Ah Spring! Birds singing, buzzing and chirping hummingbirds are fighting at the feeder; the only discordant note is the distant bellowing of the dying Clinton Campaign, a noise similar to a walrus being harpooned by a hardy Inuit. Its one of those deals where he has to keep harpooning her as she drags herself across the ice leaving a trail of bright red blood. She's not going out with any dignity, that's for sure. I'd love to hear the talk behind closed doors in the Senate, the House or the DNC. I'll bet they could make some of us old Clinton-haters blush. Every day she stays in they hate her more. Also, another Spring Wonder is the absolute and total destruction of the phony Clinton Legacy which Bill was trying to inflate to JFK size without having to go through the discomfort and inconvenience of getting shot. He's sitting on the bench between Martin Van Buren and Rutheford B Hayes and his legacy has a lot of tell-all books to endure now that the Clints cant retaliate, probably damaging enough to slide him right down the bench to take his place with Warren Harding and Andrew Johnson, where he belongs.
And why are the Dems so angry? The winner of the nomination has a problem...blue collar whites hate his guts. You think those are strong words? I've been amazed at the conversations I've had with people. I dont live in some redneck part of Oklahoma either, I live in Henry Waxman's district in Los Angeles where he wins with 80% of the vote against whatever basket case wants to have his name on the ballot with an 'R' next to it. That Rev Wright stuff really had an impact. People dont like being called evil racists. This has crippled Obama's candidacy.
So the question is can 'The Old Duffer' win. Could it be that all this running a non-partisan campaign is just strategic posing, that at some point McCain is going to say to Obama, "Excuse me dear fellow but I believe your shoe is untied" and than wallop him when he's looking down? We already know he's a crafty little plick, he sandbagged Giuliani and Romney and used Huckster-bee like an Armenian catamite, mightent he have the same in store for Obama?
Obama, even with his toppling of the Clintons, is pretty green. The Dems have some incredible blind spots; they really dont understand how regular people see them. Too much eco-babble while gas prices are rising and the Republicans are yelling about drilling for oil could be a problem, as would an Al Sharpton keynote address. But thats where they're at, thats who just took charge. Howard Dean was a zany left-wing nutball, if you remember. These guys could have the country rushing to vote for McCain out of total fear. If they cant convince people that they have some other ideas than raising taxes and more federal regulation they will have big problems.
McCain might win. Its a long time until the election and its going to be incredibly tough. McCain has as many liabilities as Obama. He has no vision, he is inarticulate and terrible on TV, the conservative base of the party flies into a rage at some of the things he says and adds them to his past betrayals but this gasoline price crisis has shown us very much the difference between McCain and Obama. McCain at least understands something about how oil gets out of the ground and into the gas tank of your car. Somebody has to stop these idiot Dems from wrecking the country and McCain is now the only hope. Hate him as we must we also must support him with votes and, yes, money. Someone who believes that gasoline prices can be lowered by imposing a windfall profits tax on the oil companies is a menace; the last idiot stupid enough to try it was Jimmy The Jerk and we got gas lines and chaos. Obama must be stopped. Hold your nose and jump on the "Straight Talk Express'.

The numbers are in in Indiana and North Carolina. Obama skunked Hillary Clinton in NC and looks to be losing by a whisker in Indiana. It means that the Rev Wright business hasnt destroyed Obama among Democrats but the signs of the damage are there. That wont do Hillary any good. The SooperDooper Delegates, the Party insiders, dont want to be under the thumb of the Clintons any more. They're tired of the Old Regime which has ruled capriciously and with many large and small injustices since 1992. They were afraid of the Clintons gaining the White House and exacting revenge on the turncoats within the Party who had jumped ship. Now it only remains for The Little Woman, with the blotchy-faced, pouting lipped, wild-eyed BJ standing unsteadily behind her like a Longhorn Bull who ate too much loco-weed (thats how he looked at Mrs C's 'Victory' speech tonight) to fess up and admit that the Democratic Party; THEIR Party, the Party that watched BJ commit perjury on national TV and still backed him; the Party which watched thugs and dictators line up to stuff the Clinton's coffers with cash and turned and said nothing; the Party which stood by while BJ launched a weak, uncoordinated attack against Al Qaeda two days after he had perjured himself on national TV and an air strike on Iraq on the day he was impeached for that perjury (the only response to a series of bloody attacks); the Party that shielded these two reprobates for almost two decades has had enough of them.
And has, at the same time, totally taken leave of its senses. Barak Obama is not qualified to be President Of The United States. His view of the world doesnt correspond with reality. He has absolutely no administrative experience. The socialist hallucinations which he shares with his radical associates are a recipe for disaster. Pelosi and Reid are just as incompetent and just as wrong. The entire left wing of the Democratic Party has worked itself into a froth after eight years of what they mistake for conservative rule. Only the threat of Bush's veto has restrained them up to now. They think the country is yearning for their heavy handed Central Economic Planning. They think that a weak regime can negotiate its problems in the world away. They think that the destructive pursuit of the Global Warming agenda will be tenable as world temperatures fall, they think Americans will be quiescent as they nationalize the health care system. They think the rich are going to sit by and let themselves be taxed into penury and that capital flight wont be the reaction to much higher taxes. They think business can function efficiently with out of control regulators and unions.
EVERYTHING THEY THINK IS WRONG!
Even with ten Rev Wrights at his back I dont see Obama losing to McCain. McCain is an impossibly incompetent candidate and so self-centered that he wont take any advice. In the months since he hijacked the nomination he has shown that he expects the Republican base to dutifully vote for him while he trolls for votes among Independents and Reagan Democrats.
He has no message, he has no charm, he has no allies except the moth-eaten professional Party establishment who took our 2004 victory and threw it away. McCain will be crushed by Obama.
Soon we will have the happy day when we watch Her Thighness slink off to her mansion in Georgetown and BJ stagger off to his pad in Chappaqua, speaking fees slashed, donations to the Lie-Berry subsiding from a flood to a trickle to spend his declining years grabbing waitresses at the country club and cursing St. Algore and Jimmy The Jerk for their Nobel Prizes. That will be the last happy day we will spend for a long time.
Obama will stride forward and the dark night will descend.

