Blue Moon
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Monday morning, the fourteenth day of March, 2011, a calm morning, as seen above, here in Osterville, the tiny, tiny seaside village that may as well define Cape Cod as a whole, with beautiful scenery, wildlife and architecture dating all the way back to the days of the Puritans, who came over from England in the mid seventeenth century… The devastation in Japan is something that is difficult to put one’s head around, as it has now been reported that the death toll may climb to over 10,000 souls. Complicating this natural disaster is the man made problem of nuclear power, namely, the Fukushima Nuclear power plant that has now seen two very large hydrogen explosions in two of it’s reactors, with all three most likely emitting deadly radiation that has caused Japanese officials to commence evacuations of over 200,000 people living in and around the nuclear facility. Another big concern is the cooling systems that have failed, completely, prompting officials at that site to pump in sea water to cool the fuel rods that are dangerously close to the 5000 Fahrenheit temperature that, upon reaching that level of heat, begin to break down and melt, causing a similar scenario that happened a few decades ago at the Chernobyl nuclear facility in the then Soviet Union, where millions of people were adversely affected by radiation poisoning in the world’s worst nuclear disaster, much worse than our own nuclear scare, “Three Mile Island”, where we saw first hand what a nuclear melt down would feel like and what it’s devastating consequences might have been. The movie, starring Jane Fonda, “The China Syndrome”, came out at about the same time as that disaster, if memory serves, prompting us all, around the world, as evidenced in recent protests in Germany over the week end, to take a little closer look at the benefits of nuclear power, along with the negatives, such as a) where do we store all of the waste from the nuclear processes, and b) do we really have all of the tools in place to prevent a meltdown if say, an earthquake occurs or if, god forbid, war breaks out and the facility is bombed. Our overall energy problem is not going away, however, we seem to always make the mistake of playing the game of reaction, as in the bp oil disaster, as opposed to being proactive about our long term game plan of creating green sources of energy that would change the whole dynamic of our “energy problem” from San Francisco to Singapore. Eventually, as the earth’s atmosphere continues to warm, with the glaciers, the polar ice caps and huge land masses like Greenland melting away into the earth’s seven seas, causing those seas to rise by as much as 20-30 feet over the course of the next one hundred years, and that estimate being very conservative, we will be faced with the daunting task of playing catch up to a problem that is right here and right NOW. The real reason, as in what happened with the electric car in the 1970’s, we, here in the United States, lag way behind the rest of the world in coming up with new and greener sources of energy is simple–big oil, big coal, and yes, big nuclear do not want the apple cart to be upset, for it would damage their short term bottom line profit margins, thus, causing a decrease in the overall value of said corporation, which, of course, would decrease the value of the stock and hurt the ever connected banks on Wall Street, you know, the “elites” that really run the show in this here, ‘US of A’. Yeehaw!–who needs the ‘cowboy poetry festival’ in Nevada when you can have real live as$holes at Goldman Sachs do your poetic “justice” for you. You can see where I am going with this one, with the “little people” making one last ditch effort to have their voices heard, as the people in Wisconsin did this past week end in Madison, over the large, loud, ludicrous bullhorns of FOX NEWS and the like, whose propaganda machine(s) are busy working overtime to keep the masses in the dark, as it were, while their corporate bedfellows continue reaping giant profits off of the backs of the common man and woman in this nation, who breathe in the toxic waste left over, after the profit taking, by corporate monsters like Halliburton and Koch Industries. The same corporations who also pour mind bending amounts of toxic waste into our fresh drinking water sources everyday, in over 37 states now, mining for “natural gas” with the very unnatural method of “fracking”, a process that utilizes over 596 deadly chemicals, while, at the same time, allowing those chemicals to seep into the soil and hence, into our tap water, tap water that you can light on fire with a match–all while, as previously mentioned, emitting alarming levels of toxic airborne substances into the air–doing all of this irreversible damage to OUR land with nothing more than a slap on the wrist, if they are caught that is, as the EPA, the environmental protection agency, lacks the teeth, and soon the gums if the republicans get their way in the slashing of “discretionary spending” currently being considered to “solve” our fiscal woes in this nation, woes that were not caused by the overpaid teacher or the poor elderly woman who is in need of heating oil, but, rather, by the greedy monsters of Wall Street– yes, this all being done by design, because REPUBLICORP removed said ‘teeth’ from the EPA for PROFIT, leaving the EPA with no power to do a damn thing about it…this now seeming to be the rule of a very sick, seditious profit model design at the very moment we need a glimmer of sanity in Washington D.C.. The EPA is in trouble of becoming inconsequential, one of the agencies where they plan to cut billions from, all in the name of “shared sacrifice”, while billionaires continue with the BUSH era tax breaks, no sacrifice there, borrowing money from China in order to give money away to the top one percent, say 100,000 dollars for those who make a million dollars a year or more. Shared sacrifice? Is this thing on? Who do the republicans really think, in the end, they are fooling? “Bueller, Bueller, anyone? Voodoo economics, anyone, anyone? Help me out here Ferris!” (credit actors’ Mathew Broderick and Ben Stein, as well as the classic film “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”)… It is hard to fool someone who has not eaten real food in a week, my friend. Have a nice day folks and ‘May the creative intelligence of the GREAT SPIRIT be with the Japanese people today’, and GOD’S SPEED to those 70 nations that are coming to bat for their fellow human beings in that beautiful island kingdom. PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
