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Continuing our discussion with Ramona Johnson

In this interview segment certain key points emerged including the need for acknowledgement, affirming and prompting as when we might say “I hear you” and “tell me more.” Probing questions may provide clarification and help the speaker to hear themselves in new ways. Feedback such as “this is what I heard you say” and what if questions and providing time for reflection can help the speaker to develop a vision, recognize their self-worth, and gain valuable insights as to how others may perceive them.

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The highest expression of human freedom is to fulfill our first, best destiny. This is achieved through consecration of our individual, personal will to that of the divine, that unifying and coordinating quality of Deity. God’s will is expressed as “Be you perfect even as I am perfect.” The rewards attendant upon pursuing perfection are made possible through the mind endowment. By using all the resources of our personality, to condition our spiritual reflexes and develop our soul power, we thereby take control as the true arbiters of our eternal destiny and truly become a being of light.

In the prose of Jesus we were told:  “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and be led to glorify your Father who is in heaven.”

If we, as individuals, are ever to stand in the personal presence of the Father in His likeness as a perfected being, it will be because of our decisions and our efforts. It will be because we have begun, in the here and now, to move towards perfection in obedience to the Jesusonian command: “Love one another as have loved you.”

Achieving the goal of the ages means that we will have reached perfection. If, on the other hand, we reject responsibility for our thoughts, decisions, and actions, we will give up our control. We would react pathetically to the circumstances of life without making any real progress. Our lives would become chaotic, our physical systems would become discordant, our societies would show evidence of disorder, a lack of harmony, and regression as it pertains to all of the most meaningful qualities of life.

In such dysfunctional societies the center cannot hold. The irreflexive members are unaccountable for their actions. They have embraced a false liberty. Within their supposed freedom to do whatever they want, without taking any responsibility for the result, is the seed of a sure and certain outcome. It will be just as foretold long ago: “Whoever sows iniquity shall reap calamity; they who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind.”

The only realm, or range of choices, in which we can truly exert complete control, is that through which we traverse as we struggle to achieve self-mastery. When we choose the higher path, we are thereby becoming independent of the material world, its situations, its appearances, its contradictions, its incessant wants, and all of its false priorities. When we mature, as a child of God, we forsake childish things.

When we can think independently of such a world and all of its distractions, we will be truly liberated, free to choose the higher path, free to achieve our highest and best destiny, free to realize the most complete and replete expression of our being. To understand the will of the Father is to know the love of a Divine Parent. For every true parent desires only the most promising, most fulfilling career for each of their children.

Fidelity of mind and a unified personality are the prerequisites for quality thinking. “By their fruits you shall know them”. And those who also reach for the values of the most real, most abundant life, are your cohorts, your fellow travelers for the long journey ahead. If you are becoming an individual capable of navigating the confusing currents of this world without losing sight of the guiding star that will bring us into an era of light and life, then you are helping to move all of us along the way to the brightest possible future.

Jesus once asked: “Why do you call me good?” And then he said: “There is no one good but God.” He also told us that ‘He who rules his own spirit is mightier than he who takes a city’. When you choose the path that leads to eternal life, you will be transforming your whole being into one filled with the truth, the beauty, and the goodness that can only come from God. The highest creative achievement of human life is one of mutual collaboration between God and each human being. Our Heavenly Father is far more than just your upstairs advisor. He is truly your partner in life.

We can nitpick. We can experience theological hiccups. We can fret about things that didn’t go our way. But, in the final analysis, the only thing that matters is our faith because it is our faith that truly says it all. Faith is, first and foremost, loyal. The highest form of loyalty is manifest when we pray to God saying “It is my will that your will be done.” The certitude about our future that stems from such loyalty is rooted in the knowledge that Our God is, in all respects, faithful. 

While the non-believers and the unfaithful do their little dance, as marionettes of destiny within the fiction of self-determination, we must remember: False liberty is unintelligent, unconditioned, and uncontrolled. It is a cruel form of self-deception. True liberty is found in the reach for our highest and best destiny and this is only enjoyed through the embrace of living truth.

When all is said and done, we are truly the arbiters of our own destiny.

