President Barack Obama took some time off today and filled out a bracket for the 2009 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. It has been released on ESPN.com. The bracket surprised many Republicans, who were expecting much different picks from the new Democratic president. Obama picked three #1 seeds and a #2 seed for his Final Four picks, making it the most conservative NCAA bracket in the history of the tournament. Some analysts say that although it is very conservative, if Barry Goldwater, had been elected president, he would have likely had the most conservative bracket in history. When accused about being too conservative with his picks, by fellow Democrats in the White House, he immediately defended his position by saying “I am willing to reach across the isle in some areas of my presidency because I feel that bipartisanship is important. I will hold strong to my Democratic beliefs about most everything else, but on this one, I’m willing to compromise.”
Obama said that he picked University of North Carolina to win the whole tournament because he thought it was a “safe bet”. This is thought by most to be a respectable decision on his part, and at this point, no one can argue with that.
President Obama urges Republicans to take a good hard look at his bracket, he says, “because it is about as conservative as it gets”. With only 3 upsets in his whole bracket, that is absolutely accurate.
Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton was surprised when she saw the bracket, and said “Wow. He makes his picks like a girl.” And later was heard whispering “Are you sure that’s not a girl’s bracket?” and “No, they are probably ok. It just looks more girly than mine.”
Obama says next year he hopes the selection committee will be nationalized in order for him to make some changes in how the tournament is run.
One of the rules he is suggesting is letting some banks like AIG and Citigroup bring a team to the tournament. He mentions that, “…just like Universities all across the country, these institutions have taught us a lot in the last few months.” They will be eligible for the basketball tournament next year because “the lessons they teach are just as important as any classes in college.” Some may argue, even more important. The lessons he said have been “harsh but important”, and he suspects, “they aren’t through yet”.
Another rule he is hoping to get passed, is one that would allow any first round losers, to get another chance, he called it a “first round bail-out”.
The New Year celebration is one that is celebrated all around the world, each one as their specific time zone reaches 12:00 midnight. It’s a perfect time to say goodbye to sufferings and celebrate achievements of the previous year, while at the same time starting with a clean slate for the year to come. Traditional New Year celebrations, like the Chinese New Year, (which is not celebrated on January 1, because of a different calendar) and other eastern cultures use a philosophy of cleaning their house, not eating meat, and casting held grudges aside as a way to celebrate the New Year. These are things that they hope will become good habits for the future. They think that starting out the year by making the first day, one of cleaning, and productivity, while ridding themselves of the evils and misdeeds of the past will put them off on a good foot. Pakastani tradition is to have a bon fire called Nawrooz in order to rid themselves of the remaining evil from the previous year. Here in America, we go to big celebrations with friends and family. We often have New Years Day off from work in honor of the New Year.
My roommate and I were talking the other day about Dane Cook’s joke having to do with child sponsorship on TV. “The reason why more people don’t give is because of this guy. For 15 cents you can change a child’s life. …. But you don’t give. And I blame the old guy. Ya know why? He’s too nice…”. That started a conversation about how we should sponsor a child. It also started a conversation about how there are people who sponsor dolphins and various other animals. It made me do a little research.
You can actually sponsor a dolphin… for a small donation of $25/month.
You can sponsor a CHILD for LESS THAN A DOLPHIN?!?
And there are people who decide that they’d rather give a few more bucks a month to get a picture of a dolphin to hang on their fridge rather than feed and educate a child.
Priorities, priorities, priorities.
How does that happen? Who are those people? If you sponsor a dolphin, I want you to explain yourself. I want a comment on this page about how you decided to spend MORE money a month sponsoring a dolphin than a child.
Perhaps these people say “Hey, I sponsor a child and a dolphin each month, so get off my back, Zach!” (That rhymes.) And to that I say, “Sponsor two children a month…and you’ll have some money left over…for Netflix or something.”
I brought this to my roommate. He said “Well, Zach. I bet it costs a lot of money to feed a dolphin. They have to eat fish. Kids can eat rice.”
I quickly, and intelligently replied “I don’t care, that’s stupid!!!” and I went back to my computer.
A Snowy Owl, now that can’t eat more than a child. And you’re not giving this owl an education, let’s be real.
I just can’t imagine caring this much about Snowy Owls, and so little about human beings. It’s just hard to picture. And certainly hard to rationalize.“Oh, poor owl, hasn’t had a mouse to eat for a week, and that kid, well, he had one just last night.”
I explored that page, and I found something that made me lose all hope for humanity.
Although hummingbirds can eat their weight in food each day,
fortunately, most hummingbirds only weigh about 5 grams.
