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🔼Welcome to Abarim Publications
Here at Abarim Publications we love the Bible. And we love science. And we love the fact that the two are surprisingly convergent. It's obvious that the ancients were far more advanced than we moderns often think. The website of Abarim Publications contains thousands of articles from studies of Hebrew and Greek to excursions in quantum mechanics, chaos theory and relativity theory. Thanks to your patronage we can keep sharing the Word and improving this beautiful world that God gave us all to tend.
The name Abarim belongs to a mountain or mountain range in Moab from which Moses viewed the Promised Land from afar (Numbers 27:12). It's also the mountain where Jeremiah was said to have buried the Ark of the Covenant (2 Maccabees 2:4). Quite a mountain, therefore.
Our logo is the first letter of the name Abarim (עברים), which is the letter ע ('ayin), which is also a word, namely עין ('ayin), which means both eye and fountain. We see things, but we also weep a bit at times.
The website of Abarim Publications has been online since 2002 (that's right folks, we're older than Facebook ☺). We initially published mostly about patterns that occur both in the Bible and in the fields of Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory, but we quickly realized that any further studies required a set of specialized Bible study tools. Computers certainly help, but one thing computers can not do and that is look for the unexpected, the "utterly other," so to speak. Computers can't discover patterns that they're not programmed to look for, but humans can (and that's why computers always fail the Turing test; they can't do poetry). So strap on your best sandals; this is one journey we'll have to hoof!
Just like we can't become successful heart surgeons by imagining things, we can also not be wise about God and ignorant about creation. Or as Paul wrote: "Since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made" (Romans 1:20).
Because the portent of Biblical names is rather underestimated in Biblical circles, we've embarked on a project to translate all occurring names in the Bible, and for that we're writing our own Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Greek dictionaries, and an interlinear New Testament with links per word to our Dictionaries. Our objective is to make the source texts of the Bible available to a much wider audience. We need many more sets of eyes to figure out what's going on, and we'll explain this in more detail shortly.
🔼Moses the desert dweller
Certain wonderfully gifted scientific scholars often vent their rightful frustration about people's ignorance concerning evolution theory — which is the whole body of inquiry into the curious and fascinating phenomenon of change, and which itself contains a wide and ever evolving variety of theories, proofs and postulates. Richard Dawkins even uses the catchy phrase "history-deniers," comparing evolution-deniers to hypothetical Rome-deniers or even Holocaust-deniers. But invariably, these same anti-history-denier scholars peg Moses as some lone blundering desert-dweller, who may have had a few good ideas but was elsewise pretty much obtuse. Moses, after all, operated in the bronze age, and if he had been really clever, he would have ushered in the iron age.
Carl Sagan famously challenged self-proclaimed prophets of today to demonstrate their powers of insight by solving the Goldbach Conjecture (cited by Richard Dawkins in his exquisite book The Greatest Show on Earth, page 12), but here at Abarim Publications we would like to challenge anyone who calls Moses a mere bronze-age desert-dweller to replicate the Giza plateau with bronze-age tools and a bronze-age infrastructure.
Most molecular biologists and anthropologists aren't engineers and architects, and almost invariably review bronze-age technology with painfully little appreciation of how advanced it was. Here at Abarim Publications we are engineers (endowed with mere Bachelor's Degrees but with three decades of work under our tool belts), and we side with guys like Christopher Dunn, whose research showed that the ancient Egyptians routinely maintained a higher degree of precision than we do today. That is such a big deal that precision-deniers should perhaps be excluded from publicly discussing cultural evolution ☺.
🔼Iron and a global pre-historic civilization
Another fruitless assumption is the belief that mankind has always been its own greatest enemy; that peoples have always competed with each other, and that the evolution of technology has always progressed on a par with warfare; in a straight line from the quest for fire to the invention of the Internet. But if that were so, we would see a corresponding progression from simple buildings to complex ones, and we don't. The ancients built buildings that reflect a mind-boggling command of mathematics and understanding of the earth and the cosmos.
Denying that the ancients were really quite advanced was once easy because the earliest writers who discussed these things also spoke of aliens and UFO's and what have you, and were consequently dismissed wholesale with patronizing glee. Today the discussion is largely divorced from the possibilities of extraterrestrial intervention, and focuses on explaining the buildings in terms of natural evolution. That allowed it to crawl onto the academic stage and a rapidly expanding body of established scholars find themselves at risky odds with conventional theories. But irrespective of one's leanings, we can all agree that these buildings weren't put there by dummies.
We moderns are accustomed to international competition because, due to cultural diffusion, we all pretty much have the same level of sophistication. But it's highly unlikely that humanity began its transition to urbanization simultaneously around multiple and adjacent centers that competed with each other from the get go. It's much more likely that urbanization arose from centers that covered extremely large areas and had no perceivable competition, and that its natural evolution was initially not focused on harnessing others, but rather on harnessing nature.
We see the exact same process in the early universe where minute variations in density caused the rise of enormous, primordial black holes in vast expanses of empty space. In our modern universe, matter is much more uniformly dispersed, and therefore there is much more interaction between celestial objects. It's the way this kind of evolution works; in two distinct stages from a homogeneous beginning and a period of inflation to the formation of giants, which subsequently evaporate into competing smaller ones.
🔼First-Time, Last-Time, and End of Time
Many cultures world-wide speak of a magical period before the present time, marked by peace and prosperity, during which teacher-gods gave humanity technology, agriculture, music, art and language. The Egyptians called this period Zep Tepi, meaning First-Time.
Egyptologists have always dismissed reports of the First-Time as legendary, but now it begins to seem that a First-Time period occurs as a rule in an evolutionary process that is marked by rapid expansion into an unoccupied realm. The teacher-gods weren't gods in the modern sense of the word, they were humans in the first stage of cultural evolution. Its counterpart, which we may dub the Last-Time, is marked by competition, during which the empire of the First-Time slowly evaporates and diversifies.
First smaller versions of the previous large empire form, but finally all evolve into a homogeneous quantum mist in which no competition occurs. Cosmologists call this state a Heat Death; the Bible calls it End of Time. Both terms sound awfully dreadful, but it's really not that bad. Most evolutionary processes are sub-processes of larger processes, and when one particular process reaches End of Time, another evolutionary process starts with a corresponding Beginning of Time. It's generally a cyclical affair, and the whole business of evolution is a fractal, but please refer to our introduction to Scripture Theory for a closer look at the internal structure of these First-Time and Last-Time periods.
🔼The study of war
Because the first civilizations had no competition, the ancients were able to develop an astonishing level of knowledge of nature and remained largely ignorant about making weapons (hence the destruction of the Aztec empire by a handful of iron-clad Spaniards). Iron, namely, is good for nothing except making weapons. The element has been known about since long before the iron age formally started, but there was little use for it. The ancients didn't use iron because they didn't need it, and not because they couldn't hack it.
It requires a critical mass of centers of civilization in order for all of them to start "studying war" as the prophet Isaiah puts it (Isaiah 2:4). When the focus of humanity shifted towards combat and commerce, the knowledge of the world shifted out of the cross-hairs, and was replaced by a new technological evolution, namely that of the technology for warfare, and that's the one we look back on now: a narrow corridor from us to the caves, with somewhere half way Stonehenge, the Giza plateau and the Nazca Lines that cannot possibly exist.
Wonderful writers such as Graham Hancock insist on a pre-historic global civilization, that left its traces deliberately in buildings all over the world, but the truth may be quite the opposite. Unchallenged human civilizations built similar for the same reason that honeybees and ants construct highly similar buildings all over the world without a common directorate. Hancock famously calls us a species with amnesia, but it's worse than that. We are a species with a roving eye or a shifting pole. The need for iron came with the invention of international competition. But before the invention of war, the ancients knew much more than conventional historians give them credit for.
🔼The knowledge of good and evil
Another persistent folly is the belief that the Hebrew Bible is a local product of a minority sect operating predominantly in Jerusalem; a religious movement that competed with other religions, telling the story of their pet deity YHWH (Yahweh) versus the "other gods," projected on a dubious national history of Israel. It positively isn't. As many mythologists have noted, the Hebrew Bible reflects a collective effort of pretty much the whole Semitic language area, from Babylon to Egypt and possibly beyond, and describes an endeavor that is wholly separate from religion and politics at large. It tells the history of Yahwism, which roughly describes a dedication to truth in its broadest sense.
Believe it or not, it takes no effort at all to deceive or be truthful, but it takes quite a bit of cerebral agility to be able to realize that there is a difference. Babies learn very quickly to cry when they associate that behavior with the reward of getting attention, but it takes up to five years to develop a "theory of mind" and become the deliberate and systematic liar that most adults remain to be. In other words, from about five years of age we understand the difference between deception and truthfulness and employ both with equal appreciation and in order to get what we want.
Beyond that initial understanding, it takes profound social sophistication to shift the attention away from the objective (what do I want?) and towards the means to achieve it (shall I deceive or not?). It requires an enormous leap to develop a preference that is so strong that a person will either lie or tell the truth when the opposite course of action would clearly lead to a more agreeable result. Systematic truthfulness, irrespective of the short-term result, requires a thorough understanding of and deep dedication to long-term social cohesion.
Natural Yahwism (not to be confused with any formal religion) describes a social movement devoted entirely to being truthful. It's not organized, it has no leader and it is not confined to any particular culture or people. It's dedicated to creation and the Creator, and results not in religious mumbo-jumbo but in a set of practical and demonstrable skills (technological, social, psychological, medical, etcetera; Deuteronomy 13:1-5). The Bible mostly focuses on both Yahwism's development and its relation to political government. Usually Yahwism was enslaved by military or commercial powers (as science is today), but sometimes it enjoyed periods of "Yahwism for YHWH"; the pursuit of truth for the sake of Truth.
