Rip Snorter's Blog

Coyotes loving the 3/4 moon.... I let the cats out at 6...didn't stick by my guns after they'd insisted for an hour they REALLY wanted outdoors.  Went out to sit with them on the porch to keep an eye on things.  After about 10 minutes a young coyote yapped (in irritation I suspect) just outside the front gate.  That's one coyote who doesn't fear humans nearly as much as he needs to to survive long.

I'd guess it's part of the litter from the neighbor's brush pile about 150 yards from the house, been accustoming himself to the close proximity of humans almost from birth.  Hasn't any body of experience to teach him stalking cats while there are good safe rabbits still out there will get his hide nailed to the barn door.

...............

Ahh................about the autism/Alzheimer's posts earlier.  If any of you have people you care about who are afflicted with these conditions and would care to communicate with the woman who has been in the program with her mother:

The woman's finished all but the shouting to get moved out of here, leaving today.  But I'd imagine she'll be in California in a day or so, and settled in enough to get her comp set up in a couple of weeks, maybe.  If you'd like her email so's to ask her questions about it I'm sure she wouldn't mind.

Just email me, or PM me, and I'll send it to you, her addy.

Orion's high in the sky this morning.  We're into a new season, blog readers.

Jack

 

 

I've decided to skip the Kennedy Administration, the 1960 election won by Kennedy by a margin of just over 100,000 votes, delivered as needed far into the 11th hour by Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, and graveyards in Texas, which opponent Tricky Dixon's campaign manager is said to have declared, "They stole the election fair and square." 

I won't go into the Bay of Pigs fiasco, in which the CIA and a group of Cuban refugees attempted to invade Cuba with the usual outcome of a presidential war. 

I won't go into the near-miss of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, turned bellicose after Eisenhower left office thanks to the bluster of the Kennedy brothers and their determination to take a hard line.

I won't go into the Kennedy boys passing Marilyn Monroe  around among themselves as a sexual plaything.

==========================

Instead, I'll go directly to Lyndon Johnson.

Once asked whether he approved of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, Johnson replied, "Of course I don't approve!  We still had one left when we quit."

Once asked to comment on the first US satellite, Explorer I, Johnson replied, "A basketball that goes beep-beep!  The only basketball that goes beep-beep I want to hear about is one someone tosses into the men's room of the Kremlin."

Johnson's our prez who created the Welfare State with his War on Poverty, much the way Reagan created a prison state with his War on Drugs.

Johnson's responsible for the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, a mockup incident to justify turning up the volume, contrast and color on Vietnam.

A surprising number of people in Texas continue to believe Johnson's also responsible for the assassination of the man who held the office he assumed upon the death of JFK.

But all that notwithstanding, LBJ was a roughly as good a prez as any of those after Reagan.

Further deponent sayeth not.

Jack

 

 

 

 

WB 1 7 9 10 13 22 26 29 35 39 44 47 48 52 53
             
MB 1 6 14 40 43

Just keeping myself honest.  Don't play'em.

Jack

 

In an earlier entry I related an anecdote about a woman living near the village who was moving to California, so's to accompany her mother, an Alzheimer sufferer, through a new treatment method that's showing success.  I have a bit more info about it now, which I want to share.

This treatment is for several conditions.  It was developed for autistic children, but it's now established to be successful in several other conditions.  It's called, MAPS (Multisensoriality for Additional Pathways and Synapses).  I gather the exercises are mostly done at home, but with frequent progress testing and instructional oversight by the treatment center.

Down syndrome

autism

cerebral palsy

ADHD

epilepsy

Alzheimer's

Dementia

Mental impairment.

The treatments take about 15 minutes per day

If you have a loved one who's afflicted by one of these conditions and want to do some further checking, here's the link:

http://www.gordonpomarescentre.com/

My only knowledge, other than what I've seen on the website, involves the local woman and her mother, who's shown profound improvement in six weeks of this treatment.

Jack

 

Uncle Joe Stalin used to chuckle about his people, about his staunch supporters.  He laughed to Nikita Kruschev about how they'd cheer those Russians, or his henchment, when he picked some new group of scapegoats to herd into the boxcars to haul off to the gulag camps. 

Until the NKVD came knocking on their own doors, which, Stalin wryly observed, took a lot of the joy out of it.  In his own way, Uncle Joe was an honest man with a surprising self-knowledge, for a psychopath.

Stalin thought it was humorous, the way he could get his people all worked up about how badly blacks were treated in America, how terrible things were in Germany to take their minds off how things were at home when crops failed, when production quotas dropped.

