It’s that time of year when we start to put up our Christmas decorations. Over the past few years, we have been putting a red white and blue emphasis on the color coordination. I got some red poinsettias and some white mums for the planters out on the front porch. To add the blue color, I placed a couple of small American flags in the planters. Click on the image to enlarge.

We have had pretty good success with pork tenderloin when we grill it with a honey-mustard glaze. Today, Damsel made some apple compoté and baked broccoli/cauliflower au gratin to serve with this delectable entree. Click on the image below to enlarge.

I was looking through the gunnies’ sites this morning and noticed a link to the Second Amendment March to be held in Washington, D.C. next April. What caught my eye was the poll they posted on their site.

Our Mission

The mission of the Second Amendment March is to galvanize the courage and resolve of Americans; to petition our elected officials against establishing anti-gun legislation; and to remind America that the Second Amendment is necessary to maintain our right to self defense.

It is the one right that protects all others.

We will accomplish our mission by a peaceful march in Washington DC, the United States Capitol, supported by satellite marches to State Capitols and smaller cities all across America.

The march in D.C. will take place on Monday, April 19, 2010 on the grounds of the Washington Monument.

Interestingly, fat Rosie gets about four percent of the vote.

Back in the summer of 2008, Damsel and I went on vacation to Southern Utah and Northern Arizona. We visited several of the National Parks, including Bryce Canyon NP. At Bryce, the weather was nice, but a bit cloudy and overcast at times. Regardless of the weather, we enjoyed our stay at Bryce very much.

We were gawking and taking pictures of the canyon and all the colorful hoodoos that make this place so spectacular, when we encountered a nice gentleman who told us he had come here from Scotland. I asked him if they had anything like this in his home country.

Now, for his answer you have to imagine his voice, which I thought sounded a lot like Sean Connery in his role in the 1999 movie “Entrapment” as Scottish master thief Robert MacDougal :

“Aye,” he replied, “that we do. Almost every day, we have clouds.”

I wish I had taken a picture of his wide grin as he spoke.

Click on Damsel’s image of Bryce Canyon to enlarge.

Family, friends, fellowship, food and football. Thanks be for those, Amen.

Click for big.

There are signs that the current solar cycle, presently in a relatively low activity state, is on the move to become more active as we enter the second year of the eleven-year cycle. This is a movie of an event captured last February that scientists are calling a “solar tsunami.” It is a towering wave of plasma that lifts itself more than the width of the Earth above the solar surface and hurls massive amounts of solar matter into space.

From NASA:

The twin STEREO spacecraft confirmed their reality in February 2009 when sunspot 11012 unexpectedly erupted. The blast hurled a billion-ton cloud of gas (a “CME”) into space and sent a tsunami racing along the sun’s surface. STEREO recorded the wave from two positions separated by 90o, giving researchers an unprecedented view of the event:

Above: A solar tsunami seen by the STEREO spacecraft from orthogonal points of view. The gray part of the animation has been contrast-enhanced by subtracting successive pairs of images, resulting in a “difference movie.”

Please note that this is actual science and not the filtered version that you get from, say, the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit. You can click on the movie above to see a larger version.

Many folks who don’t live here, see the California Coast as a place where you don’t have four seasons. While the seasons here don’t take on many of the extreme characteristics of the weather experienced elsewhere, we do have distinct seasons.

The colors in these trees with deciduous leaves give the suburban areas a definite sense of fall. By January, the leaves will all have fallen and the branches will be bare until late march or early April. Click on the image to enlarge.

The blogosphere, (but not the major media) is buzzing with news of the newly-exposed climate fraud. Cybertons (I just made that word up - there are tons of it but all in cyberspace) of emails and other data reveal the alarmists for what they are: GREENBATS!

You can depend, however, on politicians and the doomsayers to try and shoot the messenger by the usual attempts to discredit the data as being contrived and/or make disingenuous accusations against “the deniers.” The general tactic of the left is to make ad-hominem attacks on truth-tellers when they are unable to refute the truth.

Remember the conclusions we came to when evaluating some actual science:

• The media will print or broadcast sensationalized headlines to sell copy regardless of scientific value
• The media will print or broadcast manipulated science with half-truths and invalid conclusions to damage politicians with whom they do not agree
• Politicians seize on these unverified claims in order to blame their opponents
• Uneducated/uninformed people are as gullible as ever

You can add the following to the above:

• Unscrupulous profiteers will attempt to conceal the truth about the climate

We see this principle at work at the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit as they generate their “Fiction Science.”

By the way, head Greenbat Al Gore demonstrated his complete ignorance of science (or did he lie?) when he claimed the interior temperature of the Earth to be “millions of degrees.” That would be “Thousands of degrees,” you moron.

This is the view of Dockweiler State Beach near Los Angeles International Airport. We were returning from a dental appointment on Friday and took this scenic route home. Click on the image to enlarge.

The newest addition to the flowers in the patio is this pretty Christmas Cactus. It should be producing these nice pink flowers well into January. Click image to enlarge.

Or, maybe, Cirque du Insane?

Earlier this week, Alan Gura and associates filed the Petitioners “On Writ Of Certiorari To The United States Court Of Appeals For The Seventh Circuit.” I downloaded the Petitioners .pdf document yesterday and started looking through it for a little light reading.

The document contains a ‘Summary of Argument‘ which I have summarized even further here. Disclaimer: this summary in no way intends to profess anything other than a citizen’s interpretation of the contents of the summary.

Section 1 states that the Court has never directly addressed the question of the Fourteenth Amendment’s incorporation of the Second Amendment. It claims confusion is the result of inaction and the Court now has the opportunity to set straight the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment in the context of gun owners civil rights.

Section 2 speaks to the Fourteenth Amendment’s ‘Privileges or Immunities‘ clause which forbids the States from abridging civil rights including, unambiguously, the right to keep and bear arms.

Section 3 brings up The SlaughterHouse Cases of 1873. SlaughterHouse transformed the Framers’ broad protection of individual liberty, commonly understood, into a clause securing only the most obscure rights.

Section 4 speaks about The Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement that no person be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Accordingly, most of the rights secured in the first eight amendments have been deemed incorporated as against the States.

The States ratified the Fourteenth Amendment during reconstruction. The amendment sought to restore civil rights that some of the states had stripped away from blacks and abolitionists after the Civil War, including the right to keep and bear arms.

Now is the time for SCOTUS to restore those civil rights to the citizens of Chicago and, indeed, to all Americans.

Also, here’s another chance to weigh in on Sonia Sotomayor: