LifeItself

My wife and I are finishing a two week vacation in California and Washington State.  We reconnected with a bunch of friends in the Bay Area.  And on Friday, July 13th (not the full moon), my oldest son, Lucas, defended with gusto his Ph.D. thesis in agriculture at the Washington State University, and became Director of Thurston County Extension and Small Farms Faculty.  We are so proud of him! People of all walks of life really like Lucas.  This is clear from the comments we overheard and a recent article about him.  The young Dr. Lucas will need all the good will of many to introduce agriculture to the legislators and public in the fast-growing Thurston County, and get funding for the numerous projects he wants to carry out.  Helping young farmers to grow organic crops and open new markets to them by creating necessary infrastructure will not be easy. Public funding for agriculture is very scarce these days, unless you are a 67 years old corn grower in Iowa, making millions regard

I want to write about many things that deeply disturb me. But if I did, most readers would not bother to read my sermons and others would be shaken and annoyed by their implications. So I'll limit myself to commenting briefly on the growing chasm between complexity of a modern society and inability of most everyone living in this society to grasp and follow its complexity. Converse is also true: Since we do not understand the complicated world around us, we resort to the simplistic, narrow, and random snippets we call "our opinions". Most of these snippets have little to do with reality, thus the gap between what is and how we perceive it keeps on widening. Let's start from something light and uplifting. I keep on hearing good news about the various new sources of energy that will totally displace the existing fuel mix: "Genetically modified bacteria or viruses that produce enough liquid fuels to make crude oil production obsolete." Or "North Dakota i