A MAGNOLIA GRAVESTONE ORB (WARNING: INCLUDES ARTIST'S SKETCH OF A NUDE)

When  the  Patrick  Jane  character  in  "The  Mentalist"  denies  that  there  are  ghosts,  or  telepathy,  or  telekinesis  in  the  course  of  one  of  the  shows,  he  is  wrong.  These  things  are  absolutely  real.   However,   all  should  keep  their  distance  from  these  things.   Telepathy  and  telekinesis,  when  they  actually  occur,   are  almost  always  successful  because  of  demonic  activity  --  the  experiencer  is  being  "whispered  to"  by  a  demon.   What  we  call  "ghosts"    are  frequently  demonic  in  nature,  but  not  always.

If  you  are  foolish  enough  to  "play"  with  ghosts  --  by  engaging  in  a  "seance"  with  your  foolish  young  friends,  or   by  joining  your  friends  or  family  in  using  a  Ouija  Board,  or  even  just  watching  friends  or  family  engage  in  a  seance  or  use  a  Ouija  Board,  there  is  a  respectable  chance  that  you,  yourself,  will  accidentally  conjure-up   a  powerful,  persistent  "presence"  that  is  very  hard  to  get  rid  of,  which  will  not  leave  you  alone,  and  which  will  spend  years,  or  decades,  even,  engaging  in  a  behavior  called   "familiarization"    to  get  you  used  to  it  and  more  open  to  accepting  a  more  striking  manifestation  of  itself,  and  in  the  end  all  you  will  achieve  is  a  ticket  to  eternal  Hell  fire.

Why?

Because,  ultimately,  no  matter  how  you  cut  it,  conscious  use  of,  or  communication  with,  the  occult  is  a  really  a  grab  for  power  or  control  in  this  life  by  a  means  other  than  your  relationship  with  God.   It  is  really  an  "anti-prayer,"  a  prayer  to  "the  invisible  bad  guys,"  isn't  it?

Never,  ever,  ever,  ever,  ever   "talk  to"   the  occult.   Never  pretend   to  yourself  or  to  others  that  you  can  "control"  it.  If  you  produce  striking  results,   it  is  because  "it"   is  playing  with  you,  making  it  appear  that  you  have  "control,"  when  in  fact  it  is  engaging  in  a  contract  with  you,  in  which,  because  it  does  your  bidding  for  now,  it  builds-up  a  kind  of  "account  payable"  to  "it,"    and  it  will,  believe  me,  come  knocking  to  collect  the  debt.

So,  parents,  as  silly  as  it  seems,  warn  your  kids  in  advance,  "No  seances  --  ever.    No  Ouija  Boards  --  ever."  Tell  them  to  get  out  of  houses  where  seances  or  Ouija  Boards  are  being  used,  before  the  event.    Just  being  near   such  can  produce  a  bad  result  with  years  of  negative  consequences.

This  is  real.  This  is  not  nonsense.

More  on  that  another  time.

I  always  loved  photography.    During  law  school  in  the  late  1970s,  I  went  out  and  got  myself  the  much  vaunted  Pentax  K1000   SLR  camera,     and  I  had  such  a  wonderful  relationship  with  that  thing.  After  I  moved  to  Magnolia  and  married,    I  replaced  my  Pentax   with  a  digital  camera.

All  of  a  sudden,  something  new  started  showing-up  in  a  few  of  the  thousands  of  pictures  I  took  --  orbs.

http://www.freewebs.com/pinellaspascoparanormal/new%20135%20orb%20small.bmp

For  reasons  unknown,  digital  cameras  have  a  capacity  to  record  the  presence  of  orbs.    And  so,  with  the  entrance  of  digital  cameras  came  a  cultural  interest  in  orbs.   What  are  they? 

Skeptics  maintain  that  orbs  are  nothing  more  or  less   than  airborne  pollen,  which  the  camera  with  its  flash   greatly  magnifies  by  some  photographic  process  not  well  understood   by   photographers  or  scientists.  For  them,  pictures  like  this ...

https://lisagawlas.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/blue-orbs.jpg

... are  decisive  on  that  issue  --  thousands  of  the  little  guys   in  one  place!  And  near  pollen-generating  plants!

One  of  my  problems  with  the  obvious  pollen  allegation  is   that  problems  arise  when  one  maintains  that  they  are  only  pollen.

A  simple  example:   In  the  first  picture,  above,    why  is  there  only  one  (1)?  How  did  the  photographer  get  so  lucky?     Why  didn't  he  also  photograph  the  iron  and  nickel   micrometeorites   floating  down  from  above,   and  the  ambient  dust  particles  one  can  see   in  sunbeams  indoors  on  a  lazy  Sunday  afternoon?

Next,  orbs  have  a  striking  tendency  to  "skeedaddle"    after  the  camera  flash  goes  off.  They  don't  like  light.

Next,   orbs  frequently  engage  in  some  pretty  astonishing  behavior.

Once,  I  read  that  when  someone  is  sleeping  in  a  haunted  house,  and  the  ghost  is  a  night  time  "poker,"    which  awakens  the  sleeping  person   by  poking   him  or  her  on  the  side,   if  he  or  she  snaps  a  digital  flash  shot  of  the  air  above  them  they  will  almost  invariably   capture  a  photo  of  an  orb.  I.e.,  the  ghosts   hover  above  their  experiencers  in  the  form  of  an  orb.

So,   on  one  occasion  I   was  making  repairs  to,  and  cleaning,  a  vacant  home  which   a  relative  was  selling,  where  my  agreed-to-compensation  was  twice  our  cash  investment.  On  weekends,  I  would  kiss  my  wife  goodbye,   drive  over  to  the  empty  house  with  my  tools, work  Friday  night,   sleep-over  on  a  cot  in  the  living  room,  work   all   day  Saturday,    morning-till-midnight,  sleep-over  again,   and  work  Sunday  morning  (after  going  to  Catholic  Mass!)  and  Sunday  afternoon.

The  house  turned  out  to  be  haunted.     Again  and  again,  the  ghost  there  would  playfully  poke  my  hip   through  my  blankets  to  wake  me  up   at  nights  between  2:00  and  3:00  a.m.

