Author: Brian

This is oil exploration that aches in the great Mississippi Delta, the required and valuable wetland cover.

Do you think river delta and gulf waters around the world are the same? Do you think it’s different in the Arctic or across deserts and prairie? Are boreal and tropical forests ripped like this? Will sea-bottom and ridge plains be cheap filet for oil?

Can life complain or water cry? Why does nature give profits but we are left with threat?

Big Oil Hurt Coast. So why doesn’t it pay for repairs? by Dennis Woltering, tip to NOLadder.

I’m not sure that the deeper we dig the more we’ll learn.

The discovery that the first medicine man is a woman doesn’t surprise me one bit.

(AP, from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) — Archaeologists believe a 12,000-year-old skeleton found in a grave containing 50 tortoise shells, a leopard pelvis, a cow tail and part of an eagle wing is the remains of a witch doctor. [dumb term I think]

The skeleton, found at an excavation near the Sea of Galilee is believed to be that of a woman around 45 years old. The bones were found in a carefully carved oval grave with the skull resting on a tortoise shell. An additional 49 tortoise shells were in the grave, along with items such as a pestle and mortar and leopard pelvis.

This is the first proof ever of “such a kind of behavior” within this hunter-gatherer group. Keywords: first, religion, spirit, witch, medicine, shaman, doctor, woman, 12,000 years before Sarah Palin, leopard pelvis, cow tail, eagle’s wing.

In any case, she could choose a happy view, ey wot?

Is it true?

‘Dogs have no belly buttons, because their mothers gently chewed the wound from the umbilical chord, and licked them while they were healing, doing so until there’s virtually no scar from birth.’

There’s heaps of folks with no belly button, including a well-paid fashion model with a ‘smoothie’ belly.

Well, I never. I’ve never thought of it before.

Answers.com has heaps of comments about a dog’s belly button. After birth the momma dog bites it in two and it dries and drops off, leaving the belly button. It’s not as prominent as a human one but it is there, if you look real close on the dogs tummy you will find it – just a small “innie”.

I’m not writing an essay but making a point that I am beginning to believe this election has been poorly analyzed.

Lost in fabricated issues and lightweight media, the demographic and cultural reshaping of government is not yet adequately reported.

It’s not Lieberman or Gingrich or Huckabee, or Hillary and Bill for that matter. Nor the silly screens of pundits hiding villains never seen.

It’s ignorance that fought to rule America and it’s ignorance that failed.

Treason is theft of history.

It’s not $700 billion that costs us. It’s not loud radio or weak media. It’s not easy war and took budgets. We’re cut deep by great misery. We’re taken from our humanity. We’re left without trust.

We earn tomorrow.
Blood has let us rule ourselves.

Found at the blog of Daniel Florien, ‘a passionate evangelical Christian for over a decade now figuring out what it means to be an unbeliever and skeptic’, this is the November cover of American Conservative. [link]

Bush’s Broken Record
The 43rd president leaves office without a legacy to stand on.

Republicans scream Socialism! Not including health, education or infrastructure, more than 52% of our annual budget is spent on controlling the military market, rarely open to competition, and certainly not what trumpets call a free market.

We already have large-scale industrial policy in the United States and it’s called “defense procurement”

1. Why does the United States have one of the most robust aircraft-manufacturing industries in the world? The answer is not that pure free markets have, through the workings of a natural law, granted us such a bounty.
2. Why does the United States have one of the most sophisticated, innovative electronics industries in the world? Raytheon’s take from the Pentagon in 2006: $10.4 billion; Computer Sciences, $2.7 billion. And so on. General Motors received $806 million dollars that year, mostly from the Army, enough to make it the fortieth largest defense contractor on the list…

Building a Green Economy or a workable medical system is not revolutionary. We already use centrally planned industrial policy.

Since 1980 GM and Ford blew through $465 billion…

With that $465 billion, “GM and Ford could have closed their own facilities and acquired all of the shares of Honda, Toyota, Nissan, and Volkswagen.”

The Tired Fools blog found a credit crunch in ancient Rome, Tacitus’ “The Annals of Imperial Rome”:

Accusers were now intensely active. Their present targets were men who enriched themselves by usury, infringing laws by which the dictator Julius Ceasar had controlled loans and land-ownership in Italy. Since patriotism comes second to private profits, this law had long been ignored. Money-lending is an ancient problem in Rome, and a frequent cause of disharmony and disorder. Even in an earlier, less corrupt society steps had been taken against it.

…
Fraudulence, attacked by repeated legislation, was ingeniously revived after each successive counter-measure. …when the capitalists received payment they hoarded it…

Then Tiberius came to the rescue. He distributed a hundred million among specially established banks… [but as] usual, the beginning was strict, the sequel slack.

When it rains it pours. Poor America is being hit on all corners.

The Hope Diamond on display at the Smithsonian [wiki] may not belong to us.

France’s National Museum of Natural History say they can show beyond reasonable doubt that the Hope Diamond, once owned by King Louis XIV, was looted in the French Revolution.

“The evidence corroborates a scenario under which the diamond, after being stolen in Paris in 1792, was swiftly smuggled to London, where it was recut. The Blue Diamond came from a massive, 115.6-carat blue-tinged stone mined in the kingdom of Golconda, in India’s Hyderabad state. In the mid-17th century, a French adventurer by the name of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier purchased the stone from Golconda’s ruler and then sold it on to Louis XIV.

