"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts... the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."
~Edmund Burke
Friday, January 01, 2010
Thursday, December 31, 2009
FEMA death camps.
Friends, I don't want you to be stupid and I spend a lot of time explaining the difference between stupid and rational. The latest update for stupid is that FEMA now has 3,000 fully staffed death camps just waiting for YOU.
Think about it for a minute. I had to send this to someone TWICE. First my original response and then a secondary one. I include both of them.It started when I received this: Someone loaned me a DVD on the New World Order and in that movie it mentions Internment Camps, so friend of mine and I plugged in FEMA camps on YouTube and found a lot of video clips on that subject. Apparently there are 3000 of these camps in the USA.
On the first video with the Fema camp located in Beachgrove, Indiana maybe we should call Senator Luger of Indiana and ask him what these barbed wire fences with large heaters and watch towers represent. Let me know what you think. Thanks,
Fema Camps
Naturally, I replied:
Yes, I might believe there are 3000 fully staffed FEMA camps sitting empty across the US that no one has noticed. Sort of like 3,000 Area 51s, eh?I suppose you can tell me who built them how they remain invisible from satellites, why no hunters or hikers have ever found one, and that the roads in and out are maintained by elves. But I have no obligation to believe you. Who provides the electricity, water, sewers, food, and trash disposal for these 3,000 camps? I am sure the government, which runs on taxes, is going to grab hundreds of thousands of citizens and terminate them so they can no longer pay taxes. Who is going to do all this? The police aren't. The military isn't either, for three reasons. First, they are in Afghanistan or Iraq. Secondly, because if they start rounding up citizens, they are smart enough to grasp that someone else is rounding up THEIR family. But this is the best reason: the citizenry is armed. There are 500,000 soldiers and 50 MILLION armed citizens. And of course there is not that much transportation or food available....the government is footing the bill for all of this, right? And they are bankrupt. Yet they are going to take a huge chunk of taxpayers and put them into welfare camps? At whose expense? Do you think the rest of the country will go meekly along with having the citizenry dragged away? A civil war would ensue in minutes. Worse, the conservatives would blame the liverals and the Christians would blame the Muslims and the whites would blame the hispanics and blacks. You also imply that the banks are in on it because the guards get paid and they have to cash their checks. Where do they even GET the guards? Newspaper ads? The grocery stores and dry-cleaners are in on it too. Uniforms? and the gas stations. And the suppliers for the camps. And no one else has noticed thousands of people driving to work every day at invisible camps. And where do all these people and their families live? Where do their kids go to school? Are there fully staffed hospitals at each of these camps which sit around and do nothing? And fire departments? If not, where would someone tell an ambulance to go if there was a medical emergency? Are their phones there? Is the phone company in on it too? Cellphones HAVE to have GPS information. Are all the cellphone companies in on it too? Where is the internment camp on the Big Island? Who works there? Aren't they related to anyone? Do they have to take Friday off because of the economy? Actually, only you and your friend are scheduled to transported to a camp for termination. Everyone else in the country is part of the plot. Maybe you can save yourselves by flying to Costa Rica tomorrow. Did you think any of this through? Do you understand the logistics of what you are suggesting? Do you understand that EVERY agency of the government at every level is dysfunctional and that you cannot even get a goddamn building inspector to come out and do their job?. We have no water or sewers, the police and fire department will not arrive until you are dead or your home is burned to the ground if they come at all. FEMA cannot respond to the natural disasters we already have on a daily basis but they can somehow construct and coordinate 3,000 death camps for AMERICANS and only the boneheads on YouTube and various left and right-wing nutcases know about them? Do you believe there should be a requirement that a person have some basis knowledge of the subject matter before he (or she) is allowed to vote or a job and an ability to demonstrate individual responsibility prior to being allowed to procreate? Can you explain to me what the 'New World Order' is about? That is a rhetorical question. Of course you can't. Have you ever considered hanging around with smarter people than you do now?***************************************************************Then I had to reply AGAIN. The video clips don't show anything remotely definable as a potential prison camp. It is an Amtrak repair station and is clearly visible from Google Earth. There are exactly the same cameras on the Hilo Wal-Mart except instead of one, there are about seven on Wal-Mart. The orange markers on power lines are used all the way across saddle road and all across the country for that matter. They show pilots that power lines exist, but they also show where a power line is down. Most of the private train companies went out of business in the 60s and 70s. Only a few are left and they (Amtrak for instance)) usually require government subsidies. It's usually cheaper to put something in a truck and deliver it straight to a destination than to load a train car, route it somewhere and then have it unloaded and still be delivered by truck. That used to be efficient before we sent all of our jobs and manufacturing overseas and went broke. I looked at the turnstiles with the supposed 'prison bars'. Those aren't prison bars. They are simply barriers to keep people from defeating the turnstiles. If you look at them they are mounted quite lightly with external screws or bolts and could be disassembled in minutes. Prisons aren't built like that. Putting new heaters in buildings that haven't been been heated "for twenty years" doesn't seem particularly sinister either. By definition they WERE heated until about 1990. The comment about the barbed wire is incorrect as well. Barbed wire angled INWARD is to keep people from getting IN. Next time you go to Walter's, go down Paradise to 22nd and turn left. Greg's house, about fourth on the left has the same fence. It is not to keep him and Lita from getting out. It is to keep people from jumping the fence and getting IN. Let's go further. The narrator identifies this as an old Amtrak train repair station in Beach Grove Indiana. The video was taken in 2001 and the camera doesn't quite swing far enough over for me to see the Air Force number on that railroad switching engine, but I can show you what it looks like today: http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/locThumbs.aspx?id=167269
"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts... the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."
~Edmund Burke
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Oath Keepers
So I went and joined Oath Keepers because they pushed my buttons. But they turn out to be simply a money machine for the founder. The oaths they promise to keep are not going to be happening anytime soon. But what finally got to me was a rant about the H1N1 vaccine by a crackpot ex-sheriff. I have listened to him before and he seems ALMOST reasonable....except he doesn't quite have a concept of the way laws work.
So try to pay attention and don't give these people your money. They are threading the needle to be politically correct while trying to act like the protectors of the Constitution. They aren't.Al they want is your money. They have nothing EXCEPT your money and they are tip-toeing to make sure they don't make anyone mad. They are appeasers dressed as Constitutionalists. a hui houT
"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts... the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."
~Edmund Burke
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Terrorism?!?!?!?!?
Where did everyone's brain go?
How is setting your nuts on fire an act of terrorism? The world is beginning to suspect these things are going to happen and people are responding by buying firearms. The REAL terrorists are the people at the TSA counter who make me feel like I am checking into prison whenever I fly somewhere. The REAL terrorists are those in the government who try to disarm the citizenry so we cannot defend ourselves from 'terrorists'. As we can all see, and has been apparent from day one, the government is merely putting on a show. They can't stop terrorism, EVEN IF THEY KNOW YEARS IN ADVANCE WHO THE TERRORISTS ARE! Because it's not 'politically correct'. It's 'profiling'. It's BULLSHIT! If someone is on a list of known terrorists, and I don't mean the million Americans who are on no-fly lists for absolutely no reason, or the hundreds of thousands of combat veterans who can't own a firearm BECAUSE THEY ARE COMBAT VETERANS....I mean some damn Muslim jihadist or a cop-killer who was paroled just so he could do it again and the government allowed it, who is the terrorist? Listen. You want to stop terrorism on airplanes? Give every police officer or trained military person a Taser when they board. We probably have something better in our check luggage. Just let us carry it on board if you don't like Tasers. Or give us a fire extinguisher. The first person who starts acting out or sets their nuts on fire will become a non-issue within seconds. I'm not being terrorized by these radical shitballs. I am being terrorised by MY OWN GOVERNMENT who thinks it's fine to eavesdrop without a warrant, to read my mail, and to disarm me so I can't defend myself against them. MY GOVERNMENT is the terrorist here. Do you know why the government keeps trying to enforce a completely unconstitutional gun ban in D.C.? Because the American Mafia is headquartered there. They are called the Congress, but I have NEVER seen anyone vote for a bill which is better for the citizens than is is for some lobbyist's backer. DC has a phenomenally high crime rate among the citizenry but the criminals don't care. They have free, armed bodyguards. Oh, please Uncle Sam, may I have a job? May I keep the house I worked all my life for? May I have the same level of hospital care that the invaders from other countries get? "Undocumented aliens"?!?!?!?! No. They are an army of invaders. We COULD stop them, but we are two worried that someone might have a marijuana plant in their yard. We COULD stop nutcakes. like those two columbine idiots or just about EVERY OTHER CRIMINAL ACT if we allowed our citizens to defend themselves. What the hell is wrong with people lately? The conservatives say I can have a firearm but I have to go to church and gay people can't have any rights. If someone rapes my daughter she can't have an abortion. The liverals say I can't defend myself in my own gome (or anywhere else) because several thousand people a year are killed with firearms....OK. but about a MILLION a year are killed in hospitals by simple medical mistakes or infections they got IN THE HOSPITAL and that many more die of obesity and tobacco use and traffic accidents. About a thousand to one and they are all hung up on the one. (1) Get out of my personal business, Uncle Sam. Get out of my bedroom. When I start thinking of all the wonderful benefits you provide me, I realize that you screw more things up than you fix and you are owned by Big Business.....except you aren't. You are owned by We The People. We put you there to look out for OUR best interests. When we finally decide you are not doing your job, we are Constitutionally entitled to fire you. It's not an issue between Concervatives and Liberals or Repugnicans and Demoncrats anymore. It has become a right vs wrong issue. You, the lawmakers, are getting it wrong. We The People, can't ignore it anymore. You are ruining OUR lives. (2) Do NOT tell me I cannot protect my own home and family. People who choose to be victims have that right, but they don't have the right to require me to be a victim too.(3) WAKE UP, WAKE UP! You people sitting in Washington eating fine cuisine...you people in the congress, of whom over half are multi-millionaires...You have better stop spraying that orange shit on your faces and get to working for the people who pay your salaries. We are getting good and mad and we aren't going to take it much longer. I am an Oath Keeper. I swore to uphold the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic.Dr. Tom
"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts... the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."