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As they were breaking Jim out of jail, Tom Sawyer tells Huck Finn that “Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.”

The number of videos gone viral, depicting police violence upon non-white citizens within the United States, has raised awareness of persistent failures to reform a cop-culture tracing its roots to deep within that of the slave patrols. As police unions continue to make excuses for oft repeated instances of brutality within their ranks, corrupt politicians game the system to insure that a black man or woman never amounts to more than three-fifths of a person in a vote tally.

The number of departments that have successfully policed themselves appears to be exceedingly rare. While this may be exacerbated by the fact that news organizations have, for so long, operated in accordance with the doctrine “if it bleeds it leads,” It is also due to the fact that getting to the real numbers has been obstructed by those who have resisted any efforts to bring greater transparency through the creation of a national database. That proposed database would profile officers who have been the subject of abuse complaints.

State and local governments have also been unable to curtail the power of those police unions that champion the cause of repeat offenders while blocking any meaningful reform. Clearly, the chants of “defund the police” are stupid, although the idea of subordinating police departments to public health and safety agencies may eventually prove viable. Hiring only the best of the former police officers into a new 21st Century agency could address all of the persistent problems. Simply sunsetting the old outmoded departments, after the new agency is up and running, could make such a transition seamless.

Defunding those police unions that have retarded evolution makes more sense than haphazardly defunding an organization chartered to protect and serve. As the new public safety officers join generic public employee unions, the stranglehold police unions have exerted to retard any effort towards real reform would be diminished. The clean break would also serve to dispel the notion, that some officers hold, concerning their arbitrarily assumed license to punish.

Nowhere, within the federal and state constitutions, or within the charters and oaths of such sworn services, is a police officer granted a license to be punitive. And yet, many in the force have demonstrated an abysmal ignorance with respect to their limited role within the criminal justice system. Any public servant that does not understand this most basic principle is unfit to hold such a position of honor and trust. This is true for law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges.

While the Census Bureau reports that only 13.4% of the total US population is black, the Bureau of Prisons reports that 38.5% of the prison population is black. While no government agency is reporting the extent to which the law is selectively enforced, it is most certainly a part of that public benefits package now commonly known as white privilege.

In 1911, Nels Dickmann Anderson wrote a poem titled “The Thin Blue Line”. In the poem, the phrase is used to refer to the United States Army and the fact that US Army soldiers wore blue uniforms from the eighteenth century through the nineteenth century. It also alluded to the Thin Red Line of the British Army in which the Scottish Highlanders stood their ground against a Russian cavalry charge in 1854.

New York police commissioner Richard Enright adopted the phrase in 1922. Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Parker used it in speeches throughout the 1950s. He referred to the “thin blue line” in efforts to bolster the image of the department saying the LAPD, was the barrier between law and order or social and civil anarchy.

By the early 1970s, the term had been embraced by police departments across the United States. According to a 2018 law review article, by 1978 “thin blue line” and more specifically the “blue wall of silence” also referred to an unwritten code of silence used to cover up instances of police misconduct. On April 20th in 2021, that wall of silence was breached as a jury delivered its verdict in the murder of George Floyd. Former police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted on one manslaughter and two murder counts.

The Minneapolis Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division listed a total of eighteen prior abuse complaints against Chauvin. Sixteen of those were listed simply as “Closed with No Discipline while two were Closed with Discipline including a Letter of Reprimand. It should always be remembered that the original police report, released after George Floyd’s murder, read: “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) had a complicated relationship with religion. And yet, he managed to cut through all the crap with the words of Huck Finn as the character said: “You can’t pray a lie – I found that out.”

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Our interview with Ramona Johnson continues as,we turn our attention to the special challenges that poverty and mental health challenges bring to bear within a threatened home.

In Part 3 we will again turn our attention to listening and also discuss competing priorities in the home and on the job.

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In his 1989 Feeling Good Handbook, Dr. David Burns described what he termed Cognitive Distortions. The target demographic for the doctor’s book was anyone that might be suffering from bouts of depression. He wrote that “We all tend to think in extremes…and when traumatic events happen we think that way even more.” Although the book was authored for the people who are most inclined to internalize the “glass half full” kind of negative interpretations for the circumstances of life, experience has also shown that such “distortions” can affect everyone’s perception of others.

