OK, I’m back from my wanderings. And naturally enough, I have a nasty touch of plague to show for it. Even though I have way too much to do, I will mostly take it easy today and see if I can get rid of the gak, so that I can be more productive later this week.
But I just had to take a moment and post this item, sent by a friend while I was gone:
Klingon sword used in two Colorado Springs heists
A man wielding a “Star Trek Klingon-type sword” robbed two Colorado Springs convenience stores early this morning, police said.
The first robbery happened at about 1:55 a.m. at a 7-Eleven at 145 N. Spruce St., Colorado Springs police said in an incident report. The second robbery happened at about 2:20 a.m. at a 7-Eleven store at 2407 N. Union Blvd.
Witnesses told police that a man wearing a black mask, black jacket and blue jeans entered the stores carrying a sword. The armed robber took an undisclosed amount of cash and fled on foot from both stores, police said.
Officers searched the area but didn’t find the robber or the weapon, which was described as a “bat’leth.”
You have to wonder if that is how it was actually described in the police report. If so, some cop in Colorado Springs is a serious Trek fan. And someone should contact the Department of Homeland Security – this could be an indication of a real illegal alien problem.
Jim Downey
(HT to Wendel Kate. Cross posted to UTI
Filed under: Climate Change, Emergency, Failure, General Musings, Guns, Health, Humor, movies, Nuclear weapons, Predictions, Preparedness, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, Weather
Gah – it’s 55 degrees here. Inside, I mean. No, we don’t have the thermostat turned that low. The heating system, an old hot-water radiator setup, just can’t keep up when the temps get down to below zero Fahrenheit. Not in an old house with minimal insulation (and no simple way of adding any). So we wander around, playing Quintet, waiting for something resembling normal weather to return, trying to get done what we can.
It’s sobering. And instructive. In Communion of Dreams I stipulate a long period of harsh winters for much of the northern hemisphere, following the ‘small’ nuclear war in Asia. Having lived through some 15 Iowa winters, it was easy to imagine what that would be like. But I was younger, and memory is fleeting. Combine those cold conditions for a prolonged period with an economic collapse, and those years in my novel would be brutal – moreso than any of us probably understand.
And let’s hope it stays that way. When I read things like this, I wonder whether I have been entirely too optimistic about our future. Then again, not like these geniuses have been right about anything else for the last couple of years.
Wait – they’ve been entirely too optimistic, too, haven’t they? That’s what got us into this financial mess.
Gods, now I really am depressed.
And cold.
Jim Downey
I may find out Tuesday that I have a serious heart condition. That the cost of being an Alzheimer’s care-giver for those years was higher than I or anyone else expected. Or I may not. Either way, my wife and I will cope with the news, the facts, and move on with our life to the best of our ability. Because unlike my special red plastic cup, I am not busted.
That was from last Friday. Thought I would follow up with a brief note, now that I am just back from seeing my doctor.
After going over everything reasonably carefully, she’s of the opinion that there’s no evidence of heart disease, that the various symptoms which had caused me concern can all be traced to my blood pressure meds. So we’re going to tweak those. But she was adamant that I did the right thing in being concerned and coming in to see her. She also complimented me on managing to lose weight over the holidays. Not a lot, but even a few pounds loss rather than a few pounds gain is a good thing.
So, there’s that. I don’t need to worry about being fragile – just keep doing what I am doing. Not busted.
Cheers!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Daily Kos, General Musings, Health, Preparedness, Sleep, Survival
Well, as I mentioned yesterday, we had an Open House here for our neighborhood all afternoon. Which meant a lot of cleaning and prep beforehand (we’re still dealing with all the leftover stuff from the estate division for Martha Sr), the crunch of which has occured in the past week. And then I was on my feet all day, pushing my extrovert batteries to the limit of their enduance by playing host to strangers in my home. In short, by the time everyone left and we got the worst of the mess cleaned up and put away, I was exhausted.
