Two weeks ago I injured my left knee. I have no idea what caused it. As many of you may recall, I am a very active person biking regularly, lifting weights, jogging, and engaging in a wide variety of common exercise activities, so it could have been caused by just about anything. The area just above my kneecap started hurting out of the blue and as a result I can no longer run, bike, walk properly, or move up or down stairs without moving very slowly. So I decided to limp and assumed the pain would just go away quickly healing itself as nearly all injuries will. After all, it only hurts when I move it.

Then last Saturday morning, as I was slowly working in the back yard, my lower back unexpectedly 'gave out' and I collapsed straight to the ground. I loudly yelled out in pain and my neighbors on each side of me came running over offering aid. My daughters also ran over and I quickly explained to the growing crowd that it was not a broken bone or a cardiovascular issue and all I...

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I will call him "Gaston." We have been discussiong energy issues and politics via facebook and that venue has some limitations so I would like to respond to him here. It would be unfair for me to post his comments out of context but we are discussing how transitioning to electic power (nuclear specifically) could help us become less dependent upon fossil fuels. He has graciously given me his plan. Below is my response.

Gaston,

I can not claim to be from Missouri but I have always had a good time when visiting and have adopted a “Show Me” attitude to our political parties. I do not trust either of them.

As far as who is willing to actually do what, we need to look at what state governments are doing. I have been following developments of offshore wind in Maine (Dem government and help from a very Republican private citizen Matt Simmons).

Maine Win...

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Last month I tapped a co-worker on the shoulder and she spun around and proceeded to chew me out and threaten me. A friend who I generally thought of as fairly leveled headed is starting to talk about the violent overthrow of the government. A rather non-threatening drunk woman in the E.R. is told to comply or she will be mopping up urine with her hair by a health care professional. An overweight, 50+ urbanite with joint problems and addiction prone spouse that has never grown a vegetable in her life and does not know the difference between alternating and direct current sits down to tell me how she and her husband are considering moving to the North Shore of Lake Superior. They want to buy a farm and grow all of their own food in a green house to be heated all winter long with a windmill. We are getting to the point of the economic/energy collapse where people are starting to get funny; and we should only expect it to get worse.

When I was fourteen I took a water rescue course and...

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I've been "unemployed" for about 14 months having spent the last 12 of them as a full time stay at home dad of a now 19 month old not even bothering to look for work. We didn't really need the extra income and my wife and I figured me spending it taking care of our daughter was a better choice then paying someone to raise her for us. It's been a great year but I had complained a couple of times to my wife that I was definitely not feeling intellectually challenged like I was when I was the manager of a team of programmers. I was thinking that I needed to write some code or do some design as a hobby in the evenings now and again.

Anyways I got a call from a company way out of the past and they wanted me to do testing/programming for them from home. Times were flexible but they wanted 25 hours a week. So we thought this would be a great idea. And to get the time in we would put my daughter in daycare for 1 day a week. We had been thinking about doing that anyways to...

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we will all, after a fashion, be worse off.

It has long been my contention that homo sapien will respond to a return to the steel grip of scarcity by turning on one another: nation against nation, tribe against tribe, a father against his son, daughters against their mothers. This may be unavoidable but we each have an individual interest in seeing this manifestation of scarcity postponed as long as possible.

While there are thing that an individual or family can do to insulate themselves from the social cannibalism to come, no one is truly safe. The greater the distance between the breakdown in civility and the new equilibrium which will emerge the greater our exposure to risk. We will be thrust into a game of Russian Roulette. We are fools if we think we want to play any longer than forced to.

If anthropological global warming turns out to be a fatally flawed premise we can expect the forces of anti-intellectualism to strengthen their hand and it will...

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