Fired up the stereo today, hadn’t listened to music for a while, live or recorded, but was in the mood today, stereo and computer were both free.

I’ve got a collection that pretty much spans time as far as what has been recorded, and genres, though popular music, what used to be called “top-40” and rock of various subtypes is the majority, though there is so much music now that blurs the boundaries. The different genres are not so clearly defined anymore and I have a lot of music that fits into the, “I don’t know what the hell you’d call it” genre.

The computer has allowed me to digitize a lot of music I have on vinyl, a lot of it was noisy, ticks, pops, hiss, and then clean it up with software, remove the ticks and pops and hiss, fix a number of other problems. It’s time intensive though because it takes a lot of tweaking for every piece of music, different threshold settings, different EQ, different unique problems in each recording.

Listened to Bob Marley – Simmer Down, Toots and the Maytals – Bam Bam, Cab Calloways – Loose Shoes, Ruth Brown – If I Can’t Sell It, I’ll Keep Sittin’ On It, Deathcab for Cutie – Soul Meets Body, Richard Thompson – Don’t Roll Those Bloodshot Eyes at Me, Belly – Feed The Tree, Madonna – Ray Of Light, 10000 Maniacs – Candy Everybody Wants, Barnaked Ladies – Brian Wilson (Live version), Red Hot Chili Peppers – Under The Bridge, Nerf Herder – Courtney Love, Neil Young with Crazy Horse – Mansion On The Hill, Puffy Ami Yumi – Asia No Junshin, Size 14 – I Touched Her Ass, Courtney Love – Doll Parts, Norman Greenbaum – Spirit In The Sky, Interpol – Evil, Oingo Boingo – We Close Our Eyes, and I’m done for now.

One thing I’m really enjoying about this era is music. Don’t like the conservative right wing wacko politics, the wars, the total lack of concern for the environment, but this is absolutely the best period in my life as far as music goes. I like a lot of older stuff as well, but I think this era has produced some of the most unique and creative music.

I think what has made this such a great era musically is the Internet, and in large part the peer-to-peer networks that the major labels were all telling us would be the death of the music. On the contrary, they’ve allowed truly artistic and talented musicians to gain an audience instead of the tightly controlled formula shit the major labels kick out.

Size 14 is a good example of a group that would have never been heard of, selling CD’s off their website, my favorite song of theirs is “I Touched Her Ass”, and it’s complete shifts in tempo and style in the song and one awesome guitar riff two minutes and forty or so seconds into the song that makes it, it is high energy, it’s BIG guitar if ever there was big guitar.

My absolutely favorite song right now is Death Cab for Cutie’s Soul Meet’s Body, I love that song, everything about it, the lyrical content, the music, the harmonies, the guitar work, it is just goes right to my soul. It’s a great song all around.

Listening to what I think is the best song Oingo Boingo did and totally out of character from the rest of their work, We Close Our Eyes, and having a birthday coming up soon, having my 19 year old daughter left home a month ago, this one really has special meaning to me right now, we close our eyes and the world has turned again.

I’m done listening to music now, that last song, too much emotion I can’t handle any more right now.

Strange, after the crazy dreams the night before last, remembered none when I woke up this morning.

Haven’t seen the girl reflected in my monitor since I last wrote about it. Haven’t had time to research the history here yet.

Received a funny e-mail from some lady in Russia today who as near as I can tell is looking for an American to marry her so she can gain citizenship. She didn’t outright say that, but she describes herself in one sentence and then asks if I like Russian women, if I’m planning on traveling to Russia, and if I think I’m right for her. How could anyone know that from a one sentence description.

I hope she didn’t take it as overly rude, I did tell her that since I was already married I couldn’t be her citizenship ticket.

I can understand her desire to get out though. Countries that spend all of their resources on military and starve their citizens are no fun to live in. Wait, that would be here too.

I did also talk to a couple of local women on a couple of sites I am on, that helped my spirits a bit. Funny how someone who is a complete stranger is more willing to share the details of their lives with me than my own children. But that’s okay, it boosted my spirits significantly and I actually was able to get some work done last night.

I do wish my children were at least as willing to share as a total stranger, but perhaps being a total stranger makes it feel safer. My kids might worry about what I think about them, a total stranger doesn’t care what I think about them.

