OZONE HOLE (Poem)

It was a colorless, odorless, nontoxic, nonexplosive gas.
At ground level it did a lot of good.  It chilled food,
Kept it fresh; cleaned electronics; made insulation foam;
A wonder compound.

But it overstayed its welcome, slowly decaying, destroying
Another compound, also colorless, high in the stratosphere
Where it concentrated, doing a lot of good; sheltering us
From Sun's rays.

Ironically, this other gas does a lot of damage to nature
At ground level: an oxidant that harms plants, hurts lungs,
Stings eyes, creates photochemical smog.  Laws were past
To regulate it.

Humanity faced a dilemma of greater good. An established
Chlorofluorocarbon industry, an important way of life,
To balance against hypothetical ills from ozone destruction;
More ultraviolet radiation.

Skin-cancer, cataracts, food-chain destruction might result
If the one good gas was permitted to destroy the other good
Gas.  So society in 1987 limited the one good compound to
Save the other.


Originally  written in 1989 and dedicated to Richard E. Benedick, chief negotiator for the U.S. Revised, Ozone Hole was  recast in 20 line format for Poetic Voices in America, Fall 1996: Sparrowgrass Poetry Forum, p. 333. (Library of Congress: ISBN 0-923242-49-X)

PRESIDENTIAL EXECUTIVE ORDERS

The Speaker of the House John Boehner says he will sue the president because of all the executive orders he is issuing.  Though it does seem as if President Obama is keeping the country running by Executive Orders, It turns out he is a piker.

At 4 yrs and 3 mo. into his presidency (March), President Barack Obama issued 175 Executive Orders.*  At this rate (3.4314/mo.), he will have 329 Executive Orders beating his predicessor George Bush (#43)  with 291.

And there are four Presidents in the 1,000 or more Executive Order Club club: Woodrow Wilson with 1803 (first member), Theodore Roosevelt with 1081, Calvin Cooledge with 1203, and Franklin Roosevelt with 3522 (the champion).  There are two honorable mentions with more than 900 Executive Orders: Herbert Hoover with 968 and Harry S. Truman with 907, making four Presidents in a row with at least 900 Executive Orders.  Then things dropped off markedly as Dwight D. Eisenhower had "only" 484.

Since Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan is the champion with 381 followed by Bill Clinton with 364, both recent records probably safe from Obama.

I believe Jimmy Carter had the most of one-term presidents with 320.

So based on number of Executive Orders, I think it will be hard to make a case that Obama has been making an execessive amount; however, I presume the case will be made that his Orders are more meaningful. 

  * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_order

ALTERNATIVE ENERGY DISTRIBUTION

Below is a reference to an alternative energy news item that is so valuable it will form the bulk of this post.

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/new-energy-map-4-cool-things-about-renewables-17572

Although the solar power ability in the cloudier northeastern U.S. is less than, say, in New Mexico, the cost of electricity is also higher so it is pretty much of a wash, i.e. solar power is relatively as efficient in the NE as it is in lower latitude sunnier states.  And it can be cloudier than you think.  I had a solar heated room added to my house when I lived in Lakewood, CO, where solar panels heated water in 55 gal. drums and a fan circulated the hot air controlled by a thermostat.

As to wind power, I used to live in Lakewood Colorado, a suburb on the west side of Denver about halfway to the Front Range.  Winds were so high (gusts of 90 mph were common) that we had to tie down trailer offices for 90 mph winds.  There were people close to the Front Range who had double front doors and had a hard time keeping them closed.  They had to put positive closures that went into the floor and top of the frame.

I used to be involved in something called hot-dry-rock geothermal power a long time ago.  In this case you drill, say two wells, and put water down one and hyrdrofracture (frack) the rock between them creating an artificial geothermal power system.  Once a connection is established you can heat circulating water almost as a closed system.  A problem was that the water reacted with the rock (granite in the case I followed) and sealed the cracks so repeated fracking was necessary.  I don't know if any electricity is being produced this way but, of course, geothermal water is used to heat homes as well as used to develop electricity.

WORKING HARD

We hear a lot these days about how hard and difficult the lives of the wealthy have been.  How the Clintons came out of the White House in debt and had to worked hard to erase it, for example.  Anyone who has a mortgage is probably in debt.  You want to know what working hard is, I'll tell you what working hard is:

Jack hammering up a concrete driveway and loading the blocks of concrete into a truck.  That's working hard.

The guys that move your davenports, piano's (without scratching them), and file cabinets when you move.  That's working hard.

Picking oranges in Florida, putting them into bushel baskets, and carrying them and tossing them into a truck.  That working hard.

