Choices in the kind of food we eat are a personal choice which makes stereotyping such choices rather stupid if you ask me.  People tend to stereotype vegetarian/vegan lifestyles as something liberals do and meat-eating lifestyles as something conservatives do.  However I know plenty of meat-eating liberals and plenty of vegetarian/vegan conservatives.  In fact I’m looking into trying the vegan diet at least temporarily to lose some weight along with some exercise.

So when people in the debate decide to bring eating habits into the debate, that tells me that in order to resort to such pettiness, the debater that brought it up has no valid argument left on the issue being discussed.  I say this for both liberals and conservatives, stick to the issue being debated and leave each others’ eating habits alone.  Feel free to post about what kind of diet you have here in my comment board.

Ostensibly if you’re looking into going vegan sometimes it’s best to go in baby steps, such as first baking like a vegan.  I’ve been baking like one for awhile now as it helps me save on eggs and milk.  You’d be surprised at how many delicious egg-less and milk-less dessert recipes there are out there.  And for eggs it’s very easy  to substitute an egg vegan style: simply take 1 T. ground flax seed or cornstarch and mix it with 3 T. of water and replace every egg in the dessert recipe with it.  And in most dessert recipes milk can be replaced with water without loss of consistency and applesauce makes a good replacement for the fat in most baked desserts.

Jamey Rodemeyer was a teen who felt driven to take his own life.  A very sad and very tragic time for his family and my prayers are with them.  And bullying anywhere is an issue that needs to be addressed.  Parents need to step up to the plate and teach their children that bullying is evil and inhumane.  But until that happens we need to teach our children how to deal with bullies, by teaching them some moves they can use to defend themselves against physical attacks and how to handle verbal attacks.

But is it right to blame bullying as the primary cause of this poor child’s suicide as some are doing?  Because many kids are unfortunately bullied, yet many of these kids grow up to lead normal and healthy lives and would never once think of taking their own lives.  So it seems to me that the only thing that could be blamed in this case is perhaps insufficient mental health services and counseling to help people who are bullied deal with its mental effects.

But it seems to me that the first step would be teaching our children that they are equal in dignity and worth as human beings and to stand up for themselves when someone suggests otherwise through bullying.

The pros:

They’re cheap and their efficiency increases with higher wattage consumption.

The cons:

These wattage consumptions are more than many of us are comfortable with given the increasing energy costs.

Which brings me to the CFL bulb:

The pros:

They’re much more efficient than incandescents and they’ve come to be nearly as cheap as incandescents.

The cons:

They contain unsafe levels of mercury.  This results in some hidden costs besides the obvious risk to the environment and our health should the mercury contained in these bulbs leak into the environment.  Because of this if you break a CFL bulb you can’t just sweep up the debris and toss it.  You have to call in an environmental cleaning crew (who will be wearing HAZMAT suits) and that will likely cost a good couple of thousand bucks.  The waste management services of most localities also implement special procedures for dealing with CFL bulb waste, procedures that cost money to implement.  This results in a higher local property tax bill for everyone.

Which brings me now to the LED bulb:

The pros:

They’re much more efficient, more efficient than even CFL’s (at least at lower wattage equivalencies such as the 60-watt equivalency).  They also contain no mercury, eliminating that risk to our health and the environment.  They also last much longer than either incandescents or CFL’s.

The cons:

They cost plenty to buy.  The average LED bulb costs roughly $40 – $50 for a 60-watt equivalent LED bulb.  Their efficiency also drops with higher wattage consumption.  For example: LED’s are more efficient than CFL’s at the 60-watt equivalency but at the 100-watt equivalency, from what I read, an LED bulb would have to consume at least 30 watts of power, giving the CFL the advantage in energy efficiency in this higher wattage equivalency (CFL can produce 100-watt equivalent light consuming only 26 watts of power).  Also a 100-watt equiv. LED would be roughly several times the size of a standard bulb and probably cost roughly $100 – $200!  (eek!)  But it would still make the LED much more efficient than incandescent bulbs.

But despite the cons, if you can afford these initial one-time costs for the LED bulbs, the energy cost savings could possibly offset the cost of the bulbs.  The tricky part is actually coming up with the money for these LED bulbs, especially in this tough economy (unless of course Bill Gates is feeling generous enough to replace every light fixture in the US with an LED bulb, but I’m not holding my breath  ).