A constant challenge life presents is to act upon what our heart tells us we should be doing rather than acting out of pain or anger. Usually, these are two different things and doing the former is constructive and improves our lives, but doing the latter is destructive and usually hurts us more than the person we are angry at.

Right now, I find myself in a unique situation where both what I know I need, to build my network of friends locally, people I can talk to face to face, do things with, is the same thing I feel motivated to do out of anger as kind of a “screw you, I don’t need you anyway, I can find other people that WANT to be a part of my life” message.

Even though the gross objective in either case is the same, make new friends, become more socially involves with real people locally, the subtleties very likely will be affected by my motivation, and I’m having a hard time being heart motivated right now, and I fear with disastrous consequences if I can’t get that under control.

This is an aspect of forgiveness that I think a lot of people miss, it’s not so much for the benefit of the person that harmed us as for our own good. Anger and hatred are often more destructive to the angry hater than the target of their anger. I know this intellectually, yet I’m having a hard time internalizing it and acting accordingly.

Making friends for the sake of making life fuller and more satisfying is a positive thing and if done with that motivation I believe it will improve my quality of life, mood, overall functioning. On the other hand, if done as some sort of revenge, then it’s going to worsen relationships with people that I care about, even when I am angry at them.

So how to get the motivation right and do the right thing? That’s a tough one, a work in progress.

Had very disturbed sleep and odd dreams last night. Kept waking up into a semi-conscious state, where you’re not really sure where you are or what’s around you.

But when I finally woke up all the way, I first had this dream where my wife, Raymond, Eddie, and I lived in a different house, small house without a basement, with an undeveloped area of land behind it. In the back on this land, some homeless people had primitive shelters they constructed with pieces of old plywood and stuff they found lying around.

Our next door neighbor had his dog stolen. Raymond spotted the dog in a television newscast so we called the police to let them know he’d seen the dog and where it was.

Then I thought the people who stole the dog were coming after us.

The dream morphed at this point and we were living in the house I grew up in, but it wasn’t with my parents, it was the wife and I and remaining children.

But this person was still coming after us. I went down into the basement and locked the basement door, then into the garage and made sure it was secured. Then upstairs and locked the front and back doors and the screendoors.

Then we went up into the attic with a cell phone. The plan was, when we heard them break in we’d call the police and they could capture them.

But then the dream morphed again, and I found myself working with this young woman at a college administering the computer systems. She was really the brains of the operation, I was pretty much a slacky. She discovered a password file entry that appeared to not be legitimate, it appeared modified to grant a student priviledges they shouldn’t have that would allow them to do things like change grades.

So we got in a car to drive to this persons location. Not exactly sure what we intended to do when we got there but that’s the way dreams go sometimes. We went up this one street that had a dead end segment at the end, and all of the sudden the streets were snow covered. I saw a car coming from the dead end and I knew something bad was going to happen and sure enough, it flipped over.

Then we made a left onto a street just before the dead end, and another left onto a two-lane arterial that headed towards a four lane, kind of like how 5th NE goes to Northgate Way north of northgate. Anyway, this car came in the opposite direction then turned sideways into our lane forcing us to stop. This big guy got out of the car and threatened to kill us if we didn’t mind our own business. He was running a grades for money racket.

Then the dream morphed again and my wife and I were in some kind of public transit center, like a bus tunnel stop or something. There were escalator and stairwells going up and down to multiple floors. There was a gunman chasing us and the floor we were on dead ended. But there was small elevator at the end, which I got onto. For some reason Tina didn’t follow me. But I got out at the next floor and headed down to find her then we went back up the steps and the gunman came down a flight in the opposite direction. I saw him but he didn’t see us so we climbed up really fast to get away.

I woke up after that, stiff neck and bad sinus headache. Pretty odd dream.

Did receive a communications from our new found friend, seems our photo scared her off. This is unfortunate because I know to get out of this depressed state I have to increase my physical activity and social interaction.

I just can’t do the gym/swim thing, it’s just too painful. If I could find someone to accompany us and give me something to think about, someone to interact with, it would make it easier. I thought for a short while we had that but it fell apart.

Our ours make finding someone to accompany us difficult. We usually go after 11 PM, so we need a late-night person, preferably someone with a membership at 24-hour fitness where we go to work-out and swim, when we did.

