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| A blatant pimping of my new blog ...
I've added ALL of you on my new blog at les_ecrits. But I noticed a lot of you haven't added me back.
Well... I don't want to have to log in to arwen to read your protected stuff  Annndddd... the new blog so far is better than this old one, so add it! | | |
| ---PROTECTED---And unfortunately, I am not a paying subscriber, so the number of people I can add to my protected list is very limited. However, I've added most of you guys to my new, public blog at www.xanga.com/les_ecrits. Please feel free to amble on over there.
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| It's snowing???
Yup. It's June 7, and it is snowing.
That's Colorado for you. Thundersnows that don't stick, and the next day's beautiful and in the 70s.
Anyway, I figured I would scattershoot (as opposed to blog), a la Scott Stanford, Pilot & Today editor.
When column writers find themselves in such a crunch, they
inherently fall back on the faithful standby — the notes column. Sports
columnist Blackie Sherrod has built a career at the Dallas Morning News
using this method. He calls it scattershooting.
— Scott Stanford, "Scattershooting after Day of Caring"
Teen kidnapped 
Take a good look at this photograph. Kelsey Smith, 18, was kidnapped from a Target store parking lot, murdered, and her body dumped 20 minutes away. The story on CNN: Police arrest suspect in missing teen case.
The Target she was kidnapped from? 5 minutes from my parents' house, and across the street from the mall I grew up shopping at, and always hit when I go home to visit my parents.
My brother went to school with this girl. I haven't talked to him about it, but Mum says he didn't know her personally, but he knew who she was.
When something like this happens practically in your backyard, in your hometown, in your school district, you can't help but feel it's a bit more personal. And the nearness of the crime just drives home how stupid the whole situation is. I don't believe in evil, as in people having the potential to be evil, but it's beyond me how people can willingly take someone else's life. With premeditation, to boot. Who can possibly believe they have the right and power to decide to have their way with another human being and discard them like garbage?
Some people would say this is a prime example of how our society is going to hell in a handbasket. I say, things like this have been happening since the dawn of mankind. We fool ourselves into believing we are a highly developed, highly civilized society, and we take such pride in it. But you know we really aren't all that civilized when certain members of our society are capable of and choose to act like they're Neanderthals, Romans, Goths, Vikings and Normans, to name a few examples just because I'm a dummy when it comes to more modern history. After all, the oh-so-civilized Romans swept down and kidnapped and raped a group of Sabine women, and centuries later were fornicating with their siblings while watching gladiators kill each other or Christians being fed to the lions. And we call that period the dawn of civilization.
We can't even reject the few aberrations and remove them from society, because they aren't that few, and they aren't aberrations. I wouldn't even call them 'throwbacks' to lesser-civilized days of humankind, because there have always been people like that, and there will continue to be people like that long into the future because it's part of human nature, and animal nature, and as much as we try to stamp it out, we're still pretty uncivilized.
God hits the campaign trailFrom Anderson Cooper 360: "God hits the campaign trail"
"This week, the campaign trail turned into an old-fashioned camp
meeting, with Republicans and Democrats alike declaring Jesus Christ as
their personal savior.
At the Sojourners Conference on Monday,
Hillary Clinton and John Edwards gave deeply personal testimonies of
how the Lord saw them through their darkest hours. At last night's
Republican debate, Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, an ordained Baptist
minister, delivered a moving sermon on the glory of creation. John
McCain spoke about the "hand of God" moving in the world today. And
Mitt Romney, the only Mormon in the contest, said no man would tear him
from his church."
Am I missing something here? I don't recall flunking American Government my senior year of high school. But what I do recall amidst the dim haze of those few final months before graduation is a key phrase: "Separation of church and state."
As unreliable as Wikipedia's reputed to be, I'll quote it here anyway: "Separation of church and state is a political and legal doctrine which states that government and religious
institutions are to be kept separate and independent of one another.
The term most often refers to the combination of two principles: secularity of government and freedom of religious exercise." There you have it. So... WHY are we electing presidents on the basis of their religion, or being told indirectly that we should? We are
supposed to have a secular government, separate from religious
institutions. So, why are all the GOP and Democratic presidential contenders acting like the electorate's supposed to take the intensity of their religious fervor into account when we go to the polls a year and a half from now?
We as responsible, citizen voters should be voting for the person we think has the best leadership ability to guide our country for the next four years, not the person we think has the best evangelical skills or the closest connection to God. If America is a melting pot, a mixed salad, however you want to call it, of peoples, races, socioeconomic classes and religions, then we need a leader who can create bridges to all sections and segments of our country, not ignore and alienate some because they want to reach out to the 1 out of 4 voters who are evangelical Christians.
Sorry if this is news to some of you, but this country is NOT a quarter evangelical Christian. Again, referring to Wikipedia here, in 2001, 79.8 percent of American adults reported being Christian. But when you consider all the different sects and denominations that make up 'Christian' — Catholics, Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, Protestants, Presbyterians, Pentecostal, Episcopalians, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, et cetera et cetera — and then consider how many people report themselves Christian on the census, but actually don't go to church all that often. Maybe once a month. Maybe only on holidays like Easter and Christmas. Or maybe they go, but they just go to maintain appearances, or to ensure their children get 'proper' upbringing. Or maybe they go, and are truly devotional, but don't mix religion and politics. Or maybe they actually never go, but know their mama would roll over in her grave if they wrote atheist/agnostic/nonchurchgoing on their census form, so they profess themselves Christian.