Charity, as I have mentioned in previous blogs, is a free will gift of one’s own time, talent, and/or treasure to assist those who are less fortunate than we are. In Catholicism there is the principle of subsidiarity which “is opposed to all forms of collectivism.” Private non-profits (the higher-order entity) adhere to this principle by not forcing us (the lower-order entity) to give to them. In this was we still retain a sense of self when helping others.

Altruism, on the other hand, while it has in common with chaity concern for others as part of its definition, is vastly different from charity. This method of helping others violates the principle of subsidiarity. Altruism is defined as completely selfless concern for the welfare of others. Going from that definition the implication is clear. When altruism is placed in practice it means that to help others you must surrender your sense of self. And by surrendering your sense of self it opens you up to being reduced from a human being with civil liberties to a mere source of resources for the sole use of others. And once reduced to such a state one becomes no more than a slave to the class altruists seek to help and thus this leads to the very collectivism that the principle of subsidiarity so opposes. In fact it is altruism that has served as the moral basis for collectivism and slavery (which is really a form of collectivism anyway).  As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “”The inversion of means and ends, which results in giving the value of ultimate end to what is only a means for attaining it, or in viewing persons as mere means to that end, engenders unjust structures which ‘make Christian conduct in keeping with the commandments of the divine Law-giver difficult and almost impossible.’”

So to sum it up:

Charity is the self-ISH concern for the welfare of those who are less fortunate. This is another way collectivists seek to justify their view, by using the fact that we have forgotten that there are 2 different meanings for the term “selfish.” One meaning is the negative one, where being selfish means you exploit others for your own personal gain (the other meaning that you simply have a sense of yourself as a human being with dignity and natural rights). This leads me to altruism. Altruism is the opposite. It is self-LESS concern for others. But as we have seen, help for others without a sense of yourself (which is what self-LESS means) conforms more to the “exploit one group for the sake of another” meaning of “selfish.” In this way when altruism is allowed to take hold as a valid part of any economic system, slavery results. One group is effectively yoked to another in one collective. Kinda like those Borg drones in Star trek: TNG eh?

So while charity and altruism may at first glance appear to be synonyms, we see that they are in fact polar opposites. And since collectivism is slavery, and slavery condemned by the teachings of the Catholic Church, government welfare (including ObamaCare) even without provisions that include funding for things like abortions, is still a policy that conflicts with Church teaching.

We call it Palm Sunday because of the Scripture passage where Christ first enters Jerusalem. He is greeted with open arms and shouts of acclamation and with people waving palms which are then laid along with their cloaks at His feet as He passes. They are overjoyed at his arrival. However just a few days later we see that they had a funny way of showing how much they loved Him. When He first got there they were overjoyed. Then a few days later these very same people hung Him on a cross, and the sins of mankind along with Him.

This situation from the Scriptures serves as a stark reminder of the pitfalls of seeking worldly recognition, fame, and riches. These things of the world as we have seen in Christ’s situation are transitory indeed. And such things usually require that you surrender your soul, to sacrifice Truth at the altar of seeking the imperfect and transient material things of the world. These things will never bring you true power and happiness. Only by recognizing that we have the capacity to love others as Christ loves us can we break the power of the world to sell our souls into material slavery.

But despite all this, a man rose up and fought, usually with words but I’m sure he wouldn’t have begrudged the use of force if it was necessary for defense of self and others, to bring to the black peoples the same civil liberties the rest of us enjoy.  He wanted for black people the same civil liberties that allow every one else to work, live, and play as they see fit.

Dr. King was a great man who knew what things like freedom and liberty were and that they were being denied to certain human beings by the various state governments of the South, which had enacted gravely evil laws for just such a purpose called Jim Crow laws.  And the Ku Klux Klan was the great and terrible police force commissioned to enforce those terrible laws.  And they hated and moved against ANYONE who had the temerity to stand up and say “ENOUGH!  All humans deserve the civil liberties our founding fathers set forth in the Constitution of the United States!”  Anyone who expressed those sentiments usually found a burning cross on their lawn.  So this means that a great majority of Catholics woke up to this situation, as despite a minority Catholic population that tried to use Catholicism’s teachings to justify racism, most Catholics were on the side of blacks.  This is why the KKK weren’t too fond of Catholics either.

Dr. King was a great man who probably even figured that people would move against him and seek his life because of his fight for freedom for the black people.  And he did eventually give his very life for the cause of freedom.  For that he is to be remembered with honor and integrity for as long as the human race shall draw breath.