🔼The Ur-Internet
The authors of the Bible made no effort whatsoever to hide the fact that they were composing a refined hotchpotch of earlier ideas, and that those earlier ideas also existed in the refined hotchpotches of other cultures. The story of the tower of Babel in Shinar obviously tells of the transition between the First-Time and the present state of affairs, and Abraham's camel journey doubtlessly reflects the rise of exchange in its broadest sense between the great powerhouses of yesteryears.
At this point in the story the name Canaan may not even denote a particular location, but rather the beginning of international trade. The ethnonym Canaanite became synonymous with merchant and the signature symbol of full-fledged international trade in the Levant was the camel: גמל (gamal), from the verb גמל (gamal), meaning to deal or exchange. In our language the word "camel" only denotes a big, humped beast of burden, but in Hebrew it literally means "unit of trade."
The author of the Abraham cycle left no two ways about it: YHWH's command to Abraham to leave Ur and go to the Promised Land was the same as YHWH commanding the Chaldeans to begin to engage other cultural centers in international trade.
🔼The priestly subsidiaries to the Greatest Story
A much neglected detail of the Abraham cycle is that when Abraham arrived in Canaan, Yahwism was already formalized. In Canaan Abraham met Melchizedek, king of Salem (later Jerusalem), who was a priest of El Elyon (Genesis 14:18), and whose "order of Melchizedek" became the base of Israel's Levitical priestly tradition (the Levites were literally "the joiners"; they had no land and were probably peripatetic, much like the druids in north-west Europe). The "order of Melchizedek" became later applied to the Messiah (Psalm 110:4) and subsequently to Jesus Christ, also known as the Nazarene (Hebrews 5:6).
That the origin of formal Yahwism can not be tied to one distinct location but rather to trade between locations is also demonstrated by the tradition that Melchizedek was "without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like the Son of God, abiding a priest perpetually" (Hebrews 7:3). Likewise of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Jesus said that they were not dead, as God is not a God of the dead but of the living (Matthew 22:32), and living in this regard means to be engaged in exchange in the broadest sense of the word.
The sign of the covenant of YHWH with Abraham, of which Jesus Christ would be the final manifestation, was circumcision (Genesis 17), but Abraham had at least nine sons (Ishmael with Hagar, Isaac with Sarah, six sons with Keturah — among whom Midian, a dominant tribe in Arabia — and an untold number of sons with concubines; Genesis 25:6), and they were all circumcised, as well as hundreds of not-related men, both born and bought into Abraham's household (Genesis 17:12).
Isaac's "wife" Rebekah originated in Mesopotamia and was imported to Canaan, and so were Jacob's wives Leah and Rachel and concubines Bilhah and Zilpah; the four "mothers" of Israel, while through the much later prophet Ezekiel, YHWH stated that Israel's capital Jerusalem was born in Canaan and that her father was an Amorite and her mother a Hittite (Ezekiel 16:3).
Jacob's son Joseph was sold to camel-riding traders from Midian (Jacob's half-uncle), who were en route through Canaan and who delivered him to Egypt, where his oneirocritical skills were duly recognized. He subsequently achieved great political power and was also rewarded with a wife named Asenath, a daughter of Potiphera, who was a priest at On, or Heliopolis. All this obviously demonstrates a politically potent alliance between the established heliolithic priesthood and a newly introduced skill to interpret dreams. That skill remained very important throughout the Biblical narrative (Numbers 12:6, 1 Kings 3:5, Daniel 2:28). The legal father of Jesus was also named Joseph, who also interpreted a dream, also in Egypt, where he had ended up also as the violent result of an encounter with travelers from the east (Matthew 2:19).
Joseph's priestly wife Asenath gave birth to Manasseh and Ephraim, and the descendants of the latter would occupy territory directly north of Judah. A famine in Canaan drove Israel to Egypt, where Joseph was second only to the king (much later the same honor befell Mordecai, the guardian of Esther, representative of the primary Semitic deities Marduk and Ashtoreth), but over time Israel was enslaved and it took the intersession of Moses to get them out.
Moses too was highly educated in the arts of Egypt, but when he killed someone he fled to the land of uncle Midian in Arabia, and there he too met a priest. Priest Jethro of Midian of Arabia gave him not only Zipporah, one of his seven "daughters", but also some crucial advice on how to run a nation (Exodus 18), while a properly organized people appears to have been a requisite for the reception of the Law of YHWH (Exodus 20).
The Law was written by YHWH Himself on two portable stone tablets, which doesn't sound like much today but back then, the wisest men of the wisest land, namely Egypt, needed all the walls of hugely complicated temples to perform something similar. Egypt had VHS, Moses had MP4.
🔼The slip of the mini-camels
Israel's "departure" from Egypt marked a sharp decline in Egypt's economic and military prominence (Exodus 12:36, 14:28). The Israelites would have accounted for up to half of Egypt's population at the time, which was about two million people, but archeology shows no such rapid collapse in Egypt, nor a rapid change in Canaan's culture that would account for Israel's physical invasion. This means that we can be confident that the transition described in the Book of Exodus does not describe a physical movement of people but a shift in the development of Yahwism
The advantage that crippled Egypt probably had to do with the invention of the Semitic alphabet; something that ancient Egypt never adopted and which may have helped its real-time gradual decline. Note that the Hebrews are credited with the invention of vowel-notation, which lifted the wisdom tradition out of the realm of the esoteric and made it available to everyone. The Hebrews used the symbols ה (he), ו (waw) and י (yod) to mark vowels (while these symbols could also be used as consonants, much alike our letters I, U and Y). The holy Name יהוה (YHWH) consists of only these vowels, and denotes the "God of the Vowel People" as Joel M. Hoffman puts it in his lovely book In The Beginning.
When the Israelites reached the land of Moab (who was a son of Lot, Abraham's nephew, also circumcised), they were initially met by political hostility, but Moab's religious tradition, personified in Balaam, was already wholly devoted to YHWH and was duly enthused by Israel's arrival (Numbers 22:18, 23:12, 24:11). Much later, a Moabite woman named Ruth would become the great-grandmother of Israel's hallowed king David, whose son Solomon famously built the Temple of YHWH and gave one of its two pillars the name of Ruth's husband Boaz.
🔼The stone the builders rejected
The Temple of YHWH was an idea of Israel's monarchy but the materials and practical skills required to build it came from the Yahwists of Phoenicia (more specifically, from king Hiram and master craftsman Hiram of Tyre; 1 Kings 5:7). The first Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians and the second one was built when Zerubbabel led the Jews home from exile. The second Temple, however, was decreed, designed and wholly paid for by king Cyrus of Persia (Ezra 6). By the time Jesus walked the earth, the second Temple had been leveled and replaced by a huge tourist complex, which was designed and built by the Idumean Herod the Great, the Roman client-king of Judea.
In other words: there was very little pure Jewish about the early theology of Israel, and very little pure Jewish about any of the Temples of YHWH in Jerusalem. In fact, it's more than obvious that the signature names Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were the names of global social movements, and that the names Israel and even Jerusalem were only later applied to physical locations. The country called Israel today relates to the Biblical Israel the way a hypothetical village named Internet, Montana, would relate to Google and Wikipedia.
Around the time that Herod's temple was completed, Jesus (a.k.a. The Truth) was born in Bethlehem. According to Luke, while the rest of Israel was firmly clueless, some shepherds were told of this pinnacle event by angels. The Matthean gospel tells of an untold number of astronomers from the east who had realized what was going on, not by divine intervention or worming through dusty texts, but by observing the night sky. Besides a very small group of initiates (the family of Jesus and John, and Anna and Simon), these astronomers and the heathen king Herod remained the only ones to know about and believe Jesus' royalty until Jesus went public thirty years later.
Yahwism reached Rome, and gruesomely clashed with Rome's demand that all should bow to the imperial cult, basically demanding that Truth should bow down to whatever the emperor said it was (the Nazis would later do the exact same thing with their absurd Ahnenerbe). The signature phrases of Rome's national cult were merged with the signature principles of the movement and spawned a political monstrosity that had very little to do with the service of Truth or the Creator. Yahwism, the pursuit of truth for the sake or Truth, did not resurface until the scientific revolution of the Renaissance.
Presently, Yahwism in all sorts of guises is rising with a pace that the world hasn't seen for millennia. Books that have been closed for eons are opened again and read by thousands of enthusiasts. Nations that have been buried for centuries are getting dug up and revived. Yahwism is rising over borders, breaking with traditions, and escaping commerce on a massive scale. Most people don't even know what's going on, but not even that will stop it.
🔼The gift of gab
In the last few decades there has been a revolution in the field of inquiry that investigates the evolution of language. It was always assumed that different languages arose independently, and that a desire to share knowledge turned grunts into nouns and finally Shakespeare. That theory of linear evolution is now completely abandoned, and has been replaced by one that shows remarkable similarities with the evolution of empires discussed above, via a magical First-Time that makes it seem as if there once was a global civilization that left its marks all over the world.
In his delightful book The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson states, "One of the greatest mysteries of prehistory is how people in widely separated places suddenly and spontaneously developed the capacity for language at roughly the same time. It was as if people carried around in their heads a genetic alarm clock that suddenly went off all around the world...[...] No one has come up with a remotely plausible explanation of how a language spoken only in a remote corner of the Pyrenees could have come to influence Indian languages of the New World, but the links between many cognates are too numerous to explain in terms of simple coincidence."
Bill is a bit dramatic, and that's why we love him, because particularly the field of linguistics has come up with a decisively plausible theory of what happened. A modern, spoken language is precisely like the fruit of a tree that had to grow first as a tree before it could bear fruit. This tree from which all our world's languages dangle is called syntax. Syntax is the operating system of language and it came first; it's the First-Time empire of language. Actual language began with signs, which were probably pretty much universal, and which were slowly replaced with sounds, which slowly evolved into the various languages of the world.
Research shows that human language is mostly used for social bonding (in stead of the exchange of information, as one would intuitively guess) and the wisdom tradition, the preservation of useful information, appears to have been a side effect of the advantage of strong social bonds. Art was probably a side effect of the wisdom tradition, because a wisdom tradition includes skills and thus must precede art, and hieroglyphic text logically came from art.
