Into the Void

The Clean Fuels and Energy Independence Act

X-Originating-IP: [209.158.227.171]
From: RepGerber@pahouse.net
Reply-To: info@pahouse.net
Subject: Energy crisis demands action now
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 10:00:13 -0400

Energy crisis demands action now As the war in Iraq continues, energy and fuel costs rise and America’s energy consumption continues to cause climate change, the need for a cleaner and more energy-independent Pennsylvania is paramount. The Clean Fuels and Energy Independence Act, as part of the House Democratic Caucus’s Energy Independence Strategy, would put Pennsylvania in the forefront of the alternative and renewable fuel economy. This legislation would mandate the blending of ethanol, soy and other clean energy sources in fuels. It would establish production and distribution standards to advance the shift to cleaner and cheaper domestic fuel sources. And it would help to stimulate the Pennsylvania economy with in-state production of renewable fuels. Our proposal is likely to come to a vote on the House floor next week and, if enacted into law, would put Pennsylvania on track to produce enough homegrown fuel to replace all the fuel we now import from the Persian Gulf. Clean the environment. End our dependence on foreign oil. Reduce fuel costs. Stimulate Pennsylvania’s economy. Show your support for this important legislation. Contact your representative and tell them to vote YES on House Bill 1202!

Spread the word!

I am utterly appalled by the ignorance of the present energy issues displayed in HOUSE BILL No.1202, otherwise known as the Clean Fuels and Energy Independence Act.

Perhaps the Pennsylvania representatives aren’t aware of the gas crisis in the early or mid-70s where the State of New Jersey had to go to even-odd day gas rationing.

Maybe the Pennsylvania representatives have forgotten the gas crisis in 1978 or 1979 during which lines at the gas station where up to a half mile long. Gas stations sold out their daily allotment by 10AM. People were shooting each other in gas lines in anger and frustration. Increased energy costs caused several years of stagflation, where prices and interest rates went up but salaries didn’t. The average Pennsylvanian’s life savings lost a large percentage of buying power, forcing retirees to go to back to work.

The problems inherent in relying not just on foreign oil but on fossil fuels in general are not new. Any rational, responsible individual opted a long time ago to forego luxuries such as comfort, style or the illusion of safety in favor of reduced emissions and better gas mileage.

Let’s be clear, also, that the United States buys most of its oil from friends and allies. Iraq was once a friend and ally, and continued oil revenue is essential to building a government to replace the one the United States destroyed. It would be wiser to stop buying oil from that notorious Wahabbi stronghold Saudi Arabia.

As it is written, HOUSE BILL No.1202 will have no effect on Pennsylvanians’ driving habits. The bill provides no incentive for individuals to use less gas or to pollute less. There is no mention of the paranoid trend towards larger vehicles that occurred after 9-11, as if the family car is a bomb shelter rather than simply a means of getting from point A to point B. There is also no mention of the windfall profits American oil refineries have made by basing manufacturing overhead allocations that did NOT increase on the increased cost of the raw material. The emphasis in HOUSE BILL No.1202 on biodiesel technology trivializes or ignores viable alternatives to the internal combustion engine, much less the development of proposed new alternative energy technologies. There is absolutely zero mention of the effect continued reliance on fossil fuels will have on carbon dioxide levels in the air we breathe. There is nothing the bill about addressing the soil depletion that will occur if current farming practices are continued while implementing biodiesel technology.

HOUSE BILL No.1202 is an short-sighted, agrarian solution to an industrial problem. In fact, the solutions outlined in HOUSE BILL No.1202 are exactly the solutions that high school ecology clubs were promoting in the ’70s. These solutions are so archaic that to implement the bill as written would be to set energy policy back 30 years. The result of HOUSE BILL No.1202 will be to push Pennsylvania back into the the Dust Bowl era. A post-modern technological solution that addresses multiple social, financial and geopolitical facets of the energy problem makes far more sense to any reasonably intelligent Pennsylvanian.

Iraq Pennsylvania Persian Gulf climate change energy crisis

I worked late Thursday night because I’ve been having trouble getting there on time. Typically I leave at around 8, and it’s a 45 minute drive home.

I’ve been in that place where… well, it’s as if I need to stop and let my mind catch its breath, if that makes sense. Instead, I just keep putting one foot in front of the other and trudging onward in this death march we call life.

