rafting

Today I did white water rafting for the first time. It was fun and exciting, enjoyable to propel the boat as a team, and had those nervous bits when it seemed dangerous.
As we floated through smooth and rough water my thoughts where on the experience of being on uneven water, and how that is so often used as a analogy for the function of thoughts themselves. The water is singular in substance, a tangible mass made of a myriad tiny pieces, hard yet splashing to drops, swirling mysterious currents turning this way and that, yet all going downstream. There is power in water, but in most arrangements it is harmless.

After all the reading I do, it was grand to experience the foundation of a metaphor.

camera stick discovery

What good is a monopod with a ball head? Maybe I'll sell it.



But wait!






It's a keeper! I read about doing off-photographer camera and there's all sorts of ways to get unusual angles with a big stick! I can also use it for off-camera flashes once I buy some.

Bombed

I've been trying to get this picture for a while. Hopefully I'll get it better some day. We live in a navy jet training run and all my life I've been bombed by these guys. They target our house, our barn, combines out in the field, and today our equipment shed. I was standing outside with the birds chirping, connecting a chemical pump. I heard the beginning of the noise and rushed to grab my camera. I had about a second and a half to pull it out and point it up and hold down the shutter button.

When directly in line with the sound it is such a short intense roar with the build up and taper off. Its a whole body sound.

I've always liked the jets going over. They are most always A-6 Intruders, sometimes they are low enough to see the pilot. As I've got older, I also think of how glad I am that I'm not Taliban or Iraqi hoping one of these isn't going to come by and blow me up. It leaves me feeling strange inside to be working on some farm equipment, three seconds of ZOOM and the plane is a dot in the distance. If this weren't a test, I'd be dead.

This one seems to be between 500-1000 feet up. They stay under the sound barrier.

Blog day 2010: want to buy a condo?

I've been working on an advertisement for my condo in Bellingham. It was nice to have it for college, but overall it was not smart financially. I could pay it off over the next decade, but I don't think its a good investment with all the interest I have to pay. Its always best to buy things entire or not at all. As soon as I can get rid of this I'll have no debt and I intend to never borrow any money again. The "borrow is slave to the lender" and all that. Dave Ramsey is my main inspiration for being financially sensible. Second would be my parents.
Click here for to see photography of the place. $119k if you want it.

Listened to today:
some streaming praise music through Shoutcast
Buzz Goertzen - God Loves Country Music and Yodelers too!
Black Sabbath - Paranoid
Christsafari - Valley of Decision
Car Talk on NPR

Here is a guy in Lesotho building a house.

Book Review: War Cycles Peace Cycles - by Richard Kelly Hoskins

So my dad was loaned this book by a neighbor, and since my dad has a phonebook sized EMT textbook to memorize, he passed on 'Cycles' to me.
This book is an economic history of the world, emphasizing historical causes for economic collapse and what individual Americans can do to prepare for the next crash.
My recommendation: Do not read this book!
It was written with engaging style and confidant authority. It does have some interesting ideas about economics that would be worth researching elsewhere. Anywhere else. But the only reason to read this book is to have a look at the reasoning of one of the respected sages of the White Supremacist movement. I started reading 'Cycles' with no knowledge of who Hoskins was. I as just judging the book by its cover, which is black with a bold font and a crashing stock market graph. The text of the book is a fixed width font, printed by some process that looks like a copy of typewriter pages, and somewhat blurry at that. It was a glue bound paperback. This styling portrayed genuine underground publication, cheaply done in someones basement with outdated equipment. Probably was, since no publisher would put there name on this.
Growing up here in the inland northwest there may be few colored peoples, but there is a population of White Supremacists. Even so, they are portrayed as violent nuts who hate Black people. I had not thought about their reasoning for believing themselves supreme. 'Cycles' holds a lot of that reasoning. Based mainly on warped interpretation of the Bible and inability to get over past grievances (mainly the civil war), Hoskins explains how Whites are really God's chosen race, how the current Jews are not. He also claims that the Jewish bankers know the system is flawed and use it to maintain power and get rich off the wars and revolutions they instigate.
The only point worth pursuing is that lending at interest always leads to economic collapse. I found Hostkin's explanations for this lacked rigor. What was engaging was his detailed account of how large scale borrowing-at-interest had caused the collapse of nations throughout history. Not sure if he was accurate about that, but it was interesting.

'War Cycles Peace Cycles' was too full of 'trying to prove a point' to be a valid source of economic education, but it is a detailed read if you want to understand the thinking of White Supremacists.