Almost all wars and terrorism in the world can be stopped. Almost all dictators and tyrants can rendered powerless. All we have to do is to stop paying them. An alarming amount of the money Western nations pay for oil is going into the coffers of people who terrorists and dictators. All we have to do defund the worlds most violent criminals is to become energy independent.

In the first phase of energy independence we get as much energy as possible from resources which we own or which are in the hands of friendly, stable nations. First we build new nuclear power plants in every state. If the French can make nuclear work what excuse do we have? In addition, we drill for oil off all our coastal waters and we build new refineries and pipelines in every state. Existing energy companies are making plenty of money in the current climate of false scarcity. We will have to find away around them. Usually way around greedy energy companies would require political will. However, almost all existing politicians are in the pocket of the energy companies. This includes democrats and republicans. So every politician currently in office needs to be thrown out. Anyone who works for or who owns an existing conventional energy company is in my view disqualified for public office. We already know from the Bush/Cheney experience that such politicians will work in a way contrary to the national security of the United States and will start pointless wars for oil.

Merely having new politicians willing to clear the legal minefields laid down by oil bought senators and congressmen might not be enough. We might have to get a little bolder. Therefore I suggest that we build terawatts of new nuclear power plans and miles of new oil refineries in Mexico and that we send the power back to the states via pipelines, power lines, hydrogen, or whatever works. This will provide work for Mexicans and energy for us. The Mexican government will have a large incentive to make the plants secure and this increased security might even spill over to the borders and make our borders more secure.

While phase one is going on we need to start on phase 2. In this phase we bring online as many green and renewable technologies as are currently viable and put as much money as is needed into producing more. I would suggest that the model cities be built in the west and south—anywhere that it does not get cold enough to snow. The idea is to build small towns or cities that will go cold turkey. There will be no fossil fuels of any kind allowed in these cities. All vehicles and houses will be powered by wind, solar and bio-mass. The best locations would be those that have year around wind, sun and enough farming in the area to produce the bio mass. These experimental towns would be off the power grid. The only way to get power to them would be to make the green and renewable technologies work. Volunteers who truly believe that the future is green would be invited to apply for residency. We would probably take engineers and farmers over other types because we would need people who were skilled in keeping the power conversion machinery going and others who don’t mind the get your hand dirty hard work of farming.

By the pool of dreams in the cool of the evening

where the dragon Flies go to die.

White birds rise like fleeing souls

and skim the boundary between life and death

calling as though for something lost.

Evening snapped on through a bloodless sunset.

Sparse and reluctant stars rim the periphery of the sky.

It is a cloudless night.

I’ll take Rudy Giuliani because he has the right flaws. The problem with people like Hilary Clinton or even George Bush is that they believe themselves to be flawless.

Bush is “flawless by faith.”

Hilary is “flawless” by politics. To devoted lefties all that is good is on the left. All else is Error. They can be surprising dogmatic and inflexible about this belief.

The problems associated with anyone who believes they are God or that they can speak authoritatively and definitively for God are probably obvious. Nevertheless, let’s review. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Consider Bush invading Iraq for no logical reason or equally explicable, nominating Harriet Meyers for the Supreme Court. None could dissuade him from disaster because after all, he had spoken to God and God told him he was good to go.

Now if Hilary became Commander in Chief, what could we expect? We have already seen that Hilary believes herself incapable of error. It’s always the fault of a Right Wing Conspiracy or the Boys Club beating up the girl. It is never that Hilary made a mistake. It’s always someone else’s fault. So should we put someone who believes she can do no wrong into the most powerful job in the world? I don’t think so.

Rudy on the other hand know he done wrong. Several times. His position on abortion is nuanced. It has to be to get in under the radar. My only trepidation about Rudy is his view of civil rights. Like Bush, he sometimes seems to forget that everyone who did 9-11 came from outside of the US, and that therefore our borders and our foreign policy are the best ways to deal with the threat. Our civil liberties are not a threat, however much the Bush administration and it’s neo-con acolytes seem to think they are.

