Category Archives: Uncategorized

Democratic Republic

Posted on by
Reply

Does our democracy hang in the balance of this election? Only time will tell, and my gut says that is highly likely. There are those that want to change the way that our leaders are selected. Ideally, it would be one vote per person with the least interference possible by those administering the process. I would love to see us move in that direction. If some of those currently in power have their way, it is unlikely. They would rather be the final arbiter in any election process. So, instead of voters getting at least a semblance of participation in government, it will be the ones with the most power telling us who will be running things and how our money will be spent. It seems we are living in interesting times.

CO2 and passive solar, the future of desert living?

Posted on by
Reply

Once again I’m dealing with refrigerants and AC problems. I’m paying $60/lb for R-410 which replaced freon (R-22) that will be fazed out by 2020. I could probably pick up R-410 for under $10/lb but licensed HVAC companies have to have a paper trail showing where their refregerant was procured.

R-410 has its own disadvantages. It stays in the atmosphere a *long, long* time increasing the greenhouse effect. My guess is that eventually, everyone will switch to CO2. Could get on the leading edge of that trend in a niche market for green housing.

So, basically, design a passive solar house as a proof of concept with strategically placed thermal mass for heating in the winter, covered by tons of earth and a roof garden. CO2 HVAC, water reclamation and filtration, whole house HEPA air filtration, solar heated hot water, photovoltaic power generated by a flexible thin-film grid canopy over the garden. Patio should be cooled with Arab cooling towers, which are basically passive downdraft evap. Gardens should be based on low water consumption concepts from the Desert Botanical Garden.

Vegan Vitality, part 2

Posted on by
Reply

Completed my quarter down 23 pounds and dropped my A1C from 8.2% to 6.4%.  Still not where I want to be and it’s headed in the right direction.  I’m currently down 27 pounds and still off the animal products, wheat and refined sugar.  I’d like to lose another 30 pounds and drop my A1C to under 5.7. I think it’s just a matter of upping my intake of high nutrition foods.  I’ve enrolled Susan in my game, and she says she’s a nutritarian now.  We’ll go with that.

Net neutrality

Posted on by
Reply

Net neutrality was “baked into” the internet from the inception, and it has turned out to be one of the most important innovations of my lifetime. An open internet where we all have an even playing field has a good chance to bring about global transformation. It’s critical for our common good that this vehicle for free exchange of information and ideas stay neutral and immune to the pressures from those that would have their views and ideologies take precedence.

The upside of assisting – Word

Posted on by
Reply

Sometimes I am pleasantly surprised. I was assisting with Advanced Course registration at the completion session of the Landmark Forum last night, and had some great conversations. Two of them centered around the names of God used in the Bible, and the relationship between what Moses and John said (or wrote) and the nature of Being.  Logos, λόγος, or Word, is a very powerful concept.  God spoke the entire universe into existence.  Since the beginning of time, Word has been a creative force.  In this conversation, I got that what is not our identity is free to create with our Word.  Unfortunately, our identity runs the show most of the time, and it’s word is powerless.  We can only create a possibility from nothing, which means it is necessary to acknowledge our inauthenticity and creating a clearing, and that’s where Human Being shows up.  My friend pointed out that being is uniquely human, and it occurs to me that being is brought forth in Word.

God told Moses He was to be called  יהוה – which we know as I Am that I Am, or the Tetragrammaton. Some of the names of God were apparently not spoken outside the temple in Jerusalem, and Adonai אֲדֹנָי was apparently used only in prayer, and when speaking about God, it was considered more appropriate to use HaShem השם which means “the Name”.  Anyway, the names of God and how they relate to the way the world is create for each of us is, in my humble opinion, a rich field of study.

einstein gives us a task

Posted on by
Reply

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Debt Ceiling Debacle

Posted on by
Reply

Is anybody watching this fiasco unfold? It “occurs” to me as a hostage situation. Far right factions in the Republican Party have decided to hold the economy hostage to push through their agenda, and no one seems to be willing to take them to task or talk some sense to them. It now looks like they’ll get their way and saddle to poorest and neediest in our nation with mending the damage that the Bush era machine set in motion. Not only are there to be no “new taxes”, we’re extending the tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and cutting social programs to pay for it. The only point of contention now is how the Republicans can avoid cutting defense spending as deeply as the bipartisan “supercommittee” has suggested while at the same time reducing the deficit by an amount equal to the debt we’ve already incurred (and now have to pay for) without raising revenue. It looks to me that the greed has moved from Wall Street to Capitol Street by proxy.