The "breach from Egypt" occurred when the existing wisdom tradition met the Semitic alphabet. What once required colossal temple complexes, 4000 different hieroglyphs and a thorough esoteric training for a minority of initiates could now be presented in strings comprised of a small set of letters that everybody could read, and every town could own. The result was public access to everything there was, disguised as a linear story but in fact a multi-dimensional fractal matrix, of which Jewish sages said that it contained the whole world. If speech was the camel of social relationships, the alphabet became the camel of wisdom.
Researchers like Dr. Peter Gariaev and Dr. Jeff Delrow have shown that DNA is organized according to rules that also underlie human language. Droves of enthusiasts cheered that we're basically walking mailmen, and carry with us a secret message that some greater force programmed there but, again, the simpler truth is the reverse: our languages reflect our DNA. Script was an incredible invention which we take now for granted but which must have seemed magic to the ancients. But we didn't invent it ex-nihilo, we learned it from our hearts.
🔼The universe in your pocket
The ancients didn't have space telescopes and electron microscopes but they had something better. After eons of careful observation they had been able to deduce that the whole of creation is a giant fractal, and could derive the whole of it from the small parts that could be seen with the naked eye. We moderns may be able to see further and peer deeper but up until now the bigger picture has eluded us. We have archeology and literary criticism, and even though many of us believe that the Bible came to us via divine revelation, rarely do we entertain the notion that we might actually be substantially less advanced than the Bible writers were. No more so.
The Bible is mankind's greatest collective creation; it's the universe in pocket format. It works the same as does creation and tells the whole of it in the form of a multi-dimensional fractal matrix, which progresses along a complexity axis (and not a chronological or temporal one, so clocks and calendars don't work in the Bible).
All the narratives of the Bible tell multiple stories, and tie into the others via multiple points of conjunction. It can be used to unravel history, to explain the cosmos and explore the human mind, and it even details a certain kind of technology that we don't possess yet. Everything that evolves must evolve according to that basic pattern, and all structures that don't adhere to this basic pattern will be eradicated by all other things. All the books of the world couldn't contain the Bible when it's unfolded, but we'll demonstrate one particularly striking iteration (omitting most of the details for the sake of brevity):
🔼Weaving the Greatest Story
Let the culture of ancient Egypt relate to human culture at large the way an aggregate prokaryotic community (a colony of, say, bacteria or fungi) relates to the biosphere. The Exodus of Israel out of Egypt is then self-similar to the initial specialization of pre-eukaryotic life and the deposition of the two stone tablets of the Law of YHWH into the collective heart of Israel is self-similar to the biological nucleosynthesis.
Jacob famously saw a ladder reach into heaven and called that place Bethel, meaning House of God. Israel was organized around the two stone tablets of the Law in the Ark in the Temple, the House of God, just like a living cell is organized around a nucleus that contains DNA.
The Ten Commandments (or in Hebrew: the Ten Words) are organized in two sets; one pertaining to the divinity (paternal) and one to man (maternal). The double helix wasn't discovered until 1953 but the Hebrews, as only culture in the world, used scrolls for their Torah.
The Golden Age of Solomon marks the completion of a single eukaryotic cell. The transition into multi-cellular life is illustrated by the breach of the kingdom into Judah and Israel, and is expressed in the still extant Ark tradition of Ethiopia.
The exile into Babylon marks the absorption of a cell's individual genome into the overbearing constitution of a multi-cellular organism. The return and Temple of Zerubbabel coincides with the rise of mind, or rudimentary self-consciousness of a larger creature.
Jesus only had one set of human genes, namely His mother's. In this particular iteration, He was a maternal gamete; an ovum. After a period of national upheaval, His crucifixion and death coincided with a woman's ovulation. An ovum in the Fallopian tube is as dead as Jesus was in His grave because as soon as the ovum emerges from the corpus luteum, it is severed from the woman's bodily economy and is outside her body (just like an item held in one's hand or mouth is outside one's body; just like any other body part is dead upon amputation).
The resurrection of Jesus coincides with conception. The now zygote remains separated from the mother until it nests in the womb wall and it is reinstated in the mother's bodily economy. The mother's body doesn't notice the child itself, it only sees the placenta. The world in turn sees church buildings and organizational structures, and thinks that's it. What the world doesn't know is that there is a whole new life form growing behind that visible facade.
If the mother has any sense at all she will realize that there is something going on inside of her, and brace for impact at due time. The birth of the Child will nevertheless coincide with the collapse of global economy and the complete removal of formal religion (the placenta; Revelation 21:22). Whether the mother will survive depends largely on her preparation for the Birth.
Or in evolutionary terms: Homo sapiens will prove to be the common ancestor of two new species, one of which will be quite similar to Homo sapiens, and the other will be substantially different. The required ecological barrier that makes this happens, is a barrier in the "sapiens-"part of Homo sapiens; it has to do with an understanding that surpasses all understanding of Homo sapiens. This new understanding is not a matter of knowledge or intelligence, but rather the ability to see the whole picture. This new species, let's call it homo fili hominis, has been with us for a long time already, but it will reach critical mass in the very near future and branch off all together.
🔼Balancing the tightrope
The evolving biosphere is governed by two distinct processes and science has only figured one out, namely mutation and natural selection. Natural selection obviously occurs but it fails to explain two things:
- Where did RNA and DNA come from in the first place?
- If competition is really the driving force behind evolution, how come no organism has ever won?
Exactly the same questions plague cosmology. Where did the ur-singularity come from, and why is it that the universe has been expanding for 15 billion years without settling into Heat Death or crunching back into a singularity? Why is it that the universe expands at precisely the right rate, not too fast and not too slow?
The usual cop-out answer is that it only had to happen once, but it didn't only happen once; evolution too has a very precise balance. If random mutations make all the difference, why has there never been a mutation that made one species so much better than all the others that it ate all the others and now is the only one? Why is there still such a wide diversity of life after such a long period of brutal struggle for dominance? Why has no single language taken over the world? Why has no empire every conquered all?
All around us rhinos dance on tightropes and no one ever falls off. Why is there so much balance in the universe and what preserves it?
🔼How life began
From what we know now we can postulate the following (and we're not prophets; the following is wide open for correction):
When the universe was still in its First Time, pretty much all energy was locked in huge primordial black holes, and if we define a living thing as a material creature that is able to absorb light without turning it into heat (John 1:5), black holes are to be considered alive. These black holes began to evaporate in two ways: (1) via a process called Hawking Radiation, and (2) via emitting gravitational waves. Hawking Radiation produced the particles we are now familiar with. Clouds of particles combined into stars, and during their life stars produced elements up to iron and elements heavier than iron when they went super nova and their cores formed either black holes or brown dwarfs, while their coronas combined into next generation stars and planets.
When two black holes rotate around a central point they approach each other and release energy by rippling the very fabric of spacetime with gravity waves. We postulate that these waves form a Chladni pattern that permeates the whole universe and slightly influences the behavior of quantum particles. We're guessing that during a relatively short window of time, the conditions in the universe were such that a cluster of atoms would exists in its most stable condition when it formed prime-ordeal DNA, and that DNA in effect mimics the Chladni pattern at large (for the same reason that a cup of tea will cool off until it reaches room temperature; it has to do with decreasing entropy. In other words: it would require energy to not fall into synch with this pattern).
This Chladni pattern, let's call it the Univoice, still exists but because the black holes are smaller and more numerous, it "sounds" different than it did back then, and won't create DNA anymore. But we're guessing that biospheres all over the universe work like giant large array antennas and their most stable conditions are when they are as a whole aligned in resonance with the Univoice. The formation of the modern human genome occurred pretty much in the same way that the Bible was formed: the most rudimentary genome needed to drive the first living thing, evolved by competing incompatibles, assimilating chunks of code from other useful critters and by homing in on the true north of the Univoice (by pursuing maximum entropy, like anything else in the universe does).
The amplitude of this Chladni pattern is too small to detect with the instruments we have today, but it's not too small to affect the currency of a human brain. Certain very specific human brains appear to be sensitive to the Univoice and can perceive it, but most of us have brains that only hear it when we are part of a living large array antenna. Some little ones are already in place but we need a critical mass of joined minds that are aligned with the Univoice (and not with some creed that someone's made up). In the very near future, the Bible will be studied by scholars from all disciplines, and scientific understanding of creation will become less diverse and more encompassing, which should facilitate the natural formation of these living large arrays (Zechariah 8:23).
🔼Now what?
All things considered, it looks like we're in for a bumpy ride, but it doesn't have to be all that bad. Remember that all this is natural evolution and there's nothing we can do about it, one way or the other. Should these things worry you then please remember that the single most repeated command in the Bible is: Don't be afraid.
Just keep living the way you were, but try to settle any outstanding debts you may have or reconcile with people that you may have an argument with. If you're doing something that you shouldn't be doing, now is a very good time to stop. It's always smart to join a church of some sort but it might take you a while to find one that suits you. There are all kinds, from chandelier swinging to academic gatherings, but it's important that you are not alone.
We need to transcend money, but the monetary economy needs to naturally evolve towards its Heat Death. Please don't dump any large fortunes on the market. Slowly invest in fields that are now sorely underfunded because they won't make anybody any money. Try to refrain from purchases that serve very little purpose (like superyachts and Lamborghinis). Build schools and hospitals in stead.
Slowly wean people off central rule. Listen to the guys on the work floor; they know best. The crowd is wise, the swarm is smart.
Stop standardizing food production. Pull the plug out of the military industrial complex, clean up the atmosphere and begin to irrigate the world's large deserts.
The universe is about to come to life the same way in which life began on planet earth, with a whole lot of little single-cellular life forms that all pretty much look the same. It would be very nice if the Kids from Planet Earth could try to look somewhat presentable.


