Saturday Night Movies

VARMiNT from VARMiNT Films on Vimeo.

Warbird Pilot: Behind the Visor from Rob W. Scribner on Vimeo.

Lake of Dreams from roy two thousand on Vimeo.

Abiogenesis (Short Film) from Richard Mans on Vimeo.

Cork's Cattlebaron from Eric Steele on Vimeo.

What Is Art? from Stanley Ka Chun Chan on Vimeo.

Silo from David Soll on Vimeo.

BROKEN : Rock, Paper, Scissors from GangMariaYi on Vimeo.

Listen Senior Film from Listen. Senior Thesis on Vimeo.

OMOTE / REAL-TIME FACE TRACKING & PROJECTION MAPPING. from something wonderful on Vimeo.

Dateless from Remus Buznea on Vimeo.

Sensory: BBC Wildlife Director John Downer & the technology of 'spy-cam' filmmaking from Getty Images on Vimeo.

Nightingale and Canary from Andy Thomas on Vimeo.

Handle With Care from ticktockrobot on Vimeo.

A small surfer makes big waves from ABC Open on Vimeo.

Treo Fiskur from Treo Fiskur on Vimeo.

Australia's Gold Coast - Timelapse from SCIENTIFANTASTIC on Vimeo.

Friday Night Music: Traditional Cajun Music Mix

Yes, There is a Globalist Movement based on Agenda 21

I just got an email that "http://www.sustainable-city.org/ " is now following my twitter feed.  I really don't do twitter.

Funny, I thought, why would they want to follow someone who opposes "Smart Growth" and champions small, liveable, communities and individual liberty?

I followed their link and here is what I found.  The Local Agenda 21 Planning Guide

Pretty interesting, stuff.  This is not a conspiracy theory.  Governments and Non Profits are really trying to implement this stuff.   This is conspiracy fact.   Okay,  I don't want to scare anybody.  It is really is just politics and a fad of planners.  The bad part is that people are manipulating us using environmental fears to accumulate wealth and power through plans like "Plan Bay Area".  Mega-corporations like Siemens, General Electric, Bank of America, IBM, Monsanto and others hope to profit from a centralized economy and government.

Read it to your heart's content.  This document was published in 1996.  This is a real globalist movement.  Did you agree to surrender your livable community for a central planner's idea of your future?

California allocates vastly more water than supplies allow, study shows

By Matt Weiser
mweiser@sacbee.com

Published: Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2014 - 12:16 pm

The state of California has handed out five times more water rights than nature can deliver, a new study by University of California researchers shows.

California’s total freshwater runoff in an average year is about 70 million acre-feet, according to the study. But the state has handed out junior water rights totaling 370 million acre-feet. One acre-foot is enough to meet the needs of two average households for a year.

The rivers under the most strain, the research indicates, are virtually all that drain into theCentral Valley, including the Sacramento, Feather, Yuba, American, Mokelumne, Stanislaus, Tuolumne, Merced, Kings and San Joaquin rivers. Others near the top include the Salinas, Santa Clara, Santa Ana and Santa Ynez rivers.

“It seems clear that in a lot of these cases, we’ve promised a lot more water than what’s available,” said Ted Grantham, the study’s lead author, who conducted the research as part of postdoctoral studies at UC Davis. “There’s never going to be enough water to meet all of these demands.”

The study confirms prior estimates of the disparity but goes further by describing the degree of over-allocation in individual watersheds across California. It also reveals that the problem may be much larger since the researchers looked at only a subset of California water rights – those allocated after 1914 and considered “junior” rights.

California’s system of water rights, overseen by the State Water Resources Control Board, is the primary means by which the state distributes natural runoff to provide water for cities, farms and industry. In most cases, a property owner or government agency applies to the state for a water right or permit. If granted, it allows them to divert a certain amount of water directly from a river or stream.

Such rights, for example, account for all the water stored behind dams in the state, which is the primary source of drinking water for many Californians and irrigation water for crops.

The study was published in the current issue of the journal Environmental Research Letters. It was conducted by analyzing more than 12,000 water rights issued after 1914, the year California adopted its system of water diversion rules. Only those rights had sufficient data available for analysis, Grantham said.