A bit over a week ago I wrote about getting an assessment of my health here sometime after the first of the year. As it happens, a couple of days later I had reason to wonder whether I needed to do so in a more immediate manner, thanks to a clear-cut case of peripheral edema which was the result of being on my feet a lot, more or less in one location. Now, the beta blocker I am taking is a known culprit with this kind of swelling, and I have seen some problems with it off and on over the last couple of months. But this time it was really bad. Made me wonder whether it was evidence of a much more serious problem with my heart. First chance Monday of this week, I called to see about getting in to see my doctor.
Naturally, she is out of the office until next week.
*Sigh.* Well, rather than have to go through and explain everything about my life and condition for the last few years to another doctor, I decided that I would take some reasonable precautions, but just make an appointment with my doctor for next week. And I have no real regrets about doing so – if something serious happens, I can go to the ER about three minutes from here.
Anyway, all of this is a bit of prep for explaining what I decided to do last night. Following the clean-up from the party, and getting a bit to eat, I was beat but my legs were aching – both from being on them for much of the day, but also from making about 50 trips carrying boxes up to storage that morning and the day before. I also had some significant swelling again. A friend suggested a soak in the sit-up jacuzzi tub we’d installed for Martha Sr a couple of years ago, and I thought it sounded like a good idea. Before bed, I went in, got things ready, and climbed into the tub.
As I sat back in the tub, which is really pretty small (to fit into a little nook in our downstairs bathroom), my left elbow came back and smashed a plastic cup containing ice-water. It’s one of those 16-ounce ‘to-go’ cups you’ll find at about any pizza place, intended to last longer than a disposable cup so you can see the logo for the place where you got it. No big deal, right?
Well, not exactly.
But sorta.
See, this one was a nice red. Only one in the house like it. Meaning that during parties or whatnot, it was easy for me to find *my* cup, if I set it down and wandered off to do other things. By tacit agreement with my wife, this had become ‘mine’ – she didn’t use it. Bit silly, really. You know how it is.
So, it busted. Caught it perfectly positioned against the wall, the entire force of my body sitting back focused on it. Didn’t explode or anything dramatic, and I wasn’t doused with a lot of ice water. But it busted beyond repair, a couple of chunks of the red plastic dangling, nice crack around the top.
Coming at the end of the New Years Day celebration, I couldn’t help but sit there and reflect on the appropriateness of the busted cup, as the tub continued to fill around my aching legs.
As I’ve said before, I’m not religious. But many years ago I was a fairly serious student of Zen, until I figured out that for me that was a bit of a contradiction in terms. And from that time I still carry along some perspectives that I have found valuable. One of them is about the inherent ephemeral nature of all things.
So I sat there in the tub, thinking about my poor broken cup. And about my aching legs, and what they may signify. And I felt touched, in a funny way. Letting the cup go – letting it stand as an unintended metaphor for the past year and the changes and costs it has seen, was easy. Allowing that same attitude to seep into me as the water covered me was somewhat more difficult, but eventually worked.
I may find out Tuesday that I have a serious heart condition. That the cost of being an Alzheimer’s care-giver for those years was higher than I or anyone else expected. Or I may not. Either way, my wife and I will cope with the news, the facts, and move on with our life to the best of our ability. Because unlike my special red plastic cup, I am not busted.
Happy New Year.
Jim Downey
Cross-posted to Daily Kos.
Filed under: Ballistics, Flu, Guns, Health, Pandemic, Preparedness, Society, Survival
Naturally enough, given the backstory and plot devices in Communion of Dreams, I have written here many times about the threat of pandemic flu. And given my recent involvement in the Ballistics by the inch project, I have also written about ballistics fairly often. But it is still a little weird to see the two things come together.
Say what?
I was doing a little checking on the Bbti site stats this morning, since we created the site a month ago (didn’t go public with it until two days later). To date we’ve had just under (by about 2,000) a third of a million hits to that site. In looking at where the site had been mentioned (referring links), I noticed that early this month it had been posted in a thread over at PANDEMIC FLU INFORMATION FORUM.
Weird.
Sure, it makes sense. As I have argued here, being prepared for a pandemic may well mean being armed. And in making some intelligent decisions about firearm ownership, particularly for those who are not already firearms owners, having a resource like Bbti can be very helpful. This was one of the primary reasons we came up with the project, after all. Still, it was a little odd to see the site mentioned and discussed in the context of pandemic flu for me this morning.
