Butterfly Beauty

I took this photo today while hiking.

I reached a summit and when I stopped to take some drink, I saw this amazing butterfly.

The butterfly looked very peaceful and was resting on some leaves.

Its wings opened and then slightly closed and repeated this as if coinciding with the butterfly’s breathing.

The butterfly extended its legs and they seen to just be hanging out there–suspended in mid-air–this was something I had never seen before.

And beneath, you can actually see the shadow of its wings and legs on the leaf below.

Thank you G-d for showing me this beautiful sight of your magnificent creation. 😉

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Balancing The National Books

Bret Stephens had an interesting opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal (28 May 2013) called “The Retreat Doctrine.”

He argues that America’s retreat militarily from Iraq and Afghanistan may not mean revitalization for us by refocusing on domestic issues, but rather decline by prematurely ending a war with enemies that may not have ended their hatred and hostilities to us.

Interestingly enough, it is not just on the battlefield that we are retrenching, but on many other fronts as well, for example: economically, we are cutting federal budgets; monetarily, we are anticipating cutting the $85 billion per month bond buying by the Federal Reserve; social entitlements like Social Security and Medicare are on the butcher block, defense cuts are imperiling military programs, and employment cuts have resulted in a labor force participation the lowest in 30 years.

While many cuts are beneficial in terms of beginning to get our arms around the over $16 trillion deficit we’ve accumulated and in forestalling another rating downgrade by the big three credit rating firms, it is as Stephens implies, perhaps not a sign of health and renewal, but of national illness and a retrenchment of a global power.

I remember in Yeshiva learning (Exodus 34:7) about the sins of the fathers being visited on the children and grandchildren–3 and 4 generations–and I always wondered how could a just G-d hold future generations responsible, accountable for what the prior generations did?

But perhaps, the answer is evident here, where we cannot blame G-d for our own actions, where we live big, beyond our means, and cause future generations to pay the piper.

When the stock market is rallying–up almost 17% year to date and about 27% over the last year, while our GDP growth is only about 2.4% annually, something is very off-Kilter.

You can argue that retreat is renewal or you can see retrenchment as leading to decline, but either way we will be paying the national bill coming due and all our children will be on the hook for cleaning up after the party is over. 😉

Welcome To The World

What a welcome to the world this baby in China got.

According to Discovery News, the baby was flushed down a toilet…alive!

Residents heard the cries of the baby from the 4th floor bathroom.

Firefighters sawed away sections of a 10 cm pipe with the 2-day old baby inside.

The baby had been in the pipe at least 2 hours–I am amazed it didn’t drown.

The baby was brought to the hospital and put in an incubator and luckily, the baby survived.

I am sorry for the parent(s) who you’d think must’ve gone through hell before doing something this drastic.

And while I don’t like to judge or be judged, however unwanted this pregnancy or unprepared the parents were for this new child–there has got to be better ways to deal with it than this.

An early abortion or giving the child up for adoption is just two options, and struggling to keep the child is a third.

Maybe the parent(s) thought they could save the baby from even a worse fate living in poverty, born out of wedlock, or violating the one-child per family policy–but it is still hard to imagine taking an innocent, helpless infant and doing something so cruel and disgusting.

How will this child grow up, knowing it was thrown away like this by its own parents? What type of self-worth will it have? How will it feel and act towards others in society having been acted on this way?

There are so many monsters out there…killers, rapists, abusers (many serial)–do we wonder where they came from?

I remember learning people are product of nature and nurture–in this case, there was certainly no nurture, quite the contrary…and it will take at least a normal new home, where they are treated like children and not waste products for this child to have a fighting chance. 😉

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Attempting A Serenade

This was a really crazy Memorial Day weekend:

1. When I was kayaking, a guy in another boat races after us. He yells out about his wife leaving her keys in the boat. He gets so excited he falls in the lake…this really happened.

2. A couple getting married in the park are taking pictures by the lake. The photographer eggs the lady on to go down to the bank of the water with her new adoring husband. She hesitates, but finally gives in and then falls on her butt in the mud in her beautiful gown… oops.

3. This must’ve been the weekend for outdoor weddings, because we saw another couple getting married on the hiking trail’s overlook. It was a beautiful place for a ceremony and quite economical too. We wondered what they had planned if the weather hadn’t cooperated and it had rained–perhaps, “Ah, why don’t we get married next week instead!”