In the late 1990s, I was asked to organize and develop a peer support group for single parents. As one might imagine, the group spent a lot of time processing a wide variety of frustrations. It was a co-ed group, mostly comprised of people that were pretty ticked-off with the other parent, whether he or she was an estranged lover or a former spouse, One evening, we prayerfully considered the entire list of cognitive distortions in light of our own feelings.

Burns had suggested the reader consider the common cognitive distortions to, and I quote: “see if any of them are getting in your way.” I had shared the list with our group to see if the items on it would somehow apply if, in addition to blaming ourselves, we were blaming another person. In the case of what might be described as self-loathing, Burns had suggested the distortions could be internalized as follows” 

• Because your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure. 
• You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. 
• You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened.
• You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason.
• You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion. 
• You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you and don’t bother to check it out. 
• You anticipate that things will turn out badly and feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact. 
• You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections).
• You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are.
• You try to motivate yourself as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. 
• Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.”
• You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event for which, in fact, you were not primarily responsible.

As members of our group discussed each of these points and how they may have applied to ourselves, it was easy to see the loving / loathing fulcrum and just how such habits of thought could also be directed at others that we might be inclined to write off as worthless. We acknowledged the need to develop a more charitable attitude. And, although the group made a concerted effort to forgive, it was clear that, at times, this was not heart-felt or that it was done grudgingly.

Our regular meeting place was a church parlor and, clearly, the elephant in the room was the example Jesus gave when he was targeted by certain hateful Pharisees, scribes, Sadducees, and Herodians. They wanted to distract and entrap Jesus while effectively burning off any time he would otherwise have for the proclamation of certain teachings they found to be problematic.

Their spokesman identified himself as a lawyer and asked Jesus which, in his opinion, is the greatest commandment. Jesus answered saying: “There is but one commandment, and that one is the greatest of all, and that commandment is: ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second commandment is like this first; indeed, it springs directly therefrom, and it is: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these; on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Because Jesus led by example he was able, throughout his exemplary life, to augment these commandments by providing a personal and practical application of these essential principles. His spiritual attitude was clearly and consistently that of a loving parent. He was quick to correct, quick to forgive, and always ready to move on. There was no foreboding, no nursing of resentment, no harboring of grudges. 

Jesus was never distracted by those who sought to distract and entrap him. He was never the victim of cognitive distortions. He had a heart for service and this is evidenced by his revelationary life together with the revolutionary statement: “I give you this new commandment: That you love one another even as I have loved you. And by this will all men know that you are my disciples if you thus love one another.”

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From an early age we are admonished to “Never judge a book by its cover.” As we begin to pay attention to our participatory democracy, we quickly learn that any initiative named by a politician cannot be accepted at face value. Throughout history, we’ve been subjected to a wide variety of catch phrases that were used to deceive the general population. Most recently these range from trickle down economics to election integrity. We also suffer from the politics of destruction as childish coercive labeling is used to derail any sincere attempt to elevate the political discourse: Terms like repugs and libtards are now in common use.

One of the biggest ongoing deceptions involves simple misnomers. The term packing is generally understood to mean to fill a container of a given size. One might pack a suitcase or cram a large number of things into a given space, such as when a makeshift shelter is packed with beds jammed side by side. Of course, once a politician exerts their distorting influence upon the language of the realm, the meanings become contorted and decidedly self-serving.

When U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to add more justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, in order to obtain favorable rulings regarding New Deal legislation, his detractors described the initiative as court-packing. The sown confusion between packing and expanding persists even today and it will likely continue to distort the debate surrounding the prospect of expanding the Supreme Court to achieve an ideological balance.

It has become clear that, when one executive, over the course of one term, can replace one third of the the justices on the United States Supreme Court, the country has become highly vulnerable to tumultuous ideological swings. An administration that is able to fill three vacancies within a nine seat court is quite literally packing the Court. If ever, oh ever there was a time to consider expanding SCOTUS, it is now.

