Hell Yeah!

We Have a Dream

In case you were not aware, today, April 4^th, 2008, marks the 40^th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Television, radio, print and internet journalists, publishers and pundits poured forth with memorials, remembrances and lessons borne from their experiences with, or memories of King. Jesse Jackson, in a widely published opinion piece reminded us that there is more work to be done to bring justice to all the peoples of America. That Dr. King would have been satisfied to know that today’s America – a place where the adjusted-for-inflation median income of African Americans has doubled in the time since his death – has before it a Black man and a woman leading the competition for the highest office in the land.

He reminds us that America has become more like the Promised Land that Dr. King spoke of in his most famous speech.

Look at our leaders! See what this country has become!

Yet, we’re reminded that there’s more work to be done.

Jesse Jackson is right. There is more work to be done to bring justice to these shores. There is more work to be done to bring equality to this place. Work to be done, indeed.

But I believe that the time for leadership is over.

I will spare you a long list of failures. I won’t remind you of the imperfect humanity that lies beneath the skin of every man and woman who seeks to lead, because their weakness, their humanity, is the same weakness and humanity as yours and mine.

I believe that America has become inured to the sweet seductions of demagogues and demi-gods. We see the weaknesses in our leaders and we lose faith in them, and lose faith in their ability to lead us from darkness to light, and consequently, we lose faith in the system of leadership.

We retreat to our iPods and iPhones, youtube and Colbert. We seek solace from the harsh realities that loom over us like the dark shadows of a million rain clouds.

We live our lives as though there isn’t a war in Iraq, a war in Afghanistan, Darfur, Zimbabwe, Israel, Pakistan, India, China, Tibet, Colombia. We act as though $100 a barrel oil is just not all that. We think the credit crisis is some wealthy banker’s problem. We ignore the scaffold-toppling wind-storms in New York, deadly lightning in Arkansas, drought in Africa, cracking ice, filthy air, filthy water, poverty, and our neighbors with negative-savings suffering foreclosure.

I used to joke that as long as the malls were open and they took credit cards, nothing in this country would ever change.

I see a government falling over itself to ensure that nothing in this country will ever change. I see attempts to allay the consequences of reckless fiscal policy with even more heavy-handed and more reckless fiscal policy.

I see hard times ahead for everyone.

I live in Beacon, New York and have occasion to see Pete Seeger. On MLK day in 2008, I played bass with his loosely assembled band at an MLK memorial at the Springfield Baptist Church.

I listened to what he said about his time with Dr. King. I listened to other veterans of Selma and Montgomery speak about their experiences with Dr. King.

And now it occurs to me that the leadership our nation sorely needs is not going to be found in another MLK. Like waiting for the messiah, we embrace and discard so many worthy and unworthy men and women. We seize on a ray of hope, a hint of promise. A Black man for President. A woman for President. A grizzled war veteran for President.

But the time has passed for a new MLK, or JFK, or Reagan. There is no place today for a uniter thanks to the vast efficiency of the dividers.

We need leadership desperately, but now it must come from within. From within each one of us, from within our villages, towns and neighborhoods. We need one hundred million MLKs to stand up in school, to stand up in Church, to stand up in the town hall and say “I have a dream”. To promise to themselves first, then to their neighbors that they alone will work to make a difference. That they will live their lives for the betterment of mankind without wishing for recognition and honor, fame and wealth. That they will truly think globally and act locally. I know it’s been said a million times by a million bumper stickers, but today, more than at any other time in this nation’s recent history is it true: change comes from within.

and ya tell me, over and over and over again my friend...

Well, the Eastern World, it is exploding…

The Financial Times leads today with the headline “Drive on biofuels risks oil price surge” “Opec chief warns costs could go ‘through roof’” The group warned that it would curtail investment in developing new sources of oil, creating scarcity levels like we’re seeing with uranium today. Parenthetically, Opec’s very existence belies arguments by freemarket types and the President that oil’s price is not one that can be controlled by anything other than market forces.

As I read the, I asked myself ‘which came first, the chicken or the egg?’ The chicken in this case being the Decider’s hand-in-hand stroll through the Crawford Ramble with his Saudi Prince, or his irrationally provocative State of the Union speech where he singled out “Middle Eastern oil” producers as a threat to our ‘energy security’, and said America must find ways to end its “addiction” to their junk.

