Darwin Invited to Church

Charles Darwin turns some people of faith into an evolutionary guide from humble worshipers to frothing at the mouth illogical ranters.  It is a sight to be hold and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life studied the Darwin phenomenon.  Now many Churches are gathering in England to have a rational discussion on Darwin's thought leadership.  Be ever mindful that Darwin has creationist Islamic critics of natural selection as well. Enter Turkey's contribution, Harun Yahya.  It is interesting that the famed abolitionist and naturalist's birthday is the same as the 16th president of the United States born ina log cabin.  this religious confab in Oxford, England is a birthday celebration of sorts with 150 years having sped by since one of Darwin's seminal works, Origin of Species, hit the nineteenth century book world.

Science and religion have been combatants in every single arena. Science relies on the observable and proof of concept.  The fact that evolution remains a "theory" gave many a small opening to create such laughable oxymoronic constructs as intelligent design.  It took the Catholic Church 400 years to mumble out an apology to Galileo about the earth's orbit.  Darwin is now the central organizing theme for the Church to explore and appreciate a Darwinian perspective.  Lots of popcorn and lay off the salt, many people's blood pressure will rise just at the thought of this symposium.  Churches involved in this want to prove they are not strict members of the flat earth society, but more enlightened and willing to embrace discussion of Darwin's scientific genius. 

Reverend Tim Stead said: "It impacts on our entire understanding of the world."

"One of our aims in holding this conference is to go some way towards redressing the impression that some of the general public have that Christians are anti-science and anti-Darwin."

"This is a chance to set the record straight and to explore how it is possible for faith to sit alongside Darwin's views," he said.

The Church of England is figuring out how to put Darwin on thier official website after some less than flattering remarks through the decades form thier eminent leaders.  Unrepenatant atheists use Darwin as propaganda to promote their agenda that believers are deluded.  It doesn't help that literal-minded Creationists stubbornly stick to the mantra of the earth only being 6,000 years old.  Darwin considered himself agnostic after the soul destroying loss of his daughter Annie followed by another son lost to scarlet fever.

Charles Darwin was a prodigious writer of scholarly journals and a multitude of snail mail.  Few authors can claim that they have four books that are epics and mark epochs in scientific thought.  Here in one volume are the four stellar works of Darwin in From so Simple A Beginning: Darins Four Great Books: Voyage of the Beagle, The Origin of Species, the Descent of Man and The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals.

Eat A Camel or Kangaroo to Save Planet

Australians first received patriotic pleas to eat kangaroos. Based on a three year study, the next request is more urgent, the wild and proliferating camels are destroying the desert ecosystem. Eat them. It is part of the new age million camel herd control plan urged by the government. To ensure the example starts at the top, civil servants in Canberra are putting a camel on the "barbie" for their annual BBQ. Water, already an issue is a commodity that is being consumed by the animals that are now reaching out of control numbers. Same could be said for humans too - but we already know which will consume which and blame the other in the name of preservation. What a way to get over the hump.

But as they increased in numbers, they also increased greenhouse gasses and helped turn some environments into deserts, destroying plants and animals.

According to the Northern Territory natural resources department, Australia's feral camel population is doubling every nine years.

Says department spokesperson Glenn Edwards: "Because camels are cautious animals and beautifully camouflaged, and because these areas are sparsely settled, most people are simply unaware of the sheer numbers of these introduced pests – or of the extent of the damage they are causing." (Camel Herd Photo: Hans Boessem)

More than a century ago in the name of progress and needing animals better suited to the dry conditions, the great camel pack "horse" arrived for immigrants to make their way to the Australian interior hauling their survival necessities. Transportation methods drastically improved making the camel no longer required. They were set free and Voila!, a veritable camel population explosion ensued. Now, Australians in charge of policy are tying novel culinary methods to change the balance of environmental power and justice.

While Territory Camel sends some meat interstate and overseas, most is eaten in and around Alice Springs.

Camel dishes include a camel, kangaroo and crocodile pizza served at the King's Canyon Resort, and the traditional Middle Eastern "baked camel", in which carp are stuffed into turkeys, which are stuffed into a sheep, which is stuffed into a camel, which is wrapped in banana leaves and baked in coals for two days.

