30 Sep 2004
An amazing morning

As is my habit, I went out this morning to tend to the meat birds, currently housed in the barn, at about 8:30 am. We have to feed them at least twice a day at this stage, despite their ranging, and I always fill up their water containers in the morning, too.

This morning, I was delayed a bit by having to replace the latch on the gate to the coop area: one of our rams had decided that chicken feed was really tasty, and had made short work of the gate mechanism yesterday to get at it. So it was probably about 9 when I headed back in to the house.

All of the sudden there was mayhem in the paddock: all of laying hens started squawking, flapping their wings and scattering in all directions. The sheep and goats headed under the trees, and from out of the southeast (flying out of the sun, interestingly enough) an enormous bird swooped down on the flock, grabbed one of the chickens and took off towards the old school! When I say "enormous", I mean that the predator's wingspan had to be 5 or 6 feet (1.5 m). The chicken it snatched wasn't one of my little white meat birds: this was a big one, weighing probably 10 pounds(4 kg)!! And it was fast - the whole thing, from the initial chaos to watching the predator disappear over the school took maybe 5 seconds.

Well, I came in and called the Indiana Wildlife Conflict line - and there have been reports of golden eagles in the area! [The photo is from the site.] We have all kinds of hawks around here, and vultures, too, but I've never seen (or heard of) a golden eagle in Indiana...

I can't shoot it: it's still an endangered species, and there's a pretty stiff fine, but if I can document losses the state will reimburse me. They told me to be on the lookout, as apparently once one of these guys finds "easy pickings", he'll be back. Just what I don't need right now ... but I will have to admit that it was really cool to watch!

00:00 /Home | 1 comment | permanent link

In Japan, Women Can Doze With Man Pillow (AP)

Hmmm, we've had similar items here in the US for years. Except ours are generally female shaped, inflatable, and marketed to men.

AP - After a long night at work as a radio DJ, Junko Suzuki likes to snuggle at bedtime — and she says she's found the perfect partner: a man-shaped pillow.

(link) [Yahoo! News - Top Stories]

00:00 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

Killer hamster ices owner

Is this muderous hamster a relative of the rodent in this film? I just wonder what the plush toys that will undoubtably be made from this incident will look like ...

A Japanese man died after a bite from his pet hamster caused anaphylactic shock, Mainichi Shimbun reports. Ther nameless forty-something succumbed after repeated bites from the animal sensitised his immune system to such a degree that the final mouthful provoked a fatal bout of asthma.

(link) [The Register]

00:00 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

Oracle boss Ellison auditioned bathroom boulders

I was gonna put this in 'Humor', but it's really not funny: it's just, well, weird, amazing and completely outlandish. What must it be like to have so much money you can custom design a shower that contains a boulder?

It reminds me of an old quip my grandfather would make when he ran across something like this: "more money than sense".

Ellison eventually settled on a 30-ton "shower rock", after pretending to shower in front of several stony candidates for his master bathroom in Woodside, Ca. It won't be a stone alone, however: Ellison reportedly has 5,000 tons of Yuba River boulders on his 23-acre Woodside spread, which features a recreation of the Katsura Rikyu gardens in Kyoto.

(link) [The Register]

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Drinkers Object to Jack Daniel's Change (AP)

Ah, dilution ... it was 86 proof whiskey, and advertised as "a simple reminder that some things just never change. And shouldn't. This is the old-time whiskey made as our fathers made it.". So of course, they changed it:

Jack Daniel's gets to 80 proof by adding a little more water to the raw whiskey that comes out of barrels after four years at roughly 125 proof, Brashears said.

The company says that this is what customers wanted, after extensive taste testing. However, they've not been touting it in the ad campaigns. Of course,

the company was saving money by adding more water, but Jack Daniel's said any savings were canceled by the expense of having to change its labels.

And if you believe that changing the printing plate for a label costs as much as 1.8% of the output of the distillery, you're probably the kind of person who responds to these kind of emails...

At the very least, the comnpany should be required by the FTC to change it's [now fraudlent] advertising.

AP - If you've noticed that your Jack Daniel's is carrying a little less kick these days, you're probably right. The famed "sippin' whiskey," which advertises a recipe traced back to the nation's first registered distillery, has lowered the alcohol content of its flagship brand, Old No.7 Black Label.

(link) [Yahoo! News - Top Stories]

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29 Sep 2004
Maybe It's Happening

I've been thinking alot about this post over the past couple of days. It's seemingly generated a large number of hits, despite the lack of writebacks (although I must thank Kathryn for the trackback - I wish I knew how those things work! Maybe it's just an Moveable Type thing ...).

What I didn't mean to imply was that Islam should be banned or immigration restricted on the basis of religion. We can't ride this thing out by becoming like our enemies, and if we do, they will have won the battle.

