One-Revolution
What can a middle-aged paraplegic athlete do that most walking people can’t even dream of, let alone do?
Chris Waddell, shown here with his Lightfoot-built handcycle on Utah slick rock, is planning and training to summit Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest freestanding mountain on earth, on this handcycle in August.
Lightfoot Cycles is a local bike manufacturer specializing in recumbents and trikes. Check them out!
Think It’s Bad Now?
Enjoy what could well be our last few months of culturally reinforced American insularity and relative plenitude. But at least put this bit of news in your pipe and smoke it in the meantime. Talk about it with family and friends. Or start digging up your backyard to grow some veggies.
I’m a happy guy despite how it may appear, but I am concerned about our economic situation. And I’m sure you probably are as well. If you aren’t concerned yet, you will be, even if you are a filthy rich redneck living off the grid at the end of your private road.
I think Americans across the board are about to experience a whole new world of hardship and economic pain that is incomprehensible to most of us at this juncture. I really hope not, but I’m not going betting against this out of control economic freight train.
“Barack Obama, and the criminal class on Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle silly video moments, fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund America’s imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze.”
So what’s the big problem? The rest of the world’s leading nations are actively dumping the dollar as reserve currency. What does this mean? How about the end of the American way of life. The end of American hegemony. The end of rampant militarization. And possibly much, much worse.
When we elected Barack Obama, I was hopeful until I realized (again) that the problems which ail our country are fatal flaws that no politician can possibly fix. We are beyond broke. But of course, Obama’s good at fixing small problems with a single swat.
We are to put it mildly, screwed. Don’t say you didn’t know or believe the worst was still in front of you, read the article and get ready for the next economic crapstorm.
Hide me as a friend if you don’t like the topic. Or thank me later after you acknowledge that nobody you know is really talking about what’s going to happen next in this country. It’s called denial.
Or don’t thank me at all. But at least try to remove as much of yourself from the tracks as you can or you might get squashed flat like a Lincoln cent or smushed like the fly in the vid.
Got Backup?
Update: 1:00 p.m. : Hallelujah glory be! It worked! Backups really work. Yay!
This morning, I’m downgrading a Wordpress install from 2.8 back to 2.7.1 because the automatic upgrade failed. This week I’ve successfully upgraded 8 sites this way, but one client site decided to barf (no pages, nada!) this morning. So here I sit, patiently uploading the several hundred old version files and being careful not to overwrite any file that has a custom configuration, like wp-config.
Apparently, Wordpress released 2.8 knowing that a good number of themes and plugins were not yet compatible. They did try to warn me to have my backups ready, which I do. But bolstered by my previous uneventful upgrades, I didn’t take time to check in advance for compatibility of the theme I’m using, or of the plugins. Something doesn’t like the 2.8 upgrade.
I just hit the upgrade button, like a craps shooter on a roll. Aaaaaaaargh.
I’m hoping the down rev goes smoothly.
Funny how, just when you think a particular client doesn’t really do much with their web site, it goes offline and almost instantly the phone rings and it’s the client: “What happened to the site?”
This Is My Country Too
Everything Americans think they know, they learned from a televised morality play. It’s all theater. You root for some good guy and boo some bad guy. You pick your own, but you dance to the tune of the men running the show. It’s mind control, pure and simple, and if there is an American immune to it, then he is probably living in a snow cave somewhere in Alaska.
- Gypsy Joe Hess (1919-1988), prospector, self-educated philosopher and horse trader
Source: Joe Bageant
We are supposedly a God-fearing country. You may or may not be a God-fearing person. But there’s something even more fearful going on right before our very eyes: the crumbling of America’s economic foundation.
The United States economy is in freefall across all sectors. Banking. Finance. Insurance. Housing. Commercial Real Estate. Automobiles. Auto Parts. Retail. Fast Food. We are sliding into a bottomless chasm of long-term debt from which we may never recover. America and its people are being led off an economic cliff by horribly stupid politicians, anachronistic budget policies, and a preoccupied, mostly clueless electorate.
Americans saw $1.3 trillion of wealth vaporize in the first quarter of 2009 alone, as the stock market and home values continued to decline, according to the flow of funds report by the Federal Reserve released Thursday.
I believe America needs to do an about face and invest in peace for any real positive change to occur in our country’s direction. I don’t believe we should invest heavily in the tools of war and expect our desperate economic and environmental situations to improve.
