Words of Truth

According to this article, Liam Neeson thinks there are too many guns in America.  He thinks it’s ridiculous that there are enough guns for almost every person in America.

I can understand if you are anti-gun. I can understand if you believe violence is not the answer.   But if you truly believe those things, Mr. Neeson,  then why in the name of little green apples are guns featured prominently in almost every movie you make.  And why are those guns frequently the answer to whatever problem your character is facing?  Should not you in good conscience refuse to take roles that demonstrate the appropriateness of firearms in various situations?

Here are the movie posters from Mr. Neeson’s last six movies in which he played a main character.

Notice anything?  In all but one movie he is holding a gun.  So Mr. Neeson, if you want to tell us to stop defending ourselves with guns, maybe it would be a good idea for you to stop sending mixed messages, and stop profiting from the glorification of gun ownership, eh?

My grandpa died, and so I came back home to bury him. Though we did not agree on many things, he was still my grandpa. He lived a full life in his 88 years. He was a Seabee in the Navy in the South Pacific in World War 2, had four children, ten grandchildren, great-granchildren, and one wife, and he was a pilot. I remember being most impressed by that last one as a child, since I think he was the one that got me hooked on planes, flying, and the possibility of becoming a pilot. The fact that I never have is not from lack of desire, but lack of resources and time. Someday…

Anyway, I came back, knowing that most of my family would be here from my dad’s side. I got to meet my uncle for the first time, and I also got to meet my grandpa’s sister (and her children), who most of the family didn’t know existed. I told one of my cousins who I was to her, and she didn’t even realize we were related. We had the visitation tonight, and the funeral is tomorrow. But the highlight of my trip has been seeing most of my family on that side together in the same place.

As Garrison Keillor once said, “They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad that I’m going to miss mine by just a few days.” It’s too bad that we couldn’t have gotten together before Grandpa died, but that is how life is, I guess: Funerals turn into mini-family reunions.

My family can be cantankerous, argumentative and rude. They can be kind, helpful, and generous as well. Whatever they are, they are my family, and I love them. Hug your family today. You don’t know how much more time you have with them.

One of my family members recently mentioned the term “doomsday preppers” and it got me thinking.

I know what a “prepper” is.  It’s someone who keeps 50 gallon drums of potable water, a year’s supply of canned goods, etc, etc, just in case our society collapses.  I know she was referring to that type of doomsday.

But traditionally, there is another definition of doomsday, and that is the last day of the earth, when the earth is destroyed.  The only people that will be prepared for that doomsday are born-again Christians (a redundant term, but one I find is necessary).   You see, when God destroys the earth and judges all of mankind throughout history, the only people prepared for this are the people who have trusted in Christ as Savior (including me).  Everybody else is sent to the lake of fire.

So, in that sense,  I guess I’m a doomsday prepper.  😉

I’ve been driving back and forth across the Midwest several times in the past year. I’ve noticed that HAWT (Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine) farms are cropping up all over the place. I remember hearing Jan Mickelson on WHO Radio call them a “boondoggle” several years ago, and I’ve kind of held that opinion ever since. I found three definitions for boondoggle, and all of them apply: Merriam Webster’s Dictionary says it is “an expensive and wasteful project usually paid for with public money.” Google says it is “work or activity that is wasteful or pointless but gives the appearance of having value.” And Wikipedia says it is “a project that is considered a useless waste of both time and money, yet is often continued due to extraneous policy or political motivations.”

So I commented to my family that these wind turbines were a boondoggle, and my wife challenged me to explain why. I stated that I believed they cost more money to build than the energy they produced. She asked me if I had proof. I did not. So I went looking.

Do you know how confusing energy is? The first obstacle is finding out how much one of these things actually costs. As I searched through Google, I kept coming up dry, because every website was pro-HAWT, and wouldn’t reveal the actual cost in dollars, but only in MWh (megawatt hours). This is kind of like when you go to the car dealership and say “How much for this Mustang?” And the used car salesman says “This Mustang costs $200 per month.” Yeah, but for how many months? I want the cash-on-the-barrel price.

Finally I found one website that told me that these turbines cost about half a million dollars to install, and cost about 1 million dollars per megawatt the turbine can produce. So a 1.5 megawatt wind turbine will cost about 1.5 million dollars, plus the 500K for installation, so 2 million dollars. I also read that most of the new wind turbines are 3 MWh HAWTs so that’s $3.5 million each for start-up costs.

Then I looked at my energy bill. I don’t know the energy source of my electricity (probably coal), but I pay 10 cents per KWh (kilowatt hour). That means I pay $100 per MWh. Another website I found states that a 1.5 MWh wind turbine (costing 2 million to build and install, remember) actually produces about 3285 MWh per year. At my current cost of energy consumption, that is $328,500 worth of energy per year produced by this wind turbine. That means that if we installed the wind turbine and left it to run with no maintenance costs or upkeep, it would take six years before the wind turbine generated enough power to pay off its own installation. I’m guessing it probably costs about 100K in upkeep per year, so when we subtract that from the $328K, that makes nine years.

My next question was: how long do wind turbines last? And the average answer I got was “about twenty years.” So for the first nine years these things are operating at a loss. Then for 11 years they make $230K per year profit. That’s 2.5 million dollars of profit at the end of 20 years. Just enough money to build another one. When you take the profit and divide it by the total number of years in operation, these things only produce $125,000 worth of energy per year. So they DO produce more energy than they consume.

My conclusion: I don’t know. I am all for renewable energy sources, but I have all kinds of questions that I think I would have to go back to college to figure out (and that’s not happening). For instance: how much fossil fuel had to be used to make each of these wind turbines? In other words, are they really “green”? If we ran out of fossil fuels, would we be able to manufacture one of these things? Does the amount of energy expended to produce one HAWT exceed the amount of energy it produces in its 20 year service life? How much tax money in incentives is being used to pay for these wind turbines?  In other words, how much of OUR money is being used to build these things?

Is it worth it? I’m still not sure.