Nor did I mean to imply that the Koran was in any way different from the Bible. In my mind, those books are simply two sides of the same coin, and for every instance of divinely commanded terror in the former, I can find one in the latter to match it (see Numbers 31).

My point was that Christians today do not routinely demand adherence to the laws of Moses: but many, if not most, Muslims would happily accept, and some demand, the imposition of Sharia law on civil society.

I posited my belief that this is because Islam has not undergone a process of religious reformation, and as such, still has an almost medieval attitude towards civil political discourse: it is infused with religion to the point where the two are almost inseperable.

This can lead not only to terror attacks on non-believers, but to "honor" killings, and outrages like allowing young girls to burn to death because they weren't wearing headscarves.

But apparently, these outrages and the actions of the Islamic terrorists are having a serious impact on the theology of Islam: the link below is to an article where a distinguished French Arabist named Gilles Kepel argues that the terrorism is failing, and is creating a climate within Islam ripe for the kind of reformation that Christianity underwent centuries ago.

Expanding on this for a moment, perhaps that's really what we're witnessing right now: the reaction of extreme religious elements within Islam to the "Westernization" of their countries is creating a backlash, slow to ignite but sure to spread as the outrages continue. Starting with the Iranian Revolution in 1980, the whole Islamic world has been in a near constant state of ferment: imposing Sharia, revoking Sharia, issuing fatwas for the death of authors, screaming that the world doesn't understand them, declaring that they're a religion of peace.

Maybe we are living through history: maybe we are seeing the beginning of the Islamic Reformation. I've gotta wonder what England and Germany looked like from Rome in the early 16th century: remember that both side in the Christian Reformation were trying to outdo one another in religiousity: Calvin burned as many "heretics" in Protestant Geneva as the Inquistion did.

This period of extreme violence and "piety" lasted until both sides were exhausted and their countries decimated. Only then was an uneasy "truce" declared, and only then did they gradually excise the demon of religion from politics.

If it took centuries for Christianity to reform, why should we expect Islam to do it overnight?

Rather than waging a successful jihad against the West, the followers of Osama bin Laden have created chaos and destruction in the house of Islam. This internal crisis is known in Arabic as fitna: "It has an opposite and negative connotation from jihad," explains Kepel. "It signifies sedition, war in the heart of Islam, a centrifugal force that threatens the faithful with community fragmentation, disintegration and ruin."

(link) [Washington Post]

via Tacitus

00:00 /Asatru | 4 comments | permanent link

Some Blog Updating

Well, I've taken a few minutes and fixed some of the problems that have slowly crept into my blog template.

Technorati has stopped displaying my profile correctly: they either give an error message or say I don't have any claimed blogs. I can't seem to fix it in my profile, either. They had an outage last weekend, and I'm not sure things are completely fixed on their end. Never mind: I replaced the link to my profile with a simple search on Technorati for references to MacRaven.

They seem to also be displaying self-references now as well: which is annoying. Oh well, you get what you pay for, I suppose.

I've also replaced my weather marker: it now goes to Weather Underground rather than Paul Poteet's site (a local TV weatherman), as he can't seem to keep his images displaying properly. I originally liked his site better (even though I link to Weather underground from the main page of haxton.org) as he had a better link to NWS radars. But he changed that last week, too, so bye-bye Paul!

I dumped Chadd Wheat's site from the blogroll. He's a very funny guy, but he doesn't seem to get the whole concept of blogging - updates should be more frequent that every two months - and the link was just taking up space.

Well, it's out to the coop for me: time to feed the little bastards.

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Is it November Yet?

I don't know who did this, but it's beyond a doubt the best amimated GIF I've seen!

00:00 /Humor | 1 comment | permanent link

CFIA Outlines New Feed Rules to Prevent Mad Cow

Well, the Canadians are moving, but they're not going far enough:

The new measures detail how the Canadian Food Inspection Agency expects to enforce a decision announced in July, which called for brains, spines and other materials from older cattle to be kept out of all livestock feed.

Firstly, the age of the diseased cow is irrelevant: they're diseased whether or not they've started to show symptoms. Secondly, it's not clear that prions (which cause BSE) are only contained in brains, spines and nerve tissue. That's where we know they are, but these regulations would apparently allow the spleen from a BSE infected cow, for example, to be fed to another cow!

And all of it really begs the question: why are we feeding ruminants meat by-products in the first place?

Canadian food safety regulators outlined new rules on Wednesday aimed at preventing the spread of mad cow disease through livestock feed, including stricter regulations governing feed plants and slaughterhouses.

(link) [Yahoo!News]

00:00 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

Falwell says evangelicals control GOP

which is precisely why I won't call myself a Republican anymore. And I'm not alone: see the 'via' link below.