The researchers then used streamflow data collected by the U.S. Geological Survey to establish baseline natural runoff volumes for about 4,500 sub-watersheds across the state. These data were compared to the water rights. In many cases, the results showed that diverters are allowed to withdraw far more water than the stream can produce in an average weather year.

“In so doing, they give these rights-holders a false sense of water security,” said Joshua Viers, a co-author of the study and an engineering professor at UC Merced. “It’s an entitlement that may never be filled. That is unfortunate, because we continue to allocate water rights to this day.”

In dry years like this one, the disparity grows worse, because there is less snowmelt to feed streams. The consequences can be dire: This summer, the state water board imposed curtailments on about 10,000 water rights, requiring diversions to be halted completely because there isn’t enough water to go around.

Craig Wilson, Delta water master for the state board, has a different view of the situation. He said the excess allocation of water is “overblown” because many water-rights holders actually divert less water than their permits allow. And very often, much of that diverted water returns to the same stream as runoff from farm fields, where it can be used again by someone downstream.

“It’s very true, the board has issued water rights for more water than is available,” said Wilson, who oversees water rights in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. “I don’t think it’s nearly as big an issue as some people believe.”

But Grantham said it is difficult to know for sure, because the state has no idea how much water is being diverted at any moment. Diverters are not required to report their water use in real time. Instead, they report water usage annually, and these reports are not verified for accuracy.

“Particularly in times of drought, I think there is just so much uncertainty in how these water rights are being exercised that it’s practically impossible to try and manage these systems,” said Grantham, who now works for the U.S. Geological Survey in Colorado.

It has long been assumed that correcting the excess allocation would be complicated because there are so many water rights, each with unique historical and legal complications. But Grantham said the study revealed that might not be so, because 80 percent of the water volume is held by 1 percent of the water rights, and mostly by government agencies.

“We don’t really need to deal with thousands and thousands of water-rights holders,” he said. “We might just need to deal with a couple hundred that hold 90 percent of the water.”

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2014/08/19/6639570/california-allocates-vastly-more.html#storylink=cpy

Letters to the Marin County Planning Department from Community Venture Partners.

Ferguson, Mo. Protests through the eyes of a Teen.

‘Am">http://vimeo.com/103678910">‘Am I Next?': Ferguson’s Protests Through the Eyes of a Teenager
from Transient">http://vimeo.com/transientpictures">Transient Pictures on Vimeo.https://vimeo.com">Vimeo.>

Stand up against injustice!

The Last Day of Drakes Bay Oyster Company.

A very sad day for Marin Organic Agriculture. A sad day for environmentalists everywhere who recognize that mankind is also part of the environment. It is a sad day for West Marin farmers who will have the crosshairs on them next. These are the real victims of this witch hunt.

Eagle-killing rule almost done

By Laura Barron-Lopez

The Obama administration has nearly finalized a rule that would give energy companies lengthy permits for wind farms that end up killing bald and golden eagles.

Hundreds of thousands of birds are killed every year after flying into large wind turbine blades, an issue that became an ongoing saga for the administration this year.The White House finalized its review on Thursday of a rule that would give the farms a 30-year pass for the killings, known as "takings."

The details of the Interior Department rule are not yet known and it is possible it could be tweaked, though significant changes would be unusual at this stage in the process.
Obama found himself caught between green groups and renewable energy companies over the summer due to the controversy surrounding the rule, which also applies to oil rigs and electric lines.

An Interior Department official told The Hill it has been working "for more than a year to gather public and stakeholder input on the proposal," which was sent to the White House Office of Management and Budget back in April.

In August, green groups met with the White House to make the case that the 30-year permit is too long, even if the deaths are unintentional.

They argued the administration should be more diligent in reviewing the effects large wind farms have on the environment.

Late last month, Duke Energy reached a $1 million settlement with the Obama administration over the deaths of more than a dozen protected eagles and other birds at its wind farms.

The settlement marked the first time the administration had penalized a wind energy company for killing eagles. 

EDITOR'S NOTE: There seems to be no end to the rationalization of environmental crimes when the "greater good" rule is applied by government.  In California, SB743 was signed into law allowing shortcuts on the environmental review process if the project is "transit oriented development".  Hypocrites.

