There are an estimated 75,000 palm trees in Los Angeles, all of which have one thing in common: They aren’t native there. Despite being an L.A. icon on par with the Hollywood sign and Dodger Stadium, the tropical tree is no more a native Angeleno than, well, the Dodgers. Not unlike the Hollywood sign, palms were originally a marketing technique for developers hoping to attract newcomers to the area in the late 19th century. They got the idea from the French Riviera — another area palms aren’t actually native to — where like-minded developers had successfully used them just a few decades before to cultivate an image of glitz and glamour. In addition to being beautiful, palms are surprisingly easy to uproot and transport from their native tropical and subtropical environments in the Middle East, Mexico, and elsewhere, so tens of thousands of them were planted all across the California city that had once been desert scrubland.
It seems fitting that one of Los Angeles’ most enduring symbols was essentially a branding strategy chosen for its aesthetic appeal, doubly so because palm trees’ association with the city was (and is) further cemented by their ubiquity in the many films shot there. After all, most of the directors, actors, and studio executives who made Hollywood what it is today weren’t originally from the City of Angels either.
Since the 1980’s the middle class in America has declined in size because of the special privilege given to the rich to make them richer. This is all based on the “trickle down” theory which we know does not work. Now that we have reached the 2020’s we are being informed of another issue to reduce the middle class even more. That issue is AI. All of these various industries want to implement AI so that they can cut back on human employment. This means less of a payroll bill, much smaller contributions to health insurance and social security. Maybe it might be possible to get rid of those items all together and we can put more money in our pockets. Great theory but the question that comes to mind is if no one is working and all this stuff is being produced by robots that do not require breaks or meals or insurance or retirement benefits, who is going to buy the stuff you are producing? When all is automated then the factory will do the work and humans will have little or nothing to do with it and no income either. Unemployment is very low at present, but should change when AI hits with the impact that is predicted. There are dangerous jobs that make robotic workers very attractive but that technology can not replace everything. The hopes that reductions in human staff may be running around in the brains of some is just not entirely possible. Even AI will require human interface as no man made system is perfect, at least not yet. We were supposed to be flying to work by the 1960, that did not happen. This technology is like all the rest, it will have problems and that is going to require thinking beings to repair it. The hope of the very rich to get richer will have to depend on the usual lying, cheating, and manipulating that continues to happen in the political and financial arenas by our not so honest political and banking executives. It is in our people’s best interest to be well informed and very concerned about who gets elected and stays in office. Term limits need to be standard on all aspects so that we do not have the same people making decisions for 30 or 40 years as they age and get cynical or go crazy. The politics of today will no doubt play the introduction of AI as a plot by a certain group of people. This will bring the directed anger at the given group rather than the greedy business men behind the implementation. Just another way to use hate to mask the pursuit of wealth as the fault of someone with a difference from mainstream society. Hate crimes have been on the rise since 2015. The campaign for the Presidency became the venue for hate to be spewed like never before. The winning of the election put the fountain of hate clearly in the center of the picture and he gave all the people with problems the green light to exercise their hate. Even though he lost the next election he has still been stirring the pot and the news media and the court system continue to allow it to happen. It is time to muzzle the dog and reestablish civility and the rule of law in this country.
I wanted to compare Donny Dumb Ass’s behavior to a toddler but that would be insulting to the intellectual and emotional development of a toddler. I really can’t think of a psychosocial developmental stage that adequately describes the walking waste of skin that feels he deserves to occupy the White House again after his abysmal performance last time.
Let’s go over the score card:
Swore he knew more about the war in Iraq/Afghanistan than any of the Generals
His administration brokered the release of 5,000 Taliban fighters
Promise to withdraw all troops for Afghanistan
Had no plan to accomplish but promised withdrawal date
Did not follow through
Joe Bidens Administration did follow through on departure of ground forces promised by Trump
Was in reality a positive exit from a 20-year occupation but Trump and his acolytes blamed Biden for unforeseen mistakes.
Gave huge tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy putting the U.S. government in trillions of dollars of debt.
Trump added $7.8 trillion to the debt in one term
In comparison Reagan raised the debt $1.6 trillion in 8 years
One of his administration first actions was to throw out the Obama/Biden pandemic preparedness playbook and remove NIH scientist from labs in China.
Claimed that the COVID19 virus would fade into nothing
Urged people to gather for Easter Services in the beginning of the pandemic
Again, swore he knew more about the virus than the scientific and medical community
Said we should inject or ingest bleach, or use light to kill the virus
400,000 Americans did in the last year of his Administration due to his incompetence.
Refused to admit that he lost the 2020 election.
Actively tried to change the results
Insisted the January 6 insurrection
Removed and Concealed sensitive documents that pertained to National Security.
Ok this is just crap he did while in the White House and immediately after and still people what him in the seat of power again.
His latest Fight Club, Hunger Games flight of fancy is Immigrant/Undocumented Fights, I presume on pay per view. So, we really have entered the fall of Rome times (Give the masses bread and circus,) that’s so that the power base can rob the treasury and go unnoticed.