text:
Following the news of Sony's catastrophic $6.4 billion loss, new CEO Kaz Hirai made the decision to drastically cut the company's workforce down. Some 10,000 employees will be laid off to help aid any chance of a turnaround in fortunes for the PS3 platform holder. However, its gaming division will seemingly be unaffected by the cuts.
When Sony does follow through with the mass-layoffs, they won't be focusing any of it into the company's games division, Develop has learned. Sony declined to comment when approached on the matter.
Hirai previously stated that Sony would predominately shift its focus from its various ailing businesses into, digital imaging, phones and games. With its gaming division being included in their plan, Develop's sources do seem to have credence.
That said, we've already seen one major first-party studio closing down in the form of Zipper Interactive. Rumors were initially circulating regarding an upcoming closure of the developer but they officially confirmed it with a heartfelt farewell message.
Sure, SOCOM 4 didn't perform greatly — both commercially and critically — but PlayStation Vita shooter Unit 13 launched to positive reviews; so it may have been a surprise to a few that the developer was closed. Before its official closure, Sony stated that layoffs in the studio were a "normal business practice and a result of cutting back on production resources after the launch of two major franchises."

subset: commoncrawl


text:
prognosticated; prognosticating
Definition of prognosticate
1 : to foretell from signs or symptoms : predict
2 : to give an indication of in advance : foreshadow
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Learn how to use free tools to publish an e-book, and then list and sell your e-books in the world's largest online bookstores.
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text:
Response To Stolen Web Pages
More content leads to more theft. Become valuable, and you are cloned.
The Facts…
A person commits an act of theft if someone unlawfully obtains or utilizes another's property or resources with the intent to deprive the rightful owner.
In the case of web site theft, the taking of copyrighted materials, altering those materials to look like one's own work, and the placing of those materials onto the internet for commerce, thus competing with the original author, is theft. It is also a copyright violation, but it is still theft and it can and should be prosecuted as such.
The U.S. Library of Congress manages the U.S. Copyright Office. The U.S. Copyright Office considers Internet Web Pages to be software programs, reasonable since they are "programmed." To have a copyright simply requires that the work contain a valid copyright notice as follows: © year, author name.
Registration is not mandatory, but time has proven this to be a reasonable step. To register you should refer to the filing procedures required by the U.S. Copyright Office. Our site registration required a print of all web pages, a print of all web page HTML codes, a form completed, and a check for under $40.00. It was more expensive to copy the source (they require 2 copies) at Kinko's than to register the work.
On an international level, the U.S. Government became a member of the Berne Convention in 1989 and fully supports the Universal Copyright Convention. Under this Convention any work of an author who is a national of a Convention country automatically receives protection in ALL countries that are also members under this Convention provided the work makes use of a proper copyright symbol. The degree of protection may vary, but some minimal protection is defined and guaranteed in that agreement. Specific filing of a registration is not required, although it helps if you seek to prosecute offenders. Simply having the copyright notice on the work makes the copyright valid.
In dealing with copyrights, you receive protection under the auspices of the US Government. Jurisdiction for prosecuting violations is exclusively with the federal government.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Court ruled that it is trademark infringement to use a competitor's trademark in a web page META tag. The court noted that such terms could be used without violating trademarks if used as root words expressed as lower case.
In Practice…
Copyright or not, the intellectual property (the page as written) is at least yours according to netiquette, and is definitely protected if you display a properly formatted copyright tag. The facts about a suspected theft certainly need to be validated and you need to be sure that any page theft could not have been accidental, assuming that you believe that pages can be stolen by accident. There is no excuse for taking someone else's page intact, adding a little facade, doing top of page cosmetic changes, then their uploading it to their site still containing your displayed text and possibly links. This has happened to to our site many times.
Before you make a major claim against the supposed thief, you must have undisputed evidence that the text is yours. If you have such proof, there are a few things that seem to work to get the problem resolved:
- Allegations of theft are investigated by local law enforcement agencies such as the Police or Sheriff's departments. If the investigation produces evidence of theft it is forwarded from the investigating agency to the appropriate District Attorney's Office for prosecution. If you want the "theft" prosecuted as a criminal matter (perhaps as a preamble to a civil suit), then do not destroy evidence or give warning to the thief or they will remove it before the investigating agency can review your claims.
- Print the offending page as displayed, then print the HTML code for that page so that you have it. Call a friend to have them witness the theft. If your friend agrees that the page appears stolen, then continue, else go straight to the last two steps below. If it was stolen, then consider each of the following steps in the order presented.
- See if their site contains a references or clients page. If so, write down the names and URL of these sites so that you can notify them of the theft a little later.
- Use http://www.linkpopularity.com using the complete URL of the offending page. If there are links, click on the appropriate count field and print the appropriate pages. These are also pages to be notified of the theft, and all are viable links to your site. You should invite them to compare the pages, emphasizing that by linking to the stolen site that they are indirectly supporting the theft and "wouldn't they rather link to the source?".
- Locate their City Police or Sheriff's Office and report the theft. If you have installed a copy of our copyright page (tailored to your own usage), that contains the price of $6000 per page, then the theft of any page is a felony and the appropriate agencies must prosecute under the law. Violation of Copyright laws entitles you to $125,000 in damages under the right circumstances, so simply having the site removed is not going to help as much as pressing charges.
- If you are not going to prosecute, then see if other pages are possibly stolen. For instance, if the site has a strange name, or ends in a number, change the number and see if someone else shows up. Also use a search engine or two to search for their URL and see how many pages show up that look like the titles in your site and check them out. If other sites appear stolen (this is important) email the page addresses of the other violations to those site webmasters asking them if they authorized a simailar page at that URL. I have placed "bruceclay/in.com" into sections of our page as comments AND displayed text, then I search for my name and catch theft. You would be surprised at how many people steal content and don't bother to read it.
- Send their ISP a notice that their site is hosting stolen materials. Use http://rs.internic.net/cgi-bin/whois to locate the site owners, and send a notice to every person and IP address associated with the site. Visit the IP addresses and use their contact-us links for these postings. If you are unable to get their host address, call the site and ask if they know of a good ISP in their city, or if they are happy with theirs — they may just tell you their ISP name.
- Find out if the page is indexed by the various search engines (http://www.bruceclay/in.com/seo/web_add.htm links may help). For every engine where it is indexed, send an email about the theft to the support group of that search engine company and request that the site URL and index be removed permanently. Most will send back a polite note saying it is not their responsibility to judge if your claim is valid, but it is worth the time. I would definitely follow these guidelines and pursue it.
- Depending on how blatant the theft was, and if you wish to pursue copyright theft claims, report the theft via ONLINE COMPLAINT FORM to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internet Fraud Complaint Center.
- After determining the status of the District Attorney prosecution, and only if there is no prosecution or prosecution has finished, then it is time to write to their clients asking if they knew that the content at URL was illegally copied from your URL. Be sure to specify the entire URL so that their clients can easily compare the pages. Note that you might need to scan the URL's in the linkpopularity.com report to find client sites.
- As a last step and only if there is no prosecution, write to them to remove it. Do this last because if this is the first step, they will not have learned anything and will possibly do it again to someone else. (I know, most advise this as a first step out of courtesy). By this time they should understand the consequences of the theft in no uncertain terms so that they will not do it again. They took your page without telling you, so tell them last. And point them to this page (http://www.bruceclay/in.com/webthief.htm). Do you get a better response with honey than vinegar? Sometimes, but how does that discourage them from doing it again? This methodology is specifically designed to discourage the act for all sites, not just yours. Otherwise they will simply switch to stealing from a different site.
- Immediately place appropriate © Copyright tags on your pages.
- Place your name, or other tag only you will be able to identify, into comment tags within your pages, typically within large paragraphs.
- Register immediately with the U.S. Copyright Office, making sure to archive a full copy for your files.
- We offer to have everyone copy http://www.bruceclay/in.com/web_legl.htm. This page was designed to be used by anyone needing it, and it is intended to be shared. It is at least a fair starting point for you as a copyright notice. Change it to represent the degree of use that you will allow. Use at your own risk. But the overall effect of a legal page, a copyright tag, the client exposure, the resulting pressure from other web users, and the risk placed upon their ISP for hosting stolen materials, should be to get the stolen pages removed. At least it has worked for us.
- The web needs a "witness" service to compare pages and help encourage violators to withdraw their offending pages. If you agree, perhaps we can provide that service under a separate .org entity. Email us with your comments.
We suggest that you review this entire site if you can. It
contains a wealth of information that will help you
design or redesign your site for maximum effect.
Use the Home link below to start this process.
Have an issue? Contact us.
Bruce Clay India Private Limited
Office 212, 2nd Floor, South Point Mall, Golf Course Road, Sector 53
Gurugram, Haryana 122002


