Ken LaRive Facets

Madonna's prayer

2011-11-11T18:56:00.000-08:00

Voila’

Madonna’s prayer, Saint Giovannino, and the UFO

The churches of Europe are truly works of art. The buildings were meticulously planned and designed to display the awesome grandeur of God and His message. They were created unconstrained, by the combined use of God-given imagination, and a new age of mathematics and mechanical science. There are many unusual wonders for the explorer to discover in their shadowed niches, splashed with deep colored light from massive stained glass. Some of these windows, like the one found in the front of Notre Dame, Paris, is a huge circular orb showing what some debate to be ether the twelve zodiac divisions of the equinox, or the twelve apostles. Pisces the fish, two thousand years before our new Age of Aquarius, is embedded in these lead lined biblical stories. Wood and marble carvings of strange and mythical creatures, men in strange bubbled costumes, and holding unidentifiable tools, is an abundance of symbolism that continues to be debated to this very day. It will probably never end.

Christianity is falling hard in several of the countries I have visited; none more noticeable to me than England. To the north, many of Scotland’s grand Churches are being sold, or leased, for pennies on the dollar, converted into high end apartments. It is just amazing. Beautiful hand carved statues are found in dusty antique shops, fenced and pilfered, and original antique paintings by the score are being transported to America, where Christianity still flourishes, marketed for small fortunes.

Museums have moved in to purchase what some consider priceless art objects. Objects of mystery that can stimulate surprises for even the most seasoned of collectors… There are men who study art their entire lives, but are constantly astounded by new discoveries. Discoveries that defy our conventional understanding of reality...

In the National Gallery of London there is a mystifying picture that can not be explained. It was painted in the 15^th century by Carlos Crivelli, and is called “The Annunciation.” Christians know that “The Annunciation” happened when an angel appeared to Mary to tell her she was with child. “It was at the hour of midnight, when the most holy Virgin was alone and absorbed in prayer, that the Archangel Gabriel appeared before her, and asked her, in the name of the blessed Trinity, to consent to become the Mother of God.” Wrote Dom Gueranger, O.S.B. "And the angel being come in, said unto her: Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women." - St. Luke 1: 28. I have studied this picture with a fine tooth comb, and both the reality and symbolism fails me. Just what it meant when painted in 1486 AD, seems now to be lost. All that I have gotten from it is total amazement, and so called critics come away with pure speculation.

Between the buildings, in a clouded sky of bark blue, is an illuminated disk emanating a golden beam of light. It is seemingly going through the solid building’s structure, directly to Mary kneeling in a room below. She has her arms folded, as if in prayer, and it raises the question as to why Crivelli depicted this well known biblical scene in such a way.

Though there are literally dozens of paintings that seem to depict UFOs, one of the more famous was painted by Domenico Ghirlandaio. It is part of the “Loeser Collection” and is hanging in the Palazzo Vecchio, in Florence, Italy. It is a painting of the Madonna praying over the infant Saint Giovannino. The child is supported by a cherub with a halo. There is also a halo above the Madonna. I don’t know the significance, but the child Giovannino does not have one that I can see. The striking point of the painting is in the upper right corner. In a gray-blue sky, an object is being observed by a man, standing next to what looks to me to be a dog on one side, and what may be a high fortified wall on the other. What in the world? (This painting is shown in its entirety above.)

It is intriguing to speculate, and perhaps this was the main reason these paintings were created. Many artistic avenues were used to display objects in the sky, shown to be present at significant religious and historical times. Frescos, stele, tapestries, illustrations, illuminations, pencil drawings, as well as oil paintings have shown these objects in a mostly religious context. Early cave paintings around the world display objects floating in the sky, and primitive clay carvings excavated from South America show what looks to be children’s toys with the exact dimensions of a modern airplane. The ancestors of these people still use a strange whistling instrument swung on the end of a long string. It manufactures a vibratory noise that resembles the sound of a motor. They say they are calling the gods to come back from the sky, and have been doing this for untold generations. I have heard this sound, and the realization will send chills down your spine! Of course modern photography, for the last hundred or so years, has recorded many unexplained phenomena, with UFOs having a lion's share. Many have been authenticated to be totally undoctored.

Other unexplained art can be found in the French Basilica. There, a tapestry depicting the life of Mary is displayed, with a saucer shaped UFO in the sky. (#3 below) Another remarkable fresco called “The Crucifixion,” (#2 below) painted by Visoki Dicani in 1350, is now found in a Kosovo Monastery in Yugoslavia. There is a man with his head turned, clearly panted in a flying machine! Two flashing lights are unmistakable. Still another by the Flemish artist Aert De Gelder in 1710 is called “The Baptism of Christ.” (#4 below) It now hangs in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. It shows a disk illuminating a beam of light on John the Baptist and Jesus. It looks to me, without reservation, to be a solid disk. Lastly, though I could go on, is a very strange woodcut depicting an event that happened in Basel, Switzerland in 1566. (#1 below) A local newspaperman, Samuel Coccius, an eye witness to this event, wrote in his paper, “Many became red and fiery, ending and being consumed and vanishing.” Sounds like a meteor shower to me, but the woodcut clearly shows something that is definitely not of the normal, with black and white orbs filling a sunny sky, as men stand in awe. These paintings and works of art are just another set of strange unexplained phenomena attached to our human history, with haunting speculation that may never entirely be known.

#1 #2

#3 #4

Love and Peace, and have a Very Merry Christmas! –Ken klarive@bellsouth.net Special thanks to UFO Folklore Center, ARTANDUFO, and UFOs in European Art.

Note* I must admit that I have seen strange lights in the sky; just pinpoints the size of stars moving at great speed over the spangled velvet that can only be found far away from city lights. I’m told these lights are man made, a modern “Sputnik” satellite in an elliptical orbit around earth. I suppose the knowledge that they probably are, keeps me stable, balanced, and sane. I wonder how a person fifteen hundred years ago would have tried to record an unexplained sighting in the sky. What unreasoned fear might fill the heart of a person who knew that the technology he witnessed did not exist in the reality he understood? It is written of the “chariots of fire” that crossed the sky. What other descriptive means for a mode of transportation could be found, for something so alien?

Lafayette Buzz Examiner Home Page

2010-02-22T11:34:00.001-08:00

http://www.examiner.com/x-17078-Lafayette-Political-Buzz-Examiner

Lafayette Buzz Examiner Home Page

2010-02-22T11:34:00.000-08:00

http://www.examiner.com/x-17078-Lafayette-Political-Buzz-Examiner

Wedding facets

2009-09-01T17:53:00.001-07:00

Lindsay and Brandon wedding

2009-08-31T17:15:00.000-07:00

Saturday morning French Quarter NOLA

2009-08-31T13:19:00.001-07:00

Smoky Elements

2009-08-20T17:17:00.000-07:00

Smoky features

2009-08-19T09:13:00.001-07:00

Smoky Bubbles

2009-08-16T20:45:00.001-07:00

Smoky Assortment

2009-08-15T22:20:00.000-07:00

Al Lippman and Matt Busbice Africa

2009-07-27T18:16:00.000-07:00

Ryan's 30th birthday suprise

2009-07-27T13:43:00.001-07:00

Between the drops

2009-07-22T17:19:00.001-07:00

July butterflies

2009-07-21T07:36:00.001-07:00

Politics: The war between mind and heart

2009-07-17T19:37:00.000-07:00

It is politics as usual, with no holds bared. A war, it is waged in the hearts and minds of the populous like religious fanaticism.
Our standards are taught at mother’s knee, and with experience we attempt life with confident bearing. But as we look upon the world, we find joy and foreboding on one hand, happiness and quiet desperation on the other, and ask why.

We grapple with what is perceive to be good and bad and right and wrong, with decisions based on what is speculated to be the greatest. Torn by the facets of politics, ethics, and the meaning of life, our strength is our constant need to balance.

In our daily process of living, we judge others who are not like us. We justify reasons for being based on the assumptions of the facts we are fed, true or false. Confused and fearful, we give control of our lives to others, where duel-concepts are composed for the man behind the curtain to point the way.

Everyone, even presidential hopefuls will find flaws in the opus of life, and eventually held accountable.

We have watched women and children burn after a month of standoff, using words like “compound”, and “cult,” and ultimately found our understanding was based on lies. With acuity of what is universal, eternal, and justifiable Truth, we watched people jump from the fires of twin towers, and in the midst of horror we search for explanations. Ancient texts are manipulated by man-made agendas, separating and isolating us into a one truth at the exclusion of all others, and in that process domination is born, with another collection of slaves.

As we grow older we find ourselves obtuse, stubborn and uncompromising, adamant and fixated, with defensible labels for all others who are different, be they liberal or conservative, religious or secular.

Mental manipulation is now a science, and the war that wages between our minds and hearts are used for the schema of those who understand that power, as they have found even original thoughts can be despoiled. Dominated and maneuvered by prejudiced idealism, blind faith, and myopic fundamentalism, it seems at first glance that as collective human beings we are herded like sheep to the slaughter ...but this is not our true nature.

Men resist the shackles of mind and body, and when we see the light of raison d’être, we are drawn to it as one. Truth and Love lends hope as a beacon of reason, where we may someday stand on our own two feet, united ...and knowing is half the battle won.

Freedom of Speech might be lit in Lafayette

2009-07-11T07:46:00.000-07:00

Freedom of Speech might be lit in Lafayette

By: Ken LaRive

For many years Lafayette’s The Advertiser newspaper has been called overly biased toward the left and both a manipulator and destroyer of free speech. Though they deny this, those accusations have cost them both subscription and advertising revenue.

Conservative writers say it is because The Gannett Corporation has sent agenda based instructional mandates to all of their local papers superseding the predilection of local residents. Conservative values are in the majority in Acadiana, and writers question why their home-town news-paper is not a reflection of this, and why they are so reluctant to state their point of view.

“Blackballing” seems real but hard to prove, but there are positive indications Conservatism might be getting more voice.

There is growing concern for government’s tendencies toward spending, nationalism and socialism, and the so called “Silent Majority” is organizing as never before. A second Tea Party for Acadiana and the surrounding areas indicate a new push for individual responsibility, and this has gotten their attention.

In the United States, the Gannett publishes 84 daily newspapers, including USA TODAY, and nearly 850 non-daily publications, so they are a formidable voice and an influencer of ideas.

Attempting to move online, they may be realizing that giving the public the free press they demand might be a pay off in the long run. Truth, that is, both sides of an argument, might indeed be profitable now that the bottom line has hit rock bottom, and change may be for the good of both Free Speech and liberty.

Some say hard copy newspapers will find it increasing difficult to stay in business and experimenting with an on line presence. Whatever direction they choose, they may find that truth is both in great demand, and profitable.

New Orleans crime overflows Louisiana

2009-07-11T07:42:00.000-07:00

New Orleans crime overflows Louisiana
By: Ken LaRive

Lafayette took in a lot of good people after Katrina, but crime rate indicated that some we accepted did not make good citizens.

For a generation at least, New Orleans has been appraised to be one of the most violent cities in America, and several imply it is now number one.

Law abiding and responsible Louisiana inhabitants have demanded authority to put a stop to this, but little or nothing can be done. Organized crime has such a stranglehold that honest Cops will not travel through certain sections of New Orleans and Baton Rouge at night, for fear of their lives.

Some estimate the proceeds coming from drug sales to be greater than the entire Louisiana free market, including agriculture revenue, but nowhere can the truth be found, as information such as that is dangerous to the tourist industry and new business.

Port of New Orleans brings in a lot of taxable revenue; and tourism is growing fast after the crime-cleansing of Katrina, and should be protected. Sure enough, the word on the street is that organized crime mandates those who work for them never to harm an average citizen, and that those who do be punished. Now this is good business sense!

It might be comforting to know that they care. If you do get mugged for your wallet, it will be done by a person high on drugs, and not a savvy business man, like a drug dealer.

Why this is allowed is anyone’s guess, but even a limited worldly imagination could figure out why and who.

No sir, martial law can not be considered as it may endanger their rights as Americans!

America must be so proud of their southern neighbor, uneducated but caring, the true heart of our new banana republic.

The real answer for Louisiana's coastline

2009-07-11T07:17:00.000-07:00

The real answer for Louisiana’s lost coastline
By: Ken LaRive081009

Acadiana has been lucky with hurricane damage. There are others just twenty miles south who were devastated.

Looking at maps only ten years ago will show the amazingly fast erosion of our Louisiana coastline once giving us protection.

Many ideas have come forward, from the use of Christmas Trees to dredging up bottom sand, but the trend continues unabated.

There is an answer, but few want to consider it.

Coastline is maintained by sediment, mostly form the Mississippi River. Naturally, the Mississippi river changes course every few hundred years or so, diverting to the Atchafalaya.

A topical map indicates that water level is much shallower at the base of the Atchafalaya, and drops off sharply at the base of the Mississippi. With the Mississippi redirected, a good portion of the basin was washed away, quickly building and maintaining marshland, our primary protection from storm serge. After time, sediment built up to a critical point, and the Mississippi diverted back, as it has for millions of years.

The building of levies and inland canals inhibit the free movement of sediment too, showing another incompetent decision.

The answer is difficult to consider. Most of Morgan City would be washed away, and the port of New Orleans would be a quarter of a mile from what water was left, if any.

A lot of very expensive studies have formulated many scenarios, but this idea is hardly mentioned.

Another, post Katrina feasibility study, as most will agree, must weigh cost as the primary consideration, as hurricane damage is now approaching the price of a new port, and the loss of a major town.

Whatever the decision, it would indeed be an expensive proposition, and it is one that grows more serious as it is set aside.

Acadiana Tea Party July the 4th, 2009

2009-07-05T07:02:00.000-07:00

The Acadiana Tea Party in a banana republic
BY: Ken LaRive

In 101 degree heat, several hundred concerned citizens came and went for four hours, silencing summer locusts with speeches of questionable idealism like individual responsibility.

A movie was shown that gave historical significance to the event, and children in period costume said Yes sir!” as they open doors. Their laughter gave the gathering a glow of sensitive servility. How civilized.

All opinions were tolerated, including several young Communist students with homemade signs like “Power to the People,” next to a hammer and sickle. An old man with a veterans ball cap for WW2 service said quietly, “God bless you.” But they could only stare a collective blank, not understanding the significance.

Men took off their hats for the prayer, the singing of the Star Spangled Banner and the Pledge of Allegiance... Several were crying, and it was evident that few wondered why.

A father picked up one of his children during the pledge, and he put his head on his father’s shoulder with a hug. His other three stood at attention, put their hands to their hearts, and looked down with reverence during the prayer... Every trace of the event was picked up and not one tax dollar used...
Some overt pragmatist might observe how futile it might seem, to stop fascism by a child waving a flag, and a parent who teaches them love, respect, and reverence. Although one might speculate the realistic ability to stop a government ignoring our constitution, inscribing us in into the slavery of dept, and the further loss of liberty, would bend to the waving’s of a child with hope.

Indeed, America is a country built on hard work and the powerful elements of faith and hope, concepts rekindled from the ashes of our new banana republic.

Communists thoughts were tolerated...

