I doubt you will ever hear detractors bring up the wealth left over the centuries at these temples… just the wealth the Catholic Church has accumulated.
Yahoo News has this amazing story!
A treasure trove of gold and silver jewelry, coins and precious stones said to be worth billions of dollars has been found in a Hindu temple in southern India, officials said on Saturday.
The valuables have an estimated preliminary worth of over 500 billion rupees ($11.2 billion), said Kerala Chief Secretary K. Jayakumar, catapulting the temple into the league of India’s richest temples.
The thousands of necklaces, coins and precious stones have been kept in at least five underground vaults at the Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple which is renowned for its intricate sculptures.
“We are yet to open one more secret chamber which has not been opened for nearly 140 years,” Jayakumar told AFP.
The actual value of the treasure haul can be ascertained only after it is examined by the archaeological department, said Jayakumar.
The temple, dedicated to Hindu lord Vishnu, was built hundreds of years ago by the king of Travancore and donations by devotees have been kept in the temple’s vaults since.
A necklace found on Thursday was 18 feet (six metres) long. Thousands of gold coins have also been found.
Since India achieved independence from Britain in 1947, a trust managed by descendants of the Travancore royal family has controlled the temple.
But India’s Supreme Court recently ordered that the temple be managed by the state to ensure the security of valuables at the shrine.
Until now, the Thirupathy temple in southern Andhra Pradesh state was believed to be India’s richest temple with offerings from devotees worth 320 billion rupees.
The sound was incredible, the view was as well as a myriad of colors and flashes of light drizzled across the sky as I left a prescreening of Undefeated and was back on the freeway headed towards home. It is almost as if Disneyland was in cahoots with the showing of the film as they lit off their nightly fireworks display heading towards this July 4th weekend. I was one of a handful of bloggers invited to the showing… why, I don’t know. (Obviously not because of my looks.) But I wanted to show support for such a nice offer and decided to go and support the showing. I went with some reservations about Sarah, “why?” you might ask. Well, after hearing some input at a lecture by Hugh Hewitt, and listening to talk radio a bit, many of these conservative pundits are very weary of Mrs. Palin running because they feel she cannot win like a Romney or Pawlenty can. Mind you, they have some valid points in some respect, but I am [was] teetering on the precipice that Dennis Prager has already committed to. That is, he [now I] am not concerned about guaranteeing a win with a nominal Republican. He, as am I, are more concerned with turning the country back in a big way from the jaunt to the left that has been happening since the Dems took control of congress.
I was surprised to see – not because they wouldn’t support Palin, but because I wasn’t expecting to see them in the documentary – Andrew Breitbart, Tammy Bruce, and Mark Levin in the movie. Because of their background and insight into matters I respect their commentary like I do other conservative pundits. May I say, the points they were making (especially Breitbart) resonated with me. They resonated with me in a big way.
So before talking too much more about the film, I want to give the readers a bit more about the day, only because I was very early to the area to beat any traffic. I went to a restaurant across from the theaters to have a couple of beers and to get something in the gut. I sat in the outdoor section of the bar and really hadn’t planned on talking to anyone and was getting ready to pull out my Mamet book and get a few chapters under my belt with the time left before the show. (By the way, when some hear “a few chapters” they think this refers to a lot of pages. David Mamet’s chapters are short and very digestible… so I wanted to make sure people know this was no big feat.) A gentleman at the bar (Jim) started to smoke. So he politely asked if it was going to bother me and pointed out that the wind was working against me. So I moved to the other side of him, which started the conversation off. (Interaction with real – live people is far more preferred than burying one’s nose in a book, as much as I love doing this. We got to talking about various topics, one being his loss of his businesses after 9/11. He mentioned he was hitting record sales, owned three car dealerships, and then… after those planes spliced through those buildings killing many inside, we often forget that they also killed something else. The livelihood of many Americans the country over. I am not a small business owner, never have been, probably never will be. I ma one of those guys a small business owner wants working for him. So I am not aware of the impact outside of stories told via media, but once in a while you meet flesh-and-blood that has a story that touches you in a more personable way. Obviously Jim has moved on and grown and learned from his life experiences. It was a pleasure to meet a guy who is a fellow Republican – maybe not because he is as politically adept as us bloggers (*pat, pat, pat*), but deep down I think he knows that the government can get “too big to fail.”
I think the country is starting to feel this way, that the rate and breadth of growth in government is out of hand. It’s no way to run a business, or a household for that matter; which means it is no way to run a country. I broke off conversation with Jim to head over and see if there was a line at all, and it started to form. There were a couple of lively ladies up front with Palin jerseys on, one was a fellow blogger. The leader of and other supporters of the Beverly Hills Tea Party chapter (see quick question to the right). She, as well as others were there to support this release and unite in some sense for the common bond she mentions in her response that all who were there could all agree. The Tea Party reps I spoke to did not endorse Palin officially (this is not in their purview to do as you will hear further down below), but privately they leaned towards her running.
I met a young man who is not the President of the Young Republicans Club at the University of California Irvine. He talked about how when the Democrats and Republicans throw events on campus they have big turnouts. I hope the best for Nick and look forward to speaking with him again.
