My Neighborhood in 1886

Two Things Money Can't Buy, Poverty and Experience

This morning Lord Kadizzle ran across the quote above. It says a lot. Especially the experience part. During a massive brain fart lord Kadizzle suffered when he was fifty, Lord Kadizzle quit a good job and traded cash for experience. Looking back ten years was it the right move? So far, yes. I have the experience, and George Bush gave me the poverty. One thing Lord Kadizzle has realized if you wait forever to get enough money, you will never have enough. Secondly, if you do have the money more than likely you will not have the desire nor the good health to enjoy it. You can always go back to work worst case scenario. Since the Republicans wrecked the economy with the great trickle down experiment, Lord Kadizzle has been forced back to work part time, but when the dust settles, take the experience.

Ray and Brian do nice Video on Hazen, Stanton Flood

North Dakota Flooding Reminds People Of North Dakota's Existence

The Onion spin on the North Dakota flood

When I die, I don't want to go to Heaven

Lord Kadizzle woke up early this morning thinking of Bruce Springstien's lyrics "When I die, I don't want to go to Heaven, I would not do Heaven's work well". Thinking of all the torture, ruining of cultures, selling of Indians into slavery, and the rest of the great deeds done in the name of religion I can see were Bruce is coming from. The mindless stupidity of missionaries who went around the world and spread disease, and ruined cultures that were funtioning perfectly. Simple minded Mormons running door to door promotiong their cult when they have nut cases in their own back yard forcing fourteen year old girls to marry eighty year old men. Massive cathedrials built to banckrupt poor people while they live in shacks. "When I die, I don't want to go to heaven, I would not do heavens work well". The scum sucking guys like Pat Roberson robbing old ladies, the fundamentalist that put Bush in office. On it goes.

Kadizzle sees fist hand how Wall Street Thieves live

Lord Kadizzle got to find out yesterday what it is like to steal billions then relax at the spa. Thanks to his children Lord Kadizzle got an eighty minute massage at a fancy spa in the mountains near Evergreen, Colorado. After the wonderful treatment Kadizzle could see how Bernie was inspired to set up a little ponzie scheme, and why the rich need the tax breaks. After you bilk the peasants you need to do something to relax, and soothe your conscience.

Missouri River is shut off at Riverdale

Ray Kerns sent me a nice picture of the Missouri River today. The Missouri is completely shut down at Riverdale because of the flooding. This is the first time in history the dam went to zero discharge. It was a day late and a dollar short, but a nice gesture. The power plants cannot get water so they had to shut down. The good news is the lake is coming up at an unprecidented rate so the summer sailing should be the best in years.

Don't Piss on me and tell me "It's Raining".

The fallacy of trickle down economics has been blown to shreds. Now, the same people who brought us the melt down want us to believe their next gambit. All the Republicans have lined up to fight against any progress Obama might make in saving the economy. Now, suddenly they are all concerned about the future deficits and the welfare of our children. These same lackies who gave tax breaks to the rich and kept the Iraq war off the budget had no voices when Bush was destroying the economy. Now, when someone else tries to clean up the mess their voices return. These lickspittles tell us they have a budget. They have an alternative budget. One major problem, their budget has no numbers. One thing for sure in there budget with no number is the proposition that the people who just robbed us will not have a tax increase. Yup, the people who made out like bandits under Bush will not be asked to sacrifice a thing when it come to cleaning up the mess.

THERE WILL BE A TEST ON PAUL KRUGMANS NYT ARTICLE TODAY

This is a must read, unless you are intent on being stupid for the rest of your life. Krugman explains how Reagan began the economic meltdown we are now in. Would be easy to dismiss him, but unfortunately he is a Noble Prize winning economist.

Hoopleheads

The Kadizzles have been caught up in the Deadwood series on HBO. Since the term hooplehead is used in the series Lord Kadizzle decided to find out where it came from. There is some speculation North Dakota may have played a role since the state does have a town named Hoople. It was not uncommon in the 1800's for someone to say "That North Dakota Legislature is full of Hoopleheads".