2009-07-02T14:50:00.000-07:00

Happy 4th of July America!!!

California: The National Petri Dish

Posted July 2nd, 2009 at 5.38pm in Energy and Environment, Enterprise and Free Markets, Entitlements.

Supposedly, trends start in California and then spread to the rest of the country, a notion that seems to be confirmed by the latest economic news. In May, California’s unemployment rate hit 11.5 percent—the highest it has been since 1941. This morning we learn that unemployment for the entire country hit 9.5 percent in June—the highest rate in 26 years.

Will the country close the economic-death-spiral gap with California? Very possibly it will, if the federal government continues to follow California’s example of crushing its economy with ever-increasing government spending, taxing, and regulating.

The latest from California is that state lawmakers cannot reach agreement on a new budget for the fiscal year which began on July 1. That failure prompted Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to declare a state of fiscal emergency and to order a third furlough day for state employees. The state’s comptroller is now preparing to send IOUs to 28,000 California taxpayers who are owed refunds. Central to the budget impasse is the problem of closing a budget deficit that by latest estimates has grown to $26.3 billion. Some experts think California’s deficit will top $40 billion next year. Because of these budget maladies, Standard & Poors has put the state on notice for a lowering of its credit rating, which is already the worst in the nation (tied with Louisiana). California has the fourth highest foreclosure rate in the country. Of the cities with unemployment rates exceeding 15 percent, nearly half are in California. Continue reading…

Hubble's best

2009-07-02T08:21:00.000-07:00

Quotes of Power

2009-07-02T08:16:00.000-07:00

1. "Well done is better than well said."Benjamin Franklin(1706-1790)

2. "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on."Winston Churchill(1874-1965)

3. "Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless."Mother Teresa(1910-1997)

4. "Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth."George Washington(1732-1799)

5. "The time is always right to do what is right."Martin Luther King, Jr.(1929-1968)

6. "All the adversity I've had in my life, has strengthened me. You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you."Walt Disney(1901-1966)

7. "Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today."Abraham Lincoln(1809-1865)

8. "The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will."Vince Lombardi(1913-1970)

9. "It is better to light the candle than to curse the darkness."Eleanor Roosevelt(1884-1962)

10. "A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."Dwight Eisenhower(1890-1969)

11. "The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."Nelson Mandela(1918 - )

12. "We must become the change we wish to see in the world."Mahatma Gandhi(1869-1948)

13. "The best and most beautiful things in life cannot be seen, not touched, but are felt in the heart."Helen Keller(1880-1968)

14. "Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently."Henry Ford(1863-1947)

15. "Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music."Ronald Reagan(1911-2004)

Late afternoon pictures

2009-07-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

American cry-babies

2009-06-28T11:36:00.000-07:00

American cry-babies
By: Ken LaRive

For two thousand and many more years, men have made and accepted predictions about the “End Times.” In retrospect, those who totally accepted this premise became, to a degree, stagnant and dogmatic, while those who promoted and controlled these forecasts became rich and powerful. To faithfully accept these presumptions emphatically stimulates complacency, with fearful and hopeless resignation for what they might consider inevitable, while those in control reap from the instability and fear it produces. Even when the faithful espouse them for the good, like the return of Jesus, some might be prone to inaction and dysfunction in the here and now, while waiting for what they might consider inevitable and eminent.

If those books had actually been read instead of quoting and trusting someone else’s interpretation, the student would see the many times it is emphatically stated that no man knows the future... but what he is responsible for self and to make his way by His grace. God helping those who help themselves permeates these writings, and that, in and of itself, is the primary strength of America. It is called accountability. If we fail, it is because we have lost sight of this singular principle, and its many obscure aspects that also influence us.

We have free-will in America, all men do, and that means nothing is set in stone. If we were predestined we would live meaningless and inconsequential lives, without reason, without hope, and nothing could be explained, or goals formulated.

If one observes something that needs changing, worth keeping or striving for, an effort has to be made, and those who can’t or won’t take up the challenge should get out of the way... This is not readily understood today when uneven playing fields first used as a helping hand to overcome social adversity, becomes the norm for a societal term called the “have-nots.” It must now be understood that after fifty years of justification for inequity, the days of the supposed “have-nots” are over. The metaphorical “ladder” and America’s sound equal rights are based in unassailable law, and emphatically in place. What holds back accomplishment is found inside of a person’s head, and no one but that person should be held to blame.

Underachievers no longer have excuses, and can now be considered the “don’t want to be.” No child left behind is a complete fallacy now, as anyone who has ability, common sense, work ethics, and a bit of luck, can achieve. Not everyone can win, of course. It is not nature’s way that everyone can come in first, or at all. If we don’t see this concept, all of us are in jeopardy, as those who so choose to win, will have to carry those who by their own volition choose not to. When this becomes manifest in our society, most likely few will finish at all, and those who do will be exhausted and become unmotivated, unfairly pulling the weight of the “don’t want to be”.

Yes, it is scary to stand up and make a difference, to try, but that is what men with spirit do, and what America is. You might be surprised at what you can achieve if you whiners would just quit lamenting, and start doing. The only constant I see in this world is that there will always be winners and losers, survivors and victims, go-getters and cry-babies, and all else is purely semantics.

America is known to be the ladder for success and the foundation of freedom, yet more than 50 percent now consider themselves wounded commoners, and cry for attention like a brood of new-born kittens. The ladder remains, the foundation still there, but big government sponsorship of weak natured people inhibits not only the climb, but undermines the reason to try. It is evident that without government they would surely die unfulfilled, unrewarded, and unverified. They think that strength of purpose comes from outside, too myopic to realize that it dwells within. If not set in place by good example, it will become evident with limp handshakes, inactive heads, the shifty eyes of irresponsibility, and mannerisms resembling both immaturity and cowardice. Sorry to say, but these characters will also be passed on to their children, who will unconditionally accept the government yoke gladly.

Men and women just a hundred years ago lived and died by faith in themselves and the spirit of God who was their strength. Yes, they cried. They cried empathetically for the loss of loved ones by starvation, war, disease, heat and cold. They cried with a passion and fortitude to forge this nation by their own blood and sweat, and gave it to us intact. In those days, cry-babies found it difficult to exist, but today they are incorporated into the folds of society like parasites, without pride, dignity, honor, or even base self-esteem. Artificially held afloat, they now have the power to vote for those they think can perpetuate their dependence, and by a Hollywood media’s propagandized mind control, they do. The masses are born and raised to have little regard for anything but selfish concerns. Leaders revel in this dependence, and grow rich in the dynamics they have created and motivated in a welfare state.

There seems not to be enough strength, intelligence, or goodness in the common man to balance this vote, and their dependence is the excuse our corrupt leaders give for pissing away the greatest country the world has ever known. I’m telling you, this does not have to be so, and saying it out loud is half the battle won. Truth has a way of finding the good in all of us, and the past does not equal the future.

The time for crying is over. It is time to take this country back. The answers will become evident and more and more imaginative as everything is taken from us, i.e., liberty, our constitution, and economy. What we will have left is the memory of our dreams. That is the American way, responsible for our own destiny; we can pick up our tools and start again.

Faith and belief are powerful forces, and affirmative influences for the advancement of mankind. There seems to be nothing wrong with provisional presumptions pinpointing a time of disaster and its resurrection, so long as one continues to be a viable part of society, and contribute for the good.

No matter how God is perceived or interpreted by men, the essence of God is constant. America is a melting pot of many cultures, races and religions, and the term “In God We Trust” should represent all of faith. Those who have decided not to have faith in an Almighty, should have respect for those who do, because your decision is also based on faith, whether you admit that or not, and accepting even the presumption of atheism, has all the marks of religion. In essence, under the skin, we are all one.

Dolsie's 90th

2009-06-27T21:39:00.001-07:00

Dolsie hits 90!
Born June 15, 1919... Happy Birthday!

Theresa “Dolsie” Norman hit her 90th birthday with a bang at Acadian Village. Over 100 people attended her birthday celebration and everyone had a great time. Five children, 10 grandchildren, 9 great grandchildren and all of her friends from Camelot in Broussard were all there, and they ate, danced and laughed until finally getting kicked out! Everyone from 101 to 1 years of age wished her many more as she blew out nine candles!

One high point was Dolsie singing several of her old favorites, including “Baby Face”, and with the same gusto as always.

Dolsie moved to Broussard from New Orleans after Katrina to be close to family. “I always loved this area,” said Dolsie, “everyone is so nice, like one big family. I have been doing my part to help teach some how to cook New Orleans gumbo, I do miss that!”

Obamanation news

2009-06-22T18:59:00.000-07:00

Obamanation news... premier issue!
By: Ken LaRive

Obama tells the gay community to “suck it up!” while in the same day he was overheard in the parking lot to say, “We can now kill two birds with one stone,” and “closing the door on openness. What is in a promise anyway? I wasn’t yet briefed!” Gays took offence thinking he was referring to them, and said they would “Slap him silly, if they could.”

Riot Police in Iran use tear gas to make protesters more sensitive. An American Journalist hiding in the bushes thought he heard something like “Allah Akbar, give us back FACEBOOK!” being chanted in the street. A concerned empathizer citizen in New York was quoted to say “I don’t speak dat language, but tears bring out the best in people.”

North Korea tells the US that they have all of their I's dotted and t's crossed too! So there!

Al Qaeda is quoted to say they would use nukes if they had them, and it wouldn’t be pretty.

“Obama’s approval rating drops to the highest level ever...” Says the Galloping goourmet.

Goldman Sacks make biggest profit ever, and has no apology. “Barclays Capital, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank are among the European firms expected to register bumper profits, along with US banks JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley following the near collapse and government rescue of ajor trading houses including Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, UBS and Royal Bank of Scotland.” Said Drudge, “A repay of the stimulus money might be feasible if a record had actually been kept.” A top unanimous official allegedly stated.

Arizona has the longest stretch of low temperatures since 1913, while Global warming comes to Louisiana dressed like an Indian in summer to confuse us more. Al Gore had no comment.

Suicide bombers give US troops a grand sendoff, and Iraq clams victory... “38 aren’t a lot.” A soldier was overheard saying. “Man, we go'in a home!”

It is now insinuated that Silvio Berlusconi thought to pay for his hooker parties with the 40 billion he was to take from the 134 billion in confiscated US bonds. “Too bad they were fake!” He said with a wink during an impromptu press conference as he exited his flat. A reporter standing in the back noticed the Berlusconi had his fingers crossed during the questioning. “I have noticed that it is always best to answer a question with a question.” He said, “That way you can never be miss-quoted.”

Questions for Americans

2009-06-19T10:04:00.000-07:00

GUT CHECK QUESTIONS FOR AMERICAN CITIZENS

1. Do we citizens, individually and collectively, know America's core values?

2. Do we adequately explain them to our children and grandchildren?

3. Do we citizens love what America stands for with greater intensity than our potential enemies hate what America stands for?

4. Do our Federal level elected servants have the political will to protect and defend America, more than the rulers of our potential enemies have the political will to destroy America?

5. Do we citizens, collectively, have the will to demand our Federal level elected servants protect and defend America, in the event they fall short of upholding their oaths to do so?

6. Do we citizens value our sovereignty and citizenship with greater intensity than those who illegally invade our nation ignore our sovereignty and citizenship?

7. Do we know, understand and value our Constitution more than those, in and out of government, who would usurp or reject it?

8. The next time America is threatened or attacked by hostile force, do we citizens have the determination to go to the wall for America similar to how our Greatest Generation did?

9. Do we citizens value our republic with the determination and intensity to sustain and maintain it?

10. Would we allow entities in America to change our republican form of government without a vote of the People or their representatives?

11. Are such issues too trivial or retro for our current society?

Growing older

2009-06-19T09:41:00.000-07:00

Queeny goes swimming

2009-06-19T09:35:00.000-07:00

Wafa Sultan speaks of Obama

2009-06-17T13:28:00.000-07:00

Wafa Sultan...

Who Should We Believe?

After President Obama's Cairo speech, many of my Middle Eastern Arab readers reacted with bewilderment. As one of them expressed; "Who should we believe, Obama or you?" in particular his statement that "America and Islam overlap and share common principles, the principles of justice, to lerance and dignity for men and women".

True, reading the Arab press's reaction to his speech it is clear that many Muslims now love Obama. After all, he introduced to them a narrative that affirms their conspiracy theories and their identity as victims of the West. Hence, the Arab media expressed their confidence that the speech will provide a "new stance towards Islam and the Muslims, after centuries of aggression and hostility." (Al Ahram - Egypt- MEMRI)More than anything, I am reminded of a story by Nizar Qubbani, the famous Syrian poet. His young son was a physician and suffered from an acute heart problem. When Nizar asked his son about his heart condition, the son drew a red heart. Being a poet, the father interpreted the drawing as asign of a vibrant and healthy heart and took great comfort in believing this to be a sign of recovery. After his son's passing, Nizar wrote a poem describing his feelings as a heartbroken father. He felt unbearably saddened as he realized he had misinterpreted the drawing. Obviously, the son's sketch of a red heart was meant to convey no hope for his profusely bleeding heart, while the father's understanding of the symbol as a hopeful one was wrong.

The poet and the physician perceived reality in totally different ways;similar to the dichotomy between President Obama's view of the Islamic world and mine.The truth is, however, that only one reality exists.

Mr. Obama is a politician, and a very astute one. However, his speech revealed that his view is unduly influenced by naïve desire. His perception of Islam and the reality of Islam need to be synchronized. I am a physician and a realist who has lived and experienced the effect of my Arab culture and Islamic religion since childhood.

The president pandered to Muslims: praised their accomplishments,commiserated with their grievances, and apologized for injustices done to them by centuries of colonialism -- without once mentioning the history of rampant and violent Arab colonialism. He avoided any mention of Jihadi tenets, or of the Islamic political ideology of supremacy over all non Muslims -- principles embedded in Sharia law. These are taught and sanctioned openly by Al-Azhar, the university that hosted him, the foremost center of Sharia studies. Obama underscored the supposed American mistreatment of terrorists and apologized for torture in Guantanamo, forgetting that Islamic regimes are brutal to their own people. The president also repudiated significant U.S. contributions in both the lives of its soldiers and humanitarian aid to Muslims across the globe made throughout history -- despite Muslim attacks against America and Americans. In short, parts of his speech sounded like a new Pan-Arab messiah come to usher the Arab world back into its rightful world dominion.

Most disturbing was the president's call to defend Muslims against negative stereotypes. A dangerous precedent is set when freedom of speech is silenced and ideological criticism forbidden. This, again, is the stuff of nightmarish totalitarian regimes. The beauty of the US Constitution is its balance, and the wisdom it embraces by distinguishing between that which should be protected and defended and that which should be prosecuted and decried. Encouraging laws to make criticism of Islam an offense punishable by law is troubling.

Since arriving in the US, I have enjoyed the freedom to educate my Arab brothers and sisters in the Middle East, who yearn for real freedom - and I have seen successes. Mr. Obama calls these very successes into question rather than championing freedom.

