Anti Nuke Activists and Ancient Fears

There seems to be a new chapter in the old "no nukes" story. Recent stories tell of old time activists teaming up with younger ones to oppose nuclear power plants. Regarding the demonstrations during the 70s, a 66 year old activist said, "It was just the correct, moral thing to do."

That comment leads me to think that this person equates nuclear power with bombs, which is like saying that since there are wildfires, it is morally wrong to toss a log in the fireplace of your mountain cabin.

Yes, there have been safety issues with nuclear power, and we still don't have a perfect solution to disposal of used materials. However, any way of generating energy has a downside. When you think of coal fired plants, think of fatal mining accidents, whole mountains destroyed, trainloads of coal crossing the country and millions of tons of greenhouse gasses. Oil fired plants? Well how about the BP gulf oil spill. Hydroelectric plants? Think about inundated valleys, disrupted fish spawning grounds, massively altered ecosystems and the silting up behind expensive dams. Wind farms take up huge tracks of land and kill birds, and solar simply isn't developed enough to fill our needs.

While the debate on whether we should have dropped the bombs on Japan still rages on without closure, and while few people are coming out in favor of using nuclear weapons in the future, the issue of the peaceful use of nuclear power still seems tethered to these old images of destruction.

For years I drove past the San Onofre power plant weekly, never with the slightest fear. The only two high profile nuclear accidents happened many years ago, and France gets a major part of its energy from nuclear power. Our technology gets progressively better and more reliable, and there are many safety measures in place to prevent accidents. We have a viable way of generating the energy we all use daily, and it's high time to put ancient nightmares to rest and move on.

vote to save our parks

It's common knowledge that our state government is dysfunctional, and it's getting so that the only way to get things done is through the initiative process, which ultimately makes state government even more dysfunctional, if that's possible.

While I can't imagine what clever ballot measure will surface to save our schools from being boarded up and abandoned, we do have the chance to at least save our state parks. A yes vote on proposition 21 in November will keep our parks open and good condition for all Californians. An additional 18 bucks when you renew your auto registration will get you in anywhere, anytime, preserving a park system going on 150 years old.

I've heard weak arguments against it. There are a very few people who claim they never go to a park and feel they shouldn't have to pay. Still, there are people who don't go to school but still pay for that. Then there are the anti tax people who don't want to pay for anything, anytime, any place.

The most interesting was the person who said it would be too expensive, as he had four cars and two motorcycles. Let's see, that comes to 108 extra bucks a year. Seems anyone who can afford four cars and 6 bikes can easily come up with 108 dollars.

True, the most popular parks, like state beaches, will have a parking problem, but that can be solved with the extra money.

Don't forget, yes on 21

red and blue money

Our money isn't keeping up with modern trends. We have the same dull green bills we've had for, probably forever. Green doesn't get an emotional reaction or symbolize anything. Well, I guess it could symbolize the Green party, a very small segment of Americans. We need money that reflects the rest of us.

I propose our money resemble the political maps from the last elections, where we had red and blue states. We should have red and blue money. This way, people could carry the money that reflects their political persuasion. When getting change, a republican could say, "Don't give me that blue cash. I want red."

Every time someone made a purchase, he would also be making a political statement. Also, we could start tracking how people use their money. Do Democrats make better tippers? Do Republicans buy top of the line? Which party buys which beer and how much? We could even color code our ATM cards. Soon we'd have a huge data base that could be used to target the left and right. Of course, the few people in the middle would be ignored and left out.

As this moves from ridiculous to absurd, maybe people will stop and think about what they're doing and that answers to our problems don't come in the choice of black and white, or red and blue. And that if they appear that way, we are probably asking the wrong questions about the wrong problems.

The true secret security organization

Many people have taken the recent news of the expanding security and spy system as being equal to Homeland Security. That seems true on the surface, but in reality, Homeland Security is an office in DC with a head and a couple of assistants. It's a cover, a front, a sham designed to keep people from knowing about the actual organization.

It took months of probing, but I've uncovered the real, super top secret organization, called the Department of Suspicion, Outrage and Paranoia, or SOP for short.

This organization is so secret no one knows who actually works for it. Everyone has a seventeen digit secret number. What's more, no one knows the titles of the operatives. You see, the person hiring someone picks the title and is the only one in the organization who knows who that person is and that he or she actually works there. Each person has the right and duty to hire one subordinate, thus becoming the handler or supervisor for that new person. Each person in the organization, which now has over a half million agents, only knows the identity of two other people, his subordinate and his supervisor. I use "he" because most women, once learning how the department works, want no part of it.

This will be easier to explain with an example. Say a level one agent, an L-1, files a report, which says, "Agent Albert Roberts discovered on June 27 of last year that a 57 year old Al-Qaeda agent, one Salib Maqwarh, a Moroccan national, posing as a food importer, passed vital information to three Saudi men in Fatima's coffee house in downtown Damascus." Now, his supervisor gets this information, and in the interest of secrecy, edits out the names, actual locations and exact dates, leaving something like this: "In June of last year an agent identified an Al-Qaeda agent in a business in Damascus who was passing information to three other men."

