This was NASA’s image of the day and I just wanted it to stick around a bit longer.

I’ve added a new resource in the Christian Resources column on the left entitled, “Vision Journal”.

I discovered this resource while in prison.  They offer a free two year subscription and it’s a beautifully put together journal with some of the most concise lucid writings I’ve ever read.

They address real-world problems, big global problems, family problems, from a Christian perspective.

It’s one of the few sources of information, written from a Christian perspective, that both sources the Bible for answers and remains highly rational.

I highly recommend it.  They publish only four times a year but when it arrives, it is worth the wait.

I’m in a deep mental funk right now..  Found Bare Naked Ladies on YouTube (the musical group, not actual bare naked ladies), and found a song, The Old Apartment, where they break into an old apartment where they used to live and relish in the memories.

So many of the things from my life are gone, and there is no way to go back and relive the memories.

I put a new link under worthwhile endeavors on the right for the whitehouse petitions portion of the whitehouse.gov website. Mind you, not that I think anything there will be directly actionable but because it at least calls attention to issues and gives us a chance to let our elected officials know what’s on our mind, whether or not they act upon it.

I’m disturbed by the fact that our federal government is making international treaties that give away our states sovereignty .

With respect to marijuana, I have no personal interest in it being legal or not since I haven’t smoked it in 29 years, and when I did the illegal status of it at the time had no part in my decision.  I do however have a political interest in not having the laws in my state subject to the whims of international power moguls.

I am troubled that the US Justice Department is considering suing the states of Washington and Colorado because our liberal marijuana laws apparently violate some portion of an International Treaty and now the UN is demanding our justice department take action.

I would argue that our lawmakers on the national level had NO RIGHT to enter into a treaty that abridged state rights.  The combination of the Federal government basically throwing away the US Constitution, as they did with the Homeland Security Act and the USA Patriot Act, allowing things like wiretaps without a court order, indefinite detention of US citizens without a charge or any form of due process, these were bad enough, but now we have to turn over state sovereignty to the United Nations?  No Thanks!

There are, I will agree, certain things which affect the entire globe, and burning millions of tons of coal per year for power, or burning radioactive wastes so those radioactive isotopes are put into the atmosphere to effect the entire planet, as is happening now in Japan, or allowing huge amounts of farm wastes to run off into the ocean where they create huge dead zones, or BP to drill for oil using the cheapest casings they can which blow out and pollute hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean, these things are rightly the subject of international treaties.

But whether or not a person can smoke a joint, or whether they can buy vitamins, these things are not legitimate subjects of international treaties and I would call upon anyone reading this to make it known to their legislators that this will not be tolerated.

The greatest gift of God is that of his son who gave his life to ransom ours but there are many other gifts God gives us, this world, the people he puts in our lives, the lessons we learn, the tasks that we’re given, all of these things are gifts.

I regret that I did not see things this way in my younger years, did not see my wife as the gift from God that she is, or my friends, or parents, or pretty much anything of value that God put in my life.

That’s not the way I see things anymore, but one thing hasn’t changed and that’s my sense that we, humanity, are throwing away a gift of God and that’s this planet he has entrusted to us while we are here.

It’s true the Bible does say that God will make a new Earth, and it does say that man is to have dominion over the other animals.  But it doesn’t say when, and it does say we can’t know the time, only the season, so it may not happen in our life.  And also having dominion over animals does not lesson their value, they are still a gift of God and destroying them or the habitat God created for them is akin to throwing that gift back in God’s face, it is wrong.  The fact that God will create a new perfect world, one that is not subject to decay, stained by sin, does not take away the value of this world that we are in now.

I find myself in a strange place politically, because I can neither align myself with the republican conservatives who say it’s okay to destroy any non-human life, greed is good, etc.  Neither can I align myself with democratic liberals who say it’s a woman’s right to take a life if it’s dependent upon her body.  If we were to add up body counts, I’m not really sure if more people have been lost to abortion or war, but I don’t like either, I feel life is too valuable to throw away, all life.

I am not happy with what we are doing to this planet, what we are doing is not sustainable, but I think people are foolish if they think they can force God’s hand to create a new planet sooner by destroying our existing planet.

It does now appear with fracking technology that we won’t be running out of hydrocarbons for some time, at least twenty years, maybe a hundred.  That’s unfortunate because fracking technology hasn’t increased the amount of atmosphere or the ability to sink carbon dioxide one bit.  I was hoping this was a problem that was going to take care of itself by hydrocarbons simply becoming scarce enough that burning them was no longer a viable option but clearly that’s not going to happen in my lifetime.

So now if anything positive is going to happen with respect to our environment, it’s going to have to be by choice, our choice.

