The Right Rev Rowland

Today is my 4-week anniversary.

February 13, 2010, I had a massive heart attack at the age of 39. I was headed to work and dropped off a dishwasher we had just sold. As I drove, my chest tightened, my arm ached, and I couldn’t catch my breath. By the time I reached work, I had to call from the parking lot to tell them I couldn’t come in.

Off to the first hospital and a cath lab so they could try to use a stint to remove a suspected blockage in my arteries, but they found three of them almost completely blocked. All I remember laying on the table was hearing, “We need a helicopter, now!”

Lifeflight wasn’t an option, so it was an ambulance ride over to the next hospital to get in line for surgery. Before they loaded me up, my wife came  in to see me. I told her, “I’m not leaving you.” I don’t think she believed me. I had no clue what a foolish promise it was. The ambulance ride is the last thing I remember.

Three days later, I woke up in ICU, on morphine and percocet. I drifted in and out, with a parade of visitors and well-wishers coming to pray and give me their encouragement. Some I remember, some I can’t. When they moved me from ICU to recovery, I had no idea where I was. I understand that my heart stopped as soon as they got me to surgery, and they had to bypass my heart function immediately.

I would drift off to sleep for an hour or so, I would wake up thinking a day had passed. The first day I was there, I thought a week had passed. They would make me periodically get up and walk, and the first two times I had no idea where I was. I had some sense that my wife was beside me, but I began to have this delusion that we were being held against our will and kept in this little room. Must have been some powerful drugs?

One week after being admitted, I was discharged. At home, I live in a recliner, walk 2x a day. I eat really bland, low-salt food. They sent me home with a big bottle of pain pills, thank God, and eight other medications to regulate my heart.

This is my 4-week anniversary. We have moved into a smaller home, my wife is looking for work, and I am trying to get my strength back so I can go back to work. Our lives have been turned upside-down.

Through this whole process, there has been one miracle after another, from the gifts of friends, dinners cooked, bills that were forgiven, a church family that showed up to move us in one evening.

The greatest miracle I’ve seen, though, is a wife who stayed by my side, served me, comforted me, and taken over everything that I used to manage in our home. She has been a paragon of strength to bear up under every burden, yet tender enough to nurse me back to health. In the hospital, she was the nurse’s best friend, attending to most of my issues before we had to ask medical staff for help.

My wife has been my angel from God. I would never have made it through this experience without her, and I can’t wait to make it up to her for scaring her the way I did. God has sustained us and carried us through, and he has used my lovely bride to do most of it.

Thankful to be alive….. =)

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In a conference call with Nevada bloggers today, Gov. Jim Gibbons answered several questions regarding Yucca Mountain and nuclear energy. Gibbons is on the record fighting the Yucca Mountain project, yet claims to be pro-nuclear energy.

Asked today to clarify, Gibbons explained his Yucca Mountain position. Yucca Mountain was planned and engineered to be the final repository of nuclear waste as we began to shut our nuke power plants down. It was planned decades ago as the end point of American nuclear energy. Gov. Gibbons is against permanent storage of nuclear waste. What he is for, he stated today, is a reprocessing plant and a nuclear power plant that will provide more Americans with energy.

What hasn’t been made apparent in past coverage is the engineering for the Yucca Mountain site is suited for only one purpose, permanent storage. There are ten-story high buildings with cranes built in to move the containers for the (semi) permanent storage. It would be cost prohibitive to re-engineer the Yucca site for reprocessing or for nuclear energy production. That is why Gov. Jim Gibbons is against Yucca Mountain.

What Gibbons said he would do is press for a Nevada reprocessing and nuclear production site as soon as the federal government and the EPA removed the restrictive licensing process for nuclear energy. He sees the importance of pushing for those high-tech jobs for Nevadans and to find a way for Nevada to provide energy to other states in the Southwestern US.

With the fallout of climategate, and the long string of lies from environmental groups, its a wonder that there hasn’t been a more clear-eyed review of our restrictions on building new nuclear power plants or for that matter, domestic drilling for oil. Enviro-nut scientists have shown their willingness to alter the data and hide facts to suit their agenda, when they believe they are serving a higher cause. For these reasons alone there should be a public airing of facts regarding nuclear power generation, transmutation, and reprocessing R & D.

UNLV and UNR could host the premier research facilities for reprocessing of nuclear materials. Nevada could lead the way in finding new, safer methods of producing nuclear energy. Money, energy, and jobs…. too complicated to grasp? Not if we get back to American innovation and capitalism.

It was refreshing today to hear Gov. Gibbons pro-nuclear stance, Yucca and the zealotry and hysteria surrounding it have managed to cloud the facts. It’s time to take another look with a clear mind and an adult attitude. The panic spread by anti-Yucca activists has been on par with the global warming histrionics that are now being proven to have little to no basis in scientific fact.

Lets move back to some firmer reality, and instead, start asking why the federal government wants to destroy Nevada? No housing funds to prevent foreclosures, No development funds for high-speed rail when we’ve been researching and working on it for decades, and our president keeps slamming Las Vegas as a vacation or business destination.

