Peenie Wallie

Peenie Wallie: A firefly, swarms of which can be seen flickering at night in the rainforests of Jamaica

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.  Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw

"Humility is not my forte, and whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters."
-- Margaret Halsey

Flyover Country - The Red and the Blue

Although the media is trying to spin the election as close, the reality is that Bush wasn't an exceptionally strong candidate. During Bush’s first term, the economy was weak, he spent more money than Reagan dreamed of, got us involved in a nasty skirmish in the middle east, and, so far, has failed to capture Osama Bin Laden.

Bush is widely lampooned in the media as a dimwitted, Christian redneck from Texas. Yeehaw. The liberal Democrats control most of the nations media outlets: the New York Times, the Los Angeles Post, CBS, ABC, NBC, and MSNBC. They make false pretenses of objectivity, but then editorialize and spin every story.

So the question to be asked is, if the Democrats and their liberal media-mouth conspirators can’t drive a deeply-stupid little oil spiv out of the Oval office, what does that say about the Democrats?

(Click on the map of flyover country above for the complete story.)

Daft Punk - Around The World

What the bleep do we know? Well, we know for sure that the disingenuous con artists posing as

shamans and soothsayers are still trying to pull the wool over our eyes. So, I guess some things never change. I went to see this movie "What the bleep do we know" in San Francisco, of all places. I wasn't wearing a sarong, holding crystals, or burning incense, but I did go with an open mind. Unfortunately, to believe this travesty, you have to go with no mind, not an open one. They claim in the movie that a few thousand people meditated in D.C. in a 1993 study and brought the crime rate down 25% in 8 weeks. Now, obviously, this can't be true. If it were true, then every police force in the country would lay down their weapons and take up meditation. If you believe it is true, then you should go start a company that reduces crime in any city on earth for a fee. The taxpayers would pay you billions to eliminate violent crime in cities from Manhattan to Mexico City. So, I went to their website to research some of the more flagrant claims they made. And, hold onto your seats folks - you're not gonna believe it but they deliberately manipulated the results! I'm sure you're as shocked as I was. Here's the manipulated graph from the "What the Bleep" website.

Notice how, in the graph above, the crime drops constantly over the 8 week period? Nice convincing graph, but that isn't what happened in the study. For the first three weeks and the last week of the meditation study, the crime actually rose. And, it never fell 25% as claimed in the movie, or even 23% as shown in the fraudulent graph above. The graph below shows it nearly doubled before it fell and then began rising again, even with a record number of well-intentioned meditators.

They also promulgate falsehoods by Dr. Masaru Emoto that he can alter the structure of the water with his thoughts. Hogwash. He is a fraud and his operation is a hoax. I will pay Dr. Masaru Emoto $10,000.00 if he can identify, in a double-blind study, what someone's mood was when they were meditating over vials of water. So, in case you're wondering if he's a fraud, he's a fraud, because he's never contacted me to accept my challenge.

What The Bleep Do We Know? Although some of the ideas presented in this movie are intriguing, they back it all up with rewarmed junk science and half-baked logic espoused by anti-llectuals that leaves the true-believers astounded and the skeptics skeptical.

Flying over the bay on a clear night, you can see the rigid city street grid, defined by symmetrical lines of infinite streetlights. Normally, roads curve to follow the terrain, but not in San Francisco. It's like some surveyor on crack said "By God, the roads will go straight until we hit the beach on the other side." Pac Bell Park is lit up like a UFO, as is that ball field in the Marina. They're the brightest lights in the city. Golden Gate park and the Presidio are mercifully free of lights at night. They lurk in the darkness like the homeless in the door stoops.

The city looks best from about 10,000 feet, as a miniature scale replica of itself. From two miles above, the city betrays no staring defects. But once you land, and wend your way though the horrendous abortion known as SFO, you begin to suspect that something is amiss.