~Edmund Burke
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Untitled
http://www.constitutioncampaign.org/ordinances/lawenforcement.pdf
"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts... the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."~Edmund Burke
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
This story is a fabrication. It's not true.
But damnit, you WANT it to be true. You WANT Americans to be able to defend their lives and families and homes! That's why this story keeps circulating.
Shotgun preteen vs. Illegal alien Home Invaders:
Butte, Montana November 5, 2007
Two illegal aliens, Ralphel Resindez, 23, and Enrico Garza, 26, probably believed they would easily overpower home-alone 11 year old Patricia Harrington after her father had left their two-story home. It seems the two crooks never learned two things: they were in Montana and Patricia had been a clay shooting champion since she was nine.Patricia was in her upstairs room when the two men broke through the front door of the house. She quickly ran to her father's room and grabbed his 12 gauge Mossberg 500 shotgun. Resindez was the first to get up to the second floor only to be the first to catch a near point blank blast of buckshot from the 11-year-old's knee crouch aim. He suffered fatal wounds to his abdomen and genitals. When Garza ran to the foot of the stairs, he took a blast to the left shoulder and staggered out into the street where he bled to death before medical help could arrive.It was found out later that Resindez was armed with a stolen 45 caliber handgun he took from another home invasion robbery. T hat victim, 50-year-old David 0Burien, was not so lucky. He died from stab wounds to the chest. Now that is Gun Control !Thought for the day:Calling an illegal alien an 'undocumented immigrant' is like calling a drug dealer an 'unlicensed pharmacist' I like this kind of e-mail. American citizens defending themselves and their homes. "The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts... the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."
~Edmund Burke
Pro life? You betcha!
If you want to be pro-life, fine with me. But if YOU decide to take control of some teenage rape victim's life and tell her she can't have an abortion or a morning-after pill, YOU just became legally responsible for the mother and baby. YOU just became the adopted father. That's only fair. YOU made the decision, YOU assume the responsibility.
Biblically, the girl is supposed to be stoned to death (with her unborn) for 'playing the whore'. How pro-life is THAT?Boolean logic
Don't worry too much about global warming. It will slow down after the human race runs itself extinct denying there is a problem. But the problem isn't global warming or peak oil or the lack of fresh water. Those are merely symptoms. The problem is that we have almost 7 billion hungry mouths on a 3 billion mouth world. The population doubled between '57 and ~'97... in forty years.
In 1955 there was enough oil in the ground and enough fish in the sea and enough clean air to last forever. There was at least one channel of black&white broadcast TV in almost every major city. Every boy got a rifle when he was as tall as the rifle. Life was good. There wasn't much crime at all. You break into someone's house, you get shot. Simple. The only reason the police came was to arrange for the Coroner to remove the body. I never had a key to the house because we never locked the doors.So now you aren't even safe in your own home. A Brinks security system isn't going to save your dumb ass. While the bored-to-tears Brinks operator is dialing 200 people who accidentally set off their alarms, you have already been raped and murdered. The police aren't going to save you. No one will bother to call them even if they hear you screaming.... See More The country is getting so kinked that people are beginning to believe it's perfectly natural for a criminal to have a gun....after all, they ARE criminals. But the rest of us can't possibly own a firearm because we aren't criminals. In Boolean logic we call this '0".Somewhere along the line someone popped too many purple tabs and their thinking got screwed up. And then they started this stupid nonsense that you cannot whip your kid'sass good when he needs it because whatever he did really wasn't his fault. Society caused it. Give him a little more Ritalin and make sure none of the neighbors has a gun, 'cause if little Johhny breaks into their house to steal mommy's panties and finds it, society will be to blame for whatever he does.That shit stops here and now. When little Johnny breaks into my house and comes at me with a butcher knife, I'll kill the little bastard in a heartbeat. In Boolean logic this is called "1". And if I were a good Christian, I'd go over to YOUR house and drag you out in the street to be stoned for not being a responsible parent and doing it yourself. Blaming everyone else is bullshit. Blaming society is crazy. YOU raised that little ass-on-a-stick, not society. The butcher knife didn't take it upon itself to grab little Johnny and make him try to murder me. Thinking it did: logic=0. Realizing it is an inanimate object and little Johnny is...er...WAS the problem: logic=1.See how easy it is? :-)
Thank you JESUS
A friend just called and asked if I wanted to come by for Thanksgiving Dinner Thursday. I think it's nice when people reach out like that with a kindness...."What time?" "Oh, in the afternoon after late Mass." "Mass...where you take the Eucharist?". "Yes, and thank God for our blessings".
"Yes, but I mean...is that the ceremony at which a wheat thin and spoon of wine LITERALLY turn to the flesh and blood of Jesus as it goes down?" "Welll...some people don't believe it, but yes, that is a tenet of the Catholic faith and I believe it". "So...do you ever wonder what bit you are getting?""What?"... "Well, I mean don't you ever wonder if you just ate Jesus' eyeball or sphincter or some....""WHAT?!?!?""Or maybe your church just serves the better cuts. Prime rib, Some meat off the arm, pectorals. Anyway, how can you eat your Savior and them go home and tank down turkey? I'm almost sure there is something seriously wrong with that....Was Jeffrey Dahmer a Catholic?"Hello? Hello? Dang, Verizon must have dropped the call again. What ARE people thinking while they are are gobbling down Jesus' flesh and blood. Don't you care if you are getting a good chunk of meat or a hemorrhoid? If it were me, I'd like to know so I could trade places in line with some oblivious fool who probably always ends up with a toenail clipping.While your family and friends are all thanking God for your bounty on Thursday, remember that wherever you are in this great country, someone got killed for the land you are on, something got killed so you can eat it and Jesus is going to kill you, too. He has killed everything that ever lived. Make sure you are properly appreciative.Tuesday, November 24, 2009
How to be a good Christian.
You want to be pro-life, fine with me. But if YOU decide to take control of some girl's life and tell her she can't have an abortion or a morning-after pill, YOU just became legally responsible for the baby. YOU just became the adopted father. That's only fair. YOU made the decision, YOU assume the responsibility. That's as Christian as it gets.
"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts... the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."~Edmund Burke
GODDAMNIT!
WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?
LISTEN UP!THE CONSTITUTION AND BILL OF RIGHTS WERE NOT WRITTEN TO GIVE THE GOVERNMENT CONTROL OF THE CITIZENS! IT WAS WRITTEN TO GIVE CONTROL OF THE GOVERNMENT ~TO~ THE CITIZENS. GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY CONSTITUTION AND BILL OF RIGHTS. THEY ARE THE LAW OF THE LAND AND CANNOT BE INTERPRETED BY POLITICIANS TO SUIT THEIR OWN AGENDA! JUST THE OPPOSITE: THEIR AGENDA HAD BETTER COMPLY WITH THE CONSTITUTION. GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY PENIS.GET YOUR FINGERS OUT OF OTHER WOMEN'S UTERUS'!GET YOUR NOSE OUT OF MY BEDROOM!DO NOT REACH FOR MY FIREARMS! THEY ARE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE LESS DANGEROUS THAN A STAY IN THE HOSPITAL OR A DRIVE TO THE MARKET! I OWN AND CARRY THEM LEGALLY FOR ONE PURPOSE: TO PROTECT YOU. PERIOD,WHEN PEOPLE GO NUTS OR CRIMINALS OR TERRORISTS STRIKE, I, AND PEOPLE LIKE ME, ARE THE ONES YOU HOPE WILL SAVE YOU...THE GREAT MAJORITY OF YOU ARE TOO IRRESPONSIBLE TO PROTECT YOURSELVES AND NOW YOU WANT TO DISARM THE PEOPLE WHO ARE WILLING TO STAND UP FOR YOU! GET YOUR BIBLE/ QU'RAN/BOOK OF MORMON/ SCIENTOLOGY/ MOONIE CRAP OUT OF MY FACE! BELIEVE ANYTHING YOU WANT, BUT DON'T PROSELYTIZE TO ME. I DON'T HAVE TO BELIEVE WHAT YOU BELIEVE! "The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts... the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."~Edmund Burke
Heady days
These are heady days and we simply cannot plot imaginary scenarios two years in the future. We have to be based on some measure of reality and I, at least, cannot even begin to imagine what has happened every morning when I wake up.