Because  I  had  read  that  article  on  capturing  photos  of  the  orbs  carrying  "poking  ghosts,"    I  set  up  a  my  digital  flash  camera  on  a  tripod,  pointed  it  at  where  I  was  sleeping,  and  ran  a  shutter  cable  from  the  camera  to  my  cot.   The  first  time  the  thing  awakened  me  with  a  poke,  I  flashed   a  shot  of  it,  and  then  the  comparison  shot  about  two  seconds  later.   Lo  and  behold,  I  caught  an  amazing  picture  of  a  3-foot-high   orb  which,  as  usual,  "skeedaddled"   before  the  next  shot.

On  another  occasion,  Rise`  and  I  were  exploring  a  haunted  cave  in   Colorado  Springs.   At  one  point,   our  guide  in  the  cave  agreed  to  kill  the  lights,  so  that  I  could  attempt  to  capture  the  ghost  haunting  the  cave on  film.    I  laid  down  on  my  back  on  the  cave  floor,    pointed  the  digital  flash  camera  straight-up,  our  guide  killed  the  lights,  I  waited  a  few  seconds,  and  flashed  the  picture ...

The  Colorado  Springs  "ghost"  orb  "draws"  a  figure  made  of  mist  in  the  ceiling  of  a  cave

The  misty  thing  to  the  right  is  the  "ghost."  It  wasn't  present  at  all  in  the  next  shot  I  took.   Ghost  hunters  would  call  it  an  "ectoplasmic  entity."    I  personally  suspect  that  it  is  an  image  literally  made  of  mist  being  "drawn"  in  the  air  by  the  true  cold  entity.   What  is  it  a  mist-picture  of?  One  friend  suggested  that  the  thing  on  the  right  vaguely  resembles  a  particular  art  school  drawing  of  a  nude ...

http://evocative-art.com/images_a/WS15_NudeDrawingPastel.jpg

... with  head  tilted  left,   left  and  right  arms  framing  a   breasts  and  a  torso.  It  can  be  imagined  with  difficulty.

The  important  thing  about  the  "ectoplasmic  entity,"  however,  is  not  the  entity  itself,  but  what  you  see   in  it.

Click  on  the  photo  of  the  thing  to  make  it  big.    Look  carefully  in  the  ovaloid  torso  at  about  the  4:00  o'clock  position.  Do  you  see  it?  In  my  opinion,  we  have  caught  a  picture  of  the  orb  "ghost  vehicle"    racing  through  the  air  at  several  thousand  miles  per  hour,     using  its  innate  coldness  to  "draw"   its  mid-air  "mist  art"  in  the  cave,  so  that  I  could  photograph  the  "ectoplasmic"  mist  figure   with  my  digital  flash  camera.

My  most  amazing   "high-velocity  orb"  photo   was  taken  about  5  years  ago  tight  here  in  Magnolia.

I  had  been  telling  a  friend  about  how  easy  it  is  to  capture  orbs   on  camera,  using  digital  flash  cameras,   so  long  as  one  follows  certain  rules:

(a)  Go  to  places  known  to  be  haunted,  or   places  which  are  the  kind  of  place  which  one  expected  to  be  haunted.     For  example,    grave  yards  or  locations  where  a  murder  or  suicide  has  previously  taken  place.

(b)  Go  when  YOU,  YOURSELF  are  fatigued  or  sleep-deprived.     The  things  LOVE  sleepy  people.  Your  sleepiness  will  attract  them.

(c)  Go  in  twilight  or  in  the  dark  of  night.  The  things   HATE  light.

(d)  Use  a  digital  flash  camera  with  the  lens  set  for  infinity  and  the  flash  turned  on.  Since  the  things  make  a  fast  escape  after  the  first  flash,   DON'T  test  your  flash  in  or  near  the  place  where  you  want  to  take  your  ghost  photo.

(e)  You  can  talk  in  the  room,  but  DON'T  talk  to  "it"  --  ever.

So,  my  wife  Rise`  and  I  took  the  digital  camera  with  us  when  we  took  our  usual  walk  at  10:30  p.m.  that  night.  Our  2.25  mile  route  through  Magnolia  took  us  past  Magnolia  Methodist  Church   and  its  cemetery,  on    Evesham  Road  at  Barrett  Avenue.  At  the  cemetery,    I  crouched  next  to  a  tilting  gravestone,    turned  on  the  flash,  set  the  lens  for  infinity,    and  snapped  a  flash  picture  at  nothing  in  particular  next  to  the  tilting  gravestone.    This  is  what  I  got ...

The  Magnolia  Grave  Orb

Then  I  flashed  my  "control"  shot,   a  few  seconds  later,  and,  as  usual,  the  thing  had  "skeedaddled"  in  response  to  the  flash.

In  my  opinion,  you  are  looking  at  something  very  astonishing  in  that  photo.     If  you  look  at  the  thing  carefully,   you  can  see  it  "stopping  and  posing"    about  13  times  during  a  2-foot-long  path  of  travel   in  front  of  the  gravestone  and  then  behind  and  up  the  left  edge  of  the  gravestone  as  it  escaped,  barely  visible  past  the  edge.  It  appears  to  have  done  this  --  
"stopped  and  posed,"  moved,  
"stopped  and  posed,"  moved,  
"stopped  and  posed,"  moved,  
"stopped  and  posed,"  moved,  
"stopped  and  posed,"  moved,  
"stopped  and  posed,"  moved,  
"stopped  and  posed,"  moved,  
"stopped  and  posed,"  moved,  
"stopped  and  posed,"  moved,  
"stopped  and  posed,"  moved,  
"stopped  and  posed,"  moved,  
"stopped  and  posed,"  moved,  
"stopped  and  posed,"  and  
finally  disappeared  --  
over  the  course  of  the  1/1000  of  a  second  camera  strobe  flash.

2  feet  in  1/1000  of  a  second  =  2,000  feet  /  second  =  7,200,000  feet  /  hour  =  1,364  mph.