Monir Samad, owner of Afghan Village restaurant in Camberwell, has never eaten camel — watching them being slaughtered outside his house when he was a child was enough to put him off — but said he would certainly serve camel meat in his restaurant if it became readily available.

I am not sure about the image of being replete after eating a marsupial versus consuming filet of camel hump, but it appears to be of no concern to many. On the other hand, eating the animals to control their numbers has been part of the human condition since walking upright. Meat eating is a known accelerant to global warming so there is an "upside" to partaking. These are the latest to be put on the list as causes of methane gas that heat the earth, especially in drought stricken Australia.



One of the great food books that talks about where the food originates to the time it hits the taste buds is from author Michael Pollan. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals puts it all in perspective. Carnivores have ruled the earth for eons, now find out what greens and vegetables have been hiding along with all the processed food available at every price point. Eye opening, but not exactly mouth watering.

Dirty Dozen Diseases Plot World Domination

Twelve different dirty microscopic pathogens are gearing up to decimate the world. Their germ fuel to grow stronger, faster, deadlier is Climate Change. Earth is going broke in the financial greed demolition derby, placing a precarious world at risk to prepare against a takeover by a dozen powerful germs. Cash is required to fight the marauding germs to buy and distribute drugs and doctors efficiently into containment zones. People on the move from famine, fighting and fallow farms will just accelerate the spread of diseases as refugee crises take on nightmare proportions. Mix in deadly destruction from desertification, storms and flooding and the germs are rubbing their grubby little cells in glee. Most of the world watches as their money turns into unusable leprechaun gold without apparent appreciation that their health is also at stake as the animal kingdom falls prey. Scarcity makes people antsy and it beckons tin pot dictators to unilaterally take decisions to try and take over the world, especially if a two front war develops in the financial markets and a full scale effort to eradicate spreading diseases or pandemics. Who's military will have the money to stop them?

Animals spread disease. Climate change is altering the bounds of nature and pathogens are mutating while animals, mammals, birds and fowl are being eaten. Wildlife experts are screaming at the top of their lungs while global financial markets have people mesmerized as education hopes and retirement dreams float away in the world's legalized gambling meccas. As food prices skyrocket, a celebratory steak may come from a mad cow and that super special Peking duck may have had bird flu are making the remaining wealthy just as vulnerable. China has made it clear making money comes before public health and safety and that's precisely where America's corporate elite put their business chips to increase management's profits and the almighty bonuses.

Ebola, Cholera Notice & Avian Influenza

The resource rich continent of Africa is a hot bed incubator for disease outbreaks as the climate changes habitats for humans, insects and beasts of burden. Waterborne diseases will devastate health as well as its scarcity making crops fail and refugee stampedes likely. Standing water attracts mosquitoes which are disease carriers for malaria and yellow fever. China has long been noted as a location of origin for the H5N1 bird flu to morph to a human flu that would make the the Black Death of the Middle Ages or the 1918 pandemic that felled millions seem small in scope. China's algae problem blossomed stinky lime green right before the Olympics in a 100,000 ton fashion, but it the poisonous red algae tides that will kill off marine life and make eating fish a more perilous exercise.

"The term 'climate change' conjures images of melting ice caps and rising sea levels
that threaten coastal cities and nations, but just as important is how increasing temperatures and fluctuating precipitation levels will change the distribution of dangerous pathogens," said Steven E. Sanderson, president and CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

"The health of wild animals is tightly linked to the ecosystems in which they live and influenced by the environment surrounding them, and even minor disturbances can have far reaching consequences on what diseases they might encounter and transmit as climate changes. Monitoring wildlife health will help us predict where those trouble spots will occur and plan how to prepare."

The "Deadly Dozen" list - including such diseases as avian influenza, ebola, cholera, and tuberculosis - is illustrative only of the broad range of infectious diseases that threaten humans and animals, according to a WCS release.

Cholera is a waterborne disease of opportunity from lack of sanitation mixed with water which is prevalent in a myriad of developing countries. Iraq is still suffering from large outbreaks of cholera. Lyme Disease is already in the US and proliferating in the tick community that spreads it to humans. Recently, Malaysia completed a simulation for an outbreak on a plane. Babesiosis is a tropical tick germ that styles itself as a malaria like invasion of the body. Wide eyed raccoons are susceptible to parasites that turn into worms, Baylisascaris procyonis. Animals are our canaries on the Earth mine.