4. A couple comes up to me asking if I’ve seen their lost dog. They are screaming into the woods to see if they can locate the Airedale Terrier, Rosie. I asked what happened to their dog, and they explain that the dog saw some deer and chased after them into the woods and didn’t come back. They are there with their extended family with walkie-talkies and all searching and putting up signs. The next day, I am surprised to see the lady sitting on a stoop in the woods with the dog wagging its tail. I ask if this is the lost dog and what happened. And she tells me how the dog found its way out of this enormous park and walked along the side of the road home, until the neighbors sighted her and called them with the news.

5. And finally in this video, I just sort of spontaneously burst out into serenading this lovely lady. All’s well that ends well. 😉

Going Up To The Clouds

It’s been a week since Zach Sobiech, age 18, died from a rare bone cancer, called Osteosarcoma.

Zach was diagnosed at just the tender age of 14 and by 17 he was given less than a year to live.

During his last year on Earth, he wrote this beautiful song, Clouds.

The lyrics are amazing:

“And we’ll go up, up, up
But I’ll fly a little higher
We’ll go up in the clouds because the view is a little nicer
Up here my dear

It won’t be long now, it won’t be long now
If only I had a little bit more time
It only I had a little bit more time with you.”

Anticipating his death, Zach imagines, as a soul, flying up in the clouds–where the “view is a little nicer.”

And he knows, time is short–and “it won’t be long now”–and although he’ll be able to see his family, friends, and loved ones from the clouds, he wishes he “had a little bit more time” with them on Earth.

Death is hard at any age, but it is especially tragic when it is a child or someone who hasn’t been able to fully live–and experience so many things or make all their contributions.

But at any age, the loss of a good person, a kind person, a loving person–is a loss for all of us, left behind.

Zach, some day we’ll see you in the clouds with the other good people–it should be at the right time, merciful, and when our job here is done.

It is okay to love life and the special people around us and to miss them terribly when we go, but we all go to the same place…to be with G-d, and each other, in Heaven.

In the after life, we can fly higher, with a nicer view, and reflect on how we did with the precious gifts and time given to us–whether long or short–before being called spiritually home again to our perfect maker. 😉

A Flower For My Love

While hiking in the mountains today, I came across this beautiful flower.

The yellow with the orange accent is so amazing.

I brought it home in my rucksack and gave it to my honey.

Just a little sign of how I feel.

Now reading this, she says that this had better be about her. 😉

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Mayim Chaim

You can only live about 3 days without water–that’s why protecting our water is so critical.

Emergency Management (May/June 2013) says, “There are numerous ongoing threats to our water supply. Some of them [natural or man made] could be catastrophic.”

– Water poisoning: Already in the 1st century, Roman Emperor Nero poisoned the wells of his enemies. These days you’d need a large supply, like “several dump trucks of cyanide or arsenic to poison a reservoir. Plus the water system is monitored and has purification protections such as chlorine, so it’s not that simple. We can also issue “boil alerts” for people to boil the water before drinking it. Then again, we saw what some radiation did to the Japanese water supplies after Fukushima.

– Blowing it up: The water system infrastructure can be disrupted using explosives, so keeping intruders far away from it is important to keeping it safe.

– Earthquakes/Hurricanes: Much of the water system pipes are old–some built during the Civil War–and these can be destroyed by natural disasters or even a construction crew jackhammer hitting in the wrong place.

– Electrical outage: If you shut down the electricity, you shut down the water pumps…and even with generators taking over for a while, your up against the clock, if you don’t get the juice flowing again soon.

– Cyber Attack: Our water systems, like other industrial control systems are vulnerable to cyber attack. A hacker that gets control of the systems could overheat it, overtreat it, flood it, or otherwise break it and shut it down.

Keeping our water infrastructure secure, the water supply safe and potable, the transport pipes intact, the electricity working, and the systems under control–are not little matters–they are the difference between life and death for millions.

As in The Rime of The Ancient Mariner, when the ship gets blown off course into unchartered waters and the crew is thirsty for water and desperate to survive, the poet states, “Water, Water. Everywhere. And All The Boards Did Shrink; Water, Water, Everywhere. Nor Any Drop To Drink.”

In Hebrew, there is a short saying that sums up this topic, “Mayim Chaim”–water is life. 😉

(Source Photo: Dannielle Blumenthal)

Murderous Customer Service

This is a funny video about some really bad customer service experiences.

– From Seinfeld who goes to the trouble of making a reservation, which the company doesn’t hold.

– To Steve Martin who waits and waits for customer service, but the attendant keeps yapping obnoxiously on a personal phone call.