The U.S. Constitution does not define the size of the Supreme Court. In the Judiciary Act of 1869, Congress had established that the Supreme Court would consist of the chief justice and eight associate justices. The Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 was the actual name of the legislative initiative proposed by Roosevelt. The central provision of the bill would have granted the president power to appoint an additional justice to the U.S. Supreme Court, up to a maximum of six, for every member of the court over the age of 70 years and 6 months that refused to retire.

During Roosevelt’s first term, the Supreme Court had struck down several New Deal measures as being unconstitutional. However, included among the cardinal precepts of the United States Constitution is the phrase “promote the general welfare.” Roosevelt sought to bring the court into better alignment with constitutional imperatives through the appointment of new justices that he hoped would rule his legislative initiatives did not exceed the constitutional authority of the government.

The bill came to be known as Roosevelt’s “court-packing plan,” a phrase coined by Edward Rumely. In 1915, Rumely bought, and became editor-in-chief and publisher of, the New York Evening Mail. He permitted his good friend Theodore Roosevelt to use the newspaper as his mouthpiece. In July 1918 Rumely was arrested and convicted of violation of the Trading with the Enemy Act. To get financing for the purchase of the newspaper. Rumely was accused of receiving financing from the German government, which Rumely denied, claiming, instead, he had received money to buy the paper from an American citizen in Germany. Either way, he was known to be sympathetic to Germany and had failed to report this when he received the money. President Coolidge granted him a presidential pardon in 1925.

Rumely was one of two founders of the Committee for Constitutional Government (CCG) who were newspaper men. The other, Frank Ernest Gannett, was an American publisher who founded the media corporation Gannett Company which now owns USA Today. The Committee opposed most, if not all, of the New Deal legislation. The organization was successful in opposing the Bills because of a large mailing list campaign targeting legal professionals. Rumely, as executive secretary, successfully dumbed down the political discourse by employing the simplistic and misleading label that characterizes court expansion as packing.

The number of cases heard annually, by the Supreme Court, has declined steadily over the past few decades. While a Court composed of Justices who share the same world view is likely to hear forty-two more cases per term than an ideologically fractured Court, a smaller docket also increases the risk that important cases will be left undecided. This, together with all the dark money that supports judicial nominations, confirmations, and accommodations puts the Court in a position to be “captured” by certain interests or actors leading to a loss of legitimacy for the institution whose strongest reservoir of power is its legitimacy.

If the Supreme Court is the unifier of law, then the Court should actively resolve as many circuit splits as possible and thus unify the law. The best way to achieve this is to expand the Court to twenty-one Justices. In that way more cases could be resolved and a minimum of seven justices could be assigned to hear and decide upon each one. This could be achieved without adversely impacting the time allotment the individual justices set-aside for their book tours.

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In this series of treatments on healthy homes we are speaking with Ramona Johnson. Ramona is president and CEO of Bridge Haven Mental Health services in Louisville, Kentucky. In this segment, we discuss coping skills in the context of the current pandemic.

In Part 2 of our interview with Ramona Johnson, we turn our attention to the special challenges that poverty and mental health challenges bring to bear, as we further explore maintaining good mental health within a threatened home.

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Could an individual attempting to navigate without the benefit of rudder, charts, sextant, knowledge of atmospheric and sea conditions or familiarity with his or her craft truly be called its master? Or, would the graduating class of 1492 vote such a person “most likely to fall off the edge of the Earth?”

To achieve any form of mastery one must not only know where they are going, but just how to get there. They must also develop a healthy respect for the obstacles, physical and psychological, along the way. Individual humans will, as a normal part of growth, continue to experience new centricities and eccentricities not unlike the paradigm shift that took place as a result of the Copernican revolution. For example, the egocentric infant is acutely aware of the mother’s revolutions about him. From his perceptual standpoint, or lay-point, he is the center of infinity, but only until he is challenged.