The Rev. Jerry Falwell said yesterday that evangelical Christians, after nearly 25 years of increasing political activism, now control the Republican Party and the fate of President Bush in the November election.

(link) [San Diego Union Tribune]

via A Mindful Life

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28 Sep 2004
Chinese 'fear rising infidelity'

The Chinese government offical quoted in the article blames the "opening up of society" for the loss of "confidence in the loyalty of marriage". Actually, I suspect that there's a much more prosaic culprit here: Chinese government policy of "one child per family" that has resulted, over the years in a huge surplus of males. Some go so far as to call this "gendercide".

Young men will find an outlet for their sexual and reproductive urges: and with so many men to pick and choose from, it sounds like Chinese women are following their basic biological instincts as well.

Paternity tests are on the rise in Beijing as suspicious husbands try to check if their wives are loyal, reports say.

(link) [BBC News | World | UK Edition]

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Ex-Muslim turns her lens on a taboo

At some point we in the West must understand the threat to our very way of life that Islam poses. I fear that we are being we are way too "politically correct" to ever be able to speak the truth.

You hear alot about so called "moderate Muslims", like the former pop star Cat Stevens who was recently deported from the US. His biggest hit was "Peace Train" which painted him as a man of peace, and I suppose he is, unless, of course, he's dealing with heretics like Salman Rushdie.

Some on the Right (but way too few on the Left) understand the goal of the Islamists. If anything, the Left should be far more concerned about it, given the dismal record of Islam in basic human rights.

I'm concerned because, well, I couldn't even exist as a dhimmi in an Islamic state: as a Heathen, I'd be forced to convert or be killed. The subservient dhimmi status only applies to "People of the Book", i.e. Christians and Jews. Kaffirs like me - well, the Koran recommends beheading.

Islam never underwent the period that Christianity did of Reformation and internal Holy War. In the West, that religious cataclysm from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries led directly to the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment led to a severe curtailment in the mixing of politics and religion. Mainstream Islam is very similar in political outlook to Christian Reconstructionism, in that both ultimately envision a "godly" state, complete with enforcement of "gods" laws.

Note that Christianity has a "reconstruction" movement trying to inject religious law back into the secular state. Islam needs no such reconstruction, as it's never been "deconstructed". Unless and until Islam changes its basic character, which is that of a warrior religion with "conversion" by the sword an accepted norm, they will remain a threat to the ideals of a secular state, and to religious liberty.

As she begins to pray, the woman looks heavily veiled, showing her eyes only, but her long black chador turns out to be transparent. Beneath it, painted on her chest and stomach, there are verses from the Koran.

(link) [International Herald Tribune]

via Pagan Prattle

00:00 /Asatru | 2 comments | permanent link

27 Sep 2004
Memory

Laudator Temporis Acti has a great post up on memorization. He mentions several Greek poets and playwrights whose works had to be committed to memory, but think about it: nearly all ancient literature had to be committed to memory. In cultures that had not yet developed writing, such as Anglo-Saxon England, there was no other choice but memory: Beowulf, all 3180 lines, was memorized many times, by many people. How many of us could do such a thing today?

Ancient Greeks memorized Euripides and Homer. Modern Americans memorize the lyrics to Gilligan's Island.

(link) [Laudator Temporis Acti]

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Christians Use Gay Marriage to Seek Voters (AP)

If these guys don't scare you yet, consider this quote from Bill Thompson, national field coordinator for the Christian Coalition:

"Never allow the enemy to block you," Thomson urged them. "Get around them, run over the top of them, destroy them — whatever you need to do so that God's word is the word that is being practiced in Congress, town halls and state legislatures."

This election is rapidly devolving into a referendum on the emerging theocracy in America: we can stop it now, or fight it in the streets later. It's our choice.

AP - Christian conservatives are casting a wider net this year in their search for likely voters — especially conservative ones — by asking people on the phone how they feel about same-sex marriage as well as their views on abortion, a standard question in previous election cycles.

(link) [Yahoo! News - Top Stories]

00:00 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

26 Sep 2004
Organic Farming Studied As Demand Rises (AP)

The only problem with this: these are the same people that pushed the growth, mechanization and chemicals onto faqrmers in the first place, and most of their funding comes from large agribusiness (read: chemical) companies. I'll wait and see what they suggest before passing judgement, however, as even the most hardened chemical farmer is beginning to admit that we've been overdoing it for quite a while.

AP - Organic farming sounds simple — no chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides or genetically engineered plants. But succeeding at it can be complicated. A recent wave of research at universities around the country seeks to take some of the guesswork and financial uncertainty out of the practice.

(link) [Yahoo! News - Top Stories]

00:00 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link