stayed, frozen in place and while it may sound ridiculous but the night seemed to engulf the guy. I had to go back to my work but I stopped by again thirty minutes later and saw that the guy had at some point drove away himself.

Entering an empty operating room I turned on the radio and the above song was playing. I thought it fit the mood of what I saw.

Rain and poppies...

2010-01-23T19:46:00.000-08:00

I love the rain. L.A. has been in a drought condition for several years, so I am grateful that the High Sierras will replenish the water supplies we so desperately need.

The prodigious rainfall will yield enormous, magnificent panoramas of California poppies that bloom in the desert in March and April. The early California founders picked an excellent state flower.

Cancer in the Family

2010-01-23T19:31:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends, Cyberbuddies, and Cyberbrethren,

I guess you could call this a non-political post... I will currently be on semi-hiatus from blogging. My father has been diagnosed with cancer and I am unable to offer any pithy statements on society or the environment. I hope to carry on His passion and knowledge for history, politics, and worlds events.

As yet, my family is still waiting to hear the specific details of his condition. He is undergoing various tests to determine the specific nature of his illness.

I will post whenever I can and thank you all. I have cross-posted this email on Swiftspeech to say that I'm not ignoring you but have been (as you might imagine) preoccupied.

Sun's Out!

2010-01-23T08:27:00.000-08:00

It's been a depressing week. My supervisor and the guy who hired me unexpectedly lost his job. Others in my community of lost their roofs, and boats.

Political reversal in an Eastern state, and an adverse SCOTUS decision have devastated. Bad weather has prevented me from getting out with my Doberwoman and getting much needed exercise.

But today the weather has broken, and her cone-head collar is off! So, for a couple of days at least, we can air it out.

Maybe even I can get my voice back!

Is it gawking?

2010-01-18T13:58:00.000-08:00

I found this on HuffPo. It just seems to me that Royal Caribbean should be offering much more than to take a few pallets of relief to Haiti at this time. I find it offensive that a cruise ship would do a shallow dock with paying passengers onboard while the overwhelming need is still so acute. I'm wondering what anyone else thinks? Am I out of line? Though the passengers responded with dismay, some, they had themselves a swim and probably chagrined the inability to go buy trinkets.... well some anyhoo. But perhaps I'm way off base here? It just seems to be a whole hellva another level of gawking. - GHB
From HuffPo:
BoingBoing reported this morning on a Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines ship that made its scheduled docking at a private beach. Though the cruise ship delivered 40 pallets of relief supplies while it docked, vacationers frolicked and held a barbecue on the private area, just miles from the devastation caused by the 7.0 earthquake last week.
From The Guardian:
The decision to go ahead with the visit has divided passengers. The ships carry some food aid, and the cruise line has pledged to donate all proceeds from the visit to help stricken Haitians. But many passengers will stay aboard when they dock; one said he was "sickened".
"I just can't see myself sunning on the beach, playing in the water, eating a barbecue, and enjoying a cocktail while [in Port-au-Prince] there are tens of thousands of dead people being piled up on the streets, with the survivors stunned and looking for food and water," one passenger wrote on the Cruise Critic internet forum.

A Man and His Dog

2010-01-16T08:19:00.001-08:00

A man and his dog were walking along a road. The man was enjoying the scenery, when it suddenly occurred to him that he was dead...

He remembered dying, and that the dog walking beside him had been dead for years. He wondered where the road was leading them.

After a while, they came to a high, white stone wall along one side of the road. It looked like fine marble... At the top of a long hill, it was broken by a tall arch that glowed in the sunlight.

When he was standing before it he saw a magnificent gate in the arch that looked like mother-of-pearl, and the street that led to the gate looked like pure gold. He and the dog walked toward the gate, and as he got closer, he saw a man at a desk to one side.

When he was close enough, he called out, "Excuse me, where are we?"

"This is Heaven, sir," the man answered.. "Wow! Would you happen to have some water?" the man asked.

