May 15th, 2007
Dear Readers,
It's easy to imagine a clean world. Los Angeles and San Bernadino could be practically smog-free in under 10 years.
What percentage of cars you see on the road today are more than 10 years old? Surprisingly few. In ten years we could replace every gas-powered vehicle with an electric one.
Oh sure, owners of "classics" will complain about the right to plow into children because their vehicle is too big and heavy to stop, and its old brakes not being ABS, it couldn't handle the situation. They will stop complaining only when the lack of airbags kills them.
We can all have electric cars. Our next car SHOULD be electric. If you want to solve global warming it MUST be electric but.
But what?
Hmmmm. But that electric power must be clean, too. That means not Nuclear, not coal, not oil, not gas. Not "King CONG" as Harvey Wasserman puts it. Anything but.
Anything?
Yeah, anything. Wind power works. Latest studies says maybe it kills bats. But the SAME study concluded windmills DON'T kill significant numbers of birds after all -- it's a HOAX. They do kill birds. They do kill bats. So do cars. So does pollution. The question is, which system kills more, and how many bats (or birds) per mile of human travel are "worth it" to the average citizen?
Windmills can be located in great masses offshore, Wind turbines would be vastly more efficient than windmills and probably vastly less likely to have birds go in, but nobody's offering ten billion dollars to develop the technology over, say, the next 24 months -- there are no MANHATTAN PROJECTS for renewable energy. Never has been. No matter how desperate we've become.
Wave energy works! But no LOCAL government entity has the money or the GUMPTION to build one off their shores. SOMEONE will complain that it's environmentally damaging -- and they'll be right, to some extent. That same person will simply not believe that if we do one thing, it prevents another. They will believe that nothing in the world will change except now there is a different view on THEIR horizon, and if they paid for that beachfront view, they'll ASSUME the price of their house will go down. How many wrongs make a right? The correct answer is NONE. Offshore energy systems must be used, but something needs to be offered in return. And the local government cannot offer that! It cannot say: "All our cars will be electric in 5 years if we do this."
It takes a GLOBAL VILLAGE. But it can be stopped by the village idiot.
Profits or prophets, take your pick. If you want to make money off of other people's misery, invest in King CONG. If you want to listen to all the people who say: "WE WANT TO LEAVE A CLEAN PLANET FOR OUR CHILDREN. AND WE'RE TIRED OF THE SMOG AND THE WARS OVER OIL, TOO!" then all you have to do is destroy the CONG monster.
And that takes BIG GOVERNMENT. Big, honest, scientifically sound government. That's not what we have right now. And three (four, five, a thousand) wrongs don't make a right. Yet here we are.
Look at our Justice Department. Dropping like flies. When did the victims of Nuclear Power get a fair hearing since George Bush came to office? NEVER! He appointed people who will stop an investigation on the grounds that the complaint is incomplete or unclear in any way -- but the appointed Bushie made it a INVIOLATE RULE that the government employee handling the complaint was NOT ALLOWED TO CONTACT THE COMPLAINANT IN ANY WAY concerning whatever was incomplete or unclear!
A system designed to stop whistleblower complaints. It worked. At last count, it was Whistleblower complaints successfully prosecuted: 0. Whistleblower complaints thrown out: 600 and counting.
"High Crimes and Misdemeanors" includes not protecting us from terrorism. In 1980 Bennett Ramberg published his seminal work: Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy: An Unrecognized Military Peril (University of California Press, good luck finding a copy).
Every high-ranking official at the time MUST have known about this book. Every REPORTER worth their salt who was working on the issue must have known about it, too. And it's as TRUE TODAY AS IT WAS BACK THEN. It's never been refuted, only IGNORED.
Yet here we are.
Instead of having a government which is progressing towards a rational energy policy, we have a madman President who thinks he can conduct orchestras on a whim, dance the night away, make up names for people, start wars he can't stop because he hears voices he thinks are God's, defile the Constitution and set the stage for future defilement by future despots, or do anything else that pleases him -- King George and his sidekick Dick.
Protected by the evil Alberto Gonzales, who appears to be nothing less than a pathological liar and yet holds the position American citizens are supposed to have the most trust in. Crazy "Albo" drives this country (and the world) nuts, like a John Sweeney nightmare.
And nobody is left to charge the real criminals with the crimes they are committing. The murder of our young children who are sickened by leukemia and childhood cancers because the "Demon Hot Atom" (radioactive waste) from nuclear weapons production can now LEGALLY be dumped into our trash system, which is a system based ENTIRELY on being a RENEWABLE ENERGY SYSTEM. We recover massive quantities of METALS and PLASTICS and COMBUSTIBLES from trash, and re-use this material (at least once, by burning it, or sometimes over an over).
Can America elect officials strong enough to fight KING CONG? No way! Look at the current crop of front-runners: Nearly all are apologists for nuclear power in no uncertain terms, many openly embracing it. Would any of them find a way to stop coal power, or force it to be clean? Which one would change Detroit into a clean-machine manufacturing center? Not a one.
We reap what we sow. Alberto Gonzalez, the same one now reviled by nearly all of Congress and most of America, set the stage for the horrible flood of torture victims, including our own soldiers and American contractors, and Iraqi citizens, by legalizing the use of torture by our soldiers. We fought two World Wars, a Civil War, a Revolution, and a thousand other fights and didn't need these laws. But Alberto Gonzales gave them to us, and now we are reaping what we have sowed.
America must stand taller than this. America must make itself #1 in JUSTICE, FREEDOM, LIFE-EXPECTANCY, EDUCATION, LITERACY, and TECHNOLOGY.
Modern technology, properly applied, can and WILL save humanity. But when the former head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, (Richard A. Meserve) can become the head of the Carnegie Institution, which gives out BILLIONS in grants for scientific research and education, well, SCIENCE really doesn't stand a chance!
So that's why I say:
God help us.
Sincerely,
Ace
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