Matt Reinschmidt

Why Boys Don't Do Ballet

2011-12-28T19:33:00.000-08:00

I want to get right to the point with this article and explore why I think so many fathers are so totally opposed to their sons taking ballet and where the American prejudice against male dancers comes from. I am not trying to offend anyone with this article, but at the same time I have caught so much flack and encountered so much ignorance as a male dancer myself that what I have to say may irritate some. I hope this will be taken in an open-minded way as this is a real problem and I seek to explain what the real, ground-level reasons are for it.
Ever since I can remember I heard my friends giggle or make jokes at any man wearing tights dancing on stage. In the days long before YouTube and Cable TV, movies might be shown in school as part of a history or civilization class and would inevitably touch on the arts and then at some point show ballet. As soon as the male dancer appeared, here came the jokes and snickers. Since I had done ballet myself since the age of 4 this always struck a real nerve with me but most of the time no one else knew I took ballet so I would just sit quietly and listen to the snide remarks. I must say that while this is not at all the same thing as someone being made fun of or joked about because of their race, I do think I know something of that same feeling because I always loved ballet and would never not do it but hearing people disparage something I knew to be so great and that was a part of me really hurt in a way that leaves you feeling totally powerless to deal with it.
Much later in life I finally gained the perspective to look back on my childhood and also hear the comments being made anew and make some insights into where this prejudice comes from. What follows is my analysis of the prejudice against male ballet dancers.

1) Smooth or graceful movement confused with moving "like a girl".
Many, many men don't ever fully appreciate the value of being able to have a wide range of motion for the body and the ability to move separate parts of it at the same time and smoothly so as to maintain balance. Practically all the sports anyone has watched on TV since the 1950's shows athletes very highly conditioned to move in straight lines as fast or powerfully as possible. Male ballet dancers MUST move in a different way because the goal of a dancer is to maintain balance rather than impart a large amount of energy into a ball or into another person's body to knock them down. A great many confuse this with ballet making men move like girls. Quite apart from this, ballet actually makes men move a lot like someone practicing Tai Chi or Kung Fu or especially Yoga. Add to this the idea that ballet is a pure creative exercise set to music, not something intended to hurt or render another person unconscious, and you arrive at the basis for one of the big misconceptions of ballet regarding men. Curiously this is also the reason why many men find ballet extremely challenging to do and gain a grudging respect for it later in life if they ever take a class their daughter might be in during an open house type event.

2) Boys don't wear tights
Let's examine this one. When I warned that I may offend some people with this article, this part is exactly what I was referring to. I don't know how else to approach this, so here it goes: Every male athlete wears tights or far less. Swimmers? You wear lycra speedos. Wrestlers? Seriously, what is that spandex bodytard thing you guys wear? Football? Lycra-spandex cut off tights with some extra padding and a cup. Don't confuse the shoulder pads and upper jersey with the fact you guys also wear a chopped up version of tights. And, if boys are doing "girly" things when they dance, what do you call getting right behind a Center's rear end and putting your hands almost in his crotch before a snap of the ball?

3) My son will be gay if he takes ballet
Now I am a flaming heterosexual if you ask my wife. I do know many gay guys, but many of the gay guys I know are sports junkies and never ever did any ballet. And as body-built up as they are from pumping iron all the time they'd have as much luck doing ballet as Arnold Schwarzenegger. This one really stumps me to be honest and it comes up a lot as a reason why dads will not let their sons take ballet. Are there gay male dancers? Sure. Are there gay men in every profession including sports? Yes, there are, and again as the football and wrestling examples given above show, if I were a gay man I'd do those sports because then I'd be in direct physical contact with other athletic guys rather than ballet where 99.99% of the time you are dancing with GIRLS! More specifically, you are partnering girls which involves holding them in all kinds of very difficult positions and getting sweat all over yourself from them which no gay man wants because most gay men do not want close contact with women. Honestly I have to say there is just no basis to this prejudice just as there is no basis to any racial prejudice and the answer to any prejudice is education not arguing the prejudice itself because it is founded on ignorance or outright stupidity. To be brutally honest fathers who are too over dominating of their sons run a much greater risk of causing their boys to become gay than any art form including ballet could ever pose.

Now many children - boys and girls - don't like ballet and won't take ballet classes and that's just fine, no activity or sport or art is for everyone. I only hope to spark a checking of the premises for anyone out there who holds to this ignorant prejudice against boys taking ballet because for those that do want to, ballet can be a life-long benefit that will improve mental and physical health, stimulate academic performance, almost guarantee a scholarship to college for any half-way capable male dancer, and foster creativity and imagination for a lifetime. This is hardly something to be opposed to.

On the web: http://www.balletnorth.com

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Ballet North now has a Google+ Page!

2011-12-24T07:52:00.000-08:00

December 24, 2011

'Twas the night before Christmas and all over the internet, not a webbot was scanning for lack of a daemon-net. Then along came this new page and it became all the newscanned rage; check this out and see there's not any doubt about - Ballet North 'tis awesome, give this Google+ page a shout!

Ballet North on Google+
https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/115302597823851414131/

KCUR FM: KC Baha'is Fight Iranian Persecution

2011-12-21T09:28:00.000-08:00

December 21, 2011

Thank you to Alex Smith with KCUR FM 89.3 (the Kansas City affiliate of National Public Radio) for putting together this very compelling and harrowing account of the vicious persecution of the Baha'i Faith in Iran.

http://www.kcur.org/post/kc-bahais-fight-iranian-persecution

Baha'i Faith of Kansas City on KC Currents!

2011-12-18T15:51:00.001-08:00

December 18, 2011

BREAKING:

The Baha'i Faith of Kansas City segment on KC Currents can be dowloaded in mp3 format once posted to www.kcur.org - GREAT piece!

Stay Away from AB May Company

2011-12-16T07:01:00.000-08:00

December 16, 2011
Kansas City Missouri

My congregation - the Baha'i Faith of Kansas City Missouri - put out bids for Air Conditioning repair work in 2008 to alleviate problems we were having with units that had been running since the early 1970's. AB May took the bid and offered the lowest price - still getting paid over $45,000 for the job - and assured us that they could do the work and could even install the same type of units - Carrier commercial size compressor units - as had been in place before to maintain compatibility with the building controls already installed. What ensued shortly after the work was completed has been a nightmare and has shown AB May to be not at all expert in work they claim to be able to do, but very adept at shenanigans so as to get you just past the warranty period on your equipment and then leave you hanging especially if you didn't want to buy their multi-thousands of dollars a year service contract which, as it turns out, doesn't cover you like a car warranty does but just "mitigates" the cost of future repairs to a certain degree. Of course, if they install the units wrong and cause them to burn up within a few months, you'd think they would want to make that good.

At this point we are filing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau of Kansas City Missouri and have no other recourse than to put very negative reviews of this outfit before the public.

My advice to anyone reading this is to stay the heck away from AB May.

An extract of our review of AB May:

We paid them over $45,000 for this job...My congregation contracted AB May after seeking bids in 2008 to replace two 25 ton AC units at our Center. During the installation they had some issues and at first we figured it was just clumsy work to do because these are big units. Not 3 months later we continued having AC problems and had called back out a servicer from AB May to look at these brand new units and he basically said he can't work on large AC units and that AB May didn't have anyone on hand who could. Turns out that the lubricant needed to keep large compressors operating was not applied by AB May upon install. By 2009 (next summer - AC units are only used during warm weather) one of these brand new units had frozen up just after the one year warranty period from the manufacturer. AB May still denied that they had anything to do with it and now it is clear to us they were using our own ignorance of AC units against us. At this point we are filing a Better Business Bureau complaint against AB May and would urge any organization needing to have major AC work done to avoid this company because they have proven themselves to be untrustworthy and more than wiling to take advantage of congregations. If they bid lower than other contractors still stay away from them - a low bid won't fix the fact that major failures will happen because they install things incorrectly and hope you don't notice until it's too late.

Mormonism Is A Mortal Enemy of Racial Unity

2011-12-14T11:07:00.000-08:00

December 14, 2011

This is very striking. Owing to the source material of the Mormon Faith containing such passages as quoted in this article I am forced to conclude that the Mormon Religion as such is fatally, lethally flawed if we are to live in a world where all races harmonize and live together in peace and prosperity. The extreme exclusivity of Rick Perry's Evangelical-only religious comrades is disagreeable to me but I am stunned at what is really in the Mormon religion and the moves that have been made by it over time to avoid blowback.

True Religion must build unity amongst the races of mankind - inter-racial strife has caused the most disastrous wars in human history and can have zero place in a modern civilization with nuclear weapons, intercontinental travel and the world wide web. A religion that has from it's founders extremely racist, anti-Semitic vitriol cannot be of any real value to the human family and at it's core must be rotten because the core of any religion are the writings of it's founders. This is really not that complicated an idea which explains all the abstruse, bizarre and odd maneuverings of the Mormon Church over time as it tried to camouflage what it has at it's core so as to preserve it's authority over those who choose to follow and who must be, I have to say, not very curious as to what their chosen religion really has to say.

This is a great article from Renaissance Women written by Tricia Erickson, you can see the original article here:

http://rwnetwork.net/Article2292.html

Mitt Romney Is A Devout Member Of A Historically Racist Church

Posted on: Tuesday, September 20th, 2011 by Tricia Erickson

Mitt Romney Is A Devout Member Of A Historically Racist Church
During Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential Campaign, the Trinity United Church of Christ and its controversial pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, were frequent topics of discussion on the national news. Commentators from several national talk shows referred to Barack’s church doctrine and teachings as disturbing, alarming, separatist and, in some cases, cult like.
How ironic that it was reasonable to scrutinize Barack Obama’s beliefs, church membership and church doctrine, but it is now not acceptable to do the same with the possible front GOP runner for 2012. It is astonishing that the beliefs of this devout Mormon, Mitt Romney, have not come in to play now that the tables have turned.
Before I go in to just one of the scores of outrageous and alarming historical Mormon doctrines and beliefs, it is important for Americans to know that Mitt is no casual Mormon. He is a temple recommend card carrying Mormon, whose positions and activities in the church leave no doubt that he is a devout follower of Mormon doctrine.
Mitt Romney was:
· A graduate of Brigham Young University
· A former Mormon Missionary (served a 2 year mission in France in which he received almost three Vietnam War draft deferments)
o Missionary Zone leader (promotion)
o Assistant to the Mission President (promotion)
· A Bishop of the Mormon Church
· A Stake President (presided over approximately 12 Mormon wards/churches in Boston)
· Married in the secret Mormon Temple and Endowment Ceremony
· More…..
Being a member of this church testifies to the authenticity of all Mormon Doctrine because the doctrine comes from the founders and former and present prophets of the church. The Book of Mormon and the prophets are “infallible” and their words are considered to be scripture. The following are just a few of the numerous racist teachings of the Mormon Church:
The Book of Mormon, “the most correct book”, even more correct than the bible, accuses God of cursing Africans and Native Americans in the following passages of 2nd Nephi Chapter 5:
21 And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them. 22 And thus saith the Lord God: I will cause that they shall be loathesome unto thy people, save they shall repent of their iniquities. 23 And cursed shall be the seed of him that mixeth with their seed; for they shall be cursed even with the same cursing. And the Lord spake it, and it was done.
In the (Mormon) Journal of Discourses, Mormon Prophet Brigham Young adds emphasis in the following statement:
“Classes of the human family that are black uncouth uncomely disagreeable and low in their habits wild and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind the first man that committed the odious crime of killing one of his brethren will be cursed the longest of any one of the children of Adam. Cain slew his brother. Cain might have been killed and that would have put a termination to that line of human beings this was not to be and the lord put a mark upon him which is the flat nose and black skin trace mankind down to after the flood and then another curse is pronounced upon the same race that they should be the 11 servant of servants and they will be until that curse is removed and the abolitionists cannot help it nor in the least alter that decree how long is that race to endure the dreadful curse that is upon them that curse will remain upon them”
“Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain the penalty under the law of God is death on the spot.”
Also, according Mormon Doctrine, Native American Indians were also of the class of the cursed because their skin was also a darker color. These horrible, prejudicial beliefs are reiterated again and again in the Book of Mormon, found in the books of Alma, Mormon and Nephi as quoted below, directly from their teachings:
Alma 3:6 “And the skins of the Lamanites (Native American Indians) were dark, according to the mark which was set upon their fathers, which was a curse upon them because of their transgression and their rebellion against their brethren, who consisted of Nephi, Jacob, and Joseph, and Sam, who were just and holy men”
Mormon 5:15 “And also that the seed of this people may more fully believe his gospel, which shall go forth unto them from the Gentiles; for this people shall be scattered, and shall become a dark, a filthy, and a loathsome people, beyond the description of that which ever hath been amongst us, yea, even that which hath been among the Lamanites, and this because of their unbelief and idolatry.”
Jews: Church Prophet Brigham Young said that his word was to be upheld as scripture; therefore we can see the dangers in the words of a man who clearly had a heart filled with hate.
"I would rather undertake to convert five thousand Lamanites [Native Americans], than to convert one of those poor miserable creatures [Jews] whose fathers killed the savior.... Yes, I would rather undertake to CONVERT THE DEVIL HIMSELF, if it were possible. ...I would say, leave them, and come home, the lord does not require you to stay there, for they must suffer and be damned. ...[l]eavethem to live and die in their sins and ignorance. ...[t]hey take pleasure in their wickedness...." (Mormon Journal of Discourses)
I have given you just a few of the many historical doctrines of racial hate that comes from this horribly flawed and false religion that, because of its effective public relations efforts, comes across to the American people as just another “Christian” Church.
In 1978, Mormon prophet Spencer W. Kimball had a prophetic “revelation” that blacks could gain entrance to the priesthood. How convenient that this revelation coincided with the building pressure of the NAACP holding an anti discrimination march on Salt Lake City, followed by the filing of a federal law suit for barring blacks from holding positions of authority within the Mormon scout troops.
I think that Mitt Romney needs to explain why he would be such a prominent and faithful member of this historically racist church. And while I am certainly not a fan of Barack Obama, I think fair play is in order here to be, as the press would say, “Fair and Balanced”.

Brazilian TV Covers Baha'i Persecution in Iran

2011-12-08T06:08:00.001-08:00

http://t.co/eAsGj4i1

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The Categorical Imperative of Sex And Marriage

2011-11-30T21:20:00.001-08:00

The Argument:

I have many times wondered at the impossible reality of what God is when considering the basic sexual design of men and women and the nature, both mechanical and psychological, of intimacy. Is God some kind of transcendental voyeur or dirty film creator? At first glance it would seem so just because of how human sexuality works and the fact that He designed the whole thing!

After a more thorough examination of this argument however two very essential components seem to be of particular relevancy.

The Answer:

1) Harmony of Science and Religion:
Science and Religion cannot disagree unless one of them is in error. For the sake of this article, I go with the general notion that evolution is a well established deeply researched scientific law and also that the basic idea of creation - that at some point in the distant past none of this was here, and then it did come into being and begin evolving - is not at all in conflict with science. Hence the natural world God created so very, very long ago played a fundamental role in shaping how human sexuality works mechanically and psychologically, and therefore it is not the case that the elemental sexual nature of humanity just appeared out of nowhere 6,000 or 10,000 years ago but was rather in development for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years and subject to all the same environmental challenges and necessities that every other aspect of our evolution as a species has undergone.

2) The Ultimate Gift of Sentience and Free Will:
Since we are told that on a spiritual or transcendental level, if you will, that what so ever God states to be right or correct simply is automatically right and correct because the definition of reality comes from God who created and creates everything, not humanity which really cannot create anything, then it is right and correct for intimacy between man and woman to take place and also essential for the survival of humanity because without the function of intimacy there will not be any one around to replace all those who die. As conscious beings we can comprehend this because we are endowed with reason and understanding.
Furthermore, as the pinnacle of creation on earth humanity is given conscious access to all the same tools or forces necessary for creation and evolution to continue. Far from being a lofty status to savor, this a profoundly scary level to be at because it means we are responsible for everything and we can also ruin the entire planet if we are careless. So, within the context of human sexuality we experience the full force of all the same lust and passions of any animal, are fully conscious of it and also are given an exact framework within which, if we focus our lust and passion, we remain on the side of what God says is right and correct - that framework is Marriage and the monogamy it implicitly entails. This is an imperative because the only way under the definitions God has given through His Revelation that the forces of human sexual relations and intimacy - which God created - can exist and not be in eternal direct conflict, both metaphysically and in reality, with His commands to control carnal desires and disallow lust and passion to occur between any unmarried people is if a structure, opted into by free choice, gets placed over human sexuality which lets humans completely access and engage in complete human sexuality, lust and passion, and not at the same time be in violation of God's law.

The human sex drive and human sexual relations and intimacy were created by God but they do not stand outside of God's law nor did God create some glaringly impossible to manage stand-off between constant sin due to lust and desire and the opposite which is a sterile, un-affectionate condition of an eternal chastity which if carried out causes psychological problems and profound unhappiness. The full range of human sexuality, lust and passion are supposed to be engaged by us only done so within a marriage which solves both the problem of an eternal impossible choice between lust and abstinence as well as the problem of God appearing to be cruel by creating forces that haunt and plague humanity for no good reason.

Conclusion:

The harmonizing force between the powerful sexual forces of nature and the conscious awareness of humanity that brings both understanding and responsibility for actions taken to bear on human intimacy is the institution of marriage between man and woman. By way of the Divine Law stating that marriage is the right thing for a man and woman to unite in, all the other sexual forces of the natural world that both men and women bring and which God also created can go directly into the marriage and be Sanctified all at the same time.

A Vision From Baha'u'llah...

2011-11-16T05:30:00.000-08:00

After a very hard, long day in freezing sub-zero weather dealing with horses, shoveling, getting my ballet studio ready for classes and some hard drives, I came home and after a hot shower went straight to bed more tired than I remember being outside of having a bad flu. Without any request from me, and without any of the typical storminess that my bad dreams or upset stomach dreams have, a crystal clear vision came to my mind. This is an attempt to express it:

As I lay in the fog of sleep a scene fades-in as from a movie, it has real color and sound and feels like the presence of reality. Upon entering this scene I am in a class room of sorts only the very essence of the room is eternity, or rather the room exhibits eons of memory, histories of entire other groups of beings and the learning that has progressed throughout the unfathomable expanse of time - this is the room that is the foundation hall of all created beings. It is a perfect, small class room yet limitless in the thought and perceptions it can relate and recall.

Upon the wall of this room, whose bank of windows look out on the powerful fog that is the ongoing creation, there is a marvelous white board, taller than it is wide, gilded all around and especially at the top with a perfect series of glowing pure gold filaments and the board itself is a perfect white as of a pure marble with a subdued yet beautiful interplay of barely blue veins. This board is written upon with jet-black writing, so black it is as if the ink could itself consume space, and what is written on the board is not man's writing but the writing of the universe, the fundamental knowledge, the base code that any sentient created being builds upon and then makes a language peculiar to their self expressing this base code of the universe and more because in learning of this base code, one has to learn of the existence of the Writer. Upon realizing this I am stunned to see sitting upon a wooden stool balancing on only one leg that doesn't seem to quite touch the floor of this room, a small man. At least, I think he is a man; he has very long dark shimmering hair and it is hard to see him for the hair of his head and his beard.

He does not speak to me so much as he does of the board and the beautiful, amazing and infinite possibilities it holds; he then makes me aware that he knows I am there and tells me that this is how the Revelation works, this is how the whole system works for everyone. Amazed and dumbfounded at this, I am left to just behold the unmitigated splendor of it, knowing that it is not for any man or being to attempt to recreate this reality, only to know that it is there and that journeying into this room and knowing that you are there at the foundation of eternity, existence, future and past, the creation point of evolution and the explanation for evolution because time has to connect points together homogeneously instead of separating them uniquely, this is the whole point to it all. Weapons cannot work here, not even the thought of force can come into play; thinking itself can only be done in the manner that the room will allow, gaining advantage is not possible but gaining knowledge is energetically assisted. As I began to fade away and leave this stupendous scene, he told me the following: "...Any room can be as this room if the beings in it remember these lessons and seek them out for everyone. We are not removed from this room because the room wants it, we are removed from this room because we make ourselves unready for it. Only that which is of this room lasts; any thing else only exists at the impulse, the fancy of the created beings who cannot remember anything that they then create but for a time; the room remembers everything good forever and never tires of teaching."