Climate change made clear with charts graphs and analogies that make sense. It draws upon the Nobel Peace Prize winning work of the United Nations IPCC scientific work to make Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming a seminal book on the topic. It is a great book to have alongside An Inconvenient Truth from last year's Co-Nobel Peace prize recipient, Al Gore.

Attack of the Alligators

Drug runners in Rio de Janeiro went primal in intimidating their neighbors and shocked police raiders. Humans who ran afoul of the favelas' or slum hillsides' drug kingpins were fed sans ketchup to a pair of hungry caimans or alligators. Brazilian Police raided the home of the mother-in-law of a drug pusher only to get a rude backyard reception from the two man eating reptilian creatures. Skip the pit bulls and pythons, these new intimidating tactics get two in one by eating the victims and the resulting evidence. The gators are all the rage in Rio, a city known for Sugarloaf and the New seventh wonder of the world Cristo Redentor atop Corcovado as the stone replica overlooks beautiful scenery at Copacabana & Impanema beaches and abject poverty shunted aside on the hills.

Drug gangs in the city of Rio de Janeiro are known for their often brutal methods, but the police seem to believe their tactics for spreading fear are more unorthodox than previously thought.

Television images showed police officers carefully placing the caimans in the back of a truck.

One was almost 2m (6.5ft) long, although the other appeared to be much smaller.

Now a lucky local zoo is going to house the gators that ate some of their fellow citizens? Bounds of propriety and all, the US is known to kill wild animals and domestic pets that attack its citizens. It also would be relatively easy to get the caimans as the rainforest abuts many of the favelas giving cover to training and other imaginable horrors.


Ironically, the recruitment of Rio's drug runners often starts with a staple of the culture, a bailes or dance party sponsored by the current drug kingpins in groups nicknamed Red Command or Friends of Friends. In a schizoid scene, the slums are a stones throw away hanging right over a goodly few of Rio's Richy-riches. Violence is a way of life as people scratch for resources, clean water and a decent toilet finding a weird outgrowth of creativity in killing for the more ruthlessly Darwinian. During intense rains, landslides frequently remind the wealthy that the homes perched precariously above are built with whatever is at hand as the structures, favelados or people and their problems land in twisted gore at their well-shod feet. It is sad that the "quicknapping" tale of the man-eating gators will grow as the divide between rich and poor in Rio is not geographical, but socio economic with brutality practiced differently on each side of the divide.

Enrique Desmond Arios captures a bit of the history and growth of the favelas from policies, slavery and . His book Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro: Trafficking, Social Networks, and Public Security gives a grim view of the effects of the international cocaine market and its reordering of Brazilian society as a direct result of corruption, past slavery and the military dictatorship. Alligators may have been more civilized than anyone outside of the favelas knew. Ugh!

Maneating Bears Eat Two Security Guards

Rampaging gang of up to 30 bears eat two Russian security guards rather than their regular seasonal diet of Pacific salmon. A group of scared geologists remain huddled together at their Mount Ledyanaya wilderness camp on the seismically active peninsula trying to avoid bears. About 400 of their peers and the remaining mining company's security detail are firmly in the nyet! camp, refusing to be the next fishy replacements. Kamchatka is an extreme mountainous woodscape filled with a very hungry bear population more than 10,000 strong. In the middle of the area is a rich store of platinum being mined, making some oligarch richer at Koryakgeologia and those dispatched to explore and mine, more endangered. As of June 2008, a troy ounce of platinum sold for $2032 US. Instinct leads bears to go for the salmon run. Bad economic times lead human poachers to siphon off about 100 tons of salmon before bears can eat. Bears are trying to prepare and gain weight for winter. Plentiful in the bears environment are humans. Why does it aways start and end with human behavior? (Bear photo: Alexander Nemenov/AFP)

Kamchatka, 7,500 miles and nine time zones east of Moscow on Russia's Pacific coast, is one of the world's last truly great natural wildernesses. The remote volcanic peninsula is home to the rare Steller's sea eagle, as well as puffins and brown bears, who roam its geysers and snow-covered calderas - collapsed volcanoes.

