George Church of Harvard University believes DNA will become the building material of the future -- one that can help create virus-resistant human beings and possibly bring back lost species like the Neanderthal. He suggests that Neanderthals may be smarter than humans based on the size of their cranial cavity. Another indication is that they survived for over 240,000 years and we humans have only been around less than a quarter of that time and at the rate we're going
we could disappear much more quickly.
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Lovely Laurel...
That drop dead gorgeous girl in the photo is our oldest granddaughter who came to the desert to visit her grandparents last week. What a treat!!! Laurel is truly a remarkable person. She attends the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. She will graduate in December with a degree in psychology after which she will go to grad school for her Masters in Occupational Therapy (hmmm seems there were times I could have used a bit of that!).
Here's the special part. In addition to taking 20 credits in school Laurel works 35 hours a week as caretaker of 4 very challenged residents in a state sponsored group home. On a couple of shifts she starts in the evening and is on duty all night. She is not allowed to sleep as she has to make sure the residents get their meds; their Depends are clean and she monitors their breathing. On other shifts she may load all four in a special van and take them to a ball game or to the mall. Did I mention that two of these these mid-30-year-old residents are quadriplegic and the other two are severely challenged mentally and physically?
This Christmas she took Jim, the most challenged of the four, 300 miles to her parents' home in North Dakota so he could have a family holiday because he has no family of his own. It was a grueling few days for Laurel but it made everyone present aware of their own fortunate lives and the true meaning of Christmas. Laurel didn't have to do this nor was she paid... she did it because it was the right thing to do!!!!
Like many there are times when I'm disappointed in what I see in the next generation. Fortunately there are people like Laurel. She pays for most of her education, lives by herself in her own apartment, is an honor student and has an enormous heart! (She's also very fortunate to have that other beautiful lady in the other photo... her Nana, Jill)
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"Israel is doing just fine"
Anti-semitism is on the rise. Who could ever have predicted that the human memory could be so weak that for many the holocaust is a faint whiff of some ancient event that has little to do with the current world situation. Europe, flooded with Muslims, is rocketing toward a pre-WWII attitude about Jews. The newly elected Prime Minister of Egypt calls Jews "pigs and dogs" while our president bows to the Wahabi Prince in Saudi Arabia and our Secretary of States funnels billions of our dollars to corrupt Jew-hating Palestinian regimes.
Should those of us who support Israel be concerned? Of course; but then again, maybe not. Here's why.
1. Israel has discovered two of the largest natural gas fields in the world just off the coast of Haifa. More gas than Saudi and enough energy to support its people for 100 generations!
2. Fracking (the ability to extract oil from shale) has opened up one of the largest potential oil fields ever found. Again as large, or larger, than SA. Estimated at 250 BILLION barrels. Energy resources will change how Israel is viewed by many... hmmm do you actually think money can change attitudes?
3. The Chinese have signed a contract to build a high-speed railway from Eilat to Ashdod which will allow Israeli tankers and freighters to avoid the slow, costly and dangerous Suez canal. A side benefit will be the population growth in the Negev, an area long targeted for expansion but too remote for development until now. Jews are fleeing France, Britain, Russia and the Ukraine. Where will they go?... to the Negev just in time to support the energy boom and high-tech companies moving there to take advantage of government benefits.
4. Israel and China are forming huge financial and technological partnerships. Israel is helping the Chinese grow more food and the Chinese are funding massive start-ups in Israel. Seems the Chinese have no problem with Jews.
Of course, Israel has many threats to deal with, the largest of which is Iran. There is, however, the possibility that even the crazy Persians may want to reconsider their Jew hating, holocaust denying stance... rumor has it that Israel has developed, or is close to perfecting, an Electromagnetic Impulse Generator that uses non-lethal gamma rays to cripple a country by ruining its electronics. My, my... wouldn't that be a nifty solution.
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"The president is going to act. There are executive orders, executive action that can be taken. We haven't decided what that is yet."
Those words -- "executive orders, executive action" -- used in conjunction with constitutionally protected rights and liberties, ought to alarm us all. They used to frighten Barack Obama. On Oct. 2, 2007, then Sen. Obama railed against what he called the abuse of executive powers perpetrated by President George W. Bush in his administration's efforts to protect the American people from acts of terror by radical Islamists. Apparently, the current occupant of the Oval Office has overcome his early concerns about chief executives exceeding their authority.
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To me, the notion of tuning in to watch and listen to O’Reilly is as absurd as it would have been to tune in to watch the “Ed Sullivan Show” in order to see Ed Sullivan. Come to think of it, what O’Reilly could use would be more Senor Wences, Jackie Mason and the HarmoniCats, and less Alan Colmes, Bob Beckel, Geraldo Rivera and Juan Williams. In fact, I’d never have any of those twits on unless they first learned to juggle.
Speaking of twits, Colin Powell, who owes nearly as much to Affirmative Action as the Obamas do, claims that the GOP is having an identity problem. He also says that elements of the Party are racist and that it has shifted significantly to the Right, which has led to its losing the last two presidential elections.