SFO, is, after all, the epicenter of the Left Coast. It's the ideology of Eugene, Oregon put into place by bureaucrats. A boiling cauldron of liberal, iconoclastic hedonists. Raconteurs and shamans. Artists and race mixers. A mad Shangri-La, big wave surfing the cusp of the new millennium. And if you aren't here, you should be. ;)

If you're lucky, you may never know how good your laptop is. I found out. On Monday, September 27th, 2004, at approximately 10:30 a.m., I was traveling from San Jose, California, to South San Francisco on Interstate 280. I was driving a Honda XL 600 motorcycle in the HOV lane with my Sony Vaio laptop in my backpack. I was running right at 95 miles per hour when my backpack zipper suffered a catastrophic failure, spilling my laptop onto the interstate. I stopped immediately, and ran back to try to salvage what I could. I found my passport, some pencils, and a few other items before I located the laptop. The laptop had crossed all four lanes of the interstate, and was resting upside down on the shoulder. It was, of course, badly damaged. Both batteries were ripped from the laptop. The screen frame was broken. A large portion of the bottom plastic was missing. The ports in the back were badly cracked and pushed out of alignment. But when I got to the office and plugged it in, it booted right up.

What's in your backpack? ;)

John Kerry sold out our Prisoners of War and Missing in Action in favor of Trade Relations with Vietnam. Why?

"In retrospect, it is clear that John Kerry had but one goal as Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. His goal was to remove the issue of Prisoners of War and Missing in Action, as a roadblock to trade and normalization of relations with Vietnam. The question is.... why?
All we need to do is look at two events which occurred shortly after the committee presented its finding, in January 1993.

Francis Zwenig, staff director for the Committee, who was often seen during hearings whispering in Kerry's ear, became Vice President of the U.S. - Vietnam Trade Council. Ms Zwenig, who helped shaped the conclusion of the committee and its final report was now benefitting financially from the committee's efforts to close the POW/MIA issue.

In June of 1993, as reported in a Boston Herald article by Michael E. Knell, "Colliers International brokered a $905 million dollar deal to develop a deep sea port in Vietnam.." To skirt the trade embargo still in effect against Vietnam, Colliers International acted through its partner firm Colliers Jardine based in Singapore. At the time the deal was brokered, C. Stewart Forbes was the Chief Executive Officer of Colliers International."

Pictures of Jennifer from this summer. The first time I came back from Honolulu, I told her where I'd been, she erupted into howling peals of laughter. What. What's so funny? Says I. You were in Honolulu? she asks, breathlessly. That's a funny name. I thought about it. Yeah, I guess it is at that, isn't it. Well, in any event, I came back today. Flew in through Las Vegas. Where's that, she asks. Las Vegas is a city out in the desert of Nevada. I explain. Did you see any camels, daddy? She wants to know. Now I'm laughing, and she's laughing to beat the band.

The first time the tooth fairy comes, you've got the money laid out. Praying that you won't hose it all up and ruin her childhood when you slip the money under the pillow. It would be hard to explain why you had your hand under her pillow. But the first time, the money goes under the pillow and all is well. And then the second time, it's not such a big deal. You figure you've got it licked and fall asleep beside her with a stack of books on your chest and in the morning she wakes me and says the tooth fairy didn't come and I'm like Christ. I've screwed the moose. "he didn't?" I ask. "SHE didn't daddy." Oops. Toothfairy is a she. Doh. This is going downhill fast but it's 5:45 in the a.m. so I send her downstairs for a bowl of cereal and shove some money and candy under the pillow while she's down there and she returns for a brief respite in bed to give the tooth fairy a few more minutes since he's(SHE'S) running late and then she finds the money under the pillow and I'm thinking she's going to say "you put that there" but instead she says "Look, daddy, the tooth fairy DID come. The money was under my dreamcatcher!" and all is right with the world, at least until the next tooth drops out, anyway.

New batch of photographs from Hawaii. These were all shot on the island of Oahu in September 2004, mostly in Waimanalo, Lanikai, Waikiki, and Honolulu. Here's a link to the photos I shot in Hawaii in July.

Here's some links to NOAA satellite loops of Hurricane Jeanne. Note that on these loops, you can click the little boxes and see lots of things like forecast points, winds, precipitation, etc.

GEOS Storm Floater 1 - Infared Channel 4
GEOS Storm Floater 1 - Infared (Dvorak)
GEOS Storm Floater 1 - Water Vapor

The Konica-Minolta Dimage Z3 is my newest camera. . The reason I like this one is that it takes a picture when I push the button. Those among you that don't own a digital cameras may think - "big deal". Those of you that own digital cameras are probably thinking..."yeah...that would be nice if it would take a picture when I pushed the button". Also, it has a 12X optical zoom, the fastest autofocus in the the industry, an image stabilization system for people with unsteady hands (mea culpa), and 4 megapixels. I know there are cameras with more than 4 megapixels out there, but I'm not convinced that I need any more than 4 megapixels. If you have a digital camera you like with more than 4 megapixels, let me know about it.