There is a debate on Thursday and choice story will be policy and compliance or buffoonery and grievance. Yes, the clown show, and that outrage are more entertaining but at some point, we can’t all stand back and just watch the train wreck. Trump and his moronic minions effectively lit the house in fire while he was in charge, Biden has done his absolute best, with lost of obstruction, to put the flames out and rebuild the house, if we let Donald and his ilk in control again the Chicago fire of 1871 will look like a one year olds birthday cake by comparison.
Today, the famous pyramids of Giza are known as sand-colored monuments that seem to blend into the surrounding desert, but they were originally built to stand out in spectacular fashion. When the pyramids were first erected about 4,500 years ago to mark the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs, they were covered with a polished white limestone that would have sparkled in the sun and made the already-imposing structures even more dazzling.
According to ancient papyrus scrolls written by people who actually participated in the construction of the pyramids, workers transported boats filled with limestone up the Nile River to the building site in Giza. The limestone casing stones were thoroughly polished in order to increase their luster, and each one weighed upwards of 15 tons. The fact that these massive polished stones were used to encase the entirety of each pyramid, fitted together perfectly to create a nearly seamless white exterior, is a testament to the engineering genius of the ancient Egyptians. Over the centuries, most of the limestone exterior of the pyramids has been destroyed, worn away, or stripped for use in other construction projects, but faint remnants of weathered white limestone can be seen toward the top of Giza’s Pyramid of Khafre — the last remaining architectural evidence of what pyramids looked like in the days of the pharaohs.
If you know one thing about Daniel Boone, it’s probably that he wore a raccoon-skin fur cap. But alas, it turns out you might know zero things about the legendary frontiersman, as Boone never wore such a head covering at all. “My father, Daniel Boone, always despised the raccoon fur caps and did not wear one himself,” his son Nathan Boone said in an 1851 interview with historian Lyman Draper. The elder Boone instead preferred a wide-brimmed, Quaker-style hat made of felt or beaver fur, which would have offered better protection from the elements and shielded his eyes from the sun during his many long hunting trips.
We may have an actor named Noah Ludlow (1795–1886) to thank for the myth of Boone’s raccoon-skin cap. He was hired to make frames for prints of a portrait of Boone first painted by artist Chester Harding in 1820. Later, he played a character in a performance called “The Hunters of Kentucky” and drew inspiration from Boone to create his look, which included the cap we now associate with the storied frontiersman. The performances were a hit, which was good for Ludlow, but not so much for historical accuracy.
That dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago is pretty common knowledge. Not as well known, but just as fascinating, is the fact that Earth was on the other side of the galaxy when most of them were alive. It takes the sun (and thus the rest of the solar system) around 250 million years to orbit the center of the Milky Way. The first dinosaurs appeared at the dawn of the Triassic Period around 250 million years ago, and for most of their very long reign — namely the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods — our humble planet was in a completely different neighborhood of the galaxy. That means, of course, that the stars the dinosaurs saw in the sky would have looked different from the view we have today.
Though not new information, this knowledge made something of a splash a few years ago when NASA astronomer Dr. Jessie Christiansen created an animation showing which part of the Milky Way our prehistoric predecessors resided in. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the video is its ending, which asks what our planet might be like the next time we complete a trip through the Milky Way. Fortunately, our solar system stays far, far away from the inhospitable galactic center (and its supermassive black hole) as it moves through space. If it didn’t, there’d be no life on Earth whatsoever — human, dinosaur, or otherwise.
It is sad that entire departments would walk out but I suppose that even the Police can feel that they are being mistreated. When we look at the recent history in some departments we see that a very cavalier attitude has been adopted and that instead of serving the community the feeling is “them or Us”. Is this what has brought about the issues in Seattle?
Have there been a few too many cases of excess force or shoot first and think of a way to justify it afterwards? Police officers that believe like Donald Trump that they are above the law need to be replaced. If immigrant candidates are who apply and they qualify then why not put them on the street. They probably harbor far fewer preconceived ideas of who to contact than the ones leaving. The other issue is that this is a nation of immigrants some have just been here a while longer.
The people that were born elsewhere and have come here have either been welcomed because they were needed or vilified because someone felt they were here to steal jobs, or they were criminals, or different. Look at history and you will find this true of the Irish that came here during the potato famine, the Chinese that came to build the railroads, the Mexicans that have come to harvest fruit. There is always someone to make an issue of why they are here and tell you they have come because they are ________ pick your term.
All kinds of things have been attributed to them and all sorts of things have been done to them because they came. They have been killed, had their children taken from them, put in jail for no reason, and that is just three of the punishments they have been given because they came here.
These issues are but a couple of our on going turmoil of what is or isn’t good for us. Now we have religion back in public schools, at least in one state, soon to be followed by others. The issue of drafting for the military and drafting women is again being debated.
Examine that one for a minute and then try to make a case for drafting women. Laws have been struck down regarding the right to choose to have a baby or not. Women’s health, their right to vote, place in society all have been put back on the table as pawns in a chess game. Now comes the idea to draft women and do we make them equal or are the intentions to have them in the ranks as maids or as I heard one guy say, “Every platoon needs a whore”. Get real if the current propaganda preaches that the highest destiny a woman can attain is to die to give birth if you are a woman would you want to be drafted?
