1 Aktbird57 .. 39.087 acres
2 36.047 acres
Wildclickers!!!!!!
We are heading for the big 40!!!!!
Acres that is...............!
After that it's all downhill.............
Keep those clicks coming!!!!!!!!!!
Up early today Merry Andrew?
Kalicked..
Hi all,
Still not getting email updates. Well, again, anyway. WIll have to remember to come here by myself.
Sent Anita a note and suggested that she tell nurses and aides that she wanted junk food and a computer!
Will go click now.
I knew that there was something else. Glad, so glad, about Mz. Bella. In your neck of the woods she could have encountered anything. With any luck, she was just huddled under an evergreen and got good and tired of the storm.
If any of you should have the same problem as I did, with suddenly not getting email update notifications, this worked for me: I clicked on turn off email updates, and when that process was complete, I clicked on turn on email updates. Now I am getting them again.
I haven't been getting e-mail updaytes for months, sumac. I even started a thread on the subject in the help forum. Craven assured me he'd checked it out and there was nothing wrong at his end, so it must be either my machine or my ISP. I didn't do anything. Suddenly, one day, updates started up gain on a very selective basis. Now they've stopped again. Know something? I've stopped being concerned about it. I just go right to my A2K home-page from My Favorites and click on my My Posts. It's all there, no worries. (But I might just try your suggestion to see if it works for me too.
)
G'day everyone!
Thanks sumac. I should probably keep her indoors for the next few days, but Mz. Bella the type of feline that will sit and yell till I open the door and let her outside. The days I work though, after I let the cats out, they're right back home before breakfast. That's why I concluded Bella must have been frightened by either a predator animal or the intensity of the storm. She's home and safe now, and hasn't ventured much past the porch. Hurray!
Clicked for Diane and myself.
You and your 282 friends have supported 1,704,164.0 square feet!
Marine Wetlands habitat supported: 57,538.8 square feet.
You have supported: (34,182.0)
Your 282 friends have supported: (23,356.9)
American Prairie habitat supported: 32,417.0 square feet.
You have supported: (9,223.2)
Your 282 friends have supported: (23,193.8)
Rainforest habitat supported: 1,614,208.1 square feet.
You have supported: (158,475.5)
Your 282 friends have supported: (1,455,732.6)
1 Aktbird57 .. 39.118 acres
2 36.047 acres
Now where has that uppity broad gone to this time?
On the road again
Can't wait to get on the road again...
Just makin' music with my friends - and
I can't wait to get on the road again...
clicked
Momma's - Don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys.
Clicked.
Yo, everybody. Busy, just getting up and down my hill, but clicking every day. Big hello!
I received this as anemail from a friend and wanted to share it with y'all.
On Receiving Harvard Med's Global Environment Citizen Award
by Bill Moyers
Wednesday 01 December 2004
I accept this award on behalf of all the people behind the camera
whom you never see. And for all those scientists, advocates,
activists, and just plain citizens whose stories we have covered in
reporting on how environmental change affects our daily lives. We
journalists are simply beachcombers on the shores of other people's
knowledge, other people's experience, and other people's wisdom. We
tell their stories.
The journalist who truly deserves this award is my friend, Bill
McKibben. He enjoys the most conspicuous place in my own pantheon of
journalistic heroes for his pioneer work in writing about the
environment. His bestseller "The End of Nature" carried on where
Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" left off.
Writing in Mother Jones recently, Bill described how the problems
we journalists routinely cover - conventional, manageable programs like
budget shortfalls and pollution - may be about to convert to chaotic,
unpredictable, unmanageable situations. The most unmanageable of all, he
writes, could be the accelerating deterioration of the environment,
creating perils with huge momentum like the greenhouse effect that is
causing the melt of the artic to release so much freshwater into the
North Atlantic that even the Pentagon is growing alarmed that a
weakening gulf stream could yield abrupt and
overwhelming changes, the kind of changes that could radically alter
civilizations.
That's one challenge we journalists face - how to tell such a
story without coming across as Cassandras, without turning off the
people we most want to understand what's happening, who must act on
what they read and hear.
As difficult as it is, however, for journalists to fashion a
readable narrative for complex issues without depressing our readers
and viewers, there is an even harder challenge - to pierce the
ideology that governs official policy today. One of the biggest
changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer
marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power
in the oval office and in Congress. For the first time in our history,
ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology
asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold
stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is
generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple,
their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And
there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the
facts.
Remember James Watt, President Reagan's first Secretary of the
Interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever engaging
Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress
that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the
imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, "after
the last tree is felled, Christ will come back."
Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was
talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out
across the country. They are the people who believe the bible is
literally true - one-third of the American electorate, if a recent
Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election several million good
and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index.
That's right - the rapture index. Google it and you will find that the
best-selling books in America today are the twelve volumes of the
left-behind series written by the Christian fundamentalist and
religious right warrior, Timothy LaHaye. These true believers
subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a
couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the
Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the
imagination of millions of Americans.
Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer
George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am
indebted to him for adding to my own understanding): once Israel has
occupied the rest of its 'biblical lands,' legions of the anti-Christ
will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of
Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the
messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out
of their clothes and transported to heaven, where, seated next to the
right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious
opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during
the several years of tribulation that follow.
I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the literature.