Gen. Giap: Kerry's Group Helped Hanoi Defeat U.S.

The North Vietnamese general in charge of the military campaign that finally drove the U.S. out of South Vietnam in 1975 credited a group led by Democratic presidential front-runner John Kerry with helping him achieve victory.

In his 1985 memoir about the war, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap wrote that if it weren't for organizations like Kerry's Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Hanoi would have surrendered to the U.S. - according to Fox News Channel war historian Oliver North.

"People are going to remember Gen. Giap saying if it weren't for these guys [Kerry's group], we would have lost," North told radio host Sean Hannity.

"The Vietnam Veterans Against the War encouraged people to desert, encouraged people to mutiny - some used what they wrote to justify fragging officers," noted the former Marine lieutenant colonel, who earned two purple hearts in Vietnam.

"John Kerry has blood of American soldiers on his hands," North said.

GEOS Storm Floater 1 - Infared Channel 4
GEOS Storm Floater 1 - Infared (Dvorak)
GEOS Storm Floater 1 - Water Vapor

"Power struggle brewing on guns" by Kevin Vaughan and Todd Hartman of the Rocky Mountain Demagogue, would be more aptly titled "Slanderous, salacious lies that suit us". They claim that the "so-called Brady Law expires on Monday". It doesn't. The so-called "Clinton Gun Ban" expires on Monday. They claim that "Colorado law currently bans machine guns and silencers." It doesn't. Anyone can purchase a fully-automatic "machine gun" in the state of Colorado, and a silencer as well, if they pass the background checks and pay a one time two hundred dollar fee to the feds for a Class III permit. The Communist Regime of Denver still wants to enforce their own assault weapons ban, even though the State of Colorado very clearly ruled with SB25 in 2003 that it was in violation of the state constitution for cities to prohibit Colorado citizens from carrying weapons in Denver. Vaughan and Hartman are too stupid to know the difference, and too apathetic to do any research.

Here's some rough recent photos of San Francisco. They were shot at high-sun angles with deep shadows, so I'll go back and reshoot these when I get a chance. Also, I've included some links to related Bay area websites.

MARS-1 and here's a MARS-1 Painting Gallery

Art Crimes

Start SOMA

Silly Pink Bunnies

Polaroid Scene

LIMN

The Ant and the Grasshopper - Aesop's Fables - 600 B.C. - Updated for the 21st century:

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving. CBS, NBC, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can it be that, in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Then a representative of the NAAGB (The National Association of Green Bugs) shows up on Nightline and charges the ant with "green bias", and makes the case that the grasshopper is the victim of 30 million years of greenism. Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when he sings "It's Not Easy Being Green." Bill and Hillary Clinton make a special guest appearance on the CBS Evening News to tell a concerned Dan Rather that they will do everything they can for the grasshopper who has been denied the prosperity he deserves by those who benefited unfairly during the Reagan summers, or as Bill refers to it, the "Temperatures of the 80's." Richard Gephardt exclaims in an interview with Peter Jennings that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his "fair share". Finally, the EEOC drafts the "Economic Equity and Anti-greenism Act," retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the government house he's in, which just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around him since he doesn't know how to maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow. And on the TV, which the grasshopper bought by selling most of the ant's food, they are showing Bill Clinton standing before a wildly applauding group of Democrats announcing that a new era of "fairness" has dawned in America.