Cooking Turkey at Erin's

Obama may slide into trap

Lord Kadizzle is, and was a strong supporter of Obama, but things are getting scary. Until someone steps up to the plate and makes the hard calls the country will continue to go down hill. No one wants to face the fact that welfare for the rich has to end, but nothing will change until it does. Why do people making over $250k in retirement recieve social security? You can make up any story you want, but it is immoral, and unsustainable. Obama has to call for change. Why do people making over 100k per year pay no social security tax on any dollar over 100k they earn? Again make up your story, but it just doesn't fly. On the day Obama takes a strong stand on making the rich pay their share the recovery is on its way, but as long as we continue with welfare for the rich this will never heal. Why should your children and my children pay seven percent of their income to provide golf club memberships for millionairs in Phoenix?

Hazen Flood

The Lord will provide

Lord Kadizzle is not a great man of faith in the traditional sense. However, the Lord does work in strange ways, and often this is useful. Yesterday Lord Kadizzle set out to find a piece of 12 inch galvanized culvert. A project at Erin and Fran's required the culvert. Ideally Lord Kadizzle likes to get things at a discount, and the best discount is free. So first it was a stop at a contractors along the road. The contractor had no culvert. Next a trip to the dump. At the dump Lord Kadizzle had a session with the dump crew on how to make a hillbilly culvert out of fifty five gallon drums, or old five gallon water buckets. Realizing the hopelessness of such a concoction Lord Kadizzle left the friendly dump fellows and said to them " The Lord will provide a culvert".

Then next idea was to find a city or county shop that might have an old piece of culvert lying around, so Lord Kadizzle drove randomly around Evergreen, Colorado looking for the appropraite shop. With no luck finding the shop the truck started off on Bear Creek road. Kadizzle was drawn down the road by the homes of the prosperous in the mountians. After five miles of aimless driving there it was, the culvert. In the front yard of a home was about a ten foot piece of steel culvert. Kadizzle stopped at the home and asked the lady of the house if the culvert was for sale. Mrs. Housewife sent one of her minions to find dad working next door. Dad showed up and said indeed the culvert was for sale. The price was twenty dollars. Normally something like this would be at least two hundred dollars. With glee Kadizzle quickly said sold, only to discover he had no money in his wallet and Home Owners Inc. did not accept credti cards. At this point the kindly fellow said "Just take it'. Such a good deed could not go unrewarded so Kadizzle got his address and sent him the money. The story has two moral's 1) The Lord will provie 2) The Lord acts in strange ways. Lord Kadizzles God is not the one who has churches and wars and sends people to hell, but he is the one who will find you a culvert when you need one.

Pizza disaster may be blessing

Lord Kadizzle has wanted to shrink for years. The pizza from hell is still doing it's magic four days after consumption, and his lordship may be from five to ten pounds lighter. The Commander may be in the early grips of whatever this is. Megan has not had it as bad as Kadizzle. Never in modern times has the devil attacked Kadizzles digestive system with such vigor.

A society that works

You cannot have an economic system where five percent of the people at the top get ninety percent of the income. The banking mess we are now in is actually the result of the belief that many can work and only a few can prosper. The whole idea that a CEO can be worth 350 times what a line worker makes is obscene. Until the country goes back to a progressive income tax that addresses income inequality the country will continue to flounder. As long as people listen to pig advocates like Rush Limbaugh and think it is perfectly fine for the top one percent of the country to get 17 percent of the income while the bottom 20 percent of our society only gets 2 percent, the country will continue to decline into a banana republic. Why are we giving social security checks to people with retirement incomes of over two hundred thousand dollars per year? This is money taken from the young and given to the rich. Why is there no social security tax on any money earned over one hundred thousand dollars? The system is rigged in favor of the haves and against the have not's. It has brought us to our knees. How can the have nots spend when they have not. Spending is what makes the economy work. Concentrating all the wealth in the hands of a few has created the current mess and until this is addressed it will go on.
The whole notion that these people earned the money is insane, they stole it. They bribed our elected officials to rewrite the banking regulations, and just plain hoodwinked the public. All the CEO's that were such geniuses ran GM, and a host of other companies into the ground while they paid themselves millions.
If anyone suggest a limit on this unbridled greed they are quickly labeled a socialist. Sharing is evil, employing someone at Wal Mart for six bucks an hour with no benefits is what Jesus wants, and of course it is just fine with Jesus that the CEO of Wal Mart gets five thousand dollars an hour. Let Bill O'Rielly, Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the devils henchmen beat the drums for the destruction of our economy. Instead of reading and thinking for yourself, line up behind the right wing lemmings and keep telling yourself what is good for GM is good for the country, what is good for Wall Street is good for the country. Believing is easy, knowing takes some effort.