There are strong voices suggesting global warming is a plot, FEMA has 600 fully staffed concentration camps in the US just waiting to take people who refuse the H1H1 vaccine which isn't even available, and it just gets crazier from there....Clinton replaced all the gold in Fort Knox with gold-covered tungsten bars, Obama's socialist agenda is in overdrive,.... This is what happens when the fabric of society begins to rip. Instead of seeking solutions, people blamestorm. There is a concerted effort to effectively make firearms illegal. That plan....ANY more restrictions on personal freedoms...and there is going to be a civil war. I have some very liberal friends and some very conservative friends who happened to be in a firearms class I was giving. They argued liberal vs conservative on a daily basis until I sent them down to the police department to apply for permits to acquire firearms. After being cross-examined, fingerprinted, photographed and told to call back in two weeks, they shut up. One is an ex- state political party chairman and an-ex police commissioner. The other is a very powerful person also. They were treated like the police department treats everyone else who applies to own a firearm....like criminals. People in this country aren't happy anymore. They don't know who the government works for, but it's not the citizenry. This is the social part of my allegory to a slowing top. It wiggles, it spins almost normally for a time, but eventually it will fall over without warning. It's happening. Watch."The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts... the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."~Edmund Burke
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Today's rant: Hawaii
It was worth the listing fee to be the first person in history to use an Ebay ad as a blog. Somewhere on this page is a beautiful home and potential B&B for sale as well. In the safest place on earth.
After observing human nature for sixty years I see that most folks are basically nice....but some of them....well, 'clueless' is too impolite a word, and calling people dumb as a bag of hammers wasn't attracting many buyers either, so maybe I'll just say that a lot of people don't have a well-developed sense of situational awareness. Or, as I sometimes mumble..."Here's your sign".
I used to try and explain risk management. I am alluding to California here, but every state is the same. It is a simple fact of life that basic homeowner's insurance does not cover earthquakes, landslides or flood. If one of those is involved, you are not insured. Period. But you can't tell anyone that; people simply won't believe their insurance doesn't cover everything. The San Andreas fault runs right down the length of the state and NO ONE in California has earthquake insurance. Smart? Nope. But insurance DOES cover....volcanoes.
Insurance is a brilliant concept. It is sold as 'protection' but it isn't. It doesn't 'protect' you. A .45 automatic protects you. An insurance company is like a casino. You place a wager that your house is going to burn down or you are going to die and they cover the bet because you are betting against YOURSELF. Friend, whenever you bet against yourself, it's a sucker bet. You can't win unless you lose everything you own or die. The insurance company might replace the walls but the new, empty house is going to smell like wet ashes for years.....or a barbeque pit if no one got home before little Fluffy went up like a Roman candle! Poor thing, scrabbling at the wall until...
Insurance can't restore a lifetime of memories and personal effects or the kids pictures...all the family keepsakes and heirlooms. The very things that make your life 'yours'... the treasures you have saved; your grandmother's wedding ring, the first pair of shoes, pictures, diplomas....everything. Gone forever. Your personal things, your favorite things, the one-of-a-kind things. You can get on with your life but you can never get back what you lost. And you have usually lost everything. The insurance company can't take you back in time to re-live those special moments or the thousands of memories of the vacations and the graduations and the weddings. Or the real valuables which are under your bed. It's not the house you want to save. It's the contents. People move all the time. What you can't replace, and what you can't insure because they are priceless, are the things you take with you which make it your home.
"It's all right, Dear! We're protected." Think about it. YOU aren't. Someone ELSE is, you are just paying for it. If it happens to be LIFE insurance, you are protecting your wife's NEXT husband and if it's me, I want to thank you now, before it's too late. I do appreciate it!
SoCal burns down every five years or so and destroys thousands of homes and everything in them. Lava comes through Hawaii every thousand years and destroys five homes. But not the contents, because you have time to pack up and move. And there is another astounding fact about Hawaii: Rainforests don't burn. Hawaii is probably the safest place in the world. We have the cleanest air, the cleanest water, we aren't a potential terrorist target, and no one wants to invade us.
If something DOES happen to your uninsured house, you will have the great pleasure of dealing with FEMA, which used to be known as "The Disaster Agency". It's still the Disaster Agency. Changing the name didn't make it any less a disaster. FEMA is now part of Homeland Security, the biggest.......er... the second biggest joke of the century. FEMA will never be able to rebuild New Orleans, which is in worse danger NOW than it was before Katrina hit. The BEST you can hope for from them is a complete IRS audit because five minutes after FEMA gets your name, the IRS knows you have lost all your receipts. They don't do that? OH, YES THEY DO!
This is the same Homeland Security that makes you take off your shoes in the airport to see if they are stuffed with explosives and blasting caps. The things Richard Reid (the 'shoe bomber') was wearing looked like overstuffed chunks of pizza dough with fuses hanging out. I seem to remember hearing about duct tape holding the layers together. He was also ratty, unshaven and acting psychotic. No wonder he got through security. They probably thought he was Keith Richards.
"Your shoes!" the screener sneers. I presume the female in the white and blue tent means to ask politely if I will take of my shoes so they can x-ray them, but she doesn't. They have an attitude, and you can't argue with them because they can declare ANYTHING you have as contraband and confiscate it. ....but sometimes they forget, and say "Do you want fries with that?" They are the least employable people available, working in a job for which they have no interest or expertise, and they hate the work. That's not security. They don't know what to do so they confiscate your water bottle. The idiots are always confiscating Audi keys. The teeth on your house key could amputate a leg, but Audi keys retract when they are in your pocket, so they must be switchblades. Google for it if you don't believe me.
In all honesty though, they did find another guy trying to get on a plane in 2005 with elevator tennis shoes held together with duct tape. The shoes tested positive for explosives. They confiscated the shoes and let the man get on the plane after he told the TSA geniuses......in very broken English... he had no idea how explosives got in his shoes. True story. I realize ethnic profiling is a terrible thing, but guess where this guy was from. No, not New York. I guess if I were a terrorist I'd fill my boots with nasty spores and spread them to everyone in the airport when they MADE me take them off. Nothing like exploiting the enemy's weak spot, eh? "Hey, what's that"? Foot powder. Who'd know the difference, the highly trained TSA screeners? They used to confiscate tiny nail clippers in case someone rushed the cockpit and tried to check the pilots for hangnails. But they let you take your pens and pencils onboard. They automatically assume everyone is a terrorist until we complete what must be very similar to checking into a supermax prison. And they still get it wrong nine out of ten times. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2218275,00.asp
if someone did manage to get an ounce of C4 on an airplane and set it off, all he'd probably do is blow his toes off unless the other passengers happened to notice some idiot trying to light himself on fire and beat the crap out of him like they did Richard Reid.
Then "security" wants us to walk barefoot through the same place a million people have already walked barefoot. Everything anyone has ever stepped in is on that floor. There are filthy scabs, body parts, AIDS, EBOLA, H5E1, FLESH-EATING VIRUS, DRUG-RESISTANT STAPH, every type of STD and tuberculosis, worms, parasites, little bugs hopping on and off everyone in line.... and I am going to walk through that sewer and then use my hands to put my shoes back on over whatever I just stepped in so I can take it home and and share it with my family? Not a chance, pal. I either wear disposable surgical scrubs or paint my feet with latex and let them peel it off in the strip-search room while they are running the latex through the explosives sniffer (no, I am not kidding). While people are trying to get their shoes off, their kids are crawling on the floor putting lumps of greasy hairballs in their mouth. GAAAAAAAAA!
That one stupid shoe inspection idea is the best vector for spreading a pandemic or helping a terrorist attack imaginable and we are doing it to ourselves. It's just a show so you think the government is doing something. Their newest idea is a lot better though, because I do feel safer knowing there is probably a senator or congressman in the bathroom watching out for me. He taps you with his shoe when it's safe to get on the plane. You know, I really don't care what people do on their own time. It's none of my business or anyone else's. But I care when the people at the pinnacles of government who are representing ME and MY country to the world are all liars, cheats and horse thieves. If it were up to me I'd string a few of them up. More than a few. They have forgotten who is working for whom. I am a citizen of this country, not the subject of a monarch. I vote for people who promise to do what I want them to do, and then they don't. I'm a patient person, but I'm about tired of it.
Hurricanes: Almost the entire eastern seaboard of the U.S. is at or below sea level. There is nothing to stop a hurricane from coming ashore anywhere, anytime and doing huge amounts of damage. Hurricanes are made of wind. The Big Island is made of rock. Over 4,000 square miles in area and almost 14,000 feet high in two places. It's the biggest rock in the world. Bigger than Mount Everest. Wind doesn't bother us. Hurricanes simply disintegrate if they get too close. This island has never been hit by a hurricane. 500 foot tidal wave? The west coast will be gone, I won't have to walk as far to get fish and my house will be worth about 5 million dollars. Bring it on!
