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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (375325)	3/28/2008 12:46:45 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575422

They where mostly over. For a time they where completely over. Perhaps Fallujah later on could be considered another major military operation, but there where very few such operations after that point. Then I suppose "the surge" should have been called "the trickle".

To: TimF who wrote (375325)	3/28/2008 12:53:48 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575422

All Energy Roads Lead to the Sun By Andrew C. Revkin dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com Daniel G. Nocera, a professor of energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sees the sun as the only energy source that can replace fossil fuels. (Credit: Andrew C. Revkin/The New York Times)“It’s the sun, stupid,” is probably how James Carville would summarize the message of Daniel G. Nocera, a chemist and professor of energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, when he addressed a meeting on environmental issues that began in Aspen Wednesday night. The event is the first Aspen Environmental Forum, a conclave of scientists, policy experts, industry executives, environmental campaigners and communicators (I probably left out a category or two) organized by the Aspen Institute and National Geographic Magazine. A prime focus of Dr. Nocera’s lab is unraveling photosynthesis to find ways to turn sunlight efficiently into chemical fuels (hydrogen, for example). “All scientists ultimately believe solar has to be the answer,” he said. On Thursday, he laid out his “big idea” as a formula: “If you take sunlight plus water, that equals oil plus coal plus methane.” The night before, he described what he said was an achievable energy future — if the world engages seriously in pursuing scientific, technological and policy advances that are needed to make sunlight into usable energy cheaply. “With the right investments in science and the right policy you’ll have a house with shingles generating your electricity during the day when the sun’s out,” he said. “You’ll take the extra electricity and, if battery technology works, you’ll put it in batteries. Or you’ll put it in chemical fuels like I want to do…. At night you drive your electric car in, you plug it in, the next morning you get up and leave again. So your whole little world of energy is going to be generated around where you live. In some little village in India they will be doing the same thing. That’s the world I see. That would be the unifying thing. It won’t be centralized. We’ll all be generating our energy. Energy is money, so the world will be more prosperous.” But he added that, for the moment, the federal government and the public remain largely disengaged. Dr. Nocera said human activities, in energy terms, right now are essentially a “12.8 trillion watt light bulb.” Our energy thirst will probably be 30 trillion watts, or 30 terrawatts, by 2050 with the human population heading toward 9 billion. If that energy is supplied with coal and oil, an overheated planet is almost assured, he said. Finding other options is a huge challenge, he added. To illustrate, he provided one hypothetical (and impossible) menu for getting those 18 additional terawatts without emissions from coal and oil: - Cut down every plant on Earth and make it into a fuel. You get 7 terawatts, but you need 30. And you don’t eat. - Build nuclear plants. Around 8 terawatts could be gotten from nuclear power if you built a new billion-watt plant every 1.6 days until 2050. - Take all the wind energy available close to Earth’s surface and you get 2 terawatts. - You get 1 more terawatt if you dam every other river on the planet and reach 30. As he summed up, “So no more eating, nuclear power plants all over, dead birds everywhere, and I dam every other river and I just eke out what you’ll need in 40 years.” Then he turned to the sun, his research focus, which bathes the planet in 800 terawatts of energy continually. “We only need 18 of those terawatts,” he said. But the current level of investment in pursuing that energy, he said, isn’t even close to sufficient. “How committed to this are we?” he asked. The ratio of spending on health research and basic research and development on energy is 30 to 1, he added. “Right now the choice to fund science to solve this problem is pathetic.” (We’ve chronicled this lack of energy research in some detail in the ongoing Energy Challenge series.) “That’s how we’ve decided to invest your money, while there’s a chronic disease the Earth is experiencing,” he concluded.

To: TimF who wrote (375325)	4/2/2008 1:48:08 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575422

Taxes – my patriotic duty By Walter Rodgers Wed Apr 2, 4:00 AM ET It's early April, which means these are the few days of the year when Americans of almost every political stripe unite in a perennial ritual: complaining about taxes. Count me out. I'm happy to pay my fair share to the government. It's part of my patriotic duty – and it's a heckuva bargain. "Taxes are what we pay for living in a civilized society." Those words are written in stone, so they must be true. They're there to read for anyone who bothers to look up as they stroll past those New Deal-era government buildings on Constitution Avenue in the nation's capital. They are the words of former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Now there was a man! A patriotic taxpayer, not one of those chest thumpers who paper their cars with chauvinistic bumper stickers and grumble about supporting the government of the country they profess to love. Before ascending to the court, Holmes served his country during the Civil War in places with names that still raise goose bumps: The Peninsula Campaign, Balls Bluff, Antietam, and Fredericksburg, where he nearly lost his life. When he finally died in 1935, Justice Holmes gave his residuary estate to the government in gratitude! Now there's a man who truly understood patriotism in all its complexities. One facet requires citizens to pay up on April 15 because taxes are what citizens pay for necessary services. Paying taxes is an exercise of civic virtue akin to supporting one's country in time of war. Paying taxes is a conjoined twin of voting. When my wife and I emerge from our polling place on Election Day, I feel patriotic and virtuous. I am keeping my bargain with the Founding Fathers, affirming the privilege of being an American. It is a right that has roots stretching back to Magna Carta in 1215. I feel the same about taxes, paying my fair share to the republic. It affirms I am willing to share the burdens of the government that protects me. Federal income taxes are a terrific bargain in America. I like to tell my tax-grumbling friends about my last year in Israel, when the Knesset passed a new tax code that would've seized 70 percent of my income. When I lived in Berlin, my tax rate was 50 percent, and when I left England three years ago I was paying a 40 percent rate to support a gilded monarchy and a national healthcare system that did not function very well. The only place I ever lived overseas and did not have to pay more than token taxes was the Soviet Union. There you got what you paid for. Only Moscow had potable drinking water and it was dodgy during spring runoff. There seems to be an inconsistency about people who insist on wearing flag pins in their lapels, but who grumble about paying taxes. My friends grouse about government as though they had minimal financial or moral obligation to support it. Are they not part of "We the people"? I never calculated how much I paid in taxes over a working lifetime, but I began when I was picking blueberries in Maine in 1954, so it must have been a lot – an awful lot. I am rather proud of my contribution to the US Treasury over a half century. My Social Security taxes have helped soften the blow of old age for many of the World War II and Korean War veterans. I hope my federal income taxes made the lives of woefully underpaid schoolteachers just a little more comfortable, helping with their Medicare or Medicaid bills. Sure, there are things I would rather not pay for. I am not keen about farm subsidies to huge agribusiness concerns that are already as rich as Croesus. But democracy is the art of compromise, and Andrew Jackson was correct when he said, "The wisdom of man never yet contrived a system of taxation that would operate with perfect equality." Yes, professional tax planning can lead to adroit tax evasion. But reluctance to pay one's fair share flouts "the better angels of our nature." Genuine patriots don't complain about their patriotic obligations. And oh, by the way, the words carved in stone on that federal building are at 1111 Constitution Avenue. It's the headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service. Pay up and be grateful! • Walter Rodgers is a former senior international correspondent for CNN.