Beyond that though I really need some live and in person local people we can do things with. I have lots of net-friends scattered all over the world but that just does not replace face to face human interaction which now seems so missing from my life. My wife is much better at making friends. Unfortunately, the friends she makes either don’t like me, are day persons, or have health issues that prevent them from going out and doing anything physical.

Although I only had two drinks last night they were strong. Tasted like a open bottle of rubbing alcohol smells.

But oddly, I didn’t have a hangover this morning. I did sleep solidly for close to nine hours which for me is a marathon session, felt a little irritable when I woke up, but that was it.

Do you have any idea what Apple Pie that fell behind something on the floor and didn’t get noticed for a couple of weeks is like?

I don’t even want to conjecture on what some of the stuff growing on it was.

And the stickiness factor of the remains… Oddly enough, after some experiementation, I found window cleaner dissolved it.

I’ve been thinking about my mental state lately.

I’ve come to the conclusion that my view of life is something like the view one gets looking into a convex rear-view mirror. You know, those rounded mirrors that give you a wider angle view but at the expense of distorting the image making things appear smaller and farther away than they really are.

It makes both time and distance seem farther away. Your children are born, the time when they will grow up and leave it seems so far away, but then BAM! It hits you unexpectedly.

And then the distance, seems so great, even though you can get on a phone and for almost nothing be talking to them.

I think everybody shares this to a degree, always, when we look back on the past it seems to have gone by very quickly. That phenomena is often referred to as time compression.

But I think my mirror is a bit more convex than most.

I wonder to some degree how this may have been affected by experimentation with various hallucinogenic substances when I was young.

The hallucinations I experienced were largely visual and perceptual, occasionally auditory. At first they are very disorienting, but after a while you learn that you can not trust your senses. And maybe that learning contributes to the sense of distance. It’s hard to be convinced that things I can only see or hear are real. But if I can touch something it is real to me.

There is a period after a baby is born in which it has not learned the permanence of objects, that is, when something leaves it’s visual field it believes that it no longer exists. Knowing that something, not visible, still exists, is a learned response.

I do wonder if I didn’t unlearn that to some degree, causing me to experience my daughters moving out to be more like a death than mere distance.

I need to rant about the loss of life in Iraq because it is nothing less than total insanity, but more than that, this war does not make any sense in terms of our national security.

I heard the news regarding the number of US servicemen who have died in Iraq so far, it’s just passed the number of people who died in the 911 event.

I wish it were only this many. Just like Viet Nam the numbers are manipulated.

If a soldier is seriously injured and airlifted to a hospital outside of Iraq, say Germany, and subsequently dies, that soldier is not counted in the Iraq death toll.

In years past, functions like security and supply lines would have been handled by the military. The deaths of people performing those functions would have been counted in this death total. Now these functions are outsourced to private corporations and when those people, civilians, die, they are not counted in the death count. It’s been some time since that number passed the 10,000 mark.

The Iraqi civilian death count is estimated to be at the lowest 14,000, and highest, in excess of 100,000. There is no official estimate, most estimates seem to fall between 40,000 and 50,000 deaths and between two and ten times that number of injuries.

We have spent 316 billion dollars prosecuting this war. 316 billion dollars could have bought us about 316 Peak GW of wind power generation capacity. In real terms, because of wind variability, that would be equivalent to 105 GW of thermal capacity. 1 GW is a fairly ball park figure for a nuclear power generation station (often multiple reactors of 500-600 Mw), so this is would have displaced approximately 105 nuclear reactors. That would require no fuel, produce no radioactive waste or CO2.

To put this in perspective, with a 30% thermal conversion efficiency, one barrel of oil can generate approximately 500 kwh of electricity. Iraq produces approximately 500,000 barrels per day, between sabotage incidents, that’s 250 million killowatt hours per day energy equivalent for all the oil Iraq produces.

105 gigawatts of real wind generation capacity (316 megawatts peak), equals 105 million kilowatts x 24 hours/day = 2.5 billion killowatt hours per day from wind. So we could have had the ten times the energy equivalent of all the oil Iraq produces for the same amount of money we spent on the war in the last four years. And that capacity would go on generating electricity for decades.

Never mind the moral issues of all the lost life and suffering that has resulted from this war, from a purely economic standpoint we would have done much better investing in renewables, wind energy in particular, and we’d have something sustainable, the oil fields will deplete.