text:
About CKUT
WEB SITE:http://www.ckut.ca
ckutmusic on 02/01/2013 at 07:00PM
Babi Audi Live on CKUT
On a very cold January afternoon, CKUT welcomed Montreal's own Babi Audi in the studio to record a live session. There she wove us a sonic tapestry of echoed vocals layered over chopped & screwed samples from some of her fave DJs. One half of the performance art-driven duo Institutional Prostitution, Melissa Gagne has been working solo under the moniker Babi Audi for the past year or two and she's been getting lots of attention from the city's curious ears as of late -- and for good reason.


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On Saturday afternoon I was jolted back to Thursday 19th April 2007. The night my eldest brother was found dead in a corridor next to two empty bottles of vodka. That night, I drank whisky in the Hawley Arms in the presence of Amy Winehouse, who died on Saturday. Not knowing he was dead. Not knowing that four years later she would succumb to the same addiction Paul did. Not knowing that the same chemical I was using for enjoyment had killed my brother in massive amounts. Not knowing I had missed the chance to see him just one more time. Just once more. One more time and that's it.
It seems crass to use the death of one person to bring attention to your own grief. I do not mean to do this. I mean to reflect on something I have shared with few people and to give tribute to a man whose loss marks my soul. Who introduced me to music and told me about our Irish ancestors, who was the big brother who'd beat you up if you were mean to me in the playground.
Paul Christopher Maddocks was born in 1969 to my Mum and her first husband. I won't pretend the loss of a brother is the same as the loss of your first, beloved son. Paul was 8lb 12oz, and upside down; my Mum 7 stone 12lb and without the offer of a Caesarean section. He nearly killed her then and he nearly killed her when he died. The shock of bereavement slammed her adrenal glands. She stopped producing the hormone that regulates salt levels. But the doctors didn't know that. After a week of suspected stomach flu, when her body ridded itself of every drop of water to rebalance the salt in her blood, she went into "Addisonian crisis". Her vital organs were shutting down, breaking like her heart had on that day in April. The vicar who visited her says he's seen people that left hospital in a coffin who had looked better than she did.
Mama's gonna keep you right here under her wing / She won't let you fly but she might let you sing / Mama will keep baby cosy and warm.
After Paul's birth, Mum swore "never again". She went on to have four more children. She always wanted a girl and along I came in 1985. Paul was 16 and already drinking too much. I don't believe addiction is just a disease on its own, I don't think people abuse alcohol for no underlying reason. He was always searching for something, for who he was, what he was.
Paul's dad left my Mum when he was just five, a disruption that began a lifetime of searching for an identity. He was obsessed with his heritage. A few years before he died I met him in Farringdon, to vainly hunt for the death certificate of our Irish-born great-grandmother in the Family Records Centre. Years after our grandmother's death he discovered that she, an illegitimate child of World War One, had been sent to a nunnery when she was an infant. Her nun's name? Sister Mary Louise. The connection must be coincidence as not one family member knew of this before Paul. I'm forever grateful he revealed this unknown link between me and my half-Irish Gran.
Where Lagan stream sings lullaby / There blows a lily fair / The twilight gleam is in her eye / The night is on her hair
Our Irish ancestry fired Paul's imagination and his writing, which he tried to make his living, but failed. Each knockback from a publisher or film producer would always turn him back to drink. The family research inspired poems about Irish lords and kings, the pseudonym Pól Mac Madóg and beautiful Celtic drawings in his notebook that I pore over every time I'm reminded of him.
Someday you will find me /Caught beneath the landslide / In a champagne supernova in the sky
When I was 16, on Christmas morning, Paul told me his ex-girlfriend was pregnant. Just like that, like I was supposed to already know. I didn't. I've never met Billy. Paul didn't meet him much either.
Another Christmas we had to lock all the alcohol in the shed because Paul had crashed again. It was always a cycle of recovery, remission and relapse. Nothing we did could help him for long. Like Amy Winehouse, and all the world's addicts, celebrity or not, he just seemed unable to resist the demons of self-destruction.
In the last few years of his life, Paul studied music on South Uist, an island in the Outer Hebrides. It was something of a joke to run away to the Hebrides, but he actually did it. But he couldn't outrun those demons. He was clean for a year before the drinking started again. By January 2007, he knew he had to get help once more and we met him at Euston Station at the end of a two-day long journey from the furthest reaches of Scotland. For him, a two-day long binge. He was unconscious when the train pulled in.
Wake from your sleep / The drying of your tears/ Today we escape, we escape
At UCLH he begged to stay with me. Through tears of shame, "I want to stay with Louise." You might think I cried too, but I was numb with fear and worry that this was the worst he'd ever been. And filled with a cold fury that my eldest brother, the one who called to chat about bands and books, the one I talked to about politics and life and what on earth is the Daily Mail banging on about now, was poisoning himself with alcohol and he was going to die and it wasn't fair.
This is a sad fucking song / You'll be lucky if I don't bust out crying
We took him to stay with Mum. After three months, he had kicked his habits. Drink, fags, long shaggy hair all gone. A new man thanks to the bloody-mindedness of the mother who survived him being ripped out of her feet first. The mother who would later turn away from death, and the oblivion from grief that she could so easily have embraced, through sheer will to protect her family from another death.
Oh mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head / See, the sea wants to take me / The knife wants to slit me / Do you think you can help me?
But when Paul left Mum's home for his new life, he broke like a glass bottle smashed against a wall. The thing about addiction is that it has to be the addict who is strong. Family and friends can only form a barrier to those demons for so long. Faced with being on his own, he folded. And drank. And drank. And drank.
A week before Paul died, I went on holiday. I deliberated phoning him. I knew he was in a terrible state. The hour-long, rambling phone calls. The desperation in his cracking voice, his throat raw from neat vodka. Every time I said goodbye I wondered if I'd ever see him for one last hug. A farewell kiss. One last listen to Half Man Half Biscuit.
What could I do? Cancel my holiday and fly to his side just in case? One final effort to make him give up the ghost that haunted him, the ghost of obliteration?
When they found your body / Giant X's on your eyes
A week later I was in the pub. A week and a day later the phone call from my Mum, "He's gone. He's gone." I realised I had said my final goodbye, two weeks before, the last time we spoke on the phone. He died, and a bit of me died too. And it still dies again and again, every time I realise I will never get to see him that one last time.
We only said goodbye with words / I died a 100 times
Paul Christopher Maddocks, 26th January 1969 - 19th April 2007
Rest in peace, Paul. You're still alive in your son Billy, and when I meet him, I'll share with him everything you shared with me.


