How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
The story on this little R2D2-like device is that it was lifted off Earth in 2016 and then traveled to Asteroid Bennu, orbited there in 2018, landed on the asteroid, gathered samples, and then flew back to Earth, ditching the device in Utah. The journey was 3.86 billion miles and the carrier spacecraft traveled at 27,650 miles per hour. Continue reading “Asteroid tales”
As promised, I am going to look into the lineage of Barack Obama, but not very deeply, as I am not very good at this stuff, and further, do not imagine that blue bloods let it all hang out. Do we really imagine that proles like me can just turn on a computer and find their relatives and parents and trace them back generations? True, not too many will do this, but even so, we would be a nuisance, and since they control the information and hire people to manage it, I suggest that important secrets stay secret.
So first, I want to start with Barack Obama, Sr., said to be the father of the man who became president in 2008.
Continue reading “To the manor born (A Barack Obama Primer, Part III)”
This stack of firewood is the sum total of a week’s effort.I am not done by any means, as we normally go through a couple of cords every winter. By my estimation this is over a cord, but I have one partial and another full stack to to go. Note that a cord is 4X4X8, which is what the back two stacks are, roughly. Since the work is very hard I opted to finish the job in October, giving my body a needed rest.
Last year, knowing foot surgery was on the horizon, I put up as much wood as I could in a short period of time. That wood included garage scraps and pieces of willow and aspen (which do not burn as well as pine). We decided that for the first time in our then-twelve years here we would purchase a cord of wood. The cost was going to be $300. We burned less wood, however, and did not get around to purchasing it.
Demystifying Science: I stumbled upon what I consider a treasure trove of videos at the site linked to the left and also in the blogroll. The very first one that caught my eye was this one, A Billion Years is Missing, featured above. I once read the works of Immanuel Velikovsky, who claimed that Earth had once had a near encounter with part of Jupiter that had broken away and eventually became the planet Venus. Poor Immanuel was loudly and publicly criticized and humiliated. He never backed down, although his daughter reported that he was almost suicidal for a time.
By: Dave Klausler
Three years ago, my buddy Ed and I turned back only some four miles into our hike up Mount Whitney. Still dark and roughly at Mirror Lake. Our legs had been absolutely fried coming down Boundary Peak, the highpoint of Nevada, just thirty-six hours previous. Neither of us were in prime condition, and it showed in lack of recovery and probably lack of initial capability. “I do not want to be one of those embarrassing pieces-of-shit who call in for rescue,” Ed said to me that early morning on Whitney. Yes, we could have made the summit, as uphill was not the issue but the quadriceps femoris were obviously still spent – revealed on any briefly hiked decline – and the upper reaches of the Whitney trail were said to be very steep; retarding and managing the downward fall is critical. “Okay,” I replied… we turned back. The side-trip to Lone Pine Lake on the return did little to quell my disappointment. I do not like to leave things unfinished (see this: Mount Katahdin). So, what led to the failure?
I have a client of sorts, someone for whom I perform useful tasks. Since I am retired I don’t bill him, but every now and then he will send me a check. Recently he sent me $350, and I regarded it as found, or mad money. What to do with it?
We do not have cable and so do not have access to most professional football games. That’s OK by me as I stopped being a football fan back in the early 1990s. I was appointed “commissioner” of a fantasy league and so had to keep track of the stats. I could have just downloaded them off the infant Internet, but doing that meant that I had to abide by rules I did not like. Our league had its own rules, such as a waiver wire and bonuses for things like a 300 yard passing game etc.
The American health care system is easily the most expensive in the world, and one of the least efficient. It all goes back to the end of World War II, when progressive ideas were in vogue in most of the world, though not here. Countries around the world adopted various kinds of health care systems:
I recently put up a post concerning Obama and a goofed up fake photo of him and his supposed Hawaiian grandparents. I did not mention in the piece that I suspected that Obama has been given a fake background and a fake family, all put in place once it was decided that he would be a useful tool as president. Set all of that aside for the moment. Also set aside, please, the discussion that ensued about Michelle Obama being a transgender, or at least a cross-dresser, and Obama’s gay lover. We can only speculate about such matters, and it does none of us any good.
By: Steve Kelly
Note: See video at end of this piece for information on fishing, hiking and camping at Gunsight Lake.
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It’s been decided. Glacier National Park won’t be deterred from sprinting ahead with its grand experiment to use poison to kill rainbow trout planted in Gunsight Lake a century ago. Back then, Gunsight Lake had no fish.
Rather than restore Gunsight to its original (fishless) condition, Park managers want to introduce three new species: bull trout, cutthroat trout hybrids (whatever that is exactly) and mountain whitefish. What could possibly go wrong with an experiment so grand as this?
Does anyone remember what happened to the kokanee salmon in Flathead Lake? I sure do. They all died when Montana Department of Fish Wildlife and Parks broke the delicate food chain when they introduced mysis shrimp to engineer bigger kokanee salmon.
This series of posts on Barack Obama will not be sequential, and other things will interfere. I intend to keep the posts brief and deal with one subject at a time. I want first to draw attention to the photo above, supposedly taken after Obama had moved in with his grandparents in Hawaii. It is set in New York City’s Central Park.
(The grandparents are Stanley Armour Dunham and Madelyn Lee Payne Dunham. (A future post – those peerage names. Obama’s mother’s first name is “Stanley”. It’s Stanley’s all the way down!))
See anything wrong? I call it the “floating hand syndrome”. Do the measurements mentally if you can. We can see that Stanley’s left arm is hanging downward. I inserted arrows, one where the right elbow is, and the other where the left elbow is obscured by Obama’s right arm. I measured the distance from my elbow to the point of the opposite shoulder, and got 27 inches. If my forearm, hand and fingers were that long, my arm would hang down to the middle of my calf.
Piece of Mindful 