Unlike normal dreams which are forgotten almost immediately, I have been thinking about this scene for days now and feel blessed to have had so wonderful a vision. May it be of some assistance to you as well.

Why Armageddon Is Completely Wrong

2011-11-15T06:00:00.000-08:00

All the theories, prophecies, religious interpretations, and even pop culture understanding of the notion of "Armageddon" whether it is the Book of Revelation, the Rapture, the Mayan Calendar date of 21 December 2012, the Islamic prophecies, any and all prophecies which have been taken to mean that we are upon a massive, convulsive ruin all have a critical flaw in their interpretation. To be clear, this is in no way an attempt to denigrate the religion behind any of these, this is a critique of the interpretations of these prophecies.

Here is the flaw, and it is a big one: if the world is truly in for a cataclysmic event, such as some Astro-physical onslaught, super-volcanic eruption, all out nuclear war, earth-crust displacement, etc., then there is absolutely no point to ever having had prophetic forewarning because such all-out annihilatory events would in fact truly ruin civilization if not end mankind; any who survived would be in a far more degraded state than Europe in the Dark Ages and so no record, no writing, no basic education, nothing at all would survive and within 30 years the clear knowledge of what had just transpired would also be lost. No one would or could remember who had come before even including the religions and figures like Jesus or Mohamed. We have seen nearly this level of societal crash as the Dark Ages began but what started the Dark Ages was merely severe social instability within the Roman Empire and deep social-political problems that had been brewing for nearly 200 years prior - what these so-called prophetic events would entail today would be many orders of magnitude beyond that. So all the effort to build up great religious followings, all the effort to establish ministries and schools of thought and civilizations, all the effort to advance our moral understanding, would be left pointless and forgotten because there'd be too few people, if any, left able to carry them on while trying to eek out a pitiful survival on an ash-heap earth. That is why the common interpretation of Armageddon must be completely wrong. If you just think it through with basic logic, nothing about it seems coherent. Why would God have bothered to forewarn us if He just meant to squash us all anyway?

Now some would say that this is where some mystical Faith-based transcendental event would step in and magically alleviate this predicament, somehow beaming-up the chosen few into a kind of Nirvana for being faithful but this also flies in the face of all monotheistic religions who flat out say the concept of "magic", as such, is a left over from a more primitive state of man long ago. God does not use magic; neat as the books and movies are, God is not Dumbledore or Harry Potter or even Gandalf or Manwe. And we do see repeatedly in the geologic record through deep time when truly cataclysmic events have happened - from the gamma ray burst of ~600,000,000 years ago and the resulting snowball earth, to the Siberian Traps 250,000,000 years ago to the Indian traps eruptions plus the asteroid strike in the Yucatan 65,000,000 years ago right up to the Tambora super volcano 70,000 years ago (which reduced global homo sapien populations to less than 50,000) - with cataclysms come mass extinctions. A mass extinction makes any attempt to foretell the event completely useless because by definition there is no escaping and no surviving such an event.

So either these "prophecies" are the cruelest, meanest and most pointless thing ever perpetrated on a delicate humanity (because of the very inescapable nature and irresistible power cataclysms have making them the ultimate Sword of Damocles) OR they are not meant to foretell a literal massive cataclysm but are instead poetic allusions to deeper meanings and deeper understandings of what may be going on in our spiritual realm, the realm of Faith and the realm of personal works. This author, for one, does believe in God and does believe that He has left us Guidance, but this author also believes that all the so-called expert interpretations and dogma surrounding the so-called end of the world prophecies are completely misinterpreted because of the fundamental, un-workable flaw in the basic logic of the argument these interpretations make. The only way the literal interpretations of Armageddon or "End of the World" could be right is if a giant Deus-ex-Machina or Magical Miracle of some sort is worked by God to save enough of humanity that it is possible to carry on with civilization without an epic, age-long Dark Age ensuing or humanity becoming plain old extinct like 95% of all life that has ever existed here, but this also would then make God a liar because He has said repeatedly that He does not use such outlandish, flashy devices.

How To Incite Hate Of The "Other"

2011-10-21T20:23:00.000-07:00

Report exposes Iran's media campaign to demonize Baha'is

21 October 2011

NEW YORK — In a wide-ranging media campaign that has gone largely unnoticed outside of Iran, hatred and discrimination are being systematically stirred up against the country's 300,000-member Baha'i minority.

In a report released today, the Baha'i International Community documents and analyzes more than 400 press and media items over a 16-month period, that typify an insidious state-sponsored effort to demonize and vilify Baha'is, using false accusations, inflammatory terminology, and repugnant imagery.

Read the full report here (PDF)

"This anti-Baha'i propaganda is shocking in its volume and vehemence, its scope and sophistication," said Bani Dugal, Principal Representative of the Baha'i International Community to the United Nations.

"It's all cynically calculated to stir up antagonism against a peaceful religious community whose members are striving to contribute to the well-being of their society," she said.

Titled Inciting Hatred: Iran's media campaign to demonize Baha'is, the report's main conclusions are:

• anti-Baha'i propaganda originates with – and is sanctioned by – the country's highest levels of leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who gave a highly discriminatory speech in the holy city of Qom a year ago;

• the campaign spurns international human rights law and norms, including a precedent-setting resolution passed earlier this year at the United Nations Human Rights Council that specifically condemns and combats the negative stereotyping and incitement to hatred of religious minorities;

• Baha'is are branded as "outsiders" in their own land and as enemies of Islam in a manner that is clearly calculated to provoke the religious sensibilities of Iranian Shiite Muslims;

• the campaign aims to deflect attention away from calls for democracy in Iran by using Baha'is as an all-purpose "scapegoat" – and, in so doing, to smear those who oppose the government as well as human rights campaigners as Baha'is, "as if that were the most heinous crime."

• the authorities disseminate ludicrous conspiracy theories including that foreign broadcasters, in particular the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Voice of America (VOA), are controlled by or under the influence of Baha'is because they report stories about human rights violations in Iran;

"The diverse content of these attacks demonstrates tremendous effort and commitment of resources by the Islamic Republic," says the report.

"Many attacks are built on gross distortions of Baha'i history; some attempt a strategy of guilt by association through lumping Baha'is together with completely unrelated groups – such as 'Satanists' or the Shah's secret police; still others deploy a tactic of connecting Baha'is with 'opponents' of the regime, which allows the Government to discredit both the Baha'is and its opponents in a single transaction. The campaign makes extensive use of the World Wide Web, and often uses graphic images that portray Baha'is as fiendish ghouls or agents of Israel."

Bani Dugal said the demonization of Iran's Baha'i community is a matter that deserves the attention of governments, international legal institutions, and fair-minded people everywhere.

"The campaign not only clearly violates international human rights law," she said, "it also utterly contradicts Iran's long-standing claim at the UN and elsewhere that it is working to support measures to outlaw or condemn hate speech directed against religions or religious followers."

"The parallels between the campaign of anti-Baha'i propaganda in Iran today and other state-sponsored, anti-religious campaigns of the past are undeniable. History shows us that such campaigns are among the foremost predictors of actual violence against religious minorities – or, in the worst case, precursors of genocide.

"It is time for Iran to be told that such egregious violations of international law and norms cannot be tolerated," said Ms. Dugal.

Special Section – Inciting Hatred: Iran's media campaign to demonize Bahá'ís

A Special Section of the Baha'i International Community United Nations Office website presents the full report, Inciting Hatred: Iran's media campaign to demonize Bahá'ís in English and Persian, as well as an online only 197-page appendix that summarizes each of the 400-plus documents or articles that were collected during the period of this survey, from 17 December 2009 to 16 May 2011.

http://bic.org/resources/documents/inciting-hatred-book

Baha'i World News Service: Philosophers and Theologians Condemn Iran on Education Denial

2011-10-13T08:12:00.000-07:00

October 13, 2011

Philosophers and theologians worldwide condemn Iran's attack on Baha'i educators

10 October 2011

NEW YORK — More than 40 distinguished philosophers and theologians from 16 countries have joined the condemnation of Iran's policy to bar young Baha'is and others from higher education.
In an unprecedented global initiative, the 43 prominent academics – of Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim backgrounds – have signed an open letter, published today in The Daily Telegraph (UK), and reported in the Folha de Sao Paulo (Brazil).
The letter condemns in particular recent attacks by the Iranian authorities on an informal educational initiative of the Baha'i community – known as the Baha'i Institute for Higher Education (BIHE) – in which Baha'i professors, debarred by the Iranian government from practicing their professions, voluntarily offer their services to teach young community members who are banned from higher education.
Seven Baha'is associated with BIHE recently made their first court appearances after being imprisoned for four months. They were detained after a series of raids on 22 May, in which 39 homes associated with BIHE were targeted. The Institute's activities have since been declared "illegal."
"As philosophers, theologians, and scholars of religion, living throughout the world, we are raising our voices in protest against the recent attack by Iranian authorities on the Baha'i Institute for Higher Education," the open letter states.
"To acquire knowledge and learning is the sacred and legal right of all; indeed, the state is obliged to provide it. In Iran, the government has done the opposite..."
"Attacks such as these, against the rights of citizens to organize and be educated in freedom, can no longer be tolerated. We call upon the Iranian government not only to cease its persecution of Baha'is, but to provide, and promote, education for all."
Among the most celebrated academics backing the call is Dr. Charles Taylor, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, Canada. He signed the letter, he said, out of his deep sense of "conviction that there ought to be 'no compulsion' in religion."
It is also "connected to my disquiet about the Iranian revolution," said Professor Taylor, "and the way its finer ideals have been hijacked by people who are abusing their faith in order to make it serve as a tool of mobilization against the 'enemy.'"
Another prominent figure to add his name to the list is Hilary Putnam, Cogan University Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Harvard, U.S.A.
"Ever since the American and French revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century, the aspiration of peoples of different ethnicities, nationalities, and creeds for their fundamental human rights, including the right to worship as one's conscience dictates and the right to education, have gained momentum," said Professor Putnam.
"The persecution of the Baha'i university students in Iran is a shameful attempt to turn the clock back to the dark ages. Their cause deserves the support of enlightened and moral people everywhere," he said.

http://news.bahai.org/story/857

Dr Robert Jeffress Just Broke My Vote For Rick Perry

2011-10-08T18:30:00.000-07:00

October 10, 2011

Dr Robert Jeffress has stated now in very plain language that Mit Romney is no good as a President for the GOP because he is not "Christian". This has in turn ruined my support for Gov. Perry since I am not what this pastor would call a "Christian" either. This represents a very ignorant state of affairs within the GOP if it is left unchecked and now, since Gov Perry is taking Karl Rove's advice and either deliberately had Dr Jeffress make these attacks or is very comfortable in turning loose such narrow-minded hate speak and not doing much to silence it so as to go on the attack against Mit Romney with plausible deniability. But just being told by a potential President's close Faith-based allies that I would also not be welcome in the government since I am not a Christian leaves me no choice but to say flat out:

BECAUSE OF DR JEFFRESS I WILL NEVER NOW VOTE FOR RICK PERRY.

Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin both winced at the idea of Church involvement in government and even at Church's becoming anchored deeply in the United States. It is precisely this kind of humiliating human rights onslaught by someone in a very powerful level of society seeking additional power that these two founders of the United States were so adamant about the notion of separation of Church and State.

I did not vote for Barak Obama because of two things:
1) his announced policy objectives seriously worried me and
2) the extreme, disagreeable views of his immediate religious colleagues and pastors left me seriously doubting his ability to be truly balanced and neutral.

Rick Perry has just now provided #2 of the list above and I must now conclude that many in the GOP are not so much conservative as in analytic, Founder-based civil society minded people as they are narrow minded religious intolerants who only want to be around people who think like they do. Europeans loved that 500 years ago and it went over so well millions of people left and went to found this nation. I have no desire to deal with people who expect me to justify my beliefs when theirs are just replete with contradictory, illogical and completely unsupported opinions about things and are therefore just as dangerous as anything Karl Marx said.

I am a Baha'i and that means I do not get into partisan politics and cannot join a political party - nor do I want to. But ideas and philosophy matter a great deal and those who are Jeffersonian or Franklin-esque in their approach to government's role in society and the amount of power it should have always get my support, unless something worse than being a socialist comes to the front: being a Christian Taliban which is exactly what "Dr" Jeffress has now made clear he is and by extension, Rick Perry is as well or at the very least a closet Christian bin Laden. No thank you.

The Hindu and the Cowboy, Kansas City Festival of Faiths

2011-10-08T09:03:00.000-07:00

October 8, 2011

Kansas City

From Barb McAtee, Kansas City Interfaith Council

Friends,I urge you to see this play if you haven’t had a chance to do so. It is playing Sunday afternoon andMonday evening at the Plaza Library. It features true stories of immigrants and refugees who settle in KansasCity and interact with their neighbors. One of the vignettes is based onthe story of a young Persian adolescent we all know who had to flee Iran in themiddle of the night, in great peril! It is a very moving story, in a deeply touching play. Arrive early for a good seat, and besure to take friends and family!

By the way, ifenough interest is shown, this play could be produced at the Baha’i FaithCenter!

The Kansas City Festival of Faiths in collaborationwith The Kansas CityPublic Library presents:

MetropolitanEnsemble Theatre’s production of

MEET NEIGHBORS YOU NEVER KNEW BEFORE:

- A young Muslim andhis surprise encounter with New York City fire fighters...
- An AfricanAmerican pastor and the enslaved grandmother he’ll never forget...
- A Polish Jew andher story of sacrifice and survival...
- The Hindu and thecowboy who come face to face over the fate of land.

TWO PERFORMANCES ONLY FREE ADMISSION

Sunday, October 9, 2PM
...and
Monday, October 10,7 PM

Plaza Library,Truman Forum
4801 Main St., KCMO64112
Thisyear’s performances are dedicated to ShaheenAhmed and her family, local leaders and interfaith advocates. Her story is oneof several included in The Hindu and the Cowboy.

BIHE and the Iranian Dark Age

2011-10-05T21:09:00.000-07:00

October 5, 2011
Kansas City, Missouri

As a member of the Baha'i Faith I am alarmed to hear of the increasingly deviant efforts by the Iranian government to not only hamper or collapse all other religions in Iran besides Shia Islam - which naturally entails brutal measures against Baha'is - but to also interfere with the very acquisition of knowledge by young people. Not only does Iran seek to eliminate religious diversity but now Iran seeks to punish youth for what their religious leanings are by denying them the academic education needed to compete in this world and support themselves. Not since the great gypsy and Jewish persecutions of Europe 1,000 years ago or the Gestappo mandated cleansing of German society in the 1930's has any nation sought to seize direct control over the very process of learning and withhold education from any person or group the state deems unfit to be educated.

This open letter from Archibishop Desmond Tutu and Jose Ramos-Horta of East Timor (both Nobel Peace Prize winners) will illustrate just how concerned educators and academics around the world are taking these naked violations of human rights.

Big Banks Directly Responsible for High Unemployment

2011-09-27T20:44:00.000-07:00

September 27, 2011

In this interminable saga of the Great Recession - probably more accurately described as the 21st Century Depression - it has become painfully clear that the unemployment situation is going to persist for a long time to come. It is also now the case that a rather sinister and complicit direct link exists between the giant banks that received enormous amounts of tax payer money and continue to benefit from an extreme amount of liquidity from the Federal Reserve - most of which comes from future tax payer money - and this plague of high unemployment.

Consider the case of Al, a small business owner who faced a dark situation in 2008 and who continues to struggle mostly at the hands of a couple of big banks and the ongoing "unintended consequences" scenario resulting from the extreme preference big banks have gotten aside from everyone else. Al wants to remain anonymous due to his fear of possible reprisals from the very banks he has and continues to struggle with, and so this blog will not in any way or manner reveal his true identity or location.

In 2008 as the downturn really took hold, Al was actually doing just fine. He had savings in reserve for that rainy day, a business that was coming along nicely and was not behind on any payments or credit cards or the like. As the recession really began to clamp down in late 2008 Al was stunned by the summary cancelation of his credit cards, none of which were behind, and the spectacular fall of the stock market which took away most of his rainy day funds. He knew hard times would result from the cancelation of his credit cards as this was surely going to be the case with many other people's credit -and it was. However, at this point there was no sign of the machiavellian moves the banks were taking that would in turn present severe challenges on the path of recovery out of this recession. Al, like most everyone, understood that risk is a part of life and while it was truly sad to see the good times end, no hint of unfair or crooked maneuvers by banks had yet emerged - the recession was at this point just a part of life everyone has to deal with.

Al was shocked when he realized later in 2009 that the enormous bailout funds given banks and the trillions of dollars of liquidity pumped in by the Fed - most of which stayed inside the banking system - would not be coming his or anyone's way. Now faced with the grim prospect of massive unemployment hampering economic activity, no available credit of his own with which to make any moves during the recession to boost his business, and a housing and commercial real estate market so broken that it was now impossible to sell any physical asset he or his business owned and make enough to pay off the loans already against them, there were simply no moves left to make other than firing some of his own people or going bankrupt and thereby probably firing everyone including himself.

The very banks that had been behind the super-risky derivative, CDO and CDS trading schemes, which had then nearly broken the financial system of the country requiring huge amounts of public funds to shore up and then, or so they claimed, to prevent mass unemployment and mass foreclosures and bankruptcies, were going to instead sit on all the piles of liquidity they now had and at the same time stop issuing credit to people, especially small business owners, and also demand that they repay their credit accounts even though the banks had already been funded specifically to enable the relief of bad or dead accounts due to the recession that these very banks had caused!

Perhaps Al's frustration is best demonstrated in the following quote from my interviewing him one Sunday afternoon at our local Starbucks:

"I have now had to fire 1/2 of my people and re-configure how my business works so I can meet the repayment requirements on my canceled credit accounts. It's that or go broke, something has to give. This really aggravates me because the very banks making me do this had a direct hand in the economic fall that wiped out my savings, took away the equity in mine and my business' property, ruined the real estate market in general because of the denial of loans and credit by them, and are now directly responsible for choking off everyone's credit by way of extreme risk aversion despite the fact they were insulated from any real danger by the Fed - unlike any of us! It's like they now own both sides of the equation and are both judge and jury and can even set the trials up. I don't understand why so few realize that the banks' own traders and their own brokerage organizations are actually what caused this super recession. I know two other people who had their lines of credit summarily canceled which ruined their businesses and caused them to instantly fire everyone they had working for them and from then (2009) until now they are still not able to get any new loans or any credit to try and get a business going again because the banks closed their credit off, not because they were behind or defaulting. It's is a complete sucker punch with no referee around to make anyone obey any fairness or fair play rules on a basic level. How is anyone supposed to deal with a situation they did not create, that impacts all areas of the economy and finance at once, is being engineered, it would seem, behind the scenes by those who were directly involved and who now are allowed to control everyone's purse strings and decide who can continue and who has be cut based on their hunch of risk factor, even though these exact same people got that totally wrong in 08? If I didn't know better I'd say the banks are trying to make sure they really will own everything very soon one way or another. Why weren't the people who run these banks the one's who lost their credit rating, their life savings, and their future ability to make money?"

It would seem, according to Al, that the big banks have pulled off the biggest heist ever: getting hold of everyone's property either by literally claiming the title to it in foreclosure or by deliberately engineering the economy to a point where no one is allowed any credit to buy any property unless the bank really, really likes you. And all the while being shielded from any large loss of their own capital by public funds mostly from the very people the banks are now preventing from getting credit.

Add together the millions of examples very much like Al's and the reason for 10% unemployment and something like 19% underemployment continuing for years to come is made clear. The banks have now become feudal class overlords in a economy and country created specifically to get away from financial or economic tyranny. We do not yet seem to have made that great escape.