Was the romantic interlude a make-up kiss? Or was it an advance warning to his friend that he would embark on damning rhetoric, but in his heart of hearts he didn’t mean it?

Besides a few lower-level diplomatic protests, there was no palpable fallout from his provocations – until now.

It’s important to realize that petroleum production has been essentially flat for a few years, as some major fields have dried up while new ones prove harder to harvest.  Peak oil theorists will tell you the planet has dried up and that our next phase will be bitumen extraction from oil sands and shale (as they do in Canada now). Others argue that “liberals” have stymied exploration and source development for so long that it was inevitable the producing areas would stop producing and we’d be where we are now.

We alienate our “allies” in the Middle East. Wahabists are a bomb blast away from owning Saudi Arabia and really causing disruption to the oil supply. Nigeria is an ethnic cleansing train wreck about to crash, and our other major oil supplier, Angola, fights its own humanitarian issues.

None of this really matters when you consider the big picture: we are screwed, and a stupid, short sighted energy policy has gotten us here.

Consider the condition called CCD that is wiping out our honeybee populations. While there is precedent for bee die-offs (and with luck they will bounce back as they have in the past), the real, here and now consequence is that a lot of food won’t grow in the US because fruits and nuts simply don’t get pollinated. Luckily though, fruits and nuts are garnishes for our main foods: wheat and corn. We consume more corn than anything else, and our livestock lives on it too/

Not so fast though. The prices of corn and soybeans have gone up dramatically since the ethanol craze hit. We decided a couple years ago that we’d prefer cheap driving to cheap eating, so the competition for corn has gotten intense between food producers and distillers. We may not have enough corn to eat when we need it, because it’s being converted into whisky for our cars.

So, in order to continue driving our SUVs, we will turn to friendly neighbor Canada’s oil sands for petrol. But… Canada is already under fire for missing carbon-emissions targets and is being urged to (and very well may) restrict expansion of the Alberta oil sands. The process of converting tar to gasoline is extremely energy intensive, and short of building a nuclear reactor (which is being evaluated at this point), will certainly be curtailed as the world wakes up from the stupor of slow suicide.

Today, China, India and a few Middle Eastern and  African countries have moved nuclear energy from the back burner to the front page. But we have the issue of uranium supply to deal with as well. The government flooded the uranium market with tons of scrapped warhead, drove half the mining industry out of business, and the price of the stuff up from $8 to $130 a pound. The miners are exploring and drilling at full tilt once again, but it will take time to ease the metal’s deficit, yet demand continues to rise every day. The US is the only major energy consumer that hasn’t already started construction of new reactors, and we will certainly pay the price for that as we spew garbage into the air and bury CO2 underground in mad schemes to “offset”.

Disposing of nuclear waste is the least of our problems at the moment. There are plenty of uninhabitable places we could dump it with little consequence, it’s only a matter of price.

But the President goes to the G8 summit with one goal: to provoke Russia. Reigniting the Cold War is an incredibly ham-handed, transparent political haymaker, done as though America needs a new boogeyman or mortal enemy to fear. Placing missiles in Europe is needlessly provocative when we have more than enough warhead capacity zipping around at 20,000 leagues under the sea. The only possible justification I can imagine for this kind of alienation of an erstwhile ally is pure politicking; a revival of a Red Menace. I hope Putin doesn’t fall for it.

Or maybe the Iraq conflict hasn’t been lucrative enough for the military-industrial complex. IEDs don’t do enough damage to men and materiel to make this war profitable enough. We need an enemy with the capacity to destroy ships and tanks so we can enjoy the windfall of a real war economy. The question is, of course, can we fight a war right now? Iraq has been like a wasps nest, wasps stinging everybody in uniform. Our military is exhausted and overextended, hobbled by little wounds. There is no enemy, there are no Battles of the Bulge, there is no “victory”. Iraq is a war of attrition as Vietnam was, and we’re losing because there is no way to win.