text:
Welcome to Sanicare.com
Renaissance Bidet 900List Price: $99.95
Sanicare.com offers a full range of bidet toilet seat attachment, hand bidets and travel bidets at discounted pricing. Purchasing a bidet from Sanicare assures that each bidet is carefully tested to ensure quality, ease of installation and comes with full warranty service. Sanicare distributes only the finest quality bidets that meet the exacting standards of quality and good value. We are, arguably, the largest independent worldwide dealer of bidets. Executive offices are located in Las Vegas, Nevada USA. Manufacturing and distribution centers are in Asia and Europe. Customers can be assured of having access to the best technology available today. You will find our bidets sold in the world's finest hotels, commercial facilities, as well as a wide spectrum of homeowners worldwide. We welcome innovative individuals and companies to contact us.


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Grepsr.com is a Cloud based, managed data extraction and web crawling service to crawl, extract or aggregate data easily from the web. Grepsr streamlines the data extraction process by simplifying the steps involved in the process – finalizing requirements, data extraction and data delivery.
Grepsr.com is a Cloud powered Web Crawling service for everyone. Crawl, Aggregate and Process unstructured data from the Web into clean Spreadsheets, PDF and XML. Mark & Tag. Visually mark & tag the information you want extracted from webpages, screenshots or documents. Zero Technicality. We take care of creating, automating & maintaining the process of extracting information.
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Venture Slogan: Cloud Powered Web Crawling Service
Venture Link: grepsr.com
Source: Venturebin.com


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Located in mile-high Fort Davis, the Veranda Inn offers accommodations in a unique historic setting. Built in 1883, the Veranda is the oldest hotel in West Texas.
This distinctive adobe building, with 2' thick walls and 12' high ceilings, has ten rooms and suites furnished in period antiques and collectibles. All rooms and suites have private baths. A separate Carriage House is under the shade of a large pecan tree. An excellent breakfast is served every morning, featuring "from scratch" recipes that our guests come back for.
Occupying most of a town block, the inn's walled gardens and quiet courtyards shelter large verandas with rocking chairs and tables - the perfect spot for your morning coffee or evening glass of wine. The Veranda is ideal for small retreats, conferences and family reunions. Nearby are McDonald Observatory, Fort Davis National Historic Site, the Nature Conservancy's Davis Mountains Preserve, the Chihuahuan Desert Nature Center and Davis Mountains State Park. It is 2 and 1/2 hours to Big Bend National Park, 45 minutes to Balmorhea State Park, 20 minutes to Marfa (Chinati Art Foundation) and 25 minutes to Alpine (Museum of the Big Bend).


text:
Partner Sites
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Earn $5 for register...there is no more joke..joke only for stupid..
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text:
Choose a Michigan YMCA Camp!
Michigan YMCA camps, with their values-oriented programming and extraordinary but accessible locations, attract families from all over the Midwest.
Campers experience personal growth through activities enhanced by natural surroundings. Summer is the ideal time to enjoy Michigan's beautiful lakes, unspoiled forests, blue skies, long days, awesome sunsets, and a carpet of twinkling stars above the flames of a glowing campfire.
The programs offered by Michigan YMCA camps are designed to foster healthy relationships among peers and with the environment. Parents of campers consistently report positive results: stronger friendships, decreased stress, and revitalized imaginations.
Ann Arbor YMCA's overnight camp for campers ages 6 through 16. The camp is located on Burt Lake in Northern Michigan, just east of Petoskey and about a four-hour drive north of Ann Arbor. Our 150-acre campus is a combination of forest, playing fields, original and updated buildings, breathtaking shoreline and even a natural spring. Click to Visit our Website!
Life at camp is like nothing else! We have both 100 year old buildings and new, state of the art facilities. We eat, sleep, swim and play on the camp grounds. Our excellent, international staff is trained to support and challenge young campers and teens. The relationships built around camp fires, polar bear swims and adventure trips will last a lifetime! Click to Visit our Website!
Overlooking nearly a mile of breathtaking shoreline in Oscoda, Camp Nissokone has been Michigan's premier northern adventure camp connecting youth, families and groups to the outdoors since 1914. Nissokone is best known for our exciting adventure activities, teen leadership development, expert equestrian programs and family camp. Bussing is available from Birmingham and Livonia. Click to Visit our Website!
Located north of West Branch, MI, near Clear Lake, the Saginaw Family YMCA Camp Timbers is a natural treasure. Our private 300-acre setting features beautiful rolling hills and dense forest surrounding our own, private Piper Lake. Our flagship programs are summer resident camps for boys and girls ages 7-16. Click to Visit our Website!
Mystic Lake
Located in Lake Station, MI, Mystic Lake is an outstanding summer camp for children ages 6-16. The summer of 2015 marks our 90th summer of offering high quality camping programs for children and teens. Our programs focus on helping campers develop the skills that are necessary for them to have great success in life. Click to Visit our Website!
Camp Echo
Camp Echo is for campers age 8 to 17 and covers nearly 500 acres of land on the shore of Ryerson Long Lake, in Fremont, MI. We stress the core values of caring, honesty, respect, and responsibility. Click to Visit our Website!
Lifelong friendships, tall pines, clear water, are awaiting you at Camp Pendalouan, West Michigan's YMCA camp. Click to Visit our Website!
Camp Pinewood
YMCA Camp Pinewood's Resident Camp programs give children a safe environment to overcome challenges like mastering the climbing wall or hitting their first bullseye. Children explore nature, find new talents, gain independence, and make lasting friendships and memories. Click to Visit our Website!
Camp Manitou-Lin
Camp Manitou-Lin has over 100 years of camping experience and is located on beautiful Barlow Lake in Middleville, Michigan. Our beautiful, natural setting provides an excellent opportunity for all who visit. Click to Visit our Website!
Camp Algonquin
Welcome to Camp Algonquin – over 65 years of tradition in helping children experience the outdoors while being a part of a small camp community where everyone knows your name. Camp Algonquin incorporates the YMCA core values of caring, respect, responsibility, and honesty as a part of each activity and relationship. Click to Visit our Website!
Sherman Lake
With over 300 acres of woodlands, prairie, and pristine lakefront, there's no end to the adventure for summer campers. Fun activities abound such as swimming, hiking, archery, arts, canoeing, kayaking, indoor & outdoor climbing, sports, horseback, and ropes courses.State of the art facilities include all-season carpeted cabins, each with a shower and bath plus a full service recreation center and indoor pool. Click to Visit our Website!
Camp Eberhart
The Y has a long, proud history in camping activities and YMCA Camp Eberhart has been committed to nurturing youth development for more than 100 years. Click to Visit our Website!
Storer Camps
Disguised as adventures that create lifetime friendships, our programs cultivate life-skills critical for success in academics, career, family and community. Click to Visit our Website!
Camp Copneconic
Since 1915, YMCA Camp Copneconic has served thousands of families as a place for fun, excitement and learning. Here at camp, you are able to choose your programs, have a blast with our exciting and passionate staff, and enjoy the serenity that radiates from every corner of our beautiful lake front location. Click to Visit our Website!
Camp Ohiyesa
Lifelong memories are made at Camp Ohiyesa, a great escape without a ticket or an "are we there yet." Situated on 300 acres overlooking Fish Lake in Holly, Ohiyesa offers an array of activities, from zip lining to archery to horseback riding. Click to Visit our Website!


