Nearly Winter at 35 Degrees South.

From Lofty, garden pics. There’s a good number of them, so I’ll be posting them over several days. All photos are 1500 x 996, click for full size.

Around here autumn and winter are important parts of the growing season, the European exotics drop their leaves while the rest of the plants get busy. I put the old manual 80-200 macro zoom lens back on the Pentax Kx to get some close ups.

carpet

Carpet of Leaves. © Lofty.

elderbushnakednest

Elder Bush and Naked Nest. © Lofty.

lemon

Lemon. (Seriously delicious looking!) © Lofty.

Stay tuned for more.

Renaissance Technologies

youtube screencap.

youtube screencap.

If the public library was the proto-internet, then the book was both a trusty storage device and an early website. This is essentially how MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences approaches books in the course “Making Books: The Renaissance and Today,” in which students learn about bookmaking technology.

The course, led by MIT historian Anne McCants and Jeffrey Ravel, sees students making paper and building a handset printing press. The idea is to illustrate that people in the distant past were also clever technologists, while also reconnecting students to the notion of making instead of merely consuming.

[…]

This semester past, MIT Hobby Shop director Ken Stone led the students in the building of the printing press. First, students milled a huge reclaimed wooden beam from an old building, then they worked the wood in various ways until they had assembled a screw-type letterpress printer commonly used throughout the early modern period. During the build, students toured a Colonial-style print shop in Boston called Edes & Gill, paying particular attention to an early handset press like the one they were building. There they picked the brains of printmaster Gary Gregory.

The full article is at The Creators Project. Very, very, very cool, this. I’d love to learn how to do this.

Persecute Me! C’mon, Please Persecuuuute Me!

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Oh my, Matt Barber has a post up at Town Hall, flogging his recent book on the Liberal Agenda of Hating Jesus, and begging to be seen as terribly oppressed and persecuted.

The answer had to be yes. The Holy Spirit made it crystal clear. When Tristan Emmanuel, managing publisher and CFO of BarbWire Books, called me and said it was time for me to put pen to paper and write a book on the anti-Christian left’s demonic war on religious liberty (and all things godly and good), I immediately agreed.

I suppose it’s good policy to say yes to your own publishing company.

Why did I write the book? Because it had to be written. God’s natural created order, His immutable, scientific and transcendent moral precepts, as well as the very lives and livelihoods of Christian Americans, are under vicious attack today at a level unprecedented in American history.

Just once, I’d like for this supposed ‘God’ to speak for itself. I mean, take away all the rainbows or something. Anything. Holler from the mountaintops, whisper from the depths, something that isn’t yet another paranoid bigot pretending to speak for the Big, Bad, All Knowing God. (And then I wouldn’t have to dig through stacks of these books when I’m looking for the good stuff at thrift stores. You wouldn’t believe how many copies of A Purpose Driven Life are languishing on dusty thrift store shelves.)

There are evil blasphemies beyond imagination being foisted upon the American people today by our own godless government in the name of “progress.” Things like presidential edicts that open up little girls’ showers to grown men; the sin-centric and oxymoronic notion of “gay marriage”; forced taxpayer funding of child sacrifice; and forced participation by Christ’s followers in all the above sins, under penalty of law, to name but a few.

Oy, there’s no end to the ooze of melodrama. Most of this is old hat, the same old they’ve been moaning about, but I have to ask, how in the hell did transgender rights morph into little girls’ showers? I’m not interested in invading a little girls’ shower, wherever that might be found, outside a school. Those aren’t public lavs, and why the fuck would grown men be getting in to them? If you aren’t a teacher, I expect most grown men have other places to be. I expect most adult teachers have no particular desire to invade a little girls’ shower, either. It’s telling that the only ones consistently bringing up this little girls’ shower business are white, male, Christians.

Indeed, it is not just within the church’s purview, but it is the church’s duty to insert itself into state matters relating to morality, public policy and culture at large.

The push back has begun. Christian governors, lawmakers, business owners, lawyers, parents, judges, county clerks, organizations, universities, hospitals, adoption agencies and other individuals and groups have been given an ultimatum by the anti-Christian left: “Keep your Christianity at church and away from our culture!”

To which we say, “Not on your life.”

“Or our own.”

Oh, for Crispy Christ Onna Stick’s Sake. Like Ms. Garbo, I just want to be left alone.

The full screed be here.

Santa Fe: Native Treasures.

Beaded high heel sneakers by Teri Greeves.

Beaded high heel sneakers by Teri Greeves.