The Quest of Ballet - simplified

2011-09-03T10:23:00.000-07:00

The quest for that wonderful ballet technique has to be shaped by 3 things:
1) Regular, well-instructed & correct ballet class
2) Performance experiences to teach how to present works before an audience where sweat, nerves & fatigue will confront you
3) when sufficiently advanced, deliberately confronting those steps that scare or challenge you and mastering them too.
4) Oversight by those who are not afraid to tell you to wait before trying something if you are not yet prepared to do it, which avoids injury and bad technique

The Hidden Hatred Inside Islam

2011-09-02T11:01:00.000-07:00

September 2nd, 2011 - Article will be updated and referenced in an ongoing fashion

The Hidden Hatred Inside Islam

Repeating, documented instances throughout the globe illustrate a dangerous, hate-based ideology of Islam towards other religions, especially the Baha'i Faith. Either by means of passive denial of legal status or access to employment, or through overt means including naked physical violence and torture sanctioned by the government, the Baha'i Faith in particular is put under acute pressure to at the least be so interfered with as to stop operating, and ultimately to be eradicated from various Islamic countries, regardless of the human rights abuses this automatically entails.

Despite these repeated and documented human rights abuses by various Islamic governments throughout the world, the plurality of American Muslims seem to know nothing about it in an eerie echo of the hidden secret of the holocaust executed by Nazi Germany in the 1930's and early 1940's. However, such a Citizen Cain level of ignorance cannot excuse the underlying reality of one of the largest religions in the world taking multiple, pervasive, recurring and extreme actions in order to deliberately crush another world religion. Particularly in so far as there has never been in over 150 years any similar treatment from Baha'is towards Muslims.

The Rapture Already Happened (We Are All Left Behind)

2011-08-11T08:00:00.001-07:00

May 26, 2011

In lieu of all those people out there who anticipated May 21 being the end of the World based on Family Radio http://www.familyradio.com (followers of Lloyd Lindquist and Harold Camping) - and that now we are in a 6 month grace period - here's some food for thought. The "Rapture" ALREADY happened. Check this out:

In the 1850's in Persia (Iran) 50,000+ people willingly allowed themselves to be skinned alive, have burning candles shoved into their bodies in holes carved with knives, have their feet peeled and then horse shoes nailed into them, have iron rods hammered through their ribs then made to stand up and run, all for the sake of the dawn of the Baha'i Faith. To this day, 1,000,000 Baha'is have allowed their lives to be terminated, their properties taken, their children thrown in prison, their spouses tortured and beaten, with ZERO violence in return all because they believe in the Baha'i Faith and will not recant because the Baha'i Faith proclaims this as the dawn of the most glorious age Man has ever seen and that Baha'u'llah is the Promised One, the Prince of Peace, for all ages.

That is the "Rapture" - to the furthest extent until the end of the World when the Sun dies in 5,000,000,000 years, that will remain as the time when the only possible "Rapture" occurred. You may not have heard about it, but that doesn't mean it did not happen.

To be clear, the word "Rapture" never appears in the bible, nor is there anywhere that Jesus, Daniel, Isiah, or any actual Prophet talk about any such event. And the word "Apocalypse" means lifting of the veil, not a cataclysmic ends of continents. All you Family Radio people out there, check your premises. You can still get on the arc headed for eternal glory but you have to choose the correct gang plank.

The passage in Thessolonians often referred to as the justification for the Rapture also never mentions the word rapture and is in fact Paul talking to the Thessolonians; Paul was an Apostle but Paul never met Jesus nor was Paul a Divinely inspired Prophet, so how anything Paul said could be taken as a means to understand the end times thousands of years later is really not understandable. Such a stretch of a conclusion would be called false, invalid or just completely wrong in any scientific or academic field and there are no instructions, hints, or inuendo in the bible anywhere saying to use Paul as a means to understand the prophecies of the end times which actual Divinely-inspired Prophets wrote about. Which again leads back to the unavoidable conclusion that the concept of the Rapture is a pure artificiality with no Divine authority of any sort behind it.

Now I am going to go enjoy Memorial Day and be glad I have not been hood-winked into believing such a confused silly business as the Rapture.

Why Summer Glau and Joss Whedon Should Make 'Servant Girl'

2011-08-11T08:00:00.000-07:00

August 9, 2011

There is a very good reason why Summer Glau and Joss Whedon need to make the ballet movie 'Servant Girl', and that reason is: The Wizard of Oz.

Joss Whedon has proven himself over and over again as being capable of creating very enthralling science fiction and pushing the barriers of his audience with the super surreal like Dollhouse, Serenity, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Summer Glau is obviously one dedicated artist and possessed of the steel to see projects through. Her work as River Tam in Serenity/Firefly, Cameron on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and her roles on Dollhouse and The Cape show that she has the "magic", quite possibly equal to Judy Garland - regardless of executives canceling shows which, obviously, no actor can have any control over. Many great artists are like hard-to-set jewels that look amazing once set properly, the jewel cannot set itself, that is the job of the jewel smith. Actors portray characters, it is up to directors and executives to write the parts and make the production viable.

I am a total fan of live Ballet and I think it is one of the most powerful modes of expression on earth but let's face it, ballet movies have been, well, not so good. Baryshnikov's glory days on The Turning Point have inspired hoards of young dancers to take up the craft for decades but that movie is well into the thirty-somethings of age; ballet movies since then have been extremely good examples of forgettable movies. If ever a movie angle was ripe for a huge come-back and stood a chance of making a profound impact, the ballet movie is it. The recent affront to ballet - Black Swan - has very nearly killed off the viability of ever taking another dance movie seriously. Eight months of swimming to become a prima ballerina? Sure.

If any team could couple the 500 year depth, possibility and imagination-matrix of Ballet into a story line that could stand on it's own with production that leaves everyone staring at the screen wondering what's coming next, all with a surreality fit for the 21st century, it would be Joss Whedon and Summer Glau.

Here's hoping this project gets the go-ahead. History is also full of examples of movies where without mega budgets, huge enduring success was achieved. Jaws in 1975 and Star Wars in 1977 come to mind and the first in the Twilight series of movies are good examples where a distinct idea, brought through to the silver screen faithfully did make for highly worthwhile - historic, in fact - movies. The Wizard of Oz was a huge production to be sure, but mostly it had a vivid conceptualization that worked on screen - budget size does not guarantee this at all, just look at Indiana Jones IV or any of the recent Star Wars movies (Episodes I through III) but the direction does all but guarantee it, and in that regard Joss Whedon could knock this one clean out of the park. Summer Glau would be unstoppable acting/dancing in such a concept, free and clear to integrate her impressive inflection and years of Ballet and martial arts and overall physical skill into the work of Joss Whedon. This project could just be exquisite and to be sure, far better than any other Ballet movie since The Turning Point and with modern F/X, something as memorable as the Wizard.

Nightmares from Horses

2011-08-06T10:07:00.001-07:00

On a particularly warm evening after a 104 degree day in Kansas City I had gone out to where we keep our horses to turn them out. During extremely hot weather many horse owners do what is called "night turn out" letting the horses out into the pasture at night but bringing them back inside in time for the punishing heat of the day. On this night I had just been at our ballet studio for classes all evening and so was a bit fatigued as I arrived at the horse barn. We have a Tennessee Walker gelding, a Quarter Horse gelding, and a Arabian mare. The Arabian mare is especially good at getting into and causing mischief and tonight would be no different.

I had opened her stall and just turned away for literally a few seconds but that was all she needed. Springing into life from a stupor caused by the heat she breezed right past me and by the time I turned around presented her backside to me as she proudly trotted out of the barn. Not panicking at first as many horse owners train or encourage their horses to walk themselves from the barn to the nearest pasture, I thought I would be able to let her into the pasture she was heading right towards. Oh no, this was not to be. As soon as I walked out of the barn towards her she abruptly turned away from the gate she had parked herself in front of and ran off, head up high and snorting, into the back field area of the farm. Now it was totally dark outside, and she is a dark brown horse, so finding her in the dark was going to be a major problem. Not thinking any such disaster would be happening, I had no flashlight on me either.

After walking into the back field and seeing what I thought was her darker form in the dark of the night standing about 300 feet in front of me, I started to call and snap and clap for her. As I approached she galloped right past me and went right back to that same gate now about 600 feet behind me. So, I walk back eager to not get too excited and cause her to go the other way which after about 1/4 of a mile leads right out to a 55 mph highway. Again due to the lack of any forethought that something like this would transpire, the main property gate was also left open onto the highway.

As she came back into view in the low light glow coming out of the barn I could see her now standing proudly at the gate nuzzling up to our Tennessee Walker, so I thought perhaps the drama was over. I get within 20 feet of her and shazam, she takes off only this time towards the exit to A highway. At this point I yell for her to stop and she sort of does, looking at me with a brief look of concern, but then the glint her her eye comes back, the mischief starts again, and she bolts off down the 1/4 mile long drive into the night again. Now I am very concerned so i jog after her trying to catch a view of her in the glow from the distant streetlight down by the highway. Nothing visible, which tells me she hasn't gone that far yet. But, not having any horseshoes on at present, she is also almost silent in movement despite weighing about 1,000 pounds. As I jog down the drive, I catch a glimpse of her on my right beside the pasture fence, and as I turn she bolts off back towards the barn, then circles around and runs past me continuing on to the highway. At this point I am very distraught as it becomes clear she will go right out the gate unless I can get to it first. I start running as fast as I can up the drive and I do get past her, but then the other mischief loving equine residents of the pasture decide they want to run (inside the pasture fence) towards the highway and nicker at my stupid horse. Voila, she is right past me again and heading towards the gate. I see her hesitate a bit at the gate as it looks different than the gate she normally goes through back at the pasture by the barn, then she trots right on through it. As I run after her she steps onto the asphalt of the highway, turns south, and takes off into the utter darkness of an unlit Missouri highway. I am now mortified. I have no idea how far she will run, and now I am faced with the prospect of a fatal collision between her and a car doing 55 mph, or with her running off past the fence, turning off, and disappearing into other people's farm fields and being impossible to locate until dawn.

As I run down A Highway yelling for her, several cars come by. Using my iPhone as a flashlight, I flag them down - two of them do slow down, come by carefully, ask me what's up, and proceed slowly but one idiot just blew past me either not seeing me or too concerned with going somewhere at 11 pm at night to care why a person is on the highway waving a glowing cellphone and obviously in a bit of a desperate state. As I approach the south end of the horse farm property, I catch a peripheral glimpse of her on the high part of the highway burm right by the pasture fence and right by - guess who - the other horses all to eager to bolt the other direction and go back north towards the property gate. So now I turn around and run back after her (running after her is a relative term, she is far, far faster than any human and at my fastest run she is easily pulling well away from me and gets to the gate again visible in the glow from the streetlight located there before I am even 1/4 of the way back towards the gate. Just then a pickup comes up from the south and approaches my location. I am very, very worried now as a 8,000 truck could easily kill a 1,000 horse and perhaps even drive on leaving the fatally wounded animal all over the highway. But, this driver slows down probably due to my iPhone flashlight waving madly in the air, and asks me what the matter is. I say my horse has gotten lose, has run back up by the gate, and could he drive up there and try to block her back into the property gate? Son of a gun, he does this!

As I get back up there, having run 1,000 feet faster than I ever could have even as a kid, I see the Arabian mare heading back through the property gate. The man in the truck gets out, walks up to and then closes the gate. Hallelujah!!! As I get to the pick up my voice is now totally horse and I am sweating like mad. He introduces himself as someone who lives nearby, has his own horses, and used to hay the fields on the horse farm when he was a kid himself. Not believing my good luck, I shake his hand, introduce myself, and then run back into the property after the horse that I am now seriously considering shooting myself anyway.

One more time of going into the back field, then lingering by the pasture gate, then bolting off towards the road ensues but this time, she cannot get out. Sensing inevitable defeat - or perhaps detecting chemical changes in me from concern and dread to angst and total frustration (horses are very sensitive to emotional states despite being very insensitive) she surrenders and lets me put a halter on her head and walk her back to the pasture. I do so and do not say a word to her - when I put her in the pasture, she just stands there and watches me walk away. I get back into my truck, start it up, then proceed to just sit there and have a moment to myself.

The ultimate nightmare is now discovered: the prospect of having to tell your wife that you let her horse get out from the barn, which then proceeded to go out on the highway through another gate you didn't close and got destroyed by an oncoming vehicle at 55 miles per hour. No matter how bad or rough this recession is, this experience has proved to me that it can always be much, much worse and I am thanking God, my ancestors and the universe for sparing me of actually falling into this almost nightmare. Why do humans insist on owning horses? There is no good answer!

The Psychic Mind Is Real

2011-06-28T22:01:00.000-07:00

June 28, 2011

Just a quick thought note here, it seems to me that the psychic powers of the mind are in fact real. Repeatedly over the past years I have begun to notice how a disturbed state of mind, a sense of agitation or even anxiety, comes upon me right at the same time - always a little before hand in fact - that some bit of truly bad news or major difficulties appear. Most always these sensations correspond to a close friend receiving devastating news of something like cancer or a loved one passing away; further observations detailing this phenomena are of course going to be made and it is obvious that no conceivable scientific experiment could be constructed to test this observation, hence it will not be called a hypothesis, but a close statistical correlation can at least be established if repeated observations continue to follow this pattern.

Specifically just today I had a profound sense of worry and that sensation of having your back against the wall deep in my thoughts when lo and behold, late this after noon a dear friend of both my wife and me called to say she just got diagnosed with kidney/abdominal cancer. She is in her early 40s and the mother of two wonderful young children, truly something heart wrenching to experience.

Why Gay Marriage Is An Incredibly Dangerous Red Herring

2011-06-27T22:43:00.000-07:00

June 28, 2011

Analysis by Matt Reinschmidt

There is a very big problem, indeed a catastrophic problem, with the arguments that are presented in support of Gay Marriage - what the problem is has not gotten any media attention of any kind on any level that I have seen. However, it is by far the sucker punch, the stealth bomber, or more succinctly the Trojan Horse dimension of the argument for Gay Marriage that carries the most earth-disrupting properties.

The proponents of Gay Marriage would properly be called Sophists in the ancient world for their expert, uncanny ability to argue for this extreme left-wing cultural "reform" in such a way that many people are persuaded to believe that the inability to be married violates the civil rights of gay couples when in fact marriage is not really a civil right so much as it is a societal convention built up over thousands of years with a very down to earth, deliberate goal: providing a stable family where both sides of the human species are intimately involved not just with each other but with the creating and then most importantly educating of their children who in turn become the successors of the civilization.

The Trojan Horse in all of this is the unavoidable argument that religious values - i.e. morality - simply MUST bend enough to allow the concept of same sex marriage within the exact same framework as heterosexual marriage; normally this is attached to or derived from the notion that if there is no choice there is no sin and one does not choose one's sexual orientation. On a religious or theological basis, this argument seems reasonable in so far as the desire to not condemn an appreciable chunk of society at large is a good, healthy sensibility as is the restraint used to not castigate or banish those who would have been, only 100 years ago, considered abominations and left out in the cold altogether.

But here's the brambles of this hedge: for one, the act of not-persecuting any group of people is in no way redressed or reinforced by the corruption of a standard for a societal convention that serves a very matter of fact, very practical, very natural need of all humanity - the need to reproduce and have a family life in some sort of orderly, reliable way. All people do indeed have the right to free speech, free assembly, pursuit of their own happiness - but saying someone has a 'right' to marriage is very much a conditional statement because for one thing, a good number of heterosexual people never find a partner irregardless of their 'right' to do so; but practically everyone has a religion, votes (at least some of the time), moves around and speaks their mind as these are all individual choices with individual actions but marriage is a much more clumsy thing in no way guaranteed for anyone by calling it a 'right'. Frankly the huge percentage of the population that own and drive cars would probably be totally shocked to find out - whether gay, straight, or anything else - that in fact one has NO right at all to own a car much less drive one and yet a similar logic of civil rights infringement comes into play concerning illegal aliens driving cars within the USA's borders. Since no one has a right to a car or the license to drive one, no one's rights are violated if this is denied for whatever reason.

The catastrophe of the Gay Marriage argument though only comes into focus with the right frame of reference - and this is the part where I explain what no one anywhere in the media has even touched on - the theological or religious or even 'moral' contradiction hidden in the argument. Here follows my explanation of this:

The history of all religion going back into ancient pagan times is defined by one central, repeating theme - the need to make very hard choices and distinctions due to what life throws at you. In all religions this is contained in a story reference involving life and death, quite literally. Regardless of the consequence or cost, the Prophet or person in the stories MUST stick to their choices when informed by a religious or theological component, otherwise the religion becomes meaningless and the notion of faith is reduced to something you chat about around a coffee table or tea pot. The imperative to make decisions and choices informed by the study of religion and then following that through to whatever end is the hallmark of faith and is why so many persons in the Bible, Koran, Baha'i Writings, so on and so forth follow their choices even unto severe discomfort and death.

The apologists for Gay Marriage would have us believe that re-writing or re-interpreting what the Prophets have said over millenia is a matter of modern, informed civil rights for the denied. But this very argument leaves everyone of faith completely betrayed and hoodwinked. The modern situation with homosexual lifestyles and gay marriage presents everyone of faith no matter which Faith or what sexual orientation with the crucible just like all those people had to face in centuries gone by: the need and imperative to make truly hard, perhaps very uncomfortable decisions that may very well effect someone you know based on Faith or in choosing to flex, to bend, to corrupt based on what the apologists have said is a cruel, ungodly demand from religions out of date with today's world.

The reality is this: by choosing to not corrupt the standards for marriage based on a 'we know what's best here and now' argument we pass the test sent by God trying to find out whether we'll bend or even break what Faith says in service to our own notions about what is right and wrong? If we go along with the red herring of gay marriage then we both abandon our judgement to extreme political partisans PLUS we render irrelevant what Religion says is right for society and have then hidden from the tabernacle rather than showing up for the appointment with God ready to do whatever impossible thing He indicates. If we are not even willing to go to that point regarding gay marriage then we have said that we do not think the Prophets really knew anything, we know best in the 21st century, and that doing anything to avoid making a hard, uncomfortable decision concerning any group of people is the ultimate right thing to do.

An Indictment of the Catholic Church

2011-06-21T09:50:00.001-07:00

June 21, 2011

I write this out of a profound sense of betrayal, loss, and shame felt after the religious organization that I was brought up in and educated by got caught in the act of repeatedly covering up grotesque sexual misconduct by those who are supposed to represent the authority of the Church on earth. This article is in no way a discussion of any theological meaning of religion or God or Divinity except in so far as a breach of trust and criminal behavior effects the meaning of authority and the meaning of trust of the clergy by any and all lay people who are also individual, responsible, intelligent human beings.

There is an argument that while widespread, this problem is in fact small compared to the overall size of the Catholic Church. I suppose on a purely logical basis this may be a supportable statement, but it in no way diminishes the horror of discovering that in parishes too numerous to list here, and in cases numbering in the hundreds over multiple decades, a grand conspiracy to obstruct justice has been happening. This conspiracy to obstruct justice, in terms of the number of participants, the very wide range of territories involved, and the cold calculations made to perpetuate the cover-up, is no less severe than any Mafia or drug gang conspiracy, the only thing lacking is murder but in a very real sense when those who are young and naive are preyed upon by sexual deviants, a murder does take place: the murder of that young persons ability to trust and much worse, the murder of that child's self confidence. Whether bullets or knives are used or cruel intentions and sexual perversion is used, violence is violence and violations are violations.

Here then is the situation as I see it, and what I think must be done to remedy the problem. And also why I think any arguments that attempt to minimize the severity of this situation or compare the Catholic problem with offenses by Moslem or Jewish or public school members is both intellectually fraudulent and belittles both the former standing of the Catholic Church and the severe pain, suffering and anguish felt by the numerous victims of this problem. This matter has bothered my mind for some time, and I must emphasize it gives me no great pleasure to write this article.

Items:

1) The Catholic Church has had increasing trouble over the course of the 20th and into the 21st centuries with sourcing enough priests

2) Priesthood is a major sacrifice and not everyone is suited for it.

3) The completely ethical option is to deal with the fact fewer priests would be available due to maintaining the high standards required to avoid situations like what we have today, and the fall off in the number of men willing to become priests.

4) Regardless of the difficulties in acquiring new priests, lowering standards or allowance of deviant behavior among those charged with overseeing a parish and the educational institutions for children is simply not an option.

5) Upon the committal of any criminal act, that clergy member must be turned over to the authorities

6) Collusion among the hierarchy to evade justice or hide accused priests so as to prevent their facing the consequences for their actions amounts to a criminal conspiracy

7) The inter-state nature of these offenses all across the United States for the last 50 years makes this a federally prosecutable case under the Rico act. The financial gain in these cases is avoidance of public penalties or trials and associated costs resulting from the prosecution of accused clergy members.