And finally, I interviewed Marc Harris who is a blogger from BigGovernment.com and the leader of his areas Tea Party as well. To break the ice as well as start a nationwide survey of a poll truly I asked a question of everyone that was submitted to me by Every Day Reggie (his Twitter account feed can be found to the right). This was the answer wanted, and Marc gave it!
Mark was a nice guy, down to earth, good sense of humor, with a lovely lady to boot. Mark makes clear what the Tea Party is geared towards doing, and that is hold the candidates feet to the fire. The base wants to hone these politicians to stand by their core principles. This is the gist of what Marc is getting at. I end with another question submitted by Reggie.
All in all I think I would like to see a Palin/West ticket. This is what I see the base starting to settle on, especially after the release (July 15th) of this movie, which I highly, highly recommend.
Earlier this month, Sen. Marco Rubio made an auspicious debut.
Unlike so many first turns in the upper chamber, Rubio’s stirring remarks, which celebrated American exceptionalism, caught fire. The Florida Republican’s words were cited by Senate colleagues and championed by conservatives. To no one’s surprise, the push to put Rubio on the 2012 ticket only increased, even though the charismatic freshman continues to swat away the chatter.
Look for the Rubio buzz to continue. In an interview with National Review Online, he says that he will take to the Senate floor for his second speech this week — and this time he will have President Obama in his crosshairs.
Rubio tells us that he will respond to Obama’s recent press conference, where the president reveled in class-warfare bluster. “Quite frankly, I am both disappointed for our country and shocked at some of the rhetoric,” he says. “It was rhetoric, I thought, that was more appropriate for some left-wing strong man than for the president of the United States.”
“Talking about corporate jets and oil companies,” Rubio says, missed the point. “Everybody here agrees that our tax code is broken,” he says, and he is open to discussing tax reform. “But don’t go around telling people that the reason you are not doing well is because some rich guy is in a corporate jet or some oil company is making too much money.”
Watching Obama brandish such talking points made Rubio wince. “Three years into his presidency, he is a failed president,” he says. “He just has not done a good job. Life in America today, by every measure, is worse than it was when he took over.”…
I loved this show! While he did of course deal with Michele Bachmann’s gaffes, he also talked about the political history of some of the more important ones. I love the Gerald Ford gaffe that guaranteed Carter winning in 76. i never knew. (See my post on this topic.)
Hydraulic fracturing – or “fracking” – is a fast-growing source of natural gas used to create electricity, heat homes, and more. It involves forcing water, sand, and chemicals into super-deep wells and then recovering the gas released during the process.
Fracking is also highly controversial, with viral video hits such as “The Fracking Song” and the 2010 documentary Gasland contending that the process leads to polluted drinking water, home explosions, and worse.
Fracking has been around for more than 60 years and over 100,000 gas wells are dug per year, most of them in sparsely populated areas in the western U.S. With the discovery of the Marcellus Shale in the eastern part of the country, fracking is increasingly common in populated parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York, leading to heightened tensions between drillers and environmentalists. Indeed, the attorney general of New York has called for a moratorium on the practice in the Empire State.
Is fracking safe? And what are the potential benefits that will be forfeited if the practice is ended? Reason’s Nick Gillespie sat down with science correspondent Ronald Bailey to learn the truth about fracking. Bailey reports that the cases of contaminated water supplies were the result of poorly designed wells that had nothing to do with fracking itself. As important, he notes that the gas generated by fracking would not only massively increase American energy supply, it would do so with a relatively clean and cheap fuel.
Shot by Jim Epstein and Josh Swain; Edited by Swain.
Pervious concrete, a type of concrete without sand, can drain hundreds of inches of rain per hour, allowing water to filter into groundwater stores below, rather than run off into storm drains.
Paved surfaces are so ubiquitous in urban areas today that most of us give little thought to the impact they have on water quality and the health of the environment. But here’s the sobering reality: As more available land area in the country gets paved over, a larger amount of rainwater ends up falling on impervious surfaces such as parking lots, driveways, sidewalks, and streets rather than soaking into the soil. This creates an imbalance in the natural ecosystem and leads to a host of problems including erosion, flash floods, water table depletion, and pollution of rivers, lakes, and coastal waters as rainwater rushing across pavement surfaces picks up everything from oil and grease spills to deicing salts and chemical fertilizers.
A simple solution to avoiding these problems is to stop installing the impervious surfaces that block natural water infiltration into the soil. But few of us are ready to give up our paved roads, driveways, and parking lots. Rather than building them with conventional concrete or asphalt, more and more communities, municipalities, and businesses are switching to pervious concrete or porous pavement, a material that offers the inherent durability and low life-cycle costs of a typical concrete pavement while retaining stormwater runoff and replenishing local watershed systems.
Instead of preventing infiltration of water into the soil, pervious pavement assists the process by capturing rainwater in a network of voids and allowing it to percolate into the underlying soil. In many cases, pervious concrete roadways and parking lots can double as water retention structures, reducing or eliminating the need for traditional stormwater management systems such as retention ponds and sewer tie-ins.