How Dirty Laws Trash the Environment

Will our Marinwood Plaza,LLC be required to clean up the full toxic waste that threatens Silveira Ranch or will Assemblymen Levine and Supervisor Adams again attempt to intervene with regulators to get a free pass to delay cleanup? This is outrageous. A cancer cluster has been found yards from the site and pollution has been found on the East side of 101 freeway. Families and young children, especially, are at risk.

How do you know when someone is trying to deceive you with Statistics?

1) When they use metrics that sound good at first, but don't actually mean what they're trying to suggest.

For instance:

80% of all Camrys sold in the last 20 years are still on the road!

The metric suggests "oh yeah, they're really reliable," but think hard about it.

Maybe 80% of all Camrys sold in the last 20 years were sold within the last 10 years?  That doesn't say much for reliability, does it?  In fact, that would suggest that they don't make it past 10 years.

In any case, I don't mean to disparage the Camry, as I do think it is a nice car, but the metric has absolutely no meaning unless you have a lot more information.

Perhaps if they wanted to really show reliability, they would have put it as "80% of all Camrys 20 years or older are still on the road!"  Now that would say something about reliability.

2)  When they declare something effective without comparing it to the alternative of doing nothing, or without comparing it to alternatives.

The first example that comes to mind is vented ashtrays.  I remember reading a study about them.  They were made to help dissipate indoor smoke back when smoking indoors was popular.  An experiment was conducted to evaluate how effectively they cleared smoke from a room, and it was found that leaving the vents off the ashtrays turned out to be more effective than putting the vents on.  But the marketing team behind the product took the results that saidsure, the smoke clears out with these vents, but not having the vents is betterand cut it down to the smoke clears out with these vents.

Thinking about it further, it seems like comparing against "doing nothing" (placebo effect) is the gold standard for evaluating medical treatments, with a confidence result of p = 0.05 for a single-sided t test being enough to say "LOOK AT THIS IT IS EFFECTIVE!!!1!!!11!!!!"  What is not required is a comparison against cheaper alternatives, and that ought to be the gold standard -- benchmarking against competition instead of simply declaring effectiveness.

Leaving off information about alternatives is deceptive.  Seriously -- if you want to prescribe me Vicodin for my pain, it had damn well be more effective than Tylenol at making my pain tolerable, or else you have convinced me to waste money.  (incidentally, this was my experience when I got my wisdom teeth out.  Ibuprofen was just as effective at reducing the pain as Vicodin, but Vicodin was a lot more expensive and came with a 'high' that I really hated).

3)  Implying causation from correlation.  Period.

I'll just leave this here for you to laugh at.

Yarrgh, we be punishin' yer punishin of our sacred brotherhood by raisin' yer ocean temperchurs.  Long Live BlackBeard!

Same goes for debates on guns, drugs, education, government spending in general, and so, so much more.

4)  Any other omission of information.

I'll borrow some text from Richard Feynman here, emphasis mine.

Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing [...] But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school--we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

From Cargo Cult Science, delivered to Caltech students at commencement, also included in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.

It's really easy to be deceived by statistics.

What's really hard is to not be deceived.  Seriously, any time someone uses statistics to back up their point, it's likely that there's some kind of deception in there, whether that deception is an intent to deceive you, or the person relaying it to you has been deceived, or if the person gathering the data has somehow deceived themselves (i.e. confirmation bias).

Rosa Koire speaks on Agenda 21 in Denmark

Agenda 21 is a real initiative of the United Nations and it's influence is seen throughout the United States through Smart Growth policies like Plan Bay Area. Rosa Koire was one of the first to speak out against Agenda 21 and Plan Bay Area. Although, I disagree with her conspiracy narrative, she accurately tracks important government policies that concentrate power and money to an elite few. The danger to freedom is real.

I am far more optimistic about our democratic future.  The federal, state, county and local governments are broke.  The only way they can enact their vision is through punitive taxation.  This will cause massive political opposition once the plans are fully revealed.  One Bay Area is an intrusive attack on personal property and liberty. Just like in times past, (the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Era) the establishment politicians that caused this mess will be tossed on the ash heap of history and a new age shall begin.