Congress declined to fund the FDA’s food-import inspection program (for a paltry 100 million dollars), so the food suppliers we would turn to (whose honeybees are still healthy), ship us toothpaste with ethylene glycol, foods spiked with melanine “protein” and other hideous poisons.

Another pill in our national slow suicide.

The Dems in Congress roll over for the President, offering him their bellies to rub, quietly chanting “four more years”. Their contenders for the crown go to absurd lengths to prove they can out-Jesus the competition and not one of their perfectly coiffed heads allows a single global solution message to pass their perfectly capped and whitened teeth.

The Republicans are a joke. They take flip-flopping to a whole new level of absurdity as they seek to appeal to their “base”.

I’m still endorsing Kucinich for the Dems and Ron Paul for the Republicans. They are both nuts, but principled nuts who offer vision and solutions, not utterly empty base-secuding rhetoric.

A small band of home-grown jihadists plans to blow up a little-known jet fuel pipeline, level half of Queens and cost us hundreds of billions of dollars.

Osama Bin Laden said from the beginning that his goal was to bankrupt America. So far he’s doing a Heckuva Job.

Bipartisanship at work in Washington

As you may have read, the US Senate passed major legislation intended to deal with the hot-button immigration question in the US. Drawing support from both sides of the aisle, the new laws, which will be signed by an agreeable President into law, are proof that no matter who we send to Washington, with cooperation and compromise, imperfect but sensible agrreements can be reached.

While this was going on, the US House of Representatives addressed the question of "emergency" funding for the continuing conflict (it has never been declared a war by Congress) in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Few people will disagree with the statement that the "sweep" of Congress by the Democrats was driven by the nation's disaffection with the prosecution of the "war" in Iraq. No-bid contracts wasting billions, poor planning, no exit strategy, not even a clear goal or definition of Victory were issues that loomed large.

When the President years ago declared his reelection filled his bank with political capital that he "intends to spend", he began singlemindedly on his mission to expand his reach and push his agenda.

The American People didn't agree, and made it clear that he needed to be reigned in.

We took that political capital from the President - who wallows in historically low approval numbers - and transferred it to Congress. We gave THEM a blank check to use in order to reign in an administration that anybody left of Rush Limbaugh viewed as out of control.

So what did they do with it? What did they do with the POWER they were given by the people to CONFRONT this ONE SINGLE ISSUE?

They found compromise on immigration, they brought home some bacon to wounded vets, they began to shift some of our spending priorities. They brought global warming and stem cell research funding to the front and concocted legislation that would force the President to show his real mean self.

But there was that war thing to deal with.

They proffered a bill that attached timelines to withdrawal of troops. The FIRST initiative since 2003 that actually reached for the tiller to try and change "course".

Naturally, it was promptly vetoed.

At that point, a craven political choice must be made.

Rhetoric and spin come from the right wing and White House attaching unpleasant baggage to the legislation. Neocon nutjobs are blaming the Dems in Congress for "denying our troops" material support. The poor soldiers will go hungry and run out of bullets to fight evildoers BECAUSE OF THOSE COWARDLY DEMOCRATS!

Heady stuff.

Naturally, a group of men and women whose single overarching mandate was to bring sanity to the asylum is not cowed, right?

They know the American people aren't such simpletons that they'd believe that spin, right?

They know that they are THERE to BRING OUR TROOPS HOME, right?

They were elected almost singly for the VERY PURPOSE of placing timelines and progress points. They were mandated to implement the Iraq Study Group's points more than they were put there for ANY OTHER PURPOSE, right?

So, the President vetoes war funding with timelines. Here's an opportunity to make a grand symbloic gesture, to place blame for the bankrupting catastrophe where it belongs. No time for Vichy-Quisling collaboration, right?

NOW IS THE TIME TO MAKE A STAND!, right?

What does this bold, political-capital-rich congress do?

It chickens out.

It's high noon in Dodge City. Sherrif Congress and the outlaw Bush stare eachother down in the street, it's showtime.

The president reaches! His gun jams, Sherrif Congress has him dead to rights!

What do they do?

"Oh sorry for your bad luck, George old Chap, here, take my pistol, it's brand new and well oiled. You can shoot me with it, it surely won't jam."