The Devil Pizza

Lord Kadizzle has not been laid low by food poisoning for a long time, but the devil pizza has done the trick. Unfortunately it also hit Megan and one of Erin's friends at the baby shower. Lord Kadizzle was in bed all day yesterday and had a Chernobyl with the exhaust system, Meg also was struck. One of the benifits of paying food workers poorly is that they may occasionally get angry and decide to spit on the pizza's they are making. With our wonderful system where we pay the CEO hundreds of millions it is understandable that the guy making six bucks and hour with no benefits might get angry and sabotage the product.

A big day at Snoocher Bears house

Lord Kadizzle is now 60, The Commander has now held her position as Supreme Commander for 33 years. The Kadizzles were united on March 21, 1976, Lord Kadizzle was born March 21, and today is the big combo baby shower for Erin, Kadizzle's birthday, and of course the anniversary of the Bickersons. Fran, Jeb, and a host of friends are all here having a good time.

The laziest Man

According to The Commander Lord Kadizzle is the laziest man every born. This morning to keep from having to flip the pancakes Lord Kadizzle mixed in some popcorn so they would flip themselves. It worked just fine, if you use enough popcorn you can slip your plate under the griddle cake on the last pop.

Family Dancing, and Rat Dogs

As the tribe gathers for Snoocher Bear's Baby shower the games begin. To start the day the hillbillies put on Doc Watson, and Emmylou Harris. Mom and Meg danced, then Erin and Meg. Jeb suggested he dance with Fran for the traditional family dancing.

Meg brought the blasted rat dog from NY. Of course Tony J. Sprinkleton brought his various mountain clothes. Megan told the story of how her dog Tony J. Sprinkleton just had a lot of expensive dental surgery. The vet's employees were amused by a dog with an arm band that read Tony J. Sprinkleton. When Tony's turn for surgery came the nurse came to the dog waiting room and called for "Mr. Tony J. Sprinkledon."

Back at the Snoocher Bears

Back in the hot tub the circle is complete. Never made it farther than the Salt River, but had a nice winter. Now back to the incubators house. Megan flies in tonight, and the family will be whole for the first time in a long time. The picture was from the San Rafial Swell in Western Colorado. The Commander was excited about the possibilities of exploration there. Looks like next year we will do some hiking there. NPR had a good program on today about uranium in that area. According to the program, if I heard it right, the uranium somehow affected the rainbows. Going to have to do some research on that one

I love Toyota's but, I may start a Jehad with them

Mice ate my new Toyota Tundra. It is a wonderful truck, but all the trouble lights came on in the middle of no where in Utah. 460 dollars later we are on the road after they replaced the wiring harness the mice ate. When I bought the truck I noticed a place where foam was torn (see picture). I did not want to be a petty complainer, so I said nothing. I had no clue what it was, but did not seem significant. Now, I know mice had been in the truck before I bought it. Toyota will not make good on the damage, so we may have to start a Jehad.

Pizza at the Hot Tomato

The Commander and Lord Kadizzle are in Fruita, Colorado eating Pizza. Good stuff stop there for sure. They have to old fashion Pizza ovens from when I was a kid, and the Pizza is authentic. Even have live music

Cobra Arch from the air

Click on the picture to enlarge
The crack that appears running through the lower part of this picture is Buckskin Gulch. The picture above is from down in Bucksking Gulch. The Commander and Lord Kadizzle hiked it a couple years ago. The route shown in this picture was from the GPS we took with us to Cobra Arch

Hot Stock Tip

The gun nuts have gone crazy buying ammunition. This phenomenon has spread all across the country. The ammunition manufacturers are going to make a fortune. Buy some stock. When the craze blows over the stock price will drop, so get out on time. Of course the NRA is spreading wild propaganda that is just fueling the nonsense. Someone may as well make money from the gun nuts.

Yellow Rock

Cissie on Yellow rock.

Cobra Arch

The Commander and Lord Kadizzle hiked down into Buckskin Creek to see Cobra Arch. The whole area is wonderful scenery and hiking, but it is a very hard hike through sand, and hard to find. A lot of people get close, and then miss it.