As the president embarks on his new task to defend Muslims against negative stereotypes," does this mean he will somehow interfere and undermine that message? Or, perhaps it means he may join with the Organization of Islamic Conference, the 57 Muslim countries that work relentlessly to promote a United Nations resolution to suppress voices of dissent against Islam? I am confident we would all come to regret this.

Obama sidesteps the acute state of affairs in the Islamic world with flattery, failing to encourage accountability for rhetoric, practices and the behavior that feed stereotypes. I did not hear an exhortation to the Islamic world to open itself to diversity, to accept women as equal citizens with the same rights and protection under law as men. I did not hear a challenge to the Muslim world to accept other religions and their ability to practice openly within the Islamic20world -- where the practice of Christianity, Judaism and other religions would cost an individual his or her life in most Muslim countries. I did not hear a call to erase for all time, Dhimmi racism -- the Sharia law-based dictate that Christians and Jews are inferior and should be destroyed. Are these "…the principles of justice, tolerance and dignity for human beings"?

In contrast, I see my people's heart bleeding and know the pressing need for self-correction and honest examination for the sake of urgent repair. Obama dangles the carrot but shies away from the imperative issues boiling beneath the surface. Obama's reality makes my work and that of others who speak up against intolerant Islamic doctrines more challenging. He undermines this mission by placating abusive, xenophobic policies and enabling those within the Islamic world to subjugate others, to coerce others to its beliefs, and to continue these pursuits with his blessing.

The president failed to join freedom-loving individuals, liberated Arabs like myself. He failed to lead the Muslim world into modernization and vital reform. Rather than calling out, "The house is on fire." Obama smiles and tells us how beautiful the house is as it burns out of control and threatens to destroy us.

To the question I received on my e-mail; "Who should we believe, Obama or you?" I elaborated to my Moroccan reader that Obama is a politician who wishes to use sweet talk and to whitewash reality to make amends with Muslims.

I, on the other hand I am a pragmatic Arab woman who escaped from prison within Islam to the free world and now devote my life to expressing views freely and pressing for a genuine difference in Islam. We cannot have it both ways. Intolerance never tolerates freedom.

Conservative Percent by Gallup 2009

2009-06-15T16:02:00.000-07:00

Conservatives” Are Single-Largest Ideological Group Percentage of “liberals” higher this decade than in early ’90s
by Lydia Saad

PRINCETON, NJ -- Thus far in 2009, 40% of Americans interviewed in national Gallup Poll surveys describe their political views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal. This represents a slight increase for conservatism in the U.S. since 2008, returning it to a level last seen in 2004. The 21% calling themselves liberal is in line with findings throughout this decade, but is up from the 1990s.

These annual figures are based on multiple national Gallup surveys conducted each year, in some cases encompassing more than 40,000 interviews. The 2009 data are based on 10 separate surveys conducted from January through May. Thus, the margins of error around each year's figures are quite small, and changes of only two percentage points are statistically significant.

To measure political ideology, Gallup asks Americans to say whether their political views are very conservative, conservative, moderate, liberal, or very liberal. As has been the case each year since 1992, very few Americans define themselves at the extremes of the political spectrum. Just 9% call themselves "very conservative" and 5% "very liberal." The vast majority of self-described liberals and conservatives identify with the unmodified form of their chosen label.

Party-Based Ideology
There is an important distinction in the respective ideological compositions of the Republican and Democratic Parties. While a solid majority of Republicans are on the same page -- 73% call themselves conservative -- Democrats are more of a mixture. The major division among Democrats is between self-defined moderates (40%) and liberals (38%). However, an additional 22% of Democrats consider themselves conservative, much higher than the 3% of Republicans identifying as liberal.

True to their nonpartisan tendencies, close to half of political independents -- 45% -- describe their political views as "moderate." Among the rest, the balance of views is tilted more heavily to the right than to the left: 34% are conservative, while 20% are liberal.

Gallup trends show a slight increase since 2008 in the percentages of all three party groups calling themselves "conservative," which accounts for the three percentage-point increase among the public at large.

Thus far in 2009, Gallup has found an average of 36% of Americans considering themselves Democratic, 28% Republican, and 37% independent. When independents are pressed to say which party they lean toward, 51% of Americans identify as Democrats, 39% as Republicans, and only 9% as pure independents.

Ideological tendencies by leaned party affiliation are very similar to those of straight partisan groups. However, it is worth noting the views of pure independents -- a group usually too small to analyze in individual surveys but potentially important in deciding elections. Exactly half of pure independents describe their views as moderate, 30% say they are conservative, and 17% liberal.

As reported last week on Gallup.com, women are more likely than men to be Democratic in their political orientation. Along the same lines, women are more likely than men to be ideologically "moderate" and "liberal," and less likely to be "conservative."

Still, conservatism outweighs liberalism among both genders.

The pattern is strikingly different on the basis of age, and this could have important political implications in the years ahead. Whereas middle-aged and older Americans lean conservative (vs. liberal) in their politics by at least 2 to 1, adults aged 18 to 29 are just as likely to say their political views are liberal (31%) as to say they are conservative (30%).

Future Gallup analysis will look at the changes in the political ideology of different age cohorts over time, to see whether young adults in the past have started out more liberal than they wound up in their later years.

Bottom Line
Although the terms may mean different things to different people, Americans readily peg themselves, politically, into one of five categories along the conservative-to-liberal spectrum. At present, large minorities describe their views as either moderate or conservative -- with conservatives the larger group -- whereas only about one in five consider themselves liberal.

While these figures have shown little change over the past decade, the nation appears to be slightly more polarized than it was in the early 1990s. Compared with the 1992-1994 period, the percentage of moderates has declined from 42% to 35%, while the percentages of conservatives and liberals are up slightly -- from 38% to 40% for conservatives and a larger 17% to 21% movement for liberals.

Survey Methods
Results are based on aggregated Gallup Poll surveys of approximately 1,000 national adults, aged 18 and older, interviewed by telephone. Sample sizes for the annual compilations range from approximately 10,000 to approximately 40,000. For these results, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±1 percentage point.

In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls

Olympus TOUGH-8000 put to the test

2009-06-11T13:25:00.000-07:00

SHOCKPROOF (6.6ft.)Life can be tough, this camera is tougher. Rugged metal body and revolutionary shock-absorbing construction are designed to withstand a 6.6-foot drop, bump or other mishap.

WATERPROOF (33ft.)A revolutionary system of waterproof seals and gaskets keeps water out so you can take pictures as deep as 33 feet underwater.

FREEZEPROOF (14°F/-10°C)Boldly enter that winter wonderland without worrying about your camera. This camera is winterized to perform at below-freezing temperatures.

CRUSHPROOF (220lbf.)With a rugged body and reinforced LCD, the STYLUS TOUGH-8000 withstands up to 220 pounds of pressure so your camera and images are protected.

DUAL IMAGE STABILIZATIONForget about blurry shots with this 2-in-1 anti-blur solution. Sensor-Shift Image Stabilization compensates for camera shake to keep your shots steady while Digital Image Stabilization captures crisp, clear images in any situation.

The Obama Soap Opera and insane laughter

2009-06-09T19:52:00.000-07:00

The Obama Soap Opera and insane laughter

Why would anybody watch a soap opera and not CNN and Fox are beyond me? What imagination that creates “All my children” is nothing compared to the Obama team. This past week will have to go down in the history books as nothing short of amazing, and the Egypt speech will be studied by students for the next 200 years as a masterpiece of both diplomacy and bogus bull. For years I have been saying that it is becoming evident that little or nothing happens by chance, and this speach took years to formulate with the iron now being hot. It poured masterfully from Obama’s tongue like boiling syrup over cold vanilla ice cream, opening new channels and melting obstacles. We are on the brink of a New World Order, and America is Obama’s sacrificial lamb.

Opportunity for change in the form of power and control can come on fast when attitudes and dreams are stunned, economies floundering, and the destruction of morals and ethics brings into question even a reason for being... Why? ...to decimate responsibility for immediate gratification, and the weakness this incurs brings new opportunity for control of the masses. It has been a long time coming, sixty years of failed social programs by the left, the plundering of Fort Knox, legal loopholes and radical interpretations that stymie our constitution, the loss of our gold standard, the stealing of our Social Security, the dumbing of our youth, the corruption and belittling of ethics and faith, the murder of innocent children by abortion, wars controlled by international banks and a Federal Reserve that infuse and destroy economies at will and can not be audited, CIA intrusions around the world in our name, and the death of presidents who bring them to light. Now we are face to face with our destiny, and tonight I can only laugh insanely. What else is there to do when government mandates, denies, and then forms solutions to the problems they created?

In Egypt, I couldn’t have said it better, and that is a bit unsettling. Obama said what Europeans think, and uncovered the greatest of American taboo. Just a year or so ago I was blackballed by the liberal rag “The Advertiser” for a simple comment about Israel’s Zion government. What are they thinking now? Can money be made, most likely. Perhaps they are just shocked into silence, and now sitting back regrouping and rethinking cold duplicity and betrayal by their golden boy. Or is it possible all of this is preplanned?

The President of the United States of America is saying the same thing I have said for many years, and I almost fell out of my chair several times as I laughed out loud. My essays to coexist, taking responsibility for life and action, live and let live, do unto others, and such, is now coming strait from the horse’s mouth, our messiah. A man, who promotes and performs abortion around the world with our tax dollars, stem cell research for profit using these embryos, Nationalization and Socialization, with a stimulus package weighing us down with burdens for generations, is now preaching tolerance and justice to the world.

I was much surprised when Hannity said he thought Israel should strike Iran today, not six hours after the Obama speech. That was a lot to consider. I have in the past thought he was somewhat level headed, and a “True American”, but it looks as if he is just another paid performer, a True Zionist promoter.

In the seven steps of a dying country which one comes first, fear or anger? I’m a lot of both these days. And bewildered too... What is promised will sweep two hundred fifty years of tradition and hard won common sense aside for what can only be described as the destruction of freedom. Liberty will die with me, and old goats who remember life beyond the yoke. Those indoctrinated in our schools will never realize, because they were born in subjection, in a cage no longer considered metaphor, or hypothetical, but a reality that will go mostly unrealized by them, and that is a true horror.

Master Obama wants to control us, and the fastest segment of coordinated economic downturn and recovery is the unprecedented expansion of government. New Czars and the minions they are hiring will form a new domination, and along with the compiled information from our buying and social habits to medical records, they will know more about us then we have ever considered about ourselves, computerized and categorized. Oh, you thought giving your phone number at the grocer was to get a discount? What fools we have become, old men, too weak in the knees. Too old to right the wrongs we have ourselves created, by lack of caring and inaction!

Our fathers died on world fronts, battlefield theatres of blood and smoke, tears and mud, to give us this nation. Countless debates in The House and Congress, and a few fist fights and duels too, are forgotten now, as our Constitution is trampled on as meaningless. Now, 53 percent would give it all up for peanuts, and the childish belief that a politician tells the truth. The left got over the top by bussing the dregs of society, promising minorities who don’t understand the difference between a civil union and marriage, the promotion of sexual deviance from equal rights, Crown Royal from child support, murder from free choice, honor, integrity, virtue, honesty, decency, pride, principle, and respect from baseness, education from mind control, self-awareness from despair and quiet desperation, morality from evilness, consciousness from coma, love from selfishness, freedom from slavery, liberty from subjugation, capitalism from nationalism, happiness from joy, socialism from free enterprise, wonder and tolerance from judgmental criticism, responsibility from justification, and broad minded as opposed to blind myopia is now standard while trial lawyers grow rich feeding on them. The Neo-Con false-right, more liberal than conservative, never held the Republican standard in their hands. Both sides of the isle is now considered coerced, dominated and controlled, bought and paid for and threatened too, by Zionists with dual citizenships that care nothing for America but what can be milked from an ignorant and lazy middle class. I speak of Zion, and the church-state that exists... the one Obama was so clever to call a “Jewish Homeland.” The catalyst for war and our destruction as a world power was defended by the same media that got Obama elected, if that isn’t insane! Obama, following in the footsteps of our very own true peanut farmer from Plains, Carter, who warned us, in spite of the concerted effort by media to discredit, and ridicule him, is finally seen as truth. Strange how the left seeks social justice abroad while destroying it stateside, and in the distant past have promoted great men like JFK who started a new concept, but now outdated, by the words: “Ask not...” that has nothing to do with the Democratic Party today.

Yes, I’m disappointed in Americans. July fourth we will again express our disdain and disillusion by more Tea Parties. We will bring our kids too, so they can see just how civilized we have become. It will be a good opportunity to show them just what we are made of, our true meddle, our new American nature, and later we can all sit together and watch the games on TV, content that a statement was made. Good time for a beer too.

I don’t believe in the forever of heaven or hell or in angels or devils in the image of men, but if I did, Obama would fit the description of anti-Christ, and I would think likely a special place in hell for both he and his ilk would be justice, on both sides of the isle.

After I’m dead our children can read the new revised history books and look at movies where black men and Indians drank whisky in Texas salons with white men, sheep farmers grappled with the morality of anal sex, women ride the range in blue jeans fast on the draw, and men without an ounce of testosterone question manhood identity for feminine “sensitivity.” It will be a place where we can work a four day week for more creative time. It will be a place we can ponder the dreams of government as our own and identify with the masses controlled by a collective destiny. We will willingly loose the ability to question, and new laws, like the ones that test us this week, will dictate that a helmet no longer needs to be worn for motorcyclists, while a camera on every intersection now knows our comings and goings, giving tickets by a third party for not wearing a seat belt. It will be an existence of voluntary servitude, and the norm for sheep such as you, and I am one by proxy, as being lazy, and ignorant, we deserve what we now have. As we go down together, or with some miracle rise, I promise not to say I told you so. At that point what good would it accomplish? Ha! I feel that laughter coming on again...that pressure valve to curb insanity!

As I no longer recognize myself in the mirror, I see the lines and scars of an old man who no longer recognizes the country he lived and fought for. I dictated my life by societal rules, my dreams, and hard work in a country where more than 50 percent of my piers memorized player stats and yet couldn’t tell you who the Secretary of State was, or their political affiliation. They sedated themselves with liquor and prescription meds with four point four hours in front of the tube every night, and implacably vied to remain ignorant of changing times because of the effort involved. They gave away our country by not standing up for it, and my voice was censured by a media under the control of a liberal mindset that sacrificed my Freedom of Speech for the almighty dollar, their back pocket. Newspapers were bought anyway, in spite of what they do, because of the Sports section, the movie section, the horoscope section, the comic section... While we slept and played, we gave away not only our freedom, but in many cases, our very souls as well... While unlevel playing fields created rifts in social consciousness and class warfare ensued, responsibility was sacrificed along with honor and pride, and the result is far too painfully evident today, as our prisons are full, minds empty, and we travel blindly like sheep to the slaughter.

See you at the next Tea Party, or you can view it on TV as we are depicted as racist radicals and their brainwashed children making empty and meaningless gestures of defiance in the face of overwhelming opposition and odds, without a game plan but a offhand token of absurdity. Have your club meetings, old men, and hash out your grievances over pizza and beer, and drive home intoxicated and at a loss. Promote "grass root" efforts to promote a Conservative Right, while those in power vote left.