Absolutely unforgivable display of cowardice. My wingnut friends are right. The Dems have nothing to offer either. They are utterly spineless and proved it with the procedural vote that hid their votes on the actual bill, and even moreso with the bill itself.

I don't want to hear about bipartisanship and dealmaking and next time we'll really get em.

And those of you who know me know I'm not a liberal nutjob. I know that immediate withdrawal of our military from Iraq would be a disaster of monumental proportions. I have always simply asked for accountability for the failures that have occurred. The Republican Congress failed to check the President. Now the Democratic congress has too.

They failed spectacularly. They should all resign.

As a corollary, I'd like to point out to my good friends Ren and Tom Clegg that with the dramatic loss of confidence our local leaders like John Hall will confront, I bet they reach for the high profile cherries as a make-good. By this, I mean I suspect he will work overtime to close Indian Point. He's going to have a lot of disappointed people in the 19th. I can't think of what else he could do to make them happy. NYRI is a done deal as far as I can see. The other issues are big <yawns> so, there's one big one left.

Let's see what happens.

Also, I noted in the paper yesterday that Paul Newman has "endorsed" Indian Point. You guys could have made a lot of hay with that one if you hadn't ridiculed entertainers for political involvement for so long. Now talking about that would just be hypocritical!

Have a safe and thoughful Memorial Day weekend everyone. I'll be skipping the fundraiser I was considering attending.

Would you like trans-fats with that?

Wal-Mart announces their delis will no longer use trans-fats in preparation of food.

That pretty much leaves McDonalds as the last bastion of hydrogenation.

While pretty much every other fast food joint has foresworn the carcinogenic, unhealthy oils, McDonalds makes perpetual excuses and puts off the day that they too will stop using hydrogenated oils in their foods.

I find the debate over New York City's ban on trans-fats to be amusing. One side says "first it was seatbelts, then secondhand smoke and now fatty foods? What kind of nanny state is this?" The other side says obesity is a "huge" problem, and we need to act to save people from themselves.

Not much mention is made of the real financial cost to society vis a vis the tremendous amount of tax dollars that are spent caring for people whose behaviors have turned them into a walking cardiac-in-waiting. And when it comes to government intervention and the basic test of a "compelling state interest" in legislating, clearly there is one here. Billions of tax dollars go into caring for people who eat this stuff anyway - just like smokers keep on smoking.

Reading this got me thinking about lawsuits.

First, there's the smokers' suits against the tobacco companies. People who smoked and developed lung cancer or emphysema sued the tobacco companies because they "misled" the public about the nature of their products. In other words, the people needed the cigarette companies to tell them that smoking was bad for them. The hacking cough was not, apparently, enough on its own. If only Altria had said "smoking is dangerous", they would have stopped immediately.

Some of these suits were successful, some were not. In my mind it's absurd that an individual could hold a tobacco company liable for such a thing. Anybody who smokes knows it's bad for you, no matter what a tobacco ad says.

On the other hand, the lawsuits brought by the states were different. They sought compensation from the tobacco companies, who made billions selling products they clearly knew (as evidence showed overwhelmingly) we harmful - and got it. In my mind, the states are absolutely entitled to collect on the billions they laid out taking care of sick smokers.

Now consider junk food.

McDonalds more or less stands alone in a crowd of fast food peddlers who have admitted there is a health cost associated with using hydrogenated oils. The jury is in on the issue. They clog arteries, cause colo-rectal cancer, heart problems, circulatory problems and so on, and the FDA admits that there is no amount it considers "safe" for comsumption.

Despite this, when you want fries with that, they are selling you a substance they know full well to be poison.

Because McDonalds is clearly aware of the danger of trans-fats, and continues to sell them despite that knowledge, that they expose themselves to all kinds of lawsuits by both individuals and the states. And with a winning example to fashion a lawsuit on (the tobacco companies), there's a strong possibilty that some of the people and all of the states would win. Some interest groups have brough suits against KFC and McDonalds for loosely related causes, but my bet is that the big money is going to happen with these kinds of suits.

I wonder if they're thinking about this at Burger College. 

The End is Near!

For The Troubles in Northern Ireland, anyway.

The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) yesterday pledged to renounce violence and disarm. Long a key player in the terrorist war between Catholic and Protestant, the UVF will undertake a "non-military" role in the forming joint government.

