Thursday already.. and no blog since Monday
Thursday, July 31st, 2008Every day through VBS, I’ve made a square for my quilt. Then I got to blogging if there was time. I know my impressions through the VBS week are what all are wanting to read. Nonetheless, here goes.
I prayed, diligently and hard for children so we would have a group here for the volunteers to work with. I prayed, but had so little faith that I lost sleep several nights worrying about it. If I ever get to the point I can give my problems up to (GOD)* and assume I’ve done what needs to be done, I’ll sure let you know. For now, and likely the rest of my life, I’ll pray for strength to do what needs to be done, and worry that there’s something I should have done but didn’t.
The (GOD)* is my reference to the fact that I don’t know that any language is strong enough to go there, and the more easily people call on (GOD)* the more suspicious I become that they’re being patently dishonest with themselves at least and likely with me… Still, sometimes you need a word.
Wednesday evening, the church cooking crew got busy and fixed a meal for the crews staying with us from North Carolina. They’ve been doing this for three years and can get a meal out on a moment’s notice almost. Amazing! Anyway, they invited me to come join the group. I had an experience almost as described here.
The patient reacted just as if he had been shot. He looked down and literally saw blood flowing from his abdomen. He became agitated, and an ambulance had to be called. He was actually taken to the ER, and only after being given a strong anxiolytic did “the past” recede from the present, like an unconscious wave pulling back from the shore of the conscious mind. But for 30 to 45 minutes, the past and present were completely interpenetrating, pulling him down into an infinite terror.
My experience wasn’t nearly so dramatic, but sitting and talking to people who have no idea what we went through in Katrina, and trying to make some sense of the magnitude of it, I found I was about as agitated as I’ve ever gotten w.r.t. Katrina. My story is still that I was minimally affected, yet there is still apparently some trauma. I sure came home from that evening emotionally ruffled. The good news is that after the Mississippi went rampaging this spring, we’re old news. The worst is surely over now.
Now a couple of conservative type links, just so my spots don’t seem to change again. The first was published early after the Fanny/Freddy bailout was enacted. It’s got some bullet points on the weaknesses of the bill. This one struck me as important.
The second link came up in my blog reading today. I have no idea whether it’s patent scare mongering in front of an election that should be fought on foreign policy issues, but it’s scary enough for those of us who grew up in the 50’s doing duck and cover drills because the Russians were going to nuke us. The Russians aren’t the worry. But this outlines a nuclear worry based on Iran’s military tests.
In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee and in remarks to a private conference on missile defense over the weekend hosted by the Claremont Institute, Dr. William Graham warned that the U.S. intelligence community “doesn’t have a story” to explain the recent Iranian tests.
One group of tests that troubled Graham, the former White House science adviser under President Ronald Reagan, were successful efforts to launch a Scud missile from a platform in the Caspian Sea.
“They’ve got [test] ranges in Iran which are more than long enough to handle Scud launches and even Shahab-3 launches,” Dr. Graham said. “Why would they be launching from the surface of the Caspian Sea? They obviously have not explained that to us.”
Another troubling group of tests involved Shahab-3 launches where the Iranians “detonated the warhead near apogee, not over the target area where the thing would eventually land, but at altitude,” Graham said. “Why would they do that?”
“The only plausible explanation we can find is that the Iranians are figuring out how to launch a missile from a ship and get it up to altitude and then detonate it,” he said. “And that’s exactly what you would do if you had a nuclear weapon on a Scud or a Shahab-3 or other missile, and you wanted to explode it over the United States.”
“If even a crude nuclear weapon were detonated anywhere between 40 kilometers to 400 kilometers above the earth, in a split-second it would generate an electro-magnetic pulse [EMP] that would cripple military and civilian communications, power, transportation, water, food, and other infrastructure,” the report warned.
While not causing immediate civilian casualties, the near-term impact on U.S. society would dwarf the damage of a direct nuclear strike on a U.S. city.
My attribution is sloppy, but it’s written more clearly in the original, so you can check it there if you care.
Last, one of the two main reasons I still have to be concerned about the world going to hell in that proverbial hand basket… Quentin at the Suzuki string recital last spring. Quentin’s first year playing cello, he really didn’t much care for it. But by the end of last year he was able to get a recognizable tune out of the big wooden beast, and took some pride of accomplishment in his growing “artistry.” He may never play any strings after he gets out of grade school, but the exposure to making music is all to the good.