During the hike you could see over to many of the other famous sights in the area, such as the Wave, and Coyote Butt

Life in a Strange Mormon Land

If you know anything about the Mormon Religion, you know it is a bizarre cult. Sitting in St. George, Utah, not far from where the Mormons massacred, a wagon train of settlers many years ago, I notice the Mormons have blocked my computer from getting on Facebook. Yesterday Lord Kadizzle had a religious discussion with some Mormon College girls at our campground. The childlike view of the world they have is very disturbing. The Mormons do have a good side. They are very service oriented, very industrious, and generally friendly people. However, we drove through Colorado City yesterday where the fundamentalist Mormons marry 12 year old girls to eighty year old men. This is going on only sixty miles from where I sit. Religion is a relic of the past that has caused a lot of suffering, and we all need to grow up and end this nonsense that allows a Baptist Preacher in Hazen to slap a six month old baby while he deprives his 12 children of a life by home schooling them. More wars, abuse, and hate have been caused by religion than any force on Earth. If you want to believe in a higher order, fine, just don't force it on your children or the rest of the world.

Kadizzles on Parieha River Utah

The Kadizzle wagon is parked at our favorite spot down from the Pariah River Rangers station. Our friends the camp host just got to the ranger station and I am on their wifi. Really nice people who tell us all the secret spots. The commander and Kadizzle will do some exploring today. Weather nice, a little cool, but sunny and clear.

Google Earth View of Yesterdays Hike

Click on the picture to enlarge. The purple line is where the gps recored we went.

The Truth is a state of mind

One of the best parts of waking up in a wonderful place is what I call a music walk. You put on your headphones with your ipod and take a walk in the sunshine. Whistling is mandatory. The words to one song intrigue me, "The truth is a state of mind". Often I wonder how people believe some of the nonsensical things they do, but the perfect explanation is the truth is a state of mind. No matter how hard you try you cannot change the thought process of someone who has a state of mind that truth does not penetrate. Is there such a thing as truth, or can you know truth?

Richard Dawkins wrote the following letter to his ten year old daughter, it says more about truth than I ever could. Take the time to read it, then compare what you believe, to what is true.

To my dearest daughter,

Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know? How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the Sun and very far away? And how do we know that the Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of those stars, the Sun?
The answer to these questions is ‘evidence’.

Sometimes evidence means actually seeing (or hearing, feeling, smelling….) that something is true. Astronauts have traveled far enough from the Earth to see with their own eyes that it is round. Sometimes our eyes need help. The ‘evening star’ looks like a bright twinkle in the sky but with a telescope you can see that it is a beautiful ball – the planet we call Venus. Something that you learn by direct seeing (or hearing or feeling…) is called an observation.

Often evidence isn’t just observation on its own, but observation always lies at the back of it. If there’s been a murder, often nobody (except the murderer and the dead person!) actually observed it. But detectives can gather together lots of other observations which may all point towards a particular suspect. If a person’s fingerprints match those found on a dagger, this is evidence that he touched it. It doesn’t prove that he did the murder, but it can help when it’s joined up with lots of other evidence. Sometimes a detective can think about a whole lot of observations and suddenly realize that they all fall into place and make sense if so-and-so did the murder.

Scientists – the specialists in discovering what is true about the world and the universe – often work like detectives. They make a guess (called a hypothesis) about what might be true. They then say to themselves: if that were really true, we ought to see so-and-so. This is called a prediction. For example, if the world is really round, we can predict that a traveler, going on and on in the same direction, should eventually find himself back where he started. When a doctor says that you have measles he doesn’t take one look at you and see measles. His first look gives him a hypothesis that you may have measles. Then he says to himself: if she really has measles, I ought to see… Then he runs through his list of predictions and tests them with his eyes (have you got spots?), his hands (is your forehead hot?), and his ears (does your chest wheeze in a measly way?). Only then does he make his decision and say, ‘I diagnose that the child has measles.’ Sometimes doctors need to do other tests like blood tests or X-rays, which help their eyes, hands and ears to make observations.

The way scientists use evidence to learn about the world is much cleverer and more complicated than I can say in a short letter. But now I want to move on from evidence, which is a good reason for believing something, and warn you against three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called ‘tradition’, ‘authority’, and ‘revelation’.