Now if I could just get them to mention Communion of Dreams . . .
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Health, Hospice, NPR, Predictions, Preparedness, Science, Sleep, Survival
No, I don’t know what it means.
It was one of those things I woke up thinking in the middle of the night, a week or so ago. So I wrote it down.
Why did I wake up in the middle of the night, thinking such a thing? Good question. It was about 3:00, the usual time I would wake and go check on Martha Sr the last couple of years of her life. And even though it’s been almost a year since her death, I still wake about that time fairly often. I try and get back to sleep, and usually succeed. Because I know sleep is important to my recovery.
I’ve mentioned several times the steps I am taking to get my health under control, and why. For the last six weeks now my blood pressure has been stable in the 145/85 range. Still high, and next month when I see my doctor we may need to tweak my dosages again, but about 90/40 points better than it was three months ago. The meds I’m taking, a beta blocker and a calcium channel blocker, are doing their jobs and helping me detox from my cortisol and norepinephrine overloads, but I’m not past it all yet. My waking at night, even occasional bouts of insomnia, are evidence of that.
And researchers have added another level of understanding to just how dangerous this sleep disruption is:
Morning Edition December 24, 2008 · The human heart requires a certain amount of sleep every night to stay healthy, and that link between sleep and heart health is stronger than researchers suspected, according to a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
* * *
When they put it all together, the researchers got a surprising result. Among these healthy, middle-aged volunteers, those who averaged five or fewer hours of sleep had a much bigger incidence of silent heart disease.
“Twenty-seven percent of them developed coronary artery calcification over the five years of follow-up,” Lauderdale says. “Whereas among the persons who slept seven hours or more, on average, only 6 percent developed coronary artery calcification.”
In other words, the sleep-deprived people had 4.5 times the risk of heart disease — and that’s after researchers subtracted out the effects of other known coronary risk factors, such as high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes and smoking.
It remains to be seen why too-little sleep is linked to clogged coronaries. Maybe it has something to do with stress hormones. Lauderdale says other studies have shown that depriving people of sleep raises their levels of cortisol, one stress hormone.
I don’t yet have any indication of serious heart disease. The preliminary checks from visiting the doctor over the last few months haven’t turned anything up, but she has been mostly concerned with getting my blood pressure under control. We’ll be doing a more complete exam in the new year, now that this other issue is less of an immediate concern.
That’s not to say that I expect that we’ll find anything. But neither would it surprise me if we did, given what else I know about what the stresses I’ve placed my body under over the last five years. I’ve been my own puppet, dancing at all hours.
Maybe that’s what it means.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Climate Change, Global Warming, Government, Politics, Preparedness, Religion, Science, Society
From landing on the moon, to sequencing the human genome, to inventing the Internet, America has been the first to cross that new frontier because we had leaders who paved the way: leaders like President Kennedy, who inspired us to push the boundaries of the known world and achieve the impossible; leaders who not only invested in our scientists, but who respected the integrity of the scientific process.
Because the truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources – it’s about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient – especially when it’s inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us. That will be my goal as President of the United States – and I could not have a better team to guide me in this work.
That’s President-elect Obama, in his weekly radio address this morning, announcing his top science advisors.
Compare that to the mindset we’ve put up with from the Bush administration, the latest round of which was announced yesterday:
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration announced its “conscience protection” rule for the health-care industry Thursday, giving everyone from doctors and hospitals to receptionists and volunteers in medical experiments the right to refuse to participate in medical care they find morally objectionable.
“This rule protects the right of medical providers to care for their patients in accord with their conscience,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt.
The right-to-refuse rule includes abortion, but Leavitt’s office said it extends to other aspects of health care where moral concerns could arise, including birth control, emergency contraception, in vitro fertilization, stem cell research or assisted suicide.
Science hasn’t been a priority for the last eight years – conforming to ideological and religious demands has been. That may be a good way to make your political base happy, but it sure as hell is a bad way to deal with the problems we face as a nation and a planet.
Even with the misgivings I may feel about the prospect of an Obama administration, this is a very welcome breath of fresh air. We’ve got real problems facing us, and for once in a long while it feels to me like we have adults back in charge of dealing with them.