Out of the lies, the overt deceit, the ambiguity, one man stands a head above the rest as a testament and beacon for True American ideals, and hope. His name is Ron Paul, a Libertarian, the truest form of Republican, and a testament to the hard won vision of our American framers. If Americans had done their homework, not judged a man by the color of his skin or the promises he made that did not coinside with his past record, Ron Paul would be our president now, and in Washington DC there would now be hell to pay. Instead, Government is laughingly talking out of both sides of their mouth, and we are enslaved, at war with each other. Has anyone asked where the newly printed trillion went before Obama came into office? I feel a laugh coming on! We are such fools, without the vision to know what is in our best intrest. What can be done? What can I do but put my thoughts out with the hope it will make a difference? At times I feel quite isolated, and alone, as it seems to be like adding a drop of true color into an ocean of dark water. My volition comes from its merky depths as I see a few bubble rise by gasping breaths saying, "You are not alone!" And as I look into the shadowy depths, a glimmer of hope appears.

HAHAHAHAHA!

Wyoming 2009

2009-06-08T20:21:00.000-07:00

GM, Amtrak and an Increasingly Fascist America

2009-06-08T12:52:00.000-07:00

GM, Amtrak and an Increasingly Fascist America

Last week, General Motors finally declared bankruptcy. Many in government thought $20 billion in taxpayer dollars would save the company, but as predicted, it only postponed the inevitable. The government will dump another $30 billion into GM and take a 60 percent controlling interest for it. Public officials are now involving themselves in tactical business decisions such as where GM’s headquarters should move and what kind of cars it will build.
The promise that this is temporary and will eventually be profitable is supposed to ease the American people into accepting this arrangement, but it is of little comfort to those who remember similar promises when the American taxpayers bought Amtrak. After three years, government was supposed to be out of the passenger rail business. 40 years and billions of dollars later, the government is still operating Amtrak at a loss, despite the fact that they have created a monopoly by making it illegal to compete with Amtrak. Imagine what they can now do to what is left of the great American auto industry!
In a truly free market, GM would get your money one way and one way only – by selling you a car you want, at a price you are willing to pay. Instead, the government is giving public money to a private company in spite of the market signals it has been sending. Throwing money at GM does not stop it from being an engine of wealth destruction; on the contrary, it simply gives it more wealth to destroy.
Had it been allowed to fail naturally, the profitable pieces of GM would have been bought up and put to good use by now. The laid off employees would likely have found new jobs and all that capital would be in private hands, reinvested in companies that produce products demanded by consumers. Instead, we are all poorer now.
Political pressure, rather than the rule of law, is deciding how to divide up the remains of GM. The bondholders had billions in retirement savings invested in the company, and though they were entitled to nearly three times as much as the United Auto Workers, the bondholders were left with just a 10 percent stake compared to the union’s 17.5 percent stake. For their 60 percent stake, taxpayers have a future of constant bailouts to look forward to.
Comingling public control of private business is known as fascism. While today’s politicians may feel emboldened with all their new power, history will only repeat itself as all this collapses on itself. It is the height of hubris for bureaucrats and politicians to attempt to control the market and the freewill of the American people. In the end, the market always wins out. Maybe one day future generations will wise up and allow free markets to function and thrive without the albatross of government around its neck. For now, it looks like those in charge have not learned the lessons of the past, and have doomed us to repeat those mistakes once again.

Posted by Ron Paul (06-08-2009, 12:15 PM) filed under Monetary Policy

Going and coming in May 2009

2009-06-07T08:48:00.000-07:00

April and May 2009 Photos with the D-90

2009-06-06T12:15:00.000-07:00

Obama chains

2009-06-04T21:40:00.000-07:00

"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom.What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

John Gault/Ayn Rand

The speech today in Egypt will be read in schools for many hundreds of years. This day is a turning point. Nothing will be the same, ever.

Ken

2006 in pictures

2009-06-03T21:15:00.000-07:00

Old bronze god from India

2009-05-30T21:20:00.000-07:00

Books to read

2009-05-29T10:41:00.001-07:00

Nikon D90 Specs

2009-05-28T13:05:00.000-07:00

Nikon D90 Specifications Revealed

Here are the details of the Nikon D90 DSLR, which is to replace the D80.

Universal Vibration Reduction (uVR)
The new D90 incorporates an optional feature called Universal Vibration Reduction (uVR). This turns all lenses into uVR lenses, and offers a 10-stop advantage.
This means a person using a 500mm lens, who would normally have to shoot at 1/500th of a second, can shoot at 2 seconds when uVR is enabled.
The new uVR system isn't sensor based, and instead requires one of the three optional vertical battery grips (see below). In this case, the MB-D90a is required. This grip provides all the normal controls and extended battery life of a regular grip. It also holds 8 EN-EL4a batteries, along with a step-up transformer.
With uVR enabled, the combined power of the batteries sends a current through the step-up transformer. This then delivers a 110 volt shock through metal pads around the grip. The resulting electrical shock matches the shutter speed (maximum of 10 seconds).
The shock causes a very stable clenching of the photographer's muscles while the shutter is open, simulating the stability of a tripod.
Nikon advise that people with rubber-soled shoes, heart problems or pacemakers shouldn't use uVR.
The uVR facility can also be controlled remotely by Nikon Support, via the new Nikon satellite network outlined below. This ensures Nikon Support can intentionally punish users who complain about how the new D90 is missing a particular feature they expected to see.
For example, the D80 didn't feature a military-grade titanium shell with platinum casing, and some people felt this was unforgivable in a camera that costs $800. Nikon Support will now be able to give those people exactly what they deserve.
Three shooting modes...up to 12MP
The D90 can shoot images up to 12MP, a modest boost over the D80 it replaces. While everybody agrees, more megapixels is always better, the D90 provides 12MP in only one of its three shooting modes. Here's a run-down on the various modes...
Bog-standard Mode:12 regular megapixels at 3 frames per second.
XDR Mode:Every odd pixel is underexposed by 3 stops. Every even pixel is exposed as per the meter. The two images are combined in camera to produce an extra 3 stops of dynamic range at 6MP. This mode is especially useful in law enforcement, where photographers often have to photograph shady people.
GTI Mode:Every odd pixel makes up image one. Every even pixel makes up image two. That makes 2 images per shutter release, making it possible for Nikon's marketing material to claim the D90 shoots at 6 frames/second.
Even better in-camera editing
The new D90 builds on the D80's popular in-camera editing functions. Rather than cannibalizing yet more features from Capture NX, Nikon decided to include a full working version of Photoshop CS3 in the D90.
We found using Photoshop CS3 on a 3 inch LCD with a 4-way controller much easier than you might imagine. Well done on a great new feature, Nikon.
To save money, the CS3 licenses were bought from a Russian spammer at 1/50th the regular price, allowing Nikon to keep the price of the D90 competitive. Even so, European customers will still have to pay twice as much as Americans. Nikon say this is because European customers are chumps who seem willing to pay anything.
More songs than ever
The D80 included an essential feature not found in any other DSLR (as I write this). And that's 5 built-in songs you can't listen to because the camera has no speakers.
The new D90 does away with built-in songs, and includes a fully-fledged iPod. This ensures you're never short of a tune, as long as you have your D90 with you. And it's switched on. And you've uploaded some songs to it.
What's more, the lack of speakers was the one thing almost everybody complained about. It was for this reason, and this reason alone, that DPReview spurned the D80, kneecapping it with a dreaded 'Recommended' rating.
That, and the limited choice of music included with the D80.
Sure, Nikon provided a firmware update that allowed us to add more tunes by storing them in the buffer...but that was too little, too late.
Fortunately, Nikon haven't made the same mistake with the D90. They've not only included stereo speakers in the camera itself, but also the necessary cabling for a full Dolby 5.1 surround sound setup. What's more, the D90 is capable of playing movies on the 3 inch LCD via the built-in DVD writer/player found in the second optional battery grip (MB-D90b).
But just before you rush out an get yourself an MB-D90b, you might want to consider the MB-D90c. This version of the grip includes a sub-woofer (fully compatible with the D90's Dolby surround). That's right, the optional MB-D90c allows you to play music with unprecedented levels of fidelity for a consumer-level DSLR.
Let's see Canon top that!
No more shutter delays
While the D80 was pretty responsive, your reactions aren't. By the time you've realized you should have pressed the shutter, the moment is lost forever.
The D90 solves this problem thanks to Nikon's new MindProbe technology. MindProbe scans your brain, looking for those tell-tale low amplitude beta waves that signal an imminent shutter-press. By the time your neurons react, and you actually press the shutter, the D90 has already captured 3 images (or 6 in GTI mode).
That's right folks, for the first time in the history of photography, the shutter delay is actually measured in negative time. Now that's progress.
My Nikon contact tells me their R&D people are now working on a system that eliminates the photographer altogether. Nikon's customer research has discovered that when a photographer takes a great image, they claim all the credit. But when a photographer takes a bad image, they blame the camera.
By eliminating the photographer, Nikon plan to eliminate lousy photos altogether.
New built-in artistic-effect modes
In addition to the regular scene modes, Nikon have included several artistic-effect modes. You can apply these to your image in-camera. Modes include...
Black and white mode
1960s-style fast-film grain mode
Nikon long-banding effect mode
Canon plastic skin mode
KM7D high ISO smearing mode
Sony Alpha 1.3-stop underexposure mode
Point and shoot artefact mode
Memory card incompatibility solved
The D50 and D80 caused some controversy by moving Nikon's consumer-orientated DSLR models away from CF cards. This lead many Nikon users to resort to unseemly and ungentlemanly language in the forums (expressly forbidden under the terms and conditions of the standard Nikon warranty).
In an effort to avoid such distasteful events this time around, and ensure everybody can enjoy a D90, Nikon now supports the following storage formats...
SD
CF
XD
Memory Stick
3.5 inch floppy
5.25 inch floppy
8 inch floppy (in MB-D90b only)
CD/DVD (in MB-D90b only)
High-speed paper tape to maintain compatibility with Colossus
Punch cards
Wireless remote that works from anywhere
One of the complaints about the ML-L3 wireless remote, was that it was line-of-site. For some reason, you couldn't set up your camera in Texas, and trigger the shutter from France. Clearly, this should be well within the capabilities of a $15 remote control.
To answer these complaints, Nikon has put a series of satellites in orbit that are dedicated to receiving wireless remote signals from users anywhere on the planet. These are then forwarded to your camera, allowing you to trigger the shutter no matter where you are.
How long have we been waiting for this simple addition to the feature-set? Canon have had this functionality in their DSLRs for years.
Already in stores
After the fiasco over delivery of the D200 and 18-200VR, Nikon were determined to ensure they didn't suffer the same loss of face with the D90. That's why this new model is actually going to go on sale 5 days before the official announcement.

Doffing your cap to 1000 Years of Scottisah Serfdom

2009-05-28T09:40:00.000-07:00

Doffing your cap to 1000 Years of Scottish Serfdom

Right now, I’m working on a North Sea platform, and as usual, pumping the locals for ‘color’. I had a conversation with a Scottish friend who gave me an interesting insight into a bit of Scottish psyche. He has traveled extensively in the States, and loves the idea of the Constitution guaranteeing personal freedom. He was trying to explain the frustrations of being proud of his Scottishness, while at the same time being frustrated at the lack of freedom in his country, when compared to being an American in America. He told a story, which highlighted this problem that I would like to share…

He had two friends, let’s call them Tommy and Bill, who worked on the railroads, maintaining and repairing track as members of a ‘rail gang’.

“These rail gangs were made up of hard men. Tommy and Bill played at right and left back (defense) for the railway soccer team, which was infamous as being the hardest team in the league. Bill and Tommy’s motto was “they shall not pass!” and woe to any opposing forward who tried to run past them with the ball! The rail gangs were also noted for their extreme left wing political views, and during their lunch breaks there were always discussions on the merits of various forms of Socialism. The only gangers who weren’t stanch members of the Labour party, were staunch members of the Communist party! These were men who would, in times of war, have helped form the backbone of any fighting unit of the famous ‘Gordon Highlanders’ regiment in the British army. Their foremen at work treated them with the respect that was due to hard working, hard fighting men. They had a fiercely independent streak, and were proud of the fact that they felt themselves to be the equal of any of their so-called ‘betters’ in the aristocracy. They were proud of the fact that they worked in all weathers. No train would be stuck because they were inside a hut warming their hands. Not that they did it for the railway company mind you, but because of pride in their own toughness, and ability to brave the elements.

One day, as they were repairing a section of track, the whistle blew to warn them of an approaching train. They moved to the side of the track to allow the train to pass. The train slowed right down to go over the damaged track, crawling along at less than walking speed. As the train passed the line of men they looked up at the carriages as they passed. Seated in one of the carriages was the Queen Mother, the most respected member of the British royal family. When she saw the men, she smiled and waved her hand gracefully (as only she can do). Then, this group of hard men, these hardened socialists, who would punch a boss rather than take any abuse, all at the same instant, - doffed their caps to her! When the train had passed, each of them avoided the eyes of their mates, put their caps on, and never mentioned the incident to each other ever again!

“It seemed that, in spite of their strongly held socialist beliefs, that ‘we are a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns’ (we are all equal), centuries of kow-towing to the aristocracy had made the cap-doffing an instinctive reaction. These men would have had their eye teeth removed rather than admit this, but nevertheless it was so. Because there has never been a revolution in the UK, and because the ruling classes are still there, the ordinary people have never known what it feels like to be truly free. There are still hereditary peers in the house of Lords who have the right to vote on legislation, not because they are qualified in any way, shape, or form, but because their forefathers were part of the ancient aristocracy! In the distant past, people were elevated to the peerage for performing some service to the king, perhaps even providing women for his pleasure, and their sons and grandsons have been reaping the benefit for generation after generation. Only recently has the Labour government made changes to the House of Lords, with some of the hereditary peers being turfed out of their cosy club. Even this radical Labour government didn’t have the courage of their convictions, however, and left some of the hereditary peers in place. If the ruling government still doffs its cap to the aristocracy, small wonder that Tommy and Bill doffed theirs!”

Now, before we Americans start to scoff at the serf-like attitudes of these men, it’s worth thinking about the fact that our forefathers were probably driven out from Scotland (or countries like it) – and had to fight tooth and nail in the War of Independence, so that their children would never have to doff their caps to their ‘betters’. Even so, think about how the east coast intelligentia in America fall over themselves to get close to visiting British royalty, even after nearly 250 years of freedom. Take these railwaymen out of Scotland for a couple of generations, let them breathe the free air of America, and they would be no different from any of us.

Finally, a few words of warning about America which my Scottish friend passed on, and which I quote almost word for word: “Freedom is a precious commodity that has to be re-won each generation. A lazy and apathetic population will have their freedoms eroded slowly and smoothly by those in the halls of Congress who ‘know what’s best for you.’ Don’t, as a people, allow a ruling class to get too entrenched in the corridors of power! This is not a party political statement. I don’t care if you vote Democrat, Republican, or any other political party, it behooves each of you to vote regularly, and to regularly call your government representatives to account. Are two generations of Bush in the White House enough? Should you even contemplate voting for another Kennedy? Remember, it’s only a few years since Richard Nixon contemplated the idea of changing the constitution so that he could run for a third term! And it was only through the incompetence of a few burglars that it was discovered how far he was prepared to go to hang on to power! You should make sure that you elect more Abe Lincolns and Thomas Jeffersons, rather than the scions of a few ruling dynasties. Don’t create your own royal families, so that your children don’t ever feel too ashamed to look each other in the eye as they stand with doffed caps and watch some dignitary sweep past in an armoured limo”.

