Carey Rowland's blog

Something from Nothing

 Today, I am going to expose to you my ignorance of quantum mechanics in the study of physics. Furthermore, you will plainly see that my childish grasp of the physicists' exposition of this phenomenon is woefully inadequate, even naive.  But it doesn't matter if you can detect right off the bat how blatantly dense is my take on the matter. You see, I am one of those who short circuits the rational pursuit of truth by inserting faith in a Creator where there should by all hypothetical propositions be an equation, or some hard-earned experimental data.

It all started with this: http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201201132, wherein Lawrence Krauss is discussing the contents of his new book,  A Universe From Nothing, with Ira Flatow, and Lawrence makes such potentially gravitational statements as "Nothing is unstable," meaning that nothingness itself is unstable, insofar as that it has a habit of generating stuff out of itself (nothing) out in space.  

"Empty space is a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time scale so short that you can't even measure them."

Spontaneous generation, we used to call it, and thinking about it is, as Lawrence points out, a little bit "like counting angels on the head of a pin." 

But somewhere in the half-life of Lawrence's broadcast/webcast explanations, what really set my neurons hurdling  into photonic frenzies is this idea that an electron, which is whirring somewhat orbitally around a proton, cannot be adequately assessed in terms of its position in relation to the proton, or in relation to, for that matter (haha) anything else. This is because, as soon as the analyst, or scientist, casts light on the subject particle(wave) in question, in order to view the electron and make some kind of determinating statement about it, the light (the energetic effect of the light) itself alters the quarky little rascal, rendering its position indeterminable! Imagine that! Like trying to herd cats.

And Lawrence also mentioned:

"Whole universes can pop out of nothing, by the laws of quantum mechanics."

Ha!  I was stumped.

I tried, well into the evening  and the nighttime, to wrap my warpish mind around all this, which must resemble a light beam trying to keep up with a neutrino, as the French say in Switzerland.  I was getting  a little short on the fourth dimension while trying to capture the essence of  those quarks in question and fathom their unquantifiable fidgettance. And then, as if that weren't enough produndity to drag my faltering comprehension into a blackhole, Paul Krugman's recent comparison between Austrian economics and the 18th-century theory of phlogiston in chemistry popped out of nowhere, not to mention Higgs-Boson confusion on top of that, and...

while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping. . . and the faith-based  short circuit suddenly presented itself, when my friend Dave sent out his daily ditty,  http://outdeep.com/2012/01/13/light-in-our-heart , which started with this conveniently accessible concept:

For God, who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” (2 Corinthians 4:6)

to which my friend had also added:

 "The sovereign creativity of God to bring forth what to us would have been unthinkable is staggering.  This artistic endeavor of the Divine is used to illustrate the similar work of enlightening my heart."

Wherefore, I in my lay-like confusion decided to just go with that, call it a day, and hit the hay, where my wife was so peacefully sleeping in preparation for today's nursing duties. I had found a universal incarnation that I could wrap my weary mind around. Now this morning, the sun shines brightly on snow out in the back .40. Thank God for a beautiful winter day here in the inexplicable universe. Ignorance is, as they say, bliss. Grits is good too, for breakfast, with cheese.

 Glass half-Full

Michael's trouble and Naomi's hope

This is an eye-opener, although parts of it may disturb you. But Americans can not operate a democratic republic with heads in the sand.
Whether you''re with them or against them, the Occupyers are now fanning out a spectrum of ideological strategies, and our nation will be changed as a result. The societal inequalities they protest will not be easily disposed of. We must consider and analyze their complaints if our nation is to get over the polarizing hurdles that now obstruct our governing urgencies.

Although law enforcement agencies in cities throughout our nation have undertaken, for the most part appropriately, some restrictive measures to contain the Occupy campers, these people are not going away. They live among us, as does the Tea Party whose signs were raised before them.
To glean some understanding of where this thing is headed, I recommend a listen to this one-hour panel discussion:

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/25/occupy_everywhere_michael_moore_naomi_klein

The New School/New York City meeting of minds was sponsored by The Nation magazine,  and recorded at the above link for Democracy Now!. Michael Moore and Naomi Klein are positioned, as it were, at the two bookends of the discussion, with three other well-spoken panelists between them. The troublesome film-maker's controversial presence is appropriately seated on the left. Naomi's seasoned optimism later provides a constructive balance on the other end of the table.

