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Thursday, August 25, 2011

34

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"There's Justice In The Universe"
Last night, as I sat enjoying my brisket at Rudy's (business started by a Mormon family), I watched the Republican Convention begin.  The color guard led the way with Old Glory.  Old veterans proudly saluted.  Olympic athletes were introduced & the pledge of Allegiance recited. The National Anthem resonated, and I thought of America's heroic past.  An archbishop (not an evangelist) gave an invocation.  This all created a wonderful backdrop for the evening to begin.  Then the 'speechifying' began & I headed for the the exit.

As I was leaving, I took notice of the crowd in Rudy's -- and what I saw was what I like best about America.  A mixed group of people of different ethnic background all enjoying the bounty that America provides.

Then, when I arrived home and began listening to what was being said a the RNC, the tired old platitudes dressed up in red, white and blue were being were being aired once again.  Somewhere along the way to becoming the world's predominate nation, we lost our 'pazazz'.  It's what Obama tries to rekindle --- but there's little substance there.

What will rekindle our American verve is conquering our fears.  But before we can do that, we have to recognize what they are.  And we just aren't ready to face our misconceptions as a nation just yet.  Right wingers are scared to admit that CO2 induced global warming is a reality & population control in a world of diminishing resources is a must.  Left wingers are scared to admit that we can't allow a flood of illegal immigrants into our country & that we can't afford Universal Health Care for us and for them. 

"The night is not what it was.
Once, the Earth was cast perpetually
half in shadow. Man and beast slept
beneath inky skies, dotted with
glittering stars. Then came fire,
the candle, and the light bulb,
gradually drawing back the curtain
of darkness and giving us unprecedented
control over our lives.

But a brighter world, it is becoming
increasingly clear, has its drawbacks....
breast cance
is nearly twice as common
in brightly lit communities as in dark ones.
A growing body of evidence shows
that artificial light perhaps threatens
not just stargazing but also public health,
wildlife, and possibly even safety.

Those findings are all the more
troubling considering that an
estimated 30 percent of outdoor
lighting—plus even some indoor
lighting—is wasted.  Ill-conceived,
ineffective, and inefficient lighting
costs the nation about
$10.4 billion a year in wasted energy.

Light beamed into the sky is
squandered, since it's not
illuminating any target. Yet
many fixtures—like old-fashioned
spherical streetlamps—send plenty
of photons upward and outward...
as the light bounces off particles
in the air, it casts a far-reaching
"sky glow".  In dark, rural areas,
about 2,000 stars are typically
visible at night, compared with maybe
five in a bright city square—and
about 5,000 in centuries past."

[My Comment: During my teaching
career, I was disheartened by my
urban students' general lack of life
experiences. They'd never milked a
cow, butchered an animal that they
were going to eat, rode a horse,
split firewood, or marveled at
the Milky Way illuminating the
night sky.  Maybe our world's population
density
prohibits the most of these,
but properly lighting our cities might
restore our ability to at least see
more of the stars in our galactic
neighborhood.]


http://www.usnews.com/articles/science/environment/2008/03/14/turning-out-the-lights.html

http://www.nextrionet.com/mc/page.do?sitePageId=55060&orgId=idsa

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080729.html
Despite what the Democrats might say & what he ‘now’ says, Obama co-sponsored a bill favoring ‘liquid coal’ to promote his start in political life as a Senator… even his new opposite stand is weak (when you study the wording).  McCain supports the nuclear energy power plants that would provide the heat needed in this process of providing liquid fuel from coal.  Corporate interests like the idea of tightly controlling energy supplies to keep their profit margins high.  They don’t like the idea of inexhaustible energy that wind, solar, water, and geothermal / heck, they don’t really like the idea of ‘cellulosic biofuels’.  They do like the idea of government guaranteed loans (and  liability exemptions for themselves) for nuclear power plants.

Despite what the Republicans might say & what he ‘now’ says, McCain co-sponsored a bill favoring amnesty for illegals aliens (just last summer) to promote his position as a ‘centrist’ Senator…. even his new stand is very weak.  Obama very clearly supports illegal immigration.  Corporate interests love the idea of an inexhaustible supply of cheap laborers.

