The Peaceful Gnome

Sadly "Mr. David Norman" does not seem to have a telephone, nor is he capable of writing English well enough to pass for an actual Englishman, so I guess this Nigerian will have to try his scam on someone else. Mr.David Norman, Knights quarter, 14 st. john's lane, London, ec1m 4aj England Email [Deleted] Sir, Compliments of the day! I got your contact on my private search for a reliable and trusted person to handle a transaction of this nature. I know that the contents of this mail might sound so strange, but I want to assure you that every word of it is true. I am Mr.David Norman a financial consultant to a deceased immigrant Mr. Andreas Devich, property magnate who was based in the U.K., who happens to be my client. on the month of July 2000, my client, his wife Maria, their daughter andrea each, her husband Christian, and their children katharina and maximilian all died in the air France concord plane crash bound for new York in their plan for a world cruise, since the...

Gee Whiz, I called Obama a "corporate whore" before he was elected. I called him that because it accurately describes him, and nearly every other politician. Everyone knows "whore" has a wider meaning than just low level sex workers, it also includes really offensive people like politicians & lobbyists. If you want to know where the power is in America just follow the money, when you do that you'll realize that "whores" describes pretty much the entire legislative, judicial and most especially executive branches of the DC Mafia. Heck, PJ O'Rourke called them that years ago and got a best seller out of it! Now we have hypocritical right wing spew condemning the use of the word just because it was uttered by a Democrat. A new low even by these dweebs. Pathetic losers all. Media “Whoring” over Alan Grayson Reveals Hypocrisy at Zeal For Truth Source: zealfortruth.org You would think in a country where people swear, cuss, deride others, gossip, ...

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Serenity "met" her Great-great-great Grandmother and Grandfather Hans & Bella Gilbertsen (Pearson) Also said hello to Hans and Anna Sletten while we were there :-) We were on our way just over the hill to Sophia's birthday party. Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Pirate party Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

About a million useless, parasitical Sacramento drones will keep pushing paper around in the capitol, but the parks will close... as I've said before, it's time for some major civil disobedience, just hop the fence and use OUR parks anyway. California State Parks cutbacks widespread Larry Devich Here is a photo of the new California State Parks Pass, only $19.97 plus tax. Only good on weekdays, on weekends you might have to use money. Oh well. Husky 24 In. Bolt Cutters - 9003H at The Home Depot Source: www.homedepot.com All Husky hand tools are backed by a lifetime warranty-the best in the industry. In the unlikely event that a Husky tool breaks, we'll replace it free of charge. See product packaging for details.

Speaking of airborne assassins patrolling the skies... US Drone Attacks Bajaur, Killing 27 -- News from Antiwar.com

Still the best talk radio around, Christian or not: Issue Etc.

An old friend, of a somewhat "conservative" bent, sent me this today. I thought I'd share it here, along with my own reply which I have appended at the end: While I've little interest in getting in the middle of the Obama birth issue,Paul Hollrah over at UTFSM (What the hell is that anyway?) did so yesterday and believes the issue can be resolved by Obama answering one simple question: What passport did he use when he was shuttling between New York , Jakarta ,and Karachi? So how did a young man who arrived in New York in early June 1981, without the price of a hotel room in his pocket, suddenly come up with the price of a round-the-world trip just a month later? And once he was on a plane, shuttling between New York , Jakarta , and Karachi , what passport was he offering when he passed throughCustoms and Immigration? The American people not only deserve to have answers to these questions,they must have answers. It makes the debate over Obama's citizenship a ...

The longer I study biology and science in general, as a rank amateur of course, the more undecided I become on the debate between evolution and creation. I don't have any doubt at all about the fact that God initially created all that is. The Big Bang seems pretty conclusive evidence of that to me. When it comes to the origins and development of life though, I find myself simultaneously agreeing with about a half dozen contradictory theories, and this just doesn't quite work for me :-) I mean, I can easily believe two or three contradictory things at once but I start to lose my balance when I attempt to juggle a half dozen. So, I either need to get better at mental gymnastics or keep on studying and reading and pondering and praying. Which, since I find the subject of origins so fascinating, is undoubtedly what I will continue to do. I find much to agree with in the Reasons to Believe model, but it starts to seem a lot like the old God of the Gaps take on things and that j...

We live in a world where there are actual fleets of robot assassins patrolling the skies. At some point there, we left the present and entered the future.

