The Long View
What are you doing tomorrow? How about this weekend? What are you doing next year? Whats your five year plan? Are you planning for retirement? Are you planning for your children’s college? What are you doing for your grandkids? How about your great grandkids? Whats your 100 year plan, your 500 year plan?
Most people plan for today, tomorrow, maybe if you find someone who has really got there stuff together they will be planning for the next five years. A very few plan for the kids, almost no one plans for the grandkids, and forget the next 100 to 500 years.
Its not really hard to see why, no one thinks about the deep future. Humans are little more than smart monkeys. We have pretty advanced brains, but its basically monkey 2.0 . We think about feeding ourselves, protecting ourselves from the elements, and the safety of our children. We are subject to instincts, to sudden desires for this or that. Its very hard for us to think long term.
If you are a student of history you will find many examples of the dangers of not thinking long term. The Mayans farmed themselves into extinction because they didn’t understand the consequences of there actions(we almost did the same during the dust bowl). Because of one mans desire to start his own silk industry our forests are now blighted by gypsy moths. Phragmites now choke the waterways of Cape Cod because someone thought they would look nice in the yard (or bittersweet, or Japanese knot-weed or….).
The trick it would seem is to think about what the consequences of our actions will be five, ten, and 100 years from now. This is far from easy. The future can bring many changes. For some things however the writing is on the wall. The single biggest problem facing the human race in the future is the threat of global warming.
The vast majority of the worlds science community now agree, global warming is real, and its getting worse. Its so seductively simple to not think about global warming. We can let our monkey 2.0 brains take over and simply worry about food, shelter, and the safety of our children. We can let the next generation take over. People say “I wont be around for that” or “That wont happen for 100 years.” Its so easy to not do anything at all. We are simply wired to ignore the future in favor of the “now.”
We have to overcome our own brains. We have to think about the future. We have to do something now. The human race is in trouble, big trouble. Like the dinosaurs, the dodo, or any other species we are only here because of a fragile web of interconnections with every other living thing on the planet. And like the dinosaur or the dodo we can go extinct. There could be a day at some point in the future when a sun rises on an Earth with no humans.
“I like my SUV”, “I don’t want to ruin my view”, “I like the coffee from Chile”, all of these boil down to “I don’t care about the future.” For so long the Cassandras have been screaming, and the masses have been ignoring. Another horrible feature of monkey brain 2.0 is that we like our conveniences. We don’t want to go back to a day when there was inconvenience. We like our modern life. We don’t care that we use up most of the worlds resources even though we are a very small amount of the worlds populations.
So what do we do? We make a long term plan, and we stick to it. We change how we drive, how we eat, and where we live. We build hybrid cars, install wind farms, grow our own food locally. We stop consuming the worlds resources at such a frenetic pace. We make sure we frame the arguments for the future in the proper terms, that is the survival of the human race. We think long term, or we die off. Its that simple.
Monday Confessional
Memorial day.
A lot of things seem to happen on Memorial day. Here on Cape Cod it means that the tourists invade. It also means that the weather seems to suddenly get really nice. It is also a day when soldiers, wars, and conflicts are talked about. It seems to me that the most patriotic thing that an American can do is to make sure that we remember as few soldiers as possible.
By that I mean that we should afford every effort to make sure that we are as peaceful as possible. That we never need soldiers. Wars are hell. Ask anyone who has ever been in a war, and seen their friends die, they will tell you that its not anything like the movies. Every bullet fired is a failure of diplomacy. Every person killed a failure of reason. Wars should always be the last resort. I say on this memorial day, we think not just about the dead, but how they got that way. They gave the ultimate sacrifice because the humans of the earth couldn’t work things out without violence. In a perfect world, soldiers would be fat and lazy, like the may tag repair man. They would never be needed, and they would never end up dead in some other country. This memorial day lets all try and remember the sacrifice of America’s soldiers, but lets also try and make sure that future soldiers will not need to give that same sacrifice.
Closer to my personal life things are going well. I have been working a lot. Keeping myself busy. Making sure that I pay the bills, and the rent. I have been trying to get a lot of things going all at once. It seems like all the pushing is finally paying off and things are starting to move. Lets just hope I can keep it up.