Volcanoes: MILLIONS of people a year come to see our volcanoes since Mark Twain wrote about them in the 1800s. They are not explosive volcanoes, they are mild and beautiful. And the lava flows about one mile an hour when it flows. Kilauea has been erupting since 1983. It's one of our main tourist attractions. It's not dangerous. Most of the world's premiere astronomical observatories are on top of Mauna Kea. There has been a volcano observatory on top of Mauna Loa since the 1800s watching Mauna Loa and Kilauea. It's still there. Same place. No one in modern history has ever died from a volcano here, although once a tourist went and stood exactly where he was told not to stand and fell through a skylight into a lava tube. Made a "pssssst' noise and a little puff of steam, that's about it. Happened so fast he didn't have time to say "OH, SH......".
This home is at the edge of a narrow area of land called Lava Zone 1. It is insured but, because it is just inside Lava Zone 1, there is a volcano damage insurance cap on the dwelling of $100,000. Lava did come through this area, before Columbus discovered America but , if it happened again, you would have a week or two to make arrangements to move your possessions and even the house. And that, my friends, is unique in the world. It will never get too cold here, or too hot, and you can't starve. It's impossible. Food falls off the trees all year long and grilled rat isn't so bad once you get used to munching on the tiny little feet. But some people prefer beef or fish and we have the largest privately owned cattle ranch in America on this island. Parker Ranch. There is fresh local fish every day and lobster in season.
I want to live a few years in the Pacific Northwest. To sit by a stream and try to hook a trout with a fly rig.....or just pretend to fish, drink a few cold beers and listen to the birds. I don't want to hear any people, sirens or car horns. I don't hear any here and I don't miss it. If you have cash or a free-and-clear all-season home on some wooded acreage with a trout stream or two up in the wilds somewhere, even off the grid, give me a call. Maybe we can work something out.
Hawaii is a very liberal state. You can go to a doctor and get a prescription for marijuana and you can grow enough for yourself and two friends...supposedly they also have prescriptions. There isn't much crime here. A lot of people still don't lock their doors.
People here are building as fast as they can because the next wave of forty-niners from California is coming again, just like they did after the 2003 fire. Are they building new houses in Lava Zone 1? Of course. You can look it up on the county website. Forest fires, floods and the San Andreas fault are problems we don't have. This house is still here, still safe, still peaceful. But it's not as quiet at night anymore. The frogs are singing their song. A lot of people can't hear them, but they are getting too loud for me. Then again, a new warning just went on Viagra bottles that taking it can make you go deaf, so almost every male in America could adapt, no problem. :-)
I'll admit the insurance is high. About two bucks a day. But the property tax is ..........wait for it........... less than $100 a year. And hey!
You can keep the sign. :-)
Oh....what about the house? First of all, I'm not going to try to 'sell' it. When the right person comes along they'll want it and that will be that. I might throw in a free set of Ginsu steak knives, though. Even so, I suppose I ought to put in a few particulars. The video crew finished today and are doing the editing at their studio. When it is finished I'll put it on the Internet somewhere and link it.
This property abuts a private land trust. The adjacent lot is for sale. We have no heating or cooling bills but we have cable and high speed Internet. Dish TV is available and the Post Office delivers mail.
The property includes lemon, tangerine, fig, avocado, papaya, passion fruit, coconut, breadfruit (ulu) and guava. There is a lava rock wall and locking gate. Mail delivery, paved streets. There is a 16,000 gallon concrete catchment system and it's overflowing. We get a lot of rain here.
Inclusive in the sale of the property: A 4 month old $1800.00 riding mower with extended warranty, second riding mower with trailer hitch and street legal trailer, 15 gallon sprayer operated on and from new riding mower, 7.5 hp chipper/shredder, three year old top of the line oven, two similar refrigerators, washer, dryer, a new "whole house" Bosch Aqua Star water heater, 2 weed-eaters, 2 back pack Solo sprayers and miscellaneous gardening tools. The two car garage has a concrete floored attached storage shed 10'x16' filled with miscellaneous lumber and the attached screened 12 x 20 concrete floored addition is accessible through an interior 40" wide door; perfect for wood working. House also has a triple osmosis filtration system and additional under house filters. There are three independent garden sheds on the property. Two sheds are 8'x11' and one is 6' x 8' allowing for waterproof storage of all lawn and garden equipment and additional storage. There is a highly prized Sandalwood tree on the property line also old growth. This home and property are free and clear, not on lease land. Complete title will transfer. Want more pictures? Yours for the asking!
The mapquest map is accurate; you can see that the property backs to a private trust. Sperling's Best places has demographics here: http://www.bestplaces.net/city/Leilani_Estates_HI-51544562000.aspx although they are not representative of the average home price in this particular neighborhood which is in the high 300s to mid 400s. This is the third most popular area on the Big Island, the other two being Hilo and Kailua-Kona, our two largest cities. But the prices and weather are better here. http://www.trulia.com/home_prices/Hawaii/Hawaii_County-heat_map/
You can find out almost anything you want to know from the official local source: The county government. http://co.hawaii.hi.us/
We are in the Puna district of Hawaii County, the fastest growing area in the state because real estate is still undervalued. We have property booms every few years and they will continue as long as the earth exists. Thanks for visiting!
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Thursday, October 25, 2007
It's too bad the President doesn't get this.
Red Skelton's pledge of allegience.
I am a strong atheist, but this is just too beautiful not to post.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Firearms refresher course
"Those who hammer their guns into plows will plow for those who do not."
~ Thomas Jefferson
FIREARMS REFRESHER COURSE
1. An armed man is a citizen. An unarmed man is a subject.
2. A gun in the hand is better than a cop on the phone.
3. Colt: The original point and click interface.
4. Gun control is not about guns; it's about control.
5. If guns are outlawed, can we use swords?
6. If guns cause crime, then pencils cause misspelled words.
7. Free men do not ask permission to bear arms.
8. If you don't know your rights, you don't have any.
9. Those who trade liberty for security have neither.
10. The United States Constitution (c)1791. All Rights Reserved.
11. What part of "shall not be infringed" do you not understand?
12. The Second Amendment is in place in case the politicians ignore the others.
13. 64,999,987 firearms owners killed no one yesterday.
14. Guns only have two enemies; rust and politicians.
15. Know guns, know peace, know safety. No guns, no peace, no safety.
16. You don't shoot to kill; you shoot to stay alive.
17. 911: Government sponsored Dial-a-Prayer.
18. Assault is a behavior, not a device.
19. Criminals love gun control; it makes their jobs safer.
20. If guns cause crime, then matches cause arson.
21. Only a government that is afraid of its citizens tries to control them.
22. You have only the rights you are willing to fight for.
23. Enforce the gun control laws we ALREADY have; don't make more.
24. When you remove the people's right to bear arms, you create slaves.
25. The American Revolution would never have happened with gun control.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Human intelligence in government
Aphorism of the day:
People change laws, laws don't change people.
-me
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
10 myths -- and 10 truths -- about atheism
10 myths -- and 10 truths -- about atheism
By Sam Harris, SAM HARRIS is the author of "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason" and "Letter to a Christian Nation."
December 24, 2006
SEVERAL POLLS indicate that the term "atheism" has acquired such an extraordinary stigma in the United States that being an atheist is now a perfect impediment to a career in politics (in a way that being black, Muslim or homosexual is not). According to a recent Newsweek poll, only 37% of Americans would vote for an otherwise qualified atheist for president.
Atheists are often imagined to be intolerant, immoral, depressed, blind to the beauty of nature and dogmatically closed to evidence of the supernatural.
Even John Locke, one of the great patriarchs of the Enlightenment, believed that atheism was "not at all to be tolerated" because, he said, "promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human societies, can have no hold upon an atheist."
That was more than 300 years ago. But in the United States today, little seems to have changed. A remarkable 87% of the population claims "never to doubt" the existence of God; fewer than 10% identify themselves as atheists — and their reputation appears to be deteriorating.
Given that we know that atheists are often among the most intelligent and scientifically literate people in any society, it seems important to deflate the myths that prevent them from playing a larger role in our national discourse.
1) Atheists believe that life is meaningless.
On the contrary, religious people often worry that life is meaningless and imagine that it can only be redeemed by the promise of eternal happiness beyond the grave. Atheists tend to be quite sure that life is precious. Life is imbued with meaning by being really and fully lived. Our relationships with those we love are meaningful now; they need not last forever to be made so. Atheists tend to find this fear of meaninglessness … well … meaningless.
2) Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.
People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.
3) Atheism is dogmatic.
Jews, Christians and Muslims claim that their scriptures are so prescient of humanity's needs that they could only have been written under the direction of an omniscient deity. An atheist is simply a person who has considered this claim, read the books and found the claim to be ridiculous. One doesn't have to take anything on faith, or be otherwise dogmatic, to reject unjustified religious beliefs. As the historian Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-71) once said: "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
4) Atheists think everything in the universe arose by chance.