8) The conspiracy among Bishops, priests, nuns, and no doubt even Cardinals of the Church to evade justice and obstruct investigations by hiding accused clergy members creates a logic that strongly resembles the child sex trafficking syndicates of SE Asia; indeed the act of evading justice can be seen as providing aid and comfort to repeat sex offenders and enabling the continued sexual assault of unaware children.

9) The only way to maintain the Church's authority is to turn over at once all documents and all persons involved in these numerous scandals and expose them outright. The cost of this versus continued years of large settlements and civil actions can only be similar in nature, yet the message this would send to the world would change from one of a secret society uninterested in societal norms or the rights of parents to protect their children to one where the organization, while indeed made up of mortal, flawed human beings, will not tolerate behaviors of this nature from anyone and will move at once to bring justice to bear.

10) As the representatives of Christ on earth it is hard to see how a corruption of justice and a compromise of trust resulting in numerous psychological injuries and pain among the young victims can in any way be seen as doing Christ's work on earth. For we read in the New Testament that even the act of looking at another's wife constitutes adultery with her; what are we to suppose Jesus would say regarding thousands of perverse acts by hundreds if not thousands of priests in just the USA and the resulting cover up by what is supposed to be His organization?

When I was in middle school I attended St Charles Boromeo school program and was also an altar boy for the St Charles Church. I served under Father Tierney at that time. It has just become known that Father Tierney was transferred to St Charles just after being caught up in accusations of misconduct with children at another church in the Kansas City - St Joseph Missouri Diocese. The Bishop of the Diocese knew this and yet put this pervert in the church where I was at the time and in charge of the middle school I attended at the time. Now, I must say that nothing happened directly to me but I am aghast at the casual nature with which the Kansas City - St Joseph Diocese has acted since the mid-1980s with regard to hiding priests, transferring priests, and obstructing justice. Father Tierney is apparently and finally going to face some kind of justice now or in 2012 as he has been located and formally charged; there are yet other ongoing cases of priest misconduct at churches in Liberty Missouri and once again, the Bishop of the Diocese Robert W Finn has taken to yet more evasive actions and obstructions rather than coming clean and allowing justice to be done on the priests involved PLUS taking remedial actions to avoid these things ever happening again. The only organization on earth that could possibly get away with such lack of redress and contempt for the well being of it's members is the Catholic Church.

The bigger question to ask then is: what sort of Theological authority can any organization have with repeated child sex accusations and allegations over 50 years piled against it? Or put it another way - does the hierarchy of the Catholic Church suppose God is really a pedophile so this is all somehow OK? Actions speak far louder than words, it is time for the Church to come clean and take it's own baptism in pure waters of complete and open justice. Justice is the realm of God; evasion and deception are the realms of Satan.

The Concept of Please

2011-06-03T08:21:00.000-07:00

The concept of please is no less remarkable than the opposable thumb, using tools, walking upright or the taming of fire. This idea carries with it a socially complex contract that stipulates, without anyone having to spell it out in further detail, that a 'no' to the request associated with the presented 'please' carries no follow-on consequences either physically or verbally or emotionally. Such a social tool is extremely important to how humanity creates and maintains a civilization with rule of law - the use of the word 'please' makes both the speaker and the listener operate on a much more civilized level as opposed to the naked ask or the flat demand. Indeed, in nature even the most placid creatures will demand from each other what it is they want and use force to get it; in humans, while this happens all too often, still in a large percentage of instances and through the use of the concept of please, humanity avoids the typical, natural modus apparendi which is: might (or standing) makes right.

Where the real power and value of the concept of please shows up is with all the reality TV programming and all the stories of youth behaving badly and youth violence. Clearly, parents (who are the only ones that can instill something as distinctive and fundamental as the concept of please into their children) of these youth find themselves either too busy to bother with educating their own children or have themselves forgotten about the concept of please and are conducting their own lives from a "me me me" standpoint. In any person to person transaction or interaction, without the concept of please the basic operation is one of "you must do this" or "what's wrong with you that you won't do this" or any other derivative of a rude, simplistic and ultimately crude social contract very prone to argument and dispute and even the use of force.

When we use the concept of please, that interaction becomes one where it is recognized that the two parties are both human beings and that the state of being a human being itself is the highest value - so the matter at hand, whatever it is, automatically gets placed into a more moderated, more detached consideration. This is how human beings maintain a harmony between themselves and their neighbors. The instant youth or adults stop using the concept of please, the situation turns into one where the intrinsic value of being a human being - the most amazing creature ever created that we have ever encountered - is ignored and the much shorter lived, much less valuable and usually materialistic matter at hand, whatever it may be, is shoved forward as the most important thing in the universe. We the living are the most important thing in the universe - and we must use the concept of please to avoid the lure of materialism and ignorant behaviors turning us all into slaves under the yoke of reality TV producers.

A Problem With The National Endowment for the Arts

2011-05-20T09:26:00.000-07:00

May 19, 2011

The National Endowment of the Arts has donated about $2.3 million to Missouri arts groups for 2011; in Kansas City, Missouri the Wylliams-Henry Dance Theater received $10,000 to restore a production of theirs. This brings up my biggest problem with the National Endowment for the Arts: no future focus.

I will admit that I am biased on the face of it because I am directly involved with Ballet North, but I still think this point is very relevant because I am a ballet professional and I think I can be objective here. Groups that really do build the future of the arts like Ballet North seldom if ever receive funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, whereas numerous dance groups which make works of a trivial or at best semi-memorable nature receive funding from the National Endowment for their efforts constantly. Many of these dance groups proclaim to be servicing the arts education needs of thousands of children, yet none hold regular classes, and most especially none ever create students who turn into professional dancers. More to the point, it does not seem that the NEA, at least in terms of Missouri, funds anything that really makes for the future of the arts, everything goes to programs sponsored by "credible" sources and that really seems to be the only qualifier - if your organization is located in an area where no such sources exist or are active, you can expect to never receive funding.

Ballet North has tried for 7 straight years to get funding from the NEA to no avail. What is Ballet North? Ballet North is a non-profit ballet company and school which performs full length ballets for the public and provides complete ballet training for students to become professional dancers. Very much like the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in terms of a youth ballet company, but also with a school that has a 25+ year history of actually producing results in dance education with students going on to full scholarships at the University of Utah, University of Missouri Kansas City, Lindenwood and Washington Universities all on full scholarship for ballet, plus acceptance into professional companies like Boston Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, and Kansas City Ballet. That is what making a future is.

Despite that, nothing Ballet North does ever seems to fit a category for NEA funding whereas groups like Wylliams-Henry qualify for these funds without producing real world results - claimed results are produced, but these are like the forms buerocrats fill out when doing accident reports. What these outfits do have is the ability to fit the "qualifications" and categories that the NEA comes up with. As near as I can tell, for an organization like Ballet North to do this, the application would have to be a complete lie and therein lies the real issue: if an organization like Ballet North would have to basically lie to qualify for NEA funding, of what value to the arts can such funding really be? For surely, no future will be made because of it - it is precisely organizations like Ballet North that are creating both the future talent to perform the art and the future audience by means of the thousands of students who will study ballet and make it a part of their lives whether or not they dance professionally. An organization like this should qualify for funding it seems to me.

Further, over the last 7 years Ballet North performed for over 34,000 school children with the School Tour program it runs and these are hard numbers, NOT some fallacious statistic based on the population density of where you are located - average audience is 450 students, average number of performances is 11 per year on tour, so that makes 450x11=4950 students annually. Multiply by 7 and you get 34,650 in 7 years. This program includes comprehensive workshops beforehand and still, despite all this, no where in NEA funding documentation can such figures be inputed. This leaves one to conclude that either the NEA is unaware of how cumbersome and impossible their application process is, or it has been set up this way deliberately so that organizations which do not really produce any results can get funding to continue fronting a social perspective. Trouble is if you deal with the real world no one's social agenda has much to say, reality dictates a lot of what you do in terms of programming and how you run events otherwise the reality is you have no audience and no where to perform.

Had we gotten our requested $10,000 NEA funding in any one of the 7 years it was applied for then for effectively $2 per student real ballet performances equal to what is found by going to a theater and incurring bus travel expenses and ticket purchases, etc., amounting to at least $15 per student, would have resulted. We did the performances anyway but that would have been an incredibly effective use of Federal/public money in my estimation. Where else in Federal expenditures would you see the equivalent of $2 a person resulting in access to a complete ballet performance result? One could argue that to qualify for NEA funds you need to be a basket-case of an organization unable to make it on your own by your own efforts. Equally true, however, is the fact that the NEA dispenses public money based on what it describes as 'merit' and not just 'need', and as such that money should go where it is most effective AND the definition of what is most effective or 'merit' should only be real-world results like hard counts of participants, numbers of tickets sold, numbers of students trained to a high level of mastery as demonstrated by other elite organizations actually wanting them, and so on. In lieu of such metrics money spent on the arts is really being spent on societal shaping efforts or political constituency servicing, and that is an inappropriate, unsustainable and just plain dumb way to spend public funds.

Follow on:
As for assistance from elected officials, Senator Kit Bond (R) Missouri is unresponsive to requests for assistance with NEA grants probably due to Republican misgivings about the NEA but as they say, the money is going to be spent anyway so why not make it as effective as possible rather than sitting back and allowing others to guide it into less effective or even questionable uses? Senator Claire McCaskill (D) Missouri is also unresponsive to requests for assistance with NEA grants and this is most likely due to the old axiom: location, location, location. Our organization is not located in a major population center like St Louis or Kansas City proper, hence fewer votes and also we primarily serve youth who by definition cannot vote so effectively we are not serving a constituency. Many of the arts groups that get NEA funding are comprised not so much of "professionals" but of adults who themselves vote and talk to their friends about things who also vote. Add that in with living in a large population center and voila, you have the silent segregation present in what the National Endowment for the Arts does. Representative Sam Graves (R) is unresponsive again probably due to Republican uneasiness with the NEA, and that is about it.

Yes, the NEA will grant to more rural organizations but these grants are infrequent and turn out to be far, far less in amount than grants that go more often to urban located organizations. And, this unstated method of grant allocation fails completely to realize the "cross pollination" or shared effect that happens more and more - for instance, we are located in Clay County but will operate in Jackson, Platte and Clay counties meaning we will serve audiences all over the Kansas City area both in the major population center and outlying areas. Many smaller arts organizations operate like this but since our technical address location places us in a lower density area of Kansas City's sprawling suburbia, geographic segregation in terms of how the Federal Government handles distribution of grant funds results. The NEA application materials do not allow for such data to be inputted and so it is of no relevance to the application process.

Final thought: the future of the arts is in those who are still learning and acquiring their technique in whatever field, ballet, music, etc., the future is not with anyone who is a professional performer because as a professional you are exhibiting where your technique can take you in practice. As George Balanchine said: first a school, then a company. This is the reason why - if you focus on students and children you are guaranteeing the future; if you do not then you may be supporting the arts but you are supporting the arts only as they are presently and with no regard for the need to educate those who come after. This is also why about 1% of the population actually attend arts events such as dance or classical music. Look at the average age of a ballet audience and it is easily 55 years old, probably older. As an opposite example, look at major league baseball and then all the little league teams. Do the little league players become pros? No - 99% do not! But, they certainly become the future fan base. No where in the arts is any such method or tactic or idea even recognized, especially not with the NEA.

Sonic Torture of Female Baha'i Prisoners

2011-05-16T11:30:00.000-07:00

Iran has found a new way to humiliate Baha'is and "political prisoners": drive them insane as a side effect of the grotesque incarceration methods the government uses on hardened criminals in their prison facilities.

In this particular "facility" a volatile mix of actual criminals (murderers, rapists, other violent offenders) are in a general unsegregated population with "political prisoners" none of whom would be guilty of any crime in the West, and of course Baha'is whose only crime is existing. The danger from beatings and violence at the hands of the hardened criminals is very real but even more demeaning - and in a grave violation of human rights - the police guards at the prison use pain inducing, blaringly loud sirens and loud speakers to inflict a sonic torture on all those held in the facility. This causes painful sleep deprivation as the sirens are set off all night long, drives riots to break out among the inmates and eventually a forced clinical insanity claims the minds of these inmates which is the reason for Fariba Kamalabadi and Mahvash Sabet to request death now while they can still attempt to make arrangements for their bodies to be recovered, rather than death after insanity where they are likely to have disappeared into the bowels of this sadistic pit and not be found or recovered by their families.

The following report has been gathered from sources in Iran who can still contact the families of these two brave, gentle souls.

Fariba Kamalabadi and Mahvash Sabet, after three years of continued humiliating captivity in the worst dungeon of the World in Iran, have now been transferred into the WORST ANIMAL SLAUGHTER-HOUSE and thrown into sub-animal conditions.

Fariba and Mahvash are now in danger of an undignified and horrific imminent death.

The last angelic voice of Fariba, in a one minute phone call from the infernal prison, asked people "to do whatever they can, NOW, perhaps and perchance our corpses can be retrievable"; and in another one minute phone call message the day before:

"Tell the Iranian government, to issue our execution sentence immediately, so that we are martyred, rather than remain in this unimaginable sub-animal indignity, facing a treatment status not befitting of any human station."

What can you do about this? Call your Senator and Congressman in support of Senate Resolution 80 and House Resolution 134.

To find your Representative go here:

http://www.house.gov/representatives/

To find your Senator go here:

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

"When they came for the gypsies I did not say anything because they weren't my people; when they came for the Jews I still did not say anything because they also weren't my people; the same was true for the poor and the disabled. When they came for me, I wanted help defending myself but there was no one left to do so."

Resume of Matthew Reinschmidt

2011-05-15T11:00:00.000-07:00

Resume of:

Matthew Albert Reinschmidt

Education:

Graduated St Pius X High School, 1991
Member National Honors Society
Listed in Who's Who in American High Schools 1991
ACT Score: 28 (taken 1 time)

Attended University of Colorado at Boulder, 1991-1992

Attended University of Kansas at Lawrence, 1992-1996

Graduated University of Kansas at Lawrence, 1996; B.A. in Philosophy

Professional Experience:

Founded Ballet North in 1994 with wife Laura Reinschmidt and currently engaged in running the company. Primary focus and mission is ballet training, mentoring and urban core arts education but in order to accomplish this mission all areas of business proficiency are needed: marketing, accounting, advertising, customer relations and management. Extensive use of internet assets from website (www.balletnorth.com) to blog (wwwballetnorth.blogspot.com) to YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Google Adwords and email contact lists are actively being made. Microsoft Word, Open Office and various Adobe Photoshop projects are annually conducted and created in support of the primary mission.

Work Projects examples in brief:

1999 - Present: Organized and implemented annual traveling production
of Nutcracker to public schools all over KC Metro area, tasks included
rental and driving of 24-ft diesel truck with liftgate, management of
numerous scenery, audio and lighting items and equipment, and managing
time to provide for food and rest for participating staff. As of 2007
purchase of 24 trailer and driving of tour via diesel trucks was begun
and continues to this time.

1999 - major direct mail campaign created, handled both creation of tri-fold flyer, acquisition of targeted mailing list, assembly of address labels and flyers, and bulk mailing. Result: 30% increase in student enrollment

2000 - design of first website for Ballet North, using all html and Microsoft Front Page. Result: strong organic search results on Google and Yahoo greatly assisted in building awareness of the company; at least 30 enrollments or 60% of total new enrollments annually each year since 2000 due to internet search and website reference.

2001 - creation of program for Spring Festival of Dance which included 30 pages of ads, biographies and plot summary of event as well as custom graphics on front cover. Created master document using MS Word 2000 and then converted into Adobe Publisher; 500 copies printed.

2005 - Re-design of website into an all-flash powered site. Content and funcionality specified by myself, actual flash coding provided by Emptynoggin webdesigns to avoid time burden of learning flash computer language.

2007 - began a blog for the company using blogspot as provider and cross-linked flash powered site with blog to enable latest news to be easily displayed on primary website

2008 - created pages on MySpace and Facebook for the company to begin familiarizing and capitalizing on any benefit of social networking sites for awareness, especially of upcoming performance events instead of traditional marketing of services like ballet lessons

2008 - began using OpenOffice and Google Documents to enable a basic "cloud computing" approach to major document management such as master enrollment lists or participation lists which avoids problem of any one computer becomming inoperative

2008 - created broadcast ready h.264 commercial using in-house video and audio overlay, broadcasted on Time Warner Cable local for Kansas City MO region

2008 - created youtube.com channel "balletnorth" comprised of uploads of performance video; approximately 40,000 views of videos in about 1.5 years

2009 - found way to integrate hmtl site overlay and blog window into major site re-design which also avoids problem of all-flash powered sites not displaying well on PDAs and also boosts organic search results in Google and Yahoo over all-flash powered site

2009 - began using Microsoft SkyDrive as cloud computing storage device for critical documents such as master enrollment or payment lists

2011 - Google Documents now used as a primary warehouse for all documents from program notes, ballet production, and graphic files

SyFy to air Sarah Connor Chronicles beginning April 7 2011

2011-02-23T06:36:00.000-08:00

This is awesome news for anyone who thinks they like to watch TV. If you haven't already seen it, get ready for the best Sci-Fi series since the Twilight Zone (No kidding!!!!) and a truly wild ride...click on link for the 'official' news...

SyFy: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles returns starting April 7.

Contemporary Ignorance

2011-01-22T22:23:00.000-08:00

Upon the recent observance of Martin Luther King Jr Day - a holiday built upon the ideals of mutual respect, equality, and removal of ALL barriers - I am compelled to note how grotesquely ignorant many children have been allowed to become by way of girls now making fun of girls for taking ballet instead of being on a cheer squad or hip hop team. Mind, the latter involve, 9 times out of 10, wearing small underwear in public and the former is the art form built upon universal expressive technique. "Who is the more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?"

The completely, utterly anti-woman exploitation that the vast majority of contemporary cheer squads and hip hop teams employ as a means to shock the crowd into thinking it is something clever must be exposed for what it is, pun intended. With sickening upside-down notions like this idea that ballet is funny but bouncing your femininity in public for all to see is really cool being allowed to persist, many of the brave steps Martin Luther King Jr took and stood for and that cut across all racial and ethnic barriers will be lost because our society will become too dumb to know what these things really mean. Whether or not you ever take ballet or have a child that takes ballet, allowing mockery to be made of those who strive to learn a truly difficult technique by those who are ignorant, stupid, or truly confused and unaware at how gross and sexually-frankenstein-ian their own actions are indicates parents who are either uninvolved or are themselves too ignorant to understand the folly of what their own children are doing. There can be no equality for anyone without intelligence. Period.

As a dovetail to this completely destructive anti-feminine trend we have even more stupendously callous television for our children to watch under the guise of "reality TV" - namely MTV's 'Skins' series. Far from being the product of violent ne'er-do-well children, this particular vomitous mass is the deliberate product of middle aged or older mostly white guys at MTV coming up with a sure fired way of making money: cleverly almost-dress up what is essentially child pornography and put in hip lingo and smooth camera work to make it look big-time and important.

Why is child exploitation illegal? Not just because it is incredibly dangerous and psychologically harmful to those directly involved, but it truly is a mental contagion, a cancer of the psyche, that when broadcasted for all to see and then watched but other children who must themselves be near totally unsupervised, builds a reinforcing circle of social values destruction. The work of the sexploitation of all population groups has now been achieved by the media and the next generation will be left holding the bag for all the damage this grotesque ignorance parade will cause. As the Skins' actress who defended this garbage by saying, "It is what's happening now" revealed, ignorance breeds ignorance. Yes, we can remember being teenagers and we can all remember the onslaught of hormones but no, we did not need to see fellow classmates making out to 3rd base or beyond in order to feel like someone out there understands us. Of course, if we all become ignoramic base animals, would we all then be truly equal? Perhaps, but then we are left with might making right circa Europe in the 7th century. Do we really need to go that far down the path of decay before we realize what we are doing to our selves?