A small bit of common sense from Obama. Now if we can just get rid of brain dead dweebs like Lamar Smith who think that killing people because they take drugs he doesn't like is a good idea, things will be even better. END PROHIBITION NOW! Idiot politicians... Medical-pot backers react to new Obama policy

Now there is even less justification for murdering babies to harvest stem cells: BBC NEWS | Health | 'Ethical' stem cell crop boosted Shared via AddThis

The fact that the poor kid vomited twice when being interviewed makes me want to just slap the crap out of his dad. Forcing a child to lie, when obviously he really did not want to, is just plain evil. It's child abuse. In fact, that should be one of the charges as far as I'm concerned. As to punishment, I think a week in the stocks in the public square would be about right, humiliate the jerk and allow the community to tell him (and the mother I suppose, if she was really in on it from the start as well) what they think of his stunt. Prison and fines, that would be a waste of resources. Stocks are cheaper, just lock him in and let the family or friends (if he has any left now) feed and water him for the week. Sheriff Calls Balloon Chase a Hoax - NYTimes.com Shared via AddThis

William Grigg nails it again. Our "government" is just like every government that has ever existed anywhere. It is nothing more than a pack of violent thieving thugs out for personal gain, either money or personal power or, usually, both. Pro Libertate: How "Justice" Operates Under A Criminal Regime Shared via AddThis

...Simon Conway-Morris, the renowned paleontologist at Cambridge University, is just one scientist who argues that religion and science are completely compatible. The British professor believes evolution isn't as accidental or random as one might suspect. In his opinion, if evolution began all over again, human intelligence would develop pretty much in the same way as it has. Conway-Morris emphasizes that developments happen as a result of pre-existing conditions, such as the need for blood cells to have hemoglobin in order to transport oxygen. Evolution, therefore, works only because it plays out within a certain set of rules. Evolution "is after all only a mechanism, but if evolution is predictive, indeed possesses a logic, then evidently it is being governed by deeper principles," he recently wrote. "Come to think about it so are all sciences; why should Darwinism be any exception...?" ...the proportion of Christians among the science faculty in certain depar...

Sagan - Hawking remixed "A Glorious Dawn..." Lyrics: [Sagan] If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch You must first invent the universe Space is filled with a network of wormholes You might emerge somewhere else in space Some when-else in time The sky calls to us If we do not destroy ourselves We will one day venture to the stars A still more glorious dawn awaits Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise A morning filled with 400 billion suns The rising of the milky way The Cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths Of exquisite interrelationships Of the awesome machinery of nature I believe our future depends powerfully On how well we understand this cosmos In which we float like a mote of dust In the morning sky But the brain does much more than just recollect It inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes it generates abstractions The simplest thought like the concept of the number one Has an elaborate logical underpinning The brain has it's own language For testing ...

Is a particle from the future coming back in time to destroy the Large Hadron Collider? How cool would that be? :-) A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather. Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal and Search for Future Influence From LHC, posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half. According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass. I...

So yesterday we had record rainfall followed in the evening by our house jumping around for about 4 seconds, just to make sure we were all paying attention to the fact that nature is still bigger than we are ;-) God is in control, not us. Pleasanton Weekly : Earthquakes reported just south of Pleasanton Shared via AddThis

From Jimmy Eat World - The Middle

From the blog "Imperial Twilight" Imperial Twilight: More Government School Child Abuse This time the victim is 6-year-old Zachary Christie : Zachary’s offense? Taking a camping utensil that can serve as a knife, fork and spoon to school. He was so excited about recently joining the Cub Scouts that he wanted to use it at lunch. School officials concluded that he had violated their zero-tolerance policy on weapons, and Zachary was suspended and now faces 45 days in the district’s reform school. Yep, j ust another day in the mind-squashing, soul-killing, "zero-tolerance" prison that is the Delaware state school system. The good news is that Zachary's mother is home schooling him now. The bad news, it seems, is that she only intends to keep this up until her son's punishment is overturned or he goes into the kiddie lockup. After that, presumably, it's back to the regular "schoolag" for another 12 years of mandatory idiocy and degradation. Let...

War for fun and PROFIT. If you had any doubts as to why the US is in Iraq and Afghanistan, this should clear things up for you. On the Democratic side we have DiFi and on the Republican side we had Cheney and Halliburton. It's all about bloody money! They can all go to hell, as I'm pretty sure they will, but sadly they are taking America with them. News & Culture in CA | Dianne Feinstein: A Question of Ethics Shared via AddThis

It's not just the Nobel, BO is getting a whole slew of awards :

So I got up this morning and looked out the window and saw low clouds and fog here in Pleasanton and ditched the idea of going to see the Blue Angels. Later in the day when it was really nice and sunny and warm I was feeling like maybe I ought to have gone... but nope, I made the right call after all. The Blue Angels were forced to cut short their program - the highlight of Saturday's Fleet Week air show - when heavy fog rolled in and made flying unsafe, said a spokesman for the Navy's elite demonstration team. Fog forces Blue Angels to abandon their show Shared via AddThis