I figured in the price of sugar and tap water and found that you can feed a hummingbird for about ½ cent per day. That’s about 15 cents a month. That’s $1.82/ year. Hummingbirds live up to 17 years. So you can support a hummingbird for his whole life at your own home for about $30.94. (If you live in a cold climate, like me, hummingbirds may only need your assistance for 6 month out of the year, since they are migratory birds. This would bring the cost down to $0.91 per year.)
Now my first question is a person that does this would be, why do you actually care about hummingbirds?
Are you really so stingy that you decided to save 2 dollars a month to adopt a hummingbird instead of a starving child?
My second question is, if you really care that much about hummingbirds and that little about starving children, why don’t you take this money that you’re sending to this organization and feed them yourself.
Here in Maine, I could support 267 hummingbirds for the price that this organization asks for the “adoption” of 1.
I can’t imagine what they are doing with all that extra cash.
If a person is reading this article and is currently sponsoring an animal, please leave a comment. You can leave it anonymously if you’d like (after this, you probably do).
(If you are interested, click on the banner below to sponsor a child. Oh, come on, now you have to. There’s just no excuse.
To get this out of the way up front, I don’t believe in evolution. It’s not a religious thing, it’s a logic thing.
Most people will stop reading right now. That’s fine with me, I understand that there is no theory held dearer to the hearts of the people who believe it, than the theory of evolution.
This maybe the most wildly unpopular article I ever write, but if you’re still reading now, than you likely either know me and have read enough of my articles to know that I’m a thinker (maybe an odd and unconventional thinker, but a thinker all the same). Or maybe you’re already a cynic of the theory and are looking to find some ideas to confirm your already held beliefs. I suspect there will be another much smaller group still reading who will want to debate (or scoff at my inferior intelligence).
Evolution has become a world-view and it has been settled. There is no room for doubt or even a thought at this point. If anyone doubts evolution, they are considered “simpletons” and lose all hope of being considered a thoughtful scholar.
Now you may be thinking. OH NO, not more Ben Stein!
No. Absolutely not. I saw Ben Stein’s Expelled and I was thoroughly disappointed. I could’ve done a much better job myself. If I had a couple million dollars lying around, I probably would.
I don’t believe that Creationists, which are considered “the other camp” have it all figured out either. Which leaves me with no theory to call my own, but I figure, no theory is better than a wrong one. There’s no sense in making assumptions about the unknown, it just makes us look ignorant, which is clearly what we’ve been doing for years now.
The first thing that must be understood about evolution is that evolution doesn’t have intention. There is no mind behind evolution; there’s no purpose or goal. For example, if we are going to paint a picture, we have in our mind an idea in which the art becomes. Natural selection works in a way that there doesn’t need a purpose; it doesn’t have a brain; it cannot think ahead about what it would like to create; it’s just survival of the fittest. The longest beak gets the most worms, while the shorter beaks die off. This makes good sense and there is no doubt that it takes place.
The second thing that we must keep in mind is that evolution works very, very, very slowly. It would take millions or years and thousands of generations of an organism to make a measurable change.
The questions I raise here are about how things like horns, antlers and wings develop (which is excluding many other inconsistencies with the theory).
To explain my point, I will give you a chart similar to any other evolutionary chart we’ve all seen, this one involves the evolution of the rhinoceros.
Now at first appearance it looks quite legitimate, we’re so used to seeing these and accepting them, we never give them a second thought. But now we will. Let’s take a look at the change from the Trigonias to the Dicerorhinus. Here’s a closer look.
The most noticeable difference is the fact that one has no horn at all, and the other, clearly does. Now there is obviously millions of years and many, many generations between them, so let’s think about the implications that go along with this.
Since natural selection is the method used, we must ask how these things developed. Now keeping in mind that evolution doesn’t “know” what it’s creating, we must rely on the idea that the beginnings of a horn must have some advantage over not having the beginnings of a horn.
We also must remember how long the process would take to create a horn, we can imagine that the beginnings of a horn or antler would be just a simple bump on the creature’s bone structure.
The first thousand generations of having this “horn” or “bump” in this case, it would absolutely do the creature no good. It would have no advantage. So with that knowledge, it would not be advantageous of the organism for another couple million years, when it would have a horn big enough to help it defend itself. Why would the creature continue to evolve a little bump that wasn’t giving it an advantage in being the most “fit” for the environment? Natural selection would do away with this bump, not evolve it into a horn.
This thought can also be applied to wings too. Below is a picture of a prehistoric dinosaur supposedly linked to birds and the beginning stages of aviation in the animal kingdom.
Why would wings use several million years to develop, if flying wouldn’t be possible until the wings are complete? It does seem possible that before the wing would be developed enough for flying, it could give it some propulsion on the ground to make it faster, but there would still be several million years that the wing-like thing would be completely useless, and actually get in the way. It seems to me that that is adding a characteristic to evolution that it doesn’t have by nature. Intention.
