17 posts tagged “politics”

Automobile industry needs to change gears:

In introductory remarks to his first press conference, President-elect Barack Obama on November 7, 2008 said, “The auto industry is the backbone of American manufacturing.”  Automobile manufacturing and the requisite system of busy roads are an essential part of the nation’s economic system, however the nation also needs a new and improved electrical transmission highway that is so packed full of electrons that the nation can go totally electric.

The large manufacturing capacity of organizations like GMC, Ford and Chrysler and its labor force is an essential part of our economy whether they are producing cars for private use or as in World War II addressing a national need by manufacturing tanks, planes, ships, munitions, SPAM and more.

Today, more economic and social activity whizzes around our nation and the world via electrons bouncing around in computers, cell phones, HDTVs, and on the web than travel by car down the highways and byways of the nation.  The automobile is as important today as footwear long has been, but it is of no more or less importance that flip-flops, uggs or old-fashioned lace-ups.  They help us get around and get around we must---but not always.

Our major industry needs to turn a part of its production capacity to the manufacture of equipment that produces a plentiful supply of electrons, and thus enable the nation to go totally electric by capturing and utilizing the same energy that over the eons turned an accumulating biomass into fossil deposits.  This is the sun, wind and gravity that are a free natural resource, which transports them selves for nothing and will provide power for the nation’s largest consumption need: fixed-place facilities such as homes, factories and other public structures.  It is far more economical to bounce electrons back and forth at 60 cycles than to find, fight over, mine, transport, refine, distribute, market, consume and dispose of the waste of fossil fuels.

To accommodate going totally electric, the nation needs a new energy grid that facilitates the dispersed production of electricity from wind turbines, parabolic-mirror solar concentrators, sea and surf displacement generators, and thermal wells.  This system needs to have a peak-plus capacity; the plus power being used for the online electrolytic production of hydrogen for fuel cell and turbine electrical generation when the skies are cloudy or dark, and the wind and sea are still.  Electricity from thermal wells is continuous and, when combined with heat captured as a byproduct of smelting ore, casting metals and disposing of waste, has an estimated capacity to generate up to a third of the nation’s current electrical needs.

The development of this infrastructure is essential if this nation is to once again provide American citizens with personally meaningful, financially rewarding and culturally beneficial jobs, management positions, and investment/ownership opportunities.  Electric power inexpensively delivered to individuals and organization will provide the foundation of real wealth that underwrites value for some of the flimsy paper floating around in Wall Street’s house of cards.  Regardless of how much money is poured into the investment funnel, value is not going to trickle down to give this nation’s citizens the opportunity to work at the American Dream and enjoy its bounty. 

To right the current economic mess, we need to look beyond upping the seasonal sale of consumer goods and toying with the market.  The nation needs to invest in what foundations the production of all goods and services---human and physical energy.  Doing this will put money in the pockets of consuming workers and provide low cost power to the business and industrial community that will find it of great economic benefit to stay and produce within our shores.

How quickly must the nations go totally electric? Within the same time period that it took the Greatest Generation to turn America into the Arsenal of Democracy: one four-year term of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration.  At the dawn of World War II, FDR called his war production advisors together and informed them that he want American industry to produce 4,000 airplanes per month.  Some demurred and insisted that it would take a year, but FDR persisted and in a short time the nation was producing 4,000 a month and they made some of the older aircraft look like kites.  In addition, the nation produced thousand of tons of trucks, tanks, ships, munitions, SPAM and two things that citizens had never even hear of before, atomic bombs.

With a supply of electrical power that is almost free, what might the future show us: overhead trolley cables above interstates that let semi-trucks secure long-haul power, home greenhouses that facilitate the growing of edibles, heat produced inexpensively enough to feasibly produce biofuels from non-edibles, plug-ins on parking meters to charge battery powered hybrid cars, and maybe a free power lunch on a National Electrification Day commemorating the capture of electricity from the sun, wind and gravity at a cost only marginally more expensive than the air we breath.

The Army Corps of Engineers and Combat Engineers in the challenging times of World War II had a motto that well reflected the can-do-spirit that made the WW II arming of America possible, “The difficult we do today, the impossible will take a little longer.”  Aside from deciding to take the nation totally electric, there is nothing about the task that is comparably difficult or close to impossible as was that faced at the dawn of World War II---yes we can.