Carrying an air conditioner up into an attic or roof top so that the occupants can be cool.  that's working hard.

And you aren't going to get rich doing any of these sorts of things, though as an air conditioning technician, you might get to own your own modest home.  Heck, you aren't going to make as much in a lifetime of work as the median CEO's bonus.

I worked long hours of study, developed my memory, and increased my power of concentration in college to be able to do something I liked to do part of the time and there was also a lot of luck, assists from others, and heart break among the emotional highs.  But I also did this so that I wouldn't have to work hard.

Working long hours, wheeling and dealing, speaking, needing some luck, and doing something you like to do isn't workin hard.

Common! Cut it out.

CHILD REFUGEE PROBLEM IN U.S.

The influx of child refugees into the U.S., some accompanied by adults but many not, is creating a number of problems in addition to processing them:

One side effect of the crisis: Easier drug smuggling by cartels. "The arrival of large groups of women and children on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande is pulling agents away from their patrol stations elsewhere along the border, creating gaps in coverage that the traffickers can exploit, according to Chris Cabrera, the Border Patrol union representative here. The smugglers wait on the southern banks of the Rio Grande as migrant groups as large as 250 wade across at dusk and turn themselves in to the Border Patrol, he said. Then groups of single men proceed to cross under cover of darkness....The most recent statistics...show that narcotics seizures have fallen across the entire border with Mexico this year, with the drop being larger in Texas than the average."Joshua Partlow and Nick Miroff" in The Washington Post.  (http://webmailb.juno.com/webmail/new/5?userinfo=8b254f2f4f26b1dc56d8fe41da329a7b&count=1403622068&cf=SP2&randid=1822163293)

We should remember that there was a bill passed by the Senate and submitted to the House of Representatives but never acted upon that contained provision for 19,000 new border agents.  The inability of the House to act on anything but try to repeal Obamacare is causing problems I'm sure that opponents of immigration reform don't like.  Why can't they at least try to see if they can get through the 19,000 new agents?  Among other things it is a good lower paid jobs program. (http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2013/07/complete-danged-fence.html)

WIRING OF THE BRAIN

Particularly since my wife died, I have been reading quite a bit about how the brain works and how you can change it.  But even in the case of Noah who has had one side of his brain removed, who is a good example of this, in which actions and thought usually done by the right brain are now done by the left (or is it vice versa, no matter).  In my wife's case, I think she could have recovered from her first stroke except something happened to destroy her will to fight her condition which makes it very hard when all the initiative had to come from someone else.  She really had to want to get better, but couldn't manage it.

But it occurs to me that one reason we don't understand Muslims, especially conservative Muslims, is that their brains are wired differently from ours and some may even believe in martyrs getting 72"virgins" ( apparently wives actually in heaven).*  Do female martyrs get 72 virginal men (husbands)?

And it is the same in the U.S. where the religious right is able to maintain all sorts of screwy ideas like raped women don't get pregnant and are obsessed with controlling women's bodies almost as much as Muslims.  And conservative Republicans really believe that all poor people are lazy, the government is coming to get their guns, and reducing taxes and getting rid of regulations will always improve the economy.    No showing of the facts will dissuade them as their brains are wired to believe this sort of thing. (Though personal income taxes were greatly reduced as were regulations under George W. Bush, we had economic disaster..  Both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton raised taxes a lot and we had the best economic climate of my long lifetime.)

We are also witnessing in this country a significant part of the government that is quite willing to go against the will of the people, even their own constituencies, on issue after issue: on background checks for gun purchases, on the minimum wage, and on a track to citizenship for long-term illegal immigrants, just to name a few,

It is even true on a national basis.   For some reason as a nation, our brains are wired to root for the mob (presumably the underdog).  We have done this with Egypt, with Libya (even giving air cover to the mob), with the Ukraine.  We actually also did this with the Taliban against the Russians.  When we don't like the mob, we will enter into nation building as we did with Iraq and are doing with Afghanistan.  And we have learned, or I hope we have, that the road to democracy is extremely difficult for people who have no history of democracy or suffered under a long-time dictatorship.  I wonder how you could have a real democracy in Iraq when 80% of the people are of one religion (Shiite) and 20% of another (Sunni) who hate each other.  Even in the U.S., a lot of people believe that a Muslim, say, cannot be president though there is nothing in the constitution that says that presidents must be Christians.

As I have said in a recent post to my blog, I think eventually we will look on Guantanamo Bay as a dark period in American history: http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2014/06/guantonimo-

and-franz-kafka.html.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houri

ARE WE HEADED IN THE WRONG DIRECTION?