Like the child, whole societies must trade childlike perceptions for larger realities if they are to grow. The egocentric is traded for the family-centric. Geocentric planetary systems are traded for heliocentric ones and now, thanks to space telescopes orbiting Earth, great spiral galaxies are clearly seen to be moving about some unseen universe center. The olden prophet described this center as obscured by light, and behold, from the modern Earth astronomer’s viewpoint it has been revealed, the prophet was right. But there’s so much more to the cosmos than astrophysics. And it takes more than three-dimensional thinking to comprehend what is far more than holographic paradigm.

As a direct consequence of the Lucifer rebellion, the human masses have been conditioned for disbelief. Like fleas in a closed jar, we have practiced thought under a conceptual ceiling. And, once the lid is removed, the fleas can’t jump out of the jar due to muscle conditioning. Likewise, individual humans have limited their leaps of faith as well as their flights of fancy for reasons directly traceable to an unhealthy conditioning that yields in turn a variety of cognitive distortions obscuring truth as well as fact. This holds for the wage slave, the abused spouse, even whole societies.

As they might with a series of love affairs gone bad, our fellows oftentimes feel they can avoid the frustrations associated with misplaced faith by giving up. Upon considering their disillusionment and general skepticism, those resident on the planet, early in the third millennium point to some major personal or historical event as a significant factor contributing to a so called “loss of faith.”

There are those of us who are, to use the vernacular, simply hell bent, whose light of truth is refracted and confused to the point where its spectral array lacks definition, is muddled, or almost imperceptible. There are some whose concept of beauty is so contextualized that the greater gift itself is never beheld. And there are others of us to whom goodness is systematically disqualified so that our self-righteousness may never be challenged and our rightful inheritance is never enjoyed.

One cannot compensate for lost truth with mere facts, especially questionable facts. For those not inclined to faith there will always be reasons aplenty to support faithlessness. To those who cultivate faith or who possess a strong faith there can still be problems. Humans who place their faith in humans and human institutions are courting disappointment. There is no shortage of man-made disillusionment: from assassinations to inquisitions; from the first examples of genocide to the twentieth century holocaust; from the problem of pedophile priests and bad faith bishops to Daesh.

There is no reason to expect that the most basic human institutions are immune to such maladies. And this is evidenced by the erosion of civilized standards. Certain devotees of Lucifer and his debauched system of values have been highly successful at redefining, dumbing down virtue. Churchianity continues to sell indulgences in a variety of ways. Divorcing parents indulge their anger at the expense of their children. Powerful simpletons in government interpret freedom of religion as meaning freedom from religion. Some choose blindness to cosmic relationships and reject mercy with increasing contempt and disdain.

Until such time as those rejecting mercy have made the full choice of their own moral bankruptcy and spiritual extinction, things will get worse, not better, for the people of our Earth. Enduring justice will always be predicated on the laws that God himself has established. God is only limited by his own volition as expressed through His laws, and as they pertain to the physical universe, life, and interpersonal relationships. Lucifer did not have to violate the laws of the cosmos to understand the outcome of his folly any more than an Earth scientist must continually retest for the presence of gravity. The results were and are clearly foreseeable.

We must deliberately choose the witness over the masquerade. We must insure that the light we shine is one of quality, spectral purity, the whole light of Truth. In the prose of Jesus: “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and be led to glorify your Father who is in heaven.”

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“My advice to the corporate CEOs of America is to stay out of politics.” So said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on April 5th 2021. His aids were quick to point out that he was, in no way, referring to corporate contributions. As he warns of ‘consequences’ for exercising the same corporate free speech rights McConnell championed in the Citizens United case, Mitch is finally being seen as the unprincipled individual he has always been.

While the Kentucky Baptist alleges the CEOs are being bullied, we should definitely take note of how the Business Roundtable “redefined” the Purpose of a Corporation through a statement they published in August of 2019. In the statement, that moves, at least it’s public image, away from shareholder primacy, the organization claimed to adopt a commitment to all stakeholders. While many employees, suppliers and consumers doubted the sincerity of the Roundtable members and the PR piece, it now appears the “other stakeholders” just may be calling their bluff.

To be sure, the Business Roundtable is not really “redefining” anything. Companies have always been composed of people working in company with one another. Authentic Corporations were originally composed of people associating for a common purpose and acting corporately. The more recent shell-game style corporations are decidedly inauthentic. They are the ones where outside investors have been, not only in control, but also masquerading as if they somehow represent what they see as low level functionaries, the people actually doing the work.

