Death Valley ... a place to stop, look and listen

Death Valley Nat'l Park:  a place to stop, look and listen.

Especially nice on a Harley at 70 mph.




Or on foot ... as the sun is falling

                 





Now to find a quiet place to read.




Some place more elevated, say 4500 feet, but not at Telescope's rocking 11,331 feet. Snow in Death Valley in late March? Absolutely. 91 degrees on the floor; 40 degrees at 5 am where I'm camping.





                 

The flora seem not to mind. Barrel cacti and saltbrush alike.


Heading home for the night.

           


I love shadows and windscreens.




     

See you on the road one day.


***

Credits

- photos courtesy c emerson (March 2013)
- Death Valley Nat'l Park
- Furnace Creek, California (91 degrees)
- Wild Rose Canyon (60 degrees)
- Telescope Peak (35 degrees)
- Mt. Charleston, NV (through the windscreen)
- A warm shower and soft bed (gorgeous)

While you're at it, check out my latest post, "Self: What it is like to be you" on Ideas are Physical.

Household Wealth Back ... For Whom?

USA Today says: "Surging stock prices and steady home-price increases have finally allowed Americans to regain the $16 trillion in wealth they lost to the Great Recession ... [but] ... The regained wealth - most of it from higher stock prices - has been flowing to richer Americans."

That sure sounds like some Americans are more American than other Americans.

Both CBS Nightly News and PBS News Hour, while reporting the recovery, failed to mention which group has directly benefited the most (at least so far). I couldn't find any online American news sources that seemed to cover this point. (They may be there but I didn't find any on my google search of "household wealth recovers").

I had to go to the New Zealand Herald to get this detail:

The rebound in wealth has benefited mostly wealthier Americans. The Dow Jones industrial average has just set a record high, and roughly 80 per cent of stocks are held by the richest 10 per cent of households.

And for the past five years, middle-class Americans have sold stocks and missed out on much of the rebound. In the October-December quarter, Americans dumped nearly $466 billion in stocks and bought $229 billion in bonds, the Fed's report showed.

For most middle-class Americans, home equity is their largest source of wealth. National home values remain about 30 per cent below their peak.

Any thoughts?

 

Is Space = God?

Over on Robert Oerter's blog (remember my God is Possible series a few months back?), the professor has continued his posts about the possible scientific Fine Tuning of the universe. The idea is that certain physical parameters are both highly improbable and extremely critical for the emergence of life in this universe.

I have supplied various comments on that subject on the professor's blog, since it relates to the possibility of God's existence.

The following thought occurred to me: If space is something that can expand, then space is a "thing" with describable properties. If so, then this changes the question about Fine Tuning of parameters to a question about what space itself is. It also raises the interesting question of what space is "in"?  In Aristotelian terms, this would put space back into the category of having (or being) substance, and as such, space itself could be the ground of all being. This we are accustomed to calling "God", to put this into a form that St. Thomas Aquinas might have used.

A thought worth thinking about, I think, in commemoration of my grandmother, who was born this same day, in 1897, in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love.

This is also a thought I will want to explore further on my new blog, Ideas are Physical, but feel free to comment on this here.

 

Sequestration

Congress ... really? You can agree on giving AIG $85 billion in an emergency situation, but you can't agree on how to cut $85 billion during a non-emergency situation?

Don't get me wrong. I'm okay with cutting costs; even deep cuts, when necessary; but I would just prefer we did it the old fashioned way -- through smoke-filled, back-room politics.  Btw, did you think to cut your own pay before you headed home?

This from an Auburn.edu site entitled, A Glossary of Political Economy Terms: 

Sequestration

Originally a legal term referring generally to the act of valuable property being taken into custody by an agent of the court and locked away for safekeeping, usually to prevent the property from being disposed of or abused before a dispute over its ownership can be resolved.

But the term has been adapted by Congress in more recent years to describe a new fiscal policy procedure originally provided for in the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Act of 1985 -- an effort to reform Congressional voting procedures so as to make the size of the Federal government's budget deficit a matter of conscious choice rather than simply the arithmetical outcome of a decentralized appropriations process in which no one ever looked at the cumulative results until it was too late to change them.

If the dozen or so appropriation bills passed separately by Congress provide for total government spending in excess of the limits Congress earlier laid down for itself in the annual Budget Resolution, and if Congress cannot agree on ways to cut back the total (or does not pass a new, higher Budget Resolution), then an "automatic" form of spending cutback takes place. This automatic spending cut is what is called "sequestration."

AA (that is, the Academy Awards) is a Great Program

Yes, AA is a great program. TODAY I am referring to one of our family favorites: the precious, the spectacular, the truly Hollywood-based

   --- Academy Awards ! ---

Get out your ballots, call your family, and debate, debate, debate ... who will win, who should win, who acts the funniest, who is the strangest, who looks the best ... who IS the best.