Other nations have a policy of drafting women and for good or bad they are treated as equal to the men they serve with. Note to legislators, the needs of the nation and the Constitutional operation of this nation are not found while your sitting in church reading the bible or while your head is up your backsides looking for your glasses. Women currently serve in the military and have done so for many years so if we need to reinstitute the draft then it makes sense to draft women as well.
Here is the kicker, if you cannot offer equal treatment in all matters then we have a problem that seems to be most notable in a certain segment of the population and that segment is older, wealthy white men that sit in seats of power. It would seem the time has come to look for intelligent, compassionate and forward thinking younger people to fill those seats of power. We need legislators that are not corrupt by bias, ego or excessive wealth. Checks need to be put back into the system to ensure that issues are resolved for the common good not a for profit reason.
The lost city of Atlantis has been a source of intrigue and curiosity for centuries. The enigmatic sunken island, however, is not a vanished land awaiting discovery so much as an enduring myth.
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The story of Atlantis first appeared in Plato’s dialogues “Timaeus” and “Critias,” written around 360 BCE. The Greek philosopher described Atlantis as a sophisticated civilization that became corrupt under its own might, angering the gods and causing the city to disappear underwater. Despite the legend’s intrigue, no historical or archaeological evidence has ever confirmed the existence of Atlantis. Instead, it is widely regarded as a fictional allegory used by Plato to explore themes such as power, virtue, and society.
According to Plato’s myth, Atlantis was an island of demigods located beyond the Pillars of Hercules (in the modern-day Strait of Gibraltar), which in Greek mythology represent the boundary of the known world. The half-god, half-man Atlanteans let their greed surpass their ethics, and as they pushed to conquer more territory, the gods sent catastrophic earthquakes and floods that sank Atlantis into the ocean within about a day. While Plato’s account is widely considered a philosophical allegory for his ideas about the ideal state and moral decay, some have taken the story literally, sparking centuries of speculation and searches for the so-called lost civilization.
So why is Plato’s fable often taken as historical fact? The belief that Atlantis really existed is widely attributed to 19th-century American writer and congressman Ignatius L. Donnelly (who also went on to write a book aiming to prove that English philosopher Francis Bacon was the true author of William Shakespeare’s plays). In his 1882 book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, Donnelly argued that the mythical island described by Plato was not only real but also the cradle of all ancient civilization. Donnelly’s idea captured the imagination of the public, and while it has since been debunked as pseudoscientific, it inspired additional research and theories over the years.
One such theory links Atlantis to the disappearance of the architecturally and artistically advanced Minoan civilization that lived on the Greek islands of Crete and Thera (modern Santorini) around 3000 BCE to 1100 BCE. A catastrophic earthquake resulting in a volcanic eruption and subsequent tsunamis most likely contributed to the end of the Minoans, and, some think, align with Plato’s account of a sudden disappearance of a thriving civilization.
Proponents of the Atlantis myth also point to an underwater discovery known as Bimini Road as evidence of the ancient city. Discovered in 1968 off the coast of North Bimini, an island in the Bahamas, the submerged rock formation consists of a series of rectangular limestone blocks whose symmetry and layout appear to be human-made. Despite the attention the diving discovery received at the time, carbon dating concluded that the Bimini stones were a natural geological occurrence created by erosion.
Woolly mammoths seem old-school. Hunted by Neanderthals for tens of thousands of years, these elephantlike mammals, some with tusks up to 15 feet long, evolved hair and layers of fat to withstand the frigid temperatures of the ice age tundra as they roamed the northern reaches of Asia, Europe, and North America. Although they’re no longer among us, their bones — and in some cases mummified remains — fill natural history museums around the world. But these ancient beasts aren’t as ancient as you might think. In fact, it’s estimated that the last woolly mammoth died around 1700 BCE — some 800 years after ancient Egyptians built the Great Pyramid of Giza.
As the Earth began transitioning out of the last ice age some 12,000 years ago, a warming world altered the woolly mammoth’s ecosystem. Melting glaciers created a wetter planet that destroyed the vegetation mammoths relied on for food, and this dramatic shift — along with continued human predation — led to complete extinction of the creatures in most areas around 8000 BCE. However, small pockets survived on some islands that benefited from both cold-weather vegetation and protection from human hunters.
Some of the last known mammoths lived in isolation on Wrangel Island, a Russian possession in the Arctic Ocean just northwest of Alaska, and they didn’t have an easy go of it. Scientists who compared a 4,300-year-old mammoth bone from Wrangel Island to mammoth specimens 10 times older and from the Siberian mainland found that these final woolly mammoths experienced what scientists call a “genetic meltdown” due to the limited gene pool on the island, with mutations that likely made it harder to mark territory and choose mates. As for the ancient Egyptians, they kept chugging along until the death of Cleopatra, in 30 BCE. With its transformation into a Roman province, the 3,000-year-old dynasty also went the way of the woolly mammoth.
Esoteric Meandering Shouting Into the Void 
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