New Mexico’s Rich, Sunny Future

May 29, 2012 by 1 Comment


According to this article in the Guardian UK, ‎Germany’s solar infrastructure produced 22 GW of power last Saturday.

That was enough to power 40-50% of Germany. That is the equivalent of 20 nuclear power plants running at full capacity.

Germany is 138,000 square miles in total area with 81 million people.

Germany increased its solar capacity by 50% in the last year. Its 22 Solar GW provided power for 32 to 40 million people.

New Mexico is 121,500 square miles with 2 million people.

If Germany can generate 22 solar GW, how much more could New Mexico generate – and sell – with its sunnier, more southerly location? It’s true that the average American uses significantly more power than the average German. But not 20 times more.

New Mexico could run entirely on solar power – using coal or gas only for nighttime power until storage issues are resolved – and make a lot of money from selling the surplus to 20 or 30 million people in surrounding states. New Mexico could be to solar power what Alaska is to oil. (Not to mention what Arizona and Texas, with more people and bigger economies, could do. Not to mention wind power, and efficiency initiatives.)

If only PNM, the Public Regulatory Commission (the PRC), and Governor Martinez could be convinced to give up their addiction to coal. If you think they should, their contact info is available at the links just above: drop them a line.

How long would it take for America to cut its coal power by 50%? Not as long as utilities and state and national politicians would have you believe.

Think of All Those Flat Roofs in New Mexico

Filed under environment, opinion, politics, Santa Fe local, science Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Real Christians Are Not Bigots

May 11, 2012 by Leave a comment


If any Christian churches in Albuquerque or Santa Fe want to put up a billboard something like this one by a church in San Diego (maybe excluding the odd “Christianity for All” coda, as my friend Kevin points out), I will make a contribution to make it happen. I encourage my friends, Christian or not, in other states, to make the same offer.
 There are lots of bigots who clothe their bigotry in Christian  makeup. I know many Christians, and hardly a one of them is bigoted. It seems the only ones we hear about on TV or in the news are of the gay-bashing, Koran-burning, funeral-desecrating variety. If there is a war on Christianity, it is this: that the most despicable people who self-identify as Christians are the only ones who get media attention. Fred Phelps has a church that consists almost exclusively of members of his own family. The Koran burner has a church of, I think, 12 members. They get all the media attention they want.
What about the nuns Nicholas Kristof wrote about this week, or the missionaries he’s written about before, who do some of the most caring work in the most dangerous circumstances? What about the Protest Chaplains who have offered counsel during the Occupations in Boston and New York City? Well, they don’t spend a lot of time on PR. Phelps, et al, are mean-spirited attention addicts. The media gives it to them.
It’s time to remember that Christians have founded hospitals, that Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Reverend Ralph Abernathy were  Christians. That Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Christian. They set the standards. Let’s dust them off and shine them up again. The Christians I know should be proud of who they are and the communities they have made and strengthened. They are not bigots. They are not pro-ignorance, anti-science. Those who are Republicans are not the caricature of Republicans that the Tea Partiers have made of the party – a caricature that my father, a lifelong Republican, would never recognize. The Christians I know are more concerned with being a light and a comfort in the world than they are with being a power in the world.
I will go a step further than my original offer. I am going to seek out churches that feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the outcasts, here in Santa Fe and in Albuquerque. I’m going to suggest that they, perhaps in concert with other churches (and perhaps also synagogues and mosques and temples) they know, put up a billboard like the one above, and I will promise to raise some of the funds to make that happen. Again, I encourage you to do the same in your home towns.

Filed under belief, business as unusual, GLBT, local, News, opinion, politics, religion, sex, Women's Rights Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Dear North Carolina

May 10, 2012 by Leave a comment


So you have defined marriage as being between a man and a woman.

Have you considered defining “man” and “woman”?

After all, there are many varieties of gender, not just the two. There are the common XX and XY types. BUt I am told that there are also XXY, XXXY, Y with mutated X, and X with mutated Y, the intersexed, the transgendered and, I am sure, more.

So why stop at defining marriage? Think of the government jobs that could be created by requiring blood tests AND chromosomal and genital exams for every marriage license. For those of indeterminate gender, some kind of panel will have to be formed, to see what gender category the person fits in and whether they can be permitted to love someone who is not their exact opposite in chromosomal distribution.

Really, it’s just like miscegenation: once you say “white” and “black” don’t mix, you’re in a pickle. Who, exactly, is white, and who, exactly, is black? Some definitions really are useless for any but the most academic use, and applying them to law just makes life and governing more difficult.

You think you have settled the matter, NC. But your work has just begun.