Of course, my mind is taking this opportunity to slap me around. Self-defeating thoughts like:
I’m a fraud, I’m only pretending to be an engineer.
Everything I’ve ever done was stupid
or hurtful
or self-destructive.
My husband only stays with me because he made a promise to my mother to take care of me when she was on her deathbed. (Nice dramatic touch.)
Creationists don’t want their children to be more successful than they are, because that would support the theory of evolution.
Pro-lifers love rapists almost as much as they hate women.
Millenialists are working on bringing about a utopian, agrarian 1000-year peace through war in the Middle East, and are too unsophisticated to understand that a 1000-year global interregnum doesn’t equal peace, it equals The Dark Ages.
Evangelicals want to kill non-believers just as desperately as the Wahabbist Islamics want to.

I mean, rationally I know it’s all BS, but that’s how I FEEL. As long as I don’t let it suck me in intellectually too I’ll be fine.

But let me clarify, That’s what my neurotransmitters are trying to do to me. *I’m* ok. It’s the bipolar talking, it’s pessimism.

Just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Well, that’s the point of going to support groups, right? To learn how to move forward even when we don’t care about any of it. We don’t have to get sucked in. It’s about having a rational, objective observer. Yes, so I have a shitload of training in how to be logical and objective.

:roll:

I wish everybody took four years of science and five years of math in high school. It’s a good start. It teaches you how to think and how to form conclusions. If you let it, it also teaches you how to be objective.

Eh, well, I can still feel it and the thoughts are there when I’m not thinking about anything else.

On Thursday I told the boss I’d be taking a mental health day Friday. Cranked out the first version of Friday’s work and tested it on the hardware. Updated a test document. RARed the whole mess, dropped it into my shared docs for review. Sent the boss an email with a 9:30PM timestamp so he knows when I left. Heaved a sigh of relief and headed home.

I was in an accident on the way home. I was on the turnpike about a mile from my exit. There’s construction near the exit and some fellow came flying down and rear-ended me.

I’m ok, got the wind knocked out of me by the impact and breathed in some Hybrid nastiness. Contusions on my chest and abdomen from the seat belt, nausea, vertigo, and a neck sprain, but nothing life-threatening.

I suspect that my car is a total loss. It’s a classic Prius. The rear was crushed in so deep it cut through the tire and jammed the wheels. The auxiliary battery was crushed and exuding a visible a cloud of acid. Fortunately most of that got sucked into his car, not mine. The Prius avenges its own death. I don’t know how the hybrid battery fared. It may have taken out a cell or so on the left side.

Standing in a construction zone on the turnpike at 10:15PM with all the sirens and flashing lights and cars flying by just a few feet away was the most frightening thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. I had to hang onto the concrete barrier to keep myself from running away.

I was looking for an excuse to buy a new car. Maybe a Toyota Matrix. I playing around online this morning comparing prices.

Mishaps are like knives. They can cut you or they can serve you depending upon whether you grab them by the blade or by the handle.

Early manifestations and first-contact incidence of schizophrenia in different cultures. A preliminary report on the initial evaluation phase of the WHO Collaborative Study on determinants of outcome of severe mental disorders.

Psychol Med. 1986 Nov;16(4):909-28.
Sartorius N, Jablensky A, Korten A, Ernberg G, Anker M, Cooper JE, Day R.

The results provide strong support for the notion that schizophrenic illnesses occur with comparable frequency in different populations and support earlier findings that the prognosis is better in less industrialized societies.

Technorati: schizophrenia WHO+Collaborative+Study

?????? (dreaded haggis) / Gotovim.RU2

For some reason I was looking up “dreaded haggis” on Google the other day. Oh, right, to scare the Russians. Much to my surprise, I found a recipe for it on a Russian site. Why should the Sassanachs be the only ones to have to suffer?

I have been meditating – oops, first wrote “medicating” – on the word post-modern recently.

Ken Wilber says (and I paraphrase), that in the context of Transpersonal Psychology, post-modern means that your personal evolution has carried the human race past the sterile pragmatism and/or atheism of the Computer Age into the next stage. My understanding is that in the next stage, the romantic and the pragmatic will be integrated into a way of looking at the world that retains the best elements of both.

Not “your world” but “the world.”

Unlike the theistic, mystical/magical thinking of the Age that preceeded both of these, the Post-modern Age will be made up of inclusive, open minds. The theistic stage seems to prevent further personal evolution in those who embrace it, so don’t expect the anima mundi as a whole to be transformed any time soon.

On the TV show “Criminal Minds,” one of the characters stated that a post-modernist is likely to use Technology as Art. I took this to mean not that a postmodern human can’t figure out how to use a toaster or telephone, but rather that the infrastructure for using such devices is either in ruins or financially inaccessible to the average postmodernist.

My friend edi tells me that

Postmodernism = No Future

Any thoughts? I have none of my own.