They would have us believe that their party was not responsible for taking a nation with a balanced budget and no federal deficit and turning it into a nation with historic budget deficit. When the greed of Wall Street and the deeply red budget caught up with us, we were headed toward a depression. They would have you to believe that TARP and stimulus were ineffective in preventing anything, but my impression is that things could have been much worse if the leadership that put us in this situation was still at the helm.

I don’t think there’s any evidence that the two party system still works. Neither party has been able to muster the combination of leadership and insight necessary to right the ship. The far right sees no reason that we need to pay taxes for the services they receive, and the left has been unable to nudge them to a middle ground. Paying for what we’ve spent by collecting revenue and cutting spending would be compromise. Compromise seems to be a word that has taken on a derogatory connotation as unpalatable to our generation as the word “thrifty”. Economy and good management are no longer seen as ideals worth our attention, and besides, the word “thrifty” keeps bad company. It’s one of the principles in the Scout Law, and they all seem to have fallen into disfavor. A scout is:

Trustworthy
Loyal
Helpful
Friendly
Courteous
Kind
Obedient
Cheerful
Thrifty
Brave
Clean
and Reverent

We’re intent on pressing two simultaneous wars on the Asian continent when we can’t keep our workforce employed. One would have thought we would have learned our lesson by now on attempting a prolonged military engagement in Asia with no clear definition of success or a clearly understood plan on handing over the responsibility and getting out. We think we’re bringing the fight to the terrorists responsible for 9-11? That’s not true in Iraq, and I’m not so sure about Afghanistan either. Afghanistan has behaving pretty much the same way for a thousand years. Killing them only gives them something to fight for and makes them stronger. A better approach to Afghanistan might be free MTV and McDonalds.

But then again, that hasn’t worked in our inner cities. Tensions still run high along racial, economic and ideological divides, and neither Lady Gaga or Big Macs seem to have brought the violence to a close.

Relevance

Posted on by
1

It’s a little sad that the comments I see here invariably lack relevance. I rather see flames or derision than an oblique post that makes you wonder if the reader even saw the piece they’re leaving a comment about, no matter how nice they appear. My suspicion is that it’s a new form of spam, and I’m beginning to suspect that a large percentage of the comments I’ve neglected to approve were generated by bots, perhaps crafted to drive some hit ratio up on a linked site. I guess that with the millions of blogs out there, the odds of a real human finding my trivial little site is next to nothing, so spam-bots are about all I should expect to see. I guess that it takes relevance to generate relevance. Have I said anything that would speak to the human condition or offer a solution to the problems that confront my cohabitants of planet earth? Probably not. Do I have opinions? Sure. Many of my problems have been directly related to my perspective. The folks I see day and day out have choices. We can isolate from our fellow man and our Higher Power, or we can choose to engage with reality and be a channel for our HP’s love.

The choices we make can shape the planet for the better or propagate its problems.  Accepting the status quo and failing to speak out against what’s wrong in society is a choice, and it’s one I’ve made far too often.  We have problems, and the loving thing to do is to point them out, not ignore them, hoping they’ll go away.  There is a machine in motion that counts on our sleepy acceptance that they’re nothing we can do about injustice, suffering and the plight of the environment.  The status quo is very profitable to a very few, but endangers the survival of our species.  The only way to change the status quo is to influence our institutions though our choices.  The way that works with our political institutions is obvious.  We express our views and vote with ballots.  Commerce and industry take their ques from the demand of the consumer.  We vote with our checkbooks.  Our religious institutions are empowered by their parishioners.  We vote with our attendance and our financial support.  The keys are having the desire to understand the issues, doing the research, making a choice and voting your heart.  And that’s *all* about relevance.

Thinking about thinking

Posted on by
Reply

I watched Jill Bolte Taylor’s talk on the rolls of the hemispheres of the brain yesterday on TED, and it has me thinking more about Zen and Kabalah. Both of these disciplines enjoin the practitioner to learn to control the mind for a metaphysical end, and one of the meditation techniques described as “quieting the mind” sounds very similar to the experience Dr. Taylor describes in her talk about her stroke. The idea that we can move out of the ego based context of the left brain into the right brain’s experience of the universal whole by our own volition is captivating and exciting. To me, this seems like a neurological holy grail on the path to gnosis or bodhi.  Having experienced a glimps of this state as a youth, I can understand how people through the ages would dedicate years of hard work to cultivate this ability.  Dr. Taylor’s work reinforces much of what I intuitively feel about the nature of my internal dialog and it’s relationship to me and the world around me.  It’s easy to conclude that this voice is the self, but the transendental experienceso eloquently described by Dr. Taylor shatters that illusion.  The ego is not the self, and allowing the dialog to go silent is not the end of the world.  Rather, it is a means to get in touch with our true selves and experience the peace of knowing that we’re a part of something bigger that the ego can comprehend.