There are clean options, such as hydrogen fusion, that could be made operational much sooner if only we were willing to take even a small percentage of the resources we squander on war, and put it into research.  This technology has gone from being a scientific problem to an engineering problem, and the engineering problems appear solvable but it takes time to test materials and configurations to find those that are optimal.

Even though the capital expenses of hydrogen fusion are large, once built the fuel is for all practical purposes free.

There are many other options that we’re not developing, that we really should.  Wind and solar are variable but Germany has proven that they can make a much larger contribution to the electrical grid than they presently are here.

Converting long distance power transmission lines from AC to DC would cut transmission losses, eliminate electromagnetic radiation from those lines, eliminate susceptibility to solar flares and other space weather, allow interfacing of grids of different frequency and phase, eliminate cascading failures, and make practical the transmission of electrical power over much longer distances thus allowing the variations in solar and wind output to be averaged over a much greater area, allowing them to make larger contributions to the grid.

For base load power there is an ample supply of geothermal in the United States.  There is in fact enough geothermal resources to meet ALL of our electrical needs if we choose to exploit them, and exploiting them heavily in Yellowstone might just delay or prevent a super-eruption that would destroy most of the continental United States.  Yes, we might sacrifice old faithful, but I think given the prospect of another super-eruption that might not be a bad sacrifice.

When I was younger, I often had these dreams of being on an Earth where the air was pristine, the water in lakes crystal clear, not clogged up with algae from all the run-off and waste we discharge into rivers and streams, and I think those dreams were of the new Earth, but it also seems to me, we could have that here on our own planet if only we chose to take action to use sustainable energy sources, to use organic farming and more sustainable farming where proper crop rotations are done, drip irrigation is used so that nutrients weren’t leached out of the soil into rivers, streams, and lakes, and ultimately the ocean, and ground water wasn’t depleted faster than nature can replenish it.

Nuclear I’ve got mixed feelings about.  I think it has the technical capacity to be a clean energy source, one that doesn’t threaten melt-downs and massive contamination and one that doesn’t produce 100,000 year radioactive waste, but I think greed and politics will prevent that from being realized.  Such a system would require inherently safe designs, that is reactor designs that no active components need to function in order not to melt down or leak.  Such designs exist, but whether they could be built economically is doubtful.  The other thing that is needed are fast-flux designs that can consume transuranic long term waste and turn them into short-term fission products that only require short-term storage to decay and not 100,000 years.  Again, such designs exist, but economic feasibility is the issue.  Since the nuclear industry, like all industries, is driven by the profit motive, I am skeptical that a safe, sustainable, and environmentally friendly nuclear industry is possible.  I also don’t really think it’s necessary here on Earth, though might well have applications in space, should we decide to colonize other planets, particularly since those available to us would be farther from the Sun and lack geothermal activity.

God told us to be fruitful and multiple, but multiplying beyond the point where we can feed ourselves without destroying our environment is not fruitful, it’s suicidal, but that appears to be where we are heading at present.

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It is frustrating being confined to such a narrow slice of time.  This video deals with the idea of a common language from which all languages emerged.

Often, we can understand where things are likely to go in the future by looking back into the past, but with language there is a game changer that never existed before, cheap, widely available, global communications.

During man’s history, he was always expanding outward from his origins, but we’ve reached a point where almost no portion of the globe is totally unpopulated.  There is no where unpopulated to expand in to, on this planet.

So I wonder, will language eventually meld back into a common language, and if so, how much will it resemble the original proto-language?

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PANDA UNITE

Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act gives the president the authority to order the military to detain anyone, including United States citizens, suspected of terrorist activities to be declared enemy of the state and detained indefinitely without a charges, hearing, or representation. This act completely guts the Bill of Rights and the US Constitution.

Few could have missed the recent hike in gasoline prices.  Over the last few years, shortages in crude supplies have been largely to blame, but not this time.

This time you’ve got refineries being shut down or operated under capacity to intentionally cause a shortage of supplies and higher prices.  Add to that speculators who are aware that this was in the works have capitalized on it further driving prices up.

West coast refineries are operating at 79%, domestic crude supplies are abundant presently so it’s not as though they can’t get the raw materials.

I’m not convinced this is a bad thing, while the crude supply is ample now, and it appears that fracking technology will likely keep it that way for 15-20 years, there is only so much atmosphere, and it’s better to save some crude for chemical feedstock instead of burning it all up.

If the oil companies, through their own greed, price themselves out of the market, in my view that’s a good thing in the long run even if it’s painful in the short term.

Only sustained high fuel prices will encourage people to opt for more fuel efficient vehicles and vehicles capable of using more sustainable energy sources such as electricity and biofuels.

So go ahead, be greedy you bastards!  The sooner we’re rid of you the better.