Kerry's campaign continues to implode. He's now a comfortable 11 points behind Bush. Atta boy, gun grabber. Who knew people didn't want to turn in their guns? Go figure! Kerry is so desperate for help, he phoned Clinton at the hospital Saturday night, where he was recovering from open heart surgery. As a result, Joe Lockhart is now signed on as the other campaign manager. Even the New York Times - a rabidly liberal, anti-gun, foaming-at-the-mouth, tree-hugging, granola-crunching mouthpiece for the socialist propaganda of the New Left - is admitting that Kerry's camp is in frantic disarray. The notorious Joe Lockhart has been brought in to attempt to breath life into Kerry's lackluster campaign, which leaves Mary Beth Cahill sucking hind tit. Members of both camps played down any suggestion of a Clinton takeover of a troubled campaign and insisted there was no tension between the two groups. Sure. Tell me another one. In the end, it doesn't matter though. They're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The Pentagon has launched an investigation into the medals awarded to John Kerry. Seems that someone thought it was unusual that someone could get three purple hearts without ever spending the night in the hospital. Go figure. My next door neighbor was in 'Nam. He took shrapnel in his back from an enemy grenade. He didn't beg them for a Purple Heart. He begged them to get the shrapnel out of his ass. Seems that in combat, these things get overlooked. He didn't get a medal or any surgery. The metal worked its way out and fell into his boot one day at work, 15 years later. Funny how the guys I know were refusing medals while Kerry was chasing them. Makes me suspicious of the self-proclaimed heros and more reverent of the silent ones.

Two Denver police rob man in broad daylight. Denver's Channel 7 news says to go back to sleep, all is well.

Police mistake soda can for gun and muder a disabled man in his own bed. " 'I wish we had a dozen like him', Jasper police chief Stanley Christopher said." Then, they tasered this guy to death. At first, they claimed they only tasered him once. Later, they admitted they had actually tasered him four times. (Fortunately, they're apparently not obligated to tell the truth, so there's no penalty for lying. And the Denver Post obviously wasn't too concerened by the discrepancy because it wasn't mentioned in their article.)

No criminal charges have been filed against a Denver police officer for an on-the-job shooting during the District Attorney Bill Ritter's 11 year tenure.

Westminster Police, afraid they were falling behind, murdered a citizen for "holding a board in a threatening manner."

Denver Police are out of control. They are lying, loafing, spying, raping, murdering, thugs on track to kill a record number of citizens this year. Guess how many citizens the Denver Police will murder during the calendar year 2004 and win a prize. (Remember, the total murder count will include all innocent citizens killed by police, including people shot at point blank range holding soda cans, tasered to death in their homes, and killed in high speed collisions with adrenaline crazed cops running redlights.) As a tiebreaker, try to guess how many rounds of ammunition will be stolen from the citizens by the Denver Police.

Winner gets a Glock pistol, a bullet proof vest, and a class on how to defend yourself and your property against any police department, even Denver's finest.

Here's some links to NOAA satellite loops of Hurricane Frances. Note that on these loops, you can click the little boxes and see lots of things like forecast points, winds, precipitation, etc.

The movie "A Beautiful Mind" is loosely based on the disturbed genius John Nash, the Nobel Prize winning mathematician. I found an interesting synopsis of his revolutionary thinking in the field of "game theory", from the layman's point of view. I also found an interesting inverview (with video highlights) where John Nash talks about mathematics, his life, and the paranoid schizophrenia which caused him to fear Eisenhower and the Pope.

The media continues their relentless assault on common sense, logic, and rational observations. The malfeasance of the Department of Justice has allowed them to close ranks under the ill-conceived Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 (NPA). The Joint Operating Agreements(JOA's) finagled under the NPA left each major metropolitan city with a licensed monopoly in place of the "free press" the constitution guarantees. To make matters worse, a few compaines own an alarming number of daily papers. This concentration of the press can only serve to emasculate the freedom of the press.

Daniel McCarthy, assistant editor for the American Conservative, claims it is not censorship for a private newspaper to refuse to run an ad. If the DOJ had not allowed the illegal mergers of the metrolopitan newspapers to go forward under the terms of the NPA, then I would agree with him. However, once the DOJ allowed the newspaper to become de-facto legalized monopolies, it should have dictated that paid ads could not be rejected, simply on the grounds that the newspaper owners/editors disagreed with them. Without competing local newsprint, rejecting ads equates unequivocally to censorship.

Ben H. Bagdikian gets it right in The New Media Monopoly. The Media Reform Center has some nice little graphs that help put things in perspective.

As if all of this weren't bad enough, Michael Powell, the fatback fuhrer of the FCC, decided that we needed even greater concentration of the media. Fortunately, the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned his furtive attempts to allow further assimilation of the media.