Bottom line, 1 out of 4 voters are evangelical Christians, but not 1 out of 4 Americans. What is wrong with this picture??
I'm all for voting for a candidate who most closely agrees with your moral beliefs and tenets. That's appropriate. But what I think is not appropriate is for the whole pool of candidates to go off on a 'holier-than-thou, I believe in God more than you do, na-na-na-na' competition just to attract voters, especially when the Constitution delineates very clearly that state and church are supposed to be separate. And just because you're a wonderful Christian doesn't mean you're a wonderful leader. Look at Bush. I have no doubt he's got a very strong faith. But he's got us mired over in Iraq and butting heads with Iran, not to mention everybody else in Europe hating us because Bush won't jump on the global warming bandwagon.
If I could, I would just not vote for any candidate who gets into that sort of thing. But at the rate things are going, I'd just end up disenfranchising myself by sitting at home twiddling my thumbs on Election Day 2008.
We need a pandemicBack to Anderson Cooper 360: "Climatologist: World is no longer normal"
"When a climatologist tells you the only thing that's going to reverse
the effects of global warming is a "good old-fashioned pandemic that
wipes out millions" your ears perk up. Mine sure did when climatologist
Bill Patzert of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory told me that, even if
he was saying it mostly in jest."
1) Like. Duh. We already know the world's not normal. We know global warming exists. At the rate we're going, we'll end up a nice bunch of roasted turkeys ready for aliens from outer space to swoop in and feast on. Alien thanksgivings come about once every 4 billion years, you know, so we should be pretty well-done and yummy on schedule. But that's a topic for another time.
2) We DO need a pandemic. And I'm not jesting.
If you look at natural and human history ... Nature has her strategies for maintaining a healthy balance of populations. There's the food chain. Then there's natural disasters and illnesses.
The first thing we humans did was fuck up Nature's management by positioning ourselves at the very top of the food chain, where we have absolutely no natural predators. Nobody to answer to, nobody to gobble us up like we gobble up every other species on the face of this planet.
No problem. Nature could handle that. She killed us off with volcanoes, earthquakes, typhoons, wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, et cetera. And for those of us who managed to sidestep those, she had a biological arsenal locked and loaded. Bubonic plague, typhoid, cholera, smallpox, syphilis, influenza, polio, consumption, and to give a more modern example, AIDS.
But what did we do? We fucked up her management again. We developed warning systems for all her natural disasters, and safe places to escape to. We discovered sanitation and developed cures or vaccines, wiping out some viruses altogether.
As a result of better sanitation and health care, during the past couple centuries, the human population on Earth has skyrocketed, even as the populations of many other species have plummeted as we eat them, crowd them out, take over their habitats, or just plain hunt them to extinction. According to the CIA world factbook, as of July 2007, there will be about
6,602,224,175
people on the face of this planet.
I'm minded to agree with Agent Smith in the Matrix movies when he tells Neo that humans are equivalent to parasites.
Almost 7 billion people? In 1900, there were about 1.65 billion people. In 1985, two years after I was born, there were about 4.8 billion. What the hell happened? Despite two world wars and a breakout of spanish influenza just after the turn of the century, we've still managed to multiply at an indecent rate and end up with more than three times the number of people we started out with 100 years ago.
We need a nice, big pandemic to whittle down our numbers to a manageable number. I think 4 billion is manageable. So somewhere along the way, we need to lose about 3 billion of youse folks. Any volunteers?
Don't worry, we as humans have proven we can come back bigger, better and smarter after a lovely debilitating outbreak. After all, after the plague killed more than a third of Europe, we got the Renaissance. Who knows, if we can get a pandemic going here, we could have a second Renaissance/Enlightenment and actually get a colony set up on Mars or something like that. Just a little step back, and we'll be able to take five steps forward.
And who knows, maybe we'll get lucky and all the barbarian 'throwback' elements of our uncivilized society will get killed off in the pandemic, too.
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| Even at the worst of times, in the worst of moods, things like this can always put a smile on my face.
Unico
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| I forgot to mention, the place I'm 'ranch-sitting' doesn't really have internet or pager service. Er, it kind of does, but very patchy, so I'm treating it as if it doesn't at all. So I'm posting via work before I head back to the ranch.
I'm really loving this ranch-sitting thing, except for those two obnoxious little porkers, which I'll explain about when I post about the whole experience (complete with photos - thanks to Kelly telling me I should take my camera along!). On the bright side, the fresh eggs are yummy, better than store-bought ones!
Meanwhile, I thought it might be nice to post a link to the ranch's website. Unfortunately, it's down right now, so I found a page on a cabin rental website that I guess will have to do for now: Historic Ranch Overlooking Yampa River
And, yes, there is a bald eagle nest on the river. When I went out on that two-hour ride with the family, we swung by the river so the horses could wade around a bit, and checked the nest. Saw two bald eagles there, but couldn't quite see the babies.
More later  | | |
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