Far fetched? Maybe, but we should check even the smallest tendency for the ruling classes to rear their ugly heads in this fine country of ours – just in case! My friend tells me that he cannot openly write about his feelings, and envies my ability to do so. I felt a lump in my throat when I realized the implications of what he said, and how much for granted I have taken our freedoms…

I have never paid much attention to the political climate of the world. America’s controlling power has made us complacent. I assure you this is not the case in Europe. There are sweeping changes taking place here from the unifying placement of the Euro dollar, to the coming powers of France, Germany, China, and Israel. Changes that can, in a moment, upset the entire balance of the world. We should pay attention…

Katrina, and the axe with red ribbon

2009-05-21T09:50:00.000-07:00

My parents, LeRoy and “Billy” LaRive, were tenacious and strong willed Cajuns. They survived many hurricanes in Old Gentilly New Orleans, pounded by both wind and flood. At 85 they thought this would just be another one.

Nothing could get them to leave, the many phone calls from family and friends, or police going directly to their front door. They didn’t see the possibility of how bad it could get, and told every person who called a different game plan, whatever they wanted to hear. In the past Saint Raphael Church on Elysian Fields Avenue had been considered high ground, and parking cars on the neutral ground across the street had always been sufficient. This time it was not.

At first it looked as if the storm’s effects had passed with the eye, and several phone calls reveled that they had weathered it fine. A few hours later the levee broke, inundating the area with over ten feet of water. No one ever heard from them again.

A few days later a picture was found in the Lafayette paper of a boatload of people who had supposedly been taken from rooftops. My entire family agreed it was them in that picture, but the trail grew cold as they were picked up on Robert E. Lee Boulevard and brought to I-10/610. Friends and family searched the internet for listings of names, but we had no word from them, nor were their names, to this very day, compiled on any list.

At the time of this writing, October 7, 2005, their bodies have not yet been properly identified. A few days ago we got a call from “Family Finders” saying that they thought they had found my father by an ID he had on his person. It is also possible that my mother is there, as a Chaplin said there was also a “Jane Doe” with no identification. They requested my DNA, and this alone will take two weeks. We are not allowed to view the bodies, or see the Coroner’s report until a funeral home picks them up for embalming. So far, there is no one who can tell us if there will be an autopsy, though on the news last night it was said that all elderly bodies will be, and a time of death will be difficult to attain. It is our hope that we can trace just what happened, but all indications are that they were transported without documentation, lost in the mad shuffle. I try not to think about what their last moments together was like, how they ended up together, and speculation can drive you insane.

Since all of my dad’s personal information was destroyed by water, our memories are the only tools we first had. We knew little or nothing about what insurance he had, a burial plan, or anything of his assets.

At the time of this writing Gentilly is still inaccessible. A few days ago I woke up again at 2:00 thinking about all possibilities, haunted by faces. I packed a sledge hammer from my garage, my hard hat and safety boots, and headed to New Orleans on September 26, 2005. I was determined. I stopped for a BLT sandwich, a cup of coffee, and got on I-10. Traffic was moving at around 80mph and I kept up. Past Baton Rouge the pace increased to a bit over 90 mph, bumper to bumper, with weaving tail-gators. My mind swam with the last three weeks, and the three households living with us from St. Bernard who had lost everything, and suddenly I started feeling sick. Large mouth-fulls of bile came up and I spit them out of the window. The white sports car riding my bumper pulled back. After about ten of these I started feeling a bit better.

Suddenly, I was in Metairie. Lights were on, and in the half-light of 05:00 it didn’t look that damaged. Traffic went well until Bonneville, and then abruptly stopped. For an hour we crept forward, and finally saw large blinding directional spotlights over the interstate. I surmised that to be the check point. I spoke to several other men in trucks next to me and they were all trying to get to St. Bernard. WWL radio was saying there was a mix-up between NO officials and State Police, and that the corridor to St. Bernard was closed. What’s new! Every one of these men was very angry and frustrated. When I finally got to the lights a huge New Orleans cop with folded arms answered my request to enter Gentilly, with, “No, not today.” Those who were turned down for St. Bernard filled the side of the road and all parking lots, waiting for a decision…

I exited and entered Metairie, thinking I may find a back way into Gentilly. Both Veterans and I-10 was backed up, so I drove all the way to the Lakefront without a problem. Several police cars blocked the bridge over a levee, so I parked and walked over to them. I singled out one with a kind face and told him my story of trying to get into my father’s house for the paperwork we will need to bury them. Though standoffish in the beginning he warmed up, telling me that getting in was pending, and a week away. I tried with ten cops to escort me but no one would. I asked him if he was in the city during the storm, and he got very emotional. Tears flowed down his cheeks as he told me about the bodies, the looting, and the damage to the city he loved. He explained to me that the two officers who committed suicide had other problems in their lives, and this was just too much for them to handle. He got choked up talking about that too, and I realized this man was very drawn and tired. A truck driver came up and gave each of us a bag of beignets and powdered sugar, and we ate them wafting the smells of rotten garbage and seawater, while swishing away huge black flies. I remember when one would land on their skin; they would jump like being electrocuted. I thanked him for his time, knowing I would never be allowed entrance here, and traveled as far as I could to Downtown, blocked by cement and sand bags, then made a huge circle back to Veterans. I was not let through. There I met a man waiting in a parking lot who was trying to organize his crew to meet up in Gentilly. We talked about his company from another state coming down to help in the cleanup, and I thanked him for helping out. He looked at my car and asked what was splattered on the side. “I threw up.” I said.

Suddenly he looked at me hard and said “I have an idea!” He went to his front seat and pulled out an extra pass given to his company, and had me sign my name along with his. “Here, betcha’ this will do it.” I thanked him several times, not believing this stroke of luck, and as I got into my car he yelled out: “Sorry about your folks.”

Leaving that parking lot I immediately found an open gas station and filled up, then proceeded to I-10 for a brazen third attempt to get in. I-610 was now open and traffic flowed through, finally, a corridor to Chalmette. A line was formed at the Elysian Fields exit and I waited about a half hour as we crept along. Suddenly it moved faster, and a young black woman police officer barely looked at the paper and waved me through. I descended the ramp into hell.

How many thousands of times have I exited here? But what I came upon was like a nuclear holocaust, and unrecognizable. Except for a few linemen trucks and police cars the place was entirely deserted, lifeless, dead. Everyone ignored me.

I looked at the houses and saw that the water had risen to four feet here, but as I kept getting closer to the lake it got deeper. The devastation was oppressive. Every plant was dead, and the once beautiful old trees on the neutral ground were uprooted in piles, or crashed through heavy terracotta roofs, the hallmark of design in this community. It seemed like every window and door was a dark cave, and the houses empty shells. The smell of death, putrid and rotten gagged me, and flies came into my open window. One was jet black with a light red head, almost human. I saw sprayed florescent marking on every house, an X indicating the day it was checked and if any bodies were inside. That was the only color I remember, as everything had a cast of gray, even in full sun. There was no sound, no hum of life but for the crackle of a radio way off in the distance. I heard a kind of sobbing, and realized it was coming from me.

By the time I reached St. Raphael the water level on the side of the buildings topped 10 feet. I made my turn down Prentice and a left on Marigny, where I had quietly walked home from school so many years ago, and parked in front of my parent’s home. I stood in the street putting on my boots, and studied the area. It was too much to take in, as everything was glazed in gray mud, and piled upon each other. I can describe it no other way. A squirrel was sitting on a telephone line with its head up against the post, it didn’t move from the time I arrived or left. I think it was dead. A bright orange cat scurried across the street close to the ground and disappeared. Suddenly I got sick again and got rid of the beignet in fit after fit of nausea.

Through the threshold, where so many memories had entered and left, was now mounds of soggy, rotting cushions and furniture piled against the walls. I saw footprints and realized it must have been the rescue workers trying to determine if they were still in the attic. The florescent markings on the front stucco said “0” then 9/9, so no bodies were found on that date.

I started exploring from one room to another but started gagging again. I went back to the car with the idea of using some aftershave I keep on the dash to splash on my beard and hair. It worked.

Slowly the gravity of this moment hit home, and as I searched for the strong box that had my father’s important papers, I understood my parents for the first time, from a horrific perspective. The same encyclopedias and the yearbooks that ended in 1967 were swollen with water, still in the same original place so long ago. The water had risen several inches into the attic, and the melted sheetrock had fallen on top of everything, with dirty pink insulation hanging like flayed skin. In the hall I found a small hand axe with a red ribbon around it, and a claw hammer with its handle wrapped in electrical tape, leaning against the wall. It hit me that my father had told my brother in the last phone call that he had a way through a vent on the roof in case of a flooding. The ribbon was just like my father, his country heritage. He wanted to find it in the dark, or with a flash light. Very practical.

His chests of drawers were swollen tight, and I felt emotions I can’t describe as I battered them open with my sledge. I took everything from his top drawer and realized that this was his most cherished possessions. Children’s teeth, old knives belonging to his father and grandfather, clay marbles from his youth, disintegrating holy pictures commemorating the death of a loved one, service medals, old watches, rosaries, coins, nitroglycerin pills, belt buckles, straight razors from his barbering, trinkets and little colored rocks from memories lost forever. There on my mother’s dresser were boxes of baby pictures turned to black mush, and a plastic oriental statue that had taken the same position for forty years, now lay on the floor.

I had to move the bed and a pile of chair cushions to get to their closets. I broke a window with my sledge to get some air, and realized with a shock that I hadn’t even tried to open it. I saw the bars they had put up so long ago because of the growing crime in that area, and my reason for moving to Acadiana. New Orleans was their home and they would never leave it, never again. The closet was drenched but untouched, and his collection of western boots sat in rows. I took a bayonet he had placed for easy accessibility, and wondered at what kind of world would make it necessary to place a weapon for easy reach, even behind the safety of barred windows. A lot of thoughts rushed through my head, and I was a bit overwhelmed by them. My father had taught me long ago that men do not cry, men say “ouch!” and I stood in the middle of their bedroom choking them back, every one. He would have been proud.

I found some papers in the attic that has proved valuable in determining where they are to be buried, insurance, and so forth, and piled that in the back of my car. Along with that I took an old bowl my grandmother had given us, their marriage silverware, a few other memorabilia worth nothing but a memory, and that rusty hammer and the axe with the red ribbon on it.

Sounds so simple now, but at the time I could see that what lay in this muck was the tangible things they had acquired during their life, and most was unrecoverable. What I carried to my car amounted to about twenty pounds. Twenty tangible pounds with memories attached. Not their memories mind you, but my own, and though I have washed them, and will keep them through my life, I realize that all that was worthwhile in their lives is now found in the House of God.

So Called Catholics

2009-05-18T19:35:00.000-07:00

So Called Catholics and Obama now in the same boat to hell...
By: Ken LaRive

Notre Dame letting Obama speak says volumes about the Catholic Church and Christianity in general. Yes indeed, Christians are sheep. Last year when I was in India I spoke to a Hindi Holy Man who told me that Gandhi was quoted to say that if he could find one Christian who practiced the teachings of Christ he would convert. Tongue-in-cheek, or was it Indian satire?

Fifty two percent of Catholics voted for Obama, so the statistics said, but justified by a priest here in Lafayette who told me that these people were in name only, and not true Christians. He also said the Hispanics who voted for him knew nothing about what Obama stood for, but that he would open the borders for them to flood into our new give away social system.

I watched CNN last night and a Jesuit Priest said Obama gave a good speech. Jesuits? I studied under the Jesuits for four years and there is no segment of the Catholic Church so secular. Want to find a Jesuit in New Orleans? Look in the diocese business offices during the day and Bourbon Street during the night.

Catholics today and many other so called Christians don’t even understand the difference between the New Testament and the Old, a G-d of wrath compared to a God of Love. They actually think Jews are some kind of Christian want-to-be. Christians who were taught to forgive their enemies are now coerced to promote a tit-for-tat war thousands of years old between the Jews and Arabs, a church and state country with nuclear capabilities stolen from us. It is no wonder Christianity is going down the tubes all around the world with so called leaders who let pedophilias and homosexuals teach their children, and do what others tell them like whores. Christians today are becoming empty shells, promoted by a Jewish Secular media. The fact that they could have let an abortion promoter, a socialist nationalist communist promoter, the same kind who stopped the practice of religion in the USSR, the seller of the unborn fetus for stem cell research the first month in office, and with our tax dollars promoted around the world shows how low we have come as Christians. I don’t think the word means much these days, not even worth capitalizing it. Yes, so called “christian”, stay home and don’t vote, or when you do vote, vote for a murder who promised to feed you a few peanuts. Trade your immortal soul for a promise, you fool.

There will be a special place in hell for those who kill babies. There you can listen to Obama’s smooth talking BS for eternity. You deserve each other. You can sit at his feet and lament with hope for a brighter day, one you could have made for yourself if you weren’t so stupid and lazy. Damned fools.

For the loving heart of men...

2009-05-17T18:30:00.000-07:00

For the loving heart of men…

Some men have a hard time expressing love in a way that may seem evident, at least at first glance. The dynamics of what makes a man tick is just as complicated as a woman’s, …it’s just different. Comparison of the sexes is impossible because we are talking about two pieces of the same puzzle, and as no two persons are exactly alike, there are fundamental elements that are found in everyone. I will generalize that one element we all have in common is the capacity for love, simply because I can’t conceive of a life without it.

Past the hard shell finish, (the façade that men erect to hide life’s pain and disappointment), there exists in most men, a gentile loving spirit. It stays well hidden, because most men think that a display of softness shows weakness, especially among other men. Judge this if you must, but for some reason it is the way men have developed. An understanding of this one concept will help to see beyond that tough exterior. Just as I try and understand a man by his deeds, I would hope that most men would try to walk his talk. Even so, sometimes we might have to pay close attention in order to see their work. For instance…

I have several neighbors who drive old pickup trucks and cars, yet their wives all drive new ones. I wonder why?

I remember that tired roughneck leaning against the boot-rack. He was finished his twelve-hour tour hitch and is oily-grime and sweat from head to foot. Before he takes off his boots he slowly and deliberately re-duck tapes the leaking cracks. He wants them to last just one more day. Why?

I’ve seen dog-tired Mexican men in the heat of high noon singing in loud passion! With a genuine smile they told me that it is a love song. “Amour!” Love is their reason for being, and they are thankful for their work, and revel in the gift of life. Before supper they will pause in the galley by the Madonna and Child statue to pray and give thanks.

On our rig island, great hulking men will sit on plastic trash bags while having lunch, (so as not to dirty the chair with their work clothes), and will pause for a silent prayer before eating. They close their eyes and bow their heads, and it brings a hush over those who don’t. It’s a powerful moment.