The Biblical Concept of Private Property

The Biblical Concept of Private Property

Text: St. Matthew 20:1-16

It is common in churches to use a prayer during the offering which includes the words, “All things come from thee, and of thine own we have given thee.” We Christians readily recognise that everything in this world, everything we own, everything everybody else owns, the whole universe, ultimately belongs to God. If we have it in our hands for our use, it is because of His providence. He is the Creator. Everything comes from Him. And when He made man, he made him to have dominion over his creation – this small part of this creation, the earth. In this way, we reflect God’s image of sovereignty. God rules over all, he delegates the rule, the dominion, the management of this earth to us, as his representative. To the end that we may exercise this dominon, in his name, he has also granted us to mirror his ownership of the world. He who owns everything has delegated ownership – trusteeship might be a better word – of those things in this world he has placed in our hands that we may use them as we exercise our dominion over the earth.

He has also given us direction concerning this ownership in His Word. In the Ten Commandments, we read:
15: Thou shalt not steal.
17: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.

We find here, in the Law of God, that private ownership is assumed. “Thou shalt not steal” makes no sense at all unless it is assumed that the property a person owns is really his own private property and it cannot be taken away from him in a righteous manner without his consent.

We observe this kind of thing throughout the Bible. For example, the parable about the landowner Jesus tells us in Matthew 20. The lesson the Lord is teaching there seems to be that God is free to do what He will with His own. He is not under any kind of legalistic obligation to dispense his grace to anyone, and certainly not according to their own idea of what he ought to do. The Pharisees could think that God owed them salvation as if it were a wage due to them for their righteousness. This parable certainly speaks to that kind of thinking. But it more directly applies to the disciples. Jesus had been dealing with them about their attitudes and concepts previously. In chapter 19, we see him trying to teach them through the children around him and in the words about how difficult it is for the rich to enter the kingdom. It was afterwards, that Peter said,
Behold, we have forsaken all, and followed thee; what shall we have therefore?
28: And Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That ye which have followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.
29: And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name's sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.
30: But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first.

Hopefully, your ears stood up when you heard those last words, because you remembered that they were also at the end of the parable about the landowner. In 20:16 Jesus says, “So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.” The parable in chapter 20 is a continuation of what Jesus is trying to teach Peter in 19. There will be a reward for the disciples, but it will not be according to some idea of wages they may have. They are instead to be humble and recognise that there may be others who will get more honour than they. God is under no coercion to do what he will with his gifts. As the landowner says in the parable, “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own?” The whole lesson is founded on the recognition of the righteousness of owning private property.

We have both positive and negative examples in the story of Ahab and Nabaoth in I Kings 21. You will remember that Ahab knew the vineyard belonged to Nabaoth and offers to buy it from him. Nabaoth knew it belonged to him as an inheritance and refused to sell it, as it was his right to freely decide to do. Ahab then, steals it from him, murdering him in the process and the terrible justice declared against him by Elijah begins with the words, “Thus saith the LORD, Hast thou killed, and also taken possession?” Ahab is punished for both murder and violating the right of private property. Private property is a God-given, inherent human right supported by the plain teaching of Holy Scripture.

Now none of us likes poverty. We do not like being poor. We do not like to see other people poor. Every Christian not only has a duty to care about the poor but should have a heart that cares for the poor as well. The question is what is to be done about the poor? For a long time, in the west we’ve had lots of people who think that we have the power to eventually eradicate poverty. Jesus disagrees with that, as you know. Not everything is bad about poverty, by the way. Remember that Jesus said riches can keep you out of the kingdom! Of course, he cares about the suffering of the poor and he alleviates it, but he does not, in his providence do away with it. And if He, the Lord of Creation says, “the poor you will always have with you,” then it is utterly useless to think we can eradicate poverty. But we have a duty, in light of the Golden Rule, to do all we can to help our neighbour who suffers. The question arises, however: how are we to do it?

For a long time now, in the west, people who have sincerely cared for suffering – and people who have only cared about political power – have believed that the answer to relieving economic suffering is through the economic ideal of socialism.

Unbelievers start with themselves and their own resources to answer the problem of poverty, which they call “inequality of wealth”. They start by denying the principle of private property. They see this principle as one of the main causes for inequality. They can deny this principle with ease because they do not believe in the God of the Bible. Instead of individuals owning property, the society owns the property – thus the term socialism. Everything belongs to everyone.

The question then arises: how to get everything so distributed that everyone has their fair share of all that belongs to them. Who determines the size of the fair share? Who is going to administrate the parcelling out of