Joe Stalin died a few years after WWII, but the world learned a lot from him.  Leaders all over the world learned how easy it is to divert the attention of the masses away from whatever's wrong close in around them, to cast blame and create scapegoats inside the country and focus the anger of the people on them.  To trumpet minor victories as though they were giants.  To blame every failure on traitors and conspirators.  To have mindless puppets shouting his brainwash over the radio waves constantly, daily.

Joseph Goebbels learned a lot from Joe Stalin.  He's still using what he learned.

In his own unique, selective way, the US president does learn from history, as most of them have since their hero died.

Jack

 

 

 

 

When I awakened at 5:00 this morning, which is my custom, I did my business and decided to try to get back to sleep.  Didn't want to go out front for a smoke and cup of coffee because I didn't want the cats warting me to death or trying to sneak outside before sunrise.

It's that coyote in the yard last night.

Coyote is a a lot like humans in his ways.  He's difficult to trap without a lot of elaborate doings, even after a person knows him well enough to do it.  And if he's ever had anything to do with traps, it's a lot more difficult than that, probably impossible with one who's had his leg in a trap.  Nothing in the universe more cunning than a three legged coyote.

But he forms habits.  He'll go through the fence in the same place every time.  He'll jump the irrigation ditch between those two trees right over there, go diagonal off the bank and down.  Every time.  And those habits make him vulnerable to a snare.

Unfortunately, brother coyote, while he doesn't know this about himself, he knows it about other animals, including man.  A coyote will study a human and his prey the way a human who wants to get rid of him will study a coyote.

That's the reason I'm going to have to keep those cats inside during the hours of darkness, though that won't save them after the food availability out there on the mesa battens down the hatches this winter.  There was a good rabbit population, which allowed a lot of pups to reach adulthood.  But with that many adult coyotes the rabbits and rodents won't last long, and when they're gone it's going to be the village and whatever they can find.

A friend of mine, a trapper, uses road-kill cats for coyote bait.  Coyotes love the taste and smell of cat.

Jack

 

Maybe it's this moon.

Watching an old video tonight, Kiss Me Kate, Keenan Winn and James Whitmore doing the soft-shoe tap dancing scene and singing, 'Brush Up Your Shakespeare'.  All the windows open, curtains pulled, when a coyote howled almost under the window, certainly in the front yard.  Threw the cats into a panic, them going to catnap to get-outta-downrange-of-that-booger faster than I can tell it.

Not sure whether the coyote was just commenting on Winn and Whitmore, or whether it was something more fundamental to the film.

Shortly afterward the largest coyote concert I've ever heard began up on the mesa to the west.  Lots of spring pups solidly into adulthood now.

I'm thinking bro coyote's going to make a powerful nuisance of himself this winter.

Jack

 

Morning blog-readers

Nice morning here.  Moon's still full, almost straight overhead, cool, clear sky.

A friend told me a couple of interesting anecdotes she's encountered recently, yesterday.

Seems there's an outfit in California that's found a successful means of treating Alzheimer's, which is a happy piece of human gossip.  Lady just out of the village is putting her home up for rent to take her mother out there for a year to go through the complete 19 month regimen.  She's gone through the first phase here (six weeks) and seen such improvement that she feels a lot of confidence the treatment works.

Interestingly, it's mainly a matter of retraining the communications within the brain, re-routing electrical impulses to do what they did before the brain deterioration began, but via different packets of nerves.  Evidently, the mere restoration of communications within the brain halts further progress of the physical damage.

The nursing home industry and possibly the medicos won't like this, but everyone else probably will find it a blessing if they're able to afford the treatment for their loved-ones whom they're watching slowly sink into an ugly oblivion.

Same friend also told me an interesting anecdote about the daughter of yet another woman who's just come back from Iraq, evidently National Guard.  Says she's overwhelmed by nightmares, getting no sleep, won't go anywhere and sleeps with her M-16.  Constant state of unreasoning fear and anxiety.

The ship carrying all her belongings and those of her co-troops was evidently destroyed in the NO hurricane, so there's also that to keep her feeling down.

Crazy sending women to a place such as that.  This whole all-volunteer army thing is one that could have used some testing in a lot of ways before it was implemented, but the political atmosphere was absolute death to the draft, and they needed to shore up the numbers of warm bodies to use for cannon-fodder some way.  Adding women doubled the pool while tipping a hat to political correctness.  Still does.

And strangely enough, while men mostly weren't much interested in making a career of the military if they could do anything else, except those of a particular personality type, women chomped at the bit to get in, then fought to get into the combat arms branches. 

A person has to be careful what he asks for in this life, out of respect that he might get it.  They've got it all worked out now as a precedent.  Next war big enough to involve the draft will have women coming home in body bags in roughly the same numbers as men.