When I listened to the ‘pretty’ speeches given at both of the conventions, I heard the hidden meanings “behind the veil”.  I’m reminded of two sayings:
1) How can you tell when a politician’s lying?  When you see their lips moving.
2) Why vote for the crooks? You’ll only encourage them.
There are about 4,000 drilling rigs operating in the western half of the Gulf Of Mexico tapping into 70 billion barrels of oil reserves.  America's east and west coasts have about 18 billions barrels of oil still in the ground (enough to last the USA 2 1/2 years -- if it fed exclusively into American refineries).  Drilling has become substantially safer since the Santa Barbara oil spill that moved Congress to declare a moratorium on offshore drilling.  Moving offshore oil to onshore facilities is what creates hundreds of small oil spills (though one 3.7 million gallon spill in the Gulf made headlines).  What is more hazardous to the environment & ocean life is the release of toxins (benzene, arsenic, etc.) and heavy metals (mercury, lead, etc.) --- as well as specialized tools used to explore for more oil.  The group of US citizens most opposed to offshore drilling are those living in coastal states that cater to tourists.  THE WEEK

[I'm opposed to immediate increased offshore drilling for the same reason that I'm loath to tap into my annuities --- I'd like to have something in reserve for the future when it'll be worth considerably more & when I may be really desperate for it.  But, perhaps I'm not your typical American.  I'm not tapped out on credit card debt, etcetera.  I've never lived beyond my means.  What make me conservative is that I'm a 'conservationist'.  Meanwhile, not continuing to provide incentives for renewable energy while continuing to subsidize oil and ethanol makes no sense to me.]

In 1983, I was living on my ranch in South Texas.  One day, as I was working in the corral next to the windmill, I heard a heavy BOOM !!! -- I climbed up the windmill to look around and, in the distance, saw that the next door 'agribiz' cotton farming operation's tractor pulling a deep chisel plow had hit and ruptured a natural gas pipeline & the billowing flame was perhaps a hundred feet high and hissing so loudly that it was almost deafening.  Soil erosion there in that section was so serious that the pipeline wasn't as deep as it once was.... and miraculously, the tractor had not been harmed --  but the peckerwood driving the tractor just kept going and making his rounds.  The agribiz outfit he worked for was all about making money (their field manager was a famous ex-football player & didn't know the first thing about farming) & the driver probably didn't dare stop no matter what.  Eventually, someone shut down the line / but, in the meantime, I reflected on what all had been changes that had been happening in my 'neck-of-the-woods' prior to this event:

Crop dusters seemed convinced that my place needed to be dusted along with the neighboring cotton fields;  agribiz tractor drivers insisted on plowing up the county road leading to my place;  illegal aliens were no longer content to simply drink water at the well while passing  through, they were now burglarizing me and others in the area; calves were being stolen; poachers were steadily increasing their activities; drug runners shot one of my distant neighbors off his horse as he was out for a jaunt; county politicians (who were making money by subdividing raw land for colonias) refused to enact minimal building restrictions or require water lines be provided to them [colonias were starting to blend into one another and create rural barrios]; etcetera.

When I'd started there, I was in the middle of thousands of acres of brushland.  I'd had to clear brush by hand to make a track to drive into my place. Clearing a fence line was done the same way.  Life was challenging, but good.  But, then new crop subsidies made it profitable to farm marginal land & the conglomeration that had bought the surrounding land years ago to ripoff the mineral rights found a new 'cash cow'.  They cleared everything & I was left as an island in a sea of dust.  And now, as I watched the pipeline blazing in the distance, I thought "Enough!"  I moved me and my family to McAllen & later to Austin.

After I sold out, the new owner lost the back part of the property to an oil rig & then later, a huge pipeline that brought natural gas in from Mexico was run along the county road in front of the place.  The new owner died several years later.  I was living in Austin by then.  I don't know if it was the crop dusters, the agribiz operation, the thieves, the poachers, the drug runners, the incompetent law enforcement, or 'what' that got him.

After reading my previous blog, realize that 'worst case scenarios' sometimes do occur (which is too often when one considers the consequences).  Life, such as it is, happens.

Our international agribiz food production is heavily dependent upon petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides.  Manufacturing that is oil dependent will steadily increase in cost & so will that which uses coal and nuclear energy sources / called an inflation factor.  Transporting people and freight will also continue to inflate costs.  And Wal-Mart and the thousands of other companies tied up in China and other developing nations won't always get their widgets and gizmos at rock bottom prices (not even if energy prices stayed the same).

A confluence of factors is steadily moving in to tighter orbits -- with each effecting the other.  Think of it as a possible 'perfect storm' just over the horizon & we're stupidly sailing right into it.  Even though we have the weather forecast, we're too greedy and foolish to not sail into it.  The first thing we could do is to ignore the Pope, the Evangelicals, the Imams, and other religious leaders who each want to secure their religion's domination by achieving numerical superiority. We need to control world population with contraception --- it used to be disease that pretty much managed our numbers / but soap & vaccinations pretty much took that out-of-play (for the moment). 