Generation Gap
Every American generation has had its defining moment. These moments are often not known until much later when the gaze of history fall back upon them. It could be argued that my grandparents generation’s defining moment was the fight against fascism in WW2. My parents generation could be said to be the generation that brought us advances in civil rights, womens rights, and the spread of acceptance and diversity. What then is my generations moment, what will people 50 years from now remember about us. Its so hard to tell without the benefit of hindsight but I would wager a couple of guesses.
Guess one: “The savior generation”
We could be remembered as the generation that broke with tradition, buried the old ways and finally cleaned up the planet. We could be remembered as the generation that fought hard and won, renewable energy, sustainable life styles, and global fights against poverty. We could be remembered as the generation that rejected unilateral war, polluting energy sources, and “got it” when it comes to a sustainable life style. We could be lauded as the hero’s that broke the chain of endless war for oil, dirty air, dirty water, and global hunger. We were the ones that invented renewable agriculture, bio fuels, diverse renewable energy sources, and brought the world together. We stopped global warming in its tracks, and survived what effects were already with us with hard work and dignity. We treated all the worlds people like they were our neighbors, and realized that global warming raised all ships. We understood that poverty in Africa breed terrorists in America, we got it that famine in Asia lead to illness in California, we understood that with modern travel all the worlds people were in the same boat, and we acted accordingly. We Shepperded human kind through its most dire period and produced a world that was better than when we found it.
Guess two: “Generation Nothing”
We could be remembered as a nothing generation. The one that did nothing of interest. The one that left all its problems to the next generation. The ones that voted more for American Idol, than the American President. The one that couldn’t take its eyes off of the new model of whatever, to realize that we were using up all the worlds resources with little regard for tomorrow. The one that tried so hard to maintain the status quo that we allowed every illegal war, every sneaky land grab, and the degradation of all that America stands for. To become this generation all that we will need to do is, nothing. Keep watching TV, keep ignoring political happenings, keep driving your SUV, keep buying food from thousands of miles away, in short keep doing what we are doing.
Guess three: the “last generation”
We could be the last generation that really had the chance to do anything. We could be the generation that were here at the “end.” We could be the one that used up all the oil with nothing to replace it with. We could be the one that watch global warming ramp up, killing billions, while doing nothing. If we are really unlucky we could be the generation that sees the return of nuclear war, global famine, wars for water and oil, the breakdown of freedom and the end of modern life. We drove our SUV’s until the earth had enough and struck back. Rising oceans, the collapse of our unsustainable agriculture, lack of leaders due to voter apathy, rise in global poverty leading to revolts world wide, dyeing oceans, all combine to make us the last generation. All future people will live at subsistence levels.
These guesses of course could be so wrong as to be comical in 50 years. If my generation turns out to be one one of the last two, well lets hope the earth can handle such ruff use for another generation. Perhaps the grand kids that are not killed by one of the many problems facing the world today, will be able to do a better job than we did. Maybe its not too late.
But if any of the three guesses have any merit I for one want to be part of the savior generation rather than the other two. I want to sit on my porch when I become very old, sit and tell young people about how the sky used to be black with waste, and that people fought wars over this nasty black stuff called oil. I want to sit and tell old tales of the “bad old days” and watch there jaws drop with disbelieve. I want to tell them how there used to be poor people, how everyone used to fight all the time, and have them all think I am telling tall tales.
New Turbine At Upper Cape Tech
Upper Cape Technical School has a new 10kw turbine. The turbine uses a brand new kind of tower that allows for easy tilt down for maintenance. The students of the school helped to construct the turbine, in collaboration with Cape And Islands Self Reliance and Clean Energy Design.
Self Reliance put on a week long wind workshop, the attendees spent half of each day learning about the wind, electricity, and turbine technology, and the second half of each day installing the tower, and turbine.
After more than a week of really hard work the turbine was ready to go up. The counter balance tower worked like a charm. The hydraulic arm lowered the tower right down to the ground, we attached the turbine and blades and sent her up.
When the turbine started spinning I was simply amazed at how silent it was. I have been around several large and small scale turbines and all of them have made a gentle whoosh sound. This turbine is silent. We were all floored at how quiet it is.