Another  thing  interesting  about  the  Magnolia  Methodist  grave  orb   is  that  it  possesses  that  little  "comma"   at  the  bottom,    and  that  little  "window"  at  its  "equator,"   both  of  which  can  be  seen  in  multiple  shots,  helping  us  to  identify  it  as  one-and-the-same  in  each  "exposure"  of  it  during  the  1/1000  of  a  second  flash  time  lapse.

Because  orbs  can  move  like  this  --  MUCH  faster  than  than  any  wind   which  ever  occurred  in  Magnolia  --   it  is  not  surprising  that  in  the  case  of  some  of  the  orbs  being  photographed  by  others,  we  can  see  them   zipping-off  on  their  own  --  note  well,  WHILE  the  other  orbs  are  undisturbed  by  any wind --  under  their  own  power ...

http://www.silvia-kost.de/upload/bilder/Orbs/Orbs14.JPG

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/imagenes_aliens/orbs01_02.jpg

A  very  cool  racing  orb  picture !

THE GREAT MAGNOLIA TRAIN DERAILMENT

If  you  were  to  walk  down  to  Atlantic  Avenue  in  Magnolia,    and  ask  a  neighbor,  "Can  you  please  tell  me  where  I  can  find  the  Beesley's  Point  Secondary?,"    they  would  look  at  you  with  profound  puzzlement  and  respond,  "I  have  no  idea  at  all."

The  answer  to  the  question  would  be  a  few  feet  from  where  you   are  standing.    "Beesley's  Point  Secondary"  is  the  name  of  the  railroad  track  route  which  goes  through   Magnolia   along  Atlantic  Avenue,  and  through  towns   to  the  northwest,  all  of  the  way  to  Camden,  and  through  towns  to  the  southeast,   all  of  the  way  to  Beesley's  Point,  at  the  shore,  in  northern  Cape  May  County.

The  original  railroad  line  going  through  Magnolia  along  Atlantic  Avenue,   the  Philadelphia  &  Atlantic  City  Railway  (P&ACR),  was  incorporated  in  1876,  and  the  track  bed  and  original  narrow-guage  rails  (closer  together  than  today's  standard  guage   rails)  were  laid  in  only  ninety  (90)  days,  in  April,  May,  June  and  July,  1877.

Only  one  (1)  year  later,  the  P&ACR  was  in  bankruptcy!  Two  railroads,   the  Central  Railroad  of  New  Jersey  and  the  Philadelphia  &  Reading  Railway,   picked  the  railroad  up  "for  a  song"   --  $1,000,000   --  in  1883.   They  immediately  ripped-up  the  old  track  and  laid-down  new  track  along  the  valuable  right-of-way,  converting  the  line  from  narrow  guage  to  standard  guage  rails  so  that  the  railway  was  compatible  with  other  railroads,    and  so  within  a  little  more  than  a  year  they  were  able  to  connect  the  Camden-to-shore  line  at  Winslow  to  a  railroad  serving  Vineland   and  the  Delaware  Bay  shore,   and  by  1885  the  line  was  so  profitable  that  Philadelphia  &  Reading  Railway  --  later  the  Reading  Railroad  --  was  able  to  buy  a  controlling  interest  in  Central  Railroad  of  New  Jersey  Railroad  itself,  and  therefore  that  company's  rights  in  the  railroad  between  Camden  and  the  shore  and  Camden  and  the  bay.

An  1884  map  of  railroad  lines  serving  Delaware,  Maryland,  Pennsylvania,  New  Jersey  and  New  York   shows  Magnolia  to  be  the  first  stop  on  the  line  from  Camden  to  the  shore.

From  an  1884  map  of  railroad  lines  in  the  mid-Atlantic

states.  The  line  through  Magnolia  is  the dark  green  line

running  from  the  upper  left  to  the  lower  right.  Note  that  in  1884,  Magnolia  was  the  first  stop  outside  Camden  on  the  way  to  the  shore.

In  the  early  1930s,  as  the  Depression  took  its  grave  toll  on  American  business,  the  Reading  began  buying  one  southern  New  Jersey  railway  line  after  the  other,   and  ultimately,  in  1933,    consolidated   with  the  Pennsylvania  Railroad  lines  in  southern  New  Jersey  to  survive  the  Depression,  with  the  Pennsylvania  Railroad   having  a  2/3  interest,  the  Reading  Railroad  a  1/3  interest.   The  system,  which  included  the  tracks  going  through  Magnolia,    was  christened  the  "Pennsylvania-Reading  Seashore  Line."

The  Delaware  River  Bridge,  which  had  been  completed  in  1926,  and  the  American  automobile,  and  busing  and  trucking  industries,  proved  to  be  stakes  in  the  Seashore  Line's  financial  heart.   In  1976,  Conrail  purchased  the  financially-ailing-but-still-surviving  line  from   the  Pennsylvania  and  Reading  Railroads.

By  that  time,  the  Camden-to-the-shore  railroad  line  through  Magnolia  had  been  joined  by  new  track  to  an  electrical  generating  station  opened  at   Beesley's  Point  in  northern  Cape  May  County,  across  the  bay  from  Ocean  City,  since  1963.  

The  line  supplanted  loss  of  passenger  traffic  income  with  huge  and  very  lucrative  shipments  of  anthracite  coal   from  Pennsylvania   mines  to  the  Beesley's  Point  generating  station  for  decades.  The  low-pollution,  high-cost  anthracite  coal shipments  represented  what  initially  was  considered  to  be  an  environmentally  sound  balancing  act.

It  was  one  of  those  coal  shipments  that  is  the  subject  of  this  blog  item.

I  couldn't  find  verification  of  the  following  incident  in  National  Transportation  Safety  Board  records  or  in  the  news.  But  I  swear  it  happened.  I  was  there ...

My  wife  and  I  moved  into  our  Magnolia  home  on  Warwick  Road  and  Jackson  Avenue  in  March  of  1982.   We  married  in  October  of  the  same  year  at  St.  Gregory's  Church.   Our  son  Josh   was  born   in  October,   1983.

I  was  at  home  one  day with  my  wife  and  our  son,  probably  between  July  1,  1984  and  June  30,  1985,   as  near  as  I  can  remember,  when   the  house  shook  and  we  heard  a  load  bang.