There are folks who believe in an intelligent designer who evolved creatures into what they are today. I wonder about this view because I think it has been developed to try to link religion with the “indisputable scientific evidence that supports evolution”. With this thought, you are giving up the idea of Natural Selection as the evolutionary tool to evolve creatures, which is the common mindset in the scientific community. You are giving up natural selection because you are assuming that God did it instead. If you believe that God created natural selection then my argument above still holds strong.
I’m not a scientist and don’t pretend to be one. Still, in my simple mind, these examples seem to poke at the weak underbelly of the theory of evolution. I can’t help but wonder how people keep confidence in such a disputable theory. It’s become a world view. I don’t know how something this scientific, this big, could be accepted without more scrutiny. Perhaps I do know, perhaps it has happened before.
“The great mass of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.”
“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.”
You know, that title actually sounds legitimate, even though it says, “My Thoughts on Unidentified Flying Objects Flying Saucers” which is quite redundant and doesn’t really make sense.
But I bet you didn’t notice.
That’s because nobody notices subtleties.
I don’t know if UFO’s and aliens are real or not, but I will tell you that since I don’t want to believe in them, I don’t.
No matter how much evidence was given to me on the subject, I would still be skeptical of it. If it came down to me meeting an alien, being lead to the Mothership, having testing done on my body, and then being gently descended from the sky on a large column of light, I still wouldn’t believe. I would probably think I was a schizophrenic, and I would drive myself straight to the mental hospital (which is quite close, I must add).
Despite the fact that I don’t believe in aliens, I did some thinking about them and thought about “what if” they were real. Like, really real. Because I believe there are two types of real in the world nowadays, there are real things and then there are real Photoshopped things.
I must admit that ever since Adobe Photoshop has come out, UFO pictures are looking more realistic than ever.
A thought I had was, if aliens made it here to Earth from somewhere, they must have an extreme amount of advanced technology. This technology is amazing too; we’ve never been able to make a saucer looking object fly, without throwing it. I mean, we have frizbees, but all of our planes have…wings.
They also must be either very cautious or very shy, since they have not had any real contact with humans. What I wonder about though, is if they are so cautious or shy, why they continually use bright lights on their spaceship at night. Do they not have night vision technology? They’ve made a round object, like a saucer, actually fly but they don’t have night vision? I mean, come on.
Since aliens must have much more advanced technology than we do here on Earth, it’s not out of the realm of possibilities that they are reading this now just as you are. They certainly must have wireless internet connections in their saucers. They are probably connected to my unsecured wireless network right now, like all of the homeless people in the area.
Yes, there are homeless people with laptops. I saw a couple in Starbucks the other day. And I’ll tell you, there’s nothing more encouraging than to see homeless people with laptops, cell phones and drinking a $3.00 cup of coffee. God Bless America!
Ok, so in the picture at the top, I admit, it’s not a real UFO sighting. But, like I said, nobody notices subtleties. You looked at it and just assumed that it was a “UFO sighting”. Don’t lie, I know you did.
I Photoshopped the picture of the Goodyear blimp below and turned it into a UFO sighting.
Or was it this one?
I may have got them mixed up since I labeled them both UFOSIGHTING.JPG.
Since it has been decided by various special interest groups that the globe is warming because of the human race, environmentalists have been thinking up creative ways to reduce the carbon footprint of our species on this planet. It has been said by a leading global warming theorist that in 30 or 40 years “most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals… Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state — like Somalia or Sudan — and living conditions will be intolerable.” -Ted Turner
Today in some large city, an assembly of the most renowned climatologists gathered at a global
warming convention to try to change the direction of our species. The
convention lasting several days was resolved after long deliberation by discovering
the only reasonable way to stop global warming in its tracks, before our
civilization “breaks down”. It was decided that the only way to save the human
race from global warming is suicide.
They had been for several years taking less severe means of
saving the globe by having things like hybrid cars, vegan lifestyles, metal
water bottles, Al Gore DVD’s,and countless bumperstickers about hugging trees and such, but with only futile efforts. They decided that more severe path needed to be taken. They made a quick press release
to domestic as well as international communities about suicide being the definitive option to save the human race.
They made it a point to mention that it had been decided that they were not actually going to take part in this, stating “someone had to be around to collect the data”, but were urging Hummer owners to be the first to “kick their own bucket”. Rumors of that being discriminatory toward SUV owners were immediately
quieted by the group with this comment, “There is no such thing as discrimination against the guilty, and we all know, those people are largely at fault.”
Follow-up comments were made suggesting that if ridding the earth of Hummer owners, did not affect the global warming situation; it would “at the very least, lower the price of gas”.