Why does all this matter? Because I can't sell a gun in the Rocky Mountain News or the Denver Post. So, how did allowing these two newspapers to operate under a JOA serve the public interest? It allowed them to double their ad rates and ban legitimate ads for legal firearms. Think I'm wrong? Ask the Rocky Mountain News why they won't they let private citizens sell legal firearms in their newspaper. Ask them why their advertising rates doubled after the merger while you're at it.

If you want to file a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights at the Deparment of Justice claiming that your civil rights have been violated (in theory, gun owners are guaranteed equal protection under the law by the 14th amendment), click here.

Hawaii's Deparment of Societal Responsibility finally stepped in and regulated a sport that had just become "way too fun" for many people. Tow-in surfing now has a training course, certified tow-in operators, and a passle of rules regulating the operation of "thrillcraft" to tow-in surfers. In this video, Garrett McNamara tempts the "Jaws" of fate at Peahi, of the North Shore of Maui where the waves can reach heights of sixty feet. Don't miss the feral roosters crowing in the background. (If anyone has ever been to an island that doesn't have wild chickens and cats running around, please email me immediately.) Also, here's some footage of wipeouts at Jaws dated Jan 10, 2004. (Not for the squeamish.)

Just when you thought things couldn't get any weirder, they did. Someone came up with the Bike-N-Shoot. Here's the scoop. Here's a .pdf with more info.

Deep South Rampage: Willis and Joe having some fun in the Bronco and the Green Hornet at the Jackson Colliesum. (Each photo links to a different video).

Excerpts from The Seven Second Lull:

The weasel is easily the most dangerous vehicle ever constructed. The windshield was made before safety glass was invented. It has a forty-gallon gas tank sitting inches from the starter, the battery, and the exhaust manifold. The drive shaft and the exhaust pipe both run through the hull of the vehicle. Anything that falls into the bowels of the weasel will be burned and twisted around the drive shaft. The back of the weasel has no seats to speak of, and no seatbelts at all. Riding in the back of the weasel with a drunken lunatic at the controls trying to impress onlookers, is nothing short of suicide.

In case you haven't seen it, you have to watch this short bi-partisan Jib Jab flash movie This Land.

John Kerry's own private Watergate.  In the dark of night, 30 hours before the primary election in his second attempt at congress, John Kerry's brother Cameron Kerry was caught breaking into the campaign headquarters of Kerry's opponent, DiFruscia at 1:40 a.m., reportedly in an attempt to cut his phone lines.  He was arrested by the Lowell, Massachusetts police department and charged charged with breaking and entering with the intent to commit larceny.  At the time, it was widely reported, and compared to the infamous breaking at the Watergate headquarters three months earlier.  Hmmm.  Wonder why this hasn't received any publicity?

Excerpts from Keep Austin Weird:

"West of I-35, students channel their parents’ savings into beer bongs and hash pipes. East of I-35, a socioeconomic stalemate plays out in the collapsing suburbs of the racially challenged. Illegal immigrants and the progeny of slaves are carted across town in open truck beds; shuttled between the hilltop mansions. Staring forlornly from the backs of pickups, the despondent cesspool of the human genome suffers the conspicuous cruelty of the market economics. The illegal immigrants will not be permitted to scale the economic ladder or share in the American dream. They’re relegated to performing manual labor for cash, huffing gas in the shade, and cursing the system in a foreign language." Story here. Video here. Pictures here.

Repeal the 19th amendment.  Women are more emotional than men, and tend to vote based on their emotions rather than logic.  Granting women the right to vote has been the single greatest contributing factor to the rise of the welfare state in our country.  So says the research paper by John Lott, Jr. and Larry Kenny of the prestigious John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics at the University of Chicago Law School.

If you would like to say a prayer for John F. Kerry, I suggest Proverbs 26:1, "As snow in summer, and as rain in harvest, so honor is not seemly for a fool."

Jefferson County picked the wrong guy to jerk around.  This guy Michael Zinna claims that Jefferson County did him wrong on some business dealings, and he decided to get even.  He launched a scathing, vitriolic website called Jeffco Exposed that he routinely uses to publicly flog the Jefferson County myrmidons in the most base and sophomoric language you can imagine.  For instance, he says "The word is out and spreading faster than Michelle Lawrence in the back of a pick-up truck."