Compare Michael's grudge to Naomi's hope.
On one end of unfolding Occupy Wherever drama, Michael Moore says, with an odd excitement in his voice, he'd like to overhear the fearful trepidations now being uttered nightly in the bedrooms of the 1%.
On the other end, Naomi Klein admonishes the Occupyers to move beyond the "outrage phase" to a new phase of hope.
Which way will the Occupy movement move?
The way of the American revolution, or the way of the French revolution?
The way of constructive democracy, or the way of a vindictive reign of terror?

Michael Moore is a genius of video programming, and he certainly expresses in his work a powerful advocacy for underpriveleged people, but he does have some problems, mostly that he presents everything in good vs evil terms. But ourmaterial world, including capitalism, is constituted in  shades of gray everywhere you look, whether you're facing left or facing right. Here are just a few of the key phrases that indicate his judgemental attitude:

~ the "beginning of the end of an evil system"
~ deficit/debt ceiling as a "distraction", as if fiscal responsibility were not a real issue
~ "they (the 1%) created this...all the pain and suffering," as if pain and suffering had not existed before corporatocracy
 .
Michael Moore prefaces his caustic assessments somewhat with a hopeful observation that the Occupy movement has "aleviated despair in this country" and "killed apathy." This is true. But here is what's worrisome about Michael Moore:

Toward the end of the program, he mentions the inspiration that he imbibes when contemplating that a mere two people, Marx and Engels,  occupied unbroken ideological ground over a century ago. Unfortunately for the world at large, what Marx and Engels could not foresee was the onslaught of oppressive state power, through the cruel manipulations of  Stalin, Mao and others, that would later be perpetrated in the name of their theoretical wealth and power redistributions. Someone should remind Michael Moore and his comrades just how the Stalin and Mao movements turned out after their early revolutionary phases. Contemporary protesters would do well to remember the words of one of their patron saints, John Lennon, who sang, "...but if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow." While that Beatlish warning may be politically incorrect in China, it surely applies here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

In contrast to Michael Moore's hyper-critical inputs, Naomi Klein got her turn, later, at the other end of the 5-member panel. Her well-prepared spiel included a listing of positive changes, "a track record of developing alternatives" that have manifested in practical applications since the Seattle WTO protests in 1999:

~ solutions to the ecological crisis becoming solutions to the economic crisis
~ green co-ops, as in Cleveland
~ farmers' markets
~ community-supported agriculture
~ community renewable energy
~ localizing economies
~ devolving power to community levels, decentralization

These last two or three are the ironically dubious components of an evolving Occupy agenda, insofar as this: the federal/statist interventions required for implementing egalitarian measures are inherently contrary to decentralizing reforms, unless the federal actions are  at some point withdrawn or minimized. How likely is that?

The happiest item on Naomi Klein's constructive list was her mention of the 14 bicycle-powered generators being used to fulfill electrical needs at Occupy Wall Street. This happened after the police had removed their gas-powered generators, which was a blessing in disguise since the campers needed some incentives to overcome their own fossil-fuel dependencies. I'll commend them for investing some innovative sweat equity to capitalize  their dream of green energy.
 
At moderator Richard Kim's direction, Naomi Klein addressed directly the issue of federal/state involvement. (I know for a fact, this is the biggest objection that arises from our conservative factions, especially since government programs are funded by taxes.) Naomi tempers the session's wonky explorations with an appropriate admonition: "State power can be just as alienating, as corrupt as corporate power."

And there's the rub, America. As a wise creature of the forest once said, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Glass half-Full

Rascals, Scoundrels, and Settlers

Rascals rock the boat. Scoundrels would sink it, but Settlers stabilize it.

The boat, in this case, is the USS America.