Today, however, I see at various universities Black SU’s, Asian SU’s, Greek SU’s, etc.  I also see reports of whites being beat up by blacks just because they decided to date a black person.  I hear reports of whites being called derogatory terms like “cracker.”

I ask, is this what Dr. King fought and gave his blood and his very life for?  To watch from Heaven as his people use the same exclusionary tactics that the whites once used to such great effect?  Or to watch as his people push whites around the in same way they were once pushed around?

Dr. King wanted one thing: for all humans of all races to one day stand together and declare themselves equal in their humanity.  And what I have seen this day and age I firmly believe causes Dr. King’s soul great and terrible anguish as he watches while people say “Hey look at me I’m black!” or “I’m Greek!  Aren’t we so special?”  instead of “Hey, look at us, our skin color is different.  But let us not let skin color get in the way of the fact that we all share the same genome, the human genome.  And nevermore shall such pettiness divide us, we who are made in the image and likeness of God whose faces are as infinite as ours.”  I implore people of all races, do not let Dr. King’s sacrifice be in vain.  Let his work have some meaning.

But it occurred to me that a compass could also serve to illustrate this concept very well, and it is a concept more readily understood by sailors, hikers, etc.  I can’t use a compass worth a darn mainly cuz I’m clueless as to how to set the bezel and all that jazz.  But my time in Boy Scouts does me well here to bring this illustration to fruition.

A compass is a tool used to give people a sense of direction by maintaining a vector lock on true North.  This is a very great tool provided one knows how to use it properly and steers clear of areas that cause the compass to lose that lock, Which is a strange but consistent occurrence in the Bermuda Triangle, one of nature’s greatest unsolved mysteries.  In the Bermuda Triangle you can forget about trying to get your compass to maintain any sort of vector lock on true North.

Our moral compass is the same way.  It can easily get lost in the mysterious and dangerous Bermuda Triangle of our sinfulness and the moral relativism that we use in attempt to rationalize it.  As with a regular compass, our moral compass can only regain a vector lock on true North (God), when it leaves the Bermuda Triangle.  This is why we must endeavor to keep our moral compass locked firmly on God, our true North, and resist the temptation to navigate the Bermuda Triangle of sinfulness and debauchery because that is the only way we can have a clear moral direction for ourselves.

This is just me though.  I don’t know about the rest of you.  But I will continue to pray to God daily for the strength to keep this vector lock straight and true.

First, Jesus said to the people: “Unless you eat of the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink of His Blood, you shall not have life within you.”  And the people knew what he was asking, although most thought he was preaching that the way to eternal life was cannibalism and so a lot of people, not wishing to cannibalize  Jesus, left.  Probably with thoughts along the lines of “I’m not roasting this guy’s flesh and drinking his blood like some kind of vampire!  No way!  This Jesus dude is ’round the twist if he thinks that doing so with his is the way to eternal life!”  But they left before they Heard Jesus clarify Himself.  So for those that stayed to listen to him continue, not having jumped to any conclusions, He said: “My Flesh is true Food, and My Blood true Drink.”

And then at the last supper Jesus Himself instituted what true food is to serve as the flesh of His Precious Body and which true drink is to serve as His Precious Blood: unleavened bread and wine respectively.  In the book of Matthew, chapter 26, Christ broke the bread and gave it to His disciples and said: “Take this, all of you, and eat, for this is my body….”

And then He took the cup, and gave it to His disciples saying: “Drink from this, all of you, for this is my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant, which is to be poured out for many, for the forgiveness of sins.

He then instituted this to be a sacrament celebrated for all time by saying “Do this in remembrance of me.”

But the passage that I think gives greatest witness to the real presence of Christ Himself in the Eucharist is in St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 11:27,29):

“Therefore, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will have to answer for the Body and Blood of the Lord…..for anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself.”

Wow.  I ask, does mere bread and wine alone have that power, the power to hold people accountable to the Lord’s Body and Blood?  No.  But bread and wine being used by Christ to make Himself physically apparent to the faithful does.  After the words of consecration according to sacred Scripture itself, the bread and wine ceases to be merely bread and wine and becomes Christ Himself, present in body and blood, soul and divinity, appearing to us in the form of bread and wine.  This is why we as Catholics cannot just dump what is leftover from Mass down the regular drain which goes to the local waste water treatment facility.  Because this is Christ we’re dealing with now.  Christ’s flesh is now in every particle of that bread and His Blood in every drop of that wine.  We cannot in good conscience dispose of Him as waste.  We first rinse out the sacred vessels into a Sacrarium, which is a sink but one that drains into the ground.  THEN we wash the vessels in a regular sink with soap and water.  And, from the very words of Scripture itself, this is why it’s a grave sin to do things like defecate on a consecrated host.  I could defecate on all the unconsecrated hosts I darn well please.  No sin would be committed though the supply of hosts to be used for Masses would be in jeopardy.  But if I were to defecate on a consecrated host, that’s a grave sin.  I just defecated on Christ Himself.  That, my friends, is a whole different ball game.  To do so knowingly incurs the penalty of excommunication automatically.