The geniuses at Jefferson County sicked the FBI on the airport hanger he lives in with his German Shephard.  Apparently, they don't believe in the freedom of the press.  Now he claims to have captured Jefferson County Commissioner Rick Sheehan; his wife, Sheri Sheehan, and Assistant County Attorney Cynthia Beyer-Ulrich in the act of faxing him anonymous, harassing letters. Keep up the good work, Mike!

In case you missed it.  I didn't see this on television, but it has been circulating some on the internet.  Apparently, during the Olympic 3 meter diving event, this genius Canadian wearing a tutu and clown shoes climbed up on a diving board and dove in.  Reportedly, he was in the pool for several minutes before they fished him out.  He did it as a stunt, advertising for the website seen here on his chest.  The incident rattled the Chinese team so badly, that Bo Peng and Wang Feng fell from first place to last place when one of them landed flat on his back and got a zero.  

Initially, the Olympic committee tried to have Ron Bensimhon charged with terrorizing the Olympic Games(three to five years in prison).  In the end, it looks like the stunt will cost him five months in the clink.  Those poor little chinese trained for four years and then he pretty much shattered their concentration to get more hits for a web site.  He took his chances, and got five months.  Fair enough.  Plus, it isn't like it's the first time he's pulled this sort of stunt.

Congratulations to Marvin Heemeyer, a true American patriot.  The bureaucrats don't believe in a free society.  They want to keep pushing people around, as though they are immune to any repercussions.  They're above the laws they create, and treat the citizens like serfs.  Well, they don't have Marvin Heemeyer of Granby, Colorado to push around any more.  May he rest in peace.

And while we're on the subject, let's all raise a toast to Thomas Leask, of Alma, Colorado. Back in 1998, the town of Alma , Colorado decided that they were going to hook Thomas Leask up to the city water supply.  But he didn't want to be hooked up to the city water.  After battling the town government for some time, they forcibly connected him to the town's water supply. So Leask  stole a military suprplus front-end loader and rammed into the water treatment plant, Alma town hall, the post office, and the fire station.

"I plead guilty to all of it,'' Thomas Leask, 50, said in court.

"Deracinated, farraginous hordes of genetic flotsam, jetsam, and lagan, expelled from the rest of the country, are washed upon the shores of the Willamette River. The youth course through the parks and sidewalks of the city of Portland. They choke the the bus lines and the strain the Tri-Met Max light-rail system.

Unfettered, frothing herds of rabid, feral youth stalk the city, furious at the failures of the ism’s: consumerism, racism, imperialism. Emasculated men. Eviscerated women with infertile wombs and cancerous breasts. Hikers that had delved into the forests; haunted by the indescribable stumps of the oceans of trees that our great grandfathers sacked and pillaged. Victims of the failed technological revolution. Disillusioned, bulimic beauty queens. All coalesce around Pioneer Park in the afternoons to panhandle, play chess, and debate.

The men stop shaving. The women surrender their makeup. They tattoo their bodies, pierce their lips, eyebrows, and tongues so it is intuitively obvious to the casual observer how completely and totally they reject society’s expectations."  
Story here. Pictures here. Videos: Clocks and Colorblind.

Where are they now?  Ever wonder what happened to former "Maximum Leader" of Panama Manuel Noriega?  Noriega  trained at the infamous Military School de Chorrillos in Lima and graduated from the School of the Americas with honors.  He was on the CIA's payroll for decades.  But then he forgot he was a puppet.  In 1988, Noriega told his deputy in the Panamanian Defense Forces "I've got Bush by the balls".  He lost the election in May of '89 to Guillermo Endara but stayed in office anyway.  He survived a coup attempt in October of '89.  On Dec 5th, theNational Assembly named him "Maximum Leader" and Noriega declared that "the North American scheme, through constant psychological and military harassment, has created a state of war in Panama." The U.S. government interpreted this as a declaration of war and invaded five days later.  So shortly before we handed over the canal (thanks to Carter), Noriega was kidnapped and tried in the U.S. courts on charges of drug trafficking and money laundering.  Although he was declared a "Prisoner of War" by U.S. District Judge William Hoeveler, he's currently serving a 30 years sentence.  He has been in solitary confinement at the Federal Correctional Institution in south Miami-Dade County since April of 1992.  He was denied parole for the third time in March of 2004.

