Lady Anne de Bivalve

I just got an email from an old friend who has been battling a malignant cancer for quite a while. She has discontinued treatment in favor of the most peaceful end possible. This decision took great courage and I only hope that she will find peace with family and friends. We met in 1950, and have been in contact off and on since. We had laughs together and some interesting times, but went our own ways in 1958.
A year or so ago I wrote an essay about doing the “hardest thing I ever did”, and I will add this to the list. I hate that she didn’t get the therapy needed to reverse the disease. I hate that medicine can’t get to all cancers in time. I just hate all of it.
She is a good woman with core religious beliefs, and will go to her heaven when the time comes. She won’t go kicking and screaming either. She will go with dignity and with a smile. She will be an example for us all.
Damn you Cancer. Damn you.
Image: http://www.nature.org/idc/groups/webcontent/@photopublic/documents/media/prd_023218.jpg

Steve Irwin: CRIKY!!

If you ever enjoyed Steve Irwin, take a few minutes to watch this video of end the memorial service, filmed at his home base crock farm. And listen to the song of John Williamson, a balladeer of great power.
I was writing a story about Uluru and the rain and wanted to link to John Williamson’s song “It’s Raining on the Rock”. Why? Because it’s raining here, now, and that brought me to Uluru. So I went to YouTube and whilst there rediscovered the Steve Irwin video. I couldn’t help myself. I opened it, listened and watched, and had a tear as well.
At some level thus guy was a real nutter, playing with crocks, dangerous snakes, spiders and sting rays. At another he was a consummate entertainer, and at another he was a master of showing us another world. And he died the way he probably wanted to. But probably too soon, if you could ask him.
So I watched the video and thought about all the people I know who have never heard John Williamson or his songs and though “Hell, why not?” Why not indeed. Here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rdyVP95XiE&feature=related
Look into my eyes. Watch it. And whatever you do, DON”T MISS THE END!!!
Image: http://www.funnyheck.com/funnypicture/steve6.jpg
Image: http://www.johnnyleeclary.com/images/irwin_steve_snake_cp_10666737.jpg

There is Something Rotten in the State of Alabama: Tomatoes.

(Before you read further, notice that the sign says “my body my choice” etc.? Yeah? Try to “choose” woman’s health services in Kanas and see who owns your body, lady.)
You gotta love some state legislators. Alabama passes a terribly strict “immigration” policy and as a result on September 28th, thousands of migrant workers stream out of the state. Then the farmers find out that local people won’t work for the wages or the back-breaking labor, so crops all over the state are rotting in the fields or on the trees. Brilliant.
Watch Florida next. A massive use of migrant labor for a multi-billion dollar agribusiness, and the assholes in the legislature want to pass a “tough” immigration bill like Arizona and Alabama. If they do, they demonstrate once again how far out of touch they really are, and what morons they are. In fact, if they pass a bill like that and it gets signed into law, Morons would be embarrassed to have them join the club. We shall see. They are now busy trying to kill the “Obamacare” program, climbing into the uteri of the women of the state, and getting divorced because gay marriage is a danger to us all. Oh yeah, and breaking up the public school system with universal vouchers, privatizing prisons and killing state workers with more job cuts and security cuts (abolition of tenure for colleges and universities) which will take our already not-world-class-anymore universities down another notch or two.
At least we got a bunch of good workers from Alabama for the moment.
Image: http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSASvnkcElJhgFRGCoL9muN_6ylWae9CLamSc9rUSLVfUfyXBGTyj_st7dW

Throw The Bums OUT!!!

Multiplier Effect: When you spend a buck somewhere, that buck gets spent again and again, so the effect of you spending causes more spending. Look, say you hire a painter to paint your house. You pay the painter, who then gets his car fixed. The mechanic then buys a new tool, and the tool company buys material to make more tools. That is what every government does every time when there is a downturn in a country’s economy. Except the Tea Party Republicans. They insist on cutting spending. So the result is less money in people’s pockets, less spent, and less multiplier, fewer jobs, longer recession.
Almost every economist knows that in recession the government spends, and in boom times it pays off debt. Not the other way around. Reducing spending will only drive the economy in the wrong direction. Down. One more reason to use the “moron” appellation on the Tea Party and throw the bums out next election. Yeah.
http://news.yahoo.com/p-500-enters-bear-market-europe-worries-142523281.html
Image: http://img1-cdn.newser.com/square-image/106892-20110331180345/bernanke-were-ready-to-spend-more-to-prop-up-economy.jpeg

"Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink"

And so goes the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner". I think everybody knows this poem, or parts of it anyway, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. There is a good discussion about it on the Wikipedia citation below. I remember reading it decades ago and thinking that the one thing we would never run out of was water. I didn't figure on the massive population growth, the unprecedented destruction of the ecosystems of the world, or the disastrous climate changes that would plague us in the decades following the reading.
I guess most of us didn't either. But here we are. Not enough drinking water in places in Florida, Georgia, Arizona, California, New York, Africa, Australia, China, and the list goes on. And not enough water for agriculture in may places either. So crops fail, people starve etc, etc. etc.
I read a comment of Facebook this morning by a writer I don't know:

"Borden Beck: ‎"we" are apparently planning to pull water from the Columbia to replenish an already depleted aquifer in NE Ore so that life can continue... Where will Nevada get water to replenish this groundwater? Answer = nowhere... they are planning on the rapture or armageddon or the apocalypse to make concerns mute."