  The Rascals have sensed that something is rotten in Denver, or in Dallas or Detroit, or in anyTown USA. This is certainly true. But hey….they don't know what to do about it. And since their unemployed, or underemployed, or uneducated or unsettled condition renders the rascals relatively impotent to reshape the world according their tender sense of injustice, they take to the streets in protest. I can relate to it. I was out in the streets when we were in VietNam. Getting out there to make a stand seems like a cathartic something to do;  it is exciting, with all the comraderie and the shared suffering-- until the nearby residents, shopkeepers, and civic leaders start upping the ante on the physical consequences of Occupation. Then the cops hype their heretofore patient vigilance into riot-gear insensibility.

Behind the scenes, chronic malcontents would manipulate the wandering rascals, maneuvering their newfound funk toward some kind of revolution, as yet unfocused. Maybe its Lennon's revolution, or Lenin's, or Marx's, or Stephen Lerner's, Naomi’s, or David’s, who knows.

There is a lot to be upset about, for sure. The rascals are enraged about the greedy corporations, mad at the mediocre politicians, intimidated by the police, yeah yeah. They screw you, yeah yeah yeah. A witch's brew of issues boil up here: the destabilizing consequences of  competing globalized economies, inequality, outsourcing, bailouts for the 1%, outlandish executive bonuses, unpayable student loans, epidemic foreclosures, environmental degradation, polluted groundwaters, obsessive plastic lifestyles, plastic garbage in the Pacific, filthy pipelines, fracking, fricking...

 It is true that we Americans need to be roused, before it is too late, out of our hydrocarbon/carbohydrate stupor, part of which is our self-immolating oil addiction. Our petrochemical habit is a dependency that has economically castrated this formerly-great nation's independence, and greased us down into a red-light slow-idle energy complacency, comfortably numbed by an obsessive compulsion for visual and audial stimulation.

 Up on Capitol Hill-- where the WallStreet lobbying 1% conduct their dissonant orchestrations of unfunded mediocrity, the politicians pontificate about a lot of smokescreen issues. For instance, the so-called Solyndra-gate.

This is political grandstanding is dangerous. Their disengenuous inquisitions distract us from some imminent good news: New American job-creating possibilities  are actually being worked on, even as we speak, if the government does not obstruct.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, somewhere in America a few enterprising business people have, believe it or not, quietly settled into the tasks of doing what needs to be done.

… like, heating up technologies to elevate us out self-destructive oil addiction.

Yesterday, while up on a roof clearing gutters, I heard on the radio about two trailblazing west coast solar-tech  producers. Although Solar World and Solaria are not the the only two companies breaking new industrial ground, they are quietly settling us into a homesteading path that leads to real solar-tech cost-reduction productivity. Very soon (if not already), these manufacturers will, with a little help from their many power-hungry friends (US consumers), mass-produce photovoltaic roof- panels on an unprecedented scale. Affordability for John and Jane Doe will be the outcome.

 I tuned into the ear-opening update about Solar World and Solaria yesterday while listening to NPR's ScienceFriday. As it happened, Ira Flatow's enquiry to the companies' respective spokesmen, Gordon Binser and Dan Shugar, focused largely on a side issue; the issue was what Gordon Binser calls "illegally subsidized" Chinese dumping of artificially cheapened solar panels. But the entirety of thieir podcast discussion reveals far more than a cordial dispute between two industry leaders about trade strategies.  A half-hour listen draws us into a persuasive force field of updated solar capabilities. For instance, according to Dan Shugar and Gordon Binser:

 ~100,000 people are employed in US solar industry today. That's more folks than are working in coal mines, and more than in steel mills.

~The industry grew by 69% last year.

~5000 companies are involved in solar technology here today.

~Labor expense is only 10% of the cost of solar panels. So the issue of Chinese (or developing nations) competition is not as difficult as we might at first think.

~The relative fragility of glass panels reinforces the logic of domestic production and distribution.

~Actual production levels of rooftop electricity are approaching (or already at) a scale that is competitive with other power-generating sources such as nuclear and coal.

~Last year, the solar industry in USA installed, operated and delivered 17 Gigawatts of electricity, the equivalent of 17 nuclear power plants in the middle of a day.