"It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving picaninnies; and one can imagine that Blair, twice victor abroad but enmired at home, is similarly seduced by foreign politeness. They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in Watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird."

"The proposed ban on incitement to “religious hatred” make no sense unless it involves a ban on the Koran itself."

"Not even Mr Blair has been able to erode the unions conviction that we all have a “right” to a minimum wage… Both the minimum wage and the Social Charter would palpably destroy jobs."

"No one obeys the speed limit except a motorised rickshaw."

"My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters."

"Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3."

How often have we sat cursing and mumbling at our TV screens, our wives, children and pets consciously avoiding coming into our field of vision, even the very potted plants huddling with stomas puckering waiting for Daddy to explode into one of his Right Wing Bug Eyed RANTS! waiting for some politician or even commentator to say something that shows some feeling, some life, some common sense-- something that was wasnt pre-thought-out and tailored not to insult the most crotchety and sensitive lame-brain who might happen to be watching? Look at the quotes above. That's not some nut whose blog I think you might enjoy, this dude just got elected Mayor Of London! Thats probably the equivalent to being elected Governor of California in this country. Maybe better.
I had no idea the Conservative Party still existed in Britain. The last I remember of them that chinless half-wit David Cameron was being quoted agreeing with the Labour Minister For Health that fat people and smokers should be denied medical treatment by the National Health Service because their bad health was self-inflicted. Of course this was just a ruse to cover up the fact the the NHS is suffering from terminal bureaucracy and is on the Death Watch list itself. Neither party wanted to discuss that, it might lead someone to suggest that some sort of bold action be taken, a thought that strikes fear into the hearts of craven politicos the world over; but they're happy to blame the innocent victims of their incompetence and chide them for smoking a pack of heavily-taxed cigarettes or eating a box of Cheeze-its. I cant wait for National Health in this country.
But now, like a breath of fresh air, comes Boris! If he manages to Rudy-fy London, reduce the muggings and burglaries, and thwart the anti-carbon Trotskyites from totally banning the internal combustion engine from the city limits, Boris has a shot at being Prime Minister. But not if we act FAST! You see Boris, interestingly enough, was born in New York City (just like me) so that means that he's eligible to run for President in this country! Imagine the things he would say, things that haven't been said in public for years. Things that that milquetoast of a Bushy and that soggy liberal cracker of a McLame haven't thought to themselves in their wildest dreams let alone said on camera. A real conservative, who wasnt apologizing at every turn; who would take the war to the socialist enemy and grind their noses in a century of failure. I know its only a distant dream but maybe the worm is turning. Guys like Boris Johnson in the UK and Sarkozy in France are beginning to at least fight back a little. So far Sarkozy has run into a brick wall of recipients ready to commit hari-kiri to protect their sacred benefits but the ongoing collapse of the French economy is pressing reform forward. This could give us hope, if it ends well. If it ends badly, if the socialists let the ship sink before they'll agree to reforms, then we're in for an equally bad time with our pack of Stalinists.
So lets invoke the Patriot Act, seize Boris and fly him back here, find some way to depose McLame and run with a real conservative...someone who wouldnt have let Hillary's remark to O'Rielly that she was going to sue OPEC to lower oil prices get by without being heaped with the scorn a remark that insanely stupid and disconnected with reality deserves. A Leader to save us from the Socialist Night which is descending and deepening with every passing primary.

http://www.eursoc.com/news/fullstory.php/aid/2480/
Europe's_Middle_Classes_Feel_The_Squeeze.html

Apr. 30 - Swedish car giant Volvo sets a target to eliminate death and injury in its vehicles by 2020.

The firm says it is claiming a first in setting a target date in the race to cut the world-wide crash toll of 1.2 million deaths and 50 million injuries each year.

Once upon a time, in a place called Chicago there was a man whose main ambition in life was to be a clown. His name was John Wayne Gacy. He worked very hard at being a clown and was not a brilliant success but he was a fixture at the birthday parties of neighborhood children. These days marketing geniuses would say that Mr. Gacy had created a 'brand', a look and a style that people associated with him which defined him-- you want a safe, friendly, affordable, not-too-overwhelming clown for your child's modest birthday party Gacy was your man. But one day the police started pulling bodies out of the crawl space under Mr. Gacy's house. Bodies of young men who were apparently tortured and murdered by Mr. Gacy in his non-clown free time. Now Gacy was convicted of killing all these people but even if he had managed to beat the charges and been released back into the community his 'brand' was destroyed. Instead of thinking 'affordable, non-threatening clown' when they thought of Mr. Gacy people would always be thinking about the police pulling bodies from the crawl space.
Once upon a time in the same city of Chicago there was an ambitious politician named Barak Obama. He was a legislator of very modest achievements and vaulting ambitions. He had grown up among white people but his ethnic heritage was half black and in the elite universities he attended he was filled with the ideology of black victimization. Settling in Chicago to do some vaguely-defined 'community organizing' he allied himself with the leader of the Trinity Baptist Church, a large congregation with strong roots in the black community and one of his stepping stones to a seat in the Illinois Legislature and then, by a fluke to be a keynote speaker at the 2004 Dem Convention and a newly-elected US Senator following the self-inflicted collapse of the Republican Party in his state.
Obama had a golden voice and when the 2008 presidential derby started he declared his candidacy and began his marketing campaign. 'Change You Can Believe In!' ,'Yes We Can!', 'The Candidate Of Hope!' He quietly organized the caucus states which were being ignored by the incompetent and egotistical frontrunner whose own brand was 'More Of The Same Sleaze As Before'. Everything started humming along for Obama. The donors deserted the 'More Of The Same' campaign and flooded his campaign with cash. The media and the Dem Party establishment, sick of the Clinton Crime Family's lies and threats and afraid of their return to power stampeded towards the Candidate Of Hope.
And then something happened. The bodies started being unearthed in the crawlspace of the Obama campaign. The Right Reverend Wright popped up, as did William Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn. Their unrepentant anti-Americanism, coupled with Obama's own leftist pronouncements and the fact that no one really knew who he was or where he had come from began to interfere with the branding scenario. People started looking closer as the Rev Wright hogged the camera and Obama's tongue-tied and lame explanations avoided answering the bigger question; which is, how much of this crap that your close associates believe do you believe? Obama has come up with some unconvincing answers to these questions but like Gacy the fake nose has fallen off and the makeup has smeared.
This Wright business has destroyed Obama's 'brand'. It has defined him as part of a dysfunctional black political subculture of grievance and anger that most non-blacks have contempt for. "America is evil, you're all guilty, history gives us a free pass to justify any sort of bad behavior, everything wrong with our lives is your fault"...the whole tired litany of self-pity and anger laced with Marxist economic theories and demands for cash compensation for historical injustice. Anyone who hasnt been steeped in this errant nonsense in our decayed and ruined universities feels total revulsion for this point of view and now Obama has become the poster-boy for it. He is toast, he is finished. Clinton will wallop him in Indiana and North Carolina. The party which has come to loathe her and her deranged egomaniac of a husband will be forced to accept her, just as we Republicans were forced to accept the nasty, ugly, aged, sputtering, liberal clown who was foisted on us by the sheer ineptitude and political incompetence of his opponents in the Republican Primaries. Even a damaged, shrill, not very politically savvy harridan of a socialist like Mrs Clinton, despised in her own party and hated by a majority of the black voters, should be able to dispose of a fumbling dotard like McLame without too much trouble. I've voted in every presidential election since 1972 and I've never voted for a Democrat for president but if its HRC against that feeble wreck of a McLame I'll be voting for The Girl.

