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And to set the record straight right from the beginning, although I used the term above in my title, I despise the use of the term “green.” It has un-entertainingly been over used and abused and shows a complete disrespect for the great and sustainable “brown” deserts.

That said, on with keeping the “brown” movement alive.

Oil is a filthy thing. We don’t like it floating in Prince William Sound and we don’t like it flowing onto the nice brown sands of the Kuwaiti desert. We should suck all the stuff out of the ground as soon as possible and put it in nice tight containers. And when we run out of containers start burning all we want. In a nice clean burning power station. Whether you believe in suppressed technology or not, I do, and we CAN build zero emission fossil fuel burning devices. (Details in another article) These devices may not fit in your micro car, so we will send that power to your home as electricity. You can put that electricity into a disgusting toxic supper weighty battery if you like. Just don’t come asking if you can bury it in my backyard when it starts to peeter out. I will be running my home and car on compressed air and fly wheels. My car and home will need a vast quantity of fiber reinforced plastics. So, please save some of those trillions and trillions of barrels of oil to make me some plastics.

I really like the look and feel of wood as well. It is also easy to shape and form.  In fact I am willing to pay a bit more for it if you would quite clear cutting as a logging practice. It just looks terrible.  I’m all for logging mind you, how else can I get my wood. While I’m complaining why don’t you chip up those slash piles rather than burn them. Why don’t you be more careful when you build roads? Try not to scar up the land as much and why don’t you just send those trees through the mill when they have Tree huggers chained to them. By the way I think you are doing a great job of developing engineered wood products from small trees. I think that is a smart direction.

Now if I might be allowed to indulge in one or two complaints for my State bureaucracy. Why don’t you loosen up on plumbing codes so we can create gray water recycling systems? And why won’t you see the light on composting sewage systems, is there really that great of fear in losing the monopoly on pumping poop?  We won’t take the joy from you right away we just need to have rural systems allowed so as it can generate more interest and more industry, industry that will develop the systems of the future that will eliminate the big ponds and trillions of gallons of flushing water.

And a final matter: We must build more green houses. When we pump out all the oil and store it in nice containers then we may as well have a place to put all those green house gasses as well. If we don’t do something quick we will have skipped past the global warming, with all of its great scare mongering and marketability, and be right back to another pending Ice age like they had in the 1950s.

There are 3 copies of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in our home. One is always at my nightstand. I gave my son the middle name of Crusoe and I have a 30 foot dugout canoe. (okay, I’m stretching that a little, I don’t have the two-ton canoe) Needless to say I think that Robinson Crusoe is a great religious treaties and my favorite novel. Luckily I can say I have 6 copies of the Bible, multiple copies of the Book of Mormon and rows of other religious books as well. On the book shelf, coming near the end of the row just outside of the religious section would be Ben Franklin‚’s The Art of Virtue and Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe. If our books perfectly transitioned from religion to philosophy and then on to fiction I would put Robinson Crusoe just this side of Ben’s lessons on virtue.

Every so many years I will pick Robinson Crusoe up again and skip through a section or read the whole book again. One day I would like to take it to Fiji and read it on a very quiet beach to intensify the experience. If you haven’t read the book I highly recommend it. Don’t read the book that every Hollywood movie portrays, read the book that shows the relationship Robinson develops with God.

Somehow the sadness of Robinson’s loneliness there on that island (that loneliness which is the part that brings him closer to God) makes me lament that a long quiet moment alone with God is so hard to come by in our busy and bustling world.

Who cares about apps, signal strength and connectivity. Who cares if it can check your mail, give you a satellite view of the Eiffel Tower and direst you to the best restaurants in Seattle. Who cares that it can keep track of appointments, play 10 thousand songs and give GPS coordinates to emergency response crews. Who cares that it really is just a phone with some wizardry high tech gadgets strapped on. It just feels good in your hand. It’s so slippery and shiny, something a raccoon would love to play with. Kind of a smooth Apache tears good luck stone, miniature photon torpedo all rolled into one.

One day if I can’t pay my bills and the phone is dead I will still be reaching into my pocket, rubbing the Pre and wishing for world peace. I hope I don’t inadvertantly push the fire button!

I never go and see movies on the opening night. I never join in fashion trends and I never listen to pop music. So, I surprised myself when I ended up at the local Sprint store the morning of the release of the new Pre phone. I know why I wanted the phone, It was time for a change. Almost 4 years with an early model Treo and I needed to be able to access the internet and social media on the go a little more gracefully. What I don’t know is why I would break tradition and do the “opening day” thing.

Too early to give you my impression of the phone, but I will tell you that if the phone matches the service we received at the store it will take the cellular market by storm.

