Obama fits in well with his Taliban buddies

Sumerian star map, based on the night sky as it was above what is now Iraq in 3300 BC

A Sumerian star map or "planisphere" recovered from the 650BC underground library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, Iraq in the late 19th century. Long thought to be an Assyrian tablet, computer analysis has matched it with the sky above Mesopotamia in 3300BC and proves it to be of much more ancient Sumerian origin. The tablet is an "Astrolabe", the earliest known astronomical instrument. It usually consisted of a segmented, disc shaped star chart with marked units of angle measure inscribed upon the rim. Unfortunately considerable parts of the planisphere are missing ( approx 40%), damage which dates to the sacking of Nineveh. The reverse of the tablet is not inscribed. Still under study by modern scholars, the planisphere provides extraordinary proof of the existence of Sumerian astronomy.

Heaven

When I die, and close my eyes for the last time in the hospital room, an instant later I'll open them, sit up, and see this.

Then, I'll get up and walk toward the horizon, looking for my teepee, my horse, and my indian wife, who hopefully will have something tasty cooking on the fire when I get there.

Boy, stop messing around and use your head!

More power, Scotty, he's gaining on us!

Cabin Porn

                          Miner's cabin, near Mount Patterson, Sweetwater Mountains, California

But don't trust the force of gravity.

Tell me again how SUV's cause global warming.

Dogs confess their guilt, and a cat

Meanwhile, cats.

Given what's on the counter in front of her, I'd wager that's her own left hand that made the mark.

Still funny, though.

The Obama Administration is seeking to establish a separate, race based government in Hawaii

Haven't they ever heard of Brown vs. Board of Education?

  "The proposed new legal regime for Hawaii is sketched in a federal document released Friday, dubbed an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.

“The Secretary of the Interior is considering whether to propose an administrative rule that would facilitate the reestablishment of a government-to-government relationship with the Native Hawaiian community,” said the document.

The goal, it claimed, is “to more effectively implement the special political and trust relationship that Congress has established between that [Hawaiian] community and the United States.”

The move is likely intended to protect lucrative financial set-asides for Americans who are also part of the Hawaiian racial group, said Heriot."

If Obama succeeds, “what’s to prevent creating similar [self-governing racial] groups out of say, Cajuns, or Orthodox Jews or Amish?” said Gail Heriot, a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

“If you can do that with groups that are already part of the mainstream, you can balkanize the country,” said Heriot, who is a law professor at the University of San Diego.

But the proposed measure to increase legal diversity is illegal because the president doesn’t have the power to grant one group of Americans the status of a separate government, she said.

“There is no constitutional basis for conferring such status, and Congress has repeatedly refused to confer this status,” said Carissa Mulder, a spokeswoman for two members of the federal Commission on Civil Rights.

“This seems to be yet another case of the Obama administration ignoring the law to achieve its policy objectives,” she added."

If this plot succeeds, expect exactly that from the administration and the formerly Democratic party. 

With them it is always "divide and conquer," and so it will be for us Americans until the electorate 

makes them stop.  Unfortunately, it is questionable who will prevail in the end - the Democrats who 

seek to divide us into squabbling special interest groups who need to appeal to them for spoil, or the

liberty loving individual Americans who created and made the country great.

Bidding for the 2022 winter Olympics is collapsing

Everyone has figured out that it's a big money loser.   Now, all the first world democratic bidders are exiting the process, due to voter resistance,  leaving Beijing and Almaty, Kazakistan.

Man, no country whose name ends with a "stan" should be allowed to host anything, as not only will the local mullahs preach violence against it, but because everyone will come home with intestinal parasites!

Abandoned softball park in Athens.

In addition, the Rio Summer Olympics are so behind schedule that supposedly the International Olympic Committee is secretly asking London if they could host in an emergency.

The cure is to rotate between a set number of venues, which have already built out their infrastructure, and to hire experienced capitalists to run the thing.  We will be annoyed by commercials, but at least the taxpayers won't be asked to pay, and the Olympic bank accounts might end with some money in them.

Check out Peter Ueberroth and the Los Angeles Olympics, which ended with a 200 million dollar profit, the first for a summer games since 1932, for a good example of what works.

If the Rio Olympics goes bad, expect the Olympic Committee to be forced into changing the process into something like a rotating but small number of first or near first world cities to host both the summer and winter games.  It might be different, but certainly less costly and risky.  And hopefully, no intestinal parasites.

Mondays, they're like that

Fun in Sutter Creek

The kids are out of school, and bored, so we took them up the hill today to have some lunch in Sutter Creek, a touristy little gold rush town not too far from where we live.  

After lunch, we walked down the street to a glass blowing factory, called Chaos Glassworks, which we had never been to before, and watched the artist pull molten glass out of the furnace and make something nice. It was all very careful and deliberate, with nothing chaotic at all about it.

However, there was a pet chicken, of all things, in the shop, and the girls made friends with it instantly.

They didn't even mind much when it left a deposit on one of their legs, but that is simply because they are used to our own chickens and their ( ahem! ) common bird like behavior.

For them, the chicken was as much fun as everything else.  It's a cochin, small, and with feathers on it's feet.  

The wife found some chocolate mint for sale at another place, so we had to get a plant of it for the garden.  Crush a leaf and it does indeed have a kind of a combination mint / chocolate smell.

Definitely a fun time for all.  It's nice to have our own human chicks back home and available for chores (heh!) now that it's summer.

Interpreting the entangled beasts of Anglo-Saxon art

The British Museum’s consistently fascinating blog has an entry decoding the complex iconography of Anglo-Saxon art. Over at the History Blog, three are described, and make for fascinating reading.

It shouldn't be surprising, I suppose, that all the complex figures have a meaning, or represent some idea or creature, and it's a challenge for sure to tease out all the odd little creatures.  Check out both sites for much more interesting stuff.

The first is a silver-gilt square-headed brooch that was unearthed from the grave of a woman on the Isle of Wight in 1855. It was cast in silver and gilded on the front surface, a technique influence by southern Scandinavian metalwork. Created in the early 6th century A.D., the brooch is a beautiful example of Style I art, characterized by a jumble of interwoven figures art historians amusingly call “animal salad.”

Its surface is covered with at least 24 different beasts: a mix of birds’ heads, human masks, animals and hybrids. Some of them are quite clear, like the faces in the circular lobes projecting from the bottom of the brooch. Others are harder to spot, such as the faces in profile that only emerge when the brooch is turned upside-down. Some of the images can be read in multiple ways, and this ambiguity is central to Style I art.

Once we have identified the creatures on the brooch, we can begin to decode its meaning. In the lozenge-shaped field at the foot of the brooch is a bearded face with a helmet underneath two birds that may represent the Germanic god Woden/Odin with his two companion ravens. The image of a god alongside other powerful animals may have offered symbolic protection to the wearer like a talisman or amulet.