Thanks to edi for triggering this neural cascade.

Mr. Lucky: What’s the name of the two lines between your nose and upper lip?

The Internet is great. You go online trying to find out the name of the two lines under your nose and a half hour later you’re looking at a picture that will likely require years of therapy to help you come to terms with.

LiveScience.com: Cyclops kitten.

The two lines under your nose are part of the philtrum. Inexplicably, the name comes from the Greek word “phil,” or love.

In embryonic development, if all goes well two folds of flesh grow around and meet in the front of the embyro’s head, forming the face. The philtrum is the last little bit of the “seam” where the halves of the face fused together.

According to The March of Dimes, cleft lip and cleft palate are relatively common – about 1 in 1000 babies are affected. Nowadays a cleft lip or cleft palate is usually surgically corrected with excellent results.

Holoprosencephaly is another birth defect – the philtrum is often missing altogether, and that’s just the beginning of the problem. Though they look like an extreme case of cleft palate, the facial anomalies in holoprosencephaly are the result of an underlying brain malformation. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), holoprosencephaly results when the budding brain fails to grow properly, to differentiate into right and left frontal lobes. Facial anomalies usually go along with it, since the face forms as part of the same process that causes the frontal lobes of the brain to form. Serious cases of holoprosencephaly cause significant defects including missing facial features, or facial features that fail to move around to their usual position on the head, and mental retardation. In the worst cases, the baby usually doesn’t make it to a year old. Mercifully, the kitten in the picture only lasted a day despite his owner’s best efforts to feed him and keep him warm. His littermates were all normal.

Interesting tidbit: pregnant women who experience morning sickness are less likely to miscarry and less likely to have babies with birth defects. It seems that the mother’s body can detect toxins in amounts that wouldn’t have any effect on a adult, but that interfere with embryonic organ development. Her body can also detect proteins released into the amniotic fluid in some birth defects such as anencephaly or spinal bifida and have a miscarriage.

There are so many things that can go wrong. The absolute worst of them are rejected by the mother’s body before she is even aware that she is pregnant. I believe the number is only 1 in 10 pregnancies “take.”

Many medications, including psych meds, are teratogens, that is, they cause defects. Lithium causes a very specific heart defect. Valproate causes neural tube defects. The damage to the embryo can occur before the mother even knows she’s pregnant. This makes a very strong case for being on the minimum amount of meds necessary to control the illness, or perhaps to take a med holiday before becoming pregnant.

I leave it to the reader to google “holoprosencephaly.”

Photo credit – Source: Flickr, Author: cloud_nine

globeandmail.com: Virgin birth awaited in England

Merry Christmas to all my Christian friends.

CHESTER, England — As Christmas approaches, a virgin mother is anxiously awaiting the arrival of her offspring. She’s Flora, the Komodo dragon.

In an evolutionary twist, Flora has managed to become pregnant all on her own without any male help. It would seem the timing is auspicious: The seven hatchlings are due this festive season.

Follow up to http://intothevoid.us/2005/07/09/talking-to-dog/

There is this thing called the religious experience. This is where you feel the presence of something larger than yourself, and know your place in the grand scheme. Sometimes you only get a glimpse of it, but it’s enough to change your opinions completely. Uh, epiphany, that’s what it’s called. Epiphanies are associated with the amygdala and certain brain chemicals which I don’t care to look up right this instant.

Organized religions cannot allow their laypeople to have religious epiphanies. Why? Because they are exploiting that divine revelations to exert power over us. What if Dog told one of us to stop following the kosher laws or to take down the graven images in the church, or whatever your particular religion requires?

I can hear the Elders now: “What’s that? Dog told you that the church must allow rape victims to obtain abortions if they want so that they aren’t troubled by the life-long trigger of a child with the face of their rapist? Hmmm, he didn’t tell us about it! Heresy! BURN THE WITCH!!!”

I seem to burn a lot of witches in this blog. Apologies to my Wiccan friends. I am not condoning witch hunts, I am raling against them.

There’s another problem. In certain mental disorders the patient finds change very distressing. In the case where the patient is incapable of seeing others’ points of view, and is in a position of power, it can get very ugly. Since the patient doesn’t acknowledge other points of view, he perceives that his own dysfunctional ideas fill the entire universe – are intrinsic to it, are the Word of Dog. This has a lot of useful side-effects. One of them is that the patient, in externalizing his own faults, can deny them and even project them onto others! If another opinion ever impinged up the patient, he would believe that it threatens his very existance, that it threatens the order of his universe, that it is Blasphemy. He will label other opinions as Evil and then try to destroy them.