First, tradition. A few months ago, I went on television to have a discussion with about 50 children. These children were invited because they’d been brought up in lots of different religions. Some had been brought up as Christians, others as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs. The man with the microphone went from child to child, asking them what they believed. What they said shows up exactly what I mean by ‘tradition’. Their beliefs turned out to have no connection with evidence. They just trotted out the beliefs of their parents and grandparents, which, in turn, were not based upon evidence either. They said things like, ‘We Hindus believe so and so.’ ‘We Muslims believe such and such.’ ‘We Christians believe something else.’ Of course, since they all believed different things, they couldn’t all be right. The man with the microphone seemed to think this quite proper, and he didn’t even try to get them to argue out their differences with each other. But that isn’t the point I want to make. I simply want to ask where their beliefs came from. They came from tradition. Tradition means beliefs handed down from grandparent to parent to child, and so on. Or from books handed down through the centuries. Traditional beliefs often start from almost nothing; perhaps somebody just makes them up originally, like the stories about Thor and Zeus. But after they’ve been handed down over some centuries, the mere fact that they are so old makes them seem special. People believe things simply because people have believed the same thing over centuries. That’s tradition.

The trouble with tradition is that, no matter how long ago a story was made up, it is still exactly as true or untrue as the original story was. If you make up a story that isn’t true, handing it down over any number of centuries doesn’t make it any truer!

Most people in England have been baptized into the Church of England, but this is only one of many branches of the Christian religion. There are other branches such as the Russian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic and the Methodist churches. They all believe different things. The Jewish religion and the Muslim religion are a bit more different still; and there are different kinds of Jews and of Muslims. People who believe even slightly different things from each other often go to war over their disagreements. So you might think that they must have some pretty good reasons – evidence – for believing what they believe. But actually their different beliefs are entirely due to different traditions.

Let’s talk about one particular tradition. Roman Catholics believe that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was so special that she didn’t die but was lifted bodily into Heaven. Other Christian traditions disagree, saying that Mary did die like anybody else. These other religions don’t talk about her much and, unlike Roman Catholics, they don’t call her the ‘Queen of Heaven’. The tradition that Mary’s body was lifted into Heaven is not a very old one. The Bible says nothing about how or when she died; in fact the poor woman is scarcely mentioned in the Bible at all. The belief that her body was lifted into Heaven wasn’t invented until about six centuries after Jesus’s time. At first it was just made up, in the same way as any story like Snow White was made up. But, over the centuries, it grew into a tradition and people started to take it seriously simply because the story had been handed down over so many generations. The older the tradition became, the more people took it seriously. It finally was written down as an official Roman Catholic belief only very recently, in 1950. But the story was no more true in 1950 than it was when it was first invented 600 years after Mary’s death.

I’ll come back to tradition at the end of my letter, and look at it in another way. But first I must deal with the two other bad reasons for believing in anything: authority and revelation.

Authority, as a reason for believing something, means believing it because you are told to believe it by somebody important. In the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope is the most important person, and people believe he must be right just because he is the Pope. In one branch of the Muslim religion, the important people are old men with beards called Ayatollahs. Lots of young Muslims are prepared to commit murder, purely because the Ayatollahs in a faraway country tell them to.

When I say that it was only in 1950 that Roman Catholics were finally told that they had to believe that Mary’s body shot off to Heaven, what I mean is that in 1950 the Pope told people that they had to believe it. That was it. The Pope said it was true, so it had to be true! Now, probably some of the things that Pope said in his life were true and some were not true. There is no good reason why, just because he was the Pope, you should believe everything he said, any more than you believe everything that lots of other people say. The present Pope has ordered his followers not to limit the number of babies they have. If people follow his authority as slavishly as he would wish, the results could be terrible famines, diseases and wars, caused by overcrowding.

Of course, even in science, sometimes we haven’t seen the evidence ourselves and we have to take somebody else’s word for it. I haven’t with my own eyes, seen the evidence that light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. Instead, I believe books that tell me the speed of light. This looks like ‘authority’. But actually it is much better than authority because the people who wrote the books have seen the evidence and anyone is free to look carefully at the evidence whenever they want. That is very comforting. But not even the priests claim that there is any evidence for their story about Mary’s body zooming off to Heaven.

The third kind of bad reason for believing anything is called ‘revelation’. If you had asked the Pope in 1950 how he knew that Mary’s body disappeared into Heaven, he would probably have said that it had been ‘revealed’ to him. He shut himself in his room and prayed for guidance. He thought and thought, all by himself, and he became more and more sure inside himself. When religious people just have a feeling inside themselves that something must be true, even though there is no evidence that it is true, they call their feeling ‘revelation’. It isn’t only popes who claim to have revelations. Lots of religious people do. It is one of their main reasons for believing the things that they do believe. But is it a good reason?