Economic strength is of greater significance in terms of world influence than is military strength. We proved this in the cold war with the Soviet Union. They sacrificed their economy for military capability. When their economy fell apart, so did their military capability.

We are doing the same thing the Soviet Union did. China is concentrating on their economic prosperity and becoming increasingly more influential in the world. The US is concentrating on military strength. Our economy is being destroyed in the process. When it totally collapses, so will our military.

Large investments in wind power are now happening simply because the economics are favorable. Between 1999 and 2005, our wind generation capacity quadrupled. Installed capacity is forecast to grow by 60% in 2006. Wind power has become competitive with energy generation from coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy, but requires no fuel, produces no carbon dioxide or radio active waste, nor are there huge decommissioning costs. The lifespan of a nuclear power plant is limited by neutron embrittlement of the reactor vessel. Decommissioning is expensive because the reactor vessel and internal structures are radioactive as a result of neutron activation. There are parts that wear on a wind turbine, eventually bearings and other components will need to be replaced just as with any mechanical device, but save for these maintenance issues, there is no finite limit on the useful lifespan of a wind turbine.

We should be putting our energy into making this happen even faster instead of stealing another formerly sovereign nations resources. It’s not just the moral thing to do, it is also the economically sensible thing to do. If we control all the worlds oil, it will still run out in the not too distant future. The reality is that even with our military force, we can’t control the worlds oil resources. China’s growing economy will buy them increasing influence and the ability to acquire much of that oil. If we build wind generation capacity, that’s ours, and it’s renewable, it will keep producing energy for generations to come. We can adapt our transportation to utilize this energy.

Maybe we can do the hydrogen fuel cell thing but I don’t think that’s going to be the most viable option. Battery technology exists today that would enable the production of electric cars with a 300+ mile range that could be recharged in three minutes IF the infrastructure existed.

The best approach might actually be a combination of both technologies. The best way to move large quantities of electricity from where it is produced to automotive charging stations would be via DC high voltage superconductive transmission lines. The technology exists now. There are companies already commercially producing superconductive transmission lines. Another advantage of combining both of these technologies is that surplus power can be used to generate the hydrogen, helping to reduce the effects of variability in wind generated electricity.

One proposal that I think makes a lot of sense is to use hydrogen as the cryogenic cooling fluid for these superconductive lines making them act simultaneously as enormous capacity electricity transmission facilities and liquid hydrogen fuel delivery systems.

Think about the possibilities, check my numbers. I did try to utilize realistic figures, a 30% thermal conversion factor for power from oil is actually quite optimistic. The drive train of a car does far worse. The 30% capacity factor of wind power generation is based upon existing wind farm operational data. The costs of wind power installed capacity includes transmission and ancillary support costs.

To summarize, what we have spent on the war in Iraq, so far, could have bought us ten times the total energy output of Iraq, every day, essentially forever, without the loss of life and without the generation of all the CO2 burning 500,000 barrels of oil per day would create.

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed how the terrorism propaganda has been ratcheted up now that an election is coming up?

Also, you may have noticed how the gasoline prices are falling just before the election. The oil companies are easing up on the artificial shortage they created so that we’ll vote for the same bastards that got us into a major war and resulted in the $3/gallon prices we’ve been paying at the pump. The same forces incidentally that were responsible for the Enron fiasco. You can count on gasoline going right back up on November 3rd.

Coast to Coast AM in particular, first I hear Art Bell on a weekend tell us how the Muslims will continue until either everybody has converted to Islam or died. Strange, I’ve never had a Muslim make any serious attempt to convert me or condone the killing that is going on here and abroad.

Art Bell had another guest a week ago that espoused the view that the agenda was first to overthrow the United States, and then when we were out of the way, the rest of the world would be easy by contrast. I think not. I think he’s seriously deluded to think that the Indians and Chinese people are just going to roll over and play dead.

Then George Norey on the following Monday interviews Hamid Mir, the editor of an Islamabad-based newspaper, The Daily Ausuf. This person has been in touch recently with the Taliban leader who claims that Taliban will launch the largest offensive against American troops in Pakistan at the beginning of Ramadan, which should start on September 24th.