This was supposed to be the primary season that opened up the process to the people. There were no incumbents or inside candidates to stand between the will of the people and the interests of the party hacks. So how have we ended up with a liberal maverick, despised by the vast majority of his own party and already showing himself well-deserving of that contempt; a mean, low-playing, corrupt former first lady whose made-up anecdotes, penchant for political revenge and lawless behavior and increasingly unhinged husband has burned away any residual liking she might have retained in the upper crust of the Democratic Party; and the Great Chocolate Chip Hope of the blacks and the loonies, now severely compromised by the Marxist and rabidly anti-American ravings of his adoptive father and his lifelong associates?
So here we are. The more these mutts campaign the more unpopular they get. Any discussion of issues has gone by the board, the last few weeks have become a saga about who can make the worst gaff. They take turns outdoing each other. Bill Clinton, exiled to a tour of the A&W hamburger stands in the deep sticks, occasionally goes totally non-linear at some poor hapless rube who asked what BJ considers an unfair question. Eyes bugging, finger-waving hair-standing-on-end, crazy time. Meanwhile the little woman, who proudly ran the commercial about her crisis-management abilities at three AM, explained her lying about being under fire during a visit to the Bosnian PEACEKEEPING MISSION by averring that she was too tired to know the difference between reality and the war movies she saw in the distant past. We switch channels to McLame as he demands that the North Carolina Republican Party take down a TV ad which links the Dem candidates for governor of that state to Obama and Wright.
The conservatives, who have already had more than enough of McLame's feeble toadying to the Democrats, sent a tidal wave of contributions to the NC Repubs while McLame stood limply by wondering why no one will contribute to his RINO party. Rush and Shaun played the offending ad on a loop, giving the NC Reps about five million dollars of free air time and delivering a resounding slap to the wizened face of The Maverick.
Speaking of Obama and Wright, Wright seems to be on the Black Liberation Theology Awareness Tour, just in case there are people so brain dead that they havent gotten the message about the Marxist fever swamp that the Chocolate Chip Candidate Of Hope has emerged from. Obama is being crushed by this and has not been able to come up with any effective response as any blue collar support that his 'Politics Of Hope' had attracted slips away for ever.
So now the Dems are faced with nominating an unelectable Obama or a holding a convention filled with angry black and left-radical delegates which would hand the reins of the party and possibly the presidency to a candidatemost of the party has learned to fear and loathe and which would probably be besieged by outraged and angry demonstrators in the streets of Denver.
So which one of these three is going to be our next president and under what circumstances?
Grave crises loom closer and closer. The bio-fuel fraud is causing starvation and chaos overseas and rapidly escalating food prices at home. The clock is running out on Medicare and Social Security, programs sure to be pushed over the edge by adding a new Health Care entitlement. All three of these candidates are offering the nation of Mexico unlimited access to federal giveaway programs for its excess population, adding greatly to the entitlement burden. Every day we dont drill for oil or impede the construction of nuclear power plants in favor of unworkable 'green' technologies brings us closer to an energy shortfall which will shock the people who are too young to remember the chaos of 1972 and '78. State and local governments are rapidly raising taxes to the point where it wont be easy for the feds to do so without causing the whole house of cards to collapse. The three statist candidates who remain have shown that they dont have the imagination, philosophical underpinnings, leadership skills or competence to deal with any of these approaching problems. Congress is a leaderless pack of corrupt ward-heelers who are unable to focus on anything beyond conniving subsidies from the treasury for their contributors. There is no sane voice anywhere, proposing a course based on ridding ourselves of these parasites and getting in touch with policies which have been successful in the past.
Fasten your seat belts, we're in for a rocky ride.