And you know what? I think Borden Beck may be right. There have been murmurs for years about the policy shifts in America to favor the "endtimes" and bring on the end. I have always dismissed these as lunitic fringe conspiracies. Now I am not so sure. About the conspiracy I mean. The longer the world plunges into the freefall of global disaster, the harder it will be to stop the fall and pull back. I don't see any real effort in this country to do that. Pull back I mean. Sad. Very. Bloody. Sad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rime_of_the_Ancient_Mariner
Image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/80/Gustave_Dore_Ancient_Mariner_Illustration.jpg/220px-Gustave_Dore_Ancient_Mariner_Illustration.jpg

Starvation 2008, 1998 and TODAY!

August 9th, 2008: Mark Hawthorne writes that meat production is a major contributor to world hunger. Here is an example he cites:
Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington, DC, states it succinctly: “People go hungry because much of arable land is used to grow feed grain for animals rather than people.” He offers as one example the Ethiopian famine of 1984, which was fueled by the meat industry. “While people starved, Ethiopia was growing linseed cake, cottonseed cake and rapeseed meal for European livestock,” he says. “Millions of acres of land in the developing world are used for this purpose. Tragically, 80 percent of the world’s hungry children live in countries with food surpluses which are fed to animals for consumption by the affluent.”
It is now 2011, and nothing has changed except there are even more people starving to death every day. I heard a guy on NPR the other day being interviewed and when asked what could be done to help the current starvation, and he said that many more tons and tons of food would be needed. But here is the kicker: he ended with this “but it is never enough. It will never be enough.” This from an advocate of feeding the starving masses.
Just what the hell will be enough, you ask? Will you give up meat and cheese because they are feed intensive? Beer uses grain. Will the world stop brewing and drinking beer? What about vodka? And bourbon. And Scotch whisky? Dog and cat food? The list of products that are not strictly needed and are made from grain of some kind goes on and on.
Now add to the problem the propensity for humans to reproduce every time they get a full belly and “it is never enough” comes into sharp focus. What is really needed is a dramatic drop in population coupled with an increase in world cooperation in food production and distribution, all without corruption. How likely is that? (Think the Catholic church, the Church of JC of LDS, and the rest of the churches that think more is better, and ignorant people who say stupid things like “we just wanted 4 to even out the family” and crap like that.) OK, so not very likely. What is the alternative? A slow degrading of the ecosystem of the world in an effort to produce ever more food for the ever more people ending with an environmental and political collapse of horrendous proportions.
Then we start again. Hopefully in a world not glowing from nuclear (pronounced new-cle-er not new-que-ler) fallout and freezing in nuclear winter.
Image of family in 1998: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1998/387/sudan2.jpg
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Feast-or-Famine-Meat-Prod-by-Mark-Hawthorne-080808-523.html

Nicaragua: Don't blame the Monkey

Meanwhile, back at the Villa Paraiso all hell was breaking loose. Several men were running around, some climbing the building, some going in and out of upstairs rooms, obviously looking for something. But what?

The Villa Paraiso had a few animals in cages in the back, including a strange kind of wading bird that held it's head straight up to effectively hide amongst the reeds. And a monkey. This was a Capuchin, one of two species we saw on Omotepe. Now remember that monkeys are smart, have hands and don't like to be in a cage. This monkey, lovingly named by me "That F**king Monkey" loved to escape. The funny thing, though, is that it didn't just disappear into the jungle. Instead, it ran all over the hotel property breaking things that were loose. The week before we got there it smashed a Dutch tourists very expensive camera. On purpose. Just picked it up off a table and threw it hard on the ground. Mean little bastard really.

So anyway, these guys were running all over the place trying to catch the monkey, again. It looked like a French Farce. They finally cornered it, caught it and locked it up, again.

When we got back to our little villa, there, on the ground, was one of the interesting pots we bought from a local potter. Smashed by "That F**king Monkey". That's how it got its name.

Sally reminded me not to blame the monkey. A free animal, now caged, taking out its rage on the captors. Not its fault.

What I can't figure is why it just didn't melt away into the jungle across the road. Maybe payback was more important than freedom. Or maybe it was raised as a babe and didn't know about the jungle. Whatever the case, if you visit the Villa Paraiso, keep your stuff inside, and don't blame the monkey if you forget and something gets "accidentally" broken.