I  ran  outside  to  the  street,  to  see  if  I  could  see  smoke  from  an  explosion  rising  into  the  sky  anywhere,  when  I  noticed   that  something  was  wrong  down  Warwick  Road  at  the  grade  crossing   --  I  saw  a  great  wall  of  black,  and  cars  stopped  in  front  of  it.   "A  train,"  I  thought,  "But  there's  something  wrong  with  it."

One  of  our  neighbors  came  north  up  Warwick  Road  in  his  car  and  turned  into  Jackson  Avenue.  Seeing  me  he  yelled,  "Pete!  One  of  the  coal  trains  has  derailed  up  at  Warwick  Road!"

I  loaded  my  son  Josh  into   his  stroller  and  pushed  him  at  a  fast  pace  down  Jackson  Avenue  across  Camden  Avenue  and  down  to  Atlantic  Avenue,    and  there  it  was,  on  the  portion  of  the  track  between  Evesham  and  Warwick  Roads  --  a  long  coal  train  that  had  been  moving  southbound  with  a  full  load  of  coal  for  Beesley's  Point,  with  several  hopper  cars  off  the  tracks,  some  of  them  laying  on  their  side  on  and  off  the  track,   like  great  dinosaurs  whose  end  had  come.   

As  I  pushed  Josh  in  his  stroller  closer  to  the  scene  of  the  accident,   I  saw  that  the  derailed  hopper  cars  began  a  few  cars  from  the  rear  of  the  train,   around  W.  Monroe  Avenue,   south  all  of  the  way   to  Warwick  Road,  itself.     The  train  spanned  the  Warwick  Road  crossing,    so  that  several  non-derailed  hopper  cars  and  the  diesel-powered  engines   were  actually  on  the  other  side  of  Warwick  Road  into  Somerdale.    Enormous  loads  of  coal  spilled  from  the  overturned  hopper  cars  were  strewn  everywhere,  mostly  on  the  stretch  of  track  from  W.  Adams  Avenue  to  the  Warwick  Road  grade  crossing.  Some  of  the  piles   even  spread  onto  Atlantic  Avenue.

I  wasn't  surprised.  Whenever  I  pushed  Josh  in  his  stroller  down  to  the  tracks   as  a  train  was  passing  by,  I   frequently  saw  the  rails  sink  an  inch  or  so  under  the  weight  of  their  loads   down  into  their  shoes  on  the  railroad  ties,  as   the  railroad  spikes  were  gradually  squeezed  out  of  the  railroad  ties  by  the  elements.  And,  many  of  the  railroad  ties  had   turned  grey  and  cheesy-looking.

Additionally,  in  February,  1984,    I  heard  that   another  coal  train   on  the  Beesley  point  Secondary,  moving  an  empty  coal  train  northbound  on  the  Beesley  Point  Secondary  from   the  power  station  toward   Magnolia  had  derailed.       

http://thecrhs.org/image/view/6223/_original

In  other  words,  the  track  was  showing  signs  of  age.

In  the  months  following  the  messy  derailment,  Conrail  invested  in  a  massive  rail  maintenance  campaign,  to  give   the  Secondary  a  few  more  generations  of  life.     I  enjoyed  pushing  Josh  in  his  stroller  down  to  the  tracks,  where  even  the  railroad  workers  became  familiar  with  Josh  and  waved  to  him.

CHEMTRAILS AND MAGNOLIA

Friends  and  relatives  know  that  I  tend  to  come  down  on  the  side  of  the  unconventional,  when  it  comes  to  some  of  society's  biggest  mysteries.

For  example,  I  don't  believe,  at  all,  that  Lee  Harvey  Oswald  killed  Kennedy.     I  have  trouble  believing  that  9/11  was  as  simple  as  Moslem  bad  guys  murdering  3,000  people.  I  think  that  the  full  story  re  UFOs  has  nothing  whatsoever  to  do  with  "aliens,"    and  that  our  own  government  is  in  the  UFO  business  up  to  its  neck.

I  also  think  that  we  are  on  the  edge  of  global  warming  environmental  catastrophe  (as  I  said  in  the  presentation  on  global  warming  and  Magnolia),   and  that  the  government  is  hiding  its  general  inability  to  deal  with  the  problem  and  its  willingness,  in  its  panic,  to  attempt  to  deal  with  global  warming  in  cockamamie  ways.

Which  brings  us  to  chemtrails.

I  first  heard  about  chemtrails  approximately  three  years  ago.  The  reports  which  I  heard  indicated  that  the  federal  government  was  interested,   in  effect,  in  intentionally  attempting  to  pollute  the  upper  atmosphere  with  reflective  material   to  reflect  away  the  sunlight.   Aluminum  compounds  were  frequently  suggested  as  having  a  low  enough  mass  to  form  relatively  persistent  high-altitude  clouds  while  being  sufficiently  reflective  to  bounce  sunlight  away  from  the  Earth  before  warming  it.  

I  also  heard  that  the  plan  was  to  spread  matrices  --  criss-cross  patterns  --  of  the  stuff  across  the  sky  at  extremely  high  altitudes   to  efficiently  spread  it   in  sheets  above  the  Earth's  surface.

I  thought  to  myself,   "Nah!   Nobody  in  science  or  in  government  at  the  federal  level  could  possibly  be  harebrained   enough  to  pump  poisonous  metals  into  the  air  so  that,  when  they  come  down  out  of  the  sky,  billions  of  people  would  breathe  the  poisonous  metals  into  their  lungs!   Scientists  and  government  just  can't  be  that  stupid!

Except  that  twice  in  the  last  two  years,  I  have  seen  this  in  the  sky  over  Magnolia,  Camden  County,  New  Jersey ...

What  you  are  looking  at,  here,  is  good  evidence  of  an  insane  level  of  government  desperation  on  the  subject  of  global  warming.

PUNCHING A GERMAN SHEPHERD

Year  ago,  in  the  early  1990s,   I  stopped  in  the  gas  station  on  the  east  side  of  the  White  Horse  Pike  between  Evesham  and  Warwick  Roads  late  one  night  to  gas-up  my  car,  to  have  it  ready  for  leaving  for  work  in  court  in  Trenton  the  following  morning.