So the Right Reverend Wright is doing a media blitz! We're now seeing clips of an interview where angry, crackpot, Christian-hating, leftist Bill Moyers is attempting to braid his nosehairs with the ones in the Right Reverend Wright's butt. Even in this friendly enviroment we have the Right Reverend Wright pontificating, raising his hands, rolling his eyes heavenward and talking about the blood on America's hands, not as a point of contention but as a fact so obvious that it almost goes without saying. We cut to a solemn nod of assent from Moyers, obviously proud to be breathing the same air as this spiritual genius. I cant wait to see the whole interview. Or the Right Reverend Wright's speech to the NAACP. These elitist libs are so saturated with their politically correct smugness that they dont have any sense of how regular people react when they hear this kind of vile nonsense. While the elite's kids were in the snooty Private Academies, like the one Obama went to in Honolulu, our kids were toughing it out in public schools which were governed by the court order of liberal Federal judges; judges who roughly enforced every form of social engineering proposed by the radical lawyers who were filing endless briefs before them. The schools were destroyed and anyone who complained about the lack of discipline and standards was labeled a racist. We watched trillions of dollars be poured down the social services rathole; if you objected or pointed to the generations of lawless, fatherless youths who were being bred and subsidized by these corrupt and misguided programs you were labeled a racist who hated the poor. The Federal government intruded into every workplace telling bosses who they could hire and made disciplining or firing a minority a scary proposition for gutless middle managers or businessmen afraid of a lawsuit at the hands of anti-business 'public interest' law foundations or the legal hacks at the EEOC. We've been called racists lots of times and in lots of different ways and there hasnt been a thing we could do about it; if the company was big enough or if you worked for the government any disagreement with the PC status quo would land you in a 'sensitivity training' program that would teach you to grovel and apologize properly.
So now we're supposed to ignore this looney-tune Marxist flapdoodle in the name of racial harmony. Well, I'm not going to do it. The Right Reverend Wright is a hate-filled, incoherent, Marxist, grudge-holding, anti-white, anti-semitic, sniveling, poverty profiteer, and the congregation and the community who go to his church and who give him donations and awards are every bit as misguided and stupid as he is. Including star parishioner Barak Obama.
And lest you think I'm writing this because the Right Reverend Wright is black let me jot down a couple of words about Barak Obama's white friends, a group every bit as revolting as anything he could dig up in the black community. William Ayres and Benadine Dohrn are two of the most irrational and loathsome figures in this country. What other nation would so blithely tolerate two creeps who openly and fervently pray for its destruction? How are these two rewarded for their revolutionary violence and incoherent philosophy? They're college professors! Public employees. That refuse like this are considered qualified to teach anyone anything when every word they utter is steeped in the radical Marxism which has murdered hundreds of millions of people in the last century and has been seen to destroy nations from the inside out over and over again is beyond any kind of common sense. In the name of academic freedom the universities have been destroyed by a cloud of locust-like Marxists, ironically the bitter enemies of any kind of academic freedom for non-Marxists.
The media, graduates of schools where this type of professor complemented them and gave them A's for their own sophomoric leftism can only explain the objection to these people in terms of racism and ignorance on the part of the Great Unwashed. The media support Obama and they might think the Right Reverend Wright is a little 'over the top' but they're in basic agreement with everything they're both saying.
But what, for the Dems, is the alternative to Obama?
First, dumping him at this point is going to cause a STIR among the group of people who they have encouraged from Day One to think of themselves as victims of the unfair white conspiracy and have forgiven again and again for bad behavior or even outright mayhem. The Equally Reverend Al Sharpton is already threatening disruption and violence. Can a group so totally gutless and guilt-riddled as Professional Liberals go tell their black helots to go sit at the back of the convention and be quiet? Will their black constituents accept their second-class status meekly and troop to the polls to vote for the wife of the First Black President? Can these same libs look the white radical loonies who are always prone to violence in the eye and tell them to accept a fait accompli delivered by the SuperDooper Delegates?
Second, the unacceptable alternative. The Clinton Crime Family is well known for their penchant for mafia-style revenge. And the list is long. Donors, pet journalists and party hacks who jumped ship and dared to criticize 'The Legacy' are right at the top. None of these guys wants Dragon Lady and her shady crewe of sycophants in charge of the IRS and the Justice Department with the Patriot Act at their beck and call. The Clints have paid dearly in the Democratic Party and the nation for their take-no-prisoners tactics, their lies, now made transparent by a suddenly hostile media, and their general unlikability under pressure.
She's damaged goods. A coup d'etat that gave her the nomination would certainly alienate the blacks and the youth vote and leave her to fight out the election among blue collar whites with McLame, who has none of her radical plans for government expansion or her long history of sleaze and corruption.
So the Dems now have two weak and damaged candidates. Every day makes them more unelectable. A chaotic convention will seal the deal. McLame is the luckiest guy since Ringo Starr. Lets see if he can screw it up.

I guess its no secret...me and Algore love the planet Earth. In fact, I guess I'd have to say that Earth is just about my favorite planet in the whole danged universe! That doesnt mean that there arent places on Earth that I dislike intensely. Take, for instance, Las Vegas, Nevada. Its got its good points and bad points but getting there from Los Angeles in an automobile usually involves the I-15, which I hate. 250 miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic; trucks, hookers with road-rage, chinese tourists in rental cars, drunken fraternity prats, wiseguys and gangstas in Escalades, every form of human debris is hurtling to or from that glowing neon catbox in what used to be the desert at high speed. The obsessive-compulsive desire to hand over their hard-earned cash to the corporate casino owners and the practitioners of every form of vice ever invented has worn tire-ruts in each lane, making changing lanes a bit dicey in places.
So, I avoid I-15. This adds a hundred or even two hundred miles to ones trip but one traffic jam in Victorville or the Cajon Pass, one jackknifed truck or overturned SUV (common occurrences on I-15) can wipe out any advantage you gain from taking a direct route. But I'm an old hand at this, the last few years of my mother's life made me almost a commuter to the Entertainment Capital Of The World and I've learned all the alternative routes.
This week I did a fast turnaround and on the way back I drove through the Mojave National Desert Preserve. I had weighed an alternative route through Death Valley, a gorgeous spring day like this shouldnt be wasted and Death Valley wont be visitable until October but I went south instead of North.
It seems that the clouds which just rolled through LA without dropping any moisture, a sure sign that the dry season has arrived, must have dumped some rain into this isolated valley. As I drove into the preserve I noticed how lush and green the mesquite bushes were. The Joshua trees that you
encounter on the road to Cima had the dust washed off of them and were in full flower. An amazing sight. The desert floor was rioting with wildflowers and blooming cactii. I was pulling my car over every few minutes just to wander around and take pictures. I saw a king snake slither across the road . There were lots of chipmunks and a jackrabbit darting about. I didnt see any coyotes. I guess I'll just have to wait for them to wander into my yard back in LA.




At one point I stopped and watched a kestrel swoop back and forth low over the mesquite and then rose to perch on a phone pole. I got a photo.



I drove through Cima and the south towards the I-40.