"Of course, sir. Come right in, and I'll have some ice water brought right up."The man gestured, and the gate began to open.

"Can my friend," gesturing toward his dog, "come in, too?" the traveler asked.

"I'm sorry, sir, but we don't accept pets."

The man thought a moment and then turned back toward the road and continued the way he had been going with his dog.

After another long walk, and at the top of another long hill, he came to a dirt road leading through a farm gate that looked as if it had never been closed. There was no fence.

As he approached the gate, he saw a man inside, leaning against a tree and reading a book.

"Excuse me!" he called to the man. "Do you have any water?"

"Yeah, sure, there's a pump over there, come on in."

"How about my friend here?" the traveler gestured to the dog.

"There should be a bowl by the pump."

They went through the gate, and sure enough, there was an old-fashioned hand pump with a bowl beside it.

The traveler filled the water bowl and took a long drink himself, then he gave some to the dog.

When they were full, he and the dog walked back toward the man who was standing by the tree.

"What do you call this place?" the traveler asked.

"This is Heaven," he answered.

"Well, that's confusing," the traveler said. "The man down the road said that was Heaven, too."

"Oh, you mean the place with the gold street and pearly gates? Nope. That's hell."

"Doesn't it make you mad for them to use your name like that?"

"No, we're just happy that they screen out the folks who would leave their best friends behind."

I am asking personally; PLEASE HELP HAITI....

2010-01-13T09:35:00.000-08:00

Pray for Haiti. Send whatever you can afford. Keep a good thought.... pray. Remember how close to us they actually are. We must demonstrate compassion for our island neighbors. This is a near total devastation.

It is the worst earthquake to hit the Caribbean in 200 years. A 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck near the Haitian Capital of Port-au-Prince, where it has devastated the tiny nation, causing an unknown number of deaths and widespread destruction and health concerns. Despite being the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti's Internet connected devices were key tools in telling the rest of the world about the emerging crisis. We live in an era of instant access... we must make it an era of instant compassion. On Twitter and Facebook, eyewitness accounts and pictures are pouring out. The depletion of Hope begins a struggle to recover. Still; there are bight tweets... Carel Pedre, most visible Haitian tv / radio personality has been tweeting the story of Haiti as it picks itself up and realizes the destruction.

Watch CBS News Videos Online
Richard Morse used Twitter to convey a sense of how the people were reacting to the devastation: "I'm hearing singing and praying from the carrefour feuilles area. My prayers go out to the folks there."
A Wordpress-powered blog called Haitifeed is also delivering a steady stream of first-hand accounts as well as mainstream media reports from across the globe.
On Facebook, a group called Earthquake Haiti already has over 14,000 members. The group is largely being used for people to show support and trade news reports; however, there are some users who seem to be posting critical information including pleas for assistance to injured Haitians. [PC World]

The blogging community can take a lead and pass the news around while making the plea for compassion and help: Bay County, Fla:

American Red Cross is moving quickly to provide assistance to victims of yesterday’s tragic earthquake in Haiti. Red Cross estimates as many as three million people are homeless as a result of the devastating earthquake. The American Red Cross has pledged $1,000,000 to the relief effort and is preparing to move relief supplies to the affected areas as soon as transportation becomes possible. Sources on the ground in Haiti are now reporting that the American Red Cross office in Haiti has been totally destroyed and the fate of employees is unknown at this time.
The local Red Cross Chapter has begun receiving calls from local residents attempting to locate friends or relatives who live in or were visiting Haiti. All calls for this assistance are being referred to the State Department at 1-888-407-4747. The local chapter is also receiving calls from local residents who want to volunteer to assist is Haiti. The Red Cross deploys experienced, highly trained volunteers to work in disaster relief operations. Spontaneous volunteers will not be deployed. Local citizens interested in becoming a trained Red Cross volunteer can find out how by contacting the local chapter. Local residents who would like to help victims of the earthquake in Haiti can make a donation to the Red Cross disaster relief effort. Donations can be made at the local chapter by calling 850- 763-6587, by going on line to www.redcross.org, or by texting “HAITI” to “90999” (each text will result in a $10.00 donation to the Red Cross International Relief Fund).