My interest in politics goes back to a time when I thought that the president had to be named FDR and the pope Pius---this election harkens back to the seismic shift in politics that gave the nation the New Deal.

There are obviously things that are different now from back then.  Notable to me is that none of the candidates have proposed making the changes that circumstance now require---the system is broken and needs to be fixed and tinkering with interest rates and tax rebates does not address the underlying problem.

This nation has abandoned its manufacturing capacity and participatory buying our way out of the problem is not going to be possible.  This is not a problem but rather an opportunity to move beyond the cancerous economic system that fakes progress in terms of using up resources, polluting the environment and hauling what is left off to the landfill.  We are not gong to be able to go to Wal-Mart to buy our solution.  We need to rely on American ingenuity and rebuild our decaying infrastructure and construct a new one that supports an improved way of life---dingdong, free-market economics is dead. 

This great nation of ours needs to match FDR’s WPA, PWA, and CCC with the building of a national energy grid and generating capacity that outdoes TVA of the New Deal.  This nation needs to go totally electric with an advanced energy grid and dispersed electrical generating system that delivers free electrical power to all Americans.

This can be achieved by the dispersed production of electricity from wind, geothermal wells, solar cell and thermal turbines, surf and hundreds of other ways not yet even dreamed of.  Such a system can be backed up by on-line fuel cells and turbines that run off of electrolytic generated hydrogen that is produced from a peak-demand-plus system.   There needs to be no concern about efficiency---daily more energy bounces around us than can only be fractionally captured.

Like the dramatic developments of World War II, we need to make this happen within a period of 4 years.  As a great people, these can be the most exciting times of our lives.  This will allow us to free ourselves from hostile international entanglements.  Go electric, totally electric.

A presidential candidate all choked up? With a Clinton it would depend upon what “choked up” means. Now does choked up mean it “is” what it is, or does it mean it never “is” what it is?

Anyway, in this political season a new voting block seems to have been discovered and exploited---the victims of domestic abuse.  With no more cost than some dry-cheek tears to signal “I can feel your pain” and with no public “thank you” to be given in recognition of their support, some victims of this silent breaker of hearts and killer of the human spirit were moved within the security of a voting booth to silently mark a secret ballot in denotation of their very real and very personal suffering.

Now having been cryptically used as well as abused and with their plight neither being openly condemned nor its redress made a conspicuous part of the candidates agenda, these continuing sufferers might aptly be termed a silent minority.

Excuse me, I think that I am getting sick to my stomach and going to have to throw up.  I seem to be suffering from mental bulimia---for this terribly flawed and liberal Democrat, some things are hard to swallow and keep down.  But what foolishness; it is best to keep in mind that only a prominent person bent of being world leader can sincerely express  genuine concern for this great land and the welfare and wellbeing of all of its people.

People do many things in life that they never attempt to explain in terms of motive or underlying cause; they just do what may or may not be assessed good or bad by others. And what is daily done will usually go unassessed by everyone, including the person that has done it.

Mother Teresa devoted her life to the good service of others, and this humble woman did not boastfully claim great piety or God’s favor by parading her religion alongside what she did.  In fact, this good woman lived a doubt-filled life of selfless service to the poor, sick, orphaned, and dying.  To these she gave the comfort she could not find for herself—as she wrote to her spiritual confidant:  “the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see—Listen and do not hear—the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ...”

Some politicians and their holier-than-though supporters boastfully attribute and code-talk signal that their actions and intent are specially directed by God to and through them by their one, true and slam-dunk religion.  They may fool those that long to be fooled—on TV, was that a cross or bookcase in that political Christmas card, or a bookcase intended to look like a cross to those in the know?  I have heard of Bible code; do we now have Season’s Greetings code?  Sorry, I should have said Merry Christmas.

Perchance it has been written for those that think it of import:  Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life?  It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.  For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that.  But now ye rejoice in your boastings: all such rejoicing is evil." ~ Jas. 4:14-16.

Economic growth to what end? Regardless of whether the state’s means are to be justified by their ends, the Machiavellian problem becomes one in which the means and their measure become ends within themselves. Thus, we have growth not for the greater good, but growth regardless of for what or for whom.