He also claims that Al-Qaeda operatives in the United States have nuclear weapons smuggled in across the Mexican border, and can strike at anytime.

I think these claims are basically bullshit intended to whip up fear in the American public in hopes they’ll vote for Republicans who they erroneously believe will protect them.

If Al-Qaeda were in possession of nuclear weapons, I think Israel would have been the first to disappear off the map and become a glow in the dark radioactive wasteland. But I am hard pressed to believe Al-Qaeda could have acquired nuclear weapons while Iran, with much greater resources at their disposal, is still working to develop them.

I also seriously doubt that the Taliban is going to wait for a holiday to attack American forces.

If another country invaded the United States, I have to think that there would be those of us that would want to go to that country and inflict whatever harm we could.

Don’t buy this crap, because that’s what it is. If Bush hadn’t squandered several hundred billion dollars, ten thousand American lives and 100,000 Iraqi lives on a senseless war to control oil fields, we would have Bin Laden by now.

The truth of the matter is they don’t want Bin Laden captured, they want a credible threat so they can justify wiretapping our phones without warrants, jailing people without charging them with a crime or allowing them a prompt and fair trial, restricting our travel, and monitoring and interfering with every aspect of our life. Pretty soon you won’t be able to go to the bathroom without a government license and a camera watching you.

It’s time we insist on democracy here in America before worrying about it in other countries. Out with the Diebold audit-proof voting machines, and in with traceable fair elections.

The military-industrial complex Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of is upon us. It is even more insidious than president Eisenhower had imagined, having taken on a completely international presence.

Prior to the change of the millennium I had envisioned 2000 would usher in a new era of peace and prosperity. I had the feeling we’d toss these war mongers out and get on with managing the planet to the benefit of all it’s occupants.

It was silly of me to believe this would just happen by magic. The control of media by conservative forces has insured that protests do not get news coverage like they did in the Viet Nam era, so this tactic so far has been ineffective.

What can we do? Well one thing we can do is start becoming wise consumers. Do everything we can to reduce our consumption of petroleum products. Become aware of what consumer products these multinational corporations produce and avoid them. And don’t buy the propaganda on the conservative controlled news media.

And on the subject of conservatives, I remember when conservatives used to like to associate themselves with fiscal responsibility. Has anybody been keeping track? The last three REPUBLICAN presidents ran up the largest national deficits in history. The last DEMOCRATIC president balanced the budget and was paying down the national debt.

When you vote this November, ask yourself if you want to continue mortgaging our country. Ask yourself if you want to continue to support the party that launched the first US preemptive invasion of another sovereign nation in our history. The party that manipulated intelligence data to build a case for war.

I mean come on folks, am I the only one to see something is seriously wrong in this country?

Regarding Iran, does it not seem so odd that we are concerned with the possibility of them developing nuclear weapons when Pakistan already has them? Let me give you a couple of things to consider regarding this:

In the middle east, Saudi Arabia has the largest oil reserves, the present Saudi government is at least on the surface friendly to United States interest, but that is much less true of the populous. One of the reasons we invaded Iraq is that keeping bases in Saudi Arabia threatened to cause an uprising overthrowing the current government. We needed another place to put them that was central to the region. And what better place than the country that had the middle easts next largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.

Guess which country is number three? Yes, it is Iran. Surprise surprise. But oil isn’t the only interest the Bush administration has in the region. And more specifically vice president Cheney has very personal interests in the region. Cheney has uranium mining interests. Iran has developed a technology for extracting uranium from low grade ore that lowers the cost of doing so by a factor of one hundred from that of conventional methods. Specifically, Iranian scientists have developed a microbe that can efficiently extract uranium from low grade ores.

If that technology were to come into widespread use, what do you think would happen to the value of Cheneys’ uranium mining interests? I believe this is the real reason for all the stink about Iran’s processing of nuclear fuel.

I don’t want to go down the path we’re going down. I don’t want to allow a handful of power mad greedy politicians incite a war between Muslims and Christians. The Holy books of both religions tell us not to kill each other. People on both sides of the fence need to ask themselves if they really believe their leaders are in touch with God. I don’t for a minute, but I do believe our leaders are very aware of the motivational power of religions and are using them to manipulate us.

I gotta try and get some sleep now, it’s sure hard with the world in the turmoil that it is.