I turned off at the washboard road to the Kelso Dunes. I worried that my 14-year-old Honda Del Sol would be shaken to pieces in the three-mile drive to the trailhead. I parked in the empty parking lot and got a quart-sized bottle of water to take with me as I hiked up into the dunes. Very quickly I remembered a couple of things I had forgotten about desert sand dunes, as opposed to beach sand. The sand is much finer and drier, making it harder to walk on. I'm in fairly good shape, I walk on steep hills most weekend mornings, but I was soon out of breath, heart pounding. Another big difference is the temperature and the humidity. No sea breeze here. It was about 75 degrees in the parking lot. It must have been twenty degrees hotter on the sand. My water started to disappear fast. But what a walk! The dunes were covered with wildflowers. Lizard tracks wound across the blinding white sand. Ravens flew by. Absolute total silence broken annoyingly by a jet flying high overhead at one point. Not a soul around.
An inspiring moment.








My water was disappearing at an alarming rate. I turned around and walked back, arriving at the parking lot to encounter a two-foot-long lizard standing near my car. A photo op from God. But would he bolt? I slowly moved closer. He was frozen. Another step. Raise my camera. I got it! As I lowered my camera the lizard came to its senses and scurried off.









I got in my car and drove back to LA.

Linked below are two articles which highlight the increasing loonieness and destructive results of the Man Made Global Warming Hoax. If you need links attacking the bad science of Global Warming and the fraudulent and heavy-handed tactics of its advocates there are links on my 'Where's The Warming?' post of March 19th. But this isnt about the pseudo-science behind the hoax but about some of the results of acting on that misconceived premise. We've all been told for the last fifteen years or so that if we didnt heed the warnings! and act yesterday to change our evil, consumerist ways that whole ecosystems would cease to be and that millions would starve!
One of the most holy intonations in the Global Warming mantra is the prayer for the renewable energy sources which will replace evil petroleum and even more evil coal as energy sources. Evil nuclear, the true non-greenhouse, safe, renewable, infinitely abundant energy source is, of course, not considered an alternative because it is Evil. This hasnt stopped countries like France, Germany and Japan from producing almost all their electricity from nuclear power but they've been ignored by the fanatics who HATE nuclear power unless its a hydrogen bomb on the tip of an SS-20 medium-range Soviet missile aimed at them by St. Mikhail The Wonderful, in which case its a step towards World Peace. The True Answer is Bio-fuels! Ethanol! The moldy hippies from the big cities and the ever-greedy lords of Agribusiness see eye-to-eye on this one. Monstrously huge subsidies have been passed in congress to pour tens of billions of dollars into this miracle fuel. Unfortunately, because the corn must be planted and harvested by petroleum-gobbling farm machinery, because ethanol is distilled by heat, because it cant be transported by pipeline because it contains water which would damage the pipes and so must be transported by trucks with diesel-burning engines and then blended with gasoline at the refinery because few cars can burn pure ethanol without destroying their engines, ethanol actually takes more energy to produce and distribute than you get from burning it for fuel. This also means, in the aggregate, that it also produces more pollution than gasoline. But the main side effect has been its effect on food prices and the environment. The price of corn and wheat have shot up astronomically. The effect in the poorer nations has been mass hunger and even starvation. Countries like Haiti are dissolving into chaos because the average people cant afford to survive. As pleasing as it will be to see people in international parasite countries like Egypt and Pakistan go hungry as China and India outbid them for shrinking food supplies the result of this will probably be an ever increasing flood of hunger refugees into the countries whose economies can still feed their populations. But how long will that last? A century of Socialist Central Planning has left mounds of skeletal corpses wherever the people have been misguided enough to dispossess the successful farmers and adopt the heavy hand of government-imposed fairness. Zimbabwe is the latest example. Before Mugabe kicked out the evil capitalist farmers and redistributed their land to his political cronies the population was 13 million well-fed people and a healthy food export industry. Today, a mere decade later, the population is seven million people, most of them on the brink of starvation.
Now, with the United States preparing to abandon capitalism and seriously discussing nationalizing industry after industry the continued supply of food, even to its own citizens, let alone the rest of the world, is in doubt. So in a sense, the mass starvation predicted as a result of Global Warming has already started to occur, not because of any change in the weather but because the 'threat' of Global Warming has increased government meddling in the production and distribution of food has caused chaos and dysfunction in food marketing. It also seems that the sacred Rain Forests have got to be sacrificed to create more bio-fuel producing farmland and hopefully enough food so that Brazilians dont die of starvation behind the wheels of their ethanol-powered cars. Screw the Rainforest, we cant let the environment get in the way of protecting the environment, can we?
Which brings us to our second non-solution. Wind power. We've all seen the forests of bird-pureeing windmills that government subsidies have caused to be set up in what used to be called 'The Pacific Flyway', where tens of millions of migratory birds followed the path of the winds from north to south and back again. You know birds, "Dirty, filthy, disgusting, lice-ridden, BOIDS!" as the lady in 'The Producers' once said. The ugly, noisy windmills arent very efficient at producing electricity but they are better at killing birds than ten million meth-crazed, shotgun-toting rednecks with an unlimited supply of ammunition. The same people who wept when the pigeons of Trafalgar Square were denied food in the name of urban cleanliness heartlessly turn their backs of these feathered bug-eating pests in the name of Renewable Energy. The article from 'The Scotsman' is about the campaign to seed the empty and beautiful heathlands of Northern England with ugly, noisy windfarms. Of course the fragile peat bogs will have to be broken up to lay roads, transmission lines and the concrete bases that these monsters sit on, just as the desert environment has been permanently damaged by the ones we have in Cali. Again, the infrastructure to make these things work, and the energy required to keep them online is immense and comes close to cancelling out the energy you get from them. On windless days they produce NO power, as several wind-powered towns in Texas found out recently.
The problem here is that Global Warming has never been anything but an excuse for the Central Planners in the government to get control of what's left of the free economy. The discredited Central Planning nostrums that have seen a century of failure and disaster are now necessary to cure our Evil Consumerist ways. if we dont adopt command Socialism THE WORLD WILL DIE! Welcome to the New Age of Feudalism.