The passages of Scripture itself only serve to reinforce my faith that when I gaze upon the Blessed Sacrament in adoration, that I gaze in awe and wonder at the power of God who loves us so much that not only did He die for us, but he gave us a gift that lives on, the gift of His Body and Blood under the appearance of bread and wine.  Such awesome power that were He to reveal His full power to us mere mortals, our physical senses would be completely and totally unprepared for processing it.  Say what you will about faith.  Call it a fairy tale if you must.  I daresay I’ve been called worse for my beliefs.  But there is one thing that faith gives us that reason on its own power cannot: the power to live not as we wish but as we ought and the power to use our gift of reason in wise and ethical ways.  I’ve seen the incredible and miraculous changes that human beings have undergone when they gaze upon that sense perceptible sign of the sacrifice of the Lamb of God for such belief to be purely the signs of mere myth.  Incredible.

You’ve seen me cover a potential solution for an alternative fuel in the form of algae, perhaps one of our most plentiful natural resources.  Now I’m going to cover alternatives in the area of power production.

Electrical power is necessary.  It powers a great many of our appliances.  There’s only one problem: right now our power is produced by power plants that throw out a bunch of pollutants into our atmosphere.  Could there be an economically viable free-market solution to cheap energy that is environmentally friendly?  Let’s explore some of these options.

By far the option for which I hold a great deal of skepticism is one I came across on the internet.  It involves building a device capable of harnessing supposedly free electrical energy.  It involves the theories of Nikola Tesla, an undisputed genius in the field of harnessing electrical energy.  The world of AC power was built using many of Tesla’s patents.  The theory is that there is a great wealth of electrical energy trapped in the ionosphere and the proposed device would harness it.  More information on this device can be found here:

http://www.teslasecret.com

Some of the less far-fetched ideas include such things as solar, wind, geothermal and hydropower.  Solar and wind power pose 2 problems.  The primary problem is that both methods of power generation rely on a near constant supply of favorable weather conditions, a rather large statistical impossibility.  The second problem is that wind turbines and solar panels cost a mint to manufacture and install.  If anybody who reads this blog knows of less costly ways that solar and wind power can be harnessed, please be my guest and by all means leave a comment or perhaps a link to your blog where you may have addressed it.

Geothermal power generation also poses certain dangers that give me serious doubts as to whether or not the benefit outweighs the risk.  One wrong move tapping into a geothermal vent and you could have an environmental disaster on your hands rivaling Chernobyl.

Hydropower is by far our most viable option at the moment I think.  Hydropower involves using the force of moving water to rotate a large turbine.  the rotation of the turbine produces mechanical energy that can then be converted into electrical power.

But perhaps another method can be devised that would be on par with hydropower.  Because hydropower has one drawback.  In desert areas that are nowhere near any bodies of water, those areas would not be able to make use of any of it.  This method carries the misnomer of “perpetual motion machine,”  a thought that is the fanciful product of pseudoscience.  But i think it might be possible to have a turbine similar to the kind used in hydropower plants.  But instead of the force of moving water being applied to the turbine, the turbine is instead made to rotate by the application of magnetic force.  Magneto-power anyone?

So what do you think?  Is there anything to that Tesla device or should we stick with what we know works?  Or could magnetopower be the wave of the future, especially for dry areas that don’t have enough water to make use of hydropower?  Although it would be the height of irony if the answer to our energy crisis did originate with a man who lived over 100 years ago.

In a previous blog I wrote about how us conservatives always seem to get a bad rep in, besides issues regarding the needy (which I’ve addressed in numerous other blogs), that we also have  a bad rep on issues regarding “going green.”

