Third Parties and Third Rails

A great advantage of being a third party candidate is that I can talk freely about third rail issues without committing political suicide no matter what I say.
A doozy of a third rail issue that I will return to is guns. Let us approach the issue by noting that approximately 10,000 people are killed each year by gunfire. The first question is while zero is the only acceptable number, what number can we tolerate given the realities of human existence?
Looking for guidance in Syria, 30,000 people have been killed over the last year and a half and many call for military intervention to stop it. This however is not hugely more than the number who have been killed in this country over the same period. Against this Syria is a country less than one tenth of the size of the US, but in the US the killings have been going on for decades as opposed to months.
Next we have to avoid Stalinist thinking. You know Stalin famously said if one person dies, that is a tragedy, if a million people die that is a statistic. We may be seeing this in the response to the Aurora shooting where 12 people tragically died, which did nothing more than bump the total shot dead for that day up to 42 from 30, but caused an international sensation and much soul searching about gun control. So it can be inferred when we banish Stalin from our minds, that 10,000 people shot each year is intolerable. Then we remember we are Americans, we dont just go around wringing our hands we do something about it.
Pretty quickly we will start talking about money.

Off Year Issues

Last year I posted some entries about new sources of energy. A year away from the election is a good time to look at more long range issues. This is still a serious issue and since state governments have to a certain extent pick winners and losers when facilitating or financing new companies with a view to improving the state's economy over the long term, you need legislators who can keep track of emerging technology. Giving credit where credit is due, it has been the Republican Senate Minority leader of the Massachusetts State House who has been doing this and even Mitt Romney has alluded to it. Meanwhile locally, companies in Maine Massachusetts and New Jersey are hard at work on these types of  new energy technologies. But we have an election in six weeks, so I must now add to what I would like to set in motion as you state legislator starting next year.

Island Flair Fundraising Dinner

The curry was awesome as were the empanadas, rice and beans, Shepherd's pie, roast beef and all the trimmings. Thank you to all who worked (slaved) so hard to make it a success.

E -cats and Snowstorms

Just two days after the first 1MW E-cat device was sold, Connecticut experienced  Winter Storm Alfred which caused the worst power cuts ever. The Rossi ecat makes the power grid and all those downed wires obsolete, as it will sit in your basement and generate all the heat and electric power you need. It seems now there is a 13MW device on order and it would not be surprising if it went to Afghanistan to heat military camps, where gas costs the US Army $300 a gallon by the time it gets to the front. Oh wait, the E-cat makes oil and thus the strategic interest in the Middle East and so the war in Afghanistan obsolete too. If you wonder why I am covering this, it is because it has the potential to change the outlook by the time of the election next year by far more than any policy decision by any politician anywhere.
ecat.com

Not Really Accurate

I received a robocall from the NRA the other day. They wanted me to answer a question about whether I think the United Nations on US soil should be plotting to take away my gun rights. All in all, this is Not Really Accurate. Let us take the slightly pedantic point first. The UN is not on US soil. The land that the UN stands on by the East River in New York was ceded to the UN by President Truman at the UN's founding in 1948.
However what the NRA is getting excited about is the UN Small Arms Treaty. This is a good treaty in that it creates controls on the trade in small arms. A flood of small arms is the best way to make a failed state, like Somalia, a state in which Al Qaida can operate with impunity and plot to attack us. A true patriot would never want to make life comfortable and easy for Al Qaida. The Bush administration voted against this treaty, but then they were famous for acting against their own best interest. The Obama administration has taken the far more practical step of getting language inserted in the treaty that ensures nothing in the treaty can be interpreted as interfering with domestic gun laws and then voting for it. This is a good thing since the only country that voted against it was Zimbabwe, and there is no conceivable reason why a country that believes in freedom should have anything whatever in common with the thoroughly nasty and repressive regime of Robert Mugable.  I believe I  am being overly polite in representing the NRA's position as Not Really Accurate, and I  hate to sound like Andy Rooney, but wouldn't someone who shoots  a gun consider the matter of accuracy quite important?

So if the world is turned upside down later this month by Mr Rossi's e-cat

This story does not specifically concern Connecticut or New Milford, but since it is the role of the Green Party to be ahead of the curve, to trailblaze issues for others to follow, and since it has the potential to be so important I feel I have to address it.
If Mr Rossi's e-cat cold fusion device is real, it will be a bolt from the blue and will result in the maximum possible disruption to the economy, in contrast to an innovation that is  much anticipated.
1. End of coal mining. Most coal is used in power stations which is the easiest application for this e-cat.
2. End of oil exploration, it will be quickly seen that oil already discovered is adequate for future use.
3. End of most wind and solar power deployment.
4. Collapse in the price of oil and pauperization of oil sheiks as fewer and fewer people need to use it
5. Collapse of new car sales. Who will want to buy a car that uses gas when in few years they can have a car that runs for ever on a teaspoon of nickel powder?
6. Massive overall increase in economic activity and employment as companies engage in a frantic quest to implement this new technology.
7. Political earthquake in that the President will take the credit for the revival of the economy and the states hurt by the end of oil and coal use usually vote Republican.
However this is not a religious matter, we should all be doubting Thomases until it is proven to be real

A new source of energy... backstory

Many will remember the Fleischmann Pons Cold Fusion fiasco in 1989. This was front page news, two respected scientists had discovered cold fusion, a gateway to a limitless cheap non polluting source of energy, hitherto thought impossible. However it seemed no one could replicate their experiment and they we quite quickly written off and fools or hoaxers and laughed off the stage. However it turns out that their experiment  if properly done takes weeks to perform. It also required bars of the precious metal palladium  most of which refused to perform for reasons unknown and the experiment produces a small amount of excess heat which is quite difficult to measure. So as it happens, after the hoo hah had died down and in the 20 odd years since their experiment has been replicated quite routinely, most notably by the US Navy. However by then no one was listening and of course the amount of heat produced was small, far from a successful commercial source of energy. Moving forward, a breakthrough occurred in 1998 when a group headed by Professor Focardi of the University of Bologna produced a similar effect with a bar of nickel which is a much more common metal and it was much more repeatable and the amount of heat produced was much larger, but again practically no one was listening. However two people were listening. One was Professor Piantelli of the University Bologna who collaborated in the experiment and another was an Italian business man Andrea Rossi a friend of Professor Focardi. They have both worked to improve the system to produce commercial amounts of heat and it appears the Rossi / Focardi  version is ready first and the full scale reveal is planned for Oct 28th ecat.com, so let us see if the world is turned upside down or we have a damp squib.