No one knows why the universe came into being. In fact, it is not entirely clear that we can coherently speak about the "beginning" or "creation" of the universe at all, as these ideas invoke the concept of time, and here we are talking about the origin of space-time itself.
The notion that atheists believe that everything was created by chance is also regularly thrown up as a criticism of Darwinian evolution. As Richard Dawkins explains in his marvelous book, "The God Delusion," this represents an utter misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. Although we don't know precisely how the Earth's early chemistry begat biology, we know that the diversity and complexity we see in the living world is not a product of mere chance. Evolution is a combination of chance mutation and natural selection. Darwin arrived at the phrase "natural selection" by analogy to the "artificial selection" performed by breeders of livestock. In both cases, selection exerts a highly non-random effect on the development of any species.
5) Atheism has no connection to science.
Although it is possible to be a scientist and still believe in God — as some scientists seem to manage it — there is no question that an engagement with scientific thinking tends to erode, rather than support, religious faith. Taking the U.S. population as an example: Most polls show that about 90% of the general public believes in a personal God; yet 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences do not. This suggests that there are few modes of thinking less congenial to religious faith than science is.
6) Atheists are arrogant.
When scientists don't know something — like why the universe came into being or how the first self-replicating molecules formed — they admit it. Pretending to know things one doesn't know is a profound liability in science. And yet it is the life-blood of faith-based religion. One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be found in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while claiming to know facts about cosmology, chemistry and biology that no scientist knows. When considering questions about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, atheists tend to draw their opinions from science. This isn't arrogance; it is intellectual honesty.
7) Atheists are closed to spiritual experience.
There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek them regularly. What atheists don't tend to do is make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about the nature of reality on the basis of such experiences. There is no question that some Christians have transformed their lives for the better by reading the Bible and praying to Jesus. What does this prove? It proves that certain disciplines of attention and codes of conduct can have a profound effect upon the human mind. Do the positive experiences of Christians suggest that Jesus is the sole savior of humanity? Not even remotely — because Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and even atheists regularly have similar experiences.
There is, in fact, not a Christian on this Earth who can be certain that Jesus even wore a beard, much less that he was born of a virgin or rose from the dead. These are just not the sort of claims that spiritual experience can authenticate.
8) Atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding.
Atheists are free to admit the limits of human understanding in a way that religious people are not. It is obvious that we do not fully understand the universe; but it is even more obvious that neither the Bible nor the Koran reflects our best understanding of it. We do not know whether there is complex life elsewhere in the cosmos, but there might be. If there is, such beings could have developed an understanding of nature's laws that vastly exceeds our own. Atheists can freely entertain such possibilities. They also can admit that if brilliant extraterrestrials exist, the contents of the Bible and the Koran will be even less impressive to them than they are to human atheists.
From the atheist point of view, the world's religions utterly trivialize the real beauty and immensity of the universe. One doesn't have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make such an observation.
9) Atheists ignore the fact that religion is extremely beneficial to society.
Those who emphasize the good effects of religion never seem to realize that such effects fail to demonstrate the truth of any religious doctrine. This is why we have terms such as "wishful thinking" and "self-deception." There is a profound distinction between a consoling delusion and the truth.
In any case, the good effects of religion can surely be disputed. In most cases, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available. Ask yourself, which is more moral, helping the poor out of concern for their suffering, or doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do it, will reward you for doing it or will punish you for not doing it?
10) Atheism provides no basis for morality.
If a person doesn't already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won't discover this by reading the Bible or the Koran — as these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. We do not get our morality from religion. We decide what is good in our good books by recourse to moral intuitions that are (at some level) hard-wired in us and that have been refined by thousands of years of thinking about the causes and possibilities of human happiness.
We have made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn't make this progress by reading the Bible or the Koran more closely. Both books condone the practice of slavery — and yet every civilized human being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination. Whatever is good in scripture — like the golden rule — can be valued for its ethical wisdom without our believing that it was handed down to us by the creator of the universe.
Monday, January 01, 2007
The criminal justice farce
We need to fix the death penalty in this country. When someone is sentenced to death, they ought to be executed immediately. Forget all the appeals and BS. Take 'em out back and cap 'em. (Sorry Pat, that's what I think)
Then go into all the prisons and tell the lifers that serving life is a privilege, not a right, and that if they shank someone or attack a guard they get a dirt nap the same day. For that matter, ANYONE who is not a model prisoner every day in every way gets the chop.
Next we'll move on to congress and establish a policy of ethics that everyone can understand.
I would also change some of the stupid laws we have now. Eyewitness identification is notoriously poor and a lot of innocent people are in prison because they were incorrectly identified. I think eyewitnesses are a good start, but I also think there has to be corroborating evidence. Forensic science is quickly moving to make that a reality.
I also think child molesters and serial killers and rapists and sociopaths are not redeemable and cannot be rehabilitated, so they will always be dangerous to the community. If someone is convicted of brutality during a murder, or serial offenses and there is no shred of doubt as to their guilt AND they have no sense of remorse, they are not worth feeding and housing for the rest of their lives. Charlie Manson comes to mind. Karla Homulka is another one. She served a sentence and is now running around free, but she should have been executed.
In the case of pedophiles and rapists, their sex organs should be removed. End of problem.
I think that every citizen should have the right and the OBLIGATION to protect themselves and their family. Trust me, if someone breaks in here I am not going to end my life pleading with a 911 operator to send help that won't come until it's too late. Even if the person were caught and convicted, my life would have been over if I had been willing to depend on Big Brother to protect me. It cracks me up that women go and get restraining orders and the next day their ex comes over and murders them. They SHOULD have got a gun and learned how to use it.
I have a thing about drugs, too. I think drugs should be legal and cheap. If you want to sit in an alley and shoot heroin, go for it. At least you won't be burglarizing my house to get the money. Marijuana should be legalized immediately. The idea that it is a 'gateway' drug is simply wrong, and it is the largest cash crop in the US. The government should just collect their tax, pay off the national debt and be done with making citizens into criminals.
Where did everyone's common sense go?
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Whose job is it to protect you?
I repeat this a lot, but a lot of people think the police or someone else is going to protect them from ne'er-do-wells, if they think of it at all. Usually it's "It won't happen to ME." I watched a Brinks commercial tonight. The dumbass woman is watching TV with her kids and sees an ominous shadow on the floor. We aren't told how the shadow could have got on the floor. It can't have been the troglodyte outside the window unless light curves and bends. Instead of screaming and freezing, like everyone in the world would actually do, she hustles the kids off to an upstairs bedroom while the guy outside runs up and breaks a window with a tire iron...for no reason whatsoever...and then runs away. Burglars don't break windows AFTER they have been seen and they don't break windows too small to use as an entry point, but this guy did. The alarm goes off. The mother barely gets upstairs when Brinks calls. That is interesting because the alarm autodialer to Brinks ain't finished dialing yet. "Is anything wrong?" says the dumbass Brinks guy. Hell no, pal...my window break sensor went off because of swamp gas "Yes" says the woman calmly... "someone just tried to break in." "Ma'am, I'm sending help right now." "The woman, visibly relieved, says "Thank you". But in the 20 minutes it takes for the police to get there, she and her kids could be meat on the table. See, if someone comes to your house and breaks in while the lights and TV are on, they already know who is in the house, they are obviously not afraid and intend to do something you won't like.
Apparently the alarm scared off the burglar who was a moron anyway for not noticing the "Brinks" signs all over the house and failing to cut the phone line and the wire to the outside audible alarm. But eventually the police get there and explain to the woman "This could have been a lot worse". "Thank you" she replies..a totally inappropriate thing to say in the circumstance. Yes, it could. Instead of an idiot, it might have been someone with enough sense to kick down the door, grab a kid, and tell the mom to tell the Brinks guy it was a mistake and make her turn off the alarm. Or break in before she armed the alarm which people do, if at all, when they go to bed. Or picked the house next door which doesn't have an alarm. Or go "Meow, Meow' in the bushes until the kids get mom to go see about the cat.
Do you have security cameras all over? That's good. It will help the police figure out who kidnapped and murdered your daughter. Do you have a dog? Even better. Dogs are wonderful. Failing a firearm and proficiency with it, a good dog about 120 pounds is the next best thing. The intruder won't have heard the dog barking when he cased the joint and won't have brought a pork chop laced with rat poison to feed it before he comes for you.
Look, by the time you dial 911 the guy has already got into your house and unless you can defend yourself you have no chance. There is a book out called "Dial 911 and die". There are 5 MILLION violent crimes in the US every year. There would be about twice that many but for armed citizens. 911 is nothing more than government sponsored dial-a-prayer.
Many crimes occur because people simply refuse to defend themselves. They don't believe it can happen to them. They think the police are less than 30 seconds away at all times. It simply isn't true. Where I live, the police don't go to at least a non-trivial percentage of their calls. They are busy and sometimes they just don't get around to it.