Because  of  an  increase  in  armed  robberies  at  the  gas  station,   they  had  acquired  a  really  big,  really  fierce  German  shepherd  attack  dog.

He  seemed  like  the  type  that  could  only  be  happy  with  a  detached  human  arm  or  human  leg  in  his  mouth.

For  whatever  reason,  the  dog  kind  of  liked  me -- Rise`  will  tell  you  that  animals  always  kind  of  like  me -- but  I  was  a  rare  exception.  Every  time  I  was  in  the  gas  station,  the  dog  went  wild  with  demonic  rage  when   a  customer  came  in  with  his  or  her  car,  and  pulled  on  its  heavy  chain,  attached  to  the  concrete  with  a  big  lag  screw,  to  try  to  get  at  the  customer   and  test  whether  it  could  rip  off  an  arm  or  leg,  I  think  to  gnaw  on  it  as  a  kind  of  puppy  treat.

On  this  particular  night,   a  heavyset  woman  came  into  the  gas  station  and  requested  a  fill-up.    For  whatever  reason,   the  attack  dog  went  completely  wild  when  the  woman  got  out  of  her  car.   The  dog  clearly  wanted  her  dead.    He  jerked  and  pulled  on  the  chain,  screaming  with  insane  rage  at  her  presence.

Suddenly,  the  lag  screw  holding  the  dog's  chain  to  the  concrete  broke.   The  attack  dog  bounded  across  the  gas  station  pavement  at  a  high  speed,  clearly  intent  on  ripping  out  the  woman's  throat.

Instead  of  retreating  into  her  car's  open  door,   the  woman  stayed  outside  of  her  car  and  froze,  with  her  back  to  the  car,   appearing  thoroughly  frightened.

The  gas  jockey  on  duty,   a  young  Green  Carder  from  the  Punjab  section  of  northwest  India  who  spoke  pretty  good  English,   turned  around  and  bolted  toward  the  woman  like  the  wind,  closing-in  on  her  about  as  fast  as  the  attack  dog.

The  attack  dog  came  within  jumping  distance  of  the  woman.  He  leapt  up  and  was  air-borne,   his  mouth  wide  open,   his  teeth  bared,  his  head  rotating  slowly  as  he  flew  so  that  his  fangs  would  sink  into  the  woman's  throat  perfectly.   It  was  my  good  guess  that  the  frightened  woman  was  about  to  have  her  carotids  ripped-out  and  that  she  would  die.

The  gas  jockey  arrived  at  the  woman  at  the  same  moment  the  attack  dog  did.

Just  before  the  dogs  teeth  ripped  out  her  throat,  maybe  one-half  second  before,  the  gas  jockey  made  a  fist  and  smashed  the  German  shepherd  in  the  face,   knocking  the  dog  sideways  down  to  the  pavement.

The  gas  jockey  then  grabbed  the  hate-crazed  attack  dog's  chain,   and  pulled  the  screaming  animal  by  its  chain  to  the  other  gas  pump  island,   and  chained  it  to  a  metal  pole,  there.

He  then  returned  to  the  shaking  woman,  whose  life  he  had  just  saved,  and  apologized  to  her.

I  then  saw  something  amazing.

The  heavyset  woman  turned-around  to  her  open  car  door,  took  out  her  purse,   took  a  pad  of  what  I  knew  to  be  legal  summonses  --  like  traffic  tickets  --  out  of  her  purse,   announced  that  she  was  a  representative  of  the  SPCA,  asked  the  brave-but-naive  gas  jockey  his  name,    wrote  it  on  the  summons,  and  issued  him  a  ticket  for  assault  on  a  dog!!!

Now,  I'm  not  perfect.  When  I  was  a  kid,   I  wasn't  exactly  gentle  with  the  non-human  phyla  we  encountered  in  the  Frankford  section  of  Philadelphia.    We  had  hamsters  as  pets,   and  we  used  to  build  mazes  for  them  to  get  through.  We  used  to  pile  up  sheets  and  blankets,   shove  the  hamsters  into  cardboard  paper  towel  tubes,    and  fire  them  like  darts  from  blowguns   out  of  the  tubes  onto  the  blankets,  watching  their  little  feetsees   shake  wildly  as  they  flew.  We  used  to  capture  honeybees  in  jars,  and  imprison  them   in  a  glass  aquarium,  until  we  had  thousands  of  enraged  bees  buzzing  crazily  in  the  aquarium,   looking  for  a  human  to  kill.   We  even  put  a  live  sandshark  in  Frankford  Creek  to  get  it  out  of  a  friend's  bathtub ...
http://frankfordgazette.com/2011/08/18/sharks-sharks-sharks-in-frankford-creek/

So,  maybe  I'm  not  a  good  guy  to  judge.

But  giving  that  gas  jockey  an  SPCA  ticket  for  assault  on  that  attack  dog  to  save  the  woman's  life  was  about  the  meanest,  lowest,  most  evil  act  of  hypocrisy  I  had  ever  seen!

I  walked  up  to  the  woman  and  said,  "Ma'am,   what  I  just  saw  was  an  act  of  unbelievable  ingratitude.    He  just  saved  your  life!   Are  you  insane?

"I'm  an  attorney,   and  I'm  going  to  represent  this  young  hero  on  this  matter.    I'm  going  to  go  after  you  in  court,  and  get  you,  and  destroy  you  for  this  evil  act.    I  swear  to  you  that  you're  going  to  pay  him  for  this  criminal  charge  --  he's  not  paying  anything.  And  I'm  going  to  embarrass  the  Hell  out  you!

"If  I  need  to,  I'm  going  to  resign  as  his  attorney,  and  testifty  to  the  court  in  his  case  about  what  a  distinctly  disgusting,  utterly  horrible  and  ungrateful  human  being  you  are!"

The  SPCA  representative  looked  at  me  with  an  evil  facade,  paid  for  her  gas,   and  left.

I  told  the  gas  station  owner  about  the  gas  jockey's  quick  action  and  bravery,    and   explained  to  him   what  my  appraoch  would  be  as  his  defense  attorney,  and  sent  in  my  letter  of  representation,  to  the  Magnolia  Municipal  Court  and  to  the  SPCA.

