Category: American wilderness

Shallow Hal takes on Ben Franklin

I have never watched anything by Ken Burns, the famous documentary film maker. Now that he has tackled Benjamin Franklin, I am even less interested. In 2017 MM wrote a paper called Benjamin Franklin: Premier British Spook, which fit in nicely with my own thinking on the American Revolution. It is a British template, one that the Americans would later use on Cuba. The idea is to take a people infected with revolutionary fervor, and let them have their silly revolution,

In the end, however, it will still be British or American agents in charge, masquerading as patriots and heroes. Thus did we have our Founding Fathers, perhaps all of them compromised, or those not, those who were true believers, marginalized or cashiered.

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The trivium, quadrivium, and blah blah blah

I’ve been reading Jordan Peterson, and finished his book Twelve Rules for Life. It was enough of JP for me, as at my age, there was not much new for me in it. As we age, we become wiser, learn from mistakes, even become more sympathetic to others and to different ideas. For instance, at age 38, having abandoned the Catholic faith, I was angry at the Church for having brainwashed me as it did, and thought people who were devoted to the faith to be of a lesser mind than me. Later I would read The Varieties of Religious Experience by the American intellectual/psychologist William James, and took on a new outlook. While religion would never appeal to me, those who experience religious enlightenment are experiencing real phenomena, and are made better and happier people in the process. (Oddly, I no longer have this book. It was a keeper, and I do not know what happened to it.)

I now look at my Catholic upbringing as a means of 1) brainwashing me, to ensure I stayed Catholic all my life, but also 2) as a means of protecting me, since teachers viewed most of us kids as having little enlightenment and intellectual ability. Life was going to be hard for us. Having a rudder, even if one based on superstition and falsehood, would not hurt. It would prevent thinking, but also prevent despair. Stupidity is a great insulator. Continue reading “The trivium, quadrivium, and blah blah blah” →

In defense of face splitting …

If you want to jump ahead, I have with the help of a blog commenter come upon an article  in which author Karen Leibowitcz that implies (actually, seems quite certain) that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is the love child of the late Cuban premier Fidel Castro. I am going to take issue with that based on my own knowledge and experience in studying faces. But before doing that, I want to offer up a defense of the technology that I developed and use, and will use for Trudeau and Castro, called face splitting, or face chopping.

Quite some years ago I learned that in our late teens our skulls are fully formed, and will remain in that shape for the rest of our lives. The only exception that I have seen to this rule (there are probably others) is that ALS can cause skull deformities. Miles Mathis wrote a paper (dated 4/17/15 – it is a PDF and I am unable to link, so search for a paper titled Stephen Hawking Died and Has Been Replaced) claiming that Stephen Hawking died in 1985 based on the following language in Wikipedia:

During a visit to the European Organisation for Nuclear Research on the border of France and Switzerland in mid-1985, Hawking contracted pneumonia, which in his condition was life-threatening; he was so ill that Jane was asked if life support should be terminated. She refused but the consequence was a tracheotomy, which would require round-the-clock nursing care, and remove what remained of his speech. [ 55] [ 56] The National Health Service would pay for a nursing home, but Jane was determined that he would live at home. The cost of the care was funded by an American foundation. [ 57] [ 58] Nurses were hired for the three shifts required to provide the round-the-clock support he required. One of those employed was Elaine Mason, who was to become Hawking’s second wife.

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Climate scientists threaten to go on strike!

This news in that headline falls under the heading “Oh please, don’t tantalize us!”

Two articles today from the Homewood front. Paul Homewood apparently a Brit, has been blogging since 2011, and his output is prolific. Today’s article is titled Are Our Winters Getting Warmer? The answer, no, is no surprise to me. Climate “scientists” apparently do not know how to read a graph. See below.

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Audubon Schmodubon

I used to be a member of Audubon Society, in fact, up until 2021. We are a funky lot of people who devote time and energy into identifying, feeding, studying and talking about birds. Our back deck is usually a minor mess, as birds are not careful when feed is available. It is a tiered ecosystem where birds at the highest perch use their beaks to scatter seed below, looking for the most desirable morsel. Down below birds that are ground feeders hunt and peck. Seed that ends up below the deck accumulates until a doe or buck passes by.

Why, I was asked, do we care about these species? “Unconditional love” was the only answer I could muster. They show no gratitude, in fact do not even know we are caring for them. A bird pecking away at a seed bell strung from a wire has no clue he is not on a tree, one with abundant mealy worms.