Please help.

I adore(d) smoking!

2010-01-12T16:14:00.000-08:00

Me and my Marlboros, strolling down the avenue. Me and my Marlboro's every single afternoon...

I adored smoking. Yep. Part of my everyday and everyway. I'm at the emotional detox stage of stopping ... of giving up my Marlboro's. Yeah, gone, gone, gone. Over a month, now. And there are moments of the day when I still reach for the pack on the bench. Reach for the pack on the nightstand. Reach for my friend, my companion, my comfort, my cough. It's gone. Over a month now. No boro's. I smell them, up close, under my nose... sweet aromatic tobacco... aw, hell, it sucks some days. But! I did find something to assist, the e-cigarette. I got a good one, that gives you a 'throat hit' and serves as a nicotine vehicle. I've cut that to almost none, too... but I'm still vaping. It's vapor. No carcinogens, no tars, no stink, but

the cool look of smokin! And actually I do enjoy it. Sometimes grasp it out of a need, but less and less is it a need. More, it's a like and I do it to satisfy that ever friggin' crave for my Marlboro.

My breath is wider. I don't cough. My energy levels are gradually rising. I feel better. I should repeat that ... I feel better. And between you and me,

I didn't think I would ever do this. I adore smoking. It's true. Vaping, it's fine. I don't do it anywhere near as much as I smoked my boros. Nope.

I really never thought I would do this. And now I'm goddamned determined out of mean-ness sometimes, that I won't ...simply will not smoke when even now I think I'll just freak if I don't have a cigarette. No freaks here though. I haven't done it.

I never thought I'd make here.

Hello here.

I'm smoke free.

I'm not a smoker.

I still miss it some... but less and less every day.

I've made it

here.

yea for me. Good job girlfriend.

eh?

When nature makes a house visit.

2010-01-11T12:03:00.000-08:00

Woke up a little over an hour ago hearing some strange scratching sounds coming from the back door leading outside to the deck. It sounded very much like the Spock the Cat and since I knew he was inside I figured something had just caught his attention outside.

Looking at the clock on my night stand and seeing it was only a little after 2:00pm I tried to roll over and doze back off. Sleeping during the day is bad enough with the occasional phone call and I have to get up around 3:30pm anyway to get started for the beginning of my day eventually leading me to work at 11:00pm. So unless something becomes an earth-shattering kaboom I try to ignore it, and you might be surprised how many things like that happen during a normal day.

Except that the noise just never stopped. Not that it was loud or overly disturbing, just persistent and if I have a real curse it's my curiosity. With real effort I pulled my tired ass out of the bed and while not trying to act stealthy I at least moved through the house quietly.

Much to my amazement I saw Spock the Cat standing on his hind legs looking outside at a squirrel having some sort of hissy fit jumping around in front of the door. Spock was so intent on the little rodent that he had not heard me come up next him. On a closer examination the squirrel was clearly having a great time jumping around with my cat unable to come out and hunt him. Every once and while the squirrel would stop, approach the door, really get Spock excited, then back away to "dance" some more.

After a minute or two I decided to try and get my camera, which has a video function, and capture some of what was going on in front of me. I was upstairs and heading down with the camera when Sparky the Dog started freaking out and I knew he had finally come on the scene himself.

When I got back down the squirrel was on the deck railing looking like his was fun was spoiled. Spock was on the nearby kitchen table staring at Sparky. If looks could kill...well you know the saying. With a seriously great leap in the air the squirrel hauled ass off into the distance with me wondering if the damn dog hadn't blown some contest bucks for me from America's Funniest Videos.

The icing on the cake was that I was now wide awake and given past history could not go back to sleep to save my life. Of course Sparky looked very satisfied with himself jumping around for a reward for the job of scaring off the nasty squirrel.