Of course we are headed in the wrong direction.  Everyone agrees on that really.  Even President Obama says that wealth inequality is the most serious issue of our time.*  But no one seems to know what to do about it?  It sure looks like we are headed for a trickle-down economy where money is in the hands of a few unelected families who will be in charge of distributing their huge fortunes to the peasants.

We have made some small progress in reducing carbon emissions, but we need to show leadership in the goal of reducing carbon emissions.  I find it weird that the president is called upon to show leadership on this or that, but on carbon dioxide pollution we are to just wait for the other guy to do something.  I think that China is showing some recognition that it isn't right to live in filth and have started some plans to clean up emissions.  They are building lots of nuclear power plants, for example.

We seem to be surviving in this country by presidential executive orders in spite of all attempts to bring the government to a stand still.  Rather than doing their jobs, a number of representatives are talking about impeaching the president because he is still sort-of making things work.  What they seem to want is nihilism.  What an age we live in.

There are ongoing obsessions of men with women's bodies, and they can't stand the idea of women in control of their bodies.  They feel women are pro-creation machines with no other purpose.  I don't understand how women can vote for any of these people.

* http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-05-29/pikettys-capital-economists-inequality-ideas-are-all-the-rage

I'VE HEARD THIS TUNE BEFORE.

OK, there is this unpopular government we tried to prop up that has an insurgency, thousands of government troops (one estimate is 90,000 police and troops) just melted away before the onslaught.  I'm plenty old enough to remember Vietnam that had a similar story and the minority eventually won, or did they.  Vietnam (or at least southern Vietnam) seems to have become a valued trading partner.

The case of Iraq and Syria may be different in that the insurgency , called ISIS,* seems to be Sunni religious fanatics bound to establish Islamic sharia law.  As I write this, the insurgency is advancing on Baghdad.  We'll have to see how the government troops react there.

Will ISIS try to take over the entire Iraq area, including the Kurdish area and the majority Shiite area?  Will Iran feel compelled to enter the fray to support the Shiite area?   And to what extent will the U.S. re-enter the fray? We'll just have to see.

*ISIS stands for Islamic State Of Iraq and al-Sham (Syria and Lebanon) said to be an al-Qaeda group: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/10892898/Iraq-crisis-Q-and-A-Who-or-what-is-ISIS-Is-it-part-of-al-Qaeda.html

GUANTONIMO AND FRANZ KAFKA

Franz Kafka is known for his dark novels.  Of particular note here is Der Process or the Trial in which a man is arrested by some remote authority, but he is never told what he did.  It sounds a lot like what has happened to the  prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, some held for more the 12 years without ever being indicted for anything.  Some time in the future, I believe this period will be considered a dark period in American history rivaling the internment of Japanese Americans (and, lesser known, some German Americans) during WW-II.

Within the last few days, five "major" prisoners were released from Guantanamo Bay Prison for "house" arrest for a year in Qatar before being released.  John McCain who seems never to have seen a war he didn't like calls these men "the hardest of the hard core."  We Americans get kind of hysterical about our enemies and attribute to them some super human qualities, able to destroy America by themselves.  We were even afraid to put them into high security U.S. jails for certain they would escape and do much harm.  We didn't even trust them to American civilian courts for fear they wouldn't be convicted.

As has been pointed out, these five have been "out of commission" for a dozen years so are "way out of the loop."  Also they are members of the Taliban and not al Qaeda (though they are rumored to have al Qaeda connections) so it is not clear that their mission is to destroy America so much as rule Afghanistan.*  However, it wouldn't surprise me if they had worked up a great hate for being incarcerated for so long.

If we know so much about them, why haven't they been tried, much less indicted?  One is said to be wanted for war crimes (Mullah Muhammad Fazi) for the murder of thousands of Afghan Shiites in the 1990s, but why wasn't he released for trial?  They have just been held under the lame excuse that since they are not being held within the U.S., they are not protected by the U.S. Constitution.  But they were being held in a U.S. Naval base which for purposes of running for President of the United States is approved (McCain himself was born in the Panama Canal Zone in a U.S. military base and ran for President).

I have little to say about Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was promoted to Sergeant while a prisoner of the Taliban.**  It seems he was a deserter and may well ultimately have exchanged one type of prison for another.  I wonder why he volunteered for the Army?  His father looks like he has become a Muslim with the free form beard and comments.  But I do feel sorry for Susan Rice who has fallen on her sword a second time for the President in describing Bergdahl as captured on the battlefield.  Well, I suppose you can describe the whole of Afghanistan as a battlefield.  Morning Joe Scarborough has said he wonders who in the White House hates her.

* http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/01/us/bergdahl-transferred-guantanamo-detainees
** http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/01/us/bergdahl-deserter-or-hero/index.html