Errr.  I thought POW's were supposed to be released when the war was over?  The emporor of Japan was allowed to stay in power after the "unconditional surrender" of Japan.  Can you imagine if the president of our country was kidnapped and shipped to a foreign land for trial?  They knew he was trafficking drugs for years while he was on the CIA payroll.  It wasn't a problem then.  What was a problem was that he forgot who his master was.

More flag controversy.  This time, the dimwits down the hill are flying the Mexican flag side by side with the U.S. flag in the North High classrooms.  The reason the story got out is that the Rocky Mountain News ran a story about the challenges facing the students at North High and some right-thinking people noticed it and called them on it, threatening to come down and remove it personally.  Well, here's a newsflash - bilingual education is a failure.  North High is  preparing them to be day laborers. Letting them pretend they're still in Mexico by flying their flag and allowing them to speak Mexican instead of English is creating an entrenched lower class down the hill, which we will all regret down the road.

The 1994 Clinton Gun Ban is scheduled to expire automatically on September 13th, 2004.  Clinton said we “can’t be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans to legitimately own handguns and rifles.” And “I don’t believe that everybody in America needs to be able to buy a semi-automatic or fully-automatic weapon, built only for the purpose of killing people, in order to protect the right of Americans to hunt and practice marksmanship and to be secure.”  The Clinton Gun Ban did not ban fully automatic weapons.  These have been heavily regulated since 1934.  As of 1986, no more fully automatic weaspons can ever come into the U.S. for civilians.  The Clinton Gun Ban banned guns based on asthetic features you won't believe.  Guns that fire a single bullet every time you pull the trigger.  The guns we grew up with.  Think I'm wrong?  Take the Clinton Gun Ban Quiz.  See how your senator voted on Feinstein's amendment to reinstate the ban.

"If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them, Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in, I would have done it." - Senator Dianne Feinstein.  Contact your representatives.

When I was in Portland last year, I learned that the city hall had met in secrecy and voted to squander around a hundred mill to put caps on the reservoirs that supply the city with water, because they were afraid terrorists would attack them.  Sheer lunacy. (A) There's no toxin on earth that terrorists could pour into the water supply that would hurt you, because it get diluted too much (B) even if there were such a toxin, last time I checked, water runs downhill, so putting caps on the reservoirs wouldn't help anyway.  It is, afterall collected rainwater, so pouring the contaminants on the ground, or in the creek upstream of the reservoir, would allow it to run into the reservoir.  Get the picture? Deeply stupid politicians.  Also, keep in mind that, every time it rains hard, Portland is dumping millions of gallons of untreated raw sewage into the Willamette River, and has been for over a century, due to insufficient waste-water treatment facilities.  So, there is better use for the money anyway.  The Friends of the Reservoirs are trying desperately to stop city hall's chicanery.

In Las Vegas, an intruder broke into a man's house around 2:00 a.m. on August 20th.  The intruder had recently destroyed his own satellite dish with a baseball bat and shot his own television set.   The intruder made it to the bedroom where the homeowner and his wife were sleeping.  Their baby was asleep in the next room.  The wife dialed 911, but the police were unable to respond in time.  The man confronted the intruder in his home and, after a violent struggle, shot and killed the intruder.

How does the media describe the encounter?  "Homeowner Kills Intruder Neighbor".  A ..."bizarre home invasion that left one neighbor dead and one family traumatized".  (Sounds like it was nobody's fault and everyone was a victim).  Another version says "A Las Vegas area homeowner awoke to noise in the house, drew a gun and shot an intruder dead last night."  Well, no, not really.  This makes it sound like he's blasting away indiscriminately at noises in the dark, when the police said "It was a struggle -- blows between the suspect and victim."  The homeowner was treated for injuries sustained in the attack.  Although the indicent was "initially treated as a homocide", the "homeowner might not face charges."  Like they're just going to let him off with a warning for saving his family.

This man is a hero for defending his child, his wife, and himself when the police were powerless to help him.  He's no doubt traumatized by the ordeal.  These stories should say "Hero defends his family from crazed attacker .  Police powerless to save him".  Instead, they smear him with their left-wing anti-gun propaganda.  

