Winsome as ever...

 

Kai continues to have a strong sense of direction.

He combines stunning good looks,

and natural athleticism...

...with ingenuity (dishwasher bus)...

...and charm.

Kai has no trouble talking to girls - always confident that they will listen to what he has to say. (Eliora Cole)

He has no trouble dealing with his parents.

At times he is willing to accept our services...

...and he's confident in our support...

...but he's not one to be tied down by the agenda's of others.

 

Finally, to get a sense of Kai's perspective on the world we turn to his own camera work.

Brian

SunRun is a company focussed on the costs of solar power for private consumers. It has a business model which enables people to avoid the pricey installation costs of setting up their own system and also avoid the hassles and risks of trying to maintain or optimize the installation.

The idea is that SunRun’s affiliates install a top quality system on your property but retain ownership of the energy generated. They then sell you clean energy from their network for a relatively low monthly cost.

I think its great to get consumers past the barrier of installation costs, but it doesn’t quite offer the same sense of freedom that comes with owning your own means of power production.

Another down side is that the company’s business model is (not surprisingly)  reliant on federal and state rebate systems. (You can get up to 30% of installation costs back from the federal government).

Now, as much as I love the wise and well-meaning influence of politicians these type of interventions can only produce bad investment. Solar is not yet feasible in a natural market. Its getting very close but it’s not there yet. In sunny places like Italy and the US south west, I believe that solar will be market competitive before long.

But if places like Massachusetts over subsidize solar too early we may find in a couple of years that solar remains an unreasonable investment. Perhaps wind, or some other technology will prove far more efficient. This blog gives a little sampling of how and where subsidies are riddling the renewable energy market.  How can we figure out the most efficient and environmentally responsible routes to take when different stages of the industry are being manipulated? When these manipulations are pulled back, we may find that in the end, cloudy places are still not good for solar.

Germany and Massachusetts are both having to adjust to the bumpy road of government’s fickle involvement.

“Creating” a level playing field through further government intervention can only confuse otherwise rational investment in infrastructure.

However, there is a crucial and pressing need for us to understand how unfairly tilted the field already is in favour of conventional and nuclear power sources. This is really a question for a future posting but here’s a petition to the Canadian government to get you thinking.

But, as individual consumers, we have to operate in the artificial environment constructed by the solar “experts” in  Washington and our state governments, and so it may very well make good economic sense to put voltaic panels on your roof in say, New Jersey. SunRun is a creative company that helps consumers move to solar whether it is market feasible or artificially feasible.

Brian

Whenever I’m hatching a brilliant new political theory I find that children gum up the works. Whatever else is true about the political world, children start out helpless. Children must be educated, clothed, fed, protected and above all, loved. Without these things society crumbles into nothing.

Thankfully, there is a brilliant mechanism in place for caring for most of the world’s children. Parents.

As the Bible says, even bad people are inclined to give good things to their children (Matt 7.9-12). Self interests gives us an incentive to take care of our children even in our worst times.

Then there are some children without any parents to speak of. To me, orphaned (and seriously neglected) children are the most straight forward, good cause there is. They need everything, the improvement in their life from any positive attention can be enormous. Of course, this doesn’t make orphan care easy.

All this is by way of saying, I am profoundly touched by the work of Loving Arms Mission which strives to offer high quality, family-like care to orphans in Nepal and Kenya. The organization is very small, but offering life-altering  change for several small people.

Brian

“Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward” (Psalm 127.3).

We aspire to be something like this Triplepundit…I’m not too familiar with their material yet but I love the idea of critical optimism searching for sustainable business practices.

They just ran an article about Firstsolar becoming the first full solar company to make it to the S&P 500. This seems exciting to me!

Yes, solar is still too expensive to compete with gas and coal and even wind on an even playing field, but solar companies with sales of 1.2 billion are finally in the range that can drive new research to come up with awesome solutions.

It also seems to me that conventional energy prices can only go up, even without Obama Admin interference in the market, renewables will move steadily towards the competitive mark, then they will really take off. (Or, in solar’s case, then it will finally start to shine).

A juicy statistic I read in National Geographic said that the sun hits the earth’s land with 120 000 terawatts of energy each year while human consumption is only expected to require 20 terawatts some time around 2030. Let’s go with the sun.

Brian

Last night I had a lengthy conversation with a woman looking for a New Church. She’d tried Baptist, Catholic, LDS and some others and hadn’t found what she was looking for. The salesman in me is all Rev-ed up by this point (pun intended*). She found the Swedenborgian church in the phone book and wanted to ask about what makes us different.

She had some information that indicated that perhaps we were a cult?

“Oh no,” I assured her. “Not a cult. We worship the Lord Jesus Christ, not Swedenborg.”

She next wondered if we perhaps were involved in meditation or psychedelic drugs which assist in meditation practices.

“Well, no. We don’t discourage meditation, but we don’t normally do it in our worship services and we certainly don’t encourage drug use.”

“Oh.” She sounded a little disappointed. “I was kinda feeling bored with the previous churches I’d tried. I was hoping you were maybe a cult and possibly involved in creative drug use.”

“Ahh…er….can I tell you what makes the New Church New?”

Why wasn’t I ever taught to use “some people think we’re a cult” as one of our talking points?

Brian

* It just occurs to me that people usually say, “no pun intended” when they are trying to draw attention to their brilliant pun.

Some people scoff at the self-esteem movement as being sissy and narcissistic. In many ways I think it is. However, I have been learning that denigration of self is not the only thing taught in the Heavenly Doctrines.

 Consider how evil spirits and angels respond to a person:

“…the influx of hell through evil spirits is forcible, and impetuous, striving to dominate; for such spirits breathe nothing but the utter subjugation of the man, so that he may be nothing, and that they may be everything; and when they are everything the man is one of them, and scarcely even that, for in their eyes he is a mere nobody” (AC 905).

Hell wants us to be and feel like nothing. But look what heaven wants…

“…when the man has been liberated, that is, regenerated, he, through the ministry of angels, is led by the Lord so gently that there is nothing whatever of yoke or of dominion, for he is led by means of his delights and his happinesses, and is loved and esteemed” (AC 905).

Heaven esteems a person and hell wants to make him into nothing. It seems to be an oversimplification to denegrate self – in fact, maybe we should esteem self…

My yoke is easy, and My burden is light (Matt. 11:30)

Brian

For those of you who are falling behind the interconnectivity wave because you haven’t yet built habits of using FB, twitter and google reader I would highly recommend the marvelous (and free) feedmyinbox tool. You don’t even need to sign up for an account or anything. Just enter the address of the blog/site you want to follow and it will notify you of any updates with an email.

In otherwords, you can keep abreast of all the intelligent happenings on Janine+Brian=? while only relying on your comfortable, 20th century email savy.

Brian

Hello. This could be the begining of something.