http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/latestnews/Wind-farms-or-peat-bogs.3980685.jp
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/16/biofuels.alternativeenergy

So Thrilly as Hilly returns to Philly! Yes, the City Of Brotherly Love, where Traitor Russert launched the illegal alien driver's license question that began Mizz Hilly's long slide towards irrelevance and unpopularity. Now she's back on stage in a debate that her wildest dreams of a year ago never envisioned; the nerds, the droolers and the chronic losers all sent home in disgrace, stripped down and fighting for her political life against the lean, up-and-coming New Kid. But even her desperate situation couldnt make Hilly adhere to the truth:
"Regardless of the differences there may be between us, and there are differences, they pale in comparison to the differences between us and Sen. [John] McCain,"
No they dont. You're all a pack of Big Government libs and you know it. Any minor differences these socialists might have with McLame would be overcome by his Dem Senate buddies twisting his arm after he's elected. Also, what differences are there between these two Stalinists; the only thing they're arguing about is which one of them institutes the Five Year Plan. Its like Stalin and Trotsky, not a dime's worth of difference between them.
And what fun George and Charlie were having! It was like the two guys at a cockfight that hold the roosters in their hands while they bump the bird's heads together to get them killing mad.
One of the most wonderful things about this endless primary is the media has lost all its inhibitions against going after liberals. After all, with all the candidates on the far left (except maybe McLame who might possibly be on the near left) they're going to have to get used to taking out their pissant bile on whoever's available. So far they've managed to strip the aura of wonderfulness from America's First Black President and stood back and let him be revealed as a petty, grudge-filled, greedy, lying, power-mad kook as he erupts into tirades at hapless college students and voters who ask him an unwelcome question. With his eyes bugging out of his red face framed by that weird stand-up white hair he looks like another Clinton, George Clinton, after his crack arrest. So much for Legacy Boy.
The best howler of the evening was when Gibson asked the debaters whether 'The Dream Ticket' , one of them as VP on the other one's ticket, was a possibility. Total Silence. I hoped that they had patted these two down for weapons before they let them on the stage. Its pretty clear that having the other one around for four years, competing with them for media face-time, is not what either of these two are dreaming of.
So, then the debate degenerated to a discussion of 'the issues'. Who cares. Nothing these dopes ever say during a campaign actually happens so why subject yourself to the insane boredom of listening to whatever permutation of Stalinist economics has focus-grouped the best this week.
They're going to dismantle our military, hand out cash to all and sundry and nationalize whatever industries they can get their grasping hands on. Remember, everything that the socialists have gotten their hands on for the last hundred years has turned into a total disaster. Now they want more input into energy, health care, pharmaceuticals and finance. If they get it we're in for some seriously hard times.
So who won the debate over which one gets to wreck the country? Its hard to tell. Hillary is hoping that the blue collar oafs who vote Democratic in Pennsylvania decade after decade as their jobs flee the anti-business, high-tax environment which results from that, will be racist enough to be scared by quotes from Obama's book and the Rev Wright into voting White. Obama is hoping that a solid black vote combined with enough glassy-eyed, granola-eating, left-wing, fanatical loonies and swooning college students can finally put a stake through the heart of the Undying Candidate. Only the polls will tell!

Defaming Mormons is almost as much fun as reviling Born-Again Christians if you have one of those mind-numbingly dull jobs writing for a major newspaper. Not that there's much difference between the two in the Ivy League educated mind, where any religion, even New Age Idiocies like Wiccan are looked at with sneering contempt. These guys are too busy in their spare time painting their house green to reflect harmful Global Warming-causing cosmic rays to wallow in irrational belief systems. But nothing brightens a dull day at The Daily Blab like a good old wacky-religious-cult-enslaves-with-kinky-and-brutal-fury story. They can fulminate against these Mormon (make sure that word gets used alot so that America will be alerted to the enemy within) polygamists who kept their women permanently locked inside their compound where they were reduced to total subservience, brainwashed by a weird and brutal dogma of patriarchism and then traded like livestock among their close male relatives. Lurid tales of fiftyish men and just-nubile women can be flaunted to show the evils of Mormonism. Imagine the mental state people who live like that are probably in. We should condemn any religion where this type of arrangement is common, shouldnt we? Even if it encompasses a billion people and a large chunk of the world's known oil reserves, right? Because this is the type of society that breeds terrorists. Osama Bin Laden, for example, was one of dozens of children from young wives of a rich merchant. In Britain the incidence of congenital birth defects, the frequency of which is increased greatly by inbreeding, is astronomically higher in the Muslim community where just-pubescent girls are often given in marriage to much-older male relatives. The Houston compound wouldnt have raised a stir in Riyadh or in rural villages from Morocco to Pakistan, its a totally acceptable life-style. These are countries where female circumcision is accepted and common, honor killings expected of the family. Traditional folks. Not all Muslims do any of this (none of the modern cosmopolitan ones do), or live this way but a much higher proportion of Muslims do than Mormons so it must be okay to generalize like the New York Times does to Mormons. Anyway, the Mormon church has renounced polygamy and Islam isnt even thinking of any step toward female equality, the idea is blasphemy. The 60 year old Prophet's eleventh wife was nine years old.
So the next time the media get their hands on some fringe Christian group and get one of these sneering laugh-fests going remember that there are certainly Islamic compounds in this country these geniuses could be snooping into which have practices every bit as brutal as the ones in Houston. We'll be waiting, guys!