The  woman  FTA'd  ("failed  to  appear")  once.   Twice.  Thrice.    At  the  third  hearing,  the  court  dismissed  the  charge  against  the  young  man  "with  prejudice"  (meaning,  "it  can't  be  resurrected").

I  immediately  jumped-up  and  made  a  motion  for  $1,000  in  attorneys  fees   and  court  costs  against  the  SPCA,  relating  to  the  court  how  this  young  man  had  saved  the  woman's  life  and  then  had  to  answer  to  an  evil  criminal  summons  for  saving  her  life.

The  court  denied  my  motion,  saying  that  in  light  of  the  3  FTA's,  he  was  sympathetic,   but  would  not  award  attorneys  fees  against  an  eleemosynary  ("charitable")  organization  like  the  SPCA.  He  said,  however,  that  he  would  award  "costs"  to  the  court  --  a  nominal  sum.

I  responded,  "Well,  make  it  high  --  for  three  court  appearances!"

CATS AND RATS

When  Rise`  and  I  first  moved  to  Magnolia  in  March,  1982,  we  occasionally  saw  rats  and  field  mice  scurrying  hither  and  yon   across  lawns  and  streets.    However,   we  also  saw  people's  cats   carrying   dead   rats  and  field  mice   in  their  mouths  just  as  frequently.

In  other  words,  we  saw  balance.   Nature  taking  care  of  things.  So,  outdoor  rats  and  mice  were  fine  with  us,  so  long  as  cats  were  allowed  to  roam  at  large.

We  brought  a  young  cat  with  us  when  we  moved  to  Magnolia  from  Turnersville  --  Inky. 

 Inky   had  adopted   us  in  Turnersville  --  we  had  not  adopted  her.    She  had  always  been   semi-wild,  living   half  "on  the  street,"  half  in-doors.   As  a  consequence,  she  was   extremely  street-wise  and  tough,  but  she  also  loved  human  beings  --  she  never   bit  or  scratched  a  human,  ever.  She  loved  me  like  crazy.   We  were  constantly  harassing  each  other   to  entertain  each  other.   I'd  be  studying  a  map  on  the  floor.  Inky  would  see  this,  sneak  up,  and  DIVE  with  lightning  speed  UNDER  the  map,  scaring  the  pee  out  me.   I  would  then   grab  her  THROUGH  the  map,    and  Inky  would  wrestle   back. 

If  Inky  heard  Rise`  coming  into  the  room,  however,  she  would  jump  up  onto  all  fours,    and  walk  off  with  dignity,  tail   high  in  the  air.

Inky  was  an  amazing  hunter.    She  killed  thousands  of  rats  and  mice  in  her   life  --  and  also  many  mocking  birds,   squirrels,   and  rabbits,  to  tell  the  truth.

Frequently,    new  laws  are  adopted  at  the  municipal  level   because  it  becomes  "fashionable"   to  do  so.   Though  I  was  off  Council  in  Magnolia  when  so-called  "cat  leash  laws"  became  fashionable,  I  was  the  Republican  Municipal  Chair  when  Magnolia's  "cat  leash  law"  came  up  for  a  vote  in  the  Summer  of  1990.    I  opposed  the  proposed  ordinance,  making  fun  of  it  by  calling  it   "the  wild  mouse  and  rat  multiplication  law."  I  also  predicted  that  the  increased  mouse  and  rat  population  would  increase   mouse  and  rat  droppings  inside  walls,  causing   roach  infestations  to  explode.   Complaints  about  "that  strong  pee  smell  cats  leave  behind  in  the  garden"  carried  the  day,  however.  The  law  passed  in  September,  1990.

In  town  after  town  in  Camden  County,  the  "cat  leash  laws"  "worked,"  exactly  as  expected.  "That  strong  pee  smell"   outside  was  less  frequently  encountered,  but  we  also  began  to  see  wild  mice  and  rats  --  really  BIG  rats,  who  now  had  plenty  of  time  to  grow  up,  unaccosted  by  neighborhood  cats  --  scurrying  everywhere.

Their  population  exploded  in  the  towns  adopting  the  new  "cat  leash  law."   "We ... we ... we  j-j-j-just  c-c-c-can't   explain  it,"  political  leaders  across  the  county  griped.

http://articles.philly.com/1993-06-18/news/25972757_1_rats-exterminators-rodents

Our  family  didn't  have  the  heart  to  obey  the  law  when  it  came  to  Inky,  to  be  perfectly  honest.  A  leash  would  have  killed  her,  after  a  life  of  freedom.  So,  always  making  sure  that  Inky  had  her  shots,  we  left  Inky  free  until  she  died.   She  brought  home  some  really  gargantuan  dead  rats,  during  her  final  years.

I  asked  the  County  rodent  control   program  representative  what  he  used  for  rats,  when  I  saw  him  in  Somerdale,  once.  "Oh,"   he  said,  "We  can't  leave  out  traps.   So,  we  POISON  them."

I  asked,  "Do  you  know  what  the  problem  with  the  rodent  poisons  is?"

"No,"  he  responded,  "What?"

"The  rats  and  mice  eat  the  poison,"  I  responded,   "crawl  into  their  homes  in  the  walls  of  people's  residences,  and  die,   and  people  wonder  why  their  homes  suddenly  have  a  cadaver  smell  they  can't  get  rid  of.  And  the  roaches  in  the  walls  suddenly  have  rat  and  mouse  cadavers  to  eat,  along  with   rodent  droppings."

So,  the  main  achievement  of  the  "cat  leash  laws"  in  Camden  County  was  to   cause  the  mouse  and  rat  and  roach  populations  to  explode,  while   it  replaced  "that  strong  pee  smell"    in  people's  gardens  with  a  strong  cadaver  smell   in  their  walls !

One  of  these  days,  the  "cat  leash  laws"  are  going  to  un-leash   a  problem  of  a  totally  different  sort   in   Camden  County:  As  global  warming  causes  mouse  and  rat  populations,  unhindered  by  roaming  cats,  to  explode  even  more,  so  that  more  and  more  the  walls  of  people's  homes  become  filled  with   mouse  and  rat  droppings,  finally  someone  from  the  American  Southwest  is  going  to  bring  hantavirus -- an  ebola-like  hemorrhagic   disease  --  with  him,  and  it's  going  to  explode  here,  as  the  mice  and  rats  in  our  walls  become  carriers,  and  many  will  die.  