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How not to communicate

Back in the 1990s I was active in a group called the Montana Wilderness Association, since renamed “Wild Montana” and changed from activism to collaboration, an industry front group. Part of my self-initiated volunteer work was to go around Billings, my home town, and speak to various groups. But rather than “speak,” I had an idea. I was dedicated to one purpose only, the preservation of wild lands, and noticed that we had this in common with just about everyone, even our severest critics. However, we had among us misanthropes, and such people tended to be the face of our movement, as cameras tend to pick out the wild ones with dreadlocks and who carry signs and stand on street corners. In truth, the men and women I worked with in MWA were serious and stable. These were some of the best people I’ve ever known, and I look back on those times with warmth and good feelings.

My idea was to speak to disinterested and even opposition groups, and bring love of wild lands to them. I went to the forest service and asked if they had any resources I might use – in fact, they had photographs of just about every lake and mountain in the state, and offered to let me use them. My first engagement was a large gathering with the Gem and Mineral Society, and was well received. All I did, without prepared script, was to show the slides and ask who in the audience recognized the places. They were enthusiastic – they knew the names and were proud of having been there. People in that group knew every place, more than a few having hiked to them.

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The George McGovern legacy: An equal distribution of poor health

The above image, no longer in use, is called the Food Pyramid. It contains within it suggestions for healthy eating. In my opinion, humble or not, it contains some of the worst dietary advice ever given.

    • It puts too much emphasis on vegetables and fruits. I’ve no problem with them, I like most of them, but I think them overrated in terms of health. In my diet I have a small glass of orange juice daily, though not religiously, and broccoli and onions, green peppers and jalapeños. These turn up in recipes. (As I will be discussing Keto in this piece, I mention here that on that system, we avoid vegetables grown underground, but eat many grown above. Potatoes and yams, for example, are diet death, french fries a never-no-no. Green beans? Not a big deal.) (Keep in mind that I am 71. If you are in your 20s, 30s or 40s, eat, drink and be merry!)
    • The pyramid suggests we eat less meat than fruits and vegetables by far. I even get the impression that it might want us to skip meat entirely. I get most of my nutrition from meat. It keeps me slim, and provides all the nutrients I need to stay healthy, except perhaps Vitamin C.
    • I would group cheese with meats, as it is something we can eat in any quantity without affecting our weight. I skip yogurt, and do not drink milk (except with coffee). I have never liked milk. Neither did my mother.
    • Fats and oils … use “sparingly?” The body loves fats of all kinds, saturated and not. In fact, our brains are comprised of mostly fat, 60% as I read it, meaning that my dad was 60% right in a certain insult he would occasionally lay on me. (For sake of humor, I am too hard on him. He never called me a “fathead.”)
    • The biggest problem with the above pyramid is the bottom, the bread, cereal, rice and pasta group – 6-11 servings daily! If you want to lose weight and avoid diabetes, you will ignore that recommendation. Of course we all love bread – I can wolf it down as well as anyone. But if I do, I pay a price – my weight mushrooms.
    • We can agree with one thing: Avoid sugars.

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A product endorsement

I have never endorsed a product on this blog, and receive no remuneration for doing so. This blog is 100% non-monetized. However, this morning as I was showering, my wife came up to tell me there was  a beeping in the basement. I quickly toweled off and got dressed and went down. Sure enough, the product to the left here, the Watchdog Water Alarm was sitting in a puddle of water by our water heater.

I had been troubled by the water heater, as the hot water coming out of the faucet seemed too hot to me – I used a meat thermometer to register it at 140 degrees when the thermostat is set at 125. I did what we all do, went to YouTube, which said that I probably had a buildups in the tank, and that I needed to flush the water heater to get rid of the debris. That should be done every year, I was told. I thought well, heck, I don’t do that every year, but I do it often, like … well, never.

At the same time, we had two leaks in our boiler room, so I called Weatherbee, the people who tend to our boiler, and while they were booked till Monday agreed to send a man over who was in the area. As it turns out, all leaks had a common source.

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Apollo 13 spookiness

I am reading the book Dark Moon, at 512 pages of double-columned 9″ x 6″ pages, quite a chore. Many have probably seen the movies that apparently accompany this book, a two-part presentation available  at Aulis Online called What Happened on the Moon, Part One and Part Two. I was reading the book this morning on page 344 forward, and stumbled across some things the authors do not seem to be aware of.  Though they talk about a lot of whistle blowing, they do not mention spook markers*.

First, use of the number 13 for the bad luck Apollo trip was most likely no coincidence. Liftoff was on April 11, 1970, at 1:13 pm Houston time, which is, as we all know, a reference to the spook marker ’33’. That time of day can also be expressed as 13:13, which embodies “11” and “33.” April 13 was a Mo(o)nday. The switched astronaut who toggled the switch that produced the alleged exposition was Jack Swigert, the 13th astronaut in the Apollo program.

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