"It's always the bear's fault," Laura Williams, the director of WWF's Kamchatka office told the Guardian yesterday. Speaking from Moscow, she said she was seeking further details of the standoff amid reports that a jeep had been sent to the region to finish the bears off.

About 10 bears have also been seen near the village of Khalino, sniffing fish remains and other garbage, agencies reported yesterday.

Bears are usually Omega 3 omnivores, focusing on roots, sprouts, loving fish, insects and the occasional smaller delectable mammal. Capable of speed and sudden fierce attacks bely their size when they weigh between 220 to 1500 pounds each and grow to the girth of the mighty American grizzlies. For the enormous Russian bears to gain weight to winterize, they need a steady diet of salmon, which has been corrupted by over development, human intervention like mining in their ecosystems, poachers and pollution. Many times the human solution, like in this case, involves killing off the bears with a 12 gauge shotgun from the safety of a helicopter. Interesting as the Volcanoes of Kamchatka, including Avachinsky, are one of the rare UNESCO World Heritage Sites where protection of the regional ecosystems are to be protected at all costs to preserve the honor of the designation they procured in 1996. The size of the area is almost twice that of Great Britain.

Seems that a more thoughtful and preventative crackdown on poachers (worldwide) would be as prudent as keeping bears, the true residents of the rare regional habitat, from harming innocent humans.



Kamchatka is an unspoiled area with villages that were economically sustained by the fur trade in past eras. It has a panorama of geological resources and natural riches contained in the wonderful travelogue and detailed book, Kamchatka: A Journal & Guide to Russia's Land of Ice and Fire from author and explore Diana Gleadhill. Kinda cool for a former librarian. Buy a great book!

Pamplona: Running of the Bulls Festival

Bulls and Spain are inseparable in a thick rope of cultural history that brings die hard adventure seekers to Pamplona's City Hall every year beginning July 6th like frenzied moths with too much money in head on collisions with flames from wounds. City Hall in Pamplona - the only one as symbol of potential catastrophe- with thousands of white t-shirted people wearing red kerchiefs lining or running the small narrow streets that form the race course. Centuries of people running with the Bulls plays out with red ties and scarfs to commemorate the opening of Sanfermines or the San Fermín festival. Scores of people get hurt by being trampled by their fellow celebrants as iron gates swing open to start the bull run. This year, one Irish lad fell off the wall to his death while others suffered glancing or near goring from riled up bulls who are tired of the taunts, noise and screams. Nowadays, there are multi-lingual guides with highlighted safety tips for the stupid that detail all manner of things about the festival. A loud rocket sounds letting the less foolhardy run for cover, clamber up walls or hide like a sane person behind concrete barriers along the half-mile or 825 meter race course. As the gate opens, all the bulls get through the gate and another blast of a rocket goes out to let the crowd know when the last bull is let loose. Great. The final act is the corrida (bull fight) which sends members of PETA into orbit annually as they find new and different ways to express with or without clothes their displeasure at the rite.

In the way back in the day past, bulls were put into corrals pending doom at a next day bull fight. Athletic folks with good to great acceleration in their legs (read young people males with or without stimulants) would jump in the middle of the corral to display their daring to their friends. After boarding up their houses and their shops as if for a terrible storm, Spanish locals watch thousands of tumbling tourists risk life and limb in the exercise, knowing that a stampede of humans is more fatal than the bulls. Mercaderes is the stretch of the race where many injuries occur, especially when it rains. Think a sliding half ton of bull with horns pointed unable to stop with the choice of piercing softer human flesh or hitting a hard wall. The Circle of Life rushes by as the bulls rush right back into a corral to await the afternoon entertainment - them, to the death at a bull fight. More firecrackers go off signaling when bulls hit the stadium and the fourth and final rocket when all the bulls are parked in a pen and the race is over. Then, the ambulance and rescuers descend. This happens for eight days straight during the San Fermín festival.

Professional matadors fight, and invariably kill, the bulls each afternoon of the festival.

The fiesta, which ends July 14, is known also for its all-night street parties.

Tuesday's run used bulls from the southern Cebada Gago ranch, considered among the most dangerous in San Fermin. In 27 years, they have gored more than 35 people.