What a piece of work is man!
How noble in reason!
how infinite in faculties!
in form and moving, how express and admirable!
in action how like an angel!
in apprehension, how like a god!
the beauty of the world!
the paragon of animals!
And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither.

I have of late,--but wherefore I know not,--
lost all my mirth,
forgone all custom of exercises;
and indeed, it goes so heavily
with my disposition
that this goodly frame, the earth,
seems to me a sterile promontory;
this most excellent canopy, the air,
look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament,
this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,--
why, it appears no other thing
to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

William Shakespeare
Hamlet II

Back during the draft days a major part of the young men were tickled pea green to have flat feet, anything to keep them out, while women had an automatic non-obligation along those lines.  They were what young men were supposed to be fighting for.

Strange stuff, when you think of it. 

It's going to be interesting to watch the battle between the FDA and medicos and that new Alzheimers treatment bunch, thinks I.  It's not a 'medical' treatment, per se, and it has all the earmarks of just the sort of thing that ought to bring the folks who make a living out of keeping the status quo on ugly death out with their jack-boots polished to a fine sheen.

Similar to the way they've kept out a simple herbal method of shrinking tumors to zip clean out of the respectable cancer treatment business.  Native American herbal recipe involving sheep sorrel, black burdock, slippery elm and turkey rhubarb you can brew at home, knocks out benign and malignant tumors anywhere and in the human body, but there's not a medico in the US who will prescribe it, despite the thousands of people whom they've pronounced living dead who are walking around because of it.

Ah well.

Jack

 

My blog entry here:  https://www.lotterypost.com/blogcomments.asp?i=3902

involves Hanoi Jane and Joan Baez.  It's buried, but fundamental difference of perspective is being penned by konane and me in the comments section.  I believe that difference is one worth pulling to the top of the blog where others can enter the discussion if they'd care to do so:

KONANE:  Comment by konane- Today, 2:23 pm

Things haven't changed much for her except plastic surgery and hair dye. Still selling out her nation,
working for the communists. Ooops, I mean Progressive Socialists as they're now reinvented, repackaged.

Jay Dyson's political satire sums her up best..... click on the pic for his commentary.

http://www.sacredcowburgers.com/leftovers/showpics.cgi?liberal_foreign_policy

RIP SNORTER:  Comment by Rip Snorter- Today, 2:48 pm
I make a distinction between 'selling out her country' (as it pertains to supporting, or opposing this police action) and actively supporting the opposing forces. The dispicable thing about the Hanoi incident with Joan and Jane had nothing to do with their opposition to the presidential war. They visited North Vietnam in active support of and enthusiastic endorsement of specific measures and instruments for killing their own countrymen.

That thin line between opposing the hostilities in Vietnam and continuing to support the well-being of US troops in the field was a nuance that was lost on both of them. The fact US troops were in opposition to the political ideals and outcomes both hoped, and their willingness to cheer the use of armed force to kill the opposition to their political ideal, wish the worst on Americans who served there, no matter what they believed, is what I consider dispicable.

Jack

KONANE:  Comment by konane- Today, 5:14 pm
I suppose my line of thinking is very old in that if you do not agree with a particular president's course of action involving our troop deployment that while those troops are deployed on whatever mission that it is best to keep opinions silent until troops come home.

Voicing opposition to Nam and also now shows the enemy a divided nation which is viewed as being weak and vulnerable to defeat.

I believe it was General Giap who praised the anti war protesters for their victory, seems it was Kerry in particular.

I always thought that the whole pile of them should be tried for treason and punished accordingly because they went way over the line and cost many an American soldier their lives.

My reply, here, not there:
That's an opinion the government of the time would have shared with you, konane.  If citizens, like yourself, but opposed to the war, could have been charged with treason or sedition they would have been.

Unfortunately for those who'd have liked that war to still be going on, the presidents who were sending young men off to be killed and crippled while you cheered, didn't have a legal case for treason, nor sedition.  No 'enemy' was defined, war didn't exist.

The men who served as president during those years of all three wars mentioned presented the public with a fait accompli.  Troops were in the field an awfully long while before opposition formed, and there was no means for that opposition to be heard, aside from the way it was.

If the president wanted a criminal action means of controlling protest, all he would have had to do was get a Constitutionally required declaration of war from Congress for each military adventure at issue.  Then there'd have been a legal meaning to the word treason.
Instead, the president in each case betrayed the troops in the field by failing to mobilize the people and the Congress to support the war.

