Is Obama’s war on coal going to hit your pocketbooks and/or wallets?

From Phil Kerpen: 

Obama’s War on Coal has already taken a remarkable toll on coal-fired power plants in America.

Last week the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported a shocking drop in power sector coal consumption in the first quarter of 2012. Coal-fired power plants are now generating just 36 percent of U.S. electricity, versus 44.6 percent just one year ago.

It’s the result of an unprecedented regulatory assault on coal that will leave us all much poorer.

Last week PJM Interconnection, the company that operates the electric grid for 13 states (Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia) held its 2015 capacity auction. These are the first real, market prices that take Obama’s most recent anti-coal regulations into account, and they prove that he is keeping his 2008 campaign promise to make electricity prices “necessarily skyrocket.”

The market-clearing price for new 2015 capacity – almost all natural gas – was $136 per megawatt. That’s eight times higher than the price for 2012, which was just $16 per megawatt. In the mid-Atlantic area covering New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and DC the new price is $167 per megawatt. For the northern Ohio territory served by FirstEnergy, the price is a shocking $357 per megawatt.

Why the massive price increases? Andy Ott from PJM stated the obvious: “Capacity prices were higher than last year’s because of retirements of existing coal-fired generation resulting largely from environmental regulations which go into effect in 2015.” Northern Ohio is suffering from more forced coal-plant retirements than the rest of the region, hence the even higher price.  More here

It looks like the coal numbers aren’t really the coal numbers, but may in fact a mirage coerced by the Obama administration upon the coal industry.  Nothing like fake numbers to prop up what is a failing economy to make it look good.  As many as 200, ooo blue-collar jobs may be threatened by the Obama EPA’s newest rule which strangles the economy.

In obscure, blue-collar towns across Appalachia — places that most Americans have never seen — generations of coal miners have toiled away at back-breaking labor to power American homes and industry. Now, as many as 200,000 of them who dig, process, transport and burn America’s most abundant fuel are threatened by EPA’s latest coal rule.

It imposes a standard for emissions that is all but impossible for many plants to meet. It requires coal-fired plants to release no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour. More here

H/T dsm0012

I do agree with him that many republicans are playing the Washington political game, not looking out for citizens best interests. In addition I believe many are lacking the will and the courage to do what is right for the United States of America. Although I do think that more Republicans would be able to stand up for what is right for the people, for our liberty, if the democrats weren’t the majority in the senate and we didn’t have a democrat president.

Unlike Alan Keyes I do think when we have a chance to vote for less evil versus more evil then we must choose the least evil. For if we don’t stand up to the greater evil – vote for the lesser evil – then the greater evil most of the time if not always will win. I will admit that Mitt Romney is not the answer to our problems in the USA. But he is better than Barack Obama who threatens our liberties and our constitution pretty much every day. Mitt Romney will at least stop the bleeding and restore some of our liberties, at least slowly. Alan Keyes is correct when he says that our country needs to get back to God. God is the answer. Prayer is the answer. God Bless.

I would like to introduce you to Retired Army Staff Sergeant Dan Hoaglin. After half a dozen tours through Kosovo, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan, this veteran has been diagnosed with PTSD, and his is no mild case, either. Fortunately, Staff Sgt Hoaglin (Ret.) was made privvy to a relatively new and admittedly unconventional therapy that has nevertheless helped him make excellent progress toward a significant recovery and a return to a normal life when nothing else helped him one iota. Unfortunately, for every soldier like Hoaglin who is lucky enough to stumble upon this new healing modality as its advocates tirelessly (and thus far futilely) attempt to persuade the VA to give it the attention and consideration merited by the startling weight of the clinical evidence in its favor, there are many more who never so much as hear of its existence. While this has much to do with its unconventionality and the way that the theoretical foundation of this approach challenges (to put it mildly) the fundamental premises of the conventional western medical model, what should be important when considering a new treatment, remedy or therapy is not whether it confirms our biases or worldview, but whether and to what extent the claim of its efficacy is supported by the available evidence. Before I continue along these lines, please take the time to check these links and see how Kevin Doran of WROC Fox in Rochester, NY covered this story.:

If you are pressed for time, start with Segment 2: Unusual Therapy Gives Local Veteran Relief from PTSD.

If you have time more time, check this link also,-  Segment 1: Coming Home with PTSD: A Local Soldier’s Story  It goes to the earlier segment.  Segment 2 was a follow-up.