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This neighborhood exploration is about tiny East Pasadena. Despite its name, East Pasadena is an independent community and no more a part of the city of Pasadena than are South Pasadena or Altadena. Historically it was a much larger community but through many annexations it has shrunk to a small area that also includes the neighborhoods of Michillinda Park, a portion of Chapman Woods, and several numbered tracts.
Pendersleigh & Sons Cartography's map of East Pasadena
South Pasadena is neighbored by Pasadena to the north and west, San Marino to the west, East San Gabriel to the south, and Arcadia to the east. Though an independent community, many of its businesses have Pasadena addresses. East Pasadena is a small but diverse As of the 2010 census, the population was just 6,144 and 52% white, 35% Latino of any race (mostly Mexican), 23% Asian (mostly Chinese and Filipino), 3% black, and 1% Native American. Though the fastest growing population in the last ten years was Asian-American, it still has a ways to before it reaches a plurality and thus joins its neighbors in "The Far Eastside." Whatever East Pasadenans' ancestral origins, it is heavy on the American Flags... and USMC flags... and one Colombian one.


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It is not okay for cats to kill all the neighborhood birds.
I'm living next to a killer named Frankie. He's black-and-white and sweet as cats go; he's also a menace that nobody talks much about, though feral and free-roaming housecats like Frankie have become a tragic problem all over the world.
Every year in America, cats, many of them well-fed pets, kill about 12.3 billion mammals and 2.4 billion birds. When you open the door, your friendly furry feline transforms into a miniature terrorist. It's as if outdoor domestic cats are an invasive species, predators that are pampered and subsidized by doting owners.
Feral cats are an even bigger problem. In the United States, there are some 60 million unwanted cats. No wonder: With a survival rate of 2.8 kittens per litter with continued breeding, two cats can become 3,822 cats in just four years.
Frankie belongs to my neighbors. We live in a small southern Idaho community, surrounded by sagebrush foothills and lots of wildlife. A marsh hosts red-winged blackbirds and assorted ducks. Deer wander past my window daily, as well as the occasional red fox, and quail and pheasant calls fill the air. Red-tailed, Swainson's, sharp-shinned, and Cooper's hawks all share the sky with a golden eagle, though not at the same time. The Cooper's is a particular fixture; I occasionally see him dining on a finch but don't begrudge him his meal. After all, he's a native.
That's where Frankie comes in. His owner opens the door for this well-fed, neutered cat and the carnage begins. First, he digs up my flowerbed to relieve himself, then he hunts.
He bags about a bird a day. I saw him snatch a finch last week; the following day a quail succumbed to his ambush. Now that it's summer, the quail bring their fuzzy chicks to my yard, where I've scattered seeds for them. Last year, we had 36 chicks every day. But now the quail are afraid. I hear their alarm calls and always spot Frankie skulking in the bushes.
Of course, an easy solution exists for the house cat problem. Got a pet cat? Keep it in your house -- forever. The Humane Society says indoor cats live much longer and healthier lives than outdoor cats: 18–20 years, vs. 3–4 years. My indoor-only cat lived nearly 19 years. Outdoors, cats can be bitten by other cats, killed by vehicles or predators, infected by sick cats, stolen or simply lost. For all these reasons and more, animal welfare organizations urge all cat owners to keep their pets inside.
And what about being considerate or even neighborly? Frankie and friends know no property boundaries, yet their owners don't seem to care. Most dog owners know it's not right to let a dog poop in a neighbor's yard, and that includes even a very small dog.
So before you open the door to let your cat out -- wait. Think about the wildlife your cat kills. Think about your neighbor's yard. Get a litter box. Be responsible for your cat. You can't solve the feral cat problem alone, but each of us can solve the problem of the cats we own. Let's make it not OK to let your cat out so it runs loose.
Domestic animals by definition are not meant to run wild. We contain them behind fences or by other means, both for their protection and to promote civility. As fences cannot contain felines, a responsible cat owner keeps a cat in the house.
With the encouragement of my town council president, I've placed a letter on every doorstep in my neighborhood explaining why cats belong indoors, and informing cat owners that any cats on private property can be picked up and taken to the animal shelter. Frankie's not the only hunter in the neighborhood: About 25 pet cats hunt in our marsh or other backyards.
Despite phone calls, notes on the door and requests from the town council, however, Frankie's owners still let him out. So yesterday Frankie made his first trip to the animal shelter, purring in my lap. I admit I felt horrible doing this, but I also felt that his avian carnage must stop. His owners will now have to make the same hour-long drive that I did, plus pay about $40 to bail him out. I'm prepared to do this indefinitely so the wildlife here can live in peace. Today, as I type, six adult quail with perhaps 20 chicks are scurrying through the grass outside my window. Their feline stalker is away, at least for now.
Crista Worthy is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News. She is a writer and editor for Pilot Getaways magazine and editor of The Flyline, a monthly publication of the Idaho Aviation Association.
Note: the opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of High Country News, its board or staff. If you'd like to share an opinion piece of your own, please write Betsy Marston at [email protected].


text: Bellisomo's Blog - Training Camp March 20, 200812:00AM PDT Previous Next Hey guys, my name is Luca Bellisomo and I'm in my first year with the club. I'm a defender, primarily centre back although I've been out on the right side as well. Today marked the first day of our training camp in Seattle, and it went something like this... We trained this morning (Wednesday) at 10am in Vancouver. It was a pretty light session due to the fact that we have a game tomorrow against Portland. After training we had some time to grab a quick lunch before we met at 2pm at Burnaby 8 Rinks to board the Greyhound and got going. We arrived in Seattle at about 7pm, dropped our stuff off in our rooms (my roomie is Stefan Leslie) and went for dinner at Dino's, a little Greek/Italian restaurant. Taka was having a tough time with the menu, but Serge managed to help him out a little bit. There was a lot of dodgy sign language being used, and it's quite possible that Taka was more confused after speaking to Serge than before. Either way, Taka ended up having the salmon which he claimed to have liked (he gave me the thumbs up). And so now I'm at the computer in the hotel with Eddie Sebrango, who is writing some email's. I'm going to head to bed soon and try and get a good sleep in preparation for our game tomorrow. It is our first game this year against a league opponent, and so will be a good experience for us and an good indicator of how the team is looking. Can't wait. Cheers, Luca Previous Next


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Need A Job? Too Bad! The Good Jobs Are Being Shipped Out Of America As Part Of The New One World Economy
I hope that you enjoy the cheap foreign-made plastic trinkets that you will be exchanging with your family and friends this holiday season, because they are literally destroying the U.S. economy. As part of the new "one world economy" that both Democrats and Republicans insist is so good for us, millions of good paying middle class jobs have been shipped out of America. Do you need a job? Are you wondering where all the good jobs went? Well, the next time you are out just walk into a store and start looking at the product labels. Most of the things that are sold in our stores are now made out of the country. So if you need a good paying job to support your family that is just too bad – you have been merged into a global labor pool where you must compete for jobs with people on the other side of the globe willing to work for less than a tenth of what you usually make. Welcome to the "one world economy" where big global corporations make a fortune exploiting slave labor on the other side of the world while "overly expensive American workers" get dumped out on the street.
Are you in favor of a redistribution of wealth? Most of the time when the phrase "redistribution of wealth" is brought up, conservatives and libertarians visibly cringe – as they should. But did you know that right now the greatest redistribution of wealth in the history of the world is taking place and our politicians are doing nothing about it?
For a moment, imagine a giant map of the world. On that giant map, put a huge pile of money on the United States, and also put a huge pile of money on China and on the OPEC nations. Now imagine a big hand coming along once a month that takes tens of billions of dollars out of the U.S. pile and puts it into the piles of China and the OPEC nations.
As this continues month after month after month, what is eventually going to happen?
The Rest…HERE


