Sunday night, after Zelda's. Nice summer night, didn't feel like heading home quite yet; sitting in Slainte, a little up the street from the Grind, for a beer. Pre-season football on the big screen over the bar...don't give a damn about it, but still can't help but look at it, ancient survival reflex to check out movement, I suppose -- something moving! Is it trying to eat me? Better look over and check!

Anyway. Trying to relax, past few days, after wrapping up the second draft of Why Buddha Touched the Earth. Feel pretty good about it -- it's ready to send out to potential publishers. It'll need a pass by a professional editor, for sure, and a publisher might want some re-working. But with the re-arranging of some chapters from the first draft, plus a few new opening paragraphs and a new chapter at the end to tie it all together (and big thanks to Dave Landis for that suggestion), and a little more detail in some critical sections, I feel that it's pretty solid.

(Wow. I don't have a big screen HDTV at home. I didn't know how much detail they show of people's skin texture. Makes people look pretty unattractive in close-up when every pore is at 4x magnification.)

Starting to feel that "oh, where did the summer go?!" thing. Well, I know where the month since Starwood went, it went to working on this book! You'd think that would be a good answer, but still there is that in my mind that wants there to have been new adventures and romances as well as a dozen things done at home.

Never mind that if I sat down and related my life since the start of May to an neutral observer, they'd probably find it full of adventure -- "you went to three Pagan festivals, presented lectures and workshops on a bunch of interesting topics, climbed a crazy PVC dome, taught people to smash boards with their hands, went running in the nude, danced in the street at the Sowebo festival, burned a sculpture, helped a local band put together a visionary arts gathering, worked on a book addressing one of the deepest questions of the human experience...and you feel like there were no adventures?!"

Which illustrates the old problem: you can never get enough of that which wasn't the thing you really wanted in the first place.

"Adventure, excitement -- a Jedi craves not these things," said Master Yoda. I suppose if I were a Sage I'd be living quietly up in the mountains somewhere...but of course, wanting to be a Sage is its own form of craving after that which is not the here-and-now. So I ought to shut up, sit here and pay attention to drinking my beer and being here in this bar.

Zelda's Inferno exercise: imagine the backstory of someone you've seen on mass transit.

I cheated, in that the first part of this is a blog entry from three years ago.

Here's the end of the story: "On the plane out of Osaka on Thursday, young man, maybe mid-twenties, sitting next to me. Before takeoff he reaches into his bag, pulls out an envelope, puts it in his lap and looks at it. Doesn't open it. I see a girl's name written on it. I figure that he met a girl over here, this is her farewell letter and he doesn't know what it says. For about ten, fifteen minutes, he looks at it, picks it up, puts it back down, trying I think to gather up his courage. I was actually getting worried for the guy. Finally he opens it, breaks out in a big smile as he reads,throws back his head and laughs. I tell him, 'I don't know what it is, but I'm glad it's good news.'"

*   *   *   *   *

Inside the huge hall of Kansai International Airport, they embraced one last time before he got into the long United check-in line. He took her hands. "So, um. I'm going to miss you. Have you had a chance to think about...?"

As i have said before, I miss having a sane conservative movement in this country. While social conservatism has pretty much always been an intellectually bankrupt attempt to institutionalize a system of prejudice and privilege, I'd like to have some good fiscal conservatives around, some button-down bean-counters making sure we get the best deal for our dollar. As unabashedly leftist as I am, there are a few things where you'll find me in agreement with a stereotypical GOPer -- I'm opposed to excessive regulation on small business, for example (since I run two of them), and to overly strong gun control laws. I'd like to have some Eisenhower-style Republicans (updated with the past 50 years of social progress) around.

But instead, we get Republican politicians like Colorodo gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes, who believes that efforts by Mayor John Hickenlooper to make Denver more bike-friendly are "converting Denver into a United Nations community."

Says Maes, "This is bigger than it looks like on the surface, and it could threaten our personal freedoms...These aren't just warm, fuzzy ideas from the mayor. These are very specific strategies that are dictated to us by this United Nations program that mayors have signed on to." He is apparently talking about the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, an international sustainable-development association with 1,200 member communities, including 600 in the U.S.