There are men who can stand straight and tall while being judged or ridiculed for an opinion or a stand they take. They take the condescension or reprimand by the strength of their responsibilities. I’ve seen open smiles through pain, and men who have made the conscious choice to forgive their enemies for the sake of those they love.

Men’s eyes will light up in the quiet times as they show you worn and faded pictures of children and grandchildren from their wallet. They will point to each in turn, beaming as they tell you how quickly they are growing.

Some see the tender spirit of the “Watchtower Lady” and will buy every one of her pamphlets, and though they know they will never read them, they can never throw them away.

When the chips are down, men will willingly risk everything, even their own life for an idea, like freedom, liberty, and justice. Countless men have made this sacrifice, so their children could know these things. There are survivors of many war horrors, but the memories are kept locked deep inside, away from the tender hearts they protect.

Some men put their trust in God, and His strength flows in their arms, and though some choose not to, all will bend to the touch of a soft grandchild’s hand. They will give their love unselfishly, with conviction, and trust.

I have known men who maintain that love is the greatest of God’s gifts and the strongest force on earth. Men will climb mountains because of it, touched by the spirit in their hearts, and in its warm embrace, tackle every day with fresh faith. Willingly, men will sacrifice security, their health, even go to certain death for the righteousness found in their hearts, with love as their guiding force. And then, while kneeling in the dust of life’s loss and destruction, men will pick up worn out tools and start again. Pain and loss clings to the hope that only love can give to men…

This drawing is from my 1979 diary, first from a book of poems produced by San Diego City College students, where I attended from 1973-75.

The Wild Turkey Tom

2009-05-12T06:48:00.000-07:00

The Wild Turkey Tom
By: Ken La Rive © 2001

It has been said that Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey to be our national symbol. Some saw his point. It is a majestic bird. However, I’d hate to eat our freedom’s symbol for Christmas dinner. After all, the greatest nation on earth needs a symbol of strength, like a high flying predator, and a swift hunter and

fisher.

What could be more perfect then an Eagle? It is, in its own realm, the top of the food chain. But I’m sure that in our early history, and I hate to admit, but both the Bald Eagle and the Wild Turkey had a special place at the Colonial table…

The first time I saw a turkey was in Amite, Louisiana, in the middle sixties. I was with a friend visiting relations, and we took a couple of their horses for an afternoon ride. I had a crazy one that seemed to be trying to knock me off by galloping under
low trees. Suddenly, we came upon a large Tom gobbler that took off with the power of Ro-Dan. Its wing spread was awesome, and it flashed with vivid matalic colors in the sun. The trees shook with the wind it made, and then just as suddenly, it was gone. It was powerful and beautiful to behold!

I’ve seen a lot of turkey on the Evangeline trail around Alexander, and also Tunica Hills around St. Francisville. They are not easily seen when you’re walking, unless you surprise them from a distance on a trail’s dogleg. They have keen senses, a fear of man, and a survival savvy. I have heard them gobbling all around me, but seldom do you see one. It sometimes sounds like turkey laughter, but that could be my imagination. The best way to see them is to hide in their back yard, and let them come to you. That takes patience.

I hunt with a camera, not a gun, but in a way we tackle our sport the same way. I just don’t get to eat anything. Here are several observations from experience, and what I’ve heard, but please don’t base your hunting strategy on this…

“Turkeys roost in mostly the same area every night, high in the safety of trees.

“They fly down in the morning at dawn and back up at dusk.”

“Turkeys don’t like the thick of thickets, but open areas where they can see danger coming, and take flight.”

“Turkeys have a problem walking down hill, so they fly down. It probably has something to do with their center of gravity.”

“Turkeys don’t like to cross open water.”

Wildlife managers agree that having turkey in the woods is a sign of a healthy and balanced ecosystem. When factors such as over hunting by men or other predators is kept in check. If food, space, water, and proper shelter are available, the wild turkey will flourish. The turkey needs several different habitats, all in the same proximity, to raise their young successfully. There must be a safe habitat for spring nesting, possibly in a briar thicket, but also close to a clover field. A clover field is a good food source, and a safe brood range for rearing. After the poults are old enough, they will follow the hen anywhere, surviving through the changing seasons.

If the poult can survive the first six weeks it stands a good chance. By that time it is able to roost in the tree with its mother, and is removed from the dangers of ground predators such as raccoons and free ranging dogs. This phase of development is rapid and the young began to develop their adult plumage. Diet
changes from predominately insects, to a higher percentage of plant matter.

By fourteen weeks the males and females are distinguishable by their size and plumage, and the social pecking order for both sexes are formulated. The mama hen is still the boss, until all the males have left the brood. In the fall, the pecking order of the group has been established, and they become absorbed into the social structure of the surrounding population. When winter comes they are separated by sex, age and class, and finally settle into their winter range.

If you want to see a Wild Turkey Tom, there is a large Tom Gobbler walking free in the Acadiana Zoo! He loves to pose. When taking pictures of animals, always try and have the background in shadow, or out of focus. If you are close enough, use a strobe even in bright sunlight. This way there will be no harsh shadows on the subject, and it will stand out with a darker background…

Illeteracy and Corruption equals Louisiana...

2009-05-12T06:27:00.001-07:00

Illiteracy and Corruption equals Louisiana... even for Governor Jendal
By: Ken La Rive

Several Months ago I was invited to a barbeque at an old friend’s house. An older gentleman singled me out saying that some of my writings had been forwarded to him by a mutual friend. He told me he liked my style, and that if I was up for it he had a scoop that I may be interested in for an article. He told me nothing of any substance while we watched the meat burn, but mentioned to me a lot of well known politicians that he told me were corrupt. I was dumbfounded. After thinking about it for several weeks I called him and said I wasn’t interested. The reason was that I just didn’t know much about the subject, and that my previous writings focused mostly on morals and ethics. Truthfully, I thought it was way over my head. One thing rings in my ear though, he said it was just as well, as taking a stand was a dangerous thing to do.

This is the way of a lot of social functions. Men retire to the library, or the veranda, and inevitably the conversation will gravitate to politics. Most of the dialogue is very general, where debate and discussion usually ends in frustration for what is out of control. This was the first time I can ever remember where a person said something will be done. I was very curious to know what he had, and if it wasn’t the beer talking. I look forward to a bit of justice in Louisiana, as time goes by. This is what motivated the article below, and a bit of research. What I found was amazing…

While traveling I find that nearly everyone around the country looks at Louisiana as a joke when it comes to political assessment. They laugh when they talk of us electing a known self admitted criminal, and that we would do so again if he wasn’t in prison. We are thought not only to be the most corrupt, but the most illiterate state in the union. Is that actually true?

In 2002 Chicago’s Better Government Association, (BGA), released what it called “the first independent, comprehensive report on integrity in 50 states.” Integrity here refers to the administration’s ability to promote honesty in the operation of state government and affairs, and the actual strength of the legal system to bring justice and accountability to government officials.

At the time of this publication a fellow by the name of Terrance A. Norton was the Executive Director of BGA. He is quoted in a report released by the Corporate Crime Reporter (CCR), January 16, 2004, National Press Club, Washington, D.C. as saying: “In light of the recent scandals that have engulfed many institutions in the United States, one lesson has been drawn clearly, loose standards, secretiveness and lack of accountability are a recipe for disaster. We wanted to determine which states are best prepared to fight corruption and which are vulnerable.”

In the process of determining just what may be lacking in a State where corruption is ramped, five factors were reveled. One, freedom of information laws; Two, whistleblower protective laws; Three, campaign finance laws such as gifts and promotions from special interest groups; Forth, Monitoring of travel and “honoraria” laws; and Fifth, conflict of interest laws.

Interesting here, as it would seem that Louisiana surely must have these laws in place, and the ability to pursue these laws as well. Here is where it gets confusing. It is stated by CCR that having set standards in place does not insure a State’s officials to be honest and ethical. There seems to be little correlation between enforceable laws and integrity. If in fact a public official has volition to do criminal acts, laws will not thwart him, and getting away with it a matter of willingness by the Federal Government to pursue it.

According to the CCR, Louisiana is considered by the rest of the nation to be one of four most corrupt states in the nation, along with Illinois, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. Is this a bad rap? Is this slander, and if so, where is it coming from?

To help us understand this doldrum let us look at what the Justice Department has to say. It is well known that the Justice Department is very closed lipped when it comes to forwarding information, and their department of Public Affairs gives few meaningful interviews. However, the Justice Department’s Public Integrity section publishes an annual report that gives the number of actual prosecutions as well as convictions by Federal investigative means: (Report to Congress on Activities and Operations of Public Integrity Section for 2002).

In Table III, Public Corruption Convictions by District over the Past Decade, CCP took the total amount of actual convictions by each state, and calculated what they termed a “corruption rate” for every state defined to be the total number of corruption convictions from the year 1993 to 2002 as per 100,000 residents. Let me note here an important finding: The vast majority, as high as 80 percent, have been brought by Federal Authorities. Also, the Justice department reports only federal prosecution, so there is more on the table than meets the eye. A final caveat is that a federal prosecutor may not have the courage to bring to light certain convictions, and that there may also be limited resources to do so. Some public corruption will not be reflected in the Report to Congress, a public record, if it is locally enforced. Why would a Federal Prosecutor be afraid to prosecute?

Still in all, as corruption as the base line, Louisiana comes in third with a CCR rating as 7.05. Mississippi comes in first with a 7.48, and North Dakota second with a 7.09. Along with this there is noted the least corrupt states in the Nation, i.e., Nebraska with .05 wins first place, Oregon .059 being second, and New Hampshire .86 is third.

One state is exempt from this survey, The District of Columbia. They have almost 11 times more corruption then Mississippi, with a rate of 79.33. The District of Columbia is the seat of our federal Government. There were 453 public corruption convictions in the last ten year period. CCP says this is the first ever corruption ranking ever done in the United States, and its results are mind boggling. It is apparent we have a very active and corruptive federal government as well.

It seems that corruption is thwarted most often by citizenry groups, avid and unafraid reporters and unbiased newspapers, not on the take. There seems to only be a handful of these in our state. Strong judges, and moral and civic leaders do more than anything else to promote federal investigations for accountability in government institutions. How ambiguous… where laws are in place but uninforced. Whether the clean up will come from within or without just seems uncertain at this time, however…

I have heard more than once in casual conversation that the Federal Government is looking at Louisiana very closely after Katrina, because of the power struggle over those Federal troops that Governor Blanco had to formally request. In the ensuing argument over control that went on for days, people were suffering and dying without food or water. The Federal Government will not be the fall guy for what inabilities and internal corruption we have in local government, and it is my understanding that as time goes by these inabilities and corruptions that are now under investigation will be fully disclosed to the American people. However, it may be the pot that calls the kettle black. When a light is turned on, even a spot light, the person holding the light is illuminated too.

It seems that Katrina did more harm than any natural disaster ever recorded, but it promises in the long run to be the catalyst to wash out Louisiana corruption for good, or at least for a time. I paid attention while searching for my parents and the slow response was attributed to this: Naquin, a Democrat, backed Jindle, a Republican, in the Governor’s race. Blanco, a Democrat, won, and never forgot what Naquin did. Blanco did not have a channel of communications opened with Bush because of the partisan war between Liberals and Conservatives, which has polarized this country. Blanco had to request Federal Aid, but said she had to do her homework first, to see who would be in control of Federal troops. The Federal Government is in control of Federal Troops, that is the whole idea, and yet for about 4 days the war raged, while hundreds of people perished in the heat. Can’t our leaders set down their own petty differences for the common good? Do they care more for personal gain, welfare, and ego, than for the lives of their fellow Americans?

There is a well known organization based in Berlin who combats international crime and corruption around the world. They are called Transparency International. They too put out a yearly index on perceived corruption, taking an active monitor of 133 countries, giving scores from 0 to 10. Ten is the best. Finland wins hands down with a 9.7, Iceland 9.6, Denmark 9.5, New Zealand 9.5, and Singapore 9.4. Bangladesh is the most corrupt at 1.3, Nigeria 1.4, Paraguay 1.6, and Burma takes the four slot at 1.6.

How did we do? We tied Ireland at 7.5. CCR stated: “Because the Justice Department’s statistics on corruption in the United States have rarely been publicized, the world might not understand the true extent of decay here in the United States.”

They urge that the Justice Department could help curb corruption in the US by increasing its budget for prosecution, and stop withholding information about corruption. “Unshackle the attorneys at the Public Integrity Section and let them speak with reporters and the public about the scourge of public corruption in the United States.”

Should we be ashamed of ourselves here in Louisiana? You bet. It’s not so much that we are the laughing stock of the nation, but that we actually harbor criminals in our system of government. You may be different, but collectively, Louisiana voters are in the Twilight Zone. Louisiana voters know politicians are corrupt and vote for them anyway. Is it possible they vote for them because they are corrupt too, and actually identify with them? Perhaps they are too busy to do the homework necessary to understand what a politician stands for. Perhaps their vote is as shallow as the color of a man’s face, or just vote the party line they knew when their fathers were paying attention fifty years ago. Perhaps they hope that those promises are true, and that their crooked politicians will throw a few crumbs their way, simply because they are from the same city. Louisiana is a joke, mostly, because the majority of our voters are.

The billions given for Katrina relief are not accountable to the Feds. It is in the hands of those whose past is questionable, by deeds, by family ties, and by association. The promised portion of the monies for gambling was originally earmarked for the improvement of our school systems, also ranked second to last in the nation. What happened, and what has changed? Even our TOPS program, one of the few places our kids could compete on a level playing field without race, or economic standing getting in the way, is in jeopardy. Only Mississippi beats us as having the most illiterates, with the least progressive school system found in all the US. Perhaps if a greater part of Louisiana voters knew how to read, they would know better how to vote! Perhaps if a voter’s guide was the ten commandments they would be more selective! Is it possible there is a correlation between literacy and who we have in office? Makes ya’ darn proud, doesn’t it? Golly, we sure do shine!

Laying both Evil and Love on the table...

2009-05-11T20:22:00.000-07:00

Laying Both Evil and Love on the Table…

We let a lot slide past us. It seems that we can’t focus on the insipid side of life for very long. The gloomy parts make us too uncomfortable. It is a survival technique we have developed while throwing rotten bones out of our cave, running with firebrands as an entire herd galloped to their death over a cliff, or cutting down the last tree in the little vale we have made home for one last cooking fire. It is the justification for what we do, or don’t do, that I will discuss here.

In order to keep our sanity in a frightening and irrational world, we have learned to keep our perspectives a bit out of reach, a bit out of focus, so that responsibility doesn’t choke us into doing something rash, or rational, like caring enough to take a stand. Taking a stand today as it was in those days, can be very dangerous. Laughter was created as a pressure valve for what we could not control, and sometimes used in place of action. Tears helped too, for what out of control horror we experienced. Can you imagine what life must have been like before we incorporated moral value into our social consciousness? What makes us civil, is the attempt at managing the balance of right and wrong, and it goes back all the way to the Garden of Eden...