Hantavirus  hemorrhagic  rash  turning

skin  and  eyes  red

And  our  politicians,  who  will  have  caused  the  problem,  will  wring  their  hands  and  say,  "Who  knew?"

In  the  early  Middle  Ages,    cats  were  regarded  as  evil  --  frequently  as  receptacles  for  the  Devil,  probably  because  male  cats  gathering  around  female  cats  in  heat   behave  downright  spooky.  (I've  seen   a  group  of  about  8  males  gathered  in  a  circle,  serenading  Inky,  before  we  had  her  spaded.   I  saw  one  big  tomcat  standing  tall  on  his  hind  legs,  looking  at  me  with  wild  eyes,   meowing  in  a  way  that  almost  sounded  like  talk,    probably  to  scare  me  away  from  a  female  in  heat  in  the  house  nearby.)

However,  later  in  the  Middle  Ages,  when  it  dawned  on  the  people  in  Europe   that  cats  allowed  to  roam  free  wiped  out   rat  populations,  which  in  turn  wiped  out  the  spread  of  Plague,   cats  became  the  heroes  of  European  society,    and  they  even  began  to  appear  in  stained  glass  windows   in  Europe's  cathedrals !

We  really  need  to  learn  from  our  European  ancestors,  on  this  issue. 

Get  rid  of  the  "cat  leash  laws"  now,  now,  now.

Or  don't  be  surprised  when  Magnolia  is  quarantined  due  to  an  outbreak  of  hantavirus  someday.

GLOBAL WARMING AND MAGNOLIA

After  flunking  a  course  for  the  first  time  in  my  life  in  my  first  year  of  law  school,    I  took  a  year's  sabbatical,   worked  about  60  hours  a  week  while  I  learned  the  Russian  language,   paid  off  all  of  my  bills,  saved  enough  money  to  live  on  and  finish  paying-off  my  law  school  tuition,    and  returned  to   law  school  and  ended-up  graduating  with  the  second  highest  bar  exam  score  in  my  class.

During  this  time  --  that  is,  beginning  in  the  Fall  of  1976  --  environmental  law  piqued  my  interest.    After  working  part-time  as  a  paralegal  at  the  Public  Interest  Law  Center  of  Philadelphia,    I  moved  over  to  the  Environmental  Protection  Agency,  where  I  worked  as  a  paralegal   with  his  own  unit,  charged  with  devising  a  legal  and  economical  means  to  dispose  of  millions  of  cubic  yards  of  sewage  sludge,   suffused  with  poisonous  heavy  metals,  stored  in  enormous  lagoons  next  to  the  oil  refinery   at  the  convergence  of  the  Schuylkill  and  Delaware  Rivers  in  Philadelphia.

As  I  worked  on  the  poisonous  sludge  disposal  project  --  ultimately,  an  amazing  adventure  and  study  in  youthful  naivete  --  I  was  introduced  for  the  first  time  to  the  topic  of  global  warming  by  engineers  in  the  Environmental  Protection  Agency,  when  papers  on  that  subject,  being  circulated  through  the  EPA,  caught  their  attention.

They  explained  to  me  that  there  was  a  growing  fear  that  human  activity  was  causing  a  net  absolute  increase  in  the  global  inventory  of  the  atmospheric  gases
CARBON  DIOXIDE  (CO2)
METHANE  (CH4)
NITROUS  OXIDE  (N2O)
each  of  which  had  enormous  power  to  increase  the  average  world  temperature.

They  showed  me  graphs  of  data  from  Mount  Washington  in  New  Hampshire  and  Mauna Loa  in  Hawaii,  showing  a  persistent  annual  increase  in  atmospheric  CO2.   

They  talked  about  the  probable  need,  in  the  near  future,  to  treat  greenhouse  gases  as  pollutants,    so  that  government  and  international  treaties  could  try  to  control  them  to  keep  the  ice  caps  and  other  land-bound  ice  from  melting.

I  was  sold.  I  realized  that  I  was  looking  at  the  world's  biggest  worry.

I  was  sorely  disappointed  when  I  was  unable  to  break-into  environmental  law  on  behalf  of  the  government,  either  at  the  federal  level  or  at  the  state  level,  for  various  reasons.

But,  I  never  stopped  watching  the  development  of  global  warming  concerns  in  the  media.

Since  the  mid-1970s,   scientific  knowledge  about  the  true  nature  of  global  warming  and  the  dangers  it  entails  has  increased  by  leaps  and  bounds.

At  a  particular  point,  it  dawned  on  environmental  scientists  that  their  analyses  were  all  absurdly  tame,  because  "straight-line  thinking"  suffused  their  math.

To  give  a  simple -- but  extremely  important --  example,  it  is  NOT  true  that  for  every  1  degree  of  world  atmospheric  temperature  increase  above  32  degrees  Fahrenheit,  X  amount  of  ice  melts.

Instead,  it  ALL  melts  above  32  degrees  Fahrenheit.

Scientific  estimates  of  how  long  it  would  take  for  polar  ice  on  Greenland  and  Antarctica   to  melt  were  instantly divided  by a factor  of 10 !

And  then  they  had  to  be  re-divided  by  10,  again !

And  now  science  is  flirting  with  another  decrease  of  how  much  time  we  have  to  a  disastrous  melting,   by  a  factor  of  10,  for  a  third  time !

This  change  in  thinking  --  and  the  alarming  conclusions  it  leads  to,  namely  that  we  only  have  a  few  years  to  solve  global  warming  problems  --   is  referred  to  as  the  arrival  of  "tipping-point  logic."

Next,  scientists  measuring  the  increase  in  global  warming  gases  were  puzzled  by  a  new,  strictly  modern   change  in  the  data  --  the  relatively  low  levels  of  methane  in  the  atmosphere,  with  its   enormously  greater   global  warming  power  --  20  times  that  of  CO2  --  suddenly  began  to  "go  asymptotic"  on  the  graphs:  The  amount  of  extraordinarily  dangerous  methane  in  the  atmosphere  suddenly  began  to  shoot-up  alarmingly,  like  a  rocket.

