Canadian Oil Sands

Today's issue of the Colorado Springs Gazette contains an editorial touting the ascendancy of the Conservative party in Canada, claiming our northern neighbor now enjoys budget surpluses coupled with tax cuts. If only we would do the same, we would dig our way out of our troubles and, come on, get happy.

In the same paper is a column by Robert Samuelson, discussing the proposed pipeline for oil extracted from sand deposits in northern Canada, south across both Canada and the United States, all the way to refineries on the gulf coast of Texas. Samuelson favors the project despite admitting there are serious environmental dangers. Samuelson says pipes do crack (or rupture) and mentions recent spills into the Kalamazoo and the Yellowstone Rivers. He also acknowledges that oil extraction from sands is "messy" and requires large amounts of water. Greenhouse gasses, he says, are two to three times as great as in standard oil production.

In spite of all this, Samuelson feels the pipeline is a swell idea. Two paragraphs after his comment about greenhouse gas, he says they would not be significant. Canada is determined to go ahead with this project, and if there is no American pipeline they'll just export their oil to China and India, and where will we be then? Twenty thousand jobs will be created building the pipeline, Samuelson says, and in a time of high unemployment this will be good, and American companies will sell large amounts of equipment to Canada. We can presume that advances in technology will reduce greenhouse emissions in the future.

Dipping his toes into foreign policy, Samuelson claims the pipeline will bring us into closer association with Canada. The Canadians will continue to do business with us, their largest customers.

When we consider all of this, he concludes, "we should just say yes," to the pipeline.

Here is what I think. If the Canadians must engage in this practice, and if they would sell their oil to China and India if we don't buy it, so what? The international supply of oil would remain about the same and the price of oil on international markets would reflect Canadian supplies, whether their oil goes to us or somewhere else. Why risk our own environment it that's the case?

Even if the Canadians build a pipeline down to the 49th parallel, I can't see the necessity of continuing to roll it along all the way to Texas. Why not build refineries in Montana or North Dakota and turn the oil into gasoline or electricity there? The gasoline could then be shipped by rail to wherever it's needed, reducing the potential for spills and creating jobs both in the construction of the refineries and the upgrading of railroads. The number of those jobs would, I think, be greater than Mr. Samuelson's 20,000 pipeline workers. They wouldn't all be temp jobs either. New refineries would not be as dirty as old ones.Whatever acid deposition the refineries create would be airmailed right back to Canada.

Some wattage is lost along electric transmission lines and there are two other objections to them: they're an eyesore, and they do kill migratory fowl and raptors. Still, as opposed to an oil spill onto our soils and rivers, the environmental cost is lower.

The idea of running the oil all the way to Texas gulf ports (read Houston) sounds to me as though they're contemplating shipping it further. If that's so, it negates the whole argument that we need the oil for domestic consumption.

What we really need is a program of conversion to a post-petroleum society on the order of the Marshall Plan of sixty years ago. Unfortunately, our hopes in President Obama and the Democrats in this regard have been disappointing.

By the way, isn't the very essence of the word "conservative" a reference to conserving, that is not using things all up? Shouldn't people who call themselves conservatives be in the forefront of the environmentalist movement? Instead, they are tripping all over themselves to sacrifice tomorrow for the sake of today.

Republicans, Republicans, Lend Me Your Ears

Ron Reagan has been substituting for Chris Matthews this week on "Hardball." I don't know what Mr. Reagan's voter registration is, but lord, he sure sounds like a Democrat!

I was especially interested in yesterday's program, when he sailed into Dick Cheney and the former Veep's defense of waterboarding. Reagan pulled no punches, denouncing the practice as torture and Cheney as a war criminal for countenancing it. Cheney, who is under indictment by the International Court of Justice and cannot travel to Europe for fear of arrest, still insists that nearly drowning prisoners is justified.

If Cheney is a war criminal of course, so is George Bush.

Recent polling indicates, ironically, Rick Perry is the new darling of the most conservative Republicans, though the Tea Party that forms the backbone of his support is less popular among the electorate than Muslims or atheists. Go figure. Perry, who presides over Texas, currently experiencing the hottest summer on record and an intense drought, claims global warming and evolution are unproven.