I believe that this is precisely why so many people in power use organized religion to control the populace.

Anyone who foists their particular flavor of religion on another person is, by definition, trying to control them. It has absolutely nothing to do with “saving” them or helping them “attain enlightenment” whatever the Big Idea in their particular religion might be. It is all about pathology and projection and POWER.

So don’t even think about proselytizing. Why should I follow instructions that were meant only for you? If I want to talk to Dog I’ll do it myself, thankyouverymuch.

I’ve been trying to find out where my personal evolution stopped – using the transpersonal psychology model for lack of a better plan – so that I can decide what to work on next. Change is pretty destabilizing, I’m afraid, but stagnancy is another form of death. Yeah, probably hanging on too long is an issue. When I was a kid I’d get frustrated and walk away from difficulties, so I’m thinking this is a matter of finding the Tao, the middle way. The answer isn’t immediately obvious.

I think that a big part of healing is to reframe the issues (as the Republicans say).

The nature of an epiphany is to show you everyday things in a new light. To extend your vision far beyond your normal point of view. To show you things you never even knew existed, if only for a moment. Maybe this is the source of creativity? For the most part, however, you make changes by a slow retraining process.

When I took Chinese History I learned that when a new Dynasty began, the first thing they’d do is hire historians to rewrite the history books. I don’t advocate completely lying about your past or going into denial, but you can certainly try to find good things that you may have missed, and you can underemphasize the bad things. In school you may have repeated the times tables until you memorized them. Well, it works with anything. Tell yourself bad things about yourself over and over, and you will learn that. Tell yourself that you are competent and satisfied with you life, and you will learn that. This is the difference between a winner and a loser.

The winner always gets to write the history books. *Always*

Fortunately, many of our drugs keep us from being dangerously creative, from having epiphanies, and sometimes even from feeling our own feelings.

Oh, speaking of metaprogramming the meat computer, there’s an interesting site in Australia you might like to check out. It is a free online CBT course from the Australian National University. You aren’t going to cure bipolar disorder with it, but you may learn how to keep a bad day from getting worse. Thanks go to the Pendulum Resources forum for this gem.

I decided it was time to drag the intellectual level of my blog up, kicking and screaming if need be, with an anthropology piece about understanding other cultures’ customs. I may have lent that book out. I always feel like I’m blowing smoke if I don’t have quotes to back up my bizarre ideas.

But here goes. The book is called “Magic, Witchcraft and Religion” and I believe the editor’s name was Lehman. So in this piece, an anthropologist is studying a traditional tribal group. One of the interesting things about this tribe is their belief in an afterlife. They believe that the soul is attached to the body, and when a person dies the soul remains stuck to the flesh, leaving slowly as the flesh leaves the bones. In order to faciliate their loved ones’ progress to heaven, the tribespeople build a high platform and lay the body out exposed to the elements, occasionally visiting to leave gifts and turn the bones, or to collect some of the fluids for use in ritual meals. This is known as “endocannibalism” – that’s when you eat friends and family as opposed to outsiders. When the transformation is complete, their loved one is in their equivalent of heaven. The dry bones are interred and there is a celebration.

The tribespeople found it amusing that the anthropologist was so interested in their funerary customs, so at a gathering one night they asked him to tell about American customs. The anthropologist explained about heaven, and they agreed that it is similar for them. He talked about memorial services and mourning, also similar. Then he carefully explained embalming: removing the blood and replacing it with colored and scented preservative, dressing and making the dead up so that they look as if they aren’t dead at all, but merely sleeping. And the tribespeople all fell silent.

When the anthropologist told the tribespeople about burial in a sealed wooden box inside a waterproof concrete grave-liner it was all over. Some wouldn’t talk to him or even look at him. A few started crying.

Why? Because in their minds Americans prevented their loved ones from getting to heaven, and furthermore, the American continent is carpeted from sea to shining sea with potential zombies.

In the end, the only way the anthropologist could get back in the tribe’s good graces was to pretend that he was just making a sick joke and that none of what he said was true.

I think that cremation vs. burial is a similar thing. I’m not hep to the jive, but I suspect that cremation must seem an awful lot like Hellfire and Damnation to certain religious groups.

So what it boils down to is this: pick what you want, write it down and give everyone copies so that there is no mistaking it. That goes for living wills, wills, medical powers of attorney, organ donation. If you feel very strongly about, say, not having your brain-dead remains being petted and fawned over like a beloved companion animal for a decade like that poor Terri Schiavo’s were, make sure your wishes about “extreme measures” are all in writing. Make sure everyone has copies, including the family doctor. And remind them once in a while.