Polls show that Maes, a Tea Party favorite, has pulled ahead of former Congressman Scott McInnis, the early frontrunner in the Aug. 10 primary for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. Maes acknowledged that some might find his theories "kooky," but he said there are valid reasons to be worried.

"At first, I thought, 'Gosh, public transportation, what's wrong with that, and what's wrong with people parking their cars and riding their bikes? And what's wrong with incentives for green cars?' But if you do your homework and research, you realize ICLEI is part of a greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty," Maes said.

...

"Some would argue this document that mayors have signed is contradictory to our own Constitution," Maes said.

NPR reports on a survey of wild rapeseed (better known as "canola" for "Canadian Oil", since someone figured out that "rapeseed" was an ugly word, though it derivies from nothing more offensive than a Latin word for "turnip") that found hundreds of genetically modified plants growing along the sides of North Dakota roads.

According to ecologist Cindy Sagers, who led the study, "What we've demonstrated in this study is a large-scale escape of a genetically modified crop in the United States." Moreover, these aren't just plants sprouted from GMO seed that spilled, or blew over from a nearby field: evidence "indicates that these things are probably self-perpetuating outside of cultivation and have been there for a couple of generations at least," according to Sagers.

Pro-GMO researchers say there's nothing to worry about because these GMO canola plants won't out-compete wild plants. Which misses the point entirely: if GMO canola is in the wild, it's certainly in canola fields where supposedly non-GMO canola is being grown. Of course no one with a lick of sense who's considered the issue for more than thirty seconds would be surprised at that conclusion.

(For the roasting and sauteing that I do, I stick with organic extra virgin olive oil, and with coconut oil to grease my cast-iron skillet.)

In honor of the birthday of Percy Bysshe Shelley, here's a fascinating article I just stumbled upon about his attitude toward science:

From the days at Eton however when the embryo poet set trees on fire with gunpowder and a burning glass, or "raised the devil" -- and his tutor -- with electric batteries; even from earlier days, when he brought stained hands and singed clothing to the nursery at Field Place and tried to "shock" his little sisters into a cure for chilblains; Shelley's great interest lay in chemical and physical experiments that gave free scope to fancy and were too primitive to call for the exactness alien to the romantic nature of the experimenter.

During his short stint at Oxford, Shelley wrote:

"What a mighty instrument would electricity be in the hands of him who knew how to wield it? What will not an extraordinary combination of troughs of colossal magnitude, a well arranged system of hundreds of metallic plates, effect? The balloon has not yet received the perfection of which it is surely capable; the art of navigating the air is in its first and most helpless infancy. It promises prodigious facilities for locomotion, and will enable us to traverse vast tracts with ease and rapidity, and to explore unknown countries without difficulty. Why are we still so ignorant of the interior of Africa ? -- why do we not despatch intrepid aeronauts to cross it in every direction, and to survey the whole peninsula in a few weeks?"

Ah, Shelley: nonviolent anarchist, atheist, vegetarian, poet, worshiper of Pan and fan of the Goddess, and now lover of technology when applied for humane ends. Is there anything you did that I don't love?

Reuters is reporting on a study that claims to show that low-carb diets can have an advantage over low-fat ones for heart health. I'm sure that fans of Atkins-style diets, the folks who want to believe that bacon is a health food, will be touting the results. (If you actually read the article, you'll see that the small differences in HDL levels and blood pressure are no big deal, but I doubt that will stop low-carb fans from latching on to the headline.)

What this study actually shows, however, is just how utterly bad some nutrition research can be.

What was this "low-fat" diet like? The supposed low-fat diet had a target of 55 percent of calories from carbs, 15 percent from protein and 30 percent from fat.

But 30 percent of calories from fat is not a low-fat diet. The 30% recommendation was based on what was seen as an achievable goal in a fat-addicted culture, not as a health optimum; it's like, "hey, can you cut the cigarettes down to a pack a day?"