We all know that in just one generation our world is closing in upon itself. It is shrinking, as everything we do is becoming more and more significant. Pollution is taking its toll on all life forms, with hourly extinctions, and human overpopulation eats up resources far faster then they are being replenished. It seems that we barely care for tomorrow, as little or nothing is put back to stabilize it for the future. Few get involved, seek to make a positive contribution, or even attempt to understand the repercussions of our actions. We can manage to enjoy a glass of wine, watch a movie, hug our children, and not get caught up, for the same general reasons our ancestors did. It seems simple to most: Why should we when someone else will carry the load? It is just too much trouble to get involved, and we don’t want to stir up a bunch of problems, I might be labeled as some extremist liberal do-gooder. We will do anything to justify our noninvolvement. Eat, drink, and be merry, while right outside our realm of existence there may be horrors too vivid to focus on, like finding out that we have seven times more radiation in our atmosphere then before we started testing…

It would only take about a hundred nuclear bombs to destroy the earth entirely, but we have tens of thousands of warheads poised. We have the know-how to feed every person on earth, but there are estimates that a million people a year die of starvation, and more then a billion are grossly undernourished. Here in America, cancers grow along with our new sedentary life style, and with synthetically processed low quality foods we are becoming a nation of fat and physically lazy people. Compare you’re eighth grade class pictures with your child’s eighth grade class picture, and you will see what I mean.

In underdeveloped third world countries people are dying from disease easily cured for a generation here in North America, like the parasites of roundworm, hookworm, and whipworm. Leprosy and tuberculosis, yellow fever, polio, and measles go unvaccinated and even more simply cured diseases like whooping cough, diphtheria, and tetanus kills millions upon millions of children every year. I hear some say this is a form of birth control. If you do, shame on you.

Here, more children are born out of wedlock then ever before in recorded history, and the breakdown of the family unit is causing many of our social ills. Violent crime, and the use of drugs and addictions in its many forms are symptoms of an ailing society. Irresponsibility for our actions in a nation where freedom is understood to mean socialism, or the fair balance of production distribution by a welfare system that gives peanuts in exchange for pride, for three generations.

Here, our classrooms tend to isolate our children from the real world. They are given little or no responsibilities, and few see themselves in relation to what is out there. Incompetence is expected because most teachers have their hands tied. The system has no clue what demands this “New World” will place on their wards. Those teachers who do are trapped in an outdated bureaucracy, and both low recompense and blatant lack of insight squelch the motivation for change. Classes, like world history, economics, algebra, and English literature, are taught to be separate from each other, and its overall significance and effect to their lives overlooked. Consequence and motivation should be taught first, not in hindsight! The same points are instructed over and over again for twelve years, or more, because it’s intangible irrelevance to the student’s life just doesn’t fuse!

In our society, more often then not, it is whom you know and not what you know that gets you ahead. Betrayal of a spouse is common place, and divorce is easy. Those who have been convicted of murder, rape, child molestation, and any number of hanus crimes can become a millionaire in the confines of prison by having their thoughts published by a ghostwriter.

Abortion, even partial birth abortion, is practiced as an easy out, thwarting responsibility. According to Spencer Johnson M.D., more then one hundred million lawsuits are filed each year. Even when the individual is in the wrong, some get very rich. Like parasites, they take from the ethical economic potency that makes this country strong. Values that have held our society together, was once the backbone of out nation. They were developed, tried and true over generations, but are now discarded as frivolous and outdated; replaced by new age ethnic and skin-headed violent meaninglessness. When one tears down establishment as subjective and relative, life becomes worthless in the process. For a few dollars, a credit card, a handful of pills, or just a pair of tennis shoes, a person’s entire life can be forfeited to a drug addict.

There is a paradoxical commitment, a freedom if you will, that can triumph over these walls we hide behind. We feel safe, but just the opposite is true. They lock us in, and we are slaves to a world moving fast and without foundation. It can free us, and the answer is indeed so beautifully unpretentious, so overstated, that we tend to reduce its importance. It is called, in a nutshell, pure and simple …love. It unlocks the gate, and frees the spirit. With love in your hearts, a whole new insight presents itself. Suddenly, those you once perceived as enemies, are tolerated and understood, and you are free of the hate-full clutches that held your heart in check, and tainted and controlled your feelings. With love, what you have lost will be built again…

My answers are not yours. Not entirely. Each life has a reality all its own, and answers developed by experiences special to that life alone. However, one thing is universal. One point unifies us all into the single common ground that is humanity. Love. Embrace it. You will be untiring, directed, and its volition will promote you and guide you along the way as nothing else will. It is the one true purpose, and is the best reason for being…

Love is unselfish, constant, and delights us with something nothing else can …joy. It will fill us with hope, and a newfound strength that can not be broken. With love in our hearts, for ourselves, and the world, we have wings that will take us higher and farther then we ever thought possible, and the problems that once plagued us no longer have meaning. Our spirits will grow in the bounty of its light, and peace will fill us with the knowledge of its goodness. We will see the ties that bind us to this beautiful earth, and we will become one with it. With love, this powerful insight will catapult you forward without fear, and obstacles will part for you to pass, because you will know where you are going.

Alternatives, and the growing energy demand...

2009-05-11T20:00:00.000-07:00

Alternatives, and the growing energy demand…
2008

Agricultural lobbyists have been working overtime giving away yellow t-shirts. They want to take a part of the action from the oil and gas industry, with guarantees to make us more independent of imports. In their corner is a product called Ethanol, made from good old USA corn. Sure enough, Ethanol is a promising contender to other alternative energy sources, including Methanol, Compressed Natural Gas, Biodiesel, and Hydrogen fuel cells. Ethanol was probably in the mind of President Bush when he spoke of alternative fuels in his address last February, and though it looks to be at the head of the class, there is still a lot to consider, especially over the long term.

One amazing statistic is that one acre of corn can produce about 300 US gallons of ethanol annually. America uses 200 billion gallons of a wide assortment of petroleum products every year, a staggering amount. To compensate, American farmers would have to dedicate 71 percent of our nation’s farm land for the growing of corn. This makes it clear that corn-ethanol will not kick fossil fuels out of the ball park any time soon, but it’s a start. To make a real dent, all alternative fuels will have to be considered.

Ethanol is grain alcohol, or ethyl alcohol. Just like hooch, almost all ethanol is made from grain. Corn is just one alternative, as anything of a cellulous base could be used including rice that is utilized to make Sake, or sugar cane for the making of rum. We have a grand supply of both here in Louisiana. We should be going after a bit of that action, and here’s why. According to this month’s Popular Mechanics, The Renewable Fuels Association is stating that the 95 existing ethanol refineries have produced more than 4.3 billion gallons of ethanol in 2005, and there is proposed an additional 40 more refineries stepping up to the plate. In the next 18 months it is projected that they will produce 6.3 billion gallons, a mere three percent of our total US consumption. Room for growth? You bet, but let’s take a bit of a look at the contenders.

Methanol is methyl alcohol, or wood alcohol. At this time almost all Methanol is a byproduct of Natural Gas, but it can be produced from a wide variety of sources from coal or biogas that is fermented organic matter. Even sewage and various manures can be used. It is an expensive distillation process at this time, and using methanol from Natural Gas still increases CO2, the main component to the greenhouse effect, and global warming. Interestingly, there may be use yet for the plants here in the south that are causing havoc on indigenous ecosystems, like the various South American water plants choking our waterways, and that Chinese vine strangling our Mississippi forests. Perhaps this would be a good potential for them.

Natural Gas can be used in some forms of internal combustion engines, as compressed natural gas, or CNG. Natural gas is a petroleum product extracted underground by drilling. The methane part is the majority of the distillate pie, with butane and propane taking up the rest. Distillation is necessary to rid the gas of contaminates. The Honda Civic GX is the only car in America that can use CNG. Honda states the exhaust is cleaner than air from some heavily polluted areas. Makes you think.

As close as I am to the oil industry, I can’t tell if the price of oil is based on supply and demand, or coercion. There is no doubt that growing world needs like China moving from a bicycle society to a moped society, taps into this finite resource. Demand for natural gas is growing primarily from its use in generating electricity. Oilmen agree that domestic natural gas will not keep up with demand, and the US needs to have access to the worlds abundant supplies, imported in the form of LNG, or Liquefied Natural Gas. Converted to a liquid state by cooling, natural gas is greatly reduced in volume, making it very economical to ship.

When I first got in the business 27 years ago, we flared nearly all natural gas, and saw Mexico light up the gulf from the first pictures taken in space. That’s all about to change. A new terminal in Cheniere, Louisiana, will be on line soon called Liquefied Natural Gas, LNG is the ticker symbol. They will be able to accept natural gas that has been chilled to a liquid and bring it back to its natural state for transport in pipelines.

Biodiesel is actually diesel made from oils other than petroleum. Extraction comes mostly from sources like vegetable oil, or even chicken fat. This would be an excellent way to recycle our old fry oils which costs a lot to dispose of. The first display of what diesel could do was at the 1900 Paris World Exposition where Rudolf Diesel ran an engine on refined peanut oil. Processing is called transesterification where contaminants such as glycerin are extracted.

Diesel engines don’t use a spark plug for ignition. High compression in the cylinder raises the temperature high enough for ignition, which makes it more efficient and tolerant of various sources of fuel. Biodiesel and Petrodiesel have virtually the same BTU burn, between 120,000 and 130,000. Unfortuanately, at this time the process to make Biodiesel is about a dollar more than Petro. Give it some time. Either the cost of gas will rise, or Biodiesel will fall. The future will someday merge.

A most exciting alternative is Hydrogen. When finally we develop hydrogen fuel cells and an internal combustion engine to go with it, we will at last be able to make a dent in fossil fuel dependence. Skies will turn blue, our cheeks rosy, and our 120 years of lead poisoning will be a bad dream explained in history books.

Extracting hydrogen is as easy as running a current through water, but not yet cost effective. Oxygen is a byproduct too, and we can always find a use for that! But let’s not put the cart before the horse, as experts say it may be 15 or more years before an efficient hydrogen fuel cell will be completed, and car companies are working on an engine. Note* I remember reading about oil companies, or the government, buying newly invented fuel cells forty years ago, and though I wouldn’t doubt it a bit, it has never been proven. Fact is, hydrogen would be the ultimate fuel source where one could use his garden hose, or even his old cup of coffee to fill his tank, and it would last for months. Emissions would be oxygen and water. Wow!

These alternatives have a long road ahead going toe to toe with Petroleum. As demand goes up and sources go down, new varieties will have to be found. It is exciting times, and we will soon see some wonderful breakthroughs that hold the promise for changing our lives, and the world, in a positive way. One thing is certain; it will be a complicated state of affairs with failure and success at every turn. Alternative fuels will chip away at Petroleum for a hundred or more years, and probably never completely replace it, but the quality of our children’s lives will improve in ways we can’t yet fathom, at least that is the game plan. It has always been this way; our imagination is the only thing holding us back.

High Crude Oil Prices: quick reference summation
1) Restricted and competitive world supplies.
a) Political instability in oil rich nations like Nigeria and Venezuela.
b) OPEC’s valve is wide open. Saudi now producing 50/50 oil/saltwater. No longer has control over world supply.
c) Low European inventories and escalating prices.
2) Strong global demand like China and India.
3) High transportation rates across the board, both internationally and domestically.
4) Record refinery production but constrained capacity growth by both government restrictions and hurricane damage.
5) Political, like “Not in my backyard,” attitudes from states like Florida and California.
6) Low reported rate of return for refineries.
7) Strong demand growth. (Supply not keeping up with demand.)
a) Growing US economy.
b) Large car growth.
8) Environmental: New government mandated specifications.
9) Government specifications on fuel.

Big Brother in 2007

2009-05-11T19:53:00.000-07:00

Big Brother in 2007

I remember when the book 1984 was required reading in High School. At university it was discussed and mentioned many times to make a point: that the masses can be controlled both physically and mentally.

The kids in my neighborhood haven’t even heard of it, and that concerns me. Who is big brother, how can you recognize him, and why has he been forgotten?

Know first off that mind control exists, and in the sixties and seventies this consideration seemed very important, especially after what we saw in Nazi Germany. “Big Brother” was real…

It is a given that television, and the media at large, promotes agendas, their specific agendas, with money as the primary guiding force. There are enough people around to support the most graphic violence, and the most sadistic of sex. Why it is so difficult to counter? It sells.

So twisted are mainstream thoughts that kids might be allowed to watch a woman shot in her breasts, but not be allowed to watch her have sex.

Movies like “Sin City,” “Kill Bill,” and the new blockbuster hit “300” is a testament to a new kind of ultra violence, so well orquestrated and received. Based in reality? Surely, someone must have ridden a rhinoceros into battle at least once?

No, they are hits because they are entertaining to the masses. They enlist that perverse violent/sexual nature found deep in man. It is the reason “The American Way” was left out of Superman, it just didn’t promote well overseas. They gave up America for the almighty buck!

Black men drinking in wild-west bars, straddling cowgirls in blue jeans, quick draw Sherriff’s, and “Sundance” heroes, have nothing to do with reality, or history, but promotion of an idea. Big Brother is good with ideas, and though they may seem both imaginative and original, their primary use is to sell, an action figure, a t-shirt, an idea.

Big Brother blinds us from remembering where we came from, with uncertainty of what we are becoming. Metro-sexual men with no clear rite of passage grapple with the ambiguity of who they are, and women, once strong and amoral, submit to the allure of a Big Brother pitch without questioning why. Both find the other confusing and adversarial, and the reason 50 percent of marriages hit a wall.

It isn’t in vogue to mention that only Love can see us through. If our motives aren’t inspired by Love, they just aren’t very worthy. Oh Brother, what a concept!

Letter to Keith Patin

2009-05-11T15:24:00.000-07:00

Dear Keith Patin,

My last letter to you might have seemed strong. I assure you I held a lot back. I know all too well the red tape you must go through to present a request, much less complete a project in the name of Consolidated Government.

I was asked to contact you, and I did it with mixed emotions. With a somewhat naive optimism, being new to the area, I was confidently set to see this through. The importance of securing this area from negative influences manifesting themselves unchecked seemed a worthwhile cause. I told my neighbors that surely if the proper authorities would be contacted the years of neglect and overt danger in this area could and would be averted.

One predominate negative was the overwhelming sentiment by them that our duress and subsequent requests would continue to be ignored, based on previous attempts by others. I found that to be incredulous, but now see the point well taken, as no American citizen should have to request safety. It should be freely given. You emphatically told me something would be done, and I took you at your word.

Though patience is considered a virtue, it is not one of my primary graces, and is indeed a failing. Surly with something of such high importance, security, it can be forgiven. Nearly nine months has elapsed since you first came to my home with your ideas, and to me that is a long time to wait for such a benefit.

You disregarded the collective thoughts of our subdivision which I proposed to you in their name. From the start I saw a flaw in your answers, and you took offence to my questioning them. With a bit of condescension you told me that you emphatically knew that a sign indicating a camera would be “laughable” to those who use the area for illegal activity. You told me also that you had “scoped” the area yourself and saw a man who fit the description of a “pedophiliac.” Never-the-less, I thought you to be serious and decided to trust you, telling everyone in a newsletter that you were on the job, and that our long wait was over.

