No matter what they have achieved some feel the world owes them more.  Most are extremely grateful and tend to give back.  Giving is interesting; it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with spiritual or political  tendencies, or income.  It is an inclination.  This mind set exists all over the world and when tapped in to achieves wonderous results.  Can this wonder be learned?

If my life so far can be considered a survey, my conclusion is caring can’t be learned or taught.  The joy of caring can only be experienced.   You walk through a grocery store and see someone with too many items in their arms — they drop something — do you pick it up for them or do you walk on thinking “why didn’t they grab a cart?”.   You see a Mom taking a photograph of her husband and baby — do you stop and offer to take a picture of the three of them together or do you just keep walking, not wanting to break your stride or step outside your box?

Merging traffic can be a beautiful example of strangers caring about strangers and everyone doing the right thing.  Often, it isn’t such a beautiful thing, don’t be the reason why.

I was in a conversation with a physician I work with the other night at the hospital.  He described me as “ubber liberal” and decided I needed to be reformed and informed.  He started printing up things for me to read from his Fox network and I told him I don’t care for Fox or MSNBC.  I mostly get my news from PBS and sometimes I like to listen to Wolf Blitzer.

This Physician is very very afraid of our government running anything.  I, on the other hand, feel that if you leave the government out of our lives then you end up with a place like Haiti.  Haiti is a graphic example of a  weak government.  Us worker bees need to be protected from corporate interests.  We aren’t the mover shaker money makers we’re the ones out here in the trenches doing the work.  We don’t mind, we’re happy.  I have amazing respect for our founding fathers’ plan for checks and balances and equal rights.  They were a bit hypocritical about equal rights, writing and signing the constitution while their slaves tended to their farms, but, their ultimate plan was ingenious.

The Physician and I are an example of check and balance.  His check is the need to be compensated for all the patients he fights hard to save.  Many of them are self abusers, over-eaters, smokers, alcoholics, prescription drug abusers.  They vary from uninsured, medicaid, Medicare as well as the insured.  Patients get better then try to sue him for some anomaly that is most often a result of their own self abuse.  Or they don’t get better and the family tries to sue.  The litigation involved is extremely expensive and is driving up healthcare costs.  Tort reform is his primary concern to improve our health care system.   I definitely get his point and I also am angry at the folks making a living out of being sick.

My balance is the waitress with a kidney stone, the restaurant owner with chest pain, the guy that builds kayaks by hand with diabetes, the lady with a shop full of locally made art.   To them insurance is a gamble; those without are gambling they won’t need it,  those with individual insurance pay dearly for a catastrophic plan.  How can we remain innovative Americans if we can’t leave Wal-mart to try our hand at Tilapia farming or growing bamboo or opening a breakfast joint.  We aren’t really free as long as we are locked in to a job because we need the insurance?

Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post wrote…

In opening the floodgates for corporate money in election campaigns, the Supreme Court did not simply engage in a brazen power grab. It did so in an opinion stunning in its intellectual dishonesty.

It was unnecessary for the court to go so far when there were several less-radical grounds available. It was audacious to seize the opportunity to overrule precedents when the parties had not pressed this issue and the lower courts had not considered it. It was the height of activism to usurp the judgments of Congress and state legislatures about how best to prevent corruption of the political process.

Nina Totenberg of NPR wrote…

“It will undoubtedly help Republican candidates since corporations have generally supported Republican candidates more.”

Freedom of Speech

I was embarrassed I didn’t know where Latvia was so I looked it up.  They are just like us here in the U.S. except they are a tiny country and they speak Latvian.  My friend said, ” didn’t Mork from Mork and Mindy come from Latvia?”

Well, anyway, I decided I wanted to learn about Latvia.  They, like us, are suffering a recession after years of grotesque prosperity. Corruption in their government has created a  health care industry that no one would use as a template.

The Soviets occupied the country after driving out the Nazi’s.  Latvia  regained independence in 1991.  14 governments in 16 years and now Ivars Godmanis has led a new four-party centre-right government since December 2007.

They have billionaires and ads for Mercedes SLS AMG,

they have brave women…

and they celebrate being rich and being beautiful.

They have something called the Day of the Blonde in the city of Riga.  Rumor has it the first Christmas tree was decorated in Riga in the 1500’s.

They celebrate many days of independence from things that happened while under Soviet rule. Latvians don’t like to be called Russians –>different culture, different language so don’t do it. Their comments become foul and cruel and fists pound tables if you call them Russian or Soviet.  They are a proud new member of the EU and NATO and are working hard to straighten up their democracy and stay prosperous and free.