Now, the supervisor, who is an L-2, passes the information to his supervisor, an L-3, who knows who he is but not the actual name of the other L-2 who reports to him, since he only hired one subordinate. The L-3 further edits the report to make it fit with the other report, so they look like they were written by one person. The L-3 than passes it up to the L-4, where the process repeats again. This continues up to the top of the chain, the L-17, who consolidates all those reports, further editing for secrecy, so that when the final document crosses the President's desk, it says something like: "Last year in the middle east some agents discovered Al-Qaeda operatives passing information."

Now, since each person can and should hire one other person, by the time you read this the L-1s will have hired another layer, who will then become the new L-1s, moving everyone else up one number and making the top layer now L-18 and adding ten or fifteen thousand new agents, each with a unique title, to the organization.

And that, my fellow citizens, is how we keep America safe.

Bell, CA: a lesson for us all

There is a huge lesson in the recent developments in Bell, California. After the news got out on how much some people were earning, the townsfolk got the biggest earners fired and the council to take a 90 percent cut in pay. So, you can fight city hall after all, and you, the public, can prevail over the entrenched political machines. So, what's the trick?

The Bell saga points to three steps in the process. First the news of something egregious needs to get out to the public. Openness and transparency is vital to our civic life, as are the people who dig through records and bring these things to the people.

Second, you need a critical mass. People who dislike what's happening go about to the community, stirring people out of their apathy, until a number of people, all with the same issue in hand, constitute a movement.

Finally, there is the demand, not request or humble suggestion, that things change and change now. A large and vocal group confronts the power structure and says it ends right here, right now. The officials have the choice of backing down or beating a hasty retreat out the back door.

Admittedly, it's easier in a small town, a bit harder at the state level and harder still in DC. However, it has been done before, and it can be done again. Get informed; get up and get involved.

Looking at the Obama Administration

Looks like President Obama has gone from a very approval rating after taking office, to a low rating a year and a half later. In fact, there is talk now that he may be a one term president and that republicans may retake the house. How, as the saying goes, did he squander his political capital?

For openers, somehow he didn't get the nature of his mandate. People voted for an untried junior senator due to his vague message of hope and the perception that he was the anti Bush. People, most democrats and independents and even some republicans were fed up with Bush politics and the jaded attitude of an oilman-run, war-obsessed, corporation-loving administration. Obama, many people naively believed, would fix all that and bring us back to the America we wanted to see. Didn't happen.

The first clue was that we were sick and tired of Bush's war, his paranoia about terrorists and the trillions of our money he was pouring into middle east countries that were never going to become clones of us, no matter how many bucks and troops we sent. He missed the clue, and Bush's wars became Obama's wars, made even worse by the financial melt down that left Americans jobless and homeless. Get a clue, Mr Obama, we are hurting, your policies are spewing out new terrorist, and the people over there think we're A-holes.

Companies start out small, and like people, if they are healthy and adaptable, the survive and grow. And, like people, they lose vitality, age and die. But Obama kept many of these financial institutions alive (think transplants) beyond their normal life span. Worst of all he bailed them out when they were weak and could have signed anything. Now, they are strong again, on our money, and the financial reform will likely not fully reform anything to any great degree.

Health care reform is complicated, watered down and possibly filled with pitfalls, but what the hell, he promised it, and if we keep our collective fingers crossed, it might just work.

fixing the mineral management agency should have been done prior to a major disaster. Posturing after the fact does little good for those people who have lost their incomes along the gulf.

I'm tired of hope which, like dope makes you feel things are good when they are not. Just recently changed my voter registration from democrat to none of the above.

changing my voter reg.

Republicans and Democrats are bashing each other at every level: candidates for office, members of every legislature, media pundits and people on the street. Amid all the finger pointing and name calling, nothing worthwhile is getting done. Well, some lobbyists are getting their special favors, but nothing for the rest of us.

I was a democrat, thinking that they were a bit better, more on my side. However, I now have trouble telling the difference, as our debt mounts, wars drag on, the economy continues to falter, a few corporations get rich or bailed out or both and our once great education system crumbles.

I'm going down to city hall in the morning and change my voter registration. I'll look at the current assortment of third parties and either choose one or register as an independent.

I think we all should do that. Perhaps if the two major parties saw their numbers drop down to single digit, they might just get the idea, cut the pointless games and start working together to get something worthwhile done. And, if they didn't perhaps some third parties would become major parties, and the Republicans and Democrats would go the way of the Whigs.

There is nothing written in stone that says these two parties are all we get for now and for all time. They've served their purpose, and now it's time for us to walk away from them, leaving the remaining vocal few to shout endless invectives at each other, while the rest of the country gets on with it.