I've reported on these people, following some of them from Texas to
the West Bank. They are sincere, serious, and polite as they tell you
they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of
biblical prophecy. That's why they have declared solidarity with
Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with
money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a
warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where four angels
'which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay
the third part of man.' A war with Islam in the Middle East is not
something to be feared but welcomed - an essential conflagration on
the road to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the rapture index
stood at 144-just one point below the critical threshold when the
whole thing will blow, the son of god will return, the righteous will
enter heaven, and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.
So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go
to Grist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist,
Glenn Scherer - "The Road to Environmental Apocalypse." Read it and
you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe
that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but
actually welcomed - even hastened - as a sign of the coming
apocalypse.
As Grist makes clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe
lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the
U.S. Congress before the recent election - 231 legislators in total -
more since the election - are backed by the religious right.
Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th congress earned 80 to
100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian
right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist,
Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick
Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House
Speaker Dennis Hastert, and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat
to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was Senator Zell
Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos
on the senate floor: "the days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that i
will send a famine in the land." he seemed to be relishing the
thought.
And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 TIME/CNN poll
found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found
in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter
think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country
with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations
or in the motel turn some of the 250 Christian TV stations and you can
hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why
people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected,
as Grist puts it, "to worry about the environment. Why care about the
earth when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by
ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the bible?
Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be
rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to
solar when the same god who performed the miracle of the loaves and
fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?"
Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the
lord will provide. One of their texts is a high school history book,
America's providential history. You'll find there these words: "the
secular or socialist has a limited resource mentality and views the
world as a pie...that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece.'
however, "[t]he Christian knows that the potential in god is unlimited
and that there is no shortage of resources in god's earth...while
many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that
god has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to
accommodate all of the people." No wonder Karl Rove goes around the
White House whistling that militant hymn, "Onward Christian Soldiers."
He turned out millions of the foot soldiers on November 2, including
many who have made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern
American politics.
I can see in the look on your faces just how hard it is for the
journalist to report a story like this with any credibility. So let me
put it on a personal level. I myself don't know how to be in this
world without expecting a confident future and getting up every
morning to do what I can to bring it about. So I have always been an
optimist. Now, however, I think of my friend on Wall Street whom I
once asked: "What do you think of the market?" "I'm optimistic," he
answered. "Then why do you look so worried?" And he answered: "Because
I am not sure my optimism is justified."
I'm not, either. Once upon a time I agreed with the Eric Chivian
and the Center for Health and the Global Environment that people will
protect the natural environment when they realize its importance to
their health and to the health and lives of their children. Now I am
not so sure. It's not that I don't want to believe that - it's just
that I read the news and connect the dots:
I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency has declared the election a mandate for President
Bush on the environment. This for an administration that wants to
rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered
Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and their
habitats, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act that
requires the government to judge beforehand if actions might damage
natural resources.
That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicle
tailpipe inspections; and ease pollution standards for cars, sports
utility vehicles and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment.
That wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to
keep certain information about environmental problems secret from the
public.
That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against
polluting coal-fired power plans and weaken consent decrees reached
earlier with coal companies.
That wants to open the artic wildlife refuge to drilling and
increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest
stretch of undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great
coastal wild land in America.
I read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental
Protection Agency had planned to spend nine million dollars - $2
million of it from the administration's friends at the American
Chemistry Council - to pay poor families to continue to use pesticides
in their homes. These pesticides have been linked to neurological
damage in children, but instead of ordering an end to their use, the
government and the industry were going to offer the families $970
each, as well as a camcorder and children's clothing, to serve as
guinea pigs for the study.
I read all this in the news.
I read the news just last night and learned that the
administration's friends at the international policy network, which is
supported by Exxon Mobile and others of like mind, have issued a new
report that climate change is 'a myth,' sea levels are not rising,
scientists who believe catastrophe is possible are 'an embarrassment.'
I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent
appropriations bill passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene)
riders attached to it: a clause removing all endangered species
protections from pesticides; language prohibiting judicial review for
a forest in Oregon; a waiver of environmental review for grazing
permits on public lands; a rider pressed by developers to weaken
protection for crucial habitats in California.
I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to
the computer - pictures of my grandchildren: Henry, age 12; of Thomas,
age 10; of Nancy, 7; Jassie, 3; Sara Jane, nine months. I see the
future looking back at me from those photographs and I say, "Father,
forgive us, for we know now what we do." And then I am stopped short
by the thought: "That's not right. We do know what we are doing. We
are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their
world."
And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we
are greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability
to sustain indignation at injustice?
What has happened to out moral imagination?
On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: "'How do you see the world?"
And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: "I see it feelingly."
I see it feelingly.
The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as
a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news
can be the truth that sets us free - not only to feel but to fight for
the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair,
the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at
me from those photographs on my desk. What we need to match the
science of human health is what the ancient Israelites called 'hocma'
- the science of the heart.....the capacity to see....to feel....and
then to act...as if the future depended on you.
Believe me, it does.
Sorry for the double post. A hamster let me down by not reporting he's already posted it. Now I don't know how to delete the extra posting. Help!!!
Merry Andrews ~ EXCELLENT!
<look at the top of your response and you'll see an "X" Click on just ONE of the posts, a window appears asking if you wish to delete the post, then click 'yes'>