– To Michael Douglas who just wants breakfast, but the order taker will only serve him lunch.

– To Rod Farva who can’t order a burger without the threat of the fry cook spitting in it.

– To Judge Reinhold who refuses to give a customer’s money back, despite the 100% money back guarantee hanging prominently overhead.

Wow, we’ve all been there…”mad as hell and not going to take it anymore,” but just when you think it can’t get any worse, the customer service rep disconnects you and you have to start all over again. 😉

Kurzweil, Right and Wrong

Ray Kurzweil the famous futurist is an amazing person, but like everyone he has his good and bad days.

When it comes to the Singularity–Kurzweil had a very good day.

With the accelerating speed of technology change, the advent of super intelligence and superhuman powers is already here (and continuing to advance) with:

– Smartphones all-in-one devices give us the power of the old mainframe along with the communication capabilities to inform and share by phone, text, photo, video, and everything social media.

– Google Glass is bringing us wearable IT and augmented reality right in front of our very eyes.

– Exoskeletons and bioengineering is giving us superhuman strength and ability to lift more, run faster and further, see and hear better, and more.

– Embedded chips right into our brains are going to give us “access to all the world’s information” at the tip of our neural synapses whenever we need it (Wall Street Journal).

In a sense, we are headed toward the melding of man and machine, as opposed to theme of the Terminator movie vision of man versus machine–where man is feared to lose in a big way.

In man melded with machine–we will have augmentations in body and brain–and will have strength, endurance, and intelligence beyond our wildest dreams.

However, Kurzweil has a bad day is when it comes to his prediction of our immortality.

Indeed, Kurzweil himself, according to the Journal “takes more than 150 pills and supplements a day” believing that we can “outrun our own deaths.”

Kurzweil mistakenly believes that the speed of medical evolution will soon be “adding a year of life expectancy every year,” so if only we can live until then, we can “Live long enough to live forever.”

But, just as our super intelligence will not make us omniscient, and our superhuman powers will not make us omnipotent or omnipresent, our super advances in medicine will not make us, as we are, immortal.

Actually, I cannot even imagine why Kurzweil would want to live forever given his fear-inspiring Singularity, where advances in machine and artificial intelligence outpaces man’s own evolutionary journey.

Kurzweil should knock off some of the pills and get back to humankind’s learning and growth and stop his false professing that humans will become like G-d, instead of like a better humans. 😉

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Willy Wonka Wears Google Glass TOO

I can only say that my fascination with Google continues to grow daily.

Years ago, I used to joke, “What is this G-O-O-G-L-E?”

But now, I know and marvel at how Google is information!

And every type of information from news and facts to shopping and entertainment:

Research is Google.
eCommerce is Google.
Entertainment is Google.

Google this…Google that.

Archive, index, search, discover, access…learn, grow.

Google has quite literally ushered in a new age of enlightenment, no really!

The focus is on information…Google’s mission statement is:

“Organize the world’s information and make it universally acceptable and useful.”

If you believe that knowledge and learning is one of the core underpinnings for personal growth and global development then you can appreciate how Google has been instrumental in unleashing the information age we are living in.

Of course, information can be used for good and for evil–we still have free choice.

But hopefully, by building not only our knowledge, but also understanding of risks, consequences, each other, and our purpose in life–we can use information to do more good than harm (not that we don’t make mistakes, but they should be part of our learning as opposed to coming from malevolent intentions).

Google is used for almost 2/3 of all searches.

Google has over 5 million eBooks and 18 million tunes.

Google’s YouTube has over 4 billion hours of video watched a month.

Google’s Blogger is the largest blogging site with over 46 million unique visitors in a month.

But what raises Google as the information provider par excellence is not just that they provide easy to use search and access to information, but that they make it available anytime, anywhere.

Google Android powers 2/3 of global smartphones.

Google Glass has a likely market potential for wearable IT and augmented reality of $11B by 2018.

Google’s Driverless Car will help “every person [traveling] could gain lost hours back for working, reading, talking, or searching the Internet.”

Google Fiber is bringing connection speeds 100x faster than traditional networking to Kansas City, Provo, and Austin.

Google is looking by 2020 to bring access to the 60% of the world that is not yet online.

Dr. Astro Teller who oversees Google[x] lab and “moonshot factory” says, “we are serious as a heart attack about making the world a better place,” and he compares themselves to Willy Wonka’s magical chocolate factory. (Bloomberg BusinessWeek)

I like chocolate and information–and yes, both make the world a better place. 😉

(Source Photo: here by (a)artwork)