Filed under GLBT, human rights, humor, News, opinion, politics, sex Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Equal Rights

May 10, 2012 by Leave a comment


Newark Mayor Cory Booker is right on, in his conversation with Rachel Maddow. All of these issues are about equal rights – not gay rights, immigrant rights, women’s rights. Equal rights. Framing it that way makes all of these groups allies, and makes each group’s case stronger.
An Equal Rights Amendment would benefit everyone.
Please share.

Filed under human rights, politics, sex, Women's Rights Tagged with , , , , ,

President Obama Endorses Same Sex Marriage

May 9, 2012 by Leave a comment


President Obama, by endorsing same sex marriage today, spanks North Carolina the day after a large majority of its voters limited its own citizens’ civil rights.

Will the DNC follow Obama’s lead and move the Dem Convention out of Charlotte? Would they hold their convention there if NC had just voted to reinforce segregation?

The last time Dems had their convention in Charlotte, in 1860, they nominated Stephen Douglas. Who ran against Abraham Lincoln. We know how that worked out.

Democrats: Endorse Love, and Leave Charlotte. If you want to share that sentiment with the party, there is a petition here.

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PNM Is (Not the Only Utility) On the Wrong Track

May 7, 2012 by Leave a comment


Do you know about the San Juan Generating Station, owned (in part) and operated by PNM? Or the Four Corners plant on Navajo land nearby, owned mostly by Arizona and Southern California utilities? These plants are each almost 40 years old, and are requiring hundreds of millions of dollars of upkeep because it’s older, therefore dirtier, technology.  Rather than retire these plants, and transitioning to wind, solar, and geothermal – energy sources that don’t generally cause asthma in children, for example – the owner utilities prefer to keep these behemoths limping along.

Bad business loves company, and we are not alone. Apparently much the same problem is occurring in Canada, where protesters, including one Nobel Prize laureate, blocked the train tracks taking coal to the offending plant.

Of course, somehow, the police in Canada have also come to believe that their responsibility is to protect smoke stacks that kill people and damage the environment, rather than helping the people to shut down the plant.

RCMP Police Chief Roseberry, also on the scene in White Rock, stated that her concern was for public safety, and preventing human injury as a result of protesters on the train tracks.

Which must be why she arrested protesters. It’s a crazy world.

“Coal is a likely target for climate stability advocates because it has the highest greenhouse gas emissions per unit of energy of all fossil fuels and because there is enough economically available coal to trigger run away climate change.”

“Nobel Prize Laureate and SFU professor Dr. Mark Jaccard was among those arrested. “I’m a naïve product of working class Burnaby,” he said. “I’ve never broken a law in my life. I’m very uncomfortable taking this position. If governments were acting to reduce GHG emissions, or slow the rate of increase, I wouldn’t be here today,” he continued. “I’d be helping those governments to do that. But in the last few years, especially in Canada under Harper, the emphasis has been on accelerating the rate at which we are destroying the planet. So I have to ask myself and I have to ask everyone else, ethically, what is the right thing to do? It’s made me read more about civil disobedience, people like Mahandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Henry David Thoreau.””

PNM is holding their shareholders meeting at their offices at 4th and Silver in Albuquerque on May 15, a week from tomorrow. There will be a protest there that morning.

Inform yourselves. Here is PNM’s info on San Juan. And here is a statement from a New Mexico environmental group that gives an overview of the battle to close down dirty coal.

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Celebrating Love, Because We Have No Surplus

April 27, 2012 by Leave a comment


Worth re-posting from time to time.

Do we have such a surplus of love in the world that we should put a lid on it when it is found?

This video moves me every time. Not because of the cause it represents. But because it shows that rare thing, a relationship that begins, and builds, and gets to the point where both parties realize that what they have is not from some Hollywood fantasy, but is real and worth committing to, for better or worse. What is worth spending your whole life on? What an amazing experience, to have someone decide that you, of all the wonderful things in the world, are the one thing to which they wish to commit their lives and energies, and to feel the same about them.

This video shows a basic human experience, like a meal with good friends, like pulling off the road to watch a sunset, like being sick and scared, like taking pleasure in a good book or movie. Like being born. Like dying. Except this is love, which makes all the others better.

There is nothing to fear here, and so much to celebrate. Please share. Again.

Filed under GLBT, human rights Tagged with , , ,

For the Love of Wendell

April 25, 2012 by 1 Comment


Wendell Berry, sui generis

Mark Bittman has a lovely article and interview with Wendell Berry, my favorite author, in the New York Times.

There isn’t a more down-to-earth, inspiring thinker alive today. He’s much more than the “spiritual founder of the food movement,” though he is certainly that. He’s the no-nonsense yet patient father of a vision of a way of living that would foster the goals many of us seek: sustainability, certainly, but also, and as important, enjoyability, neighborliness, and satisfaction. If, in your heart of hearts, you are troubled by what we might have to give up to be what we want to be, Wendell shows that there’s no need to worry. If you have not read him, you have an unassuming new inspiration awaiting you.