I have a poster of "Known Terrorist Organizations and their Emblems" on my wall, and will now cross another off the list. This sort of progress is good collateral of the "War on Terror", as less visible, but quite deadly organizations who used terror and violence to achieve socio-political ends start to feel the heat from law enforcement, and a major shift in public attitudes toward such methods. Before 9-11, the Irish bars in Yonkers and the north Bronx were a steady source of funds for the IRA and linked organizations. But still-hurting wounds caused by hundreds of dead cops and firefighters reminded sympathetic drinkers, as they shed tears for Erin while Kevin Barry played on the juke, that their dollars created 9-11s for other people somewhere else.

Moral support lost its legs, and faces turned to the leadership demanding peace.

With the Protestant side laying down their weapons too, the possibility of peace becomes greater than it has been at any time since Cromwell arrived.

And to think, it only took 400 years. There's a lesson in that for others whose grudges are much older.

Comfortably Numb

Local Woman Among Dead screams the blood-red bordered front page of the Times Heral Record today. A 19 year old Minisink girl was among the victims of gunman Cho Seung-Hui, a man the paper has inexplicably decided to refer to by his first name.

A "Killer Profile" piece offerss a peek into "Cho's" demented young mind. HIs creative writings were filled with twisted violence, it says, causing alarm among his professors and fellow students. It then brings up the subject of this posting with the sentence: "News reports said that he may have been taking medication for depression and have been becoming increasingly violent and erratic."

The last couple decades have been breakthrough years for research into psychoactive pharmaceuticals. You've seen the commercials on TV that offer sunny green fields to replace your rainy-day mind. Ask your doctor if <insert drug here> is right for you. The sped-up voiceover rattles off an aurally invisible list of horrifying side-effects that you'd shudder at if they were presented comprehensibly. Then back to the green fields and out.

These are a category of wonder drugs. Amazing alchemist's concoctions that offer relief to real people who suffer real depression and really need help. Little understood, extremely powerful and wildly overused, these drugs have created a whole new societal issue to replace the problem of individuals suffering clinical depression. A few of these depressed people seem to lose connection with that magical evolutionary gift of compassion, and then lose connection with the reality they and others live in, and their lives seem to take on a violent video game surreality that involves real guns and dozens of real-live dead people. The catch is, the hero can not win this game, and his last man almost always dies by his own hand.

I'd always speculated that pharmaceutical-addled mass muderers like Harris and Kliebold in Columbine had some sort of mental breakthrough in their last moments during which they realized or understood the incredible horror of what they'd done, and in an overwhelming rush of realization, killed themselves.

But I am now convinced that I was wrong.

The time that passed between parts 1 and 2 of the Virginia Tech atrocity was long enough for "Cho" to contemplate what he'd done, decide he wanted more, insert another quarter in the game and start playing again.

And maybe when he realized he was 1) running out of ammo and 2) a dead man as soon as the first cop arrived, that there was no way he could win. And maybe he thought that somehow, after this game was over (by his own hand), another quarter would buy him another play.

It makes me think about Columbine, and the many other anti-depressant-related horrors (read some here). Maybe we have been plain old dumb-lucky that these guys weren't carrying 10,000 rounds, because the sense-of-morality check that's in place in a "normal" mind simply isn't there anymore in someone whose mind has been sufficiently altered by one of these wonder drugs.

We live in a society that's changed from "take two aspirin and call me in the morning" to "let me write you up for this new anti-depressant. Take it for a month and call me, or call me if you feel any side effects". Of course, one whose mind is profoundly altered is not one who can reasonably assess his side effects from the perspective of normalcy. One seems to reach for a rifle instead.

Doctors are being evermore squeezed for productivity by insurers. They are offered "low-maintenance cures" for common ailments like depression. A 5 foot tall woman receives the same dose of an antidepressant as a 340lb linebacker. They're both told to experiment on themselves with dosages without having any measure against which to judge results.

It took years for the FDA to get "suicide" listed as a side effect on one drugs' insert.

A Scientology front organization called the Citizens Commission on Human Rights demands data on "Cho's" depression drug history - they make the connection that others seem not to.