The Supreme Court’s series of decisions, advancing a fictitious corporate personhood, served McConnell’s interest as long as certain buffoons on the bench were willing to soil themselves as they also held “money is speech.” So which is it Mitch? Is the only acceptable speech expressed as money? Is it pleasing only when others are parroting you? Or, is it that you’ve been operating as a ventriloquist’s dummy for so long, with a mouth controlled remotely, that you now lack the ability to recognize the obvious inconsistencies within your own statements?

It is now clear that you embrace hypocrisy as a point of pride. it is also clear that your are a serious embarrassment to the faith. It was John Wycliffe who, in the preface to his Middle English translation of the bible, wrote: “The bible is about government of, by, and for the people.” It was Abraham Lincoln, the same guy you refer to when you say “the Republican Party is the party of Lincoln,” that amplified Wycliffe’s statement so eloquently at Gettysburg. And now Mitch, you have betrayed just about every principle once held the Grand Old Party.

Your real problem is that the electorate is capable of pattern recognition. And, one hundred years after that era of mass consumerism known as the Roaring Twenties, we have the ability to reprise that phenomena based upon a more Intentional Consumerism. We can be intentional about which airlines we use, which beverages we consume, which entertainment events we attend, and which representatives we choose to elect. We can vote each and every day with each dollar we spend.

If our so-called representatives are not representing us, we can insure that any inauthentic corporation contributing to their campaign, becomes the target of the most technology advanced boycott since the days of Charles Boycott. We can do the forensics on all the dark money, beginning with those businesses that conceal such expenditures. We can compensate for the attacks on net-neutrality and other assaults on the First Amendment.

Sooo, as you warn businesses about what you call “serious consequences,” you are picking a fight you can’t ultimately win. You haven’t been able to win on the merits for a very long time. That’s why you and your cohorts have to cheat. You support purging voter rolls without supporting documentation of relocation or death. You support attacks on mail-in voting and vandalizing the United States Post Office. You favor moving polling places away from marginalized neighborhoods, thus creating long lines, and making the serving of water illegal.

You have a history of supporting any form of bigoted gamesmanship that insures a black citizen never amounts to more than 3/5ths of a person in a vote tally. You have no plausible deniability with respect to your racist agenda. You said that “Parts of the private sector keep dabbling in behaving like a woke parallel government.” While you may have written off the sentient beings, within your own constituency, businesses cannot afford to write off their customer base.

You are in the habit of packaging every value proposition for simpleton consumption, but the electorate is not composed of simpletons. The emotionally charged and most intellectually stunted part of your base may be deceived by the “Stop Socialism” bumper sticker as ninety one of the Fortune 500 companies use the roads the bridges, the airports, and the air-traffic control system; and then make no meaningful contribution to the public treasury. You, Senator McConnell, are very fond of saying Kentucky punches above its weight and indeed, your state is united under the Stop Socialism banner while it citizens receive $2.41 for each and every dollar they pay in federal income taxes.

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In this treatment Dr. Bates warns of the key differences between flu gases and engine exhaust gases. We will touch upon throttle settings and turn-down ratios plus the value of insulation in the context of reclaiming heat. We will further discuss rocket stoves, and just how easy it is to make dangerous mistakes.

At this juncture we would like to express our sincere appreciation to Dr. Bates for our deep dive into gasification. In Part 1 we learned about the process of gasification. In Part 2, we considered moving vehicle engines as well as stationary engines like generators and wood stoves. In Part 3 we discussed how it can help in leveraging the waste stream. In Part 4 we asked if gasification can play a role when there are disruptions in the petroleum supply and if it can be a viable component of a sustainable future. In Part 5 we discussed certain characteristics of diesel and gas engines, using a farm tractor as a preparation system, and we again touched upon two stage wood stoves. Don’t touch that hot stove!

If you would like to check out some of the additional resources referred to in this series of treatments on gasification, you will find links at www.TheLivingCrown.org . You can also ask any follow-up questions you may have, and these will be addressed within the discussion forum.