Your assertion is fundamentally flawed.  If the prez, any of them, could have done as you believe they should have, they'd have done so.  Instead, they avoided it at the cost of the troops in the field, because they'd never have been able to begin those wars if they'd had to do their sworn duty to the US Constitution and ask the elected representatives of the people for permission to wage war.
Jack

 

MM Friday night:  5 16 41 46 50 1

PB last night:5 9 27 49 52 6

Moon phase as per the data provided by Libra Dave's Excel chart:

 1ST     
18-Jul-05 11 13 19 28 39 48 
 Jul 16, 2005 9 17 37 39 49 52 
 Jul 13, 2005 7 30 32 35 45 47 
       
New York Lotto  1ST     
 Jul 20, 2005 8 30 51 54 57 58 33
 Jul 16, 2005 7 11 15 26 45 49 21
 Jul 13, 2005 8 9 11 13 25 53 28
       
New York Lotto  1ST     
  May 14, 2003 6 9 11 17 32 58 39
 May 10, 2003 12 24 32 49 52 56 37
 May 7, 2003 8 43 46 48 53 55 10
       
Illinois Lotto  1ST     
 Feb 27, 2002 10 11 20 33 34 44 
 Feb 23, 2002 16 25 33 34 49 52 
 Feb 20, 2002 17 22 27 32 34 36
     
Florida Lotto  1ST     
4-Jul-01 16 18 20 21 25 27
 Jun 30, 2001 2 3 7 30 49 52
 Jun 27, 2001 15 25 26 34 41 42
 1ST     
23-Oct-96 14 21 26 29 33 46
 Oct 19, 1996 22 23 36 39 49 52
 Oct 16, 1996 5 6 8 10 17 18

 1ST     
10/27/2004 11 17 40 44 51 21
10/23/2004 15 24 49 50 52 40
10/20/2004 1 11 17 41 46 24
 1ST     
5/1/2004 1 10 34 39 47 33
4/28/2004 27 34 42 49 52 23
4/24/2004 2 13 22 35 44 28
 1ST     
10/16/2002 8 11 24 31 37 41
10/12/2002 23 26 46 49 52 28
10/9/2002 9 10 38 42 43 5
     
 1ST     
3/9/2004 16 23 29 36 51 49
3/5/2004 30 40 47 49 52 3
3/2/2004 25 30 35 40 50 4

A photo of the actual pre-dawn moon this morning is provided on the earlier blog entry.

Make of it what you will
   

Jack

 

This is Zuni Salt Lake. 

It's about forty miles south of the Zuni Rez, almost in AZ.

There's a ghost town you can barely see in the pic.... used to be a considerable community down in there when it was private land, from the 1840s until the 1950s, evaporating salt from the huge concrete beds.  Most of the buildings are still intact, though they're going away rapidly.

Today it belongs to the Zuni tribe, one section of land, but it's not in the national trust as part of the Rez.  Tribes have been acquiring a lot of land from casino monies and other ways during the past decades, making the lands acquired 'tribal', but not Rez, which puts them into an interestingly ambiguous position insofar as road maintenance and county taxes. 

 Salt Lake was acquired as a piece of a lawsuit against the US government involving an airplane with a hydrogen bomb aboard that crashed on the Rez, with first responders being Zunis, but which the feds didn't bother telling them about the bomb, leaving emergency workers exposed to hazardous materials without knowing it.  The tribe got a few million out of that, which they used to purchase 60k acres of land to the south of the Rez, but Salt Lake was thrown in as a bonus.

Salt Lake's a sacred place for the Zunis, home of Salt Mother.  If you are willing to risk hopping the fence and wandering around down there ..... it's a volcano crater with a hollow secondary plug you can climb, then a spiral trail leading back down inside ... that's where most of the rituals for Salt Mother are held... but all over that section you'll pass over various religious items from recent times you'd be well advised to leave untouched.

Anyway, Salt Lake used to be the place all the tribes got their salt throughout history.  A place where a constant truce between warring tribes existed.

It's also part of what the power companies would love to strip mine so El Paso and Phoenix can fire up their hair dryers every morning, and keep their homes refrigerated.

Which the Zunis believe would thoroughly piss off Salt Mother, with considerable resulting pain for the Zunis, and all the rest of us.

They might be right.

Jack

 

Right now.

Those numbers last night could leave a person with the impression things are slipping back into behavior patterns I've been discussing on this blog.

13 numbers picked, bought 9 tickets.  4 of the 13 numbers hit as whiteballs.  I had the redball down as a whiteball, as well.

Meanwhile, PB jumps another $6 M lump, bringing that jackpot to something in the ballpark of $36m lump after taxes.  A goodly sum.