Inglourious Basterds

2010-01-10T09:34:00.001-08:00

Just last night I finished the DVD of "Inglourious Basterds". It's got to be one of the 20-25 worst films I have ever sat through. The major question raised was why was it ever made?

I hesitate to say much more. If I say it was boring, its defenders will say that's the way Quentin Tarantino intended. If I say it's cliche-ridden and formulaic, defenders will say that's what Tarantino intended. If I say it's historical ~~fiction~~ fantasy, defenders will say it's satire.

I guess I'll just mention one positive note: Christoph Waltz' rendition of SS Commander Col. Hans Landa ("The Jew Hunter") was a gem. (I'll watch for him in future DVD elections). But that's about all I can say on the positive side for the rest of his cinematic vehicle.

It's tedious; cheap on set (most of the move takes place around tables). ~~Gratuitous~~ Sadistic violence.

This spoofs all spaghetti World War II movies? Nothing new since Hogan's Heroes is what I say. WW II has been over for 65 years. No matter. What the world still needs, I guess, is its perennial cliche-laden (anti) Nazi movie. The smart good guys beat the dumb bad guys.

The Nazis deserve to be punished (forever) but what about the rest of us?

I don't Tweet, Facebook, or find My Space...

2010-01-08T10:16:00.000-08:00

...where blogging is "...more social than email and more expressive than Face Book." I am seriously belated in wishing all of you Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year, hoping that 2010 will bring us better times and more happiness.

I am honored to be a contributor to this wonderful blog where I don't have to fact check, but just rant and rave as I please—politely, of course. Many thanks to Vigilante for the invitation to join this forum and among the great bloggers. Domine nom sum dignum.

Politics are wearing me down, but please excuse me. I need to run over to another blog and raise hell with some bigots who posted at Swiftspeech. And that's about as political as I will get here.

I Wish It Hadn’t Happened That Way

2010-01-06T11:54:00.001-08:00

When I was young, I grew up on a ranch in Wyoming. My family were well-to-do, so the ranch was a retirement home. My father didn’t do any physical work unless it was for pleasure, which it often was. We ran a few cattle, and we had riding horses and two teams of workhorses. No one out our way had electric lights or telephones until we moved in and had the wires extended from town. (The telephone line was communal, so we all took turns on using it. If it was busy, you just waited. Our telephone number was 28.)

One day we children were whisked into town for the day, but I know what went on. A large hole was dug down closer to the barn, and the four workhorses were led into it. Then, one-by-one, they were shot. My father was a kindly man, but I do not recall why he had that done. All I can remember is that, after that, we had tractors—and no work horses. One of our saddle horses died of sleeping sickness (possibly near that time), and it may have been that the other horses were also coming down with it. I just don’t know.

It has always been my belief that most ranch hands have felt love for the animals they worked with. Red, our ranch hand, had no family that I was aware of, and no car to get there. This was 70-some years ago. Not everyone had cars, many hitch-hiked, and there was little to do in town except drink and look up the “girls.” He probably hitched a ride into town with Elmer, the foreman.

Thinking about that time from the viewpoint of the ranchers, having no car, and nothing much to do when you got there must have been a pretty lonely life for a ranch hand, especially if he was the only one on a ranch and uneducated to boot.

But this is not just about one family, one ranch, and four horses. It is about the beginnings of a time when so many ranchers and/or farmers were making changes, abandoning live animals for machinery. It is about a large part of human life when too many people (in town as well as country) began to turn from a life of depending on animals as well as returning their love to using things made of metal and glass in their stead.

By the same token, people began to turn from country living to living in cities packed close to each other. The odd thing is that, in a world long past, people could live far apart, yet count on each other at harvesting time, as well as when emergencies arose. And you always waved at everyone you passed, whether you knew them or not.

On the other hand, if you move into a large town or city, the tendency is to ignore most everyone, even your neighbors (sometimes even those in trouble.)