Why?  Where  was  all  of  the  extremely  dangerous  methane  coming  from?

Two  places,  it  turned  out.    As  CO2  heated  the  atmosphere,  the  seas  got  hotter,    decreasing  their  ability  to  hold  dissolved  methane.

And,   as  CO2   heated  the  atmosphere,  the  Asian  and  Alaskan  tundra  began  to  defrost,  releasing  shocking  amounts  of  methane  into  the  atmosphere,  as  ancient,  previously-frozen   animal  and  vegetable  matter  under  the  ground  began  to  rot  again.   Suddenly,  a  new  "sport"  took  root  in  Siberia  and  Alaska  --  setting  invisible  methane  geysers  on  fire ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM0hczFNDZI

Suddenly,  out  of  the  blue,  mankind's  global  warming  problem  has  been  multiplied  by  a  factor  of  20,  as  the  methane  graph  now  outstrips  the  carbon  dioxide  graph  in  illustrations  depicting  global  warming  gas  increases,  because  methane  is  20  times  as  bad  as   carbon  dioxide,  for  global  warming  purposes.

Next,  scientists,  greatly  puzzled  by  radical  temperature  increases  in  the  seas  near  the  poles,  made  another  astonishing,  deeply-discouraging  discovery  --  the  ocean  currents  work  like  conveyor  belts  transferring   ocean  heat  increases  due  to  global  warming  from  the  hot  Equator  to  the  cold  polar  regions,  concentrating  it  there.

Because  of  the  currents,  every  ONE  degree  in  ocean  temperature  increase  at  the  hot  Equator,  directly  under  the  sun,  generates  a  FOUR  degree  ocean  temperature  increase  at  the  cold,  dark  poles !

Suddenly,    the  risk  of  polar  ice  cap  melting   had  been  multiplied  and  accelarated  AGAIN,  by  a  factor  of  FOUR !

As  science  came  to  terms  with  these  new  realizations,   some  began  to  calculate  the  amount  of  land-bound  ice  in  the  world,  being  melted  by  global   warming.

The  amount  is  astonishing.

When  all  factors  are  calculated  into  the  estimate,  the  total  increase  in  world  sea  levels,  if  ALL  land-bound  ice  were  to  melt,  comes  to   225  feet.

225  feet  ABOVE  current  sea  levels.

Now,  think  about  that.  On  the  average,  Magnolia,  New  Jersey  is  23  meters,  or  a  little  over  75  feet,  above  sea  level.

What  that  means  is,   If  all   of  the  land-bound  ice  above  sea  level  in  the  world  were  to  melt  from  global  warming,    on  the  average  Magnolia  will  be  150  feet  BELOW  the  surface  of  the  seas !

150  feet !

The  best  way  to  understand  that  figure  is  to  be  made  aware  that  the  deepest  I  could  dive,  when  I  was  a  SCUBA  diver  with  tanks,  years  ago,  is  165  feet.

The  water  above  Magnolia,  when  all  of  the  melting  is  done,  will  be  so  deep  that  normal  SCUBA  diving  methods  will  barely  be  adequate  to  reach  your  front  doors!

That  seems  ridiculous,  doesn't  it?

But  it's  NOT  ridiculous.

It's  starting  to  actually  HAPPEN !

No  joke.

Currently,  the  oceans  at  our  latitude  are  become  about  1/32  of  an  inch  deeper  each  year.

You  can  understand  why,  when  you  look  at  YouTube  videos  of  Greenland  ice  melting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EMCxE1v22I

Very  soon,  it  will  be  1/16   of  an  inch  per  year.

As  July's  grow  hotter  and  hotter  and  hotter,  it  will  become  1/8  of  an  inch  per  year.

Then  1/4  of  an  inch  per  year.

Then  1/2  of  an  inch  per  year.

1  inch  per  year.

2  inches  per  year.

4  inches  per  year.

8  inches  per  year.

And  so  on.

In  other  words,  that  1/32  of  an  inch  per  year  IS  ONLY  FOR  THIS  YEAR.  We  DON'T  have  225  feet  x  12  inches  x  32  years,  or  86,400  years.  We  have  40,  or  maybe  30,  or  even  as  little  as  20  years.

Until  the  sea  water  creeping  up   the  railroad  tracks  toward  Magnolia  from  the  direction  of  Clementon  reaches  Warwick  Road.

This  is  where  things  are  going.

As  scientists  and  some  political  leaders  absorbed  and  quietly  discussed  these  facts,   they  also  looked  at  the  consequences  in  a  more  realistic  fashion,  geographically  and  demographically.

In  most  estuaries  --  the  bays,  rivers  and  creeks   subject  to  tides  --   every  1  inch  increase  in  ocean  depth  yields  an  invasion  of  about  1000  inches  of  land  to  the  left  and  right.  That's  83.3  feet  to  the  left  and  right,  for  a  total  loss  of  166.6  feet  of  inhabitable  estuary  shore.

The  best  way  to  understand  this  figure  is  to  look  at  the  hotels  on  the  beach  at  Miami  in  Florida.

A  few  inches   of  ocean  depth  increase  will  decrease  their  value  from  HUNDREDS  OF  BILLIONS  OF  DOLLARS  to  $00.01  --  one  cent !

Now,  here  is  the  real  problem  with  ocean  depth  increase  --  about  65%   of  humanity  lives  on  land  adjacent  to  estuaries.

That  means  that  very  shortly,   65%  x  7.4  billion  people   in  the  world,   or  4.8  BILLION  people  --  including  every  human  being  in  Magnolia  --  are  going  to  have  to  move  upland.

As  the  chaos  generated  by  such  a  move  accelerates,  it  will  be  more  than  any  political  system  in  the  world  can  handle.  Governments  everywhere  will  collapse.   The  uncanny  ability  of  modern  movies  to  anticipate  things,  like  "Mad  Max:  Fury  Road,"  will  once  again  be  proven,  in  spades.

This  is  the  near  future,  friends.