Are they trying to destroy our economy so we will jump at the repository? Will the EPA come riding to the rescue with federal dollars as long as we accept permanent storage at Yucca? Are we being set up, aided and abetted by our senior Senator, Harry Reid, and the anti-Yucca activists?

It’s time for Nevada leaders to begin pressing for a better deal for Nevadans and a better technological solution for America. We can’t just dump and forget, we need to recycle and improve. It USED to be the American Way to come up with innovative solutions, but it seems now the ’science is settled’ in too many areas that are just begging for a breakthrough. Let’s be American again and find a way through. Let’s come up with a better solution.

Gov. Gibbons, you could start leading the way now. Say it louder, please.

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So here in Clark County, Nevada, our school district has decided that their teachers can completely deny the facts of history in class and keep your teaching job.

Lori Sublette, a Phys Ed teacher at the Northwest Career and Technical Academy, told students in her class that the holocaust in Nazi Germany was exaggerated and that the pictures were fabrications, actually taken in Russia. Why a gym teacher was talking about world history we don’t know. Why a credentialed teacher can deny established historical fact and keep their job? We don’t know.

Now Sublette has been transferred from a premiere tech academy to Johnston Middle School in North Las Vegas. She was sent home with pay until her transfer, and now she continues her career with CCSD. I don’t think this should be allowd to stand. She has the freedom to hold any opinion she wants, but as a teacher, she has a responsibility to students and parents to stay within her expertise in class.

the Clark County School District cannot be let off the hook with a sweep and dump maneuver by simply transferring her around. I contacted CCSD to complain a week ago, and have received no response as yet.

Here is the text of my complaint to CCSD:

“My son attends SWCT, we have been looking at possibly moving and transferring him to NWCT. Your tepid response to Ms. Sublette’s egregious actions is cause for great concern. Simply transferring her to another school is not a firm enough response. Her assertions denying the truth of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany border on lunacy. It is not an area of opinion, it is a historical fact. If you do not end her tenure with the CCSD, then you will force parents and community leaders to bring an even greater national spotlight onto your failure to manage your employees and protect our children who are in your care. Please do the right thing for our children, and let Ms. Sublette go. A transfer only implies your agreement with her positions. I am hoping you can bring yourselves to make the right decision.”

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Mr. Bell has done it. The Military has used it. Most Americans have never heard of it, and we need it now more than ever.

J.C. Bell, owner of Bell Bio-Energy of Tifton, GA, has developed a process of taking organic material and turning it into fuel. Anything that grows out of the ground, any kind of plant life, can be turned into oil-based fuel with the help of specially engineered bacteria.

Ft. Stewart, GA, already has a working plant that Bell engineered and paid for on their base. The Navy intends to do the research necessary to make this bio-fuel a large portion of their jet-fuel supply. There is a test flight scheduled for Earth Day, 2010, on April 22nd. But aside from the military, the government has been anything but prudent about this bio-fuel breakthrough.

As reported by World Net Daily:

“Both Cain and Bell have been frustrated, though, by the creeping pace at which federal officials have heretofore been moving on the technology.

‘We have been slowed down because of not being able to get through the bureaucracy of the government not living up to the commitments they made,’ said Cain.

For instance, the initial contract Bell had with the Department of Defense for demonstration plants expires tomorrow.

‘I don’t know what we’re going to do,’ Bell admitted.”

After already spending $6 million of his own money, Bell has been promised $7 million in stimulus funds from last year’s allocations. Almost a year ago, and still no funding that has been promised. I’m sure the healthcare takeover will go much more smoothly, though.

This miracle of scientific discovery is exactly the kind of “shovel-ready” project that the government should be streamlining in light of our dependence on foreign oil. But you may have never heard of it, and your representative in Congress probably hasn’t either.

If our whole nation were to get behind this American discovery, I wonder what we could do with the price of gasoline?

What could we do with the economy?

I’m just sayin…..

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UPDATE #2:  Meehan was hired by the DNSC to help Coakley’s struggling campaign with ‘messaging.’ So, ‘technically’ he IS a campaign operative and he apparently attacked a reporter. Oh, and BTW, he is an Obama appointee. Nice.

Regardless of the outcome of the Massachusetts special election for US Senate, this has got to be the defining moment ofthe year 2010:

More of this type of thinking has got to break into the conscience of the American public. Government does not give us our rights, God does. Government, party, and family dynasties do not hold claim to certain positions of power, it belongs always to the people being represented.

If we don’t take that power back from the people in government at ALL levels this year, we are going to lose what has made America great for 200 years. We will be eclipsed by the Chinas, Russias, and Indias of the world.

I’m just sayin……

UPDATE:

Leaving the state of Massachusetts to raise money at the feet of the Washington, DC power elite, MA Attorney General and Democratic candidate for ‘Kennedy’s’ seat in the US Senate witnessed an assault on a reporter for the Weekly Standard.

The dude doing the pushing? One Mr. Meehan, who it turns out, is a Democratic ’strategist’ and a huge Coakley supporter! The guy on the ground? Weekly Standard reporter John McCormack, who was asking Coakley questions she wanted to avoid. Her statement? “I didn’t see what happened.” Look at the photo, does it look like she wasn’t aware?

Here is the video Neal Cavuto played on FOXNews about events immediately after the body-check took place:

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