~In the summertime, there is a direct, favorable correlation between solar energy supply and the peak power demand occasioned by widespread air-conditioning.

~When smartly integrated, individual home installations (or institutional ones) can be connected to our existing power infrastructure (with modifications)  to inject electricity into the cumulative power grid. Thus, consumers can become net PRODUCERS of electrical power at certain times of the day, thus lowering their electric bills.

~As demand for solar installations has grown, the cost-reduction curve has followed the same pattern of cell phones, computers, and dvd players. Bet you didn't know that, huh?

~Solar World has over 1000 employees in Oregon, and has been making photovoltaic panels for over 35 years.

~In Germany, there are some peak-demand times when 40% of contributed electrical input is being generated by solar panels.

 I was quite impressed with all these statistics, both yesterday as I heard Dan and Gordon list them for Ira on the radio, and this morning when I replayed the ScienceFriday podcast.

 So hey! In the turbidity of all this stir-crazy Occupy controversy, and right in the middle of the bad banking news and European woes, here we find some very real, very timely good news about newfound American industrial innovation, and developing job opportunities on the dark-cloud horizon, maybe even on your community’s own rooftops.

 What Dan and Gordon communicated to Ira really comes down to this: the time for cost-effective solar design and application is no longer future. It is now. This is one sector of manufacturing that the Chinese will not be able to dominate, because our automated capabilities can effectively competetive with developing-world low-wage production expense (which is only 10% of a solar panels cost).

 And everybody needs a little sustainable wattage.

 So, all you angst-ridden discontented shivering souls out there--

Before you Occupy the frigid streets and possibly get thereby injured, infected or arrested, think about a productive alternative:

Occupy, for an hour or two while you fill out the application, the human resources foyer of your local appropriate technology producer. If you don't find one locally, maybe you'd become the entrepreneur-installer to heat up this movement in your community. Perhaps you'd  be the first one in your community to capitalize on this work--work that really needs to be done if America is going to continue to Occupy its Can-do legacy. The time to Occupy energy independence is now.

Think about it. Like Ira mused yesterday: we Americans invented the light bulb; we invented the energy-generating solar roof panel.

What’s the next thing (or process, or service) we need to invent to light our way out of this oil-pit we’ve dug ourselves into?

Glass half-Full

The nine-pound hammer: a portrait

From a foundry in Manchester  a nine-pound hammer came; John Bull flung it onto a ship at the Liverpool docks.
Jimmy-boy  picked up the tool at a warehouse in Baltimore, and he wielded it all the way up to West Virginia. 
John Henry grabbed the thing and beat out nine tons of number nine coal, nine thousand times.
Nine million times, Johnny drove a spike in the ground, knockin out a railroad with his nine-pounder to Chicago all the from Baltimore.
Then along came nine thousand navvies swingin their way from St. Louis to Seattle; they went a-beatin out a double ribbon of blue steel  to carry America from across its heartland to Pacific shore, all the way from Baltimore.
Jackie tossed the nine-pound hammer onto a freighter that sailed out beneath the golden gate. It landed on a Shanghai dock, went from there to Singapore, and on and on to Bangalore, all the way from Baltimore.
But choppin' out between sea and sea,
rang a blue new tune from somewhere in Kentucky;
them good ole boys came pickin out a tune
from Paducah to Prague and and on to Pashtun:
a sound the world had never heard before
all the way in silvered steel, strung out through Baltimore.

Nine Pound Hammer

The power of the universe

With impressive regularity, the moon orbits the earth every 28 days or so. This arrangement produces some very real effects on what happens to us and to our planetary home.

Long ago when I was in school, I learned that the mysterious white orb up in the night sky has a gravity of its own. Like every object that exists anywhere, it has a power to compel other objects in its direction. This gravity attribute of matter, which is proportional to  its mass, is an important part of the mechanics of the universe.  An intricate clockwork of physical events is constructed around it. Thanks to Johannes Kepler and  Isaac Newton, among many other wise men who lived long ago, for figuring this out.

I suppose heavenly objects are  a little like people in this respect--posessing a kind of magnetism that produces a sphere of influence. But among humans the attractive forces are relatable more to personality, leadership, status, charm, and such immeasurable factors, rather than a person's size, or what the physicists call 'mass'.