Here I am at the end of my blog, and where do I find myself without even realizing it? Pointing out a major part of what happens to humans as our numbers increase.

ARW
1/6/10

Edgar Sawtelle

2010-01-05T23:22:00.000-08:00

Just finished Edgar Sawtelle, a 1st novel by David Wroblewski. I have to skirt the narrow straits of saying a few words about it without betraying the ending. Maybe I'll accomplish this by forcing myself to be as brief as possible.

In the 1st place, this is not a book for anyone who hates dogs or is allergic to Kleenex. Like myself, Edgar grows up rurally. Like myself, he grows up with large dogs, "varsity dogs", as I call them. Unlike me, but like dogs in a way, Edgar is mute: he sees profoundly and hears everything deeply but he cannot speak. From working at an early age in his family's commercial kennels, he grows into a masterful dog trainer. In the process, he learns how to communicate to homo sapiens and canines alike through signing and eye contact.

In the second place, the telling of Edgar Sawtelle is a retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet. To me, that theme was only a distraction.

That's all I'm going to say, except to quote a few words of Wroblewski's in a Q and A at the back of my coffee- and tear- stained book. In this exchange, the author was responding to a series of questions pertaining to 'work' dogs trained to 'help' humans. Wroblewski says,

….. The one thing that struck me, the one thing they did not particularly focus on, was companionship, which, to my mind, is the main occupation of dogs nowadays. The overwhelming majority of dogs that live with human beings do so specifically as companions. And I wanted Edgar Sawtelle to take that job seriously, too.

….. I think there are good relationships between people and their dogs. Good matches. Good Chemistry. And so there is the canine equivalent of … love at first sight, your one true love, things like that. But I don't think it's a feature of the dog; it's a feature of the relationship that's built between the person and the dog.

….. There was another book which made a big impression on me before I even started working on this novel which was Adam's Task by Vicky Hearne. Her thesis in that book is that the process of training is only superficially about obedience; what it's really about is constructing a language in which you can have this conversation that will carry on for your entire life, a conversation about what matters and what doesn't matter. Does it matter if you come when I call you, or does it not matter? Does it matter if you wake me up in the morning, or bark at the doorbell? Or does it not matter? So, it seems to me - and this is true in my own life - that training is the means to an end, and the end is not obedience. It's just better understanding, better communication.

….. It comes back again to language and what its limits are, even language to the degree we have it with dogs. We have communication - we don't have what we would formally consider language. But we have tremendous communication. One of the things I like about Edgar, even now in retrospect, and that I worked hard on in this book, was constructing a character who just reveres language, because he's denied this certain aspect of it. To him, the most unforgivable thing you can do is to use language in a way to obscure truth, or obscures communication, or obfuscates what is right.

At first Trophy Wife wouldn't let me have Edgar Sawtelle; she first had to re-read it 2½ times. Eventually, she became impatient for me to finish it so we could discuss it. But once was enough for me. We'll be discussing it forever.

I Just Tweeted This

2010-01-05T20:25:00.000-08:00

No, really, I just tweeted this. "It's personl, but it's also political, but then isn't everything?" and then I left a link to my just posted blog entry for this evening. Then I noticed that I had mail. I checked, and what did I find but a just posted invite to join you here at, "It's Not Political~Just Personal!" Well, right there you'd get an argument from me since I'm the woman who believes everything is political, especially the personal. A man on twitter howled at that assertion. He asked, "Even sex?" I answered, "Especially sex." Remember Sexual Politics? It was the first feminist book I read that really resonated for me. And it may have ruined not one but three marriages and countless other relationships with men. I could no longer being treated like the "little lady." I got mouthy. I began to object to things that as far as the men in my life were concerned were just as they should be, as they'd always been, the natural order. And that was when I began to aspire to live alone. Anyway, I hope I don't make regret inviting me to contribute. I'm bound to be a thorn in someone's side. So, please, let get this out of the way. I'm sorry if I have offended you, but...