The students came out to see the turbine go up, and had a lot of questions about how it worked and how the tower worked. They got really excited when they learned that they would be providing the maintenance for this machine.
Both tech schools on cape now have a PV array, and a wind turbine. This allows them to offer classes on renewable energy technology. A new industry is being built from the ground up here on Cape Cod, and now we will have skilled craftsmen and women ready to enter it.
The turbine is a learning tool, it will provide a large amount of energy, enough to cover 2 to 3 normal sized homes. The tower is the first of its kind, a counter balance tilt up tower. It allows easy tilting down of the tower for servicing of the turbine, without any guy-wires. This allows the tower to keep a very small footprint, something that is often needed in areas where space is limited.
The workshop was a great success, and a good time was had by all!
Here are two video’s took using a digital camera, they are not the best quality but they do show the turbine up and running.
Upper Cape Tech Wind Turbine Video One (mpg)
Upper Cape Tech Wind Turbine Video Two (mpg)
A Crook Is A Crook Is A Crook
The scandal bug has hit the GOP hard lately. It seems every week some high placed Republican party member is outed for some sort of crime. The democrats have been relatively free from such scandal, but today new information has come out about the actions of William Jefferson Democrat rep from Louisiana.
It takes a particular kind of nerve to be filmed taking $100,000 in alleged bribe money out of an FBI informant’s car, have the FBI later find the same cold, hard cash wrapped in aluminum foil in your freezer — and then adamantly claim that you have done nothing wrong.
If these things are true, and it seems they may be, the democrats need to separate themselves from this man as soon as possible. Instead I fear that they are going to run the exact same play the Republicans have perfected as of late. They will use the same spin tactics the republicans do, and tell the same stupid lies the republicans did.
If the Democrats want to show us they are a party ready to lead they need to show the American public that they will not tolerate the same law breaking that is so common with the party currently in power. My advice to Democrats, don’t play politics, find the crooks and kick them out. Don’t protect someone who is corrupt just because they vote with you in the House. Don’t follow the Republicans down that road.
Williams was found with 90 grand in the freezer for Pete’s sake! This is either the biggest frame job ever, or this guy is crooked. The Democrats must see that the American people don’t want more of the same. They don’t want to trade one crooked party for another. If they hope to win back the house and senate they need to show me, and the rest of the American public that they will not suffer fools lightly.
In a related note the Republicans seem to be as worried about this raid as the Democrats.
Republicans should have been elated in the days after the FBI raided the Capitol Hill office of Democratic Rep. William Jefferson (La.), but instead some were bristling, suggesting that the first-time-ever search of a sitting congressman’s office may violate the constitutional separation of powers.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) told a wire service yesterday that he was “very concerned” about the constitutionality of the search and had queried the Senate legal counsel to look into it.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) sent an e-mail to Capitol Hill Republicans on Sunday night decrying the FBI’s actions.
“What happened Saturday night … is the most blatant violation of the Constitutional Separation of Powers in my lifetime,” Gingrich fumed, after having seen news of the search on CNN. “The President should respond accordingly and should discipline (probably fire) whoever exhibited this extraordinary violation. … As a former Speaker of the House, I am shaken by this abuse of power.”
Could it be that the Republicans feel this sort of criminal investigation (you know the kind were they actually catch the bad guy doing bad things) could set a bad precedent when it comes to there wrong-doing? Could they worry that they could be next after the mid term elections?
Over the next couple of months, if it comes out that he was in fact guilty I want to here calls for Williams to step down, and I hope to here these calls from the leaders of the democratic party. This is not time to round the wagons and put on a spin campaign. This is time to find out the truth, and if the truth shows corruption that corruption must be exposed and the criminals behind it must be brought to justice.
Monday Confessional
Man I am busy. Running around all crazy like. Doing all sorts of things, getting into all sorts of action. I helped to put a turbine up (more coming soon) and I have been doing a lot to further my one man IT firm Dune Design. I went to Martha’s Vineyard and saw a naked guy (don’t ask) and explored some cliffs, good times all around. Tess is keeping me very very busy and she is the most amazing person ever. Life is good, and hectic, and good. Just trying to hold on to all of it.