If free-market growth were to occur biologically within our body, we would call it malignancy and either attempt to control it or get rid of it altogether. From a perspective of Mother Nature, we humans could be considered the pathogens that she would pluck from planet Earth and send to the land fill, or mutate into beneficial elements that have self control.

Oh, so Mother Nature, like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, is but an invention of our imagination, however the Good Earth is not and we best attempt to keep it that way.

“We have met the problem and it is us,” ~ Eco Pogo.

A good deal of “scam science” comes out the propaganda mills in Washington and Washington that Karl Rove used to give us George W. Bush—these operations are rather ridiculously called “think tanks.”

These are “rent-a-mouthpiece” operations that make their members big bucks by telling the general public anything that will serve the religious, corporate and political interests of those that buy them. Thinks-tanks such as the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), Project for the New American Century (PNAC), and Discovery Institute will be happy find that privatization of Social Security is a wonderful idea, global warming is a scam, efforts to save the Florida Everglades are unnecessary, invading Iraq was a great idea, and Creationism-Intelligent Design only took God six days to do.

You too can start your own tax-exempt Think Tank. Just put some pages out of the web that attack something that is rational, include one or two nice pictures, list a bunch of folks as experts (either living or dead), and include an easy way for people to send you money—they call it getting involved.

If your think-tank cause is not supported by scientific research, just say that it is. If experts in the field have come to censuses about something that you do not like, just say that they have not.

And be sure to make it look like you are not someone out on a broken limb that is sawing it off—insist that there is a groundswell of opinion that is with you. This astorturfing should be supported by expert opinion from someone in or Forest Lawn Cemetery (oops, that cemetery is too close to Hollywood—list another one).

Remember, you are not trying to convince real thinking people that you know what you are talking about; you are just trying to get some fellow culturopaths to go along with you and send money or at least repeat your shtick.

Maybe some folks, particularly the religious right, remain ignorant of the disastrous consequence of global warming because its gradual increase is keeping them as blissfully unaware as a frog that has been placed in cold water that is gradually brought to a boil. Before the frog realizes it, he is in hot water.

It could be just a part of God’s master plan, and we are already in hell and God is gradually turning the heat up.

Does anyone know where the religious-right stands on revering the flag as an image of America?

I think we can trust that they have read Exodus 20:4 in their King James: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”

“Appease” is used as a pejorative term of weakness by those that advocates violence or the threat of its use in the solution of various kinds of disagreements--particularly those that involve conflicting interest between people of different nations.

The propagandists that use this term would like to claim that the world’s troubles with Adolph Hitler were in large part due to Neville Chamberlain traveling to in Munich1938 and entering into the Munich Agreement.

Well before September 1938, Hitler had completely consolidated his dictatorial control over Germany, and had ridden into Austria and taken over as a returning and liberating hero.

The rise of Hitler is not a lesson in appeasement, but one of slipping into being a nation of men and not law.

By using fear and the threat of foreign devils (axis of evil and WMDs comes to mind), a continuous barrage of propaganda, intimidation of the press, and with the support of a small but willing pack of sycophantic followers and opportunists, Hitler subverted the existing rule of law and crushed any opposition by claiming that those that questioned were unpatriotic, not good Germans, traitors or foolish appeasers—extraordinary means were needed in extraordinary times (and what’s the matter with a little water boarding?).

How did this happen? In part, as Edmund Burke suggested, “All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.”

But the forces that the good people of Germany faced were subtle and more sinister than they could ever imagine. The subversion of freedom was also so gradual that they never recognized a point of no return; by then anyone that did not go along was as much of an enemy as were the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, foreigners, and other evil doers.

After Hitler’s Germany came to an end, a majority of Germans could legitimately claim that they never really had seen it coming until it was too late and then there was nothing they could do. Too late, those that tried were the silent dead or missing.

As Justice William O.Douglas poetically cautioned, “As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”

And what about the small number of Germans that were loyal to Hitler to the end and those that to this day would beyond all reason defend Hitler and trumpet his cause again? They identify with their Man of Steel—the warp and weave of his nature is that of their own and no one can readily think of themselves as being rotten to the core.

Another Bush and Cheney abuse of power and the public trust.