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This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Oops

The date in the above post is wrong. I used a post that I had started and then abandoned. It was really July 21.

Guillain Barre Exit

After four months of zero improvement, the diagnosis of Gillaine Barre has changed! It isn't GBS that I have at all. It seems that an X-ray taken recently has revealed a ruptured disc in the thoracic section of my spine. My Neurosurgeon friend informed me that this has created symptoms much like GBS. The cure, however depended on an operation on that particular vertebra.

This was done at IU hospital on March 15. The "cure" entailed cleaning out considerable debris, bed rest for a few days, then residence at Rehabitation Hospital of Indiana. This is where I am now, getting an amazing amount of Physical Therapy. My son Adam has loaned me a laptop, thus allowing me to post this message.

I'm thinking positively!

Gerry

My Summer Vacation

Remember how you reported on "What I did on my summer vacation" on your return to school in the Fall? In my case, I hardly ever had anything to report. My elementary school education was during the Great Depression. We never had a vacation with both my parents scratching to make a living for me and my brothers.

This year my summer vacation was a zinger. My wife and I boarded our black Lab dog at our daughter's place, borrowed our granddaughter from the same address and flew off to Turkey!

Some explanation is in order.

My wife and I were invited to attend a dinner last year, put on by the Holy Dove Foundation.It was in a very nice place and the menu was great and we listened to several people report on their visit to Turkey. They were all quite enthusiastic about their adventures. As for me, I half listened because after all, we had gone to Turkey on a Globus Tour 14 years before.

Flip the calendar to this Spring. I had been out of the last of my three hospitals and I was beginning to walk almost normally with the aid of a walker or a cane. My rehab was developing nicely, but when I learned that we had been asked to join a group traveling to Turkey I blanched. Remembering our prior trip, I had to say with regret that I could not do this.

So my wife inquired about our thirteen-year-old granddaughter as a replacement for me. OK with our trip leader, the Executive Director of The Holy Dove Foundation. Mmmm--OK from our daughter. Then a week before the departure I was released by my therapist at Rehab. I checked with my Neurosurgeon about my joining the group and he said OK!

It was a very long plane trip. There was a lot of walking involved at our destinations. Some places were up flights of stairs. Several had no elevators. I was asked one morning after a hard previous day how I slept. I replied that had the bed been a slab of marble I would have slept as well.

This trip was vacation-like, but that wasn't the purpose. Our group was recruited by the Holy Dove Foundation in order to experience, first hand, Muslim people in their own environment. We visited business people in their offices and educators in their schools and universities. We had dinner with families in their own homes, prepared by the ladies of the house. We visited Mosques with people at prayer and holy sites of several religions. We were on city streets jammed with cars and people. The countryside is booming with new construction. This is a dynamic country!

The most memorable moments were in the homes of our evening hosts. There, in each of these family sanctuaries, we exchanged gifts and shared our backgrounds. The hospitality that was shown by these people was astounding.

The Holy Dove Foundation is dedicated to the concept of removing barriers to understanding through dialog. That is a concept that may seem simplistic in our modern, rushing civilization.

I thought so.

But not anymore.

If this was an eye opener for me, just think of the reaction of our granddaughter. What a report she can write this fall!

Home Fires

I live in the mid-western State of Indiana. My electricity is derived from a plant near downtown Indianapolis powered by the prime resource in these parts, i.e., coal. Right now there are other plants going up to provide ethanol from another regional resource--corn. Both of these could be sensitive issues today.

The problem with the coal-fired power plant that makes our lights go on is that it is old and dirty and billows clouds (if it could be seen) of carbon dioxide into the sometimes clear mid-western sky. The problem with the corn is that the plants to change it into "gasohol" will work the same way.

Now, Indiana is not the dirtiest polluter. it is just one of several states in the Midwest that have these old smoke and CO2 belchers. As a matter of fact, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin account for one fifth of the carbon dioxide emissions in the United States already and they're planning on more of these "old technology" power plants. That give this region of the United States the distinction of producing more global warming pollution than any single nation on the planet other than China, India, Japan and the countries formed from the former Soviet Union.