You Want Cures, You Need Science
If you believe that the big bang theory is wrong, thats fine. If you believe that evolution is bunk, thats OK. If you think the earth is only 2000 years old, good for you. When, however, you start basing laws based on these views, we are going to have some problems. And that is what seems to be happening with a new cancer cure.
Merck & Co. Inc.’s vaccine to prevent the world’s most prevalent sexually transmitted infection sailed through a panel of U.S. health experts, despite early fears of opposition from the Christian Right that it might lead to promiscuity and a false sense of security.
The drugmaker’s efforts to educate Christian groups while touting the vaccine’s top selling point — prevention of cervical cancer — helped win them over.
But Merck may ultimately find itself at loggerheads with those same groups as it seeks to make the vaccine mandatory for school admission, a step considered key for widespread acceptance and one that many of the groups oppose.
The vaccine, known as Gardasil, with an estimated $2 billion U.S. market potential, targets four types of sexually transmitted human papilloma virus, or HPV, which is believed to cause more than 70 percent of cervical cancer cases and 90 percent of genital warts.
“We don’t think it should be made mandatory for school attendance,” said Peter Sprigg, vice president of policy at the Family Research Council, who attended the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory panel meeting on Thursday.
That view is shared by evangelical Christian group Focus on the Family
From here.
If you want cures, you need science. So we could tackle this problem one of two ways, we could ignore these anti-science crusaders and continue to enjoy the plethora of benefits that science has brought us. Or we can fight fire with fire and try and use our beliefs in science to pass our own laws. Perhaps we could pass laws that say “unless you believe in science, you can’t get anti-biotics.” or “unless you believe in science, no motorized travel for you.”
I kid, but that is basically what these people are doing. They are using there faith to influence laws such that we the science champions will not reap the rewards of all that hard work.
Honestly why not cure cancer if you find such a cure? Why worry about weather or not curing cancer will lead to more sex. Cancer is bad, we should cure it. If having sex at an early age is bad, lets stop that as well. However we should never make arguments that curing X will lead to more of Y, and because Y is against my belief we can not cure X.
You can not have it both ways, if you want cures for cancer, and AIDS and even the common cold you need to embrace science. If you are reading this right now you are using products of science. Most things in life are products of science. For all its comforting ways, faith has cured very few illness (if any) and created no new technology. If you like cars, TV, Advil, flight, guns, shoes, radio, Viagra, and many many other things, then you like science.
It can bring us bad things, good thing, neutral things, but its the only way we have found so far to get new things. If you don’t like it, stop using all the things science has lead to and don’t try to hold these things from the rest of us.
What if? (Part Two)
A while ago I wrote about the Bush administration using warrant-less data mining to try and find journalists secret sources.
Now it seems that attorney general Alberto Gonzales says that it may be possible to prosecute journalists that public information that they got from secret sources, or that is classified. Revealing CIA illegal secret prisons, or illegal torturing, secret energy policies that favor the oil companies, the lack of planning for the Iraq war, all of which we as citizens need to know, could get the reporter arrested.
This is a bald faced attempt to stifle free speech and to keep the governments illegal secrets, secret. When journalists are unable to find out the illegal workings of the government our democracy suffers. Think back to all the scandals that have been revealed by journalists, conservative or liberal you should be happy that these muck raker’s are out doing there job.
Watch Alberto talk in his own words below, and then here from the ABC reporters on how they feel about there phones being monitored.
Download this video here. (wmv)
Download this video here. (wmv)
A Failure Of Justice
Imagine for a second that something like the following has happened to you. You are abducted, taken to some far off place, beaten, treated badly, tortured, and not told why or by whom.
Then lets imagine you are then dropped in some other country and told “It was all a big mistake.” Well this has actually happened to a German citizen named Khaled el-Masri.
Mr el-Masri says he was picked up in Macedonia in 2003 and flown to Kabul, Afghanistan, where he alleges torture.
The judge did not rule on the truth of the allegations, but said letting the case proceed might endanger security.
Rights group the American Civil Liberties Union brought the case on behalf of Mr el-Masri - who was never charged with any terrorist offenses.