But I was thinking about the moon because of what happened two days ago when Pat and I were at the beach; it was a scary event that is indirectly related to the moon's orbit around us. Now as I write this the moon's glory is fading, as its master the sun renders it invisible while I watch the sun come up over the island of Maui, Hawaii. Being awake so early,  I must still be on east coast time, even though its been a week ago since I was there.

But about the moon...Mostly we tend to think of gravitational forces between earth and moon in terms of the earth's greater gravity (due to its larger mass.) We see in the night sky the moon doing its thing, sort of hanging there night after night, seeming to travel an arc across the nocturnal sky as dusk pulls its curtain of darkness across the heavens, until dawn comes blasting all that blackness away, with sunny brightness and life-giving warmth.
We are forever accustomed to the fact that our earth powerfully determines the moon's behavior. But their cosmological connectedness works both ways. That little white sphere, so hopelessly tethered by gravity to its giant companion,  exerts an unyielding, and quite predictable, effect over our worldy substance.

This dynamic is most easily observed in our oceans. Collectively, they are an immense resource that no one can measure. But the little old moon, even as small as it seems to us, pushes our oceans around like plasmic silly putty all the time, every day and night. That precocious dimpled satellite grabs, for instance, our largest planetary mass, the Pacific ocean, at one end, so to speak. As earth revolves, the moon fluffs its massive surface waters like a great oceanic blanket, wrinkling it all the way from Canada to Australia, crumpling it from Japan to Chile, and everywhere in between and beyond.

Tremendous physical forces of nature are set in motion through thousands of miles of water, producing the tides,  the ocean swells, waves on the beach.

Right in the middle of all that lunar-induced force field of liquid dynamism is a string of islands we call Hawaii, which is where I now write this. Down there on the beach, which I am beginning to see again in the widening light of dawn, a wave crashes in the sand. It crashes because all that lunar-inflicted energy, which has passed in wave form across thousands of sea-miles, is suddenly resisted, and stopped, by a physical object--the beach. The mixture of energy in the wave--it may have  been (guessing) 70% potential energy and 30% kinetic--is uproariously transformed into 100% (?) kinetic energy as it strikes the shore and dissipates. 

A couple of days ago, Pat and I, fools that we are, happened to be standing in that Maui surf,  when the awesome power of the universe, having been channeled by our  feisty little tide-jerking earth-moon through the oceanic medium, came crashing against us with a force we had never heretofore experienced. The big wave came as the first among a set of  whoppers; it whipped Pat and me around like rag dolls for a few fearful seconds. Having been caught clueless in a tenacious explosion of kinetic water energy, we were lucky to recover and walk away from its ferocity, back to our little beach blanket island of sun-screen and security.

Well, not lucky--actually,  more like "saved." Saved by God, who is greater, and more benevolent, than all the jerky universe that stirs us around like fruity  chunks  in a beach-blender.
Do you think me naive to assume such a thing as God's protection in the midst of a terrible wave? It's okay. You may say that I'm a naive believer, but I'm not the only one. Another believer, one from ages long ago, wrote this about that same power of the universe, (from Psalm 93):

"The seas have lifted up, O Lord,
 the seas have lifted up their voice;
 the seas have lifted up their pounding waves,
 mightier than the thunder of the great waters,
 mightier than the breakers of the sea--
 the Lord on high is mighty."

Glass half-Full

Defunding H2 from H20

I learn a lot about what's on the cutting edge of scientific research by listening to Ira Flatow on ScienceFriday, NPR. The segment I heard today (8 April 2011) was downright inspiring as the program presented some good possibilities for  generating energy from sunlight by  experimental technology that could separate of hydrogen and oxygen from water.They call it artificial leaf; its something like synthesized photosynthesis. This ScienceFriday edition is worth a listen.

http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201104081

Dr. Daniel Nocera of MIT talks with Ira about this very promising technology of using silicon to  function in energy-gathering ways simulating what photosynthesis does in natural leaves, only better. Nocera's rap goes like this:

What does a leaf do? It turns photons into electrical current, stores the solar energy while splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. In this new tech, silicon replaces the leaf. Stored hydrogen produced thereby runs a fuel cell. This silicon system catches the sun as much as a hundred times more efficiently than a leaf.
The real breakthrough is that these researchers are using earth-abundant materials: silicon, cobalt, phosphate and cheap metal.  Hence, some practical applications for energy generation are realized; they're building prototypes at MIT, with the experimental apparatus going for days  with no drop in productivity. This water-breaking work has propelled progress well beyond the science; now its in the engineering phase.