Jim Downey
Cross-posted to UTI.
Filed under: Constitution, Daily Kos, Emergency, Failure, Government, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Society
The radio said 13 degrees. It’s cold enough that the cats have left taking turns curling up on my lap, and have parked themselves on radiators. We’re fortunate that we can afford to heat this 125 year old house, at least enough to keep us warm if we wear layers.
And the news is as cold as the weather: 533,000 jobs cut last month, over one and a quarter million in just the last three months. Take a look on how Yahoo! news titled that link – it’s very telling. As I have written previously, I think we’re in for a long haul, something akin to a true depression rather than just a bad recession. All the elements are in place, many are already playing out just as they did during the Great Depression. And, as bad as it is, I think this is also a time of potential – potential to make some changes which would normally be resisted by entrenched interests: reregulation (intelligent reregulation) of the financial sector; revamping transportation to create an infrastructure supporting mass transit; introduction of single-payer health insurance; elimination of our insane War on (Some) Drugs.
75 years ago today, during the great Depression, Prohibition ended. It is time to do the same thing again, but with marijuana. Legalize it. Regulate it. Tax it. Treat it like alcohol. Pardon or commute the sentences of everyone in prison for using it or selling small amounts. Quit funding para-military squads in local police departments in the name of “stopping drugs”. It’s a waste of people and resources to fight this pointless war.
It’s been well over 20 years since I last used pot. If it was legalized tomorrow, I’m not sure I’d ever use it again. I don’t have a dog in this fight, from that perspective. But as someone who loves liberty, who hates to see government empowered through fear-mongering, who thinks that we will need all of our resources to deal with *real* problems rather than artificial ones, the time has come to end Prohibition again. And I hope that the new president will have the balls to do so.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI and Daily Kos.)
Filed under: Ballistics, Emergency, Failure, Flu, Government, movies, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Society, Writing stuff
Sometimes I wish that I listened to my own advice. For literally decades, my mantra of advice for friends has always been “trust your instincts”. This isn’t just some mystical mumbo-jumbo: a healthy, functioning human brain with a decent amount of education and experience is an amazing data processor, with multiple layers of analysis always going on – and one of them is what your subconsious is considering that kicks up to your conscious awareness as a “gut feeling”. This is the premise behind the book Blink (which I haven’t read, but have read enough about from the author and others to have a decent understanding of).
OK, so what am I going on about now?
[Mild spoilers ahead.]
Just this, when I originally conceived Communion of Dreams, I was writing a book about . . . wait for it . . . the aftermath of an economic collapse. Yeah, the bulk of the book you see now was pretty much the same. But the backstory was more about how a series of severe but not pandemic flu epidemics lead to the collapse of the world economy around 2011 – 2012. And how that collapse would lead to a significant downturn of the human population worldwide, as the carrying capacity of the planet changed. Yes, I still had the extant plot device of the Fire Flu there, but it was to be what Diabolus became in the current version – a terror threat that played off of the memories of what happened a generation previously.
But I was writing this initially around 2000 – the economy was just too good, things seemed like they would be smooth sailing forever. Trying to get people to think about, let alone believe, that an economic collapse could occur was just too difficult. Most people only understand the functioning of the economy when it smacks them in the face – and in spite of the brief downturn following the 9/11 attacks, few people understood what was building on the horizon.
So I went with the current revision of the book.
I should have trusted my instincts. They have only very seldom let me down. Because now there is a growing awareness of the precariousness of our economic situation. Most people are still only thinking that we’re in for some “rough times”, which I gather they think will be a limitation of how many new plasma televisions they can buy. But even that level of understanding would be enough for them to understand what I was (or, rather, would have been) writing about in that earlier version of Communion.
And yes, if you look at what I said above, you can conclude that I think that things are actually going to get a lot worse for a lot longer than what the current awareness believes. It really depends on how foolishly our government and business leaders act – right now I am not optimistic. Will it mean a global economic collapse? As one of my favorite actors in one of my favorite roles said:
Personally, I’d give us one chance in three. More tea anyone?
Jim Downey
(With apologies for having my Monday doom and gloom a day late – it was a busy weekend launching Ballistics by the inch.)
Communion Of Dreams 