It’s not that I wouldn’t like to see us move to more environmentally friendly sources of fuel and energy, it’s that the ideas liberals have proposed thus far for doing so oftentimes involve much more government control over our private lives than the Founding Fathers intended.  This in turn creates an environment where “going green” costs lots of….well….green (pardon the pun).  I mean, have you seen the price of organic items?  To shop organic you’d have to be part of the “rich and famous” crowd.  For example an alternative to artificial sweeteners like splenda is in the organic section of Wegman’s called xylitol, a sugar alcohol that, unlike sugar, metabolizes independently of insulin, causing very little, if any rise in blood glucose levels.  A lot of sugar-free chocolates use a sugar alcohol like xylitol as the sweetener.  They also have  a rather unfortunate side-effect when consumed in excess quantities.  Let’s just say that if you plan to consume a sugar alcohol in excess quantities you’d better have plenty of Immodium handy.  Anyhow, the bags of xylitol in the organic food section at Wegman’s were $8 – $9 apiece.  Yikes!  I think I’ll stick with Splenda thank you very much.  Or at the very least Truvia, an all natural sweetener that is a blend of stevia and erythritol, another sugar alcohol commonly found in grapes.

Anyhow, back to alternative fuel.

One example of a liberal idea that would not be viable is that they’ve bandied about the idea of using corn and other land-based crops as an ethanol source.  This is problematic because a lot of these crops are also used as food sources.  And there’s already a high enough demand on crop farmers such as corn farmers to produce enough to be used as food.  To add on demand for use of corn as an ethanol source would quickly become more than most corn farmers could produce.  Another problem arises when you consider the amount of time it takes to grow most land-based crops.  So not only would total aggregate demand outpace supply in this area, but producing the supply of corn itself (and other land crops) is a very time-intensive process.

Another problematic idea was the idea to use water as fuel for cars.  I think everybody knows that water would be of no use in a combustion engine, as water does not burn.  About the only way it could be used is to redesign a car engine to work not as a combustion engine but as an engine that would break apart the water molecules and use the hydrogen as fuel and expel the oxygen out the exhaust pipe.  And that’s problematic because the Engine would already have to have a certain amount of energy available to it to initialize that process, as any student of chemistry knows that it requires an investment of energy to break a molecular bond.

But what most people have overlooked is the possibility of using algae as an alternative fuel source, one that has the potential to compete with crude oil.  For one thing there’s currently not a very high demand for using algae as a source of food.  About the only people that use it for food are those of Asian decent, otherwise there tends to be very little demand for algae as a food product.  I once tried a seaweed cracker and found that the taste left something to be desired.  So you could grow crops of algae and use nearly the whole crop for the purposes of fuel production.

Algae can produce a lot of oil.  Many estimates put algae as having a good 60% of its weight in oil and potential oil yields of roughly 26,000 gallons per hectare of algae, give or take a few hundred.  That sounds like a pretty decent yield to me.  Thus many estimates that I’ve come across state that we wouldn’t need much more than 15,000 square miles total in algae crops to fulfill our needs in the area of oil production.

Algae is also nature’s multi-purpose tool.  The leftover plant matter from extracting the oil could be used to make organic animal feed, which would in turn free up some more of the corn supply since right now corn is the popular thing to use to make animal feed.  It could also be used to make those biomass charcoal briquette substitutes that I see all the time at Wegman’s in their organic section.  The leftovers could also be fermented to produce an alcohol that could be used as a fuel, like ethanol.  Though I think fermenting it into propanol or butanol would make better sense because ethanol is also used as a drinking alcohol.  So if you used ethanol as a fuel source you’d probably see people at the fuel pump station fueling themselves up rather than the car, unless you were to add some sort of toxin to the supply of ethanol to be used for fuel that would render it not for human consumption.  Making the leftovers into propanol or butanol would make better sense because those aren’t drinking alcohols and so no toxin would be needed.  Those alcohols are toxic enough on their own for human consumption.  Crude oil is also used as a source of large hydrocarbons that get sent to a hydrocarbon cracking station to make propene molecules, which are then hydrolized to make isopropyl alcohol, a popular first aid item.  Algae could be easily substituted here as the oil source.

Algae also has another advantage.  Unlike most land-based crops, algae grows much more rapidly.  I imagine you could have a crop of algae ready for use in much less time than a crop of corn.  Also, you could have 2 different types of algae crops going: one with high lipid content for use in oil production and another with high carbohydrate content which could be fermented into whichever alcohol you think could be better used as a fuel.  Or you could have a third crop to ferment into ethanol and sell it as moonshine….LOL!

So, could algae be our best bet as an economically viable and environmentally friendly source of fuel for our automobiles?  You decide!  As always my comment board is open.