Ira asks: whats next for commercial viability? Dr. Nocera says they're working toward the apparatus being the workable size of two doors and thus operating effectively. Passing water over silicon and producing energy, but without wires--that's the breakthrough-- making the necessary gases  over surface of silicon. Next  challenge is engineering a gas collection system, and now they're using regular water instead of something rarer, so that's the real  promise of significant improvement.

Dr. Nocera also mentions in the closing comments that people in developing world are less dependent on old technologies  than we are; that is something to be aware of. Folks in the developing world are more open to new techs, being less dependent on the old (fossil-fuel) ones.

This is cutting edge; you won't hear about it on fox or hln. That's why I appreciate ScienceFriday, and that's why I appreciate NPR.
Although I do not subscribe to the exclusively materialistic hypotheses through which Ira interprets our cosmological origins, I do appreciate the excellent coverage that he and his staff regularly provide on scientic frontiers.

And my appreciation extends beyond the ScienceFriday crew, to NPR generally, which is an informative aural venue through which we Americans can garner fuller understanding of our life on this finite planet as it exists today. National Public Radio is a place in broadcast space where we can hear, and participate in, real disscussions about relevant, timely issues. A little "liberal" perhaps, but its more productive, I think, than listening to some self-made mouthpiece who pontificates through a microphone and insults callers who disagree.

As a supporter of public radio, I hope to see ScienceFriday and all the other NPR programs continue. If the Repubs, of which I am one, succeed in cutting the funds for public broadcasting, I do not see that as an insurmountable obstacle for its continuance. I plan to continue my financial support. I truly believe that the excellence in journalism and educative programming supplied therein will find adequate means to prosper in the competitive world of commercial media--and without compromising their high journalistic and first-amendment standards.

If our Congress is inclined to consider cutting NPR out of the federal funding trough, I suggest that they defund Planned Parenthood instead, and then appropriate that money that would have otherwise aborted feti to promote growth--growth in public comprehension of the issues that define our existence in 21st-century America.

There's no sense in aborting feti when we will have dire need, in the future, for young working citizens to support our expanding Medicare demands and our waning energies.

Glass Chimera

Bad habits

Poor ole uncle sam; all strung out on crack and heroin. Or, excuse me, I'm thinking of somebody else, some loser squatting in the abandoned house down the street.
Uncle sam is junked up with those other habits, the acceptable ones--credit crank and  mainline oil.

The politicians  have their two different camps for rehab strategies:

Liberals want to keep the methadonish greenback mainline flowing freely, with that rubbery Fed strapped around uncle sam's arm so everybody rich and poor high and low has a little jingle to keep their jangle pump primed up, and they want to keep the oil price high with energy taxes to discourage consumption and theoretially get us weaned off the middle east fossilized mainline, which is so politically unstable these days due to widespread outbreak of democratic frenzy, rendering the Gulfs unpredictable, liable to be cut off at any time and you know we'd really be up shiite creek then. But it'll be a sunni day in hell before we ever achieve energy independence. Nice thought though.

Conservatives want to cut the hell out of credit by going cold turkey with fiscal responsibility, which they mistakenly think the "American people," couch potatoes all, want. They talk big about slashing budgets, but know it can never really happen thanks to the credit-cranked old new deal and all the neo-deals since then. On the other side of the pump, they wanna keep energy prices low so everybody can drive to work at the jobs they don't have any more or are working parttime, gotta keep them gas tanks filled up, and if the Ahabs the Arabs get to be upstarts with their ole OPEC tricks we'll send the boys over there to whip em in line and teach em a thing or two about democracy.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, Dick and Jane are starting to figure out they better make the best with what they got. What will you do today to make the world a better place for you and yours?