One advantage that Giuliani has over Bush in this matter is that he has not been caught publicly playing grab ass with the Saudis and his family is not owned by oil money. In addition, I think congress will be more embolden to keep Rudy’s feet to the fire when it comes to protecting and defending the constitution and persevering our rights and freedoms. It will be good to see congress doing something other than buying our votes with our money for once.

Rudy Giuliani does realize that there is a group of people who wake and go to bed wanting to kill us and that we need to be prepared to do something about that. In my view, Iraq is not that thing we needed to do. All that was accomplished there was to give radical Islam a foothold in Iraq it never had before and to pave the way for a new Shite state. Lord knows you can never have too many of those…

The poor and elderly should be moved out of harms way. This is the true lesson of the Katrina hurricane. We should use two criteria to evaluate evacuation zones. The first is: what is the likelihood of a disaster occurring? The second is: what is the likelihood that it will take longer than three days for authorities to get to the most difficult to reach people? Multiply these two probabilities together and we get a rough estimate of the places where it should be public policy to evacuate the poor and elderly. The 100 places in the United States with the worse overall scores should be evacuated as soon as possible. Furthermore, just as governments should not reward people for building in flood plains or on earthquake faults, governments should also not pay to put affordable housing in the most hazardous areas in America. In fact, in conjunction with the evacuation which should be done as soon as possible, we should engage in longer term planning. Zoning commissions in various municipalities should zone certain residential areas as being unfit for the poor and elderly. These areas would come from a larger list of the 1000 least safe places in America.

The poor and elderly should clamor for these changes most of all. During Katrina we saw the spectacle of poor people who did not have cars locked in an arena. After the bathrooms stopped working conditions were like being locked in an outhouse or cesspool. No human being in America should be treated that way. As for the elderly, when some of their care takers fled to higher ground it is still unclear what was or was not done to the old people who were stranded.

As a rough measure we can identify places where it might be hard to rescue people. Katrina again comes to the fore. Any location where natural or man made disasters are relatively likely would be one criteria. Take for instance, fault lines in major California cities. Another factor is geography. Help is much quicker to arrive when there are many maintained roads entering the affected areas from every direction. If you have an ocean on one or more sides then the disaster has to take out fewer paths before our emergency response would become suspect.

We might want places some locations higher on the potential disaster list even though we know of no conceivable natural and man made hazard because the paths for emergency response or few, or vulnerable or poorly maintained. For instance, if government is the first or only resort to rescue a group of poor or elderly people on an isolated island with little or no transportation, then government might want to discourage the poor and elderly from living there.

Let us enact a policy to protect people who otherwise might die before we can reach them. We should do this not just because it would be he compassionate thing to do, but also because in the long run it could save us time and money. Some might counter argue that people have the right to live where ever they wish. This might be true if such people are paying for where they live with their own funds and if they make their own arrangements for emergencies. If they expect taxpayers to foot the bill we have the right to at least discourage costly and potentially dangerous behavior.

Pink blossoms tumbling

Strong Swiftly moving current

Youth passes quickly.

Flight

Screaming over the liquid mirror

gliding over infinity

hoping and fearing the water's edge.

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Haiku Interlude

Wading through the grass

hip deep in the nodding heads

all dew and dust now

...........................

dawn and dirt and dew

and bright days begin anew

dusk and dust and death

.....................

beating feathered wings

screaming over a mirror

landing on the shore

......................

holding baited breath

waiting on the next moment

releasing tension

Take the Pledge

All Presidential Candidates should make pledges like those below. If they refuse, then you should refuse to vote for them.

1. No More Oil Wars.

2. Work for independence from foreign oil on day one.

3. No more wars for corporate profit.

4. No more secret deals for $4 per gallon gas.

5. No more Chicken Hawks promoting wars of choice when they themselves avoided combat.

6. Make government green--if you can't make what you have the most control over green, I don't care about your plans to make the country green.

7. No more torture.

8. No more lying about torture.

9. No more re-defining torture.

10. No more drunken hunting.

11. No more secret deals with big corporations to divide up the spoils before the war even starts.