Perry touts an "economic miracle" in Texas, but his claims will not pass scrutiny. Much of whatever prosperity Texas has achieved is due to the presence of oil there, which has nothing much to do with Perry's administration. Texas remains among the states with the greatest disparity between the wealthy and everyone else, their students continue to rank near the bottom in every proficiency test, Perry has presided over more than twice as many executions as any other governor in a similar time period, and there are disturbing stories concerning his alleged indifference to exculpatory evidence in death penalty appeals.

Perry even spoke to a secession rally in Texas, suggesting it is a concept worth considering. Perhaps he needs to be reminded that we fought a war over this issue one hundred fifty years ago and secession lost.

Can the GOP, the party of Abraham Lincoln, seriously consider nominating such a man?

Dementia

So, the women's basketball coach at the University of Tennessee says she has been diagnosed with onset Alzheimer's disease at age 59. That's the same age as my sister, who has the same illness at a more advanced stage.

Early onset of this debilitating fatal illness is one of the banes of life and a terror for everyone who loves someone afflicted with it. Aside from the obvious sympathy for the person who has the illness, there's the fear that you will get it too. What little memory loss, or inability to concentrate, is the first straw in the wind, heralding the inevitable beginning of the inevitable end.

One day last week I was doing errands in town and suddenly couldn't remember the name of the street where I live. After several futile minutes searching my memory banks, I finally had to pull out my wallet and consult my driver's license. Only then did I know the name of the street where I live.

It sent me into a little panic.

As a history teacher, I have always had to remember arcane bits of trivia: how many breakdowns did Henry VI of England suffer; who was Secretary of State in 1977; what was the difference between the National Assembly and the National Convention and so forth. If or when those bits of knowledge disappear and I'm left with nothing but the lyrics to Gilligan's Island, or who won the World Series in 1947, what will I do?

Maybe not notice. Among the last surviving signers of the Declaration of Independence were Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. A lesser known signer who lived into the nineteenth century was Charles Thomson, secretary to the Continental Congress. In one of their last letters, either Adams or Jefferson mentioned that Thomson still lived and was "innocent and happy as a baby."

Perhaps that's not such a bad way to end one's days.

For those of you who are wondering, Henry had two catatonic breakdowns, Cyrus Vance was Secretary of State in 1977, and the National Convention was the most radical phase of the French Revolution.

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale

A tale of a fateful trip

That started from this tropic port

Aboard this tiny ship.

And the Yankees.

Bread on the Water

For some reason, I was thinking about NECCO wafers recently. For you youngsters out there, NECCO wafers were rolls of flavored compressed sugar candies wrapped in wax paper sleeves. They were sold all over the United States as far as I know, but I haven't seen them for maybe thirty years and am pretty sure they've gone the way of the dodo. So probably has NECCO itself, the New England Confectionary Company.

Thinking about NECCO wafers made me remember a story my father told me about his own grandfather, Maximilien Lefebvre, who came from Montreal to Boston to visit dad's family in about 1918. One day while there he took my father, then about five years old, for a walk and bought him a roll of NECCO wafers.

It was a tiny act of kindness, but my father still recalled it sixty or more years later. Grandfather Max continued to live in my father's heart for all that time, and even continues today since I know the story and have just passed it along to you.

In my own childhood, I remember fondly my uncle Raymond, who took time from a Florida vacation to throw a baseball around with me when I was five. And I was terrible, he had to chase my bad throws over and over again. He's nearly forty years in the grave, but the friendliness he showed to a little boy lives on.

As I'm sure astute readers already have figured out, my point is that acts of charity, of kindness are remembered, and hopefully, are paid forward. May we all do so.

No politics today. No jokes.

There, Their, They're

And now a few words from Grammar Guy, a new addition to this blog's stable of talent. Grammar Guy, not to be confused with Dave Barry's alter ego Mr. Language Person, begins his association with us by tackling homophones, words that sound alike but are spelled differently and have different meanings.

Grammar Guy begins with "its" and it's." He hopes everyone realizes that "its" is a possessive, meaning something belonging to it. "It's" is the contraction form of "it is." It's easy to remember the difference.

"Your" and "you're" are much the same. It's (notice the apostrophe) astounding how often the two forms are confused.