You better forget the idea of living in a society in which the government can protect you. The police are NEVER called until AFTER you are victimized or dead. If you want to protect your family, YOU need to accept the primary responsibility. You can get a permit to carry a concealed weapon in most states (with some notable exceptions). You can hire a gunslinger (like me) who is licensed to carry a concealed weapon in all fifty states. You can get a Taser in many states. You can get pepper spray. You can always get Home and Garden Raid which sprays up to 25 feet and expend a can in an attacker's face. It will probably stop him or her unless they are drugged up.
The thing I usually hear is "Oh, I couldn't hurt anyone". OK. Look through a forensic textbook (Brent Turvey has some good ones out) and see what will happen to you if one of these bad people gets hold of you. After that it's "A GUN??? Suppose a child found it?" Suppose you don't leave it around for a child to find. Suppose you teach your sissy x-box playing brats not to play with guns. If they shoot themselves anyway they are doing the genepool a favor.
I am not advocating violence or crime, but GUNS are merely expensive rocks. The person's MIND is the weapon, not the method. Don't blame guns for killing people. Blame cars. Guns kill people like pencils cause misspelled words.
The Presidents
This is the simple version. Not everyone agrees with it, but I have never, since 1960, failed to correctly predict the results of a Presidential election and this is how I decided. I am going to skip right to Jimmy Carter, who is almost as stupid as Dubya (he pulled the rug out from under the Shah of Iran and thus enabled the Ayatollahs to take power and our embassy) and is now showing himself to be an anti-semitic idiot. I don't care whether he is or not, I'm just saying. He lost a second term because he wouldn't stand up to Iran while they held our hostages for 444 days and he gave the Panama canal away. To Manuel Noriega.
Bush 41 didn't get reelected for the simple reason that he refused to get rid of his VP, fondly remembered as the Man Who Couldn't Spell Potato.
Al Gore didn't get elected behind Bill Clinton because the country was punishing the Democrats for lying about Monica. No one cares that she was sucking his John-Thomas. Everyone cared that he lied under oath about it. If it had not been for that, the idiot Bush 43 would not be president.
If it's Hillary vs Obama, Obama will win. I'd vote for McCain, but he's a Republican and Bush has ruined the Republican party for years. So if it's Hillary vs McCain, Hillary.
Monday, November 27, 2006
Mission accomplished in Iraq !!!!
SUCCESS IN IRAQ!!!
It's time we leave Iraq. Our mission is accomplished.
We have been completely successful at training and equipping the Iraqi police and army well enough that they are able to kill several hundred insurgents dressed as civilians a day and will soon be killing thousands more.
The middle east is now completely destroyed and our ability to influence either Iran or anyone else is gone. Iran now realizes that we neither have the will nor the power to prevent them from carving up Iraq and starting a nuclear war to destroy Israel.
Let's take our victory and move on to North Korea. We haven't actually lost that war yet. There is still time to get another wing on the new Presidential Library. I propose it be built near Waco at the old Branch Davidian site.
In other news, the war on drugs has been almost as successful as prohibition, the Constitution is only a piece of paper, and Dubya is officially the worst two-term president in history.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Dear President Bush
You didn't lose the House and Senate because there is not enough progress being made in Iraq. You lost because YOU lied to us about needing to invade Iraq. There were no WMDs and you knew it but you wanted to prove how much better a leader you are than your father. You aren't. You are just a common liar.
You have lied to us, every day with everything you said and when we started to complain, you began revoking our freedoms under the Constitution which you swore, during your oath of office, to uphold. You lied during your VERY FIRST ACT AS PRESIDENT, by taking that oath.
Now we have given the Democrats a mandate to reverse your power grab and your attempt to revoke the Constitution and your eavesdropping on us all and your permission for Americans to torture prisoners and the disappearance of Habeas Corpus and those 800 little notes you appended to laws passed by Congress with which you give yourself permission to simply ignore the law if you don't like it.
You are not our king, pal. You are our employee. It isn't treason to disagree with you. Your war is wrong and illegal and has destabilized the entire middle east and America has no respect anymore from any country in the world because of you.
Who do you think you are to ruin our legacy, to ruin my chances of getting Social Security, to send our children to Iraq over and over again until they are killed to spend half a TRILLION dollars funding Halliburton when Americans have no medical insurance?
You ARE the emperor with no clothes. I love America and the Office of President but, as the vote proved, most of us hate YOU and your ignorant, muddled, slurred attempt to be relevant.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
The Domesday book, Chapter VIII
My buddy from San Francisco:
You clearly need cheering up; besides large volcanoes smothering the planet in toxic gases (we're over due for those you know) the Earth's magnetic field is in the process of a polar shift and about to collapse bathing the planet in deadly solar radiation. Then there is China running out of water, unlike oil they can't steal if from anyone else (California long ago showed the limits of that). Resulting stress from a lack of food, pollution and radiation damage will make them wide open for a nice pandemic that will spread its deadly tendrils around the world.
You see, the great wheel of life will turn crushing countless millions to a bloody pulp in the process and things with turn out all happy.
Actually, I am looking forward to watching nature push back at our attempts to ruin the earth.
Super volcanoes: Yep, we ARE overdue and there are several possibilities, one under Yellowstone. That sulphurous boiling water is bubbling up for a reason, but we can't predict those things and we aren't even sure that another one will occur without some outside influence like an earth impactor. It's not something we created.
I am very interested in the perambulations of the magnetosphere but not particularly worried by it. That reversal occurs on a regular basis and is happening now. Sometimes it happens in a matter of days or weeks, sometimes it takes thousands of years. Our magnetosphere is weakening and becoming irregular and the polarity WILL flip, but no one knows when or why, or the result, or the actual dangers, but I'm thinking the worse that will happen is we take some hits from solar radiation that change our weather patterns. And cooks our satellites, or some of them. And I'll probably get a lot more basal cell carcinoma than I do now.
But neither of those things are due to overpopulation and all of my 'sky is falling' scenarios are a direct result of overpopulation and our inability, as a race, to deal with it politically. Someone has to go, but no one wants to be that someone. And no one really has the moral authority to decide who goes and who stays, so it boils down to who has the nastiest and most effective WMDs and is willing to use them to destroy much of the world. And THAT is controlled by who has the advanced technology and manufacturing capability to generate food and weapons at the same time and THAT is a function of who controls the energy resources. But the very dynamic of switching back to a coal-fired energy base to support all the people will ruin the planet. We have only 300 million people in the US out of 6 BILLION in the world, but we use 25% of the earth's energy resources and are the largest polluter and we simply are not going to stop 'til we drop.
I gotta tell you that the Muslims are more than willing to die if they can take us and the Jews out with them (although the logic behind that astounds me) but I doubt that living in a mosque in the desert and knowing of only one book in the world, the Quran, is conducive to creating agile politicians or freedom of thought. But the reality is that these sand turbans are going to have nukes and delivery systems in the VERY near future.
Pakistan, one of the most backward countries in the world has an arsenal already. They passed it on to Iran and Iran has the weapons NOW, but not enough of them to be able to offer us a shit sandwich and make us eat it. But they will, and they are not afraid to start lighting those things off. Here's why: Our military is seriously degraded. After Iraq we may not be able to get volunteers anymore. I certainly wouldn't volunteer for the military knowing I would be sent to a shit war over and over until I got killed. At least in Nam we knew we'd get out if we made it for 13 months.
And we DO have nuclear aircraft carriers and subs, but we have only a limited number of delivery vehicles. Once we shoot off the MIRVs in the boomers and the cruise missiles, we are done. The ships can sail, but if there is no jet fuel the aircraft stay home.
We must win a nuclear war in the first round and, to preserve the economy of the entire WORLD, we can't allow nuclear strikes on major US or allied cities. If that happened, it would prove to the world that we talk the talk but can't walk the walk. And we would no longer be a superpower, we'd be down in the dirt with everyone else. The problem is that nuclear war is unwinnable because everyone ends up dead. The USSR understood that. Iran doesn't care. We are better off loosing a biological but.......errr....we don't make them anymore. SHHHHHH!
Power, you see, is as much a matter of perception as ability. We didn't win in Korea. We lost in Viet Nam. We broke almost even in Panama and Granada, but we were run out of Lebanon and Somalia and our efforts in Bosnia....well, no one even knows WHY we were in Bosnia. Now we have destabilized the entire middle east and made ourselves the asshole of the world in the process. And the President's psychotic agenda pushed him to grab most of our constitutional right to privacy and protection from illegal search and torture and imprisonment forever without a hearing. We have become EXACTLY what Iraq was under Saddam and only today have the voters arisen in revolt and proclaimed Bush to be a failure and maybe the worst president ever. History will not look upon him kindly.
But no matter what, Washington rolls on wheels greased by special interests and they don't give a shit if everyone dies as long as they get more than their share. And there is big money floating around in Congress. 40 MILLION dollars was spent on just ONE Senate race. Missouri, I believe, where Claire McCaskell won with the help of Michael J. Fox and Rush Limbaugh who should have stayed home with John Kerry.