Cool, you can continue slaughtering people in countries around the world, drive the world economy into the ground, do absolutely nothing different from your hated predecessor in fact, yet because you are "Black" you win the big prize. The Nobel Prize, now fully committed to "Affirmative Action" We do live in Bizarro World now, don't we? In Surprise, Nobel Peace Prize to Obama for Diplomacy WASHINGTON — President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” a stunning honor that came less than nine months after he made United States history by becoming the country’s first African-American president. The award, announced in Oslo by the Nobel Committee while much of official Washington — including the president — was still asleep, cited in particular the president’s efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons . “He has created a new internatio...

It is all I can do to keep from ranting and screaming. This is appalling and borders on idolatry (worship of the state) in my opinion. Click through to the blog post by McCain, and read the comments. Then go on through to the actual painting's web site here and read the explanations this clueless git writes about history and America. Cyberbrethren: One Nation Under God Shared via AddThis

A few days... er... weeks ago, we went to the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. That day Serenity had colored everyone's hair, except mom who said no thanks... here is what we looked like when we went :-)

It's Fleet Week in San Francisco again. I love watching the Blue Angles and checking out the ships that come in to port. I plan to go to the city on Saturday along with whoever is willing to come with me. San Francisco Fleet Week 2009 Shared via AddThis

Debunked yet again, for the umpteen thousandth time. But don't let that stop you from believing in it! I'm sure the aliens who picked up Elvis will come back and explain everything any day now... Italian group claims to debunk Shroud of Turin Shared via AddThis

From the Blog Science and the Sacred : We don't want our children to grow up misinformed about creation. We want our children to know about the truthfulness of evolution, but we also realize we are in the minority in our churches. Because our position is the minority view, books, videos and websites abound which teach children that biology, at its very roots, is wrong. Curricula teach children things we parents and grandparents know to be untrue. Our concern is that as our children come to independence, as they learn the earth really is billions of years old and life has been evolving from the beginning, they will discard the faith of their youth. If that faith is interwoven with anti-scientism it will be nearly impossible for some of our young people to rebuild the fabric, when they find that many of the threads within the fabric have to be removed. Augustine, 1600 years ago, said it best. In reading the following, simply substitute the word "child" for his word "in...

Over 100 Hollywood moguls and insiders, including Woody Allen, Martin Scorcese, David Lynch, and Harvey Weinstein have signed petitions urging the release of child rapist Roman Polanski, who has been arrested after fleeing a plea bargain 30 years ago. The gulf between the entertainment world and America ? Cranach: The Blog of Veith Shared via AddThis

I argued with this one for a while, even when I clicked on the "to verify this click here" link. But if you cover everything except the 2 linked squares on that page it proves it to be true. Just goes to show that just because you saw something it does not mean it was really there. APOD: 2009 October 4 - The Same Color Illusion Shared via AddThis

Peter Gray's latest post, not directly on unschooling or anything but on how our assumptions that school = normal distort reality: How Developmental Psychology?s Marriage to the School System Distorts Our Understanding of Children | Psychology Today Shared via AddThis

This movement should create a situation in which authorities will control empty stores, but not the market; the employment of workers, but not their livelihood; the official media, but not the circulation of information; printing plants, but not the publishing movement; the mail and telephones, but not communications; and the school system, but not education. Kulerski's words appear in a fine article published by The Freeman, "A Tribute to the Polish People". It's a fascinating study of how to beat a modern police state without resorting to violence, which is a game the state usually wins. Significantly, the Poles were able to outmaneuever and undercut their oppressors even though they had no cell phones or Internet. Of the six points Kulerski enumerates, the American state is already retreating in the fields of information, publishing, communications, and education. Imperial Twilight: State Secession versus Counter-Economics: Which Is the Better Strategy? Shared via ...

Check out the video at the end of this post, it's fantastic. We must teach the controversy! We need to hear both sides of the issue! Heh, this parody is wonderful. I mention that it is parody for those of you out there who might actually think this is serious. It is a joke. Intelligent Design vs. Alien Intervention - Science and the Sacred Shared via AddThis

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We are here in SF after going to the Gulf of the Farallones Visitor center where we learned about plankton and other cool stuff. When we leave here we will ve going to the symphony. Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

I walked and biked to school when I was in elementary school. This sort of over controlling BS makes me just a bit crazy. Obviously the folks who make these rules would not be very comfortable with the concept of un schooling ;-) School district could backpedal on policy -- Page 1 -- Times Union - Albany NY:2997: Source: www.timesunion.com Saratoga Springs board to consider modifying ban on riding bikes to schools