I’m walking about two miles a day, usually near sunset. It’s more like “trudging” for me, as it seems that most of the walking is up steep hills, so I’m huffing and puffing along, occasionally leaning on my walking stick to catch my breath and look around. The walks back down take half the time and that’s when I usually take some photos.

Here are a couple from my walk yesterday:

If you know of someone who has experienced Gulf War Syndrome (which looks an awful lot like some kind of chemical poisoning), put them in contact with Debra Bellmaine, who is helping to organize a detox project for these vets, based on the “Purification Rundown” developed by L. Ron Hubbard.

Like the detox project for the 9/11 rescue works in New York, it is FREE to those undergoing the program. That one in New York is funded in large part by Tom Cruise, putting his money where his mouth is.

An acquaintance, Lisa Miller of LA, is seeking funds to to go Australia to help the victims of Cyclone “Larry”. Not a joke – Lisa spent several weeks last year helping victims of Hurricane Catrina as a full time Church of Scientology Volunteer Minister and now wants some help from you to go help the Ozzies. Enough small Paypal payments to her will do the trick. I’ll vouch for her.

It’s part of a campaign by the Scientology VM’s to get hundreds of them there to distribute supplies, clean up and build new facilities, and help those …

The Maryland school board has bypassed local school boards in Baltimore and will be operating four high schools directly, according to an article in today’s NY Times.

Invoking the federal No Child Left Behind law, the Maryland school board voted today to take control of four Baltimore high schools with chronically low achievement and strip the City of Baltimore from direct operation of seven more middle schools.

This sounds wonderful–when junior isn’t doing the job, you bypass and handle it yourself–until you realize that they don’t have a clue either.

In the March “Reason” Magazine there was an excellent …

Lyn Nofziger died earlier this week, at age 81, of unspecified cancer.

I will miss Lyn’s political observations and pithy poems, mostly published as “Joy Skilmer”, a clever pun on “Joyce Kilmer”, the poet who wrote “Trees”, the poem everyone knows that starts: “I think that I shall never see, a poem as lovely as a tree.” There’s an annual bad poem contest at Columbia University named after Kilmer. Joy Skilmer was Lyn’s other half.

As a political conservative, Lyn was often quoted in The Federalist, one of the largest distributed political newsletters on the net. Here’s one such …

Barbara Ayash, founder of the Concerned Businessman’s Association (CBA) has created video describing the new Set A Good Example program. It uses the non-religious moral code called “The Way to Happiness” created by humanitarian L. Ron Hubbard to teach children what is moral. The moral code was first published in the late 70’s, as I recall, and Barbara has had some amazing adventures teaching gang leaders in Los Angeles about honor and integrity. She is amazing and sets a good example herself. In any event, here’s the new video.

Chinese dissident Wang Wanxing spent 13 years as a guest of the Chinese police in psychiatric detention. In 1992, after he was detained while unfurling a banner critical of the Chinese Communist goverment, the psychs jailed him for “severe mental pathology.” According to the NY Times, he was diagnosed with “‘delusions of grandeur, litigation mania and conspicuously enhanced pathological will,’ which Western human rights groups say are diagnoses that officials have used to lock up troublesome dissidents who have not broken any laws.” Rather like the millions of slippery diagnoses of “Manic Depressives” who are put on drugs or locked …