Somewhere between Ventspils and Kolka cape in Latvia (ex-Soviet country) is located two radio telescopes (also known as “zvjozdachka” – the star), that in those days were one of most secret elements in soviet army. There are two antennas left – RT-32 (main dish is 32 meters in diameter) and RT-16 (16 meters). The smallest one – RT-10 – was taken away when soviet soldiers left Latvia in 90-ies. With those antennas Russian forces were able to spy phone calls everywhere they wanted. So what are they doing with these two now?

This guy had a pretty impressive collection of car photos, here is one of them and his comment…

“I am from Latvia. Some people say, in Latvia is the biggest percent of
exclusive cars in northern Europe. I am a starting photodraph, and my biggest
passion is taking some nice shots of cars.
You can look at my latvian car
collection, and I hope you like it
and it will be great if you publish this photos right here, because people
think that Latvia is a very poor country.
Who knew?

I read an article in the New York Times about a lady named Marlane from the town of Eleanor West Virginia.  The town was named after Eleanor Roosevelt.  In the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency the government created towns with jobs for folks that lost their jobs and couldn’t feed their children. The government project was called the New Deal.  Obviously there was immense opposition to this blatantly socialist endeavor.  Some (as do I)  commended the government for stepping up to the plate and addressing the needs of hungry Americans whose children had never tasted milk or flushed a toilet.

These are the initiating paragraphs of the article…

Early spring, in the Depression year of 1935. A poor girl from coal-mine country, a dark-haired girl of 4, rocks beside her mother and two sisters in a car moving through the rain-swept night. Soon they will join her father, a Great War veteran who pads his shoes with cardboard. He has been working for months on some distant government relief project.

When the car finally stops, the sleepy girl can see only a blur of mud and midnight. Not until morning does she take in this government project: a new American town, raised from a field by her father and other men with families caught in the stalled gears of a broken economy.

The girl is told: You’re home now, Marlane.

I had to read on and as I did I thought about how this would turn ugly in today’s America.   The Chicago Tribune and the New York Times were 1935 versions of Fox and MSNBC.  Then, like now, a lot of people didn’t like government interventions but there wasn’t a television to throw it in their face.  So the New Deal carried on and enriched some lives during the Roosevelt administration.

Some of it was disturbing.  The creation of all white communities, cod liver oil for all children, toys brought in government trucks for Christmas, and you could be evicted for not complying with the rules. According to Marlane, the rules were easy, and the home, the job, the milk, the indoor plumbing and the toys were gifts from the Roosevelts.

Jobless folks like Marlane’s parents probably did not vote, they were busy looking for a job.  Yet, the Roosevelts did everything they could think of in the time they had to create a better life for the jobless.  This upset many of the Americans who did vote.  They did not want to pay for what may have been considered the lazy and the uneducated.

What is even more amazing is, now in 2009, some of the hard working middle America farmers and factory workers are against politicians who think like the Roosevelts did.  Politicians who want health care for everyone and clean air for everyone.  Coastal Americans are voting for the politicians who will do the most for middle America and middle America is shaking their fists at the coasts.

There are politicians who really do want to help people.  They have to get voted for, so they have to be politicians and raise money to get voted for.  We vote for the guy or gal who markets themselves best. Hard to know which  politicians are really trying to do good things for not-so-fortunate Americans.  If the the not-so-fortunate Americans get a job, a home, breath clean air, and obtain some health care,  the fortunate will not lose their fortunes.

When one party has too much power things go belly up.  The “doubya” administration was a good example of a party driving our country into a mess.  Blinded by the power and money of corporate America.  I’m  liberal leaning, but, raised by Republicans.  I tend to see both sides, but, lately I’m thinking both sides are ruled by corporations.  I think corporations love money and war and improving stockholder profits and could care less about average Americans.  Maybe they don’t create wars, but they love them.  So they create hate and fear, the two key ingredients of war.

Television, which is a huge corporation, provides information.  TV is paid for by huge corporations that tell them what to tell us.  These same corporations have caused us to lose our jobs.   They told us to buy American, now they tell us it is a global economy.  I tried to buy American made products for Christmas.  I had to give everyone money — that is the only thing made here.  They tell us what to hate and what to buy — and we do what we’re told.  Are we losing our drive, our moxy, our innovation?  Don’t be afraid of government, be afraid of corporations and television.

When I finished reading the article I wanted to comment on how well Dan Berry captured the town and Marlane’s frustrations.  They weren’t accepting anymore comments so I came here.  Marlane loves her town and it’s history and the innovation it’s very existence represents.   I learned from the history that Dan Berry covered so well in his article.  I learned to care. Half the country cares Marlane.  The other half is watching TV and doing as they’re told.

To read the NYTimes article go to

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/25/us/25eleanor.html

Copenhagen looks like it is going to be a bust.  The only way folks are going to change the way they do things is if it creates jobs and saves money and makes money.  Net metering seems to be the answer in my mind.  We need to get our state legislatures to make it possible for factories, stores and private homes to create their own energy with solar and wind and contribute to a central grid through net metering.