It is not normal to be afraid of the dark Sir, and what dangers it will bring. It is not normal to have leaders who play lip-service, make promises, and use disparagement for the very real and long standing concerns of the community. It is no reason why these hooligans thumb their noses at authority, and why honest and hardworking citizens would scoff at the idea you could help. With music blaring and headlights on high they have completed the job of grotesque art, and it is full of hate, lusts for violence and sex, and a complete disregard for you, our representative authority. This is a mockery Mr. Patin, of our very society, and the values we hold dear...

Perhaps you should find items like used prophylactics, needles, beer cans, paper bags of fast food discards, and empty cans of paint on your front yard. A ‘dough-nut” on your front lawn might prove a point, and make you more empathetic. But I hope you never have to deal with this...

I know all too well the signs of a neighborhood in trouble. Being from New Orleans I watched as a young man my world disintegrate by lawlessness and so called leaders who were out of touch with reality and accountability. Because of that I moved to Crowley to raise my family, and have now moved to Lafayette where I see Acadiana to be the finest place in Louisiana to live.

I am very reluctant to see this area so disrespected, so emphatically unappreciated, with solutions so easily acquired.
Lighting the dark, recording what goes on, even periodically, with signs that do not take away our civil liberties in the process is not too much to ask after many years of authoritative failure, as you indeed represent leadership, and yes accountability too. Is painting over the graffiti too expensive? Perhaps we could take up a collection? Surely that couldn’t be more absurd then your suggestion to have the Boy Scouts do it.

You are indeed responsible too Mr. Patin, and if you do not relish that responsibility, please pass the baton on to someone who does. Something very bad is poised to happen under that the Camellia Bridge. It is bound to unless someone with the power to implement what is necessary steps forward.

Earnestly,

Ken LaRive

P.S. Since my last letter a young drug user who lived across the street from my home broke into my home while I was upstairs. Holding a gun on him I ordered him out of my bedroom and home. It took four police officers ten minutes to subdue him in front of my home. It was found he was on a wide variety of drugs, and has several charges on him and a court date coming up where I am to be subpoenaed. I would have been in my rights to have shot this man, but had the good sense to gauge the situation and look for an alternative. If this doesn’t indicate a change in our subdivision, nothing will.

99 Libertarian Quotes

2009-05-11T10:02:00.000-07:00

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul, can always count on the support of Paul. â€“ George Bernard Shaw

America needs fewer laws, not more prisons. â€“ James Bovard
War is just one more big government program. â€“ Joseph Sobran
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. â€“ John Adams (1814)

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. â€“ Benjamin Franklin

One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation. â€“ Thomas B. Reed (1886)

If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all. â€“ Jacob Hornberger (1995)

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. â€“ P.J. O’Rourke

The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates. â€“ Tacitus

Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. â€“ George Washington

No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session. â€“ Mark Twain (1866)

There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him. â€“ Robert Heinlein

The true danger is when Liberty is nibbled away, for expedients. â€“ Edmund Burke (1899)

Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none. â€“ Thomas Jefferson

The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society. â€“ Mark Skousen

A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government. â€“ Thomas Jefferson (1801)
The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it. â€“ John Hay (1872)

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. â€“ James Bovard (1994)

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. â€“ Thomas Jefferson

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty. â€“ Thomas Jefferson

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. â€“ Goethe

When the government’s boot is on your throat, whether it is a left boot or a right boot is of no consequence. â€“ Gary Lloyd

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. â€“ H.L. Mencken

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. â€“ H.L. Mencken

It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve. â€“ Henry George

Where morality is present, laws are unnecessary. Without morality, laws are unenforceable. â€“ Anonymous

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. â€“ Barry Goldwater (1964)
Liberty is not a means to a political end. It is itself the highest political end. â€“ Lord Acton

The power to tax is the power to destroy. â€“ John Marshall
[On ancient Athens]: In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all â€“ security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again. â€“ Edward Gibbon

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. â€“ C. S. Lewis

Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property. â€“ Lysander Spooner

In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning, and cruelty. â€“ Leo Tolstoy

There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws. â€“ Ayn Rand

If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen. â€“ Samuel Adams

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too. â€“ Somerset Maugham

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. â€“ Alexander Tytler
A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. â€“ G. Gordon Liddy

The United States is a nation of laws, badly written and randomly enforced. â€“ Frank Zappa

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it. â€“ Justice Learned Hand

It is sobering to reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence. â€“ Charles A. Beard

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. â€“ Edward R. Murrow

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. â€“ Thomas Jefferson (1781)

The desire to rule is the mother of heresies. â€“ St. John Chrysostom

Can our form of government, our system of justice, survive if one can be denied a freedom because he might abuse it? â€“ Harlon Carter

It is not the responsibility of the government or the legal system to protect a citizen from himself. â€“ Justice Casey Percell
No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words “no” and “not” employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights. â€“ Edmund A. Opitz
The government was set to protect man from criminals â€“ and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government. â€“ Ayn Rand

The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin. â€“ Mark Twain

What this country needs are more unemployed politicians. â€“ Edward Langley

I believe that every individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruits of his labor, so far as it in no way interferes with any other men’s rights. â€“ Abraham Lincoln
Those who expect to reap the benefits of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it. â€“ Thomas Paine

Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have. â€“ Harry Emerson Fosdick

The state in which the rulers are the most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed; and the state in which they are the most eager, the worst. â€“ Anonymous

It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones. â€“ Calvin Coolidge

To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical. â€“ Thomas Jefferson

It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. â€“ Voltaire

The war for freedom will never really be won because the price of our freedom is constant vigilance over ourselves and over our Government. â€“ Eleanor Roosevelt

Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt. â€“ Herbert Hoover

Give me liberty or give me death! â€“ Patrick Henry

First they came for the Jews, but I did nothing because I’m not a Jew. Then they came for the socialists, but I did nothing because I’m not a socialist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I did nothing because I’m not a Catholic. Finally, they came for me, but by then there was no one left to help me. â€“ Pastor Father Niemoller (1946)

Government at its best is a necessary evil, and at its worst, an intolerant one. â€“ Thomas Paine

There’s never been a good government. â€“ Emma Goldman
We must have government, but we must watch them like a hawk. â€“ Millicent Fenwick (1983)

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws. â€“ Montesquieu
A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them. â€“ P. J. O’Rourke

Government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. â€“ Henry David Thoreau
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. â€“ Mark Twain
There is no distinctly native American criminal class save Congress. â€“ Mark Twain

Talk is cheap â€“ except when Congress does it. â€“ Cullen Hightower

You cannot adopt politics as a profession and remain honest. â€“ Ambrose Gwinett Bierce

[Political] offices are as acceptable here as elsewhere, and whenever a man cast a longing eye on them, a rottenness begins in his conduct. â€“ Thomas Jefferson (1799)

The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it’s so rare. â€“ Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1976)

The most fundamental purpose of government is defense, not empire. â€“ Joseph Sobran (1995)

Governments harangue about deficits to get more revenue so they can spend more. â€“ Allan H. Meltzer (1993)

When important issues affecting the life of an individual are decided by somebody else, it makes no difference to the individual whether that somebody else is a king, a dictator, or society at large. â€“ James Taggart (1992)

No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power. â€“ P. J. O’Rourke (1992)

Here’s your enemy for this week, the government says. And some gullible Americans click their heels and salute â€“ often without knowing who or even where the enemy of the week is. â€“ Charley Reese (1998)

The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another. â€“ Milton Friedman

The best government is the one that charges you the least blackmail for leaving you alone. â€“ Thomas Rudmose-Brown (1996)

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free. â€“ P.J. O’Rourke (1993)

The Government is like a baby’s alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other. â€“ Ronald Reagan

Americans have the right and advantage of being armed â€“ unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. â€“ James Madison
The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals â€¦ It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of. â€“ Albert Gallatin (1789)

The Constitution shall never be construed â€¦ to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms. â€“ Samuel Adams

I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it. â€“ Alexis De Toqueville

I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. â€“ Thomas Jefferson (1800)

I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy â€“ but that could change. â€“ Al Gore

If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law. â€“ Winston Churchill

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom. â€“ Charles Peguy

The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people. â€“ George Washington
A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer’s hand. â€“ Lucius Annaeus Seneca, c. 4BC - 65AD.

He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one. â€“ the Bible, Luke 22:36.

Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest. â€“ Mahatma Gandhi, in Gandhi, An Autobiography, p. 446

Whenever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to ensure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery. â€“ Benjamin Disraeli, 1874

These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations. â€“ UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 29(3).
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery. â€“ Winston Churchill

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences. â€“ P.J. O’Rourke (1993)

Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. â€“ Ronald Reagan (1986)

America's Beacon of Light...

2009-05-03T13:17:00.000-07:00

America’s Beacon of Light…
By: Ken La Rive

I remember my father in law, God rest his soul, as being a highly political activist. I think that one of his biggest disappointments in me was the fact that I cared little for it then. I wanted nothing but to look at life through Kodacolor film, and I thought it was far too difficult and ambiguous to be worthwhile. As I got older and saw the severity of the world, the realization that the only way to change something was to get involved became very apparent. And then, I see that what we are as a nation, that is, how we think, and the way we perceive the world, is filtered through a belief system that is sometimes tainted by our own bias and prejudice, and then I never understood the saying ‘America, right or wrong.’ If we are to engage with an enemy, we must think of ourselves as being right, and I know that even the minor skirmishes of high school is a testament to this. I never won a fight where I knew I was wrong. So too, if we engage our forces for the good of America only, without regard to who is hurt, those innocents who suffer is the blood on our hands.

I love America, and the idea of America and its Constitution that materialized from our founding father’s dream. It is indeed the closest to true democracy any nation has ever come to in this world. Those here in Scotland tell me that Americans are known to be a warm and generous people, confident in the knowledge that they are free citizens in the greatest nation on earth, and that America is founded on the principles of democracy and freedom of the individual. Our borders are open, our security lax, because we trust that we are perceived to be a precious jewel, and a beacon of light for the rest of the world. As I was caught on the outside looking in when this horror hit America, I saw it from a different perspective. I would like to share it with you…

Imagine a situation where terrorist action kills a large number of people, and that these terrorists are sponsored and financed by a foreign state. Most would agree that the country that has lost its citizens would be justified in treating the terrorist action as an act of war by the foreign state, and in taking reprisal action against that foreign state.

Now change the situation just slightly. Suppose that it was not a state that financed the terrorists, but individuals who, running contrary to their country’s attitude to the terrorist group, gave financial aid to that terrorist organization, who then used this money to purchase the material necessary to commit the terrorist act. What should the offended-against country do in this situation? It is debatable whether they should treat the atrocity as an act of war by the financiers’ country. Would they be justified in sending in delta force style troops to assassinate the financiers? (Brace yourself!)

Would the British government be justified in sending assassins to the US, taking out American citizens who actively raised money for the Irish Republican Army, under the various guises that this organization uses in America? Now I have heard that some Irish Americans were duped into donating money, not understanding that the funding was for the overthrow of the British Government there. But I am assured here that most there knew full well what they were doing, and then, ignorance is no excuse, even if the lie was bold-faced.

The US government could attack Afghanistan, in order to ‘get’ Osama Bin Laden, and punish the Afghan people for allowing him to spew out his hatred of America, (which amendment to the US constitution was it that protected free speech again?). But is it right for Americans to exercise their right to free speech by openly supporting a terrorist organization in the UK, with an amendment to the Constitution protecting their right to do so, but wrong for Afghans to exercise their right to free speech by listening to, and even agreeing with, Osama Bin Laden??

It could be argued that the USA’s blind support for the actions of the Israeli government has stimulated and created that government’s complete disregard for the rule of law when it comes to Palestinians individual rights and freedoms, and has allowed the moderate voices of most Muslims to be drowned out by the shout of militant terrorists. It cannot be right that Israel replies to acts of terrorism with illegal incursions into Palestine. No arraignment of suspects, no trial, no guilty verdict, just an eye for an eye, and somebody, anybody, in Palestine dies at the hand of the Israeli army acting under the orders of a legally constituted government. Every time a Palestinian farmer is peremptorily pushed off his land by the Israeli military to make room for yet another Israeli settlement (against United Nations Resolutions), another possible suicide bomber is recruited by Hamas!

No matter how we see it, the people who flew those airplanes into the World Trade Center felt completely justified in their own minds to do it. I believe that these acts were barbarous and directly against the teachings of the faith that these people profess, however, we need to understand the reasoning and the justification that drives these people. It is evident to me that we should first attempt to know the mind of our enemies, as indeed they are, before a correct reaction is formulated. At this point we should use our heads instead of our bombs, as it should be evident to all by now while looking at the actions of Israel, where each act of terrorism is followed by government sponsored reprisal, only leads to more Israelis dying from yet another suicide bomber.

America should certainly use its vast intelligence organizations to gather evidence against the organizers of these terrible acts and to bring them to justice. What would be unacceptable to the rest of the world would be for the US to use its awesome weaponry to bomb a foreign country in the hope that they ‘get’ the perpetrators, with zero risk to American personnel, and hideous risk to the innocent populous of that country. The temptation to use overwhelming force is almost irresistible, but we should beware of the consequences for the people of America. The mujahadeen of Afghanistan resisted the full might of the Russian army for many years with fanatical dedication, and would go to any length to exact revenge for an attack on their country. If America is not to become a fortress, with much greater security and limitations on personal freedom than now exist, there can be no guarantees against a recurrence of a tragedy similar to that of recent times.

There are no easy solutions to this problem of world terrorism, but lack of military action does not equate with weakness. Lack of proper investigation and police work to determine who the organizers are, and the absence of ensuing prosecution of the perpetrators, would certainly show weakness. Consideration should also be given to the idea that any guilty parties should be tried for crimes against humanity in The Hague, with the war crimes tribunal acting as the court. This would give the fanatics no cause to blame America for any convictions and would show them that the whole world condemned their actions and that it wasn’t just America acting like the school playground bully, as is thought in parts of the world. For this to happen, America would have to subscribe fully to the idea of world justice, and allow its own citizens to be tried, if guilty of crimes against humanity, in this same court.

Americans have got to learn to have trust in this system of world justice, which, at the moment, can apply to all citizens of the world apart from a few rogue states – and America, who do not recognize the court. The world is now a global village, and we depend on one another. If this world is not to descend into total war and barbarism (which would suit these terrorists), we need someone to take a lead, and to act in a way that is rational and just. Jesus said, “Forgive those who offend against you”. This does not preclude the use of justice, but does preclude revenge.

The relatives of the dead are grieving. Their hurt is almost unbearable. Just like Palestinian and Israeli mothers grieving over their dead children and husbands, they must inevitably be angry, and wish for revenge. But, as we ask the Palestinian and Israeli mothers to put aside their grief, in order to try and break the dreary cycle of violence, we must also ask the grieving American relatives to take pause before embarking on a course of action, which will, as sure as the sun rises with the morning, lead to greater and greater hurt. Ask the people of Northern Ireland, whether they prefer the compromise that now exists in that country between the warring factions, to the dreadful bomb-filled days of yesteryear.