This has turned into an actual rant and I am off my subject, so I am going to stop. But as long as politicians and the religious fundies worry about same-sex marriage as though it is going to end the world and then sneak off to their own homosexual encounters, there isn't much hope.
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
The Domesday Book, Chapter VII
A Colorado reader comments:
I think the best thing to do at this point is to stop waiting for our governments to do something and instead, take personal responsibility for the problem. And this approach will work regardless of which crooks are running our government by growing the businesses that will create the change.
You are missing the point. And for the same reason everyone else misses it.
See, it doesn't matter whether everyone in America has hybrid cars. The energy it took to produce them comes from fossil fuel. The energy it takes to produce a photovoltaic array or a windmill farm far exceeds the possible energy return from them. The amount of fuel it takes to grow food and bring it to the marketplace is staggering and the electrical grid of the WORLD is powered by fossil fuels for the most part. The energy required to convert raw uranium to a fuel isotope and store it after it is used is more than the potential power produced by the plant over it's lifetime. That's why we aren't building any more...and you didn't address the reason we are running out of resources: overpopulation.
We have already used up most of the earth's natural resources. They are not renewable. When the oil is gone and the coal is gone and the forests have been burned for heat, we are really and truly ****ed. And that is not some fantasy humans will need to address in a thousand years. We will all be dead in a thousand years. GOD will not appear at the last minute and save us. He has never appeared at the last minute and saved ANYONE! He did show up once to to Show Moses His hindquarters. Moses was mooned by God. Holy Moses!
The only thing that will slow our complete extinction that is a mass extinction event or a huge nuclear war or an uncontrolled pandemic, and all of those are looming big. Depending upon exactly how it plays out, there will either be a few mammals left or none at all. If there are a few left they will immediately go about the business of killing or enslaving the rest.
But even then, the ice is already melting, faster and faster each day. Very soon, the weather will either go completely out of control and revert back to the premordial soup era with constant acid rain and rapidly increasing CO2 levels, or it will simply stop. The jetstream will stop, the Atlantic conveyor will stop and the seas will become stagnant ponds of red algae. Clouds will no longer form (I need an entire chapter to explain THAT) and there won't be any more rain. The Ozone layer will dissolve.
There is nothing you can do as an individual or a town or a country to stop it. Believe me, China is not going to stop burning coal and the US is going to start burning it again big time when the Mideast goes up in flames because of that ****ing idiot George Bush. My state has one geothermal plant which is clean....until we have an earthquake and it vents a million tons of SO2 into the atmosphere. As it is, our volcano tosses out a million pounds a month anyway, but it usually blows north over Maui and Oahu. And we are one of the three PRIME areas in North America to have a windmill farm. We actually have several of them, put in years ago at the cost of untold millions of dollars. But after the oil crisis of the 70s went away, no one wanted to fund their maintenance anymore, so they sat there and rusted. Now that we need them they are merely eyesores.
Our local power generation grid is coal powered and diesel powered. A collier docks here every month or so and offloads a whole shipload of coal. And a barge comes in with diesel and gasoline. And we have no industry here except growing macadamia nuts and orchids. Industrial states and countries cannot get enough power and will use force when it starts to run out, JUST AS WE ARE DOING IN IRAQ. But because Bush lied about it instead of simply saying "OK, we now own this oil", we have been ****ing around and will end up without it.
I think I need to write a book. I am not as good at connecting the dots as Richard Burke (Connections), but I have thought a lot of this through and every time I find another connection, it points to a closed entropic system which is nearing chaos. And when we start hemorrhaging, stop-gap political band-aids won't even begin to help.
The Domesday Book, Chapter VI
From our Australian correspondent:
"Umm....any chance of a rant that isn't about us all being doomed?"
Not much. But you can do what everyone else is doing. Pretend there is no problem. Pretend there is plenty of food to go around and pretend that the commercial I have been seeing on TV.....a little girl smiling and saying that there is 250 years of coal left so why worry....isn't propaganda.
Oh sure, there is plenty of coal left. High sulphur coal. When it burns and the Sulpfur Dioxide (SO3) mixes with water vapor (H2O), like it does around the volcano I live on, it turns to something else. What happens when SO3 dissolves in H2O? Anyone?
"You get acid. Acid rain. Another thing they're trying to deny the existence of."
Very good! The compound which is formed is Sulphurous acid, H2SO3. The reaction goes like this: SO2+H2O==>H2SO3 which is a weak, unstable dibasic acid. Now the point becomes why are we concerned with that? So what? So this: Without going into the chemistry, the bottom line is that Sulphurous acid solution is slowly oxidised by atmospheric oxygen to Sulphuric acid. So Carbon Dioxide and Sulphuric acid. Sound familiar? Think Venus.
Venus is THE runaway greenhouse effect poster child. The temperature and pressure of the atmosphere decrease with height, so water vapor rises in the atmosphere and encounters conditions that should cause it to condense back into liquid water and fall back to the surface. Rain.
On Earth the ozone layer prevents ultraviolet light from destroying water in our atmosphere. Our water is recycled through the atmosphere and most of it returns to earth. On Venus, there is no LONGER an ozone layer, and the atmosphere isn't opaque to ultraviolet light. This allows ultraviolet light to destroy water because, as water rises in Venus' atmosphere, UV light dissociates it into two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. The hydrogen is much lighter than the water molecule was so it easily escapes Venus' atmosphere. The water will usually quickly recombine with a carbon or carbon monoxide molecule to form carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide. Venus' atmosphere is:
* CO2: 96.5%
* N2: 3.5%
* SO2: 0.015%
Heavy water, which is composed of one oxygen, one hydrogen, and one deuterium (a proton and one neutron), cannot reach the requisite height as easily. If it does, it can still be dissociated just like normal water, but this happens at a much slower rate. Thus, a measurement of how much deuterium compared with how much hydrogen today shows that Venus has much more deuterium in its atmosphere for each hydrogen atom than Earth does. This is the strongest evidence that Venus has lost a massive amount of water in its history.
Like we will. But probably not for quite a while.
I'm not a pessimist nor can I predict the future. I simply see what is going on and try to extrapolate it a few years.
"I know everything you've been saying in these rants is unfortunately true."
I believe it is, but there are many people who disagree.
"Is there absolutely no way to delay the inevitable though? None at all? Nothing anyone can do?"
Not in my opinion. Humans shit in their own nests because there have always been plenty of new nesting sites, and there still are. There is plenty of pristine land left, but 50 SQUARE MILES if it is turning into desert every day. In addition, our memories are short. Great grandpa is dead so we cannot directly compare his experiences with our own. So we cannot see ourselves sinking into oblivion.
But there isn't plenty of energy left and there isn't any way to feed more people than we have on a long-term basis without burning a lot of energy to produce artificial crops and artificial herds of animals to eat. We have almost completely depleted the oceans of fish since 1950 and I must make the point one more time that ALL life on earth that relates to us is controlled by a very tiny band of sea and air. I estimate it at fifteen meters thick, extending about 8 meters above and below sea level. If the balance of life is disrupted anywhere within that zone, biotic life will simply cease to exist.
In the natural scheme of things every organism competes with every other organism for food, living space and reproduction rights. Evolution allows random mutations to push up out of the status quo and continue pushing until they run out of food or living space. That's why dinosaurs got so big and that's why they ruled for millions of years. Until they ran out of food...or air. Then they all died. (this is not a treatise on the causality of major extinctions, so we will not postulate on the reasons they occurred....suffice it to say they did and left a fossil record.)
Humans started out with an opposable thumb. We don't have the best eyesight in the animal kingdom by far. Birds, the descendants of warm-blooded dinosaurs do. But then we did something no other terrestrial animal did. We started growing bigger brains faster than bigger bodies. It was exactly what no one could have predicted because it was an entirely new evolutionary strategy and it was too successful. It ruined the balance of nature. We broke out of millions of years of slow change punctuated by sudden global disasters into an organism that could, for the first time, create our own global disaster.
And we are not going to stop and think what we are doing until we have done it. We can't. The very recipe for our evolutionary success, which is 'breed 'till you bleed' precludes us from changing the reason we were successful in the first place. We got here by killing everything that got in our way and it is our destiny to meet that same doom. We have such a strong genetic imperative to breed that some people even try to breed with members of their own sex. I am absolutely NOT anti-gay. I am merely pointing out that the genetic imperative to breed is still there no matter what your orientation and there is nothing wrong with it.
But advocating an "Abstinence until you are twenty-one" policy is not only extremely stupid, it creates more serious psychological problems than just handing out a couple of condoms to your sons and daughters before they go on a date.
Just like the obviously ridiculous policy of Catholic priests not being allowed to have sexual relations with women after GOD specifically invented sex between a man and a woman. That's not right. It's not even wrong. It just promotes a priesthood full of kiddy-diddlers. Even if you are one of the superstitious fools who believes in a huge invisible pal in the clouds you know that isn't right. Hey dummies, GOD's ONLY job is to kill everything which ever lived. Your soul is no good to Him while you are still using it.