Happy New Year to All My Friends

2010-01-01T08:38:00.000-08:00

2010 is a fairly round number. Very promising for a fresh start? I'll take a stab at some New Years Resolutions.

Lose weight (& post progress on line!)
Never blog posts or comments on the 'Net before several coffees or after several Mai Tai's (That's always gotten me into more trouble than I can handle).
Always have a good read at hand. (I'm talking about those archaic papery objects that go floppy in your lap if you fall asleep.)
Subject myself to being taken for a walk by Doberwoman once a day.
Never sell MadMike short!
(other)

Getting a start anyways: a work in progress.

An idea whose time may has come

2009-12-31T19:28:00.000-08:00

Surprisingly, I appear to be one of the few Luddite holdouts in North America a far as cell phones are concerned. A work-related pager is bad enough for the weeks that I'm on-call but just as far as being "reachable" I bristle at the idea of people just calling to tell me some ridiculous tidbit of trivial information.

Recently I realized as I was listening to some baby cry and its mother do her best to hush the child apologizing for the noise that I would far rather hear any baby cry that listen to about 95% of the adults I know speak. So it should be easy to understand that my reluctance to join the cell phone hordes is not only because of high-priced calling plans, bad service, or the belief that I would break the tiny phones on a regular basis because of my big hands and slippery fingers.

Holding fast to this premise I then come across this poster and realize that maybe I do need to have a cell phone with a camera. Countless times I have been sent of a gourmet mission by my wife looking for some special fruit, herb, or other obscure ingredient for her boiling kettle of Martha Stewart witchery only to come home with the wrong item. Lets just say that such incidents are not fun.

A camera cell phone would allow me to search the aisles of the organic and snobbish food store full of zombie suburbanites with confidence. While searching for some rare tropical red and green melon for my wife's special ladies night fruit salad and only finding its Doppelganger green and red counterpart I could quickly email a photograph and learn if it would be acceptable. Saving me much in the way of frustration and needless travel.

Of course this means that I would be even more on the grid with the eventual phone calls while I'm standing in line at some store or post office having to harshly stare at the other people nearby to at least attempt to look like they are not listening. Damn, life in the 21st century just ain't what the old science fiction shows promised it would be. I would gladly trade the current 21st century timeline for one where we vacation on space stations and play golf on the moon. I'd like that nerdy Verizon dude to find a way to get cell coverage out that far.

New Year's Eve Nightmare

2009-12-31T11:43:00.001-08:00

I woke up on the wrong side of a dream on this last morning of 2009.

Like many dreams going back three decades, it was a tennis dream. The worse dream I ever had was when I was serving in my sleep and dislocated my shoulder! After that experience, I started sleeping on my stomach with my right arm tucked under the mattress. Of late, tennis dreams have been rare.

But this morning found me playing doubles. Not my forte: don't play especially well with others.... Anyway, it was a strange foursome. Opponents were a shockingly beautiful PYT with long raven-colored hair and a total studded-out jock. My partner was a fortyish bald-headed guy who had a couple of needles or syringes planted in his body. One in his neck. Needless to say, he sort of looked ghoulish and zombied-out.

Another strange thing was that between points, my partner would go up to the net and confer quietly with our two opponents for about 20 seconds or so. In the thirty years of tennis in my previous life, I have never seen that.

Anyway, it was match point in the 3rd set. The stud was serving to me in the ad court. Now I had been dialing in his serve the entire match, and I was totally ready to bend his bad high twister with my backhand into his crotch as he charged the net behind his serve. There it was! And I raised up on my backswing and.... a shooting cramp ran up the back of my right leg paralyzing me as his serve flew by my ear. I woke up in a face-plant on the floor, screaming and cursing.

Trophy Wife and Ballou were quite disturbed. They wanted an explanation (interpretation) for this event and were not satisfied with what I could provide them.

In any case, I hope the end of 2009 goes out in a more tranquil fashion for all my friends on the 'Net!