The next most important thing is to switch to the cheap and inexhaustible renewable energy sources by harnessing the wind, sun, water and geothermal --- but petroleum, coal and nuclear interests are against that.  Just look at Congressional action last session.

If we don't do these first two things, then anything else is superfluous.  At the worst possible moment, Mother Nature's minions, the Four Horsemen, will provide the population control measures needed / and by then the source of our energy won't matter, because the greenhouse gas induced global warming 'climate change' will be too far gone to slow down.  The experiment called 'modern civilization' will have failed -- just as most experiments do.

Even the uninitiated can see that Bush Jr.
knows that oil is a finite resource that can
only escalate in price and will be increasingly
difficult to depend on....  Bush's 'ranch'
has been completely off-the-grid since 2002.
The ranch is equipped with the latest in
energy saving
and renewable power systems.
It has been described as an "environmentalist's
dream home." The fact that a man as steeped
in the petroleum industry as Bush would own
such a home should tell us something.

Dick Cheney's personal investments indicate
he realizes we're facing some harsh economic
realities, also.  Cheney, several years ago,
invested heavily in a fund that specializes
in short-term municipal bonds, a tax-exempt
money market fund and an inflation
protected securities
fund. The first two hold
up if interest rates rise with inflation. The
third is protected against inflation.  Cheney
dumped another (estimated) $10 to $25
million in a European bond fund which
tells us that he easily forsaw a steadily
weakening dollar.  So, while working class
Americans are losing ground to inflation
and rising energy costs, Cheney will be
enhancing his wealth in Europe.  This from
the fellow who said "deficits don't matter".

No country, however powerful, can maintain
the huge federal deficit & gigantic trade deficit
that we are. It's been publicized for many years.
Yet (as a reflection of how our government
operates) people keep racking up credit card
debts
/ and note that 97% of bond  issues pass
in the USA while appraisals keep climbing ---
despite the axiom:
"If you can't pay for it, you don't 'need' it."...
the lessons of the Great Depression were passed
down to me. And when we don't learn the lessons
that history has to teach us, then we're bound
to repeat them. If you don't already own it
when things take a dive, you'll likely lose it.]
Whether you ride a bike, carpool, van pool, take the bus or even "car share", there are immediate options for reducing your transportation costs:
http://www.rivercitiesrideshare.com/en-US/
http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/bicycle/default.htm
http://bicycleaustin.info/
http://www.cleanairdrive.com/rcr/carpooling/default.htm
http://cleanairdrive.com/CommuteSolutions/Care/default.htm
http://www.capmetro.org/
http://www.cleanairdrive.com/rcr/Busing/default.htm
http://www.austincarshare.org/

Save how much?
http://www.nh.gov/dot/nhrideshare/calculator.htm
http://fueleconomy.gov/
As Hurricane Gustav approaches, I'm remembering talking with a lady I was working with who lost a brother in the immediate aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans (where she grew up).  Her family had finally managed to make it to Austin to live with her.  I commented to her that maybe they ought to consider not going back to New Orleans since it was below sea level, lower than the Mississippi River and has been continuing to sink throughout its recorded history & developments along the coast had reduced protection against storm surge in an age of rising seas and increasing storm intensities... she gave me a blank look.... she had no idea what I was talking about.  I was left wondering what planet she was from. Wasn't she aware that a grave cannot be dug anywhere in New Orleans without it filling up with water?  Didn't she wonder why so many people had begun moving to higher ground after Hurricanes Camille, which struck in August 1969, Andrew in August 1992 or George in September 1998 gave everyone a definite heads-up wake-up call?  Maybe she wasn't so much ignorant or in denial as she simply wanted to get her family out of her house -- but why would they want to return to a place that will ever increasingly be in greater and greater danger, especially since relocation funding was available?  I guess they REALLY love their town & I guess they hadn't read the 2001 article in Popular Mechanics (but I guess neither had FEMA):
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/1282151.html

Now I'm thinking of them needing to evacuate once again now as Gustav approaches.  I wonder if they're considering the viability of a continued life on a sinking delta?  I know flood insurance there is not an option.  They really need to read:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/25/time_to_move_to_higher_ground/
No matter where you live or move to, if you ever find yourself wondering where to take a particular item  what to do with something (e.g., electronics, appliances, oil filters, windows, anything at all) in a 'green' manner, simply click on:
http://earth911.org/
& enter the item and your zip code.