Luckily I had lots of leisure time this Saturday morning. I was at the store almost three hours. Now I know you are going to say “What! Three hours? You call that good service?” Let me just say we certainly could have cut the time down a bit, we had two plans and three phones to deal with. The time thing is okay, it was like having an enjoyable dinner out on the town with friends. The sales associate was so helpful and friendly that we truly left feeling like he was a friend. The manager’s last name was the same as my wife’s maiden name and sure enough they were related. I’m sure this helped in the extra special service we received, but hey, get it when you can. I am confidant however, that even without this connection they would have treated us equally as well.

What it comes down to is this: Verizon has the best network and AT&T has the best phones (until now) and Sprint has served me well in customer service for over 6 years. Now they have topped that and given me a real group of people who I can visit face to face and get more than communication services, I can get the services and the relationship. In the future this relationship will far be more important than any product. I don’t think that I am so different than millions of other consumers. With a little bit of relationship comes a lot of customer loyalty. It is loyalty that helps us ignore your competition and your prices.

P.S. Sprint! This is not an invitation to raise our rates.

I understand that Sprint stores are somewhat independent and your experience may differ, although I can’t believe that Sprint corporate policy and management does not also play a big role in training and staffing of these independent stores and local area managers.
Thanks to Glen and Jason of the southern Medford, Oregon Sprint store
1390 Biddle Road, Suite 104. Medford, Oregon

I really don’t like dividing people into the two camps of liberals and conservatives. The dividing line between these two thoughts has blurred. It’s almost as difficult as finding dividing ideologies between Republicans and Democrats of today.

The real dividing line in political thought is between those who have an in depth understanding of history and the world and those who do not.

The first group I refer to as the Inn Keepers. These are old world inn keepers, the ones who sat you down at a thick wooden table, fed you a meal, drew your bath and readied your bed. They knew what was going on in the kingdom. They heard the news from all of the travelers that passed their door and they had validation from a thousand quests that had stayed the hundreds of days before and would learn more from hundreds of guests to come. They are wise folks that have come to know whose tales were true and whose tales were tales.

The second group I call “Lost Boys.”  This is in reference to J. M. Barrie’s characters from the play Peter Pan, not the marauding gang of teenage vampires of the pop culture movie of the same name. (although there might be some of these in this group as well)

The Lost Boys got left behind in Kensington Gardens for to long and now they have been taken to Neverland. They are not bad, they are not wrong. Just like children you can’t condemn them for their actions because they just don’t know any better. Perhaps it is that they never grew up. Perhaps it is that “no lost boy is allowed to know anything that Peter doesn’t know.”

Now I said that you can’t fully blame them for what they do or their lack of knowledge, but still you had better beware of their actions. They are easily influenced by Peter Pan and Tinkerbelle. You might even get an arrow in the breast when jealous fairies put thoughts into their heads.

What are you, an Inn Keeper or a Lost Boy? I hope you’re surrounded by a bunch of savvy travelers and are not a Lost Boy influenced by the tinkling bells of the modern media.

I just took a journey through about 20 influential atheist’s biographies on Wikipedia. My attempt was to find 1 or 2 that had made some outright effort to publicly work against religion. From these short biographies and others that I have read a little more in-depth I can only find the communist leaders. Certainly there are a lot of notable and intelligent people from our past that subscribe to no religion and no God, but for the most part their comments where just a part of their lives and writings. Today is much the same. We have some intellectuals and some celebrities that like to be vocal about their no-belief, but most don’t go out of their way to cry foul or organize around their atheism. The only place I seem to find the uproarious atheists is on the web, trying to become notable and famous.

Some people that we tend to think exude atheism in fact said very little about it. Others have taken their influence and created more from it than was really there. In fact Darwin knew the implications of his scientific theories, and upon the release of his treastis, felt in his words, that he “was about to confess to a Murder.” He wasn’t releasing his finds for the purpose of putting down religion, but he knew it would be a source of leverage for those who would.

Religion is a steely beast. Not perhaps one with tough hide and scales, but one that heals quickly and has a great reservoir of blood. I’m grateful a good portion of that blood flows from this America where a most of the population remain steadfast in their belief of a creator. If that balance were to shift we would join a group of people who flounder for explanation of man’s purpose.

I like many scientists with religious faith have no problem with the mechanics of science and evolution. Maybe “In the beginning” and the time God called the 5 days of creation, was a period of millions of years set forth to prepare this planet for our arrival. Maybe he let species come and go in his process of giving the earth some variety. We don’t have problems with the theories of retracting toes, narrowing mandibulas or lengthening necks. We do have a problem with theories that eliminate the notion “In the image of God.” We claim creation. It is easy to find whole congregations of religious scientists who believe in the evolution of species, but it is difficult to find and atheist scientist who believes he was created by God, As silly as that seems to sound.

Since there is not much of real movement to create the rise of the atheist it seems strange that we should divide into two camps on the evolution subject. It is a waste of time to produce legislation to say yes or no to teaching evolution and or creation and skip them both. Let them be taught at home. Maybe we should focus instead on absolute sciences like quantum physics and brain function.