In the Hopi creation myth, and most Native American creation myths, we are allowed to be here on this earth but only provided we care for it and treat it with respect.”  – Dan Namingha.

Each year, the Native Treasures Indian Arts Festival brings over 200 Native American artists from 40 tribes and pueblos – each of whom is specially invited by the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture – to Santa Fe, New Mexico to display their artistic pottery, jewelry, paintings, glass, stone, bronze, baskets and textiles.

This year the theme is “Mother Earth” and is oftentimes depicted as a turtle in Native American mythology and art which signifies water, good health, long life, patience, determination and peace.

This year’s featured artist at the 12th annual Native Treasures Indian Arts Festival is Dan Namingha. A prolific painter for over 40 years, Namingha, who has been producing earth-friendly, pro-environmental messages for decades, was also awarded the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture Living Treasure award for his overall body of work as well as for recognition of artistic excellence and community service.

Full Story Here.

HIV+ Organ Transplants Okayed in California.

Credit: Shutterstock.

Credit: Shutterstock.

Organ donation and transplantation between HIV-positive people is now legal in the state of California.

On May 27, Governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 1408, a new piece of legislation that protects surgeons who transplant organs from HIV-positive donors into HIV-positive patients from being penalized by the state’s medical board. President Barack Obama’s HOPE Act technically reversed the federal ban on this procedure back in 2013, but as Medical Daily previously reported, there’s been a delay in uptake. Apparently the National Institutes of Health needed time to “properly iron out the act’s guidelines,” so up until now in California, doctors were criminals and even faced jail time if they condoned HIV transplantation and donation, Tech Times­ reported.

[…]

The surgeons at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore had a similar feeling in March when they were approved to conduct the first HIV-positive organ transplant in the U.S. Dr. Dorry Segev, an associate professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins, told NPR that both HIV-positive and negative patients would benefit from the ban reversal when it comes to the organ transplant waiting list.

“Imagine now we take hundreds or maybe thousands of people off of the list, then everybody behind them moves forward,” he said. “So people with HIV are benefited directly and everybody else on the list is benefitted indirectly. And we’re all very excited to get started.”

Full Story Here.

Sunday Facepalm: The Great, Straight, White Hope.

Oh, pardon, that should be The Great, Straight, Christian, Male, White Hope. Dave Daubenmire says so.

“The attack that’s going on in America today is against the white, heterosexual male,” he said. “That’s the battle. If Satan can get control of the family, if they can get the white, heterosexual male removed from the scene, if they can get him ‘de-balled,’ if I will, if they can do that, there is nothing to hold back the forces of darkness in America.”

“It’s not racist, it’s the truth,” he added.

Daubenmire then argued that the war on poverty caused fatherless African-American households because the government became the parent. Now, he said, the government’s “sights are set on the white, heterosexual male.”

He declared that there are “forces of darkness that are working to overthrow this nation and overthrow this world on behalf of the prince of the power of the air, the prince of darkness.” To control the world, Daubenmire argued, these forces will first have to defeat white, heterosexual, Christian American males.

That’s not all! Ol’ Dave also weighed in on transgender issues:

On “Talkback with Chuck Wilder” this Tuesday, Ohio Religious Right activist “Coach” Dave Daubenmire suggested men today need to “man up” with “pitchforks and torches” to fight transgender people’s use of bathrooms that match their gender identity.

“What would our forefathers have done?” Daubenmire asked. “What would they have done two generations ago if the president of the United States tried to tell them to let men walk into their kids’ bathrooms?” Daubenmire answered his own question: “There’d have been pitchforks and torches. They’d have gone downtown and they’d have gotten things straightened out.”

“They would say, ‘We need that committee that was talking to the Salem witches,’” Wilder said. Wilder and Daubenmire then discussed whether witches are male or female. “Whatever, it doesn’t matter,” Daubenmire said.

“What’s wrong with us, Chuck?” Daubenmire asked. “How is it that we’re so sissified that daddies are going to let perverts violate their daughters’ restrooms?” He agreed with Wilder’s statement that that “political correctness” and “insisting on diversity” are the main problems that led to this. Wilder said that under Obama, areas require “X amount of Chinese, black, white, I’m sure we gotta get the Syrians in there now. Diversity, I’m telling you, it’s scary. You know, let America be America without any prejudice, and it should work perfectly.”

Yes, I’m sure that would work wonderfully. You just have to get all the non-Christian, non-white, non-hetero people to leave. Perhaps if you ask nicely? My guess would be no.