Merry Christmas, My Merry Friends!

2009-12-24T09:40:00.000-08:00

From Hendrys Beach (Utah Savage knows where it is): a daily morning refuge for Ballou and myself.

All the best to all of my friends, in no particular order and as fast as I can type them:

Anvendelig
Beach Bum
Blogging4Food
Boris
Coleen.Rowley
DB Cooper
Doc Demento
Doc Häagen-Dazs
Dusty
Emily
GetaLife
Gwendolyn H. Barry
Hill
I.P.
Jack Jodell
JollyRoger
Kwayzar
LASER'S EDGE
Lil'Bill
LTE
m
MadMike
Messenger
Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf
Mycue23
Nombre (44)
Non Partisan
Oso
Petro
Reality Zone
Rock
schmog
SJ
Soros Proxy
Stella by Starlight
Stimpson
TomCat
Truth 101
Urban Pink
Will Hart
Wizard
Yellow Dog
...

And most of all, first, last and always, my thoughts & thanks to daddyBstrong.

Without all of you, I am nothin'.

HELP WITH FACEBOOK!!!

2009-12-18T10:52:00.001-08:00

I liked the old title, picture and purpose much better. Now this is just another blog. If I had made such an arbitrary change you would have thrown a hissy:-) :-) I'm just sayin'...

Oh well that is not why I am posting. I am trying to send you news, like you send me, on Facebook, but can't figure out how to do it. When I click the share links on the sites they default to my page. How do I go about sending them to you?? Thanks old man.

A Dog, Out for a Walk....

2009-12-12T15:23:00.000-08:00

This photo released by
Anthony M. Tortoriello
shows Faith, a two-legged dog,
walkING down Michigan Ave to the wonderment of the human pedestrians.

Tiger Woods' Anthem

2009-12-10T17:45:00.000-08:00

Personal Effects

2009-12-05T22:01:00.000-08:00

An Under 500-Word Movie Review

Just saw this Canadian film, courtesy of Netflix. I rented solely on the strength of one scene I saw on my way to bed one night.

It's a very gritty treatment of excruciating loss and descent into pathos which righteous anger does not relieve, but perpetuates. Michelle Pfeiffer, one of my all-time favorites, does not disappoint. I wasn't sure that I could hang in there for the full four quarters, but I did, and even saw the 'behind the scenes' extra which deepened my understandings.

Rules & Badges?

2009-10-05T21:45:00.001-07:00

One member of the commentariate asks (in email) what the rules might be for this blog, born - as it was - of the mother of necessity. Another comment suggests that I aspire to be Constable on this street.

I haven't given it much thought. In response, I instantly asked my self about what is lacking mostly among my favorite venues and blogs on the internet. I instantly thought of:

Honesty
Mutual respect
Checking politics at the door

As I said, I have not given this site much thought. It was born out of spontaneity. Maybe observation of these three rules would yield zippo content. More thought should be warranted. And be entertained.

Just so I don't get no badge pinned on my shirt.

Transplanting Blogged Posts as Opposed to Linking them with HTML Codes

2009-10-04T06:32:00.000-07:00

My original dispute with MadMike, un hombre with whom I have enjoyed many discussions and disputes in the past and whose friendship I treasure - that dispute now seems trivial. However, I did raise it, and I do not want to shrink away from resolving it, if it's possible to do so.

What I originally said was,

With all due respect, and I have a lot of Respect for you, Mad Mike. But I have to object this practice of taking someone else's work from his site and just transplanting it on the top of your own. If you think highly of Jolly Rogers' post, the proper thing is to link it. Not steal it. Now I say this with the confidence that J.R. may have expressed no objection, indeed you might even have exacted permission from him; indeed, still he might even post to this thread appreciation for your activity. Whether of not he officially objects or not, I do object.

I think this statement was complete and adequate to reflect my feelings at the time. However, there is a good chance it was misplaced. That's why I have taken it outside.