Manufacturers may actually come back to the USA if it is more cost effective through net metering.  Jobs will be created through installation of these systems, and hopefully job opportunities returning to the USA.  Manufacturers love saving money, their profits improve so then their stock holders are happy too.  Making money is the central purpose to life on this planet.  With net metering we can save the planet and make money.  Everybody is happy.

Why don’t legislators like it?

Here is the easiest explanation I could find regarding Net Metering.

Imagine the simplest possible metering arrangement: a single, 1960s-standard electromechanical meter. Now imagine that a residential customer, Ray McSolar, added a rooftop photovoltaic (PV) system (also known as a solar-electric system) to his home, on his side of this meter. Ray wakes up early for his job; on most days, he is out of the house before sunrise. In these dark morning hours, Ray makes his coffee and breakfast while watching the morning news on TV. The electric meter spins forward as Ray is consuming electricity from the grid.

Determined not to waste a bit of electricity, Ray shuts off all of his appliances as he heads off to work. Ray’s solar panels now start churning out electricity as the sun rises—electricity Ray sends back to the overstressed grid. His meter now spins in reverse.

When Ray returns at night to cook dinner and relax in front of the TV, the meter spins forward again as he consumes more electricity than his system generates. The result? Ray’s bill will show only his net consumption of electricity from the grid. Should it be a hot sunny month (when the grid needs the most help), or a month in which Ray’s electricity use is low, any excess electricity his system generates is rolled over to his next bill, just as he might rollover excess cell phone minutes.

Utilities should not have a divine right to charge for electricity that customers can otherwise generate more efficiently and more cleanly on their own.

Congress realized the vast potential of net metering when it mandated in the 2005 Energy Bill that every state consider adopting or expanding net metering programs by the end of 2007.

Indiana and Arkansas, utilities successfully undermined state legislators by convincing the state utility commissions to adopt minor rule changes that destroyed the entire program. As a result, Arkansas registered no participating customers in the first two years of its program. And by 2004, Indiana only had six participating customers in the entire state.

Participation in New Jersey has skyrocketed by over 30,000 percent since 2002. It’s amazing. The state utility commission is literally drowning in new applications. Because they embraced the net-metering concept and new business applications soared because of the savings on their bottom line from providing their own energy. What New Jersey and other states (like Montana, California and Oregon) prove is that Americans are willing to invest in their own energy independence if regulations would only let them. 

I live in Arkansas and this state can definitely piss me off pretty regularly.  (When I lived in Florida I had the same problem, but, with over-development.  Now Floridians are crying in their mortgage debt muck and their association dues mire.  Developers didn’t give two flying figs about the beautiful banyans they chopped down to build a Blockbuster video store or the eagles nests that fell to the ground to build another strip mall.)

Arkansas and their electric co-ops are advocating for another coal fired power plant and are trying to convince Arkansans that they are poorer than other states so “we can’t do what they do”. That is total bunk! Arkansas has water, wind and sunshine.  Utility fat cats easily scare the Arkansas public in to thinking we will have no electricity if  net metering is embraced.  Participating in clean energy is a foreign concept and we Arkansans don’t take kindly to foreigners.  At first.  But we warm up and smile when you show us the money.

Some of the traditions bite the big dog.  Like the Yuletide (what is yuletide anyway?) tradition of incredibly wasteful shopping.  Gaudy jewelry, Sweaters, and googahs no one needs or uses or has room for.  This exchanging of crap is dumb and I’m trying to get the people I love to stop the madness.  lets just dance and hug and be kind to each other.  If you insist on exchanging stuff then I would rather have a fresh caught trout than another googah to store in my utility room.  Go to the ballet with me, I love the ballet.

No one would have followed Martin Luther King if he had said “I have a nightmare”, as mentioned by energy secretary Ed Miliband.

We have to be careful that we don’t scare off would be joiners with too much hyperbole.  Admittedly, I am an extreme advocate of climate change.  We need to unite in being good to this earth.  It has been so good to all of us.  I am  hopeful that the decision makers representing the world in Copenhagen are uniting in the dream — and not denying the nightmare.

Side note and a bit of irony –> more than 1200 limos are being called in from all over Europe to meet the delegates, officials and presidential demands of the Copenhagen climate summit.  Too cold to ride bikes I guess.  The “economic growth” advocates ie: Republicans for continued pollution, will be represented by US Senator, Jim Inhofe

We all know the nightmare –> So many pictures of people riding bikes in China through polluted air with face masks.  Stories of asthmatic children in the Bronx breathing diesel fumes.  Photos of decapitated mountains in West Virginia and the subsequent coal muck escaping in to small towns.  Growth was so big and so fast that sewage spilled in to drinking water in Florida.  Many fists pound many tables when you suggest that things need to change.