"There," is an object farther away from Grammar Guy than something that is "here." It can also be used as a term of consolation, as in "There, there, there," spoken to a distraught person. "Their" is another possessive, and "they're" is the short form of "they are." Got all that?

Now, how about "layer" and "lair?" One's a domesticated hen and the other is the place she should never wander into.

"Principal and principle." One's a headmaster and the other is moral ground to stand on.

That's about all that Grammar Guy can think of at this time. At his next appearance he'll look at meaningless expressions. As a preview, he offers, "Crucial straw poll." What's up with that? "Crucial" implies it's the most important in a series of events, and everything after it is an anticlimax. How could that possibly be true of an event that involves a tiny handful of people who actually had to pay to cast non-binding votes? And yet, a "crucial straw poll" caused one putative president, Tim Pawlenty, to drop from contention. For the record, we pick presidents by a process that's little short of insane.

Bring The Troops Home

The downed helicopter last week with the loss of thirty Americans should prompt a serious re-evaluation of the commitment we have made in Afghanistan. It is nearly ten years now since the first American units put boots on the ground and helped rout the Taliban government there. Since then, we have installed and encouraged the Karzai government there, which, despite the passing of a decade, has not been able to consolidate its hold on the country.

The Karzai government did sign a deal for a natural gas pipeline to the benefit of American (and multi-national) companies if it is built, and we have sunk billions of dollars in Afghanistan, a considerable share of which has been wasted or stolen. So it's fair at this point to ask whether continued American presence there does more harm than good. If the Afghan government isn't capable of dealing with internal dissent by now, will it ever be?

The worst case scenario following American withdrawal is: the Taliban crushes Karzai's government and resumes its merciless rule. They allow or encourage al-Qaida to build training camps there and these are used to train militants for attacks against us in various places around the world.

That's grim at the very least, but how long are we willing to keep our soldiers there to prevent it when the decade they've already been there hasn't done the trick. At a time when the USA is experiencing huge budget deficits and our economy is in a lengthy period of doldrums, can we continue to pump so much of our economy into what looks more and more like a money sinkhole? More important, how many people, American and Afghan, will die to prolong the current stalemate?

The people of Afghanistan must make the hard choice to resist the Taliban or submit to them. The interests of the United States are best served by bringing our troops home from their country and from Iraq. Doing so will save lives and money and allow us to pursue political settlements throughout southwest Asia.

We owe it to the inhabitants of that tortured land to clean up after ourselves too. Removal of landmines and other equipment should be accomplished as part of the withdrawal or afterwards, perhaps under UN auspices.

And Baby Makes Three

Just Joe and Amy

And baby makes three

They're happy in

Raleigh, N.C.

That's just awful, but it has been running through my head since Kris and I returned to Colorado yesterday. It was a wonderful visit to family in the Tarheel state and in Virginia, and our first look at baby Violet was a highlight of the trip we'll not soon forget. Holding new life as your own years are dwindling perceptibly is a treat that's hard to duplicate and impossible to beat.

Little Violet has a floppy epiglottis, so she wheezes and honks as she breathes. Somehow this endears her to us even more. She's so precious. As we drove away from Raleigh towards Blacksburg on the second leg of our vacation odyssey I casually asked Kris how she liked the baby. She said, "I'm a goner. I'm in love."

So am I.

We pretty much ate our way across the Old Dominion, lots of restaurant meals, many receipts in my wallet, and an aversion to getting on the scale now that we're back home.

Daughter Jennie and her husband Brian are doing one of the finest things I can recall, inviting our son Danny and his wife Bethany to live with them. Danny and Bethany are having serious financial problems and this will help them enormously. Needless to say, I'm tremendously gratified by their behavior and very proud of them.

We returned to Colorado Springs to a flap brought about by our congressman, the lamentable Doug Lamborn, who referred to the president as a "tarbaby." What a dope! Even setting aside the rudeness of the remark (And can you imagine the furor of the talk radio people if a Democrat had said something similar about President Bush.) there's the matter of the latent racism in his use of the term.

My friends and neighbors here will re-elect him easily.

The decline of the stock market since the budget deal last week has prompted the Christian left website to wonder if the Republicans have lost more money in the plummeting market than they would have spent had there been a tax increase on the wealthy.

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