This morning I was reading an article on Real Clear politics entitled 'Where Have All The Republicans Gone?' by Gary Andres. Its the usual collection of demographic tables that essentially misses the forest because it is studying the trees too intently. The most egregious mistake that all these Inside-The -Beltway types are making is the decline of registered Republicans and a consequent rise in the number of Independents, and thinking this represents people drifting left towards the Democrats. That mistake underlies the entire premise of the McLame campaign; he thinks he will drift left with the electorate and score big. Just the fact that McLame and his advisors are so completely WRONG about something so fundamental underlines what a completely unqualified candidate for the presidency he is. The rise in Independents is a result of conservatives being appalled and shocked time and time again by the drift by the Republicans toward facilitating big government as the solution to every problem and the unwillingness of most Republican office holders to oppose or even debate the Democrats on any issue. As soon as there is a confrontation the left-wing media publishes a bunch of polls and the Republicans run and hide like a bunch of whipped little sissies. A large portion of the blame for this has to be laid at the feet of the party's so-called leader. Bush has spent his entire time in office being 'non-confrontational' to people who were calling him a homicidal retard. He didnt push ANWR or offshore drilling and his reward from his Democratic party-pals was to be called a tool of Big Oil. Now that we have a petroleum crunch and gas prices are rising it is, of course, Bush's fault! You can go down the line on issue after issue where Bush has turned his back on the people who elected him and sought comity with his sworn enemies. He has actively favored opportunists and non-ideological types in his appointments, and in fact left almost all the Clinton appointees in place in the CIA and State Departments, ensuring leaks and betrayals aplenty. He could have realized the destructive results of a McLame nomination on the party and recognized McLame's total unfitness both as a candidate and a president. McLame hated Bush and did everything he could to sabotage him and his fellow Republicans in the Senate. But did Bush openly or tacitly support any one of the much more acceptable and qualified candidates who were available or groom one of his own? No, the head of the party sat silent, just as he did while Dummy Hastert and Spending-Bill Frist turned the legislature into a welfare office for crooked corporate donors and a halfway house for closeted deviants.
None of it matters. This is going to be a Dem tidal wave. The crooked corporate donors and the closeted deviants are all solidly backing the Dems. All this fighting and tearing on the Dem side wont hurt them a bit; they're not arguing about the issues but about personalities and it seems certain that Obama has it locked up or will shortly. A damaged Clinton with an alienated black vote might have been a contest for a REPUBLICAN candidate, but for a sawed-off, superannuated, ultra liberal, hot-tempered aisle-crosser? Either of these extremely flawed, incompetent militantly left-wing Dems could beat McLame. What liberal in their right mind is going to vote for a liberal McLame when they can vote for a liberal Obama? Even a lot of Republicans will be voting for Obama or some looney Bob Barr third party candidate just to send a message to the arrogant hacks who promoted McLame's takeover of the party.
See you on the bread lines!

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/04/where_
have_all_the_republicans.html

"Clinton said she and her husband have many gay friends that they socialize with when they get the chance. "I've got friends, literally, around the country that I'm close to. It's part of my life," she said."

Yes, its election time! Gays arent as numerous as a lot of other groups who get a lot less attention but they are very politically active and an especially open-handed group when it comes to making campaign contributions. So now, with the candidates as hungry for money as a junkie going through withdrawal symptoms, the gay pander is on!
Now we are going to have to admit that the thought of John McLame 'going across the aisle' to make a play for the gay vote is enough to turn the stomach of any red-blooded American, gay or straight; McLame just doesnt have much Gay Appeal. He doesnt have much Straight Appeal. Let's face it, this mutt is just downright unappealing. Because he's appalling. But thats another post. But there is a group in the gay community who live lives of quiet desperation, unable to reveal themselves and openly announce their proclivities lest they be covered in shame and scorn and even physically assaulted. Yes, I'm talking about Gay Republicans. Some people, regardless of their sexual orientation, notice that liberalism doesnt work and generally leads to disaster. They hate high taxes, they hate overregulation, they reject social engineering schemes and plans to install central economic planning in the name of fixing the weather and generally find the whole panoply of liberalism unconvincing. They have two problems. Left wing gay activists consider any form of conservatism, no matter how thoughtful and inclusive, to put one in active cahoots with the 'God sent AIDS to punish gays' psychotics and any conservative views fill them with rage. The other problem is that the party that up until recently stood for conservative values also includes many 'God sent AIDS to punish gays' psychotics. But their problem has been solved by McLame and the current crop of Republican leaders who are enthusiastically renouncing conservatism, relieving gay conservatives of any obligation to support anyone. Just like straight conservatives. We all just need to shut up.
But thats not where the REAL action is in the gay community. Its with the Dems. Now you would think that Obama would have a natural 'leg up' with the gay community. He's tall with handsomely chiseled features. Manly. His speeches are filled with hope for the future and imply a new, happy world to come. The kind of stuff that idealists and gay activists love to hear.
Except. What do you think The Right Reverend Wright says about gays in his friendly little sermons? The truth about black politics is that while they tend to be far to the left concerning issues of governance and policy black Americans are very socially conservative. They are anti-abortion and anti-gay. Very anti-gay. Obama, almost totally unknown except for his association with The Right Reverend Wright, is linked closely to the mainstream of political thought in the black community. The anti-gay mainstream.
Which brings us to the Clints. As the quote above illustrates Miz Hilly and the gang will go to any length, say any thing, crawl as low as they need to crawl to get the nomination. I expect Bill to announce that he tried being gay once but that he didnt inhale. The Clints are also not ones to be turned off by promiscuity or kinky sex practices; Bill could campaign in the steamrooms of the most notorious urban bathhouses without batting an eye. But thats not the real reason that Clinton III has a handle on the Gay Vote. Obama is DAD, the father who rejected them and treated them with contempt; Hilly is MOM, the stern but controlling matriarch who understood. She looks down on her children and smiles.