Besides Mr Tenet, the case named 10 other CIA employees, as well as three other companies and their employees.
However, the district court judge in Virginia rejected the challenge, saying Mr el-Masri’s “private interests must give way to the national interest in preserving state secrets”.
So your picked up, tortured, held in secret for months, and when its all over you are not even able to sue, because your law suite would reveal state secrets. Kafka would be proud.
Lets follow this logic, we are going to scoop up people we think are terrorists (to protect our people and preserve freedom), we are going to torture them (to get the information out of them, to protect our people and preserve freedom), then when we mess up we wont even let them take the case to court (to protect our people and preserve freedom).
In order to keep people safe, to protect there freedom, we make them unsafe, and take away there freedom. We destroy freedom, to protect it. We abduct them, take them to another country, beat them, inject them with drugs, make them were diapers and shackle them. Then when we realize it was all a mistake we wont let them have there day in court because we are afraid that it will “reveal state secrets.”
But perhaps the case is being dismissed not for state secrets but because the Bush administration does not want the details of this highly illegal program to come to light.
“It’s simply not possible to believe the case involves state secrets,” Wizner told the judge. “The government’s moving to dismiss this case … on the basis of fiction.”
…
The Bush administration based its dismissal argument on affidavits from Porter Goss, who was CIA director before announcing his resignation last week, that officially assert the executive branch of government’s state secrets privilege. The privilege is a legal precedent that gives President George W. Bush the right to protect U.S. military and state secrets.
“By their very nature, clandestine intelligence activities are not acknowledged by the United States,” Goss said in a public affidavit. He also filed a classified affidavit with the court.
“The denial of CIA involvement may, by itself, provide the informed intelligence analyst useful information about the CIA’s capabilities and the scope and thrust of CIA activities,” the document said.
Goss also warned that public exposure from the case could undermine U.S. relations with foreign countries.
The governments position can be classified as such. “We cant let the guy who we tortured illegally to go to court because then everyone will know that we tortured him illegally, and also the fact that we tortured him illegally will make other countries, whose citizens we are torturing illegally, mad at us”
In America a lawsuit like this would be seeking millions of dollars in damages and perhaps years of imprisonment for the culprits. Masri only wants…
$75,000 but has said he would consider settling in exchange for an apology from Tenet.
Perhaps this is what they are really afraid of, being forced to say they are sorry.
This guy was a German citizen but what is to keep the same thing from happening to an American (for all we know it already has)? There is no oversight, no monitoring of these programs, we don’t know what is happening.
We have let this go too far, you can not destroy freedom to protect it. You can not remove human rights in order to preserve them, you can not become a monster to stop one.
Crooksandliars.com Seems To Be Down?
Crooks and liars seems to have been hacked, down, or purchased, by something called ziaspace.com
A WHOIS search seems to show that the John still owns the place, perhaps they are moving server companies? Lets hope its not permanent
Registrant:
4066 1/2 Lyceum StLos Angeles CA,90066 Fax. +0.1234 Creation Date: 06-Sep-2004 Expiration Date: 06-Sep-2005
Domain servers in listed order: ns1.bravehost.com ns2.bravehost.com
,
United StatesRegistered through: GoDaddy.com (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: CROOKSANDLIARS.COM
Created on: 05-Sep-04
Expires on: 05-Sep-06
Last Updated on: 18-Jan-05Administrative Contact:
Amato, John amacom@earthlink.net
4066 1/2 Lyceum St
Los Angeles CA,90066 Fax. +0.1234
,
United States
Tel. +0.3109955322Technical Contact:
, nocontactsfound@secureserver.net
4066 1/2 Lyceum St
Los Angeles CA,90066 Fax. +0.1234
,
United States
John Amato (3953701411) (amacom@earthlink.net) Fax — Tel. +0.3109955322Domain servers in listed order:
LAIN.ZIASPACE.COM
ANDROMEDA.ZIASPACE.COM
REVA.SIXGIRLS.ORGRegistry Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
Registry Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Registry Status: clientTransferProhibited
Registry Status: clientRenewProhibited
Registry Status: clientUpdateProhibited
edit: Everything seems to be ok now, odd.
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