Spain lists as second, with 40, for the most UNESCO World Heritage Sites in one country. The arts pay homage to the history of bulls and bull fighting. Antiquity shows the worship of bulls at Knossos. In España, during the 19th century, Francisco de Goya made his famous etchings of the recortes or Basque-Navarre bull fighting style. The bull lives to a ripe old age with this style. Edouard Manet did a famous rendering of a gored matador in Dead Bullfighter (1864-1865).

Ernest Hemingway, one of the top 100 books of all time according to some literary critics The Sun Also Rises (1926) is the best way to experience Pamplona and The Running of the Bulls. Who needs the actual goring - neither human or bull enjoys it.

Santa's House IS Melting!

Santa Claus, Kris Kringle, Father Christmas with all his aliases, is having a severe climate crisis at his winter house with flooding and potential destruction from titanic-sized moving ice flows. Endangered polar bears, seal colonies and elves are at a loss about what to do as the ice melts beneath their feet, erasing the only way of life they have ever known. The north pole, True North sits (sat) upon thick floating ice as it is in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. Antarctica is a continent with land (Mars has similar) beneath Earth's South pole.

For the first time in modern history, the North Pole may be iceless this summer. Scientists say it's an even bet that sea ice in the region will completely disappear in the next few months, perhaps as soon as August.

"If the North Pole melts, then you don't have to worry about the Northwest Passage. It will still be significant, but going on top of the globe would be politically easier," Mahoney said.

A UN panel is supposed to decide on control of the Arctic by 2020. Last year, Canada's Conservative government announced plans to acquire up to eight Arctic patrol ships and to build an army base in Resolute Bay and a naval station in Nanisivik.

(Inter)National security is also at stake as nations do legal battle and put ships to sea in the wake of the ice breaking apart to own the future shipping lanes as well as the vast mineral resources located in the northern polar region. Big oil, already making windfall profits, is bound and determined to go to work to mine and drill the region. After the decade old debacle of the Exxon Valdez epic environmental disaster, the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) in its hat tip to big piggy oil profits, reduced $2,000,000,000 US off the maritime penalty they ignominiously merited in destroying the Alaskan indigenous peoples water in Prince Williams Sound, their homes and live in harmony with nature way of life, it removes any fear big oil has about accountability on future spills. Whoever controls the never before opened Northwest Passage, controls the economic engine. Russia, Canada nor US is ceding anything to each other while the UN dithers on a decision until 2020 . In 2007 from Murmansk, Russia tested its nuclear powered ice breaker, 50 лет Победы, transliterated as 50 Let Pobedy or NS (Nuclear Sub) Fifty Years Since Victory. Ice shelf melting pushes the resource race to a higher level of insecurity. (Trio Photo by Martin Jakobsson Associated Press)

All (sic, nations) are studying the underwater geology to try to increase their claims. Under international law countries have exclusive economic rights to the sea within 200 nautical miles of their coast. If, however, they can prove that the continental shelf extends beyond that limit, the rights can stretch to 350 nautical miles.

Others have a different dream for a warmed-up Arctic – as a new cradle of civilisation. Trausti Valsson, professor of environmental planning at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, believes that as rising temperatures make many lower latitudes uninhabitable, so the lands around the Arctic will evolve into “the new Mediterranean”, with towns and cities springing up in Arctic Canada, Alaska and Siberia.

Such a scenario may seem unlikely now but an ice-free Arctic would have many attractions – not least being the Northwest Passage itself, which would immediately cut 5,000 miles from shipping routes between Europe and Asia via the Suez canal and whose development would prompt pressure for new ports along Canada’s northern coast.

However, most climate researchers view such thinking with despair. “It is a great irony,” said Serreze, “that the melting of the ice cap could give us access to yet more fossil fuels that will accelerate climate change even further.

“I suspect the only thing that is going to stop humanity wrecking the planet is when we get hit by some serious ecological disasters, and by then it may well be too late.”

So, in the weirdest bit of economic irony, the theory of Santa Claus cemented in commercialism and run amok cash capitalism squeezing every dime and bit of blinking plastic goo gaws out of the season of giving, may be helped by global warming by building a tourist laden frozen Disney mecca at the home of Santa Claus, degrading the environment further, while making more global warming bad case scenarios. The Northern Lights are already gorgeous beyond belief, a marketing campaign around them just makes me cringe. Slaps forehead...