Some of you might find this interesting.... All the recent jackpots won numbers.  49 and 52 aren't on there, but the rest are, some conspicuously.  All those 27s dancing were the reason I had 4 whiteballs instead of 3 last night.

jackpot wins       
       
Fri, Sep 16, 2005  12 13 19 21 38 3 9 
 Fri, Sep 16, 2005  7 13 16 27 29 30 35 17
Fri, Sep 16, 2005  13 21 27 38 44 48 
       
Sat, Sep 10, 2005 1 8 24 27 34 46 30 
Sat, Sep 10, 2005 6 8 26 33 35 42 41 
Sat, Sep 10, 2005 7 20 40 41 43 47 
 Mon, Sep 12, 2005 6 11 19 29 39   
Mon, Sep 12, 2005 5 8 11 18 31   

Jack

 

 

 

A few weird Saturday news items:

Current New Mexico State Treasurer and former State Treasurers indicted for extortion.  Current one, Vigil, will return to work immediately after his arraignment.

ABQ Public Schools Chief Business Officer pleads guilty to DWI.

Hayward, Wisconson, Chai Soua Vang (Southeast Asian?) convicted of killing six deer hunters when they trespassed on his land, called him racial slur names and took a  shot at him.  (A man needs to be a bit careful who he calls whatever they called him.  The law can avenge you, but it can't protect you from someone who's not intimidated by a bunch of guys with rifles).

Katmandu, Nepal, Nepalese armed forces are accused of torturing Maoist rebels to extract confessions, according to UN investigators.  That's a sort of new twist on the thumbscrews.

Indian tribes are suing the US Department of Interior for $100 billion for offenses dating back to 1887.  Maybe it's time to normalize relations with the Indians.  Save some money just to pay the usual welfare and unemployment, rather than all the other wrongs that have happened since Columbus.

UK truckers are evidently going to shut the country down because of fuel prices.

Vatican's ordered Roman Catholic Seminaries to be inspected for 'evidence of homosexuality'.  That one sound fairly repellent.

Some Bush kid, son of a Bush who's evidently Guv of Florida, maybe kinfolk to the Prez somehow, charged with public drunkenness in Texas.

That's the sort of helpful stuff you learn by reading the newspapers.

Jack

 

No one cares to know the realities of history, though they love to cite pieces of it and what might have happened if.

Here’s what DID happen (Only the three most prominent presidential wars since WWII). No speculation, no ifs thrown in, just reality:

Undeclared Presidential War #1:

Korea: no strategy to win:

Result? 50,000 US casualties, 50 years of US occupation with no end in sight. (The forbidden IF:) IF we hadn’t spilt all that blood to save Korea the Soviets or Chinese MIGHT have taken over Korea and Japan, robbing them of their manufacturing capacity and ability to compete with US products.

Undeclared Presidential War II

Vietnam: no strategy to win, carried out by presidents of both parties.

Result? 100,000 plus US casualties, Vietnamese president assassinated by the CIA, escalation justified by a contrived incident, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, the country eventually polarized against the task.  There was never any strategy to win, never any intention of winning by any definition of the word. The final outcome couldn’t have been worse if we’d saved the 100,000 American casualties and let the Vietnamese decide their own fate. The best possible outcome we could have hoped for was a divided Vietnam (like Korea) with US troops still on patrol, occasionally getting themselves killed, South Vietnamese producing products for sale in the US at cheaper prices than US workers could produce them.

Undeclared Presidential War III:

IRAQ I. no strategy to win, carried out by the father of this president. Stated purpose: Save Kuwait, Saudi, other Persian Gulf oil producing states from Iraq.

Result: More US treasure spent, more US casualties, US troops withdrawn before victory was secured. $66 per barrel crude barely more than a decade later.

But this one’s going to be different because we’ve carefully avoided examining our mistakes of the past. Merely used fragments of them to trumpet patriotic platitudes about what should have happened, what might have happened if whatever US presidents occupied the position at the time hadn’t been what they were.

Which, of course, this one is not.

Jack

(If you get bored do a Google search on the phrase, 'miserable failure')

 

In my August 29, 2005, blog entry entitled, Those Powerball changes, link:

( https://www.lotterypost.com/blogcomments.asp?i=3662 ) I ruminated at length about whether the 'hidden' changes within the PB structure would result in larger, or smaller cash value prizes in percentage of trumpeted (by PB and lottery authorities) prize values in annuities. 

Mooshie, a single-post, newly registered LP member's posted a comment there I haven't taken the time to back-check:

I suppose my only thought is that if this proves true, it's only one more paving brick in the smooth street we all knew we were tredding.

Jack