“After Louis XVI tried to flee revolutionary France, the French crown jewels were sequestered by the revolutionary regime and held in a mansion on the Place de la Concorde in Paris, where they were stolen in a five-day spree by a gang in September 1792. From then on, the Blue Diamond was never seen or heard of again.

“But suspicions began to be aroused in 1812, when a massive blue stone of 45.54 carats was attributed to a London diamond merchant, Daniel Eliason. Its next known owner was a British banker, Henry Philip Hope. The diamond showed up in his catalog, but with no details of its provenance. After Hope’s death, the gem was bequeathed to his nephew and ultimately the nephew’s grandson, who sold it to pay off debts.

“In the 20th century, it passed into American hands and eventually was donated by Harry Winston Inc. of New York to the Smithsonian in 1958.”

Alva Noë
We should reject the idea that the mind is something inside of us that is just a calculating machine.

Simply put: there is nothing inside us that thinks and feels and is conscious.

Consciousness is not something that happens in us.

It is something we do.

Plucked off the street and wrongfully rammed into prison for life, this is a terror guaranteed to create injury.

But as innocent prisoners are freed, governments offer little or nothing to compensate for the mistake, a stunning disrespect of fundamental civility.

1. Exonerated inmates often don’t have state help

2. Only 25 states compensate the wrongfully convicted

Merciless pittance cannot cover great shame.

Get your home-made hallucinations now!

Less risky than Moral Turpitude [wiki], much cheaper than Dr. John Lilly’s Isolation Tank [wiki], Mind Hacks points to an article on hallucinations using the ‘Ganzfeld Procedure’.

This must be a Baby-Boomer’s Must-Do, Revenge Of The Unexplored, A How To Guide to Left Over Ping-Pong Balls Lost in the Rumpus Room [wiki].

Used in parapsychology, also to induce hallucinations, the Ganzfeld procedure creates ‘unstructured sensations’ by placing half ping-pong balls over the eyes to see diffuse white light and by playing white noise through headphones.

Sipping the Campus:
Census Bureau figures for 2007 show the median income for U.S. households rose by 1.3 percent but salaries for university presidents increased by 7.6 percent with the number of presidents making more than $700,000 nearly doubling from eight to 15.

Not to be overlooked tidbit:
John McCain lost his home precinct to Barack Obama by 13 points. [Arizona Republic]

I’m certain the building codes in southern California will be updated to force sprinkler systems on residences.

It’s not an easy task for architects and builders. The engineering is daunting. The liability is a Pandora’s Box in an insurance market already burdened with litigation and institutionalized avoidance. Delivering adequate water during a firestorm is nearly an impossible challenge for public agencies.

Australia’s Calair Pipe Systems makes a variety of nozzles for outside or external sprinklers to protect homes and buildings from wildfire. Their Fire-Pro System includes heat engineered polymer pipe, nozzles and activation sensors.

The intense heat of a storm of fire may overwhelm any system, but risk is most often from embers flying through miles of neighborhoods not merely proximity vegetation. An automatic sprinkler system might be the breakthrough homeowners are looking for, but there’s much work ahead.

Wet helps, but winds of fire at 50 or 70 miles per hour can boil water away in moments.

Extensive Flash slide shows are here at LA’s CBS TV and another at LATimes.

I didn’t know you could clamp a puppy down. Great trick!

George Monbiot at The Telegraph:

Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people.

The founding fathers of the republic – Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and others – were among the greatest thinkers of their age. They felt no need to make a secret of it. How did the project they launched degenerate into George W Bush and Sarah Palin?

In the most powerful nation on earth, one adult in five believes the sun revolves round the earth; only 26% accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of US voters cannot name the three branches of government; the maths skills of 15-year-olds in the US are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries of the OECD.

But this merely extends the mystery: how did so many US citizens become so stupid, and so suspicious of intelligence?

…”the degradation of US politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies“.

How many brilliant never get opportunity?

Thom. Jefferson said the free is the place we find tomorrow.

There’s no other task.

“Talent is being able to build things that others can’t build. Genius is being able to build things that others can’t see.”

Just ask the wild-eyed visionaries!

They can and do exist, and it’s time we enfranchised them, gave them voice.

Whether it was Ford or the Wright Brothers or Edison, inventions and innovations often came as a result of considerable collaboration and teamwork. Of course they were wild eyed, but there was a lot of collaboration, a lot of iterating, a lot of persistence, a lot of perseverance.

Solo invention is very very rare and often misrepresented; collaborators have been left out of the credits; history has painted a false picture about the sheer process of invention and innovation.

It’s nuts wanting better than simple.

I’ve met only fools that think we are not foolish.
And greater fools putting themselves wise.
Ignorance is the hiding place of bullies,
illness clustered in rank.

It’s tender folks I respect.
And aspiring folks more.

I wish there were something we could do. There is so much draining our society, bullies, pirates and pathology, and such a good world if we could do better.

David Brooks, still too polite, at the NYTimes:

It is all a reminder that the biggest threat to a healthy economy is not the socialists of campaign lore. It’s C.E.O.’s. It’s politically powerful crony capitalists who use their influence to create a stagnant corporate welfare state.

Here’s a map you will not likely see.

Several jet engines are being developed to increase efficiency. This is the GE-90 with 4 times the performance for the price.

Huge isn’t it?

The Golden Gate is a Bridge To Nowhere too.