Concerning Fathers

2011-01-02T21:34:00.001-08:00

January 2, 2011

Fathers and fatherhood has been nearly wiped off the cultural canvas at this point by decades of virulent feminism and the result has been ruinous, from the myriad statistics involving gangs, violent crime by teens, drug trafficking by teens, property crimes by teens and on to the proliferation of single moms and now the most perverse concept, right up there with genetic hybrid animals or the pedophile books Amazon sells: the concept that having a baby is a terrific and fun right of passage, but that getting married is too big a responsibility to be entered into.

This concept has been encountered by myself on several occasions over the past few years and it is simply stunning. The notion that raising a child to become a helpful, responsible and contributing member of society is really no big deal, instead the sign of adulthood that getting pregnant brings (oh good, your reproductive organs work, such a credit to you...) and the elevation of status to being a "mom" becoming a kind of biological trophy or sort of "Rolex" betrays the underlying lack of basic education. An almost deliberately retarded - in the strongest sense of the term - muddling of the concept of parenthood into a type of victory lap around the track of societal entitlements and poverty class social standing should be a jarring, sickening thing to witness by everyone. Getting a man to knock you up and then forcing him out of the family and away from his child is the current state of many single mom's minds and is downright insane.

Single mothers who do not have the ability to value common sense thinking and cannot foresee the inevitable and awful void of no opportunity, no enrichment, no future and no education that this derelict behavior of fatherless child making brings upon them and their child(ren) within 12 to 14 years after birth simply have no business having children.

What is more, the world truly needs FATHERS to return to the family table. It takes two to make the child and it sure as heck takes two to raise the child for while mothers provide the nurturing care and first education (hopefully) of the child, fathers play an equally critical and irreplaceable role of backing up the mother, showing the child what male behavior should be and even what male virtues are (yes, there is very much such a thing as male virtues just as surely as there are the female virtues everyone seems obsessed with at all costs nowadays) because with out both female AND male, yin AND yang, nurturing AND strength, the family unit is just not complete. We can spend all day or a thousand years arguing this in P.C. land but the adult thing to do is acknowledge that this is how nature is supposed to work for homo sapiens 95%+ of the time and to promote or allow a widespread departure from this is a suicidal joke.

The current status of nearly 50% of all families being comprised of single moms and in some quarters having 70%+ of all children under 10 raised by single moms is simply unsustainable, and quite frankly not in the best interests of children or society. Having children marvel at a man wearing a wedding band and being married to a woman as some sort of miraculous unique thing is simply an unacceptable and profoundly dangerous way to run society.

To be honest I do not think anyone should have a child without being married. Yes, divorces are needed in some cases and yes, one or more parents do die, but NO, 70% of children under 10 being raised by single moms is not an OK statistic either and it is going to be much harder on societal health than any abusive parent or untimely death was. Please single moms who have never been married but have multiple kids, stop it - for all our sakes.

How Does the Stock Market Work?

2010-12-28T15:44:00.000-08:00

December 28, 2010

"How Does the Stock Market Work?"

For those who have not been completely psyched-out by all the news from the various media outlets over the past 2 years during the Great Recession, investing in the good old stock market whether NYSE or NASDAQ is still your best tool to make future money and build up a capital base on which you might actually be able to retire. If you honestly think Social Security or your employer is going to some how handle your retirement, do not bother to read any more of this post!

The reason why the stock market always works for practically all individual investors is because of the way in which it works - yes, that sounds circular, but here is the cut and dried version:

All companies listed on the NYSE or NASDAQ exchange must provide upon their listing with the exchange a large piece of capital (cash) which goes into a giant pile of cash or reserve fund with which the NYSE or NASDAQ guarantees all transactions, particularly selling transactions, regardless of size up to a certain point which is far, far beyond the scope of any individual investor's ability to make. This means that you do NOT literally have to have a buyer linking right up to your sale of X company's stock when you sell it; instead the exchange guarantees the sale against it's reserve fund and also against the strong likelihood that some other investor will, during that day or within a certain limited time frame, buy the shares you just sold. This is why you can always go liquid with stocks and why exchange traded stocks like Apple or Coventry Health Care or Barrick Gold are and have always been a far, far better investment tool than real estate ever was because with real estate, for example, you do literally have to have a buyer lined up to buy your sale at the point in time you wish to sell. This is why so many people have gotten so hurt in the housing market, they were using houses as giant pieces of stock in the completely mistaken notion that perceived market momentum would take the place of an exchange trade guarantee like that which the NASDAQ or NYSE provide to investors.

Now gold presents just as big a hazard as real estate because with the exception of exchange traded commodities contracts - NONE Of which are what you see on TV selling gold coins or with G Gordon Liddy talking about. ALL of the gold investments you see on TV would require a direct sale to another buyer if you wanted to liquefy the investment which has the distinct possibility that you'd be unable to go to cash if you ever needed to. True, gold has never been worth zero as they say, but it is also true that unless you come to terms with a buyer, your gold is completely useless as an investment vehicle. You are stuck with it in the absence of a particular buyer willing to do business directly with you.

Over the long term and even a middle-term of 20 years, the NYSE has creamed all other investment vehicles and modes of investing. All you need is to go to a company like Scottrade (with whom I do have an account) or TD Ameritrade or any certified stock broker and take charge of your own investing. It is really quite simple, you do NOT ever need a stock broker to do this. Open an account, fund it with what cash you are comfortable with, then simply buy some stock in whatever company you choose - the best way to do this is to buy stock of a company whose products you are either directly familiar with in a professional setting or whose products you like. That is it! One form to fill out, throw down some cash, and you are investing.

How do you avoid losing money? Well, investing is a R I S K. Crossing the street is a risk as well. Many investors do the pedestrian version of not looking both ways: they throw money into stocks but do not set up a very simple, very powerful safety tool, which is called the Good-Till-Canceled Stop Loss Order. With this tool that is easy to use and provided by all online brokers like Scottrade or TD Ameritrade, you set a limit under the current price of your stock. Generally, give it a solid 5-10% range UNDER the current value so that sporadic trades don't trigger the stop loss order to sell your shares unnecessarily. So yes, you may loose 5-10% of value but on the flip side as we have just seen over the last 2 years you are certain to miss out of rises of 30-40% in many cases as companies go to war to make themselves as profitable as possible. If you bailed out of the market in 2008 you are really hurting now as you have missed the huge rally that has been underway.

So what have we learned? Real Estate is never ever going to be a genuine investment because you cannot liquefy on demand. For that, you must have an exchange in which to buy and sell and the housing market for all of us regular folks will never be able to do that. Gold as well will never be able to do this because it requires direct sales to another buyer just like real estate. If you want to make money for the future, get back into the stock market using self-directed investing through Scottrade or TD Ameritrade, skip the broker, and use stop loss orders to shield against loss of value. It is really that and nothing else, no other "investment" the media talks about stands any chance of growing to where you can use it upon retirement or to fund any other life endeavor you may take on in 10-20 years time.

How To Train Your Child or Yourself To Dance

2010-12-07T17:37:00.000-08:00

Introduction:

Because I encounter this question and situation on a regular basis I am putting it down here in black and white what the truth is with regard to how dance training should - no, must - be done if you want your child to be a good dancer. Inevitably scores upon scores of young dancers decide to focus on Ballet at some point and then discover they have all the wrong habits, all the wrong muscles conditioned too stiffly, and are basically a huge mess. In some cases there is literally no way to undo the damage of this poor, negligent training. Since the vast majority who read this article will never take class from my company I have no motive here other than to set it out clearly and in plain English what the truth is. While in the grand scheme of things this may seem a trivial matter, consider how many millions of dollars are spent in "competition dance" or the like that is totally wasted time and money and especially consider how much money and time and pain comes from spinal or knee/ankle injuries because the dancer never got the proper training to gain control of these very flexible joints. If you follow this advice I can unequivocally guarantee a much, much better result than any other way suggested or promoted as good or effective or the worse descriptor of all - "fun" (everyone wants to have fun, right?) in how to train your child to dance. Fun is FREE, learning is not. Anyone who says different is definitely selling you nutmeg.

How To Train Your Child To Dance

The way in which parents choose to train their children in Dance generally and with regard to Ballet specifically can be completely counterproductive and in many cases outright detrimental. There really is a critical, specific order to follow if you want to get the results you expect and have your child able to dance with all the energy, style, excitement, and safety you'd want.

What is that order? Ballet first and only until the age of 13-14 years old. The reason? Simple! Ballet trains in great, systematic detail how to control the core, the hips, the knees and the ankles. These areas are the very same areas where young dancers in general and girls in particular are naturally very flexible and have almost no control, and are also the very areas where nearly all injuries will happen unless the conditioning and control needed to prevent uncoordinated, improper joint movements gets learned to full mastery.

Caveat: FORGET this notion that ballet, tap and jazz can be learned by young dancers/children at the same time. That is the worst possible way to go about teaching anything - try teaching piano, violin and drums in the same music lesson and see what happens. The human mind can only learn one new skill or subject at a time. There is no way around this. To engage in combo-classes is to completely waste your money and your child's time and to quite possibly risk injury because the "training" received in these classes is, to be frank, always wrong and always works the wrong muscles the wrong way and creates dancers who move like blocks of wood rather than the smooth effortless motion needed for dance. In all my years of teaching I have never, ever seen anyone whether child or teenager come from any combo-class school that had any business even trying ballet without a major dose of remedial bad-habit breaking that can take years to accomplish. And that is just to get them to where they don't look horrible doing corps de ballet parts alongside other correctly trained beginner ballet dancers.

After BOTH the body has reached adult form AND the technique of ballet has been learned to where the student can clearly demonstrate control of the body core, placement of the hips and knees, control and strength of the ankles - at that point the study of practically any other dance form is A-OK and will be tremendously boosted by the student having had good, clear ballet technique.

Why is ballet so helpful for other dance forms but not the other way around? Ballet is built on a complete system of how to move every joint in the body - literally - in a certain way that creates, using the human body, what many consider the concept of the "golden ratio". The mission or purpose of Ballet is to augment the harmony and melodic structure of symphonic classical music with physical form. These are not steps or movements you would ever do in day-to-day life, and require many non-obvious coordinations and movements of the body. ALL other dance forms are what is called "pedestrian" in origin meaning they all derive from some function or task or other work that was at some point actually done in day to day life and therefore do not require any enhanced body core or leg control in order to make the movements of that dance form. That is the difference in technical level between Ballet and anything else and also why Ballet is such an effective, powerful and irreplaceable tool in the physical training of young students. This is also why Ballet can and does lead to improvements in any other dance training once mastered, but the other way around simply cannot ever work.

This is the truth of the matter, please do yourself and your child a huge favor and use it. The best things in life are free, and honest, expert advice from a professional who cannot possibly gain from you taking his advice is priceless. Doing the right thing is always the right thing.

Matthew Reinschmidt
Ballet Master,
Ballet North Inc

Metaphysics of Life and Death

2010-11-03T07:30:00.000-07:00

It is a profoundly sad experience to witness the death of a loved one or young person due to illness or injury or age. Such experiences commonly cause hiccups or outright denials of faith and belief in God due to the perceived cruelty and injustice of the dying experience. But rather than using platitudes or cliche expressions to sweep these emotionally trying times under a rug or cap it off to avoid spectacle or emoting by the grieving, perhaps a bit of analytics would help keep perspective on this. For surely, all of us will follow anyone who dies today sooner or later and before long in any case.

Estimated Number of Humans Alive Today:

6,560,000,000

Source: Population Reference Bureau and United Nations Population Statistics

Number of Humans (Homo Sapiens) Who Ever Lived:

106,456,367,669

Source: Population Reference Bureau

So in plain numbers then:

-> 94.5% of all Humans who ever lived are now deceased.

-> 5.5% of all Humans ever born are alive now.

Probability that all Humans alive or born this year will no longer live in 150 years or less:

-> 100%

This is not to make some gothic statement about death and the dark and such genre, but rather to state in clear numbers that dying is not some sort of cruelty on God's part, it is a hard-wired, built in and completely inescapable part of being alive in this Universe. In a "Religious" sense, it is why Adam and Eve ultimately had to die.

Pain and suffering is also something that often accompanies death and can by itself cause those who witness and grieve to go cold with regard to Faith and Belief but here again it is necessary to say that if we were somehow always prevented from ever experiencing or seeing physical pain, suffering, illness, etc., we would not actually be sentient beings. Free will and having the ability to choose with the resulting consequences, benefits, downfalls, and so forth simply requires that there really is not a safety net as such to the Universe. And of course, it is also entirely possible that those suffering can be cured of their ailments and brought back to fully active life again directly as a result of having a real state of Free Will which allows us to pursue science and medicine and discover the cures.

All of this hopefully galvanizes us to seize the day and pursue those things that matter without regard to waiting for a perceived permission or for the "right time" because we are, all of us, truly on a limited time table in this life. And with the status of having a real Free Will there is a great, profound meaning in our choice to believe and have Faith - a choice free of any consequence or absent any experience of sorrow or loss is really a meaningless choice as it would have no context.

And to finish, something else to keep in mind, is that ALL of the Prophets of God, every last One (Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Zoroaster, even Budha and Krishna, and Baha'u'llah) evoke either by direct statements or by complete silence on the matter a sense that the next life after this one is truly something to behold and not a thing that can be put into words; a thing both completely un-Natural (precluding any Natural creature such as living humans from being able to perceive or comprehend it) and yet totally Divine. This being the destination after death it is no surprise then that anyone living and those in the process of dying as well have little to no sense at all of where death takes us, only that it takes us forever away from here. This is why the author thinks developing the Spirit, and creating a life built on a pursuit for non-material discovery, is perhaps the best idea in all of the living world.

The Massive Scale of the Atmosphere and the Massive Lie of CO2 Emissions

2010-10-28T09:20:00.000-07:00

In any discussion of the impact of man-made emissions, specifically CO2 (which is itself a natural compound emitted by almost all forms of life not to mention volcanoes) it can only help to keep in mind the overall scale of the atmosphere. Since most measurements of CO2 emissions are done in terms of weight or tonnes, let us first start with the figure that more or less expresses the overall static weight of the Earth's atmosphere:

1.16187x10¹⁹ pounds (source: World Book Encyclopedia)

or
1,161,800,000,000,000,000,000,000 lbs

or
58,090,000,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes

Next, the figure estimated to represent global emissions of CO2 by human activity gathered by the UN climate change office for 2009:

29,321,302,000 tonnes

So, NOT factoring in absorption rates of oceans, limestone, the rain-washout effect, and of course photosynthesis by all plants and algae which could very well consume this entire amount of CO2 and then some and replace it with pristine, fresh O2, the yearly "naked" emissions by global human activity as a percentage of the overall atmosphere in weight would be:

29,321,302,000 tonnes / 58,090,000,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes =

5.04756447 × 10^{-13 %}

0.000,000,000,000,504,756,447 %

So if humanity wanted to fill the entire atmosphere with man-made CO2 and there were no plants or geologic cycles active to consume this CO2 and put O2 back out instead, it would take more years than the Universe has existed for to do this. That is the scale we are talking about here and this is the reason why any and all Global Warming arguments that come down to taxing carbon emissions and blaming modern society for any possible temperature shifts (which are themselves not outside the margin of error for the statistics used to "prove" the argument) are complete red herrings masking some other hidden agenda for social control because clearly, man simply is not anywhere near powerful enough to shift or control anything as mind-bogglingly massive as the atmosphere of the Earth.

How Printed Media Sexually Twists Children

2010-10-27T15:18:00.001-07:00

Many people comment, critique and outright complain at how so-called "Pop Culture" seems narrowly focused on one thing: sex. Specifically, women's sexuality as it relates to women being flirts or somehow using female sex appeal to gain social equality. But there is a much darker, sneakier side to this sexual exploitation and one that I think has been missed: the effect of printed materials especially Playboy and other only slightly less explicit mags like FHM or Maxim on young boys minds.

Practically all of my childhood buddies reveled in getting "almost" in trouble like riding dirt bikes inside construction sites around the neighborhood, sneaking into and out of newly built homes, playing "war" with bottle rockets, and then of course there was the most nefarious thing that would from time to time come about: sneaking a look at a friend's newest Playboy (subscribed to by his father).

Now, all of us and all young people in general have a general curiosity about the opposite sex even before the hormones of adolescence kick in. But the effect of seeing such explicit material at an age too young to be directly effected or stimulated by it (as, no doubt, his father was and therefore the subscription to Playboy...) does cause a lasting effect: it forever puts a totally distorted, graphic image of women in full color front and center in the mind of the young boys looking at such material. At this early an age (under 12) boys and indeed children in general are almost incapable of being conscious of what they are doing to themselves when "paling around" with a group of friends, this is what parental supervision is for and why children aren't allowed to do other things like drive cars. And while no outright harm came from this - no property or personal crimes - nevertheless it served to put extreme, exploitative images in the mind which otherwise might never be there, photo shoots for these magazines are staged in the most impossible artificial settings usually and are also heavily edited.

Now, fast forward 25 years or so and 'tadaa!', we have an even more profane, explicit, suggestive cadre of imagery and media of all types including printed media constantly being put out for circulation by today's adults who as children saw this same explicit material, and so the cycle continues: children will inevitably be exposed to this imagery which can only have the effect of twisting the young mind with powerful in the extreme imagery of a sexual nature that is not forgotten and serves to interfere with the sexual development and relationships between young men and young women later on - the paradox of the feminine requirement of respect for the mind (which this author totally agrees with) AND the demand for the "freedom" to be as outrageously suggestive, sexual and lewd as possible because of some notion of "rights" which could only come from a background where a Playboy mentality is the commonplace.

Clearly, with birthrates at or near historic lows for much of the time-span since the proliferation of printed explicit materials like Playboy et al (specifically from the mid 1960's to today, 2010) those men and women in the decades and centuries before had no problems establishing and maintaining a healthy sexual relationship, in fact apparently did so in a more effective way, with no where near the ridiculous abundance of sexual imagery plastered everywhere both private and public as we have today. Yes, the author is aware of the existence even in the ancient world of what can only be described as pornographic depictions but the onus is still on those who claim this as some sort of out for the need to moderate today's situation: printed materials all but did not exist in antiquity due to extreme cost; statuary has been found but also in quite limited numbers; the population of Europe in antiquity estimated to have been around 400,000,000 (nearly 300,000,000 lived within the border of the Roman Empire not counting Northern or Eastern Europe) and so the per capita availability of such high-powered graphic imagery would have been very low. Clearly the effects of birth control have moderated the contemporary birth rate, but as they say it takes two to tango and so when men and women do decide to have children, many have commented that the current mature man has a lower sex drive than "normal" and hence the need for Viagra, etc. yet men of the past centuries also clearly had no troubles in making large families which naturally would require maintaining a healthy sexual relationship at leat into middle age.

Perhaps men and women would have more and better sexual relations if the sexual media material were not so abundant in today's society. With the extreme abundance of printed sexually explicit material it cannot be avoided that children far too young to understand any context but more than old enough to fully remember the images will be in contact with these publications and so the cycle of interference with and the possible perversion of the natural, healthy human sex drive is set to continue. One feels compelled to ask Hugh Hefner: are your profits really worth this human cost?

Fact Check: The Reason the Baha'i Faith is located in Israel

2010-10-14T15:26:00.001-07:00

October 10, 2010

It would seem that there is some attempt by certain governments and entities to factually portray the Baha'i Faith as being some sort of arm or agent for the state of Israel owing to the location of the Baha'i World Center on Mt Carmel which is in the major port city of Haifa, Israel. What any such arguments are really doing is attempting to, as they say, "have their cake and eat it, too...". As a fact-check against this duplicitous and inaccurate argument, this short article will completely explain both why the Baha'i Faith is centered in Haifa, Israel and also why any statement likening the Baha'i Faith to some sort of MI-5 or CIA for the Mossad demonstrates either a fully dishonest portrayal of history or a complete ignorance of the history that led immediately up to the present day.