Glass Chimera

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Warmth

Recently it was brought to my attention that humans have resorted to busting up the substrata of earth's rocky crust to find gas and oil.
In a process called hydraulic fracturing, petrochemical companies mix up a brew of chemicals and pump it deep into the ground.The resultant pressure cracks the mantle of rock that supports our landscape. Oil and gas are released in the process, which the companies then recover and sell to us frigid consumers.
It is a tragedy and a damned shame that we humans have gone this far in destroying our earth's surface just to get fuel, because the chemicals used for hydraulic fracturing are seriously pollutive. They poison groundwater.
I had heard about this a while back. But a few days ago, I got an email about a documentary video that describes this process and its destructive effects. I watched the video trailer about this "fracking," and it troubled me greatly.
But that little piece of communication came to me in the morning hours of a day that dawned here in the Blue Ridge with a temperature of 7 degrees fahrenheit and a blowing blizzard.
Now I have to tell you that we have recently purchased a fancy Vermont Castings gas stove, and we have been very pleased with the serious heat that it provides in the form of instant flames (that look like a wood fire) at the turn of a thermostat.
The stove was acquired after Pat had done extensive research to inform our decision about which gas appliance would be the best to meet our needs. We paid some serious bucks to acquire  the thing  and have it installed this fall, after thirty years of busting and splitting firewood, and suffering through super-dry electric baseboard heat to survive these sometimes fierce Appalachian winters.
So when we got this intense heat at the push of a button, we were quite impressed with our progress. We have worked hard for it.
The stove burns propane, and I regretted that I had to spend a bunch of money on it instead of investing in a solar system on the roof. Such a venture would have familiarized me with a more sustainable technology. But at age 59, I just feel worn-out with all those years of dealing with the heat thing every winter--hauling the wood, building the fires, so labor-intensive, and having my respiratory tract chronically irritated with the dry heat. At my stage of life, it seemed necessary to have a heat source that is predictable and proven.
So when I saw, a few days ago, this video about hydraulic fracturing, I wondered it this destructive practice had been a part in the chain of services that had delivered my propane. I do not know.  But I was thinking about this, and feeling somewhat hopeless about the prospect of sustainability and hydrocarbon abuse and pollution.
But I am warm, and it was seven degrees outside, with a blizzard howling at my windows, and I give up. Its a damned shame that it has come to this.
And most of America is, I fear, in the same predicament.

Maybe next spring we can discuss what should be done about fracking, just like next year we can debate what should be done about our national debt.
Good luck with that.

Have you eaten your unemployment check yet?

BEFORE the United States of America became a great producer of modern goods and services, our ancestors were farmers. This growing nation of innovators and organizers was fed by a westwardly-migrating population of planters and tillers.

A billowing spirit of agrarian productivity grabbed our nascent nation by the scruff of the neck; it thrust our great-great-great grandfathers and grandmothers out upon  fertile prairies and verdant valleys with rakes and a hoes and a teams of grunting oxen and mules. Even from the start, we were a mobile nation, yearning to be free, and aiming to busy ourselves with gainful agriculture.

Along the road, we organized, we mechanized, transportized our ways and means of producing food on a massive scale, over two centuries of intensely fruitful labor. We produced, with much toil and sweat,  the vast system of food production and distribution that we have today.

We clueless Americans--each one of us--need to take a studious walk up and down the aisles of our nearby grocery stores. We need to consider the vast array of foodstuffs available at our fingertips. We must understand that all of this didn't just happen for us while we were adolescents sipping fizzy sodapop, looking for some kind of excitement while mommy and daddy were at work so we'd have dinner on the table.
Two centuries of developing industry and agricultural innovation made our supermarkets what they are today. This was no small feat. It turns upon a vast system of food distribution that is, guess what, slowly becoming, from a planetary standpoint, too expensive, and ultimately unsustainable.