The press and the police hold no pretense of objectivity regarding firearms.  Citizens that exercise their constitutional right to keep and bear arms are routinely treated by the media and police as second class citizens.  That they ever considered pressing charges in this case belies the extraconstitutional tendecies of the police.  They want to disarm society and defend us as best they can.  If people die because they can't respond in time, it's a price they're willing to pay.

Some recent photos of the mule deer that live out back.

In an Oct. 14, 1979 letter to the editor of the Boston Herald, John F. Kerry wrote: "I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real."

Kerry, a senator from Massachusetts, also talked about his experience during a speech on the Senate floor on March 27, 1986.  Kerry said, "I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared -- seared -- in me."

Only, he wasn't in Cambodia in 1968.  Read about it here.  Read about how well the major infotainment papers are avoiding this story like the plague.

Read excerpts from "Unfit For Command". Hear what the soldiers who served with John F. Kerry in Nam think about him here.

NASA asked kids to send in rocks to be analyzed with the Rock Abration Tool(RAT). Jennifer responded in January. On August 25th, they finally posted the analysis which clearly shows ...er....a squiggly little graph thingamajiggy.

Excerpts from Her Majesty's Prison:

"When you think of the Bahamas, maybe you think of Palm trees, groomed white sand beaches. Shallow aqua water. Casinos and hotels. I’ve seen the $500 a night resorts like Old Bahama Bay (formerly Jack Tar Village) where they charge $126 U.S. dollars for a knit cotton shirt and run a Zamboni across the beaches in the mornings to erase the footprints from the sand. But that isn’t the Bahamas that I know. The islands that I’ve seen in the Bahamian archipelago are hopeless, low, limestone clumps overrun with palmettos and red mangroves, populated by a festering, crisis of vanity bent on raping the islands to eek out a desperate living. Boiling in a crucible of sun scorched third world poverty, they unleash a preternatural genocide on the marine world around them, fishing for lobsters, conch, mutton snapper, and sea turtles.  Anything they can harvest from beneath the waves they kill and grill. The natives do not practice catch and release - nothing is thrown back." Story here. Pictures here.

Excerpts from Hang Loose:

In the shade of the Sea Grapes, a man is patiently mumbling to a passel of rotund haoles, so white they appear translucent. Possibly even European. I eavesdrop on their conversation, with passing interest. It might be a cult under the tutelage of a shaman. I’d heard rumors that the Mormon’s were running a compound over near Turtle Bay. I’ve been to Eugene, before. I’ve seen my share of cults and communes. The people were always plump, pasty-white Europeans that spoke broken English and avoided the sun like vampires. This smelled of something weird. Some bizarre ritualistic suicide pact that would be national headlines in a matter of hours."  Story here. Pictures here.

Macromedia Flash presentation of Jennifer's Artwork here. (~work in progress). (Requires free Flash Player)

Excerpts from Don't Look Down:

You don’t go into the mountains to die. You go to escape the pain of being alive. To taste the outdoors. But two miles above sea level, the weather deteriorates rapidly. It can change from clear and sunny to whiteout conditions in a matter of minutes. As I turned to head back, it started to rain. Lightning flashed through the clouds. Thunder echoed through the valley and off the face of the continental divide. Sitting on the 4-wheeler, I realized that I was the tallest thing around for miles. As tall as the Petronas Towers in Kualu Lumpur. I leaned down over the handlebars and raced back down the trail. Lightning can’t hit a moving target, can it? Lightning flashed. Thunder boiled across the mountain range. I wondered if this would be my last day on Earth."   Story here. Pictures here. GPS tracks here.  

Excerpts from Austintatious:

"I never believe the gate agents. They're the interface between the airlines and the befuddled masses. They're pathological liars. Actors without cameras. They practice lying to themselves at home in the mirror while they're putting on lipstick and crocheting their eyebrows together. "Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to inform you that, due to the bad weather in Malaysia, our flight from Denver to Austin will be canceled. That is all." They lick their lips and mouth the fabrications, moving their lips in an exaggerated manner. And I saw that they were still at home in front of their dressers, pushing lipstick into the crevices of their chapped lips."  Story here. Pictures here.

When I returned from Las Vegas, I told Jennifer I'd been out in Las Vegas, a city in the desert in Nevada. Did you see any camels daddy? she asked.