The founder of the Baha'i Faith was the Manifestation of God or Prophet named Baha'u'llah (1817-1892) who began work in what is modern day Iran but 150 years ago was still the Persian Empire. During the early to middle-aged years of Baha'u'llah's life all activity was centered in Persia but circa 1857 the Government of Persia formally requested (read: required) Baha'u'llah to relocate both family and followers to Baghdad, Iraq. After approximately 6 years Baha'u'llah was again formally requested to relocate family and followers to Adrianople (on the European side of the Bosporus Strait right across from present day Constantinople). After this very long journey (some 1,000 miles all of which was done on foot and through the winter to cross the formidable mountains in the Southeast of present day Turkey) the Ottoman Empire then made their own "invitation" to Baha'u'llah that all should relocate to the very ancient (indeed it is mentioned in the Old Testament) and very real prison fortress of Acre in what was at the time PALESTINE. These events with the Ottoman Empire happened primarily in the early to mid 1870's which is obviously quite some time prior to the founding of Israel which did not occur until 1948 or a solid 70 years after this forced relocation into Palestine/future Israel!

Now right across the bay to the Southeast from Acre was at the time the small port town of Haifa and also there is situated the very same Mt Carmel that the Prophet Isiah is linked to some 3,000 years earlier. At this time around the 1870's to 1880's the area was quite undeveloped, and Mt Carmel was nothing but scrub land. Baha'u'ullah instructed his son Abdu'l Baha' to locate an administrative center for the Baha'i Faith on Mt Carmel simply because, frankly, there was absolutely nothing there and it was a quiet, out of the way location where the Baha'is could run the affairs of their Religion in relative peace. Baha'u'llah and Abdu'l Baha were at this time both forbidden from leaving this region of Palestine, both still being under a form of house arrest by the Ottoman Empire so there was literally no place else for any activities, plans, or (as would happen after Baha'u'llah passed away in 1892) building to possibly be done at. Baha'u'llah was under this form of house arrest right up until passing away in 1892.

So, with this background now readily viewable that explains why the Baha'i Faith is located in present-day Israel and also why despite this, it is simply a complete untruth that the Baha'i Faith has any sort of formal, informal, covert or spygame type link to the Israeli Government, it is hoped that this urban legend of the Baha'i Faith being sometype of agent for Israel is now debunked. The Baha'i Faith has been in the process of establishing it's World Center on Mt Carmel for nearly twice as long as the state of modern Israel has existed, this work having begun in the 1880's directly owing to the "requests" of the Ottoman Empire that Baha'u'llah confine family and followers to Acre Prison which is right next door to Haifa and Mt Carmel, and the subsequent status of house arrest forcing Baha'u'llah and all Baha'i administrative activities to remain in the Acre/Haifa vicinity until well after Baha'u'llah passed away.

My Problem With Space Aliens

2010-08-03T19:33:00.000-07:00

The whole sort-of-fringe issue of aliens from outer space, otherwise known as extra-terrestrials or E.T.s, is something for which everyone has to check what information there is and come to their own conclusions about, anything resembling proof of theory being very thin on the ground as it were. However, there is one aspect to the E.T. debate that presents an interesting opportunity for a logical analysis worthy of a very famous E.T., Mr Spock. So without further adieu, here is my logical analysis of the problems with any current E.T. theory or belief.

1) Complete lack of any sonic booms.
Despite what appears to be hundreds of UFO sighting wherein the eyewitnesses claim to see a craft or array of lights speed away at fantastic rates there has never been any documented or recorded sonic booms. The nature of a sonic boom caused by breaking the sound barrier makes it impossible to cover up or mask by the Government or "Men in Black". Everyone in a given vector from any UFO speed-away event would hear it, simple as that. So, either the UFOs go right to the speed of sound but then stop short of breaking it knowing as they no doubt would how sonic booms propagate and would then leave a footprint of their visit, or there really was nothing there to begin with because there was no sonic boom. In the case of Military pursuits where the pursuit aircraft (ranging from P-51 Mustangs in the 1940's which could not go supersonic to F-4 Phantoms in the 1970's which can go much faster than the sound barrier all the way up to F-16s, F-18s, F-15s all of which can go well over 1,000 mph in any high performance environment) is chasing the UFO at top speed, all those cases state that as the Military aircraft was beginning a pursuit and not having gotten it's speed up yet (but would still be going 400 -500 mph), the UFO just dashes away leaving the pursuit craft practically standing still. This super high-performance dash would require a sonic boom - but again, none have ever been heard by anyone.

2) Space Exposure
Granted that even if it were concluded that UFOs are real and therefore E.T. is real, the problem of deep space radiation exposure is acute. Far from the view of many "tree-huggers" here on Earth, space is a zone of extreme radiation hazards. Our solar system does a very good job at reducing the level of interstellar radiation bombarding us, and then the Earth's own magnetic fields and atmosphere filter out practically all the rest as compared to what is out there. But traveling between star systems presents a very high radiation exposure risk. All the E.T. craft have always been described as being made of very light, miraculous materials. Some speak of huge mile-wide craft which would seem to solve a radiation exposure problem but most speak of small, demure flying craft which would just not shield against high radiation levels over long periods. We have a complete Periodic Table, the elements are consecutive right up to materials that are very heavy and exceedingly rare and so completely impractical to use for anything like an industrial process. So whatever composite materials E.T. may use the underlying elements simply have to be the ones we already know about and almost none of them are of any use in shielding against radiation if not built out very stoutly. Of course, the E.T. craft could have some kind of magnetic shielding but that would make the craft emit a very strong EM field. Some observations speak of bizarre instrument readings so perhaps the use of a magnetic field for shielding is what causes this. But even with this, there would be no way to keep radiation from the hull of such a craft totally and so over time the craft would get progressively more radio-active. The Earth alleviates this problem by having both a strong EM field and a thick atmosphere of gas that absorbs gigawatts of radioactive energy daily and can further cleans or eliminate it by the rain/evaporation cycle which washes captured radiation to the ground where it continues to decay until gone. Perhaps it is not impossible for advanced E.T.s to engineer something that can accomplish this same amazing feat on a very small scale suitable for a space craft (even the hugest spacecraft would be a microscopic affair compared to a planet like the Earth) but in lieu of any understanding of how that could even be possible, the only reasonable conclusion would be to say that any E.T. craft would have to have a limited life cycle due to inevitable radiation contamination of the hull by interstellar space.

3) Relativity
Assuming for the purposes of this article that the E.T.s do not use a wormhole or other extremely hypothetical means of space travel, the only way to get anywhere in the Galaxy would involve going at least 99.9% the speed of light. This requires enormous energy to accomplish akin to using the energy of the biggest hydrogen bombs made constantly just to keep a very small craft moving at that rate. But more troubling, General Relativity clearly explains that when you travel that fast, time for you relative to everyone else moves much, much slower. So a civilization doing this would have to be able to deal with a mission lasting 500 or 1,000 or 10,000 years of home planet time versus a few years or decades of ship time during the space travel. How this could be done is very, very hard to imagine. How long has any human civilization lasted? Even if a human civilization lasted 1,000 years like Ancient Rome or Ancient Egypt, how would one continue an entity or organization or government in a continuous form for that long in good enough working order that by the time the mission returned home someone would be living who knew what was going on and what the mission was?

These three items form a very good basis to think critically about the E.T. issue and use some logic regarding it rather than continuing to refer to "they can do anything because they're no doubt so advanced" even when we do have enough science to understand that not everything is possible. No doubt there are still ways in which E.T. could do these fantastic missions, but the way thus far any supposed evidence has been presented and accounts given, it just doesn't seem credible or like a matter where someone has a whole new level of insight. Instead it seems like E.T. supporters want you to completely abandon your own judgment in order to believe their story and that is perhaps more troubling than whether or not E.T. exists.

An Educational Moment of Clarity

2010-07-26T16:24:00.000-07:00

Moment of inspiration: "Education", whether in classic arts or mathematics or languages, is neither a capitalist enterprise nor a communist exercise, education predates those "isms" by thousands of years and is what makes everything else in civilization - and civilization itself - possible. That you can, for the expense of an amount of money, access practically any type of education whether physical, artistic, academic or theoretical is nothing short of a miracle...it took practically all of human history to sort out how to do education in an effective, repeatable and accessible way.

What Do Employers Need?

2010-07-25T16:32:00.000-07:00

You are an employer, about to hire a new employee. What is it that you want from him or her? Surely it is this: the sincere desire to understand what it is that makes money for your company, and the willpower to master whatever unique skills or processes or concepts make that happen. Perhaps this seems simple, but then if a company doesn't make more money than it spends, it does not exist - it is really that simple.

This knee-jerk reaction to the notion of making money as being really and truly the only necessary thing that has to happen in an economy is really based on ignorance. Ignorance of the reality that if money is not made, then the only two possible life situations are being on a permanent charity whether government or religious or local, or death by starvation. Either situation results in you being completely unable to have any say in your future.

Moreover, the ever increasing amount of time, energy and money that is consumed in the endless debate about how much of this money making Government is entitled to take from everyone and what the proper or mannerly level of profit should be for companies completely distracts from the other deadly reality all employers know: it is incredibly hard to make money regardless of how much "help" (or hindrance) Government puts in the way for the sake of "fairness". Now, just what this "fairness" means is so politically charged with Machiavellian expedience that it is really more properly called a Trojan Horse to entrap everyone in debating and thinking about profit and money and work in general in terms the Government sets forth, which has nothing to do with the reality of it. Forget about fair, here's what every employer has to do every month:

Pay all loans
Pay all utilities
Pay all insurances (property, liability, health)
Pay all employees
Buy all needed supplies
Pay all advertising methods (or no one knows to use your business)
Pay all payroll taxes (FICA share that has to come from employer not just you)
Pay or set aside funds for all other taxes whether sales or income or property
Pay any legal costs from any legal actions whether settled or on-going

Do you see anywhere in that list where it says to actually figure out how to close sales or move more items or close on new clients?

It is more than hard enough already to find or figure out how to make money - and employers deserve not our sympathy, and not our "mercy" - they deserve our respect and yes, even some loyalty.

Baha'i Faith Realizes Racial Unity

2010-07-11T12:14:00.000-07:00

July 11th, 2010

Kansas City, Missouri

With the systematic approach to teaching that encompasses a non-confrontational, informative and inclusive approach, the Baha'i Faith has succeeded in bringing a degree of racial unity into practice that has never existed elsewhere in society.

All over the United States, teaching groups that almost invariably include men and women working together who are also very often of both white or black or middle-eastern or asian descent, Baha'i teaching campaigns demonstrate both sexual and racial equality in living effort for a common purpose, which is in itself a goal very worthy of achieving for the sake of humanity.

The next public teaching effort will be started on Sunday July 25th all across the Kansas City, Missouri area so whether or not you are inquiring into religious beliefs, one can still appreciate what this vision of all humanity working together can look and feel like. How many problems of the world would just stop if this mode of operating were to become normal?

Social Security and Social Justice

2010-05-20T15:53:00.000-07:00

Oh boy, here comes pure controversy. So there are not quite 58,297,000 people getting Social Security benefits as of April 2010. The 2011 annual budget for Social Security is $11,985,000,000 but the government will actually spend ~$800,000,000,000 on it. This equates to a YEARLY benefit of $13,723 per person. The average Social Security yearly benefit is closer to $8,000 - where is all the rest of that money going? Even better, each American who pays FICA (about 75,000,000 of them as near as anyone can tell) owes $10,666 yearly to pay for it. Is it just me or is this a horribly Ruth Goldberg way to go about it? Even better the government re-taxes the benefit to, you guessed it, make more payments through it. Come again? How's about cut all this nonesense out altogether and let everyone invest - yes, invest it - because on the "long term" that Social Security is supposed to be for, even now the stock market is exponentially higher than it was 30 years ago whereas each dollar's purchasing power - the value of social security - has gone down by nearly 40%. Does anyone really think this is a particularly good idea? My mother was on SSA and so was my grandmother so don't give me heart achy arguments, give me some logic here people that explains how this can possibly work even 20 years from now with the established trends of dollar parity & purchase power decline vs stock market exponential rise.

Carmen 2001: Grand Jetes Entournant by Matthew Reinschmidt

2010-04-25T18:40:00.000-07:00

Here I go, Carmen is a blast of a ballet to perform!

Cinderella 2007 Prince and Friend Pas

2010-04-25T07:45:00.001-07:00

Wayward Daughter (La Fille mal gardee) Simone's Clog Dance

2010-04-25T07:43:00.001-07:00

Nutcracker Grand Pas de Deux from School Tour 2009

2010-04-25T07:40:00.000-07:00

Baha'i Faith: My Journey to Salvation

2010-03-28T14:24:00.000-07:00

As I have journeyed through my life and encountered the loss, trajedy, and personal challenges which can overwhelm and convince that there is no God and no point to anything, the one element of my choosing - or the one thing I pursued that has turned out be beyond any value definition - and that has guided me and let me die to myself and yet be reborn amid the hardships, challenges, and terrors this modern world shells out has been the call of my Lord, Baha'u'llah and the Baha'i Faith. The profound power of the Holy Spirit coursing through the Writings and Prayers that Baha'u'llah revealed can deal with the most invasive, stressful, worrying or depressing challenges and lead you to a new horizon, and a new reality of understanding.
As surely as I have felt the winter wind and the spring rain, I have felt this Power in my life during all the times that things have just managed to work out in the right way, and in the subtle call always there that hearkens one to gain ever deeper understandings of how things actually are - indeed I have come to realize that the Lord Baha'u'llah knows me and everyone seeking His Guidance and remembers us. I am nothing special, yet this Spirit, this Essence that transcends, well, everything, has the infinite capacity to bother itself to help anyone seeking to do right in life and be of value to one's fellow man.
How can you partake of this Call? You have to be willing to let the 'you' that now exists to die away. Not 'you' the personality, but 'you' the set of desires, certainties and wants that you think are just dead-on. This won't happen over night, it takes perhaps a few years - but your insights slowly change, your sense of belonging to something truly profound grows, your basic take on everything shifts away from the present xenophobic materialism or radical anti-religion that defines happiness as 'he who dies with the most toys wins' and instead you become aware that there are millions of people in this world that worship humility and service and strive with everything they have to improve the world of man for the sake of one's fellow man and not to make the next mega-fortune or to be the next Senator. This alone causes you to change your thinking away from the din of politics, away from the sickophantic inanity of hollywood and pop-culture. Through the eternity of time the only decision that matters is whether or not you choose to be re-born by the Lord of the Age and then to serve His institution, the Baha'i Faith. My reason for writing this is not to patronize or preach to you, it is because I feel 100% after all that I have gone through that this is the best thing for you to do, even better than going organic and getting enough exercise

http://www.bahai.us

Baha'i Faith - Why I Became Baha'i

2010-03-26T18:14:00.000-07:00

I can best summarize why I became a Baha'i in one sentence:

The return of Jesus Christ Himself, just as Daniel, Isiah and St John/Revelations predicted so many thousands of years ago. And while I do know the Biblical prophecies and how to justify it there is something else that goes with such a decision that cannot be expressed in words anymore than words could ever have captured the true essence of Jesus: you feel it is right in your very soul.

And heck, what isn't there to absolutely love about this Faith? Extreme diversity of every race, creed, economic status, you name it. I know a lot of you people out there in the blogosphere rail against anything that is organized or systematized at all and prefer to say "I don't need any of that between me and God" but for me that is a nonsense argument - show me one thing in life at all that works well without any planning or structure. Seriously, name one! No? That is because nothing in life works at all without some type of organization - your business, your studies, doing your laundry, everything requires at least some level of organization and in some cases a good degree of organization and I think, to be frank, Religion is something totally beyond a stream of consciousness or fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants "Han Solo" approach. We are talking about your eternal, everlasting relationship with the Almighty here AND, hopefully, building of a community that can sustain you through not just your adolescent or young adult inquiries into existence but also through births, deaths, marriage, support during those later times in your life when you won't be so sure of what it is you know for sure right now, all of it. In that regard the Baha'i Faith is light years beyond my experience with other Faith communities - I do not name them here because unlike many on the internet who cannot behave themselves, I am not interested in criticising or negativity towards anything, I am only interested in promoting what I think is by far the best thing ever.

Should any of this convince you? Heck no! You my friend need to go on the internet and use the seeker reponse system at http://www.bahai.us - find out for yourself if this marvelous Religion is for you.

Oh, and my advice to you is this: ignore anyone around you who negates your seeking or tells you to ignore or steer clear of 'those Baha'is' because someday, and maybe someday soon, they will all be gone either moved out of town or dead - yes, that will happen to all of us - and this will leave you hanging out there having still not made any progress in satisfying that persistent spark, that ever present needle in your consciousness telling you something truly profound is waiting out here for you if only you could find it. Trust me my friend, you can find nothing more profound than this Faith which knows no limits to mystical debth, spiritual power, and practical planning to re-organize and re-juvenate all of humanity for the next thousand years. All you need to do is 'click'!

Probabilities

2010-03-17T22:03:00.000-07:00

You are more likely to get mauled by a grizzly bear and a polar bear on the same day than you are to win a powerball lottery.

Climate science uses statistical analysis in the application of data to construct climate models. The amount of atmospheric CO2 of concern is .3%. The best statistic matrices have errors of at least .8% up to 3.5%. Finding a .3% result where the error rate is 2 to 10 times greater than the wanted detection is just as likely as that powerball jackpot so better get that bear repellant.

If you do the same thing twice but expect 2 different results you are guaranteed a 100% failure rate.

100% sure that this post ends here.

God Has Free Will Too

2010-02-10T20:31:00.000-08:00

We humans often complain that if God is there and loves us, or if He exists at all and is some type of all-powerful Entity, why doesn't He answer our prayers and, more appropriately, prevent all the horrors we cause our selves? To which the answer comes, fairly believably, that if we have free-will (which certainly seems to be as close to a universally accepted value as any we can find) then we can't be subjected to miraculous interventions on a constant or even semi-regular basis less this free-will be crushed and we become akin to a mindless zombie the real tragedy of which wouldn't be that all our horrors stopped (obviously no bad thing) but that we stop all advancement and progress in lieu of the next anticipated Divine Bailout.

But this concept, this notion that our free will really couldn't survive detectable Divine Interventions goes the other way, too: God obviously has a free-will of His own being the intelligent Super Being that He is. Therefore, we are just silly to expect we could somehow master, convince, goad, con or in any way persuade Him to do our bidding because let's face it, practically everything that goes wrong on Earth including this ridiculous and awful recession, are caused directly by us. Quite possibly the fact that things come back to some kind of normal and tend to run along most of the time OK could be the very sign that God is in fact involved in our affairs and also that we are so incredibly good at jacking everything up we simply can't detect consciously this constant "return to neutral" intervention.

Salute To My Forebearers

2010-01-24T09:44:00.000-08:00

There is no stopping time.

My father was an honorable man, should have been a Medieval Knight. He and George S Patton equally out of time, the 20th century was a horror to him on the Korean Peninsula. A very strong athlete, he felled trees at 65, raced the 1650 as a swimmer when young, but diabetes beat him at 69. He was a noble example of restraint, moderation, and the try-best-you-can pursuit of the known, the allowed, and the "forbidden" beyond. Daniel, Revelation, St John, Martin Luther - and especially Volt, Ohm, Ampere, Tesla and Oppenheimer were his mentors. The profound non-existence yet power of electricity, circuitry, and EM communications were for him like reading a menu at Applebee's for me. A genius in these areas he quite likely was, even an owner of patents. Ever try creating a totally new version of the internal combustion engine? A Sterling Cycle sodium cooled V-8 was something he cooked up in his spare time. I like to think some of the forbidden beyond is now known to him.

My mother, a dedicated non-conformist, allowed me paths most mothers never take the time to bother with. Ballet at 4, Swimming at 6, and bad allergies cured by going stone cold hard-core organic. Allergy shots suck - to heck with this type of modern medicine - farm fresh milk rules. Montressori School, Catholic School, all done with the view of limitless horizons. The stress nearly killed me but I know what she meant by it and I can't help it, I love her for it. Yet the fatal flaw was exercise. A twisted ankle at around 37, she went deadly sedentary but never knew. Alzheimer's, that damned disease, picked her off without her ever knowing it. I miss my mother and know better not to work out. Dropping dead of a heart attack is easy - play with Alzheimer's if you really think you're brave. And while I thought I was a true anomaly in the Brady line she kept a secret, her dad, mom and aunt were traveling thespians in their spare time back in the day in the lost world of Middle Missouri. I do not wander alone!

There is no stopping time.