To learn about the Northwest passage which lured all manner of ice ships towards it like a beacon, look no further than great nonfiction adventure stories like Martin W. Sandler's Resolute: The Epic search for the Northwest Passage and John Franklin and the Queen's Ghost Ship. The serious business of oil exploration and the threats is found in Oil, Globalization, And the War for the Arctic Refuge authored by David M. Standlea.

Whales Under Attack

Whales are having trouble finding mates due to overfishing, collisions and being mercilessly hunted. There are not enough (healthy) fish for whales to eat to sustain their numbers. Lonely whales are choosing to die rather than live without mates. So What says Japan, Norway & Iceland as they petition the sixty year old International Whaling Commission (IWC) to hunt down haunted undernourished whales to increase the coffers of their own economic engines. It is 77 nations against 3 clueless countries that stubbornly refuse to accept that hunting whales for commercial profit was pretty much over in the twentieth century. Japan, deservedly, has been under international fire and surveillance for its constant flouting of the treaty with whiny exhortations that they have people for centuries who lived off of whale hunting and that should not change. Talk about out of touch with the times and the very real threat of extinction of certain whale species.

The psychological impact of over-hunting on the highly intelligent and sociable animals has been identified as the latest threat to the survival of the species.

The whale population has already fallen dramatically over the past few centuries because to culling by Japan, Norway and Iceland, and the poisoning of oceans which kills off their food.

But now a French scientist has said the majestic mammals - which can reach 80ft in length and weigh the same as a passenger jet - could also suffer from heartbreak.

Paris naturalist Yves Paccalet said: 'It may be that these intelligent animals are so exhausted from their combat with humankind that they have simply have given up the fight.

An International Whale soap opera continues for the next week in Santiago, Chile as the debate rages led by three outlaws to have the twelve year old ban lifted or relaxed. Greenpeace's ship, Esperanza, already tailed Japan's pseudo research fleet as they chased whales for a biological study project in the South Seas of Antarctica earlier this year. Japan, now, wants to "shop" for whale meat closer to home. After a ten year absence from the IWC, returning in 2002, Iceland just plain ignores the commission's treaty using scientific study because Icelandic fisherman claim whales eat too much fish. Competition.

The Japanese delegate to the IWC, Joji Morishita, did not confirm his country's agenda at the meeting but he reaffirmed support for commercial whaling, according to an interview given to Chile's El Mercurio newspaper.

Morishita said his country's consumption of whale meat went back hundreds of years and should be respected by the rest of the world.

"This is a case of accepting the coexistence of different cultures," he said.

Japan kills some 1,000 whales a year using a loophole in the IWC moratorium on commercial whaling that allows "lethal research" on the ocean giants. Norway and Iceland defy the moratorium altogether.

The IWC seeks an Ocean whale preserve on the same scale as the UNESCO World Heritage site, Mount Kenya National Park, on land for conservation and encouraging observation in their natural habitats. Australian Environmental Minister, Peter Garrett, seeks an overhaul of the whaling forum's charter as the debate needs to encompass conservation and environmental concerns. Australia has been a loud and vociferous critic of Japan's whaling practices as well as sending Oceanic Viking in pursuit of Japan's whalers. Iceland hunts Fin or baleen whales which are an endangered species.

A démarché, diplomatic warning notice, was delivered to an unconcerned government in Reykjavik. The irony is that the excess whale meat Iceland killed was for export to Japan which claims no way no how would they be purchasers. It takes 75% of the IWC membership to make a change and no consensus is yet happening. Japan threatens to leave the IWC in dramatic fashion if their proposal is rejected. Major negotiators that settle wars are trying to close the commercial whaling loophole while others are stalwarts of the status quo. The sea saga drama drags on.

Peter Heller depicts the dangers of the deep for the world's whales in The Whale Warriors: The Battle at the Bottom of the World to Save the Planet's Largest Mammals. Heller went aboard Watson's Sea Shepard for a whale saving mission/adventure of a lifetime and captures what drives people to go to sea in a massive effort at whale conservation from the hunters.