Bittman does us the favor of providing a link to a page of Berry quotations, from which I plucked this one, that resonates with me particularly well these days:

“There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say “It is yet more difficult than you thought.” This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

If you have never read poetry because it’s just so . . . hard, unclear, taken with itself, try Wendell Berry’s poetry. Here is a sample:

The Wild Rose

Sometimes, hidden from me in daily custom and in ritual
I live by you unaware, as if by the beating of my heart.
Suddenly you flare again in my sight
A wild rose at the edge of the thicket where yesterday there was only
shade
And I am blessed and choose again,
That which I chose before.

 

I had that one made into a calligraphy for my nephew and his bride. If you don’t get a sigh out of your long-time partner from leaving a copy of this poem on his or her nightstand, I’d be surprised.

If you are of a more revolutionary bent, here is a manifesto:

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

See what I mean? It’s almost impossible to stop quoting the man himself, because everything he writes is so much better than what can be said about him.

If I had to decide what kind of inspiration to put in a paper or on a web site to supplement or supplant, say, Biblical quotes and horoscopes, I’d have no trouble deciding: I’d have a regular feature called “A Berry A Day,” and would get a straight shot at heaven for having come up with the idea.

Filed under business as unusual, culture, environment, inspiration, literature Tagged with , , , , , ,

Finally, A Tiny Speck Of Justice: Spanish Nun Maria Gomez Valbuena Charged In Baby-Stealing Operation, Refuses To Testify

April 16, 2012 by Leave a comment


In a small news story, the Huffington Post reports on the case involving some 300,000 stolen babies. This is big news in other countries, but here in the US, it’s not exactly front page news.

MADRID — An 80-year-old Spanish nun has refused to testify at a court hearing about her alleged involvement in the stealing of newborn babies from their parents and selling them to other families.

Spanish police have investigated hundreds of cases amid allegations of baby trafficking dating from the years after Spain’s 1936-39 civil war and supposedly a few even in the mid-1990s.

Authorities were alerted by an association of people searching for lost relatives. The group alleges the scheme involved a nationwide network, including doctors, nurses, midwives, nuns and intermediaries. Mothers were told their babies had been stillborn.

Sister Maria Gomez is the only person subpoenaed so far. She appeared in court Thursday and told the judge she would exercise her right to remain silent.

Reuters reports that Sister Maria Gomez is charged with “illegal detention and falsifying documents.”

According to Newser, one mother of a stolen infant alleges that Sister Maria Gomez also threatened to steal her other child.

Spanish nun Maria Gomez Valbuena (C) leaves a court in Madrid on April 12, 2012, after refusing to testify before the judge for her alleged involvement in a case of stolen children. (PEDRO ARMESTRE/AFP/Getty Images)

“Stop asking me [where the baby is] or else I will also take away your other daughter and you will go to jail for adultery,” the mother claims Sister Maria Gomez said.

The BBC explains that thousands of babies are thought to have been stolen under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship with the aim of removing children from their “undesirable” left-wing parents and placing them under the care of “approved” right-wing families.

via Spanish Nun Maria Gomez Valbuena Charged In Baby-Stealing Operation.

We’re talking about a baby-stealing operation that continued into the 90′s. Priests, nuns and doctors were involved. One nun has been found to have over a million dollars in her bank account.

The people running the operation told the parents their baby was dead, that they couldn’t see the body, and sold the baby to paying customers. They then falsified all the documents.

I find these crimes so heinous, so offensive and reprehensible, that for the life of me I cannot fathom why it is not front page news around the globe.

300,000 children. It will be hard to follow the trail, since all the facts have been covered up, but just imagine what it would be like to find out you had been one of these babies. You were stolen from your mother and sold to the people you thought were your parents. The people you know as your parents bought you from a baby stealing operation.

In the case of single mothers, that would make at least 600,000 people whose lives have been forever altered beyond belief. If you include the parents who bought the children – who may not have known they were complicit – that would make around 1,200,000 people affected. And once again, the horror is laid at the feet of the Catholic church.

Will the church demand justice for the victims? Will the vast wealth and resources of the Catholic hierarchy be used to help those harmed, bring families back together, and see that justice be done to all those responsible? Not bloody likely. The pattern they have followed for hundreds and hundreds of years is to cover up, to deny, and to protect the wealth and power of the church at all costs.  And it costs the victims of their crimes most.

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Raise Your Hand If You Know A Hypocrite Who Benefits From The Government They Hate

April 15, 2012 by Leave a comment


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