And now I feel the detachment, I can imagine the end - I will end, at least here, and just as my father and mother before me nothing will be left behind. We think on such a small scale - in 50 years no one remembers anyone no matter the size of the family or the guilded oil painting on the wall. We live here for a while but eternity is our destiny. If I live for that then my parents have done well and all is well. The enormity of time is a bottomless bungee jump and we are trying to crawl down the rope we brought with us. Eventually you have to let go or better still, jump. Don't worry about hitting the bottom, the truth is there isn't one. Honestly if you were in the beyond and knew the ride is such a rush would you bother to try and soothe the fears of all us Freshmen who keep being freaked by what we have no control over? Credit ratings, stock holdings, "status" - see if those matter in the endless free fall.

There is no stopping time, I'm ready to jump so let's go! The show must go on.

Eternity's soft madness

2010-01-10T20:42:00.000-08:00

Why not live forever if we could? All our perceptions of what the biggest problems are retain a very comfortable smallness with the complete certainty that no one can deal with any of them for more than a century. Eliminate this smallness and what's left, millennia or eons where the sky changes, the mountains fall and oceans shift? What is there to grasp onto if time is the only concern? Controlling life and death solves none of the problem that necessitates them: the ungraspable void of the expanse of time. Any mind possessed of the ability to never die would have to be able to confront an enormity terrifying in it's ability to make entire life systems silent and inaudible. Perhaps life itself knows of this and so refuses to allow anything alive to become aware of it; evolution is the life force left to push against the diamond-crushing weight of a non-limit. If we were to become capable of confronting the reality of forever a soft madness would be our destiny - could we remember everything?

Children, Don't Botox Your Brain

2009-11-27T09:41:00.000-08:00

November 27th, 2009

During the past few years a distinct difference has emerged in nearly all children we see in our educational organization that amounts to a fundamentally new trend:

Lack of the ability to make inferences or to "connect the dots".

It has become clear furthermore that even a basic introduction to philosophy, at any level, is just not coming through primary and most secondary education leaving nearly all students of whatever socio-economic background equally incapable of dealing with life if thought is required. This level playing field is hopefully not what education and educators have hoped to create, but with all the emphasis on technical learning and specialization the whole point of education as such has been lost: the ability to creatively think, or to keep it on the simplest terms, the ability to just think.

This obsession with becoming a human-robot-terminator-type entity with the ability to instantly make a correct decision based on fancy data originating from the cyberworld (mostly) is creating the quintessential zombie generation not able to perceive just how precious the very limited time on earth we all have is, and equally unaware that maturation and the eventual lack of youth (gasp) IS going to happen and the challenge of life is not to try and prop up the sketchy useless years of youth with endless chemical invasions or plastification via laser and scalpel, but to find the internal wherewithal to converse with the vastness of the world, understand what where and when, and then make the essential human contribution to existence - formulate an idea of what it all means. If one wants to be a very dangerous person poetics might be introduced.

Having gone far past the normal quaint stereotype that thinking deep thoughts is odd or only something a character like that Socrates guy did thousands of years ago in the age of eternal toga parties, we are now faced with an entire generation that doesn't know what meaning means. Existence is analog which means ceaseless alteration, evolution, adaptation, variability in the extreme, and all the delicious grayscale of love platonic and romantic. It might even include the religious notion of wondering what happens beyond the end and even the notion of wonderment at the marvel of just being alive. Modern education is trying very hard, deliberately or accidentally, to create students of the certain who are masters of the multiple choice exam but more importantly masters of subjects that have all been far too neatly packaged for mere consumption followed by excrementation upon useless and endless exams letting today's educational proctologists examine if the pre-determined digestion has happened and then, repeat the whole process with the next subject ready for neat consumption. Inference of meaning? Application of wonder at what has been revealed? Quaint side effects only good if ignored especially if it leads to the cancer of asking why, best left alone.

The solution? A bold voyage like Marco Polo out into the once known but now mysterious ancient land known as thinking. Dare we even call it Philosophy? How about anti-cave dwelling sexual equality insurance? Or do we want to remain semi drowned in the vanilla concentrate ocean that is this youth obsessed, appearance obsessed, boringly shallow and iron-maidened situation that while possessed of the physical freedom to make any lustful gymnastic maneuver whenever desired cannot grasp the simple and most powerful fact never in the news: we are all alive, for a little while. None of us created this existence or know from whence it came - and the way to improve your quality of life is not through perfect silicone or flawless botox, but rather with what your mind can glean from the universe that created you and will, no matter what, again destroy you. When you do die, or when oblivion taps you on the shoulder more to the point, will your perfect breasts or botoxed face matter to you or be of any use or comfort? Insuring your implants does not grant you sexual equality but you might be able to use them for flotation if your plane lands in the Hudson...if you think about that, at least you are thinking now so maybe the implants were worth it after all.

Horse Pasture Space Available at Reinschmidt Stables

2009-10-20T13:30:00.000-07:00

October 20, 2009

Reinschmidt Stables

Horse pasture space is available on 40 acres of land already bisected into basically 20 acre areas ready for horses to habitate.

Excellent grass quality, fresh water on site, fully fenced, and a very convenient location right on A-Highway almost exactly 4 miles north of Roger's Sporting Goods or 3.5 miles Southwest of Kearney, MO

The exact location of the stables is:

13920 A Highway
Liberty MO 64068

Call 816-734-3969 for details

Rates begin around $130 per month for pasture of one horse

NEWS FLASH: IRAN WINS BIGGEST BASTARD AWARD

2009-10-18T09:24:00.000-07:00

October 18, 2009

The Biggest Bastard Award ("BBA") for 2009 now has a clear winner, having beaten out other contenders living in areas such as the "O.C.", the tumultuous Texas/Mexico border, somewhere in Brooklyn NY, and even in Moscow or Damascus.

The undisputed champions of bastardism now clearly reside in Tehran, Iran marking a major geopolitical shift away from the traditional champions in the Far East and Russian Plains.

Only a true bastard-master could come up with such dastardly behavior as imprisoning 7 housewives and husbands all of middle age or older for teaching children who otherwise hardly read or write; operating charity operations to tend to the destitute; and in general providing the benefits of the civilized to the supposed members of whatever community the Iranian Government allows to function in between goat orgy sessions. (Cruelty to animals was not a qualifier for the BBA this year.) What really seals this award to the Iranians is that the charges themselves find fault with mothering, housewifery, charity, and roll them all up in the all-time winner for the worst open ended Machiavellian trump charge: 'spreading corruption upon the earth'. As if Iran wants to take upon itself the task of absorbing all corruption in the world - although in actuality Iran is among the rarefied super-corrupt along with western China, Bangladesh, and the Congo. (No offense Congo...)

This beautiful status of being so corrupted that Iran perceives charity and teaching as evil but incarceration and torture as worthy is a truly awesome example of a complete loss of reality, another pre-requisite in the Biggest Bastard Award carefully looked at by the awards committee.

For this absolutely stunning demonstration of the mastery of bastardism, it is with great pleasure that the BBA (Biggest Bastard Award) for 2009 goes hands-down to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Good job, boys!

Why Football is Stupid

2009-10-07T17:31:00.002-07:00

For those of us toiling in obscurity facing ever decreasing or just non existant budgets yearning to bring and give the magic and universal positive benefit of arts education to students, why should we give respect or concern any longer to athletic programs in general and football in particular?

All that has happened for 25+ years is ever expanding money pools filling for youth sports serving only to advance sports marketing and sales while at the same time bold face lies that money can't be found for music or dance or drama - but God forbid we cut the athletic department!

There is no future in any of this, you have the same chance of going pro as getting hit by lightning. And the benefit of sports? That's easy: broken joints, torn ligaments, crippled adults, concussions, risks of Alzheimer's, sudden death in practice, glorification of gang life and thuggery with blind endorsements of athletic felons, on and on.

The assumption that arts educators can just keep struggling with no reward, barely any pay, and no budget is the same level of stupidity as wanting something for nothing. You actually just get nothing, despite all the hand-wringing.

It is a huge mistake to perennially fund athletics near 100% and to ignore everything else - that is exactly the attitude a stereotypical meat-headed lineman would take, at least the ones I have met.

I say to hell with football and athletics departments and all their backers. Anyone who has marveled at fully scholarshipped college "stars" getting in bar fights over ignorant issues or wonder how convicted gun crime or dog fight felons manage to keep multi-million dollar paychecks is thinking this, I am just giving word to it.

But then they kind of won the war in the end: there is now no 'arts' of any scale to balance athletics, so the Neanderthalian mental state of the standard tied-end or center need not be challenged. Use their mind and body in a non-linear fashion? Oh no, we can't have that. So this is also the epitaph of the arts: go suck an egg, coach.

You lot can now enjoy the world free of pesky, geeky arts people asking 'why'. Hopefully you won't feel the need to understand meaning in life because without the arts, all you have is the game. Of course you can only play the game while you're young so good luck with old age - oh I forgot, you're immortal.

Hopefully you never tire of chasing that ball or dare to seek a beyond, the arts can't help you anymore with that because you have killed them. Oh wait, Hollywood can take care of that, never mind everything is perfect and no harm done, don't trouble yourself.

Wait, some good news about all this: the increasing cost and underperformance of public schools is most definitely not the fault of the arts, the arts budgets (where they still exist) are now at practically zero and their staff are a tiny reducing fraction of the overall cost of any school. I wonder what would happen to public school performance if that trend were finally and strongly reversed?

Christ Returns, Armageddon and Rapture Already

2009-10-07T17:31:00.001-07:00

As the world continues to spiral into a future increasingly likely - indeed certain - to add more teachnology, more epic social integration, more global trade and basically creating a civilization so radically different in standards, "norms" and day-to-day tasks the question must be asked:

Did the Return and the End of Days already happen or will it never happen?

As the world speeds towards a status increasingly approaching an unrecognizable state from what could be gleaned in Revelation, have we missed something huge or is Revelation completely cryptic and now useless?

With a view that is scientifically and common-sense compatible consider the following idea and hypothesis:

On a time scale just beyond a lifetime, around 130 years, look at what happened between 1863 and 1988. This period of time took humanity from the Civil War and the dawn of Marxism in Europe through the electric light, radio, automobiles, airplanes, medical breakthroughs galore, the birth of computers, atomic energy & bombs, spaceflight, and then the early stages of the Internet plus 3 world wars if one includes the extreme economic cost and also mortality of the Cold War along with WW 1 and WW 2.

This is a staggering change unlike any other period or even age of the world. And it continues to accelerate regardless of Boom or Recession. Truly stupendous.

It must be stated then that far from waiting for the Rapture, embracing all humanity and global change is the afterlife of what came before and all those old imperial ideas are the dead never to be resurrected.

This would mean Christ has already come and gone - a mega event Religiously and Historically. The signs of epic History are all around us. The Religious sign? Only one fits the bill: Baha'u'llah and the Baha'i Faith. Check into it yourself...

http://www.us.bahai.org

Difficulties of Going Green - Hyperbole

2009-09-23T11:51:00.000-07:00

September 23, 2009

Amidst the current economic recession wipeout, and actually a few years prior to it happening, we had planned on creating and operating a green or "off the grid" place of business in a more rural setting knowing that staying outside of city limits greatly facilitates the infrastructure needed to minimize or eliminate the grid. We began researching how to get off the grid over 3 years ago in late 2005 and have since come to view with serious suspicion the current so-called environmental movement.

Why? It is literally ILLEGAL to go green - and no one was more surprised or upset than we were.

Item 1:
In order to mount a windmill generator on one's property - neighboors agreeing to it aside, and hopefully no NIMBY lawsuits - the power utilities require a type of insurance rider that NO insurance company is able to carry in Missouri BY LAW!

Item 2:
Solar arrays are not available in any configuration beyond a glorified hot water heater type set up or for powering a TV - the parts and pieces are either not for sale in Missouri or are again simply illegal to sell in Missouri, we are not sure but there just isn't anything solar of any good scale availble in this state that we can tell.

Item 3:
It does seem to be possible to go green with regard to water and sewage if you are lucky enough to find a property with good water well potential - until the latest regulations for county land specify a type of laterals septic system that obliterates any value or environmental impact of otherwise going green on the water system. Going green here just really won't matter.

So practically speaking it is just not possible or even legal to go green, at least in Missouri. Which means the only genuinely viable way to do anything about the state of our oil addiction is to advocate for nuclear, natural gas and coal powered electricity production. Any other fashionable mode of green is just hyperbole suitable for coffee shop discussion but otherwise completely and literally illegal - and therefore impossible - to do.

This is so Mickey Mouse, the only thing better is the Sierra Club lawsuit in California to block a solar power array being built in the desert. You can't make this stuff up. But since it is apparent to us now that the powers that be have completely blocked the public's ability to minimize oil use while at the same time criticizing the public for increasing energy use a classic power grab scenario is all that the green movement amounts to: you think they are solving your problems for you, and that the problem is severe, but in reality THEY ARE THE REASON WHY WE CAN'T SOLVE THE PROBLEM BY MAKING ANY EFFORT TO CONFRONT IT ILLEGAL IN SOME WAY. Home wind generators are the only effective type of green energy currently out there for knocking a dent in oil use and so long as it is illegal to install these even in rural areas due to this insurance regulation baloney, the legitimacy of the green movement is very seriously tarnished in our view. You can't state how to solve a problem while at the same time blocking the solution with regulations and meanwhile finding ways to over regulate and control the existing energy supply unless all you really want is 19th century type absolute power. How very disappointing in the 21st century.

Nuclear Fission Is The Only Option, For Now

2009-09-21T15:24:00.000-07:00

September 21, 2009

We need more power, and we need it now. And yes, it needs to be 24/7 not peak output in perfect weather.

It has come to the point that all industrialized nations - especially ones as large as the United States which still supports a very large manufacturing base with or without GM - have started looking to alternate energy supplies for the future. The simple reality is, however, that no viable alternative currently exists to fossil fuels. The scale needed to adequately supply even current needs from industry to homes to emergency services dwarfs all combined wind and solar units in operation and planned for the near future.

But there is one alternative: Nuclear Fission. Yes, Nuclear Fission. Why is it an alternative? Three factors:

1) Scalability into the multiple megawatt range per facility is already proven - and this is a 24 hour, 7 day a week output not subject to weather conditions or bird strikes.

2) Sustainability for the long run is already proven - enough nuclear fissile material exists in the world to sustain a robust nuclear fission reactor array for dozens of decades if not longer just based on current geological data

3) Safety is already proven. Yes, safety and nuclear fission DO go hand in hand. ZERO emissions of any kind, established technology which makes a 3 mile island meltdown incident impossible (and even then 3 mile island didn't kill a single person, as opposed to Chernobyl which was built with poor standards and worse oversight) and the containment of spent fuel is now so robust it would literally take a nuclear bomb blast to compromise the storage coffins and devices which, let's be real, at that point means we'd all have much bigger problems to deal with than a spent uranium fuel problem.

As the United States shifts, indeed rushes to embrace, hybrid and pure electric type vehicle options as well as public transit not powered by oil, a robust building program for nuclear fission power plants could be a major lever to use against our oil addiction and would be completely free of the Mickey Mouse factor associated with wind and solar: what the weather might be doing that day. Any protest of the safety issues surrounding nuclear fission might sound like real concerns but the practical reality shows that these concerns are not founded and indeed are only in the way of the greater public good.

Or, we could all install giant gerbil wheels and hook up a dynamo to them in our basements, that would work to go green and solve our obesity problem...

What Are You Paying For?

2009-09-05T09:58:00.000-07:00

If you are paying money to have your child take an activity where at the end of the day all they receive is someone telling them they're the greatest thing ever, then something is terribly wrong.

That is what grand parents are for - you pay to receive that which you cannot provide by your own immediate effort. This REALLY holds true for all things education or learning based such as, for example, BALLET!!!

Learning self-honesty and self-insight is the pinnacle, the summit, the epitome of what and why man ever invented the concept of education and ended the paleolithic era.

"Know thy self" never applied more than it does today.

((What any parent thinks their child learned by taking part in the activity pictured above is completely beyond this author.))

Epiphany

2009-08-23T13:13:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it is best to simply allow the poetic muse to unlock the how.

I know not what others may think but I do know what others do say
and I believe this is not the way;

If believing is even the right word.

Don't worry they say about things like Death, just take it all
day by day
'Cause you know we don't know what's next after this
and that makes perfect sense.

But then they also will say - and dangerous is this - disregard the bother
too heavy to lift what the Prophets have said and even if God exists.

If believing is even the right word.

The inevitable slide we all go down that leads us to where the earth shall
drown
all our sorrows and our very life and make it in short order like
we never had any light - this is why they will say forget about God and just
do your thing, day by day.

The grand design that limits our plight but also prohibits anyone from being
truly a blight. Khan, Caesar, Atila the Hun, Ramses the Pharaoh or Moses the One;
Hitler, Stalin, those bastards of Rwanda, Kim Jong-Il or Pol Pot and Mugabe. All
have or will gone down to the ground, never again to be around and in short order,
not even a decade or two, will personally be forgotten and perhaps their history too.

Against that they say why should we bother to take up and read about God and wonder
since it all will end but this is the problem - suppose it doesn't end?

If believing is even the right word.

My father blew up from a diabetic shock, 1440 blood sugar will really make you rock. My
mother was stricken by Alzheimer's too, and that damn disease robbed her in lieu of something
like a dignified end.
Reduced to nothing, no mind and no heart, I had to make due with some
faith as a start that what she was really was existing somewhere somehow and should be listening to my pleas and cries and fear and want.

If believing is even the right word.

And all those before who met their end, cancers, car crashes, truly stupid ends and made no matter did it at all whether the person hit by the fall was 79 or 22, that cunning Death cuts all
no matter who.

But what do you do with yourself? What happens to you when you find you have nothing left to say and no one to say it to? Beyond pale and useless at that point seems any focus on just trying to get day to day dreams or pursuing with zest the trinkets of the world that not only you can't take with you but can't even help to curl up the load carried in your mind that with the impossible mass of all the iron of Earth resting on your back makes you look down at where you are at.

What do you see? An impossible machine of a billion reactions any one of which seems to just barely work, and voila you are! Change but a one and you are no longer. We want control and an easy outlook on things and to put ourselves in a nice tidy place free from the strain of knowing just how barely here we really are. The man in the cave 2200 years ago learning from Socrates the original mind show must have concluded at some point that humans are remarkable just that we somehow are. Phantoms in the world and Harry Potter - this is all wrong, even Tolkien might allow. We the living, the supposed real, we are the phantasms fleeting as steam blowing in the wind. Found on Earth which is truly a Garden from Eden, only a constant state to live in allows us to think we are all that.

If believing is even the right word.

20,000 people hacked and tortured in 1857 who dared observe that God works on His own schedule. Follow along and find you will that these were but the first to get caught in our hell. We fight and yell and blow up and scream, make nuclear bombs to humble the knee, all the while the grand illusion is made like the movie Oz with much more pain.

Go for it man, do your thing, harass those people who want all treated the same and maim, torture, disfigure and crush the bodies of those attracted to the Glory of God.

Better yet you can even insult the name of God and try to say you, you barely there bag of reactions, know best for everyone about God.

And those in the Playboy mansion, drunk and unashamed to act like baboons with better make up, take you your measure of satisfaction that no one can prove you wrong and it all makes sense, life is about you because nothing else makes any sense. Or dollars.

But my path I see from all that death around me, and the reality that nothing I do in life changes this fact that my mortal bones go the earth in no time flat. Only suppose that is not truly the end? We discover each day more things in the world than Horatio's philosophy ever did not observe and yet we protest as loud as we can that souls and the next world are just not right, man. Because we know better.

I'll have to say now at the end of this rant that gut instincts tend to be right, statisticians can even show that. So since I know my mind has questions I can't answer with Playboy or genocide or militancy and weapons nor pleasure seeking and glory that Romans knew would not last. I must decide which way to go so that in my own mind I know that I'm not just another passenger on board the Titanic which everyone said no disaster could master.

We all have to ride on board it would seem and do the lifeboats matter? Not so much it would seem. But when the ship goes down as all must and do, more than our science allows might just be what comes next to do. In that case we have two outcomes: knowing we prepared and followed along the sage words and advice from Those who spent everything They had just to lend man a hand. The price They paid from all through the ages gained none of them a thing, except blisters and rages. For just such a purpose as what I have spun, these writings and Religions have all been done to keep us in order and able to see how to contemplate beyond the end that must be because an end in total maybe it's not. The other outcome would be ignorance is bliss - good luck with that, buy a lottery ticket while you're at it.