The average intake is estimated at 35.4% calories from fat in industrialized nations, so 30% is only a little below that. (I've seen estimates that the American average is 45%, but that only shows how fat-addicted we are, not that 30% is low.) In developing nations it's 19.6% -- close to the 20% estimated for Late Paleolithic humans. That's much higher than other primates, and almost certainly well in excess of our needs, but we might call 20% a moderate-fat diet. An actual low-fat diet like the Ornish plan gets around 10% of its calories from fat.

Considering 30% to be a "low-fat" diet is an all-too-common flaw in diet studies. But this one addds another big whopper. Where did the low fat, high carb diet get its carbs? Were those on this arm of the study getting complex carbs from vegetables and whole grains? Well, no: study participants

were instructed to start exercising regularly -- mostly brisk walking -- and learned tactics for weight management, such as writing down what they ate every day and setting reasonable short-term goals (if you normally eat 10 candy bars a week, for instance, first try cutting out a couple rather than going cold-turkey.)

(Emphasis added.) So it seems sugar was on the menu, even in high amounts.

Meanwhile, the low-carb group got their small ration of carbs from a strictly regimented selection of vegetables, fruits, grains, and dairy.

So the "low-fat" diet here was a high-fat, sugar-laden, nutritional nightmare, and the "low-carb" one was an even higher-fat, sugar-free nutritional nightmare. It's not surprising that the low-carb diet, bad as it is, might look good in comparison -- even with the side effects this study found common: hair loss, bad breath, and constipation.

And this passes for science?

A few days ago I stumbled upon a graph of the obesity rate in the U.S..
It was steadily slightly increasing since the 1960s and then around 1980 (the data points are too sparse to exactly locate the point), there was an inflection point where it started to climb more rapidly.

Now, look at this graph of U.S. consumption of sugars. HCFS gets introduced in the 1970s, it's cheap, and so we started to eat more sugar -- increasing our per-capita consumption about 20 pounds a year.

Notice the similarity in the shapes of the graphs. Hmm.

That 20 pounds works out to extra 25 grams of sugar a day, an extra 100 calories from sugar alone. So sugar itself is only a fraction of how many calories we over-eat -- our caloric intake increased about 25% between 1970 and 2000. But there's a pretty clear link -- put sugar in any food, and we'll eat more of it!

Correlation is not causation, as they say; but it does jump up and down and point and say, "Look here! Look here!"

I don't know how much of a role subtle biochemical effects involving fructose might or might not play a role on top of increased caloric consumption; the research seems mixed, though I've admittedly only scratched the surface. But the simple fact that food got sweeter, we started eating more of it, and got fat, explains a lot.

So here's an interesting pair of trends: the price of solar photovoltaic power continues to drop, due to economies of scale and improvements in technology and manufacturing, while the price of building nuclear fission power is rising. According to this study from the North Carolina Waste Awareness and Reduction Network (NC-WARN), the trend lines have now crossed, and in North Carolina solar power is now cheaper than nuclear. (The report was prepared for the state government; the exact results will be different in other states in depending on insolation, but the trend is going to be the same everywhere.)

The prices compared by the study are the prices to consumers and include government subsides for both solar and nuclear; but even if the solar subsides were removed, the crossover point would be delayed no more than ten years. And the solar includes only PV, with no accounting of the potential of concentrating solar power.

According to the New York Times, the construction of the first round of nuclear plants in the U.S. resulted in electricity users getting stuck with nearly $100 billion of costs from bankruptcies and "stranded costs", and a report by Citigroup Global Markets last November termed the financial risks for a new generation of nuclear plant "so large and variable that individually they could each bring even the largest utility to its knees."

Meanwhile, the proposed American Power Act is set to give away about $56 billion to the unsustainable nuclear power industry, including tax credits, access to bonds, an increase in government insurance against regulatory delays, and loan guarantees -- guarantees which leave the American taxpayer on the hook in case of default.

The risk of default for these nuclear industry loan guarantees is about 50 percent.

So, we can get stuck with the bill from the nuclear fission industry as they give us a power source with huge security, waste disposal, weapons proliferation, and safety concerns; or we can make clean, efficient, and effective use of that large nuclear fusion reactor that Providence has provided just 93 million miles away.