But I don't blame the pharma companies. It's their job to develop and sell drugs of all kinds. And this class of drug is a wonder drug, though I would never in a million years permit a member of my family to take one for any reason. But we were cursed with a cultural disadvantage: being good Irish stock, we will doggedly suffer anything until our antagonist dies, or we die of cirrhosis!

My finger points straight at the doctors who prescribe incredibly powerful drugs, with a profoundly deep reach, as though they are no more powerful than aspirin, and rate about as much follow-up observation. It's a time when a doctor will put a 5 year old child on chronic meds for ADHD at the request of a bleary-eyed overworked, under-siege kindergarten teacher. Doctors whose sum total knowledge of these drugs is a one-sheet from the pharma. The insert, clinical trial data and studies go unread.

The villain in this story is the doctor who wrote the Rx for "Cho", then cut "Cho" loose, expecting "Cho" to somehow be sane and courageous enough to tell him he was feeling violent and erratic for the months leading up to critical mass.

Let "Cho", Harris, Kliebold and the hundreds (or thousands) of murders and suicides perpetrated by people on these drugs be a warning to every doctor who writes a scrip for one of these drugs: you break it, you bought it.

Blame the bottle.

I can't top this, so read it yourself! Hell YEAH!

Neddie Jingo!

Good Simpleton

Today I think of Brother Francis from A Canticle for Liebowitz. He thrives and achieves greatness during a snail-paced life rife with futility, only be eaten by highwaymen who put an arrow between his eyes.

A bus can mow you down at any moment. You can be killed by a train derailment. You could fall off your chair, never to rise again.

Life is filled with unending life-ending uncertainty. All the buzzing and pollen gathering, making all that wax and honey, being a good worker bee, doing your part for as long (or short) as you live.

Then, bangbangbangbang on and on for a 10 minute eternity. 50-odd people shot, 30-odd dead.

Some of the agitators demand weapons bans. Others demand weapons for students.

Was he high on drugs? Or low on pharmaceuticals?

Why did the school not lock down after the first assault?

Where were the police? Where was the killer. WHO was the killer? How could this happen?

"Chris, can you tell us what it was like in the classroom when the gunman came in and shot your German professor?"

The press demands answers. THE PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW!

But that's not true. The people don't want to know.

For as much pleasure as this nation seems to derive from bloody spectacle television, I really believe there comes a time when people don't want to hear about it anymore. When they stop reading, stop listening and start thinking.

All of the papers I will read tomorrow, the Times-Herald Record, the Poughkeepsie Journal, the Financial Times, the NY Times, and the Daily News will SCREAM the headline 31 DEAD as though it's the first time I will have heard that news.

But they will be carrying news I don't want to hear about anymore. I know everything I need to know right now, thanks.

Once I heard "man shoots 50, killing 31, self; constable blunders", anyway.

We all need a moment to pause and absorb the magnitude of what has happened, to create our own inner space for something as large as the knowledge that 62 parents will go to bed tonight having defied nature by living longer than their children. With no good reason in the world.

No news show will give taxonomy to the madness of this kind of killer. No news-reader will give insight worth seeing.

Hug your babies, and be grateful they're safe and well. Say a prayer for the families who aren't so lucky. Turn off the TV and go to bed.

It's been a bad week..

for Indian Point, anyway.

The explosion in the transformer yard across the street from the facility has caused IPs safety rating to be degraded from green to white. Not to mention it scared the crap out of a lot of people already on edge about Indian Point's safety.

Local Congressman John Hall, Westchester's County Executive Andy Spano and a host of other politicians renew their calls for independent safety assessments and for outright closure of the plant.

Noreen O'Donnell writes a common-sense piece in the Journal News, articulating the gut-level fear felt by most of the people who live in the shadow of that facility.

Leaks, shutdowns, terrorism, and now explosions. Scary stuff when you're talking nuke plant.

But we must realize that either choice - shutting down, or allowing re-licensing of IP - is not to be made lightly. A thousand good jobs, megawatts that would need replacing, huge impact on the local economy - these are all huge considerations. While the dangers of radioactivity weigh in as well. 