Polluters love muddling the facts, and making fun of the nightmarish scenarios.  Some scientists  actually feed the machine that is profiting currently.  The collaborative machine of industry, shipping, air flights, hospitals, manufacturers, and on and on are horrified by the idea of changing energy production and usage. We have evolved to need stuff, rather than just water, food, shelter and coffee.

Many of them don’t think of themselves as polluters but as providers of jobs.  Many of them simply don’t care as long as stock holder profits are improving.  No such thing as a sustainable status quo in the stock market.   We just need to make change less horrifying and point out the advantages to health and stocks.

So lets describe the dream… Andrew Gilligan wrote an article for the telegraph.co.uk…” Copenhagen is a city filled entirely with bicycles, stuffed with retrofitted, energy-efficient old buildings, and seems to embody the civilized pleasures of low-carbon living without any of the puritanism”.

Costa Rica produces 99% of its energy from renewable sources, reversed deforestation and is aiming to become a carbon-neutral country by 2021 by combining its ministries of energy and environment, and abolishing its army.  Ok abolishing armies will probably never happen world wide, there will always be bad guys to fight.  We can dream though.  Other small island nations such as the Dominican Republic and Jamaica are also fairing well in levels of health and a very low footprint.

What angers me is the minds that sit around figuring out ways to make money off of our misfortunes.  There are boardrooms full of people trying to figure out how to pocket some cash.  I call them clipboard carriers.  Administrators are rewarded for making money rather than  for providing amazing results for the health of a community.  I worked with an occupational therapist who was so inspiring to me and others as we watched her bring smiles to the depressed and life to those ready to give up.  She was let go because she didn’t generate enough income for the little rural hospital.  Hospitals are not factories.  They don’t have assembly lines.  Hospitals are full of real people with real problems and sometimes fixing those problems just doesn’t make anyone any money.

Dr. William D. wrote a blog that made me think,  then again maybe they are factories?…

“. . . the life of the pig has moved out of view; when’s the last time you saw a pig in person? Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and packaged to look as little like parts of animals as possible. The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there’s no reality check on the sentiment or the brutality. . .”

The same disconnect has occurred in healthcare for the heart. The emotional distance thrust between the hospital-employed primary care physician, the procedure-driven cardiologist, the crammed-into-a-niche electrophysiologist (heart rhythm specialist) or cardiothoracic surgeon whose principal concerns are procedures—with an eye always towards litigation risk—mimics factory farms that now litter the landscape of the Midwest. The hospitals and doctors who deliver the process see us less as human beings and more as the next profit opportunity.

The “factory hospital” has allowed the subjugation of humans into the service of procedural volume, all in the name of fattening revenues. Never mind that people are not (usually) killed outright but subjected to a succession of life-disrupting procedures over many years. But whether livestock in a factory farm or humans in a factory hospital, the net result to the people controlling the process is identical: increased profits.

The system doesn’t grow to meet market demand, but to grow profits. The myth that allows this growth is perpetuated by the participants who stand to gain from that growth.

See hospitals for what they are: businesses. Despite most hospitals retaining “Saint” in their name, there is no longer anything saintly or charitable about these commercial operations. They are every bit as profit-seeking as GE, Enron, or Mobil.

http://www.wellsphere.com/heart-health-article/factory-hospitals/472314

I think most of us really do care about people and their individual health.  We just need to care less about profits.

Enough said?

Well, maybe I’ll just add this…

Just 16 of the world’s largest container ships can produce more pollution more than all the cars on the planet.

In an editorial report in Britain’s Daily Mail, an award-winning science writer Fred Pearce, author of Confessions of an Eco Sinner, writes that the super-ships that keep the West in everything from Christmas gifts to computers pump out killer chemicals linked to thousands of deaths because of the filthy fuel they use.
”As ships get bigger, the pollution is getting worse. The most staggering statistic of all is that just 16 of the world’s largest ships can produce as much lung-clogging sulphur pollution as all the world’s cars.”

In today’s world ships are used to transfer everything from oil to electronics and as the demand for cheap consumer goods increase, so does the number of ships needed to transport goods around the world.

There are about 100,000 commercial ships at sea, importing and exporting goods all over the world. Many of them burn marine heavy fuel, or “bunker fuel”, that is high in sulphur content – the result is that the ships’ fuel is extremely dirty and polluting.

Thanks to the International Maritime Organization (IMO) rules, the largest ships can each emit as much as 5,000 tons of sulfur in a year — the same as 50 million typical cars, each emitting an average of 100 grams of sulfur a year.

With an estimated 800 million cars driving around the planet, that means 16 super-ships can emit as much sulphur as the world fleet of cars.

Ship emissions expert James Corbett of the University of Delaware calculates a worldwide death toll of about 64,000 a year. He expects that figure to rise to 87,000 deaths a year by 2012.