Why do we insist on digging America’s hole deeper? Is this the real American Way? Why will we burn through more than 600 billion dollars on military expenditures in 2009? Look at the difference between the USA and its nearest-spending military and economic “rival” China. That 522 billion dollar differential could solve a lot of problems in this country. And to keep us all safe, we’d still be at parity with China’s military budget.
Another way to look at this militarized rape of the country’s budget?
Add the figures for the next 9 countries and you get 476.4 billion. That’s right, America spends more on planes, guns, bullets, grunts and combat boots than the entire rest of the world combined.
This is not the kind of momentum America needs or can afford. We need to secure our borders here at home and invest in domestic programs that result in greater economic security. We need to stop the bleeding and start healing our national psychosis. We can claim there are bad guys out to get America, but the baddest, most dangerous guys are the folks in Washington selling us all up the river without a paddle.
President Obama, are you listening? You better listen, that’s why we elected you and not that other guy.
Top 10 military spenders in 2008 ($bn)
1. USA 607
2. China 84.9
3. France 65.7
4. UK 65.3
5. Russia 58.6
6. Germany 46.8
7. Japan 46.3
8. Italy 40.6
9. Saudi Arabia 38.2
10. India 30
These are conservative estimates, putting America’s military expenditures at about 36 percent of our annual budget. Some watchdog organizations peg US military spending at 54 percent of the US Budget for 2009. That’s 1.449 trillion dollars!
At what point will the straw break the camel’s back, President Obama? Congress? The middle class can only take so much. Will you raise my taxes to pay the interest on the national debt? I hear my share will soon be $155,000.
Send me a bill. I dare you.
Source: Yearbook on Armaments, Disarmament, and International Security published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri)
120 Minutes
Ready to live more in the next couple of hours than the rest of your life to date? Just tell yourself you have only 120 minutes to live. (Whisper it to yourself a few times, it helps to get this profundity front and center in your mind.)
Of course time will pass the same no matter what you tell yourself. Months. Years. Decades. But when you forget to seize the day in bite-sized, 120-minute chunks, tell yourself again and again whenever the urge strikes: I have only 120 minutes to live.
One day it will come to pass that you find yourself arriving on the doorstep at the end of your life. And there will be no more seconds, minutes, days, months, years or decades.
You now have 119 minutes. Good luck making the minutes count.
Judy Toups Least Tern Highway Dedication, June 19
My mother was a well known author, birding authority, and newspaper columnist for more than 35 years. She did a lot to preserve birding habitat on the Mississippi coast, and she helped thousands of people learn more about birds through her columns, her teaching, and her leadership.
A friend just said that every bird lady should have a highway named after them. I couldn’t agree more. The only problem is, there aren’t many true “bird ladies.”
She was a rare bird, indeed. Just like the rare birds she dedicated her life to.
http://judithtoups.blogspot.com
Link to Sun Herald article.
Dead Guy Ride
Today’s ride with my buddy Larry Chinn, who came across a dead hunter on this ride near the hacienda in late fall a few years back. He apparently had a heart attack and died with his rifle nearby. Yikes!
I am the luckiest heart attack victim that ever lived. Because 1: I’m still living, and 2: I’m still riding the Dead Guy Ride!
Music by me.
Old Growth Walk With Mr. Chu and Tamera
The creek you hear is our drinking water. The stream that Mr. Chu loves to take a dip in is the “A” ditch, an irrigation diversion off of Nelson Creek cut in in 1899. Can’t tell you what the bird making that call is.
Scenes From Yesterday’s Bike Ride
Overlooking the West Fork of the Bitterroot River from Lavene Creek
View of Boulder Point Lookout from Lavene Creek
Most bike rides in the Bitterroot are of the uphill/downhill variety. Old logging roads intersect with single track lines (game trails that have also become bike paths) through the forest, making for interesting rides and great scenery. Basically it’s ride up and up and up and work real hard getting to wherever you’re going, gaze at the views for a while, eat some energy food and drink more water, then ride down and smile all the way home.
This ride: take the Trapper Peak trailhead road about 11 miles out the West Fork. Start riding up and take a right on 7603 spur road at about 2.5 miles. Go about 1/2 mile further, past locked gate, to first promontory and look for single track heading uphill. Go up some more.
Pollution-free exercise right out the front door. You should try it sometime.
Freedom Is Just Another Word
Thanks to Survival Acres (John) for posting this where I could stumble across it.
