Cowboy Logic

After nearly a decade of lurid press, we find that evidently there really was an intruder responsible for the JonBenet Ramsey murder.

Nerves are raw since the exposure of the latest terror threat in England and the subsequent enhanced security measures both in the U.S. and abroad.

However, the event of today, has been ruled an unruly, claustrophic passenger. Earlier reports that she was carrying Vaseline, a screwdriver, matches, and a note about Al Qaeda were denied by the Transportation Security Administration and the FBI.

An eloquent article by Brenda Sexton of the Enumclaw (Washington) Courier Herald, articulates many of the themes that recur with frequent interactions with horses. She profiles Peggy Gilmer, a successful executive coach in her own right, who came to even greater success when joined by her horses in coaching sessions. Peggy has taught both corporate executives, and young children, with equal success.

One of her students, Sarah, has learned the universal truth of horses: that you can never muscle them into cooperating. They choose to cooperate and assist humans by recognizing the leadership of the human and agreeing to it.

Sarah is a petite, soft-spoken 10 year old, but when she’s in the arena with a 16-hands high, 1,100-pound, full-of-life Tennessee walking horse she’s assertive and confident.As the horse paces the rail of the enclosure, Sarah, poised and strong, commands respect. Without the use of reins or a harness, Sarah brings the horse to her side. She is strong, yet respectful.

“I’ve learned even though the horse is 10 times bigger than I am I can still be an authority over it,” Sarah said. “If I can control something so much bigger than I am. I can control them when they’re not being nice.”

I daresay there’s more than a few executives who could stand to learn this basic lesson. And yet the horse offers this lesson for free, daily.

“Horses teach us to be resonant leaders,” Gilmer said. “A horse’s survival depends on being attuned to others. They live in the moment and are incapable of being anything but authentic.

“Horses, she discovered, show a leader when they are present, intentional, authentic and connected, the four attributes of good leadership.

“Horses are awesome at all these things,” she said. “Horse doesn’t want to be a leader.” But, they know what they want in a leader.

If only major corporations could know what they want in a leader and articulate it as well.

Second Life is taking on a life of its own as a venue for live music. SL has long been a favorite of the online role-playing game groupies, but in the past year, it has blossomed into a diverse and vibrant mini-economy, and now, a home for music. Both stars, and rising stars feel at home in the virtual world.

Move over, MySpace: Pop legends and aspiring rock stars are heading for an online outlet that’s more Sims than social networking.

With thousands of bands now crowding the pages of MySpace.com, acts like Duran Duran and Suzanne Vega are turning to the online virtual world of Second Life to make themselves heard.

Artists are creating avatars and using the game’s audio-streaming features to play “live” concerts on stages made of polygons. With nearly 400,000 members, Second Life is considered by some record companies to be a good venue to reach fans.

Even better, it’s profitable, if not yet lucrative to the young performers:

“There’s more and more live musicians playing on here every week,” said Melanie Fudge, a Welsh acoustic songwriter who performs in-world from home most nights under the alias “Mel Cheeky.” Fudge said there’s no equipment to lug around, she doesn’t have to drive and she can mind her son while performing.

“There’s a crowd of 30 to 45 that show up to every online event (and) I have sold many more CDs through Second Life than I did previously,” she said.

A home in England was ransacked by a marauding squirrel. I blame international terrorism.

Crazed squirrel ransacks house

Powerline participated in an interview with the once and future (hopefully) Prime Minister of Israel. Clearly he “gets” how far his country has sunk and the difficult task that now remains for Israel to do.

The proper division of labor for dealing with the threat is as follows: Israel should dismantle Hezbollah and the U.S. should disarm Iran. As to the latter, President Bush has emphasized his commitment to preventing a nuclear Iran, and Netanyahu believes that Bush is truly committed to that imperative. As to Hezbollah, the recent war was only the first round in a protracted battle that Israel will win. Netanyahu was reluctant to criticize the Israeli government while troops are still in Lebanon. He said he has substantial concerns about its handling of the war, but that expressing them should wait for later. When asked why the government didn’t act more aggressively during the war, he answered “I don’t know.”

First Things — never a publication to shy away from tough issues — has a commentary on the physics of the resurrection. Stephen Barr holds that it’s a tough problem, even for God.

…the resurrection of the body involves “God’s reassembling at least some of the numerically same particles that once were in our living bodies when we were alive.” That seems to me to be a very problematic notion from the point of view of modern physics—indeed, strictly speaking, a meaningless notion.

But God, being omnipotent, could do this right? He could, but Barr makes the crucial point that if the afterlife is a world of continual miracles, then it has no laws bounding its behavior and thus is not a world at all. Probably the most accessible answer is that the world to come is not recognizable nor understandable by normal human (earthly) intelligences, and is therefore incomprehensible until we get there.

First Things has praise for “The Incredibles”.

Incredible as it might seem, the Disney studios are to be congratulated for their moral rectitude. Allow me to explain. Having finally succumbed to renting the DVD of the animated feature film The Incredibles, I was stunned at how good it was. I don’t mean good in the technical or artistic sense, though it is certainly good in both senses. I mean it was good in the good old-fashioned sense of being morally healthy and unabashedly critical of bad or evil behavior.

Yes, The Incredibles is a very good movie. It’s perhaps not surprising but still enlightening to realize how some of Disney’s best-selling films have a fundamental conservative orientation. Disney, one of the most liberal of major corporate organizations, nevertheless realizes that their core audience is more traditional and conservative than they are.

The Green Helmet man, now known as Salem Daher, has admitted staging photos for propaganda purposes in Lebanon. He’s not apologetic however:

“I did hold the baby up, but I was saying ‘look at who the Israelis are killing. They are children,’” Daher said. “These are not fighters. They have no guns. They are children, civilians they are killing.’ ”

He said he had no regrets and he made no apologies. “I wanted people to see who was dying. They said they were killing fighters. They killed children.”

[H/T: LGF]

A fast growing field of horse specialization is equine dentistry. As unlikely as it sounds, many horse related illnesses can be traced to bad teeth. And bad teeth lead to bad nutrition which leads to bad feelings in the horse.

While Carl Stuckey’s left hand wrestled with a flopping pink tongue the size and consistency of a large eel, he tried to maintain a grip on a long, saliva-slimed drill straight from a dental phobic’s nightmare.

Stuckey wasn’t bothered at all that his arm was up to the elbow in teeth, his boots covered in a milky drool. After all, he spent 21 years working in nuclear-waste cleanup. Compared to that, filing down a horse’s incisor is a blast.

“I love it to death,” Stuckey said after nearly an hour of grinding on the teeth of a 10-year-old Tennessee walking horse named Jayrue. “You open up the mouth, and it tells you the whole story. And I fix the problems, and it makes that horse healthy.”

As my own equine dentist says, “It all starts in the mouth.”