The study in which Dan is taking part, the Veteran Stress Project, mentioned in each segment at the two links given above, is being conducted by the Soul Medicine Institute, which is directed by Dawson Church, Ph.D., who also founded it.  Dr. Church is doing more than anyone else in the world to subject Energy Psychology to rigorous scientific standards. The new treatment, as Doran says in the segments at the above links, is called EFT, Emotional Freedom Techniques (that’s techniques plural – Doran got that part wrong [understandably and quite excusably, since even now many EFT Practitioners still insist on using the singular]).  Dawson Church’s main website, EFTUniverse.com, is a major source of information on this new modality as well as training and many free resources are available there.

EFT was developed by a man named Gary Craig from techniques discovered by a clinical psychologist by the name of Roger Callahan, PhD.  Callahan called his method TFT (Thought Field Therapy).  The TFT process was very complicated, involved much cumbersome testing and required a practitioner to memorize dozens of long tapping routines or algorithms as Callahan called them, for any conceivable ailment, pathology, stress or pain issue. Gary Craig simplified those algorithms into one single easy-to-memorize routine that could be used for just about anything and everything. Callahan discovered that by tapping on certain points used in acupuncture lifelong debilitating phobias could be eliminated, and proceeded over several years to produce many elaborate patterns of tapping on those acupoints.  Craig discovered* that by tapping repeatedly on all the endpoints of the major acupuncture meridians, every issue could be addressed without the necessity of memorizing so many different tapping routines. By tapping them all, you inevitably got the right ones, while tapping the others had no ill effect and did not interfere with the effect of tapping the correct ones. By doing the routine repeatedly, the proper points were inevitably reached in the correct order.  Craig called it “the Basic Recipe”, and it is a way to do Callahan’s TFT without knowing any of Callahan’s special algorithms.  By doing Craig’s recipe you inevitably find the right points in the right order.

EFT quickly overtook TFT in popularity and is now by far the most widely practiced and most effective of the many modalities that collectively comprise the field of Energy Psychology. I found out about it two years ago by web checking a single oblique reference to “Callahan techniques” in a book I had read.  It was about helping people manage their cravings for cigarettes so they could kick the habit if they wanted to.  After a little bit of googling I was quite intrigued by what I found.  It wasn’t just good for quitting smoking.  It was good for just about anything and everything!   That motivated me to continue looking into it, and I found that there was so much free information and training available out there (and there still is), I tried it.

It works.  It is just that simple.  I have used it to help myself and many others (friends, family, co-workers) for many emotional and physical health and pain issues: nearly crippling chronic joint pain, lower back pain, night leg cramps (these were mine. They used to have me in tears and keep me up for hours whenever the occurred), sinus headaches, trouble with swallowing pills, anger issues, fear of thunderstorms, pain from a fall, constipation, grief issues…the list goes on. I cannot remember everything off-hand. Two instances of my use of this modality stand out as my favorites, and were not listed in the preceding sentence. In one, I performed an experiment with a diabetic whose blood glucose reading was very high. Fifteen minutes of EFT brought his next reading, performed immediately after the tapping, down to normal.   In the other, I approached two total strangers (this was very much against the grain of my personality, but somehow I summoned the gumption to do it), a couple at a local McDonald’s, because one of them, the husband, was so bent over from Parkinson’s Disease that his head was lower to the ground than hips. That is no exaggeration – how he could see where he was walking was beyond my comprehension since his face seemed to be tilted toward the ground behind his feet. His wife led him around some, but he was also able to get around some on his own, which boggled my mind.  I asked them if I could try to help him with EFT tapping and they eagerly agreed. After twenty minutes of using Craig’s the Basic Recipe with the man, his posture improved noticeably – his head was at least a bit further from the ground than his hips and his head could visibly look where he was going when he walked.  I gave my name and number and offered to keep working with him for free but I never heard from them (I later found out that such apparently inexplicable refusals to follow through with something that is actually helping them is typical of those with that disease and falls within its symptomology).

This is not witchcraft.  This not occult woo-woo or New Age foo-foo. This is an approach to medicine that has worked for millenia .  It spread beyond China quite some time ago (e.g., in Japan it became the basis of Shiatsu, which is a form of acupressure massage).  It is still practiced in China right alongside Western medicine and some of the best doctors there are qualified in both surgery and acupuncture.    The Church existed alongside it for as long as Christianity has been in the Orient, and there was never any movement by Christians in those cultures to oppose this approach to medicine on doctrinal or spiritual grounds.   In fact, the English word “acupuncture” was coined by some highly impressed Catholic monks who observed it being performed.  It is derived from the Latin (acu means needle, and puncture comes from pungere).  Although cultural influences have melded together over time so that some acupuncturists associate their art with Taoist beliefs, they are completely separable, as one might expect of two things whose origins are totally separate and unrelated.