Suppose I told you that your dog was dead. You’d be very upset, and you’d probably say, ‘Are you sure? How do you know? How did it happen?’ Now suppose I answered: ‘I don’t actually know that Pepe is dead. I have no evidence. I just have this funny feeling deep inside me that he is dead.’ You’d be pretty cross with me for scaring you, because you’d know that an inside ‘feeling’ on its own is not a good reason for believing that a whippet is dead. You need evidence. We all have inside feelings from time to time, and sometimes they turn out to be right and sometimes they don’t. Anyway, different people have opposite feelings, so how are we to decide whose feeling is right? The only way to be sure that a dog is dead is to see him dead, or hear that his heart has stopped; or be told by somebody who has seen or heard some real evidence that he is dead.

People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you’d never be confident of things like ‘My wife loves me’.
But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn’t purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.

Sometimes people have a strong inside feeling that somebody loves them when it is not based upon any evidence, and then they are likely to be completely wrong. There are people with a strong inside feeling that a famous film star loves them, when really the film star hasn’t even met them. People like that are ill in their minds. Inside feelings must be backed up by evidence, otherwise you just can’t trust them.

Inside feelings are valuable in science too, but only for giving you ideas that you later test by looking for evidence. A scientist can have a ‘hunch’ about an idea that just ‘feels’ right. In itself, this is not a good reason for believing something. But it can be a good reason for spending some time doing a particular experiment, or looking in a particular way for evidence. Scientists use inside feelings all the time to get ideas. But they are not worth anything until they are supported by evidence.

I promised that I’d come back to tradition, and look at it in another way. I want to try to explain why tradition is so important to us. All animals are built (by the process called evolution) to survive in the normal place in which their kind live. Lions are built to be good at surviving on the plains of Africa. Crayfish are built to be good at surviving in fresh water, while lobsters are built to be good at surviving in the salt sea. People are animals too, and we are built to be good at surviving in a world full of … other people. Most of us don’t hunt for our own food like lions or lobsters, we buy it from other people who have bought it from yet other people. We ‘swim’ through a ‘sea of people’. Just as a fish needs gills to survive in water, people need brains that make them able to deal with other people. Just as the sea is full of salt water, the sea of people is full of difficult things to learn. Like language.

You speak English but your friend speaks German. You each speak the language that fits you to ‘swim about’ in your own separate ‘people sea’. Language is passed down by tradition. There is no other way. In England, Pepe is a dog. In Germany he is ein Hund. Neither of these words is more correct, or more truer than the other. Both are simply handed down. In order to be good at ‘swimming about in their people sea’, children have to learn the language of their own country, and lots of other things about their own people; and this means that they have to absorb, like blotting paper, an enormous amount of traditional information. (Remember that traditional information just means things that are handed down from grandparents to parents to children.) The child’s brain has to be a sucker for traditional information. And the child can’t be expected to sort out good and useful traditional information, like the words of a language, from bad or silly traditional information, like believing in witches and devils and ever-living virgins.

It’s a pity, but it can’t help being the case, that because children have to be suckers for traditional information, they are likely to believe anything the grown-ups tell them, whether true or false, right or wrong. Lots of what grown-ups tell them is true and based on evidence or at least sensible. But if some of it is false, silly or even wicked, there is nothing to stop the children believing that too. Now, when the children grow up, what do they do? Well, of course, they tell it to the next generation of children. So, once something gets itself strongly believed – even if its completely untrue and there never was any reason to believe it in the first place – it can go on forever.
Could this be what happened with religions? Belief that there is a god or gods, belief in Heaven, belief that Mary never died, belief that Jesus never had a human father, belief that prayers are answered, belief that wine turns into blood – not one of these beliefs is backed up by any good evidence. Yet millions of people believe them. Perhaps this is because they were told to believe them when they were young enough to believe anything.

Millions of other people believe quite different things, because they were told different things when they were children. Muslim children are told different things from Christian children, and both grow up utterly convinced that they are right and the others are wrong. Even within Christians, Roman Catholics believe different things from Church of England people or Episcopalians, Shakers or Quakers, Mormons or Holy Rollers, and all are utterly convinced that they are right and the others are wrong. They believe different things for exactly the same kind of reason as you speak English and someone speaks German.