For reasons of his own, Mr. Powell has chosen to overlook the fact that George W. Bush appointed two black Secretaries of State, he being one of them, whereas Barack Obama appointed a pair of Caucasians named Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. What’s more, only a nincompoop with an agenda would insist that John McCain and Mitt Romney are living proof that the GOP has been shifting to the far right.
Besides, if there’s anyone who has an identity problem, I’d say it’s a guy who keeps insisting that he’s a Republican, but has twice endorsed the most radical left-winger who has ever put his feet on the desk in the Oval Office.
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HAPPY NEW YEAR!
2013!
(John, Don, Peter photo by
JIM)
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From Sergeant Major Ken Baschke US Special Forces retired
"When President Obama called on the Navy Seals they killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan ... when the Navy Seals called on President Obama he let them die in Benghazi".
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WHAT IF THERE WERE NO HYPOTHETICAL QUESTIONS?
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Following is absolutely the best article published on the question
of guns and the Fed's lack of authority to control them.
This is by Judge Andrew Napolitano
If you have listened to President Obama and Vice President Biden talk about guns in the past month, you have heard them express a decided commitment to use the powers of the federal government to maintain safety in the United States. You also have heard congressional voices from politicians in both parties condemning violence and promising to do something about it. This sounds very caring and inside the wheelhouse of what we hire and pay the federal government to do.
But it is clearly unconstitutional.
When the Founders created the American republic, they did so by inducing constitutional conventions in each of the original 13 states to ratify the new Constitution. The idea they presented, and the thesis accepted by those ratifying conventions, was that the states are sovereign; they derive their powers from the people who live there. The purpose of the Constitution was to create a federal government of limited powers -- powers that had been delegated to it by the states. The opening line of the Constitution contains a serious typographical error: "We the People" should read "We the States." As President Ronald Reagan reminded us in his first inaugural address, the states created the federal government and not the other way around.
Notwithstanding the Constitution's typo, the states delegated only 16 unique, discrete powers to the new federal government, and all of those powers concern nationhood. The Constitution authorizes the feds to regulate in areas of national defense, foreign affairs, keeping interstate commerce regular, establishing a post office, protecting patents and artistic creations, and keeping the nation free. The areas of health, safety, welfare and morality were not delegated to the feds and were retained by the States.
How do we know that? We know it from the language in the Constitution itself and from the records of the debates in the state ratifying conventions. The small-government types, who warned at these conventions that the Constitution was creating a behemoth central government not unlike the one in Great Britain from which they had all just seceded, were assured that the unique separation of powers between the states and the new limited federal government would guarantee that power could not become concentrated in the central government.
It was articulated even by the big-government types in the late 18th century -- such as George Washington and Alexander Hamilton -- as well as by the small-government types -- such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison -- that the new government was limited to the powers delegated to it by the states and the states retained the governmental powers that they did not delegate away. At Jefferson's insistence, the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution to keep the new government from interfering with natural rights such as speech, worship, self-defense, privacy and property rights, and the 10th Amendment was included to assure that the Constitution itself would proclaim affirmatively that the powers not delegated to the feds were retained by the states or the people.
The Supreme Court has ruled consistently and countless times that the "police power," that is, the power to regulate for health, safety, welfare and morality, continues to be reposed in the states, and that there is no federal police power. All of this is consistent with the philosophical principle of "subsidiarity," famously articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas argued that the problems that are closest to the people needing government intervention should be addressed by the government closest to those people. Its corollary is that all governmental intervention should be the minimum needed.
Now, back to Obama and Biden and their colleagues in the government. If the feds have no legitimate role in maintaining safety, why are they getting involved in the current debate over guns? We know that they don't trust individuals to address their own needs, from food to health to safety, and they think -- the Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding -- that they know better than we do how to care for ourselves. Obama and Biden and many of their colleagues in government are the same folks who gave us Obamacare, with its mandates, invasions of privacy, increased costs and federal regulation of health care. They call themselves progressives, as they believe that the federal government possesses unlimited powers and can do whatever those who run it want it to do, except that which is expressly prohibited.
This brings us back to guns. The Constitution expressly prohibits all governments from infringing upon the right of the people to keep and bear arms. This permits us to defend ourselves when the police can't or won't, and it permits a residue of firepower in the hands of the people with which to stop any tyrant who might try to infringe upon our natural rights, and it will give second thoughts to anyone thinking about tyranny.
The country is ablaze with passionate debate about guns, and the government is determined to do something about it. Debate over public policy is good for freedom. But the progressives want to use the debate to justify the coercive power of the government to infringe upon the rights of law-abiding folks because of what some crazies among us have done. We must not permit this to happen.
The whole purpose of the Constitution is to insulate personal freedom from the lust for power of those in government and from the passions of the people who sent them there.
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Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent is "Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom."
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WHY DO THEY PUT BRAILLE ON DRIVE-THRU BANK MACHINES?
