Posts Made By: Edward Acklin

We've been experimenting with trying to catch landing shots to see how their bodies deal with the slow-down-and-stop part. Kind of fun to try. Takes a few shots to catch them right, but pereverance furthers.

...shows what he thinks of our cuisine, I guess.

There seems to be an implicit welding-together of faith and belief in a lot of these discussions, and I'd like to note a relationship between these two activities. Faith, generally speaking, is that stuff that I accept with little or no reproducible evidence. Things like the concept of addition telling me that adding one to unity entails adding at least one more to that. I have faith in this "Principle of Addition" because it seems necessary to create useful relations between countable objects like sheep and wives and little circles of shiny metal. In time I come to believe that the counting I do with these rules can show whether I've got more sheep or wives or shiny metal than I need and decide perhaps to trade some of my wives for some of your shiny metal. We work out a deal based upon our belief that counting sheep and wives and shiny metal means the same thing to each of us, so our deal won't go sour. In this case, our belief grows out of our faith and depends directly upon our sharing it for it to have any meaning at all. If deals go bad often enough, our faith gets challenged and we sometimes change our beliefs. Maybe a wife is worth 4 sheep or a few more pieces of gold. Maybe a sheep is not for sale this season at any price. Still, with faith in the agreeable bounds and bonds of the faith, we've got us a system. If faith goes, though...if we find that counting does not work any more..that in fact the 2+2 sheep we thought made 4 gold coins now turns out to have made 3.999 Copper Coins, our whole system comes into question and all our deals are suspect. You might even want your wife back. Throughout my life I've had my belief adjusted over and over. I suspect it will happen again. Through all of that, however, my faith has remained as solid as the heart of a neutron star. Faith may give one person a rigid structure to build a system of beliefs upon that make him feel secure and protected. It may give someone like me the courage to ramble on through the strange twists of life and love and fortune, health and sickness, excitement and fear that is this long and interesting life without drawing one single conclusion about the author of it or His intent for Me. If I can't read whatever signs people tell me God has plainly put out
there for me, I just fall back on my faith and keep rolling in the best way I know how. One man might see a sign for me that I see as nothing more than a decorative poster on the road. You might look at the road and see a tiresome trail to work. I might look at that road and see a long adventure in the world on its roadsides. Keep the faith and be careful what belief you wrap around that faith and you'll get down that road or out that door or where ever or nowhere ever you want to go.
But in the end, friends, don't ask belief to support your faith. It don't work that way. Belief is perishable on its own. Faith must be consciously destroyed.

Yes it is. Nice shot, too! I like cardinals, the wife likes Jays. Somewhere we have a picture of a Rufus-sided Towhee, one of the more elusive locals, as well as our resident Roadrunner, who is brazen enough to come on the porch for dogfood. We've even driven around the backroads here looking for roadkill so Donna could get shots of the Turkey Vultures.

Nice shot of a really majestic bird. We have a pond of a couple of acres and these show up there fairly often to hang out in the shallows. It always amazes me how, when they lift off the water, they're gone in three wingbeats. The first one lifts them up, second one positions them and third one accellerates. This is all done slowly, not the anxious flapping of a smaller more excited bird...just a liesurely liftoff and exit.

Gosh, Carl...North Greenland? Do you go there often? I've flown over Greenland and always wanted to go there and Iceland as well. Never made it. Good shot!

Great shot! I agree about the forum. It's always got something different to look at.

To portray any government as "what it is versus what it was intended to be" is a tricky sort of enterprise. There's not a government in history, existing or extinct, that is (or was at its end) what its "founders" envisioned in its beginning. This can be good or bad or a bit of both, as it seems to be here. Nevertheless, a certain beaureaucratic shift was more evident after the war of 1861-1865 (Civil War, Late Unpleasantness, etc...) wherein official statements quit saying "The United States of America are..." and began saying "The United States of America is..."

Mostly, however, the government becomes what it does at the hands of its legislative bodies who are elected by a very small number of us. This is not because of any prohibition against our participation, but because most Americans cannot be bothered to educate themselves, register, be active, and vote.

We are at less risk from conspiracy than from ignorance and apathy.

my $.02

Really beautiful! Great shot. Camera? Lens? Settings?

Really beautiful shot KURT. These are plentiful here, too, but we have yet to get a good shot of one because, as you say, they keep their distance. Forwarding this one to the wife right now!