Both languages are, in their own country, the right language to speak. But it can’t be true that different religions are right in their own countries, because different religions claim that opposite things are true. Mary can’t be alive in the Catholic Republic but dead in Protestant Northern Ireland.

What can we do about all this? It is not easy for you to do anything, because you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: ‘Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?’ And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?’ And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.

Your loving,

Daddy

Hyper Active or Hiker Active?

Today Lord Kadizzle is letting The Commander run on her own. On second thought the whole idea of Kadizzle "letting" The Commander do anything is absurd. The Commander is on one more hike while Kadizzle rest. Yesterday we visited the site where Butch Cassidy and the Sun Dance Kid filmed the bicycle scene. The picture is above of the actual house.

A Vast land of endless surprises.

The Commander and Lord Kadizzle spent day three exploring more uncharted areas of Zion. Zion is one of those places that keep you going just a little farther. One danger is that as you keep going "just a little farther", and you don't have time to get back before dark. The Commander is great for that mistake. Although the Commander considers herself a rock climber, she would not let Lord Kadizzle assault a steep slickrock peak he wanted to try. We both have been tempted to hike all the way down to one fork of the Virgin River. Luckily, we did not try. Today, we found out the route we were going to take would have "cliffed" us, as they say, meaning we couldn't go any farther without climbing gear.

Exploring Zion

Walking slick rock in Zion is the best hiking on earth. Again today The Commander will lead another exploration into unknown territory.

Bush has destroyed our savings

Just looked at my retirement account, or should I say what is left of it. Bush and his gang did way more to destroy the country than Bin Lauden could have ever hoped. It will take years to dig out of the mess that idiot created. Traveling you can see the damage everywhere. Stores in Phoenix shuttered and for lease. Fewer people in the campgrounds, and the big honker RVs just are not moving. Mabel and Zeke that were looking forward to retirement are now home worrying how they are going to make it because of the robbery the Republicans pulled off with the tax cuts for the rich. Putting a war on a credit card rather than make the rich pay their share was a stroke of genius. Lets give some more bailout money to pay CEO bonuses.

Zion, heaven on Earth

The Commander lead the way on a new hike at Zion. Rarely do the Kadizzles explore the south side of Zion, but we found a wonderful overlook of the Virgin River. Will do Zion for a couple more days then on to Grand Staircase Escalante. Got a little snow last night, but will be a nice day. The Commander just bought some used water shoes and socks, so a wet hike up a stream is surely in our future.

Shoot with no remorse

Lord Kadizzle has in his head a list of people he could shoot in the head with no remorse. On this list is Rush Limbaugh, and Pat Robertson. Today the New York Times has a good article on Rush and what an embarrassment he is to the Republican party. Pat Robertson has been robbing old ladies for years and to make matters worse is a Republican, as if Jesus would ever tolerate Pat Robertson, or Rush Limbaugh. Even Jesus could not forgive them.

Goodbye Rushinda Limbaugh, and call 911 for McNugget alerts.

For lack of entertainment Lord Kadizzle had a long political discussion with the neighbors at our camp site. The husband looked like a washed out old Viet Vet, and his wife matched. On and on we went in the usual circles, it was fun, and each side had the usual diatribe. It all ended in good humor. Today when we left Mrs. Republican hard core insisted on a hardy goodbye. As we rolled out his three Amerikan flags were flying proudly. Frank had a hard time getting a word in edgewise between Rushinda and Lord Kadizzle. Lord Kadizzle made little headway with Rushinda once she declared there were no facts that disagreed with her view of the world. Anything that disagreed with Bill O'Riley, or the other hard cores was just fabrication of the left.

Before leaving Lord Kadizzle spent a few moments watching Fox News with Frank on the TV that projected from one of his storage areas under the forty foot motor home. Frank alerted me to a story that a woman had called 911 several times because she went to McDonalds and they were out of Chicken McNuggets.

Rattlesnakes and Drunks

In the last two days the big news has been the drunk that smashed through our gate at the gated community, and the siting of two rattlesnakes. The drunk hit the gate at about fifty, and decided to run out into the desert on foot. The sheriff instigated a helicopter hunt, and soon he was captured. It was interesting to wake up to the crashing sound when he hit the gate. Our first rattlesnake Cissie walked by and did not see. Fortunately it was dead, even though coiled. The second one was on the trail. Hiking is taking on a new phase. When I get to better wi-fi. I will put some pictures on.