Sometimes, to avoid the sugary idiocy of the local news I switch over to the BBC International news, which is to be seen on one of the half-dozen public TV systems available on my cable TV lineup. Even though its to the left of Pravda at least the BBC tends to cut out the fluff and actually report events that are happening in places other than the US and to stay away from the puff pieces that have almost completely taken over American TV news.
But not always. The BBC decided to do its broadcast from the memorial service that was taking place in the courtyard of the motel where Dr. King was murdered. The broadcast was the usual giant dollop of hagiographic tripe that we've come to expect from our tamed and neutered liberal media. A certain amount of that is fair, or would be if we didnt have to hear about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson being slaveowners every time their names are mentioned, if every time we hear about the goodness of America we didnt have to revisit the treatment of the Indians; any reference to anything or anyone that was formerly held up as an ideal now comes with modifiers attached just so we dont forget what a poisoned legacy our greedy, imperialist society has accumulated over the centuries.
So why not King? How many people under the age of fifty actually remember Dr. King? My kids studied King-worship in school; they went to majority-minority schools (a term we have to thank the Civil Rights Industry spawned by Dr. King's legacy for) and the warm, fuzzy propaganda was somewhat offset by the behavior of the poor oppressed minorities who have used their newfound freedom and equality to overcome their former meekness in ways not covered by the coom-bi-ya platitudes of the the Liberal Weepers. But Dr. King himself is a mere icon, a poster hung on the wall. The soul-stirring eloquence of his words was missing. How come? It seems the greedy King family, less interested in the legacy of Dr. King then in their legacy have attached exorbitant fees to the public play of any of his speeches, causing an almost total blackout of King's voice from the airwaves and any documentaries that are likely to be shown in schools. Did you notice, in all the hand-wringing praise of King that was so ubiquitous last night how his actual voice was almost completely absent? The film clips were sparse and far between. We got hours of Jesse Jackson and Roger Wilkins but brief seconds of King himself.
Of course it was never mentioned how far King had fallen in the Civil Rights movement by the time he was assassinated. The 'movement' had developed a taste for the much more savory views of H Rap Brown and Huey Newton by that time. Why show a bunch of suit and tie wearing Negroes when you could show shotgun-toting dashiki-clad Blacks threatening to exact revenge on their former oppressors? Thats great TV! The activists had completely dropped the non-violent rhetoric, and the love of violence had spilled into the hearts of the spoiled baby-boomers, trapped in the new systems of state universities by their 2S draft deferments (and cowardly fear of service in Viet Nam) and at the mercy of formerly powerless seedy academic parasites now filled with the lust for the power the old order had so wisely denied them. "Bombard the headquarters!" said Chairman Mao and these middle class spoiled brats joined hands with their Black counterparts to throw the books written by Dead White Men into the bonfire and to mouth the platitudes of revolution and violence. King was old news. Until he was shot.
The emerging Civil Rights Industry needed an ultimate victim, an icon whose appearance ended all argument; the mere sight of Dr. King's profile ensured that the viewer understood what an undeniably racist society we were living in; Martin died for our racist sins. Payment for our racist sins was in the form of the burgeoning War On Poverty programs that sprouted like mushrooms in those troubled times.Tom Wolfe, in 'Mau-mauing The Flak Catchers' remarked that the aim of the poor in all these new poverty programs spawned by the Johnson and Nixon Administrations was not to be on the program but to work for the program.
Now, forty years later, in the courtyard of the Lorraine Motel were assembled the beneficiaries of the billions of dollars so thoughtlessly ladled down the national toilet in the name of fighting poverty. The ever-nauseating Hillary showed up at the festivities, and in the middle of a speech striking in its phony sentiment and larded with the usual platitudes she promised to appoint a 'poverty czar'. That sounds like a good job, I wonder what it pays? The crowd, who had enjoyed themselves earlier by booing McLame, who showed up to apologize for voting against the King National Holiday (OK I'll admit it, I enjoyed seeing the s--t-eating grin on the old duffer's face as the crowd got in gear), didnt attack the wife of the First Black President for her many racist attacks on her black opponent (who was very prominently missing from this orgy of bad taste) much to my chagrin. I guess in the interests of brevity she didnt quote Andrew Young's remark that Bill Clinton was blacker than Barak Obama because he had slept with more black women. Of course Jesse Jackson showed up to perpetuate his lie about the Bloody Shirt (sort of a secular Shroud Of Turin). The BBC had Roger Wilkins, someone I've always liked and admired, to inject a few words of quiet good taste into this misguided 'celebration' but then canceled out any attempt at seriousness by doing a long standup while in the background a female Gospel singer with a really piercing loud voice shrieked loudly and longly almost drowning out the commentator's yelled cliches. It was like some ear-splitting ultra-modernist atonal musical guilt-sniveling.
I should have watched the traffic report, the new llama at the LA Zoo and the Doppler 7000 Weather Radar (which, of course will show no clouds closer than Seattle until next October) and listened to the ever-witty badinage between the carefully coiffed anchorpersons; a group completely balanced by age, race and national origin in keeping with the guidelines which have sprung from the legacy of Dr. King.

A new set of showtrials are in progress. The people who have done everything in their power to raise gasoline prices are bringing in the people who are doing everything they can to lower gasoline prices and demanding to know why prices are so high. Politicians who voted to keep ANWR and the outer continental shelf off limits to drilling, who have prevented the construction of nuclear power plants and oil refineries and who are wasting hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer's money on bogus 'renewable energy sources' feel like they have to show the morons who voted them into office that they are 'tough' on the energy company executives who they imply are engaged in a nefarious scheme to squeeze money from the helpless public. Almost every disruption and price rise that has happened recently can be traced to government intervention in the market, usually, but not always, at the behest of the eco-maniacs whose ultimate goal is the end of private automobile ownership for the common herd. Even though the Republicans are (or were) slightly better on this issue the fact is that the political culture in Washington is united in its belief that this type of intervention in the marketplace solves problems instead of creating them. In the coverage of the banking crisis one reporter remarked that there hadnt been this level of government regulation proposed in the finance industry since the Great Depression. There was a charming lack of irony in that statement which showed no understanding that excessive government regulation might have turned the Crash Of 1929 from a sharp recession and market correction into a decade-long nightmare. Now we're seeing the same Hoover-FDR style of bullying/bungling and an entire elite culture which has been so miseducated in their Ivy League socialist boot camps that the obvious basic economic facts of life are a mystery to them. This has even slopped over into the private sector. The larger a corporation becomes the more out of touch with economic reality and bloated with layers of bureaucracy it becomes. Now we're seeing more and more companies coming to the government for a bailout so that the shareholders, who put up with endless mismanagement and government overregulation wont have to stop and think about where all this is going. Bear Stearns is a prime example. The government goes on a rampage yelling about how restrictive lending practices (requiring good credit and the mortgagee putting a certain percentage of the price down before a mortgage was given) were locking minorities and the working poor out of the housing market. Down go the fences and all of a sudden the housing market is filled with deadbeats and speculators, prices expand in a giant bubble which everybody mistakes for a real growth in equity and then POP!