Image:http://gb.fotolibra.com/images/thumbnails/29626-monkey-in-cage-ometepe-island-nicaragua.jpeg

Dining in Nicaragua: Spiders

We got to Ometepe Island in the late afternoon, got off the ferry (?) and drove to the Villa Paraiso. Check in for the group, around 14 or 15 was the usual firedrill, but we got settled. We probably had supper at the hotel, drank a lot of Tona` or Victoria and plenty of Flor-de-Cana 7 year old dark rum. BTW, this is a magnificent rum, among the best if not the best I have ever had. World class. Anyway, the next morning when Sal and I walked the path to the patio for breakfast we noticed a lot of spider webs across the path. We used the old "sweep your hand in front" trick and had no more trouble. I noticed a few webs around the table.
The next morning when we went for breakfast the damn path was really webbed, so we picked up a couple of sticks to clear the way. On sitting down I noticed that the silverware and everything else on the table was webbed down to the table. Then I noticed that I was webbed to the chair, so was Sal, and so was everyone else!! Nobody had seen a spider, but when we looked, as they say down this way, real close, there they were. Thousands of the tinyest spiders I ever saw. Busy running all over the place, webbing everything to everything.
The next morning, more of the same. When we left that morning I looked back at the hotel and the entire roof was solid web. I couldn't see the tile or thatch. Just web. The owners told us that sometimes they have an outbreak (read that a hatch) of these harmless spiders. Just an annoyance. I agree. We didn't get bitten or anything, and we had good breakfasts, but what a feeling to be webbed to your chair, arms, legs, shoulders, the whole Guapote.
I couldn't find a photo of the building, but here is a tree covered in webs. Imagine a whole building, but so dense you couldn't see through it. It was GREAT!!!
Image: http://igniteaparty.gigxl.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/flor-de-cana-grand-reserve-7-year.jpg
Image.http://cdn.webecoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/worlds-largest-spider-web.jpg

Mexico: Model for the Future?

What is needed for your town to get to the place where Acapulco finds itself today?
Extortion and killing have made this once popular tourist destination a nightmare town. The latest atrocity discovered yesterday is a sack containing 5 human heads left outside an elementary school. The note inside warns specific drug traffickers of the same treatment. Now, the unanswered question asks are these heads of drug traffickers, killed by rival groups, or the heads of teachers who have been threatened with death if they don’t “donate” half of their salaries to the cartel.
Other heads and corpses with and without heads are found daily in many parts of Mexico. All of these are presumably drug cartel executions. Maybe there is the odd murder for gain, hidden in the avalanche of bodies, but mostly these are drug killings.
Corruption of officials at all levels lets this massacre go virtually unpunished, except by the law of the jungle. Could this happen in your town? Did it happen in Chicago in the early 1900s? Did it happen in New York? In Miami? In Los Angles? Could it happen in Tallahassee? In Thomasville? In Managua?
Friends, we are inching closer to this level of violence and criminal control every day in many places in the world. When we cede control of public functions to private enterprises we lose control. Then we open the door to corruption and criminal activity. There are credible reports that the US Government is contracting with the cabal that manages the Conficker network for access to botnets to infiltrate hostile governments. The cyber groups that run the Conficker network are criminals with criminal intent. So the infiltration of crime into government is already an established pathway.
Get real. We are not that far from Acapulco.

Image: http://i.huffpost.com/gadgets/slideshows/191819/slide_191819_376178_large.jpg
Graphic slide show: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/27/acapulco-severed-heads-mexico_n_984263.html#s376187&title=Recent_Violence_In
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/27/140704494/the-worm-that-could-bring-down-the-internet

Who Wrote the Bible? Who Wrote the Book of Love?

(Disclaimer: I think religion is very important and often does very good works. I think many people believe in some religion and benefit (some more than others). I also think it is fundamentally flawed.)

The girl (Pamela Foreman, aka tamtampamela) on this (1) YouTube video has been around for a while making videos about god. She made one where she says that god came to her in a dream and told her to tell everybody in Massachusetts to vote for Scot Brown OR ELSE!!!
Now for me, this kind of statement defines a wacko. So when she posts about another dream that prompts her to ask atheists “Who Wrote the Bible” and expect the obvious answer to be her god (Duhhh!) she just adds to the wacko-ness of her persona. The answer, substantiated by evidence, is that MEN wrote the Bible. In the First Council of Nicaea in 325ce MEN sifted and began to choose which books to include and which to exclude, and during the dark ages Monks and Scribes, all MEN, wrote and rewrote the Bible, picking and choosing what to leave in, what to throw out and what political slant to portray at any particular time. Then, MEN had the book that emerged from the dark ages translated into other forms by MEN, and so it went up the present.
I may be incredibly naïve, but it looks like the answer to her smugly asked question is MEN. I don’t see god anywhere. Oh yeah, the “god directed the men and the men wrote down what he (see, god is a MAN too) wanted” argument always appears here. Divinely guided I think is the usual phrase.
I think it was rather Manly guided, to produce a work of contradictory rules and bizarre scenarios to serve the MEN that were doing all the work.

Oh, and the “Book of Love”, that’s easy: The Monotones (2).

Image:http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/TUsgUPX8Pho/default.jpg

1. Bible: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-ijRn6JORs&feature=related
2. Book of Love: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YvQdsfzVa4