In the decades ahead, we must get back, at least partially,  to local food production; it's the only way out of our present breakdown. Agriculture requires land, water, and work. What are more and more folks needing these days that they don't have? Work.  What else do those unemployed cadres need every day? Food.

Put the two concepts together, y'all. Now is the time for all good men and women to get off their twinkie obesities and find something to do besides the same-old-same-old whatever's available down at the state unemployment office. Read 'em and weep, America.  Times are hard, and will not get better until we fundamentally change they way we do things. What can YOU do today to sustain life for yourself and those whom you love? Take another disappointing trip down to the employment office?

If we'll look around, we'll see that between the parking lots and driveways and big boxes we still have some earth beneath all that pavement. Maybe it's time we start using those spaces for somthing besides collecting rubbish and growing weeds. Even grass--what good is it compared to alfalfa?

Now we stand upon the precipice of an obsolete, collapsing monetary-industrial system.  We will never again produce, on a massive scale, the wheels and widgets and whatnots that drove our pride and our paychecks empowering us to glide through those cornucopious A&P aisles.

Many of us have already figured this out, and are doing something about it. Have you been to a local farmer's market lately? There may be someone there with whom you can barter or trade for food so you won't have to be spending so much of your hard-earned $$ just to keep food on the table. Not only that, but what about your carbon footprint? Oh, but that's another compost pile of worms...

Anyway, here's what actally what got me going on this ran this snowy Saturday morning.  When the US House of Representatives takes up the food safety bill that the Senate (SB 510) has passed, don't let our lawmakers strangle local farmers with burdensome regulations that are appropriate only for mega-producers. We don't need the feds interfering with grassroots commerce. Let the citizens of our townships and cities decide for themselves what locally-grown produce and food they are willing to take a chance on eating.

Don't let the Reps weed out the Tester amendment. If you don't know what that is, google it. It's time you found out what's going on with the food.

No quick fixes for us

If our crisis is really, as most folks are saying, about jobs, then we are destined, I hates to tell ya Buckwheat, for yet another rude awakening. Over the next two years we'll come face to face with the rude discovery that Repubs are just as clueless about quick-fixes for employment as the Dems have turned out to be.

The tea party crowd is strong on individual liberty and empowering the people to control their government instead of the other way around. That's good. But their policies of dispersed government and free enterprise will take years to produce benefits under the present conditions of catastrophic economic rearrangement. Capitalism, having been usurped by derivative-wielding uber-speculators, has crashed. It will have to be reinvented at the grassroots level by We the People to reflect the enterprising improvisations of a desperate populace who would otherwise find themselves tyrranized by a very strong current toward 21st-century statism.

Democrats are now dazed with deer in the headlights shock over the sudden dissolution of their overzealous progressive mandate; they  are being herded, temporarily, into a dunce corner until we collectively discover that the Repubs don't have any effective quick-fixes for putting folks back to work either.

A year or two from now when the Repubs are shown to be equally clueless at blood-from-a-turnip employment schemes, maybe we'll begin to face our real economic problem.

Which is?...
 
We're not manufacturing much stuff any more, because folks in the developing world can make everything so much cheaper. Like it or not, that's what has happened, and will be happening for the next century or so, if our planet sustains us for that long.

Consequently, we are going to have find something else to do in America to keep ourselves busy, housed and fed.

And what might that busyness be?

We could start by cultivating food again, locally. That's  what we started out doing several hundred years ago. And we were pretty dam good at it too. Production of healthy food needs to be our once-and-future emerging industry; at least that way most folks will have something to eat while they renegotiate their mortgages. Those expansive suburban backyards will have to take on a decidedly agricultural character, instead of the keep up with the Joneses lawn-yawn vanity that has castrated their productive use for the last sixty years.

It's hard work, though. Ask the Mexicans who've been doing that gathersome labor for us for the last few decades. Maybe we'll sweat off a few obese pounds, though, as we learn once again about the true meaning of the phrase "back to work."

When we get too pooped with farming in the back .40, we can take a break, head for the garage, and  tinker  for a while with solar collectors, windmills and battery-powered soapbox derby cruisers. That's the true meaning of power to the people in this era of peak oil perkitude.
You think I'm kiddin'?