The Domesday Book, Chapter V
From our New Zealand correspondent:
"Cheerful little sod aren't ya!"
Yes.
"Our beloved (NZ) government has decided to "do something" about Global Warming...only nobody seems quite sure what, but no doubt it'll be something which: 1) The glorious opposition can attack & claim it's useless & 2) The entire country will find painful in some way,so we can bitch & moan & whinge constantly."
Well, you sure have that part down pat. The problem is that America won't let you do anything meaningful. We gotta have our air conditioners and our Hummers and our factories making things we don't need and we'll get them as long as we have the cash to pay for oil or the power to take it by force.
The planet is already crashing and even today there is no way to stop it. But we won't stop it. We will fight over the remaining resources until we go extinct.
People think it will be a slow process and we will be able to fix it with enough money or that Jesus will come back at the last second and save everyone.
I have no idea what the people on Easter Island thought as they were cutting down their last tree, but it is quite likely that I'll be here to see the modern equivalent.
The Domesday Book, Chapter IV
It is only a matter of time. No new weapon in history has ever been invented that was not eventually used by all sides in a conflagration, each one greater and more horrible than the last, with the possible exception of biological agents. We have 'em and will use them to clean up anything the nukes miss, but the problem with biologicals is that once they are loose in the wild they immediately begin to mutate in unpredictable ways. You can't stop them and you can't make them selective.
People in many countries have come to believe that they live in civilized societies and will be protected by the government or the police or God, so they pass anti-gun legislation and become victims waiting for someone to rape, rob and murder them. CSI is supposed to be a good show (I have never watched it), but the police.....and the CSI people don't arrive until someone finds the raped and mutilated bodies of the victims.
I would have been a victim several times over if I had not been given a rifle at a very young age and trained in it's use and the responsibility that goes with owning a gun at a very early age. But I was, and so I was ready to defend my home at age 6, which I did successfully. I believe that I live in a civilized nation, but I have been in several gunfights which I did not ask for or seek out, but they happened. I learned not to delegate my personal defense. I assume the responsibility for it. Marshall is another person who understands what I am saying. He has been there and he knows firsthand.
And MILLIONS.....that is MILLIONS of Americans a year prevent themselves from being victims of violent crimes by simply rejecting the mindset of victimology.
President Teddy Roosevelt, realized this and had schools teach kids to use firearms. Then everyone became lieberals and decided that Big Brother would protect them from all comers, and that boys needed to learn ballroom dancing. But it isn't true. If you want to be terrorized, forget the stupid Amber Alert crap you saw on the news. Lightning will strike more people than terrorists ever will.
Wait until you wake up in the middle of the night and realize someone is in your room. But when that person is in your room and you know you can't get to a phone and you know your kids are in the next room, you suddenly understand that you are no longer in control.....of your life, of your family's lives, of your body, of anything. Friends, THAT is terror. And the choices you could have made but didn't, and chose to be a victim instead, now guarantee that something really bad is about to happen. You can only hope that he strangles you BEFORE he mutilates your body. And regardless of what you see on TV, unless your attacker is a close relative, business associate or household member, if he doesn't leave a lot of forensic evidence, he (or she) may never get caught. Apart from druggies, there are probably sixty serial killers operating in the US right now. All they want to do is kill YOU. They have no mercy, and they haven't been caught. Most of them operate for years and most of them never get caught.
I am a strong advocate of people owning, and being proficient with firearms. "OMG!" you say! " I would never allow a firearm in my house because of my children". I know parents who won't let their kids learn to swim because they might drown. All you are doing is preventing these kids from being prepared to function in the real world. Don't take them camping, either. Don't let them play sports. God forbid they should fall down or get dirty.
Teach them that JESUS is in charge and won't let anything bad happen to them. Don't discipline them. Don't disrespect them by exercising any control at all. Then when they end up in jail for shooting all their classmates because they think it's a computer game or because they have been raised to be irresponsible sociopaths, blame society.
Sunday, November 05, 2006
The Domesday Book, Chapter III
Carbon Dioxide storage is here. Compressing the gas into a supercritical fluid and pumping it underground is the way big oil is working to keep the greenhouse gases at a manageable level. They say there is enough room underground to store decades worth of CO2. Billions of tons. Maybe, if the plan goes big-time, trillions of tons.
But 'underground' doesn't mean the same thing as burying Aunt Mildred. She probably won't come back to haunt us during an earthquake. The first time we have even a small earth impactor, or a serious enough earthquake all of the undissolved gas is going to be ejected to the surface. Here's the problem. We can't breathe it. So when it DOES come out, it will overwhelm (1) every oxygen breathing organism it covers; (2) industry's ability to hide it again, and (3) will cause a sudden and immediate spike in the atmospheric temperature.
Some of it is going to leech in to the water table and turn the water acidic and some is going to push things like uranium and arsenic to the surface, but that's a whole other story.
Burying all that CO2 is like planting a huge asphyxiation bomb and hoping it doesn't go off.
Monday, October 30, 2006
The Domesday Book, Chapter II
The global population hit one billion about 1800. Two hundred years later there are 6 billion people on earth click on this and scroll down.
I wish they had a tabulation about how fast the ice is melting, but I don't see it. I don't think there is good quantification yet.
The earth can support about 3.5 billion people. We can't kill off all the animals or eat all the food or deplete all the oceans at that number, but we have already burned most of the oil. More people than that deplete the natural resources beyond their ability to replenish. We have already tipped the ecosystem past the point of no return, so there is going to be an extinction event pretty soon. I am talking mass die-off here, not merely a pandemic or a nuclear war, although those are probably in the cards too.
The food is almost gone and the oil is almost gone. The DAY Iran gets a serious nuclear capability they are going to nuke Israel and Israel is going to nuke all of the oil regions in the middle east. Everyone knows it. And they can't help it. They have been fighting each other since the dawn of civilization and they will never stop.
The Muslims are willing to live in the 7th century again, without cars, without oil, without electricity, without medical care, because many of them do anyway, and they will take the loss to get rid of the Great Satan. But because they are such ignorant assholes they don't realize that when the earth goes they will go with it.
The Great Satan, in the meantime, is going to run out of food and oil at the same time. EXACTLY the same time. And so will everyone else. The economy of the entire world will crash on that day. And it won't be 2040 when there are 9 BILLION people, it will be between 2010 and 2020.
Will the human race survive? I used to think "Sure. Life is very difficult to extinguish. But there won't be many and they won't have a very good chance of starting over". Now I am reconsidering. A disaster involving 6+ billion people will overwhelm every government on the first day. The second day there will be no more government or armies because everyone will be trying to get to their families. They won't make it. That same day people will start killing each other for food or revenge or for medicine or just because that's what people do when they don't know what else to do.
By the end of that week if you are anywhere NEAR a population center you will be dead or starving. Stephen King described the landscape in The Stand, which was the only King book I could ever read. It rang optimistically true except he allowed a few people to live. He didn't know about global warming back then.
I can hear you saying "Wait a minute, Pal! A global warming die-off can't just happen is a week or a month. We would notice and stop it." I beg to differ. There are BILLIONS of tons of CO2 ice just sitting in the oceans like huge rocks. The oceans have been absorbing it for thousands of years. As a result, we still have enough O2 to breathe and the earth hasn't overheated. But if the oceans warm up just a bit and that stuff bubbles back into the atmosphere....or if the Atlantic conveyor stops and the sulphur-loving organisms near the bottom move toward the surface, we are ****ed, right then. Not in 20 years, I mean within weeks.
Plants are going to help kill us too. Everyone knows that plants convert CO2 to O2 through photosynthesis, but we have just discovered that when plants are stressed they can produce methane as well. Like cows. Methane is a good, clean fuel but it is also a greenhouse gas which lingers in the atmosphere for about 100 years and warms the earth 23 times as much as CO2. Burning 20 gallons of gas equals a good cow fart.
We are past the tipping point before which we could prevent this. We are very near the critical point at which this situation will begin to feed on itself. We don't notice it because our top is spinning just like it always has so we feel no sense of impending danger. When it stops, and I use a metaphor, it will wobble once or twice like a kid's top and almost instantly crash, just as tops do. When it does, humans, which are not able to control the weather, or each other, or do anything but kill off every other life-form that gets in the way of a parking lot, are not going to know what hit them. Do you know that 99% of every species and plant which has ever existed on earth is extinct? That's just natural. It has happened because we have had 5 MAJOR and several other less major extinction events we can document. Here is the Wiki.
So science tells us that even without an earth impactor, another major extinction event will happen within 10 million years regardless, but that the activities of humans, a previously non-existent factor, may move the event up to ........oh, maybe....tomorrow.
But every cloud has a silver lining. No scientist has ever witnessed the world dying off before, so there is a lot we can learn! As long as we can write pretty fast. Sadly, no one will ever read it.
And there is religion. If everyone is dead, we will have succeeded in our goal of wiping out organized religion. If I am one of the temporary survivors though, you can be damn sure I am going to try to control anyone I meet by invoking religion. If that doesn't work and they won't accept me as King, I'll just kill them.
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