If believing is even the right word.

My eyes have seen things I could never have dreamed and my horrors are vast, too much it would seem. I gain no rest from anything except the love and words of Writings from Them. Blessed be Them, no way to repay the invaluable thing Religion is really here to say. When you live and see what has to be and how the ends come fast or slow and yet no power have we who can blow up entire mountains with a few grams of stuff to alleviate this shipwreck and keep out of the dust.

I go for the Faith because only It was ever made to show you the way when all the science and stuff and marvelous tech come forth and show they really are the created of those who were created by the Creator. Deny that reality or get bent out of shape that all your tools can't address what I've made abundantly clear in this meaty bit of prose then you'll have no peace or have to live a lie pretending you have answers to the questions that don't die even after you meet your end. Or is it?

If only my iPhone had signal...

Ya-Baha'u'llah-Abha!

No, I'm German-Irish American and Baha'i. Jesus wasn't from Bavaria either.

Experts Agree, This is the Dumbest Thing Ever

2009-07-28T07:49:00.000-07:00

If you have some sort of fundamental right to "healthcare", (but of course you can't have any right to make money, that would be just too unfair...) where then do we guarantee our supply of Doctors from? I for one would look at this chart and head for the hills - no way I would want to go $400k or more into debt and sacrifice 8+ years of my life for all the training in order to have the privilege of dealing with this retarded level of bureaucracy. You can yell and scream about your rghts all you want to, I must acquiesce and let you suffer since you chose the chlorox option for your gene pool. But then I forget, a Neo-Marxon concept of efficiency is how many bureaucrats can touch something before it ever does anything. 100% efficiency is present here, well done Nancy. Perhaps things got out of control with Neo-Cons in charge, but with Neo-Marxons in charge nothing can even move. Life is vibration and motion, not constriction and suffocation - that would be like living on Io. I prefer Earth. So should you.

P.S. If you actually did vote for this, please don't read my blog. I start feeling strange in a very Hegelian way at the thought of one of "you" trying to understand me, because I might rub off on you lessening my mojo.

Gangs are Enemies of the State. Cool, right?

2009-07-24T09:05:00.000-07:00

July 24th, 2009

This is the unsolvable problem about Gangs: they are Gangs.

All social contracts every other citizen operates under are null and void to Gang culture; everything from economic models to the very concept of criminal justice are simply meaningless to Gang members and are not adhered to. The consequences for behavior derived by the rest of society are meaningless to them as well.

The only solution to this problem is one of condemning Gangs as an enemy of the state set for irradication; obliterate their ability to raise money by either killing or imprisioning all drug middle men and the cartels themselves; and hold other members of society blameless for whatever actions are taken against Gang members singularly or in groups.

MS-13, Latin Kings, Bloods, Crypts, Aryan Nation - any and all organized Gangs exist solely to subvert and corrupt the State so as to guarantee Gang dominance and survival. This constitutes a State-within-a-State situation explicitly forbidden by the Constitution and impossible to sustain in real life because it creates a de-facto two-tiered Justice system: those who are not in the Gang and therefore subject to the rule of law and able to be controlled by law enforcement, and those who are in the Gang and therefore not subject to the rule of law and able to be controlled by law enforcement due to equivalent or superior violence and firepower, at least when confronting law enforcement.

The right to keep and bear arms comes in to play here: as prevalent as Gangs are, they are outnumbered immensely by the general population that wants nothing to do with their culture of crime, corruption and violence. All citizens have a right to bear arms, and states have the right to keep and deploy the militia. It is approaching the point where the State will have to decide if it wants to maintain control over it's urban population centers; if it does, deployment of the militia of the second amendment will have to be carried out.

There is no such thing as rights or law within a Gang, it is all built upon might making right. If we choose to let this go unchallenged as a society then we forfeit everything gained since the Magna Carta of 1215. Since millions of lives have been lost in the maintaining of freedom from oppressors, persecutors, and brutality in general, our present course of inaction letting Gangs run virtually unopposed in our urban centers (and indeed any population center of sufficient size) is very definietely not cool.

Hizb ut-Tahrir Beer Hall Peutch of 2009

2009-07-19T08:37:00.000-07:00

July 19, 2009

Would the Leadership of this country please wake up.

In the same week as the brew-ha-ha over a CIA program to seek and destroy Al Qaeda operatives - which never got implemented and therefore did not meet the reporting requirement the CIA operates under - reaches fever pitch and the Congress is considering ever so wisely whether or not the CIA lies to them, Hizb ut-Tahrir holds a public conference in Chicago titled "The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Islam".

You can't make this stuff up.

A group that has been banned in many countries of the Middle East (yes, the Middle East has even banned this group) holds a conference in our Second City all about their imperative to impose Sharia law on everyone.

And, in the guise of controlling so-called "hate speech", a measure is about to be voted on in Congress that would make it possible for Hizb ut-Tahrir to sue anyone including yours truly should we dare to be critical towards Sharia law, or anything to do with Islam.

Free speech is regulated by the open and unrestrained dissimination of ideas and by others who, also exercising free speech, counter back in the realm of ideas. Free speech that leads to or is in support of actual efforts to subvert or destroy the country is not protected speech but under this Congress and this Administration the tables are going to be turned on this. This author cannot understand how (espeically if the Supreme Court is now attempting to be open to what European or other courts have said as a source of new ideas) this country tolerates the operation of Hizb ut-Tahrir when it is banned not only in the Middle East but in several European countries precisely because it is a front door to subversion and treason towards any non-sharia nation.

I seek to remain a political atheist and I subscribe to what the Roman Cincinatus did in his political life: you get elected to accomplish a goal or a mission and then, when this is done, you hang it up and go back to the farm. That being said elections have consequences and I would like to think that the vast majority of people who voted in 2008 did not have this type of beyond surreal political and social fatalism theater in mind. If you did, please don't read my blog.

As someone who has seen first-hand the sociological damage abusive parents cause to children and abusive spouses cause each other I am left with the only conclusion possible to a mind loyal to logic and what repeat experience clearly indicates: Sharia law, by way of it's literally mideival prescriptions for husands physically disciplining everyone in the family, is not an Islamic code (Mohammed never wrote about such things in the Koran, READ IT YOURSELF!) but is rather a completely Satanic fallacy expertly designed by despots centuries ago to convice of the greatest con by Satan: that evil forces don't actually exist.

Sharia law is the antithesis to the Arthurian concept:
might does not make right

Sharia law forces might to be right by creating a totalitarian regime ruled by a very few elite who cannot be questioned because of the sanction that to question the state is an insult to Islam and to God and so requires you to be murdered. This is joining partners with God on an epic scale.

Might I suggest then that Congress stop the machiavellian blame-storming session using the CIA as everyone's call girl for a grotesque gang-bang orgy of self-righteous pronostication and instead get on with the deadly business of protecting this country from mortal, deadly threats like Hizb ut-Tahrir who will, as soon as we think they aren't a threat, shove a sharia law grenade right down our throats with the pin pulled and then laugh at us as we run desperately to the hospital, outraged that we have been murdered, before being turned into a red cloud misting the pavement.

All I can say is that, without losing political neutrality by declaring a party affiliation, I will never be able to vote Democrat ever again on a national level after this week. What a cosmic joke we have become. Hitler would be proud. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin especially (since he was a publisher of ideas) would be most annoyed at us right now. And, I don't think this is what Dr Martin Luther King Jr had in mind, there is no non-violence in Sharia law; for a Sharia economy to work somebody has to be getting beaten, tortured or killed otherwise there is no credibility for the state.

With the imposition of an equal opportunity of torture and death for the crime of using the mind we will finally have become a truly equal society if Hizb ut-Tahrir gets their way, and if we help them along in their endeavor do we score karma points with murphy's law?

On the other hand, if there was ever a proof of the truth that those who, with the loudest screaming and yelling, champion the cause of equality are really seeking to put all the power in as few hands as possible and take all power away from everyone else including you, this is it. What Marx couldn't do with atheism Islamic Fundamentalists have done with Islam, now that is truly impressively scary. But then we all want to be judged by a panel of old gangsters for everything we do in life.

Right to Healthcare Must Accompany Right to Freedom From Bankruptcy

2009-07-17T12:08:00.000-07:00

July 17, 2009

It has emerged that the House of Representatives Healthcare Plan violates a basic law of economics, supply and demand, with regard to prescriptions and coverage for painkillers. Specifically, the cost savings model proposed would curtail costs by cutting back on usage of, for example, Tylenol III based on the recommendations of a National Oversight Board or Board of Experts. This way the system avoids covering the costs of giving out or "through-putting" the pill or prescription. The problem is that, while this method may alleviate some patient costs as such, the unit cost for the pill or prescription will skyrocket due to lack of usage and therefore lower sales.

This method of cost-cutting then is really nothing more than sales control and will lead to, on the one hand, pateint frustration at not being given a product that quite possibly both the patient and the patient's doctor think needed and on the other hand, generate enormous unit cost increases for all prescribable medicines stemming from an artificial cap being imposed by a 3rd layer of rules the only goal of which is cost reduction, NOT efficiency of use.

In many ways this parallels the major flaw in the CO2 cap-and-trade scheme whereby the assumption of high taxes and/or permit costs based on production of CO2 limits will cause consumers to use less energy thereby lowering CO2 output but in reality the only analytic certainty of cap-and-trade is higher unit cost of energy with no assistance provided regarding finding ways to actually use less energy. If consumers have to use less energy due to lack of money to pay for it, the unit cost of energy will rise because fewer units are being sold, which after the initial demand reduction shock that lowers prices will lead to a price/use barrier where producers must charge high rates per unit compared to non cap-and-trade because their margins must be met in order to stay solvent.

It may be the case that to really afford all these initiatives Congress will have to extend by legal binding right the right to not go bankrupt thereby voiding the value of all money and solving all these fundamental contradictions destined to implode normal economic models as we know them.

Gang Growth Directly Caused by Bad Parents

2009-07-02T21:30:00.000-07:00

It can't be a mere coincidence that stories such as the one where a family in Tennessee laughed when they were told their 18 year old son, who had been a gang member for a few years, had been showered by AK-47 bullets and was now dead. Not even a Tennessee Williams play can be as dark as this grim reality.

There is always will be disobedient children; but the staggering growth of gangs all across this country - in the hundreds of thousands to be sure - represent two things: 1) ultra violent, completely counter productive values and no life skills in a staggering number of youth and 2) a total lack of parenting skills which is truly negligent and should be criminal. This kind of negligence is so widespread that it totally outpaces the number of "old fashioned" bad kids and is the progenitor of this awful trend.

A truly marvelous social study would be to survey and observe the relation between the gang members of various areas of the U.S. and the nature of the parent relationship, if any, the gang members have. We have an army of totally lost zombies in the prime of their lifes wasting eternity away on such transigent, non-productive behaviors as drugs and "territory protection" which reduces these human beings with 1,000,000,000 neurons into something no better than insects who guard their own nests but have no grasp of a greater reality. We are human and we know we must die but an appreciation of this eternity where your soul will spend all of it's time is so lacking among these zombie youth that only spiritual starvation induced by neglient parents can explain it. If human children can go bad in such numbers all by themselves then as a species we are preparing to self-destruct and go extinct. But in either case, the ultimate result of gang life is extinction at which point no territory or "respect" matters because you are no more.

It could very well be that to really turn the corner on gang proliferation the parents of these zombie youth need to go to jail themselves and stop having more kids they are just going to ignore and then giggle at when another zombie youth turns him or her into mincemeat with an illegal assult weapon. If you can laugh at that you are truly lost and while you might be a homo sapien, your humanity is very much in doubt.

Evolution

2009-06-26T18:46:00.001-07:00

The hardest thing to understand about evolution and the grand scope of life on earth, and probably life everywhere, is to remove the artificial partition between 'animals' and 'rational animals' and replace it with the notion that the code of life drives all of it. The genetic code is an evolving sequence of instructions capable of taking in feedback from the surrounding environment then creating or modifying (evolving) creatures to best deal with it and the code itself wants to make mulitple pathways forward in time as a survival mechanism. The best way to survive is to not have any one branch of the organism so important that it's loss dooms the whole thing; the genetic code powering all life on earth knew this from the beginning and has seen to it to create multiple pathways to branch myriad organisms. God enters into this discussion, I think, where we see the stunning ability and power of genetic code to carry forward for hundreds of millions of years in so proliffic and in many cases amazing ways - who coded the code?

We do not yet know if other sentient beings existed on this earth, perhaps around 65,000,000 BC, and lost to the destruction of that era, or even before; geologic time is immensely long and dwarfs any human perspective. The argument is also not so much the seemingly paradoxical situation where if "nature" as such creates a creature (humans) that can perceive nature and master it, isn't this like a sculpture waking up and telling Michelangelo what to do? But from the perspective of the never ending quest and power of genetic code down the ages the quest for a being capable of perceiving the code, and where beneficial to evolutionary survival fixing it or using it to best advantage, is in a way the ultimate solution to evolution: the reinforcement of the ultimate traits for survival. Of course, this is no guarantee as creatures 65,000,000 years ago could have reached this same technical ability and then noticed that bright light streak in the sky. Although, today we stand a good chance of seeing that light and trying to do something about it rather than letting it fall on our heads which puts us right back to seeing that the code has succeeded in creating an organism that can deal with everything earth (and the nearby cosmos) can throw at it. Emphasis here is on can people, no guarantee we actually will!

New Classes commercial for Ballet North

2009-06-07T08:20:00.000-07:00

This is the latest video commercial I did for Ballet North featuring Nutcracker School Tour video and referencing the start of new classes:

Fusion is the Ultimate Green

2009-06-01T20:45:00.000-07:00

If we want to get beyond the arguments that go back and forth over oil vs solar vs wind, "dirty" vs "green", non-renewable vs renewable, then fusion power is the only conceivable answer. Now that the laser system at Lawrence Livermore National Labs is functioning at a level to induce nuclear fusion, now is the fork in the road and the turn of the page in history. In fact, in all of history since the beginning: every power source man has ever used was either subject to a zero-sum game such as water power, unavoidable limitations such as wind, and inevitable extinction like oil.

Fusion is the ultimate green because it can be renewed for as long as there is a universe, and since it already happens all over the universe nature as such can deal with it - or more specifically, as a natural function it is compatible with the surrounding universe and world creating practically no radioactive hazards like fission does, and requiring no supply of dangerous materials to make possible.

Now are we serious, or are we just blowing hot air for more windmills?

Government Credibility Not Credible - Ever!

2009-05-30T08:02:00.000-07:00

$564,000 per individual in the United States is now what the current overall Debt of the United States has reached. This according to the May 28th report by USA Today. One has to ask exactly what have we, the supposed beneficiaries of Government's actions especially in the financial arena, gotten for this impossible debt load?

Of this approximately $63 - $68,000,000,000,000 sum, only a very small fraction has gone into concrete for highways, air traffic control systems and airports, national defense, NASA - bricks and mortar stuff in general. The overwhelming majority is an abstract debt instrument used to finance social programs.

The only problem with this is: At over 1/2 million dollars per individual, EVERYONE should have their own home, perfect credit, a new car in the driveway, and college paid for outright or close to it. No where near 300,000,000 Americans are on welfare or social services; 60% or more of the populace never enters into recurring or long-term medical care and about 50% of the populace never has even a minor operation.

This debt load does clearly illustrate the, for lack of a better word, stupidity of Government in handling money. We citizens have not gotten anything close to a tangible value for this huge burden that the vast majority of Americans could never repay even if they liquidated all their holdings and assets. And with no clear indication of value being returned for this debt - no new cars, no paid-for housing, definitely no free college - and only a small fraction of Americans ever on the welfare rolls, the only conclusion that can be drawn given this impossible debt situation is incompetence on the part of Government and especially the bureaucrats responsible for structuring these debt instruments. $68,000,000,000,000 should equal universal financial security. What do we have instead? No clear answers and just more of the same.

Oh yeah, electing of a politician is the sure-fire way to deal with financial issues. The last 100 years very clearly demonstrate this conclusion to be a delusion.

Politics is for Fools

2009-05-17T14:44:00.000-07:00

Politics seizes on what has already happened, twists it into a radical or variable agenda item then stands on it until it's use as an attention getting device is exhausted. This makes the seized upon variable take on an artificial life of it's own greatly adding to wasted energy and quite possibly contributing to gas emissions by way of the millions of pages of paper documents created to maintain and disseminate the agenda item. In order to play politics you have to be permanently stuck in the recent past.

Philosophy is built upon the predictive - it is of no use to philosophize about the past but rather to infer about the future.

Matt Reinschmidt

Why Boys Don't Do Ballet

Ballet North now has a Google+ Page!

KCUR FM: KC Baha'is Fight Iranian Persecution

Baha'i Faith of Kansas City on KC Currents!

Stay Away from AB May Company

Mormonism Is A Mortal Enemy of Racial Unity

This is a great article from Renaissance Women written by Tricia Erickson, you can see the original article here:

http://rwnetwork.net/Article2292.html

Mitt Romney Is A Devout Member Of A Historically Racist Church

Posted on: Tuesday, September 20th, 2011 by Tricia Erickson

Brazilian TV Covers Baha'i Persecution in Iran

The Categorical Imperative of Sex And Marriage

A Vision From Baha'u'llah...

Why Armageddon Is Completely Wrong

How To Incite Hate Of The "Other"

Report exposes Iran's media campaign to demonize Baha'is

Baha'i World News Service: Philosophers and Theologians Condemn Iran on Education Denial

Philosophers and theologians worldwide condemn Iran's attack on Baha'i educators

Dr Robert Jeffress Just Broke My Vote For Rick Perry

The Hindu and the Cowboy, Kansas City Festival of Faiths

BIHE and the Iranian Dark Age

Big Banks Directly Responsible for High Unemployment

The Quest of Ballet - simplified

The Hidden Hatred Inside Islam

The Rapture Already Happened (We Are All Left Behind)

Why Summer Glau and Joss Whedon Should Make 'Servant Girl'

Nightmares from Horses

The Psychic Mind Is Real

Why Gay Marriage Is An Incredibly Dangerous Red Herring

An Indictment of the Catholic Church

The Concept of Please

A Problem With The National Endowment for the Arts

Sonic Torture of Female Baha'i Prisoners

Resume of Matthew Reinschmidt

SyFy to air Sarah Connor Chronicles beginning April 7 2011

Contemporary Ignorance

Concerning Fathers

How Does the Stock Market Work?

How To Train Your Child or Yourself To Dance

Metaphysics of Life and Death

The Massive Scale of the Atmosphere and the Massive Lie of CO2 Emissions

5.04756447 × 10-13 %

How Printed Media Sexually Twists Children

Fact Check: The Reason the Baha'i Faith is located in Israel

My Problem With Space Aliens

An Educational Moment of Clarity

What Do Employers Need?

Baha'i Faith Realizes Racial Unity

Social Security and Social Justice

Carmen 2001: Grand Jetes Entournant by Matthew Reinschmidt

Cinderella 2007 Prince and Friend Pas

Wayward Daughter (La Fille mal gardee) Simone's Clog Dance

Nutcracker Grand Pas de Deux from School Tour 2009

Baha'i Faith: My Journey to Salvation

Baha'i Faith - Why I Became Baha'i

Probabilities

God Has Free Will Too

Salute To My Forebearers

Eternity's soft madness

Children, Don't Botox Your Brain

Horse Pasture Space Available at Reinschmidt Stables

NEWS FLASH: IRAN WINS BIGGEST BASTARD AWARD

Why Football is Stupid

Christ Returns, Armageddon and Rapture Already

Difficulties of Going Green - Hyperbole

Nuclear Fission Is The Only Option, For Now

What Are You Paying For?

Epiphany

Experts Agree, This is the Dumbest Thing Ever

Gangs are Enemies of the State. Cool, right?

Hizb ut-Tahrir Beer Hall Peutch of 2009

Right to Healthcare Must Accompany Right to Freedom From Bankruptcy

Gang Growth Directly Caused by Bad Parents

Evolution

New Classes commercial for Ballet North

Fusion is the Ultimate Green

Government Credibility Not Credible - Ever!

Politics is for Fools

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