Our newspaper has a spot in the summer months that tell interested readers about "No-Zone" days when the atmospheric pollution is particularly bad. It's not only CO2 but mercury and small particulates that can do damage to us. So, what happened to the Clean Air Act?

Well, the Clean Air Act was modified to allow industries with the old, dirty technology to grandfather them, i.e., let them get away with their pollution until they built the cleaner plants. Unfortunately, if a plant is still running and producing power and there is plenty of coal around, why make a new plant a priority? That's why the mid-west is not the greatest place to to raise kids and to avoid lung disease. Oh, it's a great place to lure industry. We have coal enough to burn for the next hundred years!

Recognize, however, what coal is. Coal is the carboniferous remains of trees, trees that used to cover this region in a vast forest. Trees that breathed in carbon dioxide and exhaled oxygen. When a tree takes in CO2 and releases O2, what's left? What is left is C, carbon. What happens when we humans burn coal, or C? We release the product of that combustion, CO2. What else do we do? We produce soot, smog and other unhealthy stuff to get into our lungs and our kids' young bodies.

The Environmental Protection Agency has made a list of the counties that are still operating the old plants. Marion County, that encompasses Indianapolis, is one of them.

Ever hear of solar power? How about water power? Why not wind power?

Oh yes. There is also nuclear power.

Let's get rid of coal.

Something else to concern us

Apparently we don't have enough to worry about with a war that eats our soldiers and costs a mint and a climate change that can wreak havoc worldwide. Now the Doomsday Clock, maintained by the atomic scientists at the University of Chicago, has been advanced two minutes. It now stands at five minutes to midnight as of 1/17/2007. This symbolic warning about possible nuclear holocaust was changed because the atomic scientists have become concerned with the nuclear activities of North Korea and Iran as well as the increasing threat of global warming.

OK. Here is another scientist who is concerned with another colossal threat. His name is Edward O. Wilson and he is a world class biologist. I just finished reading his latest book entitled "The Creation: An Appeal To Save Life On Earth" It's a slim book that really held my attention. His message is a shock to the system. After having read the book I embarked on some research and found that other biological scientists have been giving the same warning for several years.

There have been five great "die offs" that have been found in the fossil record. The following is a quote from Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. "Since the early years of the twentieth century, absolute dating methods, such as radiometric dating (including potassium/argon, argon/argon, uranium series, and carbon-14 dating) have been used to verify the relative ages obtained by fossils and to provide absolute ages for many fossils. Radiometric dating has shown that the earliest known fossils are over 3.5 billion years old. Various dating methods have been used and are used today depending on local geology and context, and while there is some variance in the results from these dating methods, nearly all of them provide evidence for a very old Earth, approximately 4.6 billion years."

That's a bit more than 4004 B.C.E.!

These die offs include the biggie of 250 million years ago when 70-80 percent of life departed from the oceans and land because of calamitous volcanic activity and space junk pelting the planet, and the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago from the asteroid strike in what is now Yucatan.

Now there is today.

Peter Raven is past President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has stated in the foreword to their publication Atlas of Population and Environment : "We have driven the rate of biological extinction, the permanent loss of species, up several hundred times beyond its historical levels, and are threatened with the loss of a majority of all species by the end of the 21st century."

Oy vey!

Scientists are beginning to call this the Sixth Mass Extinction. It is proceeding faster than the great extinctions of the past. The reasons for the current mass extinction include:

- habitat destruction
- deforestation
- hunting and poaching
- the introduction of non-native species
- pollution
- climate change

All of which are human related!

In the January issue of National Geographic the vast Amazon forest was discussed as becoming only half-vast. There appears to be a concentrated effort to turn that area of Brazil into farmland. To raise soybeans, no less. This loss of CO2 breathing trees can't help but exacerbate the world's turning into a hot house but it also destroys habitat for an inestimable number of creatures.

Not a pretty picture. So what if the planet loses a bunch of animals, won't that give humans more room?

I subscribe to the biblical role assigned to humanity. We are caretakers, not rulers of the Earth. We are responsible for the well being of our world, not its destruction. If we allow the destruction of our nonhuman neighbors we may be the last of our species as well.