Acupuncture, moxibustion, acupressure, shiatsu, Qi Gong, and now EFT, all use the same system of meridians, or currents of energy or Qi (pronounced “chee”), and the points are gateways or openings in those currents where the energy can be influenced from the outside.  The Western medical model rejects such an energy system a priori – because it is obviously conceptually akin to vitalism, which they regard as completely and incorrigibly discredited in favor of their Godless, soulless, de-humanizing mechanistic approach (do you get the idea that I question their hasty and not-entirely justified total categorical dismissal of vitalism per se?  Good, because as a Catholic philosopher, specifically as a Thomist, who believes that there is more to life than chemical reactions and more to the universe than particles in motion, I do!).  They reject homeopathy for the exact same reason – not because it does not work (it does, even on animals, so no one had better try to tell me it is because of the placebo effect [another phenomenon for which the Western medical model has no explanation whatsoever]), but because their materialist mechanistic view of the world and man’s place in it (as just another pile of atoms jiggling around meaninglessly in the void) cannot account for it; their whole paradigm is incompatible with it. When there is a conflict between the available  facts and a theory that is held to that strongly, the facts always lose.

At the Veterans Administration there is no profit motive to drive innovation and improvement of health care outcomes because it is a government bureaucracy and as such everyone involved in its administration has an overriding interest in maintaining the status quo in order to keep their jobs.  Don’t rock the boat! Don’t mess with the System!  The System is more important than any one individual and his or her problems. Hence it is more important than the vets it is meant to serve and help.  They are, after all, just individuals.

If Obamacare is not struck down by the Supreme Court or repealed, we can expect much more of the same. True medical and therapeutic innovation will slowly cease to exist, leaving behind a mockery, a masquerade of it, a sick, twisted funhouse-mirror image of what it once was, in the form of a total corporatist, fascist merger of the interests Big Pharma and Big Government (we were already pretty close to that dystopian nightmare, and Obamacare will just make things worse, much worse).  Oh, we’ll get new pills for every conceivable condition or unpleasant life situation to numb us and dumb us down, but these will not be advancements of medical science. We are already pretty far down this road, a road that will end in all effective alternative treatments being strictly prohibited.  So do what I did: google it.   Find out about EFT now and when you have the opportunity to do so, share it with a vet that you know.  Get the word out while you still can, so that as many of our returning soldiers who continue to suffer from the effects of their heroic choice to protect our freedom can have as much of their pain alleviated as possible, while we still have some freedom left and some time to use it.

Elihu Speaks of God’s Dealings with Men

36 Then Elihu continued and said,

I found this excerpt from St. Irenaeus’ Against Heresies where he talks of Pentecost and the sending of the Holy Spirit at the site called The Crossroads Initiative.

This reading is used in the Roman liturgy’s Office of Readings for the Feast of Pentecost.  It is an excerpt of St. Irenaeus’ landmark work, Againt Heresies (Lib 3, 17, 1-3: SC 34, 302-306).  It contains beautiful imagery of the Holy Spirit as the rainfall of God as well as a fascinating allegorical interpretation of parable of the Good Samaritan to explain the role of the various persons of the Holy Trinity- God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.

When the Lord told his disciples to go and teach all nations and baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,he conferred on them the power of giving men new life in God.

He had promised through the prophets that in these last days he would pour out his Spirit on his servants and handmaids, and that they would prophesy. So when the Son of God became the Son of Man, the Spirit also descended upon him, becoming accustomed in this way to dwelling with the human race, to living in men and to inhabiting God’s creation. The Spirit accomplished the Father’s will in men who had grown old in sin, and gave them new life in Christ.

Luke says that the Spirit came down on the disciples at Pentecost, after the Lord’s ascension, with power to open the gates of life to all nations and to make known to them the new covenant. So it was that men of every language joined in singing one song of praise to God, and scattered tribes, restored to unity by the Spirit, were offered to the Father as the first-fruits of all the nations.

This was why the Lord had promised to send the Advocate: he was to prepare us as an offering to God. Like dry flour, which cannot become one lump of dough, one loaf of broad, without moisture, we who are many could not become one in Christ Jesus without the water that comes down from heaven. And like parched ground, which yields no harvest unless it receives moisture, we who were once like a waterless tree could never have lived and borne fruit without this abundant rainfall from above. Through the baptism that liberates us from change and decay we have become one in body; through the Spirit we have become one in soul.

The Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and strength, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of God came down upon the Lord, and the Lord in turn gave this Spirit to his Church, sending the Advocate from heaven into all the world into which, according to his own words, the devil too had been cast down like lightning.

If we are not to be scorched and made unfruitful, we need the dew of God. Since we have our accuser, we need an advocate as well. And so the Lord in his pity for man, who had fallen into the hands of brigands, having himself bound up his wounds and left for his care two coins bearing the royal image, entrusted him to the Holy Spirit. Now, through the Spirit, the image and inscription of the Father and the Son have been given to us, and it is our duty to use the coin committed to our charge and make it yield a rich profit for the Lord.

I found this beautiful song on the internet.

How many of you use Twitter? Facebook? YouTube? I happen to use all three.  I found twitter first and still enjoy tweeting with my followers, many of whom have become great friends, to either discuss politics, faith issues, or other goings on in the U.S. and around the world.  Do you use any of these outlets to spread Jesus’ Gospel?  Blogging is also a great tool to evangelize to others.  God Bless.

This video highlights that the cornerstone of the rights and our most cherished freedoms  - the Constitution – is under attack more pervasively and openly being targeted by the Obama administration.  This is the first time in American history that our constitutional rights have been put in as grave jeopardy as they are now.  One of these most cherished rights is the right to religious freedom and the Obama admin is trying to nullify these rights which are guaranteed by our Creator, specifically the right for Catholics to believe and actively live out the tenets of the Catholic Church, by using coercion to force the faithful to abandon our non-negotiable doctrinal beliefs effectively saying to hell with your conscience.

This Catholic political ad promotes pro-life values such as refraining from voting for those politicians which support abortion and euthanasia which are in accordance with Catholic precepts.  The video does not focus on those issues where a Catholic may use their prudential judgement, such as how we assist the poor whether we believe the private sector or government does it best, environmental concerns, immigration policy or those facets which involve war.  These matters are not obligatory so therefore these issues should not be allowed to carry undue weight when considering whether to for vote for a particular candidate at the expense of the non-negotiable issue of life.   Unfortunately, we have laity these days who treat matters of prudential judgement as if they were doctrine and vice versa.

Question: How could any Catholic morally justify voting for Obama, the Democratic candidate, when his administration has consistently attacked the Catholic Church, and threatening to undermine her core beliefs via the HHS mandate, and when he is the most pro-abortion president in the history of our Republic who supports gay “marriage”,  and has been thumbing his nose at the Constitution at every turn?   Wouldn’t a vote for Obama be a vote against the Catholic Church?  Our rights are crumbling from the inside out due to policies being initiated by the Obama administration, just as Alexis de Toqueville warned this nation to avoid so many years ago, so how any person of sound mind but especially Catholics of conscience could possibly think that it is ethical (morally licit?) to vote for Obama (or any Democrat) is beyond me.

If Catholics can actually justify in their minds that it is okay to vote for Obama when he supports unjust laws, pure unadulterated evil, and is openly attacking the Church then what we have is a sad state of affairs regarding the Church my friends.  I wonder if these people would have justified voting for a certain WWII German Chancellor because he was a friend to organized labor, being the candidate of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party?   Would they have been “Personally Opposed But” about the Final Solution?

Here in America the systematic slaughter of unborn babies has by far surpassed the number of people who were killed during the Holocaust.  Even with the knowledge of that fact Catholics keep on voting for Democrat candidates who support the murder of innocent human beings.  Many citizens treat abortion as a side issue, as almost nonexistent since they are unable to see and tangibly touch these human beings in the physical here and now since they are hidden away within another human’s body but instead they give the visible,tangible poor much more consideration when they step into that voting booth.  Since quite a few Catholics today have followed a moral relativistic Hear No Evil See No Evil mentality I wonder had these same people been alive during the 1930′s and 1940′s would they have ignored those Holocaust victims who were also hidden away from public viewing?

TO ALL CITIZENS, ESPECIALLY CATHOLICS: Are you going to sit idly by and allow our sacred rights to drift off into the sunset, or even worse vote for the Party of Death, the tyrannical anti-freedom party, the party which has displayed anti-Catholic bigotry through their various policies or are you going to be a light in this period of darkness, a soldier in St. Michael the Archangel’s army and stand up for the Catholic Church with all of her goodness stand up to the test of fire?