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Notes From All OverSeptember 26, 2003
On CSS redesigns, ISSN, semantics, and FIR revisited.
A note from Paul Hammond to those who would rebuild existing sites in CSS:
CSS can do so much more than tables ever could, and your work is showing none of this. In fact, it's hinting at the opposite, that CSS doesn't give us any new toys to play with and people can probably get away without learning it, as long as nobody looks at the source.
Read the rest. Thought-provoking, and touches on a very good point: consider your etiquette. No one likes to be told they're wrong. §
Requisite link time: Joe Clark dismisses the increasing rejection of weblog owners who apply for ISSNs. You may remember an article on mezzoblue a few months back relating my own problems in obtaining one for this site. First-hand experience on this matter suggests Joe is entirely correct in both his assertions and conclusions. (via Zeldman) §
Marking up a title. This is a simple book title, folks, it should be open-and-shut. That it's not (and don't get me wrong: it isn't) suggests a big hole in general understanding of what is so semantic about semantic XHTML.
I'd argue that true semantics require rigid definitions, leaving little room for grey area. But then I realize I don't know the first thing about the Semantic Web, and browsing through the source is far from enlightening: RDF is covered every which way, but I haven't seen a single mention of XHTML.
Do we have an 'Elements of Style' for semantic XHTML yet? Will one exist? Does XHTML even matter in the context of a semantic web, or is RDF the ticket?
These are questions. I don't know the answers. §
In bringing back online some of the still-missing content last night, I added this roundup of alternative FIR methods that came to light around the time I published my Digital Web article. I never publicized it, because it seems there really isn't a perfect alternative yet. Phark is nice code-wise, but doesn't work in IE5 and doesn't solve the images off, CSS on problem. Levin/Gilder is code-heavy and rather ugly, but does solve the accessibility issues… though it introduces a new problem with transparent GIFs.
We haven't cracked this one yet, but there has to be a perfect solution out there somewhere… §
Reader Comments
about the ISSN issue: sure, joe clark - by all means a sacred cow of the (accessibility) web community - says that the registrars have no right to refuse ISSN registration of blogs. well…my first reaction would be: and so what ? a blogger defending bloggers' rights to register…that's certainly going to put pressure on the registrars, eh ?
Wait a sec Patrick, on first glance I thought your comment might have some merit, but then I realized: who defends anybody's rights to anything? The people themselves of course! Sure, sometimes a mysterious and powerful benefactor may take up someone's cause, but that is hardly the driving force behind societal progress. You ought to take the merits of an argument based on the argument itself, not your opinions about the author.
what i'm saying is that it is naive, in my opinion, to think that just because everybody links to joe's article, and makes a big fuss about it by whatever means (emailing the registrars ? calling their government representatives ?), that things will automatically change. i'm getting a slight deja vu here, thinking back at the "free jaws for web developers" discussion…
i'm all for the idea, and no, i don't necessarily have anything against joe…i just don't like the feeling of "joe said it, so iit will have more clout" subtext i get from many articles on his writeup…
"Joe Clark dismisses the increasing rejection of weblog owners who apply for ISSNs"
I'm sure that talk about ISSNs will pop-up at the next http://webstandards.to/ meeting…looking forward to it ;)
I think that the policy is to reject blogs outright unless the owner complains. Realizing they have no defense for this type of discrimination against a new publication medium they eventually will grant the ISSN. This process most likely filters out about 95% of the blog requests.
I was initially rejected…complained…then granted an ISSN a day later (ISSN 1708-2935). Two emails is all it took to get an ISSN (plus a third to confirm that I had received the second one granting me the ISSN).
So my advice is to save all the arguments on why your blog deserves an ISSN for the 2nd email as the 1st will simply get you a form letter response. The 2nd email is the one they will be forced to read if for no other reason than that the continued correspondence begins to irritate them and it's just easier for them to issue you the damn ISSN!
I posted my initial thoughts on the whole ordeal: http://www.zeit.ca/archive/20030719/
1. The link to your revised image replacement page works fine from your blog's frontpage, but not from the permalink page. Dashes in the URI are replaced with %E2%80%93.
2. There's a glitch in the first and second textareas's content; the string 'background-image:' is mentioned twice.
Else, nice overview.
Re: rebuild existing sites in CSS
I don't recode to show somebody they're wrong; I do it to practice my CSS skills. I often figure out interesting and new hacks, compromises, and insights for my CSS "tool-belt".
Re: Roundup of Alternative FIR Methods
Is there really a problem? Lately, I've been leaning towards pseudo-RDF for assigning IDs and classes. For example:

Foobar

What does it mean?

The h1 tag indicates that we have a heading, the first div is the title of the heading, and the second div is the subtitle. This would be like RDF triples:
heading1 title "Foobar"
heading1 subtitle "What does it mean?"
Is there anything inherently wrong with this technique?
A request: Would it be possible to put items as separate posts? It's kind of daunting to post a reply on one particular thing when there will likely be comments on other unrelated parts of the post.
the gilder/levin method is repeating the background image vertically - i see two copies of the image. win2k firebird0.6
Good to see you updated the roundup page from a two months ago (I found it through backtracking on refers). Maybe we need to get the screen reader makers, web designers, web browser designers, and accessibility experts in one room to figure out how to clear up all this mess and to make everbodies lives easier.
Dave, just a small quibble.. XHTML isn't, and never will be, semantic. It does not tell you what anything means. It's purely structural. It'll tell you everything you need to know about what a piece of text *is*, but nothing whatsoever about what that piece of text *is describing*.
In the end I think the best solution to achieving both will be to markup all documents up using *two* markup languages. XHTML to inform tools of a document's structure, and another one (hopefully easier to get than RDF) which sits in the same document identifying meaning.
Then again, there are only a small subset of documents that will ever need both of them anyway. Structural description is more than enough for most 'content' documents around, and documents which require semantic description are more storage / database style files than content.
I've bene thinknig of applying the new Skip navigation method recently discovered as a pseudo FIR replacement. You can read the full story at http://student-kmt.hku.nl/~sander17/opinion/index.php?m=200309#3
but in practice this allows screenreaders and google to fully access your headers without any penalties for hiding information (as opposed to h1 span, hiding the text in span and using FIR), as well as any CSS disabled browsing device. CSS enabled browsers that have images off can be catered to by putting the same information in the image?s title attribute. This way it is possible to accommodate all users.
If RDF is ever the ticket, I'm going to refuse the ride.
If we're going to move toward semantic markup, there needs to be something that provides semantics. I have two more questions without answers, though: do we really need to move toward semantic markup? And if so, is it enough to have a human- (but not machine-) readable profile that defines the semantics? That's what HTML provided, and it seemed to work well enough. Everyone knew what the 'p' element meant, even if they didn't use it.
Re. Semantic markup - good questions (I've added a link to your post on the ESW Wiki, maybe someone will take note).
Personally I'd lean towards Lach's suggestion of separate languages for structure/meaning, but these certainly don't have to sit in the same document. XHTML (+CSS) + RDF would I believe be a good choice. RDF isn't difficult, it's just different from most markup so people tend to get wrong-footed. RDF/XML can look horrid, but it's designed primarily for machine, not human consumption. If you look at the model first (which is the good bit!), it's not far from familiar relational database ideas.


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It's been 38 days since my crash, and things are progressing, but not as fast as I would like.
There was progress 1.5 weeks ago when I got a massage @ World Gym, which left me feeling good, then a productive acupuncture session last Wednesday, which also helped. This initiated a ramp-up of my physical activity. I did 10 minutes on the trainer on Thursday morning followed by a resistance training session in the evening where I was able to up the effort significantly from my previous one. While none of these exercises caused pain, I was left feeling quite fatigued, and waited for the bus rather than walk up Potrero Hill afterwards.
Friday and Saturday I was still tired. My walking was definitely off compared to how it had been on Thursday. Despite this, I wanted to stick to the trainer rides, so on Friday I did 20 minutes, then Saturday I did two rides, one of 10, the second of 20 minutes. I figured my fatigue had been from lifting, and the riding was good.
Unfortunately Sunday morning I was still feeling hobbled. Instead of continuing my upward trajectory in cycling, I took a rest day: heating pad, hot bath, self-leg-massage with The Stick. It all helped, and today I'm doing a lot better. But I want to check again with World Gym to see if I can get another massage appointment.
I've got a physical therapy appointment set up, but it's still not for a week. So until then I'm on my own.
On the positive side, my range of motion continues to improve. I even rode a bike a bit outside, just in a circle on Saturday while watching Luna Rosa sail a solo heat at the America's Cup trials. But I'm not especially close to feeling good taking a running stride or commiting to doing a ride of any significance outside. I think riding uphill would be quite a challenge. This would be an excellent application for Garmin Vector, as I'd like to see how much my right leg is slacking off on the trainer rides.
At this point, I'm still on track for a 6-8 week recovery typical of significant injuries. The doctor told me if I plateau out and am not "significantly improved" by next Tuesday I should get an MRI. Hopefully I make that deadline.
On the plus side, I've been reading more than usual. Currently on my Kindle: The Gods of Gotham. Excellent stuff: New York 1845. I find city life in the pre-car era to be intriguing, although the lack of bicycles is deeply disturbing. Certainly the level of poverty portrayed in the book is sobering. But my recommendation to mid-19th century New Yorkers: invest heavily in real estate in the northern, agricultural part of the island.


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Wednesday Night long pose sessions are from 6:30-9:30 PM. $ 20 per person, we provide the horses and easels; you bring your own drawing/painting materials. First come, first serve for position. 20 people maximum. Model holds a single pose for two weeks, so plan medium accordingly. Visit our MEETUP page to reserve a spot.
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Earlier Event: July 5Long Pose Nude Figrue - MARK (1st night)
Later Event: July 15LIMITED COLOR OIL PAINTING