So here's what I'm effectively being asked to decide. Would I prefer cheap electricity from a life-threatening plant that could be minutes away from melting down? Or spiked unemployment, loss of millions of dollars in the local economy and a drastically higher electric bill - but I'm alive?

I'm a regular joe citizen of this area, I've lived my whole life within Indian Point's shadow, and that's the choice I'm being asked to make. And I do not know a thing about what distinguishes a safe nuclear facility from a dangerous one. But I still have to choose based on what little comprehensible information I have available to me.

Entergy and ren ask me to trust the tireless, wholesome, well intentioned scientists of Entergy and the NRC, the benevolent fire-keeping sorcerer-owners of Gaia's fire.

Riverkeeper and my local leaders call them dangerous, incompetent, venal liars who will let everyone rot so they can become ever richer.

So I sit here worrying about my choices, as cries are raised for an independent review of the plant.

It's absolutely true that nobody trusts the NRC, and on the other side, nobody who supports the plant will trust a study conducted by a team of Indian Point assassins.

And there's the more disturbing question: why does Entergy oppose an independent review of the facility? If there's nothing to hide, what are they hiding?

So here's what I think we should do. call on our government - and Entergy - to remove the politics from the equation, and let us take a real look at what's hot in Buchanan.

Hire a FOREIGN organization with NO vested interest in the outcome. Give them full authority to conduct a thorough and thoroughly independent study. Bring in scientists from another nuclear country like France, Germany or Norway to conduct this independent assessment, and make the conclusions a matter of public record. Keep it honest by making it contractual that none of the participants can work for Entergy or a related company at any time in the future. And if that is not honored, allow for severe, multi-million dollar fines. This shouldn't be much of an issue for say a German engineer. There's plenty of work for them in their own countries.

We are not capable of doing this on our own. IP can't get a fair trial in a local court, so let's change the venue, or at least the place the jury comes from.

Does anybody have any compelling reason why this is a bad idea?

If so, I'd love to hear it, and I'm sure the two or three other readers of this obscure message board would as well.

****Update****

John Hall will be holding a town meeting tomorrow evening at 7pm (Monday, April 9th) at the Howland Cultural Center on Main Street in Beacon. The subject will be - you guessed it - energy. I wonder if Vincent Ferro will be there. Just in case, I'll bring the "Excommunicate Rudy" signs - in case he forgot his.

Save the Farm!

The recent spate of mortgage foreclosures that have led to the "subprime crisis" is not good news for anybody. Sleazy mortgage lenders, promising something for nothing counted on the fact that as a nation, we are unconcerned with tomorrow, and crave instant gratification of our consumer "needs", and will agree to just about anything to get what we want RIGHT NOW! The future cost be damned.

Granted this was a collaborative effort, as "subprime" lenders worked hard to obscure the real cost of their product, and people chose to remain naive. Still, the bill inevitably comes due, and payback can be a bitch.

This crisis is a microcosm of a greater crisis we will have to deal with eventually:  when our debt to China comes due; when it comes time to pay for the wars we wage; when payment comes due for stupidly treating our planet like a sewer.

We are living on borrowed time (and money), as individuals, a nation and a species.

There's one component of this crisis that makes me believe the consequences of Fed-driven cheap and easy credit were a collaborative evil-plan by big business and government: the bankruptcy bill.

With no chance of absolution of debt, the poor, naive people who over-bought houses that were then foreclosed on (and sold for less than their bank note), will not have the option of bankruptcy relief. They will pay back every penny they borrowed, with interest. Many will be stuck making mortgage payments on properties they no longer own - for the rest of their lives. A new, congressionally mandated indentured servitude.

Fortunately, there may be hope for the thousands of Americans who find themselves unable to meet their obligations. So if you, or someone you know is in such a situation, send them the link to this excellent article by Terry Savage, contributing editor of Jim Cramer's thestreet.com.

Keeping Your Piece of the American Dream

It basically comes down to this: the banks would rather avoid foreclosure, because everyone loses, so they may be willing to work with you to find a solution. Savage offers a few things to try that are worth a shot.

And do yourself a favor and avoid variable rates whenever possible! Like gas prices, they have a tendency to going up a lot faster than they go down. Good Luck and Happy Easter!