I Have a Dream Redo:

August 28, 1963 Martin Luther King speaks at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. Some 45 years later to the day Barak Obama accepts the nomination of the Democratic Party as the nominee for President of the United States of America. These two events are related.

The whole issue of race relations in America is fraught with difficulty and emotion. When the 55 sage men met in Philadelphia in 1787 to design the American Constitution the issue of slavery was in fact not resolved but rather deferred. For the sake of population counting slaves were counted as 3/5 of a citizen. But additional restrictions were imposed. Congress was forbidden from prohibiting importation of slaves for the following 20 years. A “person held to service of labor” in one state be “delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor shall be due”.

Congress did in fact forbid the importation of slaves in 1807 some 20 years after ratification. However this was more of a concession to Great Britain who had outlawed slavery on March 25, 1807 by Act of Parliament. While the importation of slaves from Africa was forbidden no attempt was made to abolish slavery by either Great Britain or the United States.

The struggle continued throughout the years leading up to the American Civil War. In 1850 the Fugitive Slave Law required individuals to return fugitive slaves to their owners. The Dred Scott v. Sandford decision by the Supreme Court further divided the nation. It 1857 Chief Justice Taney read the majority opinion that stripped all slaves of any and all protections of the law. On October 16, 1859 John Brown a radical abolitionist lead 22 men in a raid on the Federal Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. The plan was to use the captured weapons to arm slaves in the American South. It is interesting to note that Robert E. Lee led the federal troops retook the Arsenal.

By two executive orders issued by President Abraham Lincoln freed all slaves in states that did not rejoin the union by January 1, 1863. This order did not free the slaves in the border states of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia. Several acts of congress and the second part of the executive order and the Dred Scott decision was effectively reversed.

However Sothern Blacks had 100 more years of slavery by another name to endure. Jim Crow laws and warrantless arrests and total disregard of habeas corpus coupled with the KKK enforced the re-enslavement of southern blacks. In fact until Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 black America was not free. LBJ well knew that his signing of that act would in fact cost the Democratic Party their power in the South. Today the Democratic south remains almost totally Republican. So much so that only in northern Virginia and areas around Atlanta and Dade County Florida can a Democrat stand a chance of being elected.

The dream lives on. The struggle for the laboring worker vs. the corporate owners continues. Those who are without medical coverage continue to work and hope that they do not fall victim to an accident or illness. The ranks of those who cannot afford to purchase a home or who have purchased a home only to lose it to a foreclosure swells week by week. Compounding these problems is a rapidly increasing rate of inflation. These are the problems that try the souls of the American Common Man.

Against this troubled backdrop we have the vision of a Black man who has overcome all obstacles to become the first Black to be nominated for President of the United States of America by a major party. May god bless America Black, White and Brown.

Money and Power:

There seems to be some confusion with some people asking which came first money or power. Maybe this will help. Asking which came first the chicken or the egg is a dodge and asking a question like this prevents knowledge rather than helping. The chicken and the egg are the same critter that is to say both are different forms of a chicken. So it is with money and power. Money and power are really different forms of the same thing.

If you stop and think about many of the questions being asked today you will see that many of those questions are not designed to illicit information but rather to serve as points over which people can endlessly argue. The argument serves to prevent a consensus being reached and real and meaningful solutions being found and applied.

Consider the different sentencing guide lines for cocaine possession. Rock cocaine is the form most often used by Black America. White Americans prefer their cocaine as a powder. Now consider that having the same amount of cocaine in different forms carry different mandatory sentences. Is this the height of stupidity or not. Yet folks will argue over this very point.

Today American education system is in a state of disrepair. In many school districts the schools themselves are in desperate need of repair. Do we fix them? We do not we argue about whether or not prayer in schools should be permitted. Or we argue if the teachers are doing their job. The answer is simple. If the students are not able to read and they are in the seventh grade someone has failed to do their job. If the roof leaks we as citizens have an obligation to fix the leak.

Tonight there will be a question and answer session between Pastor Rick Warren and presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and John McCain. Already the Christian right is confusing things by saying that Rick Warren will not ask their stance on Abortion. I for one am far more interested in each mans approach to energy sources for America in the 21 century. Abortion issues do not bring knowledge to this they just serve to cloud the stage with emotion not logic.

Let us all see how clearly issues can be addressed and true solutions proposed to America’s problems. Let us quit bickering over issues that matter little and address issues that matter a lot.

Carbon Cycle:

Oil shale fascinated me back when I was a kid. I actually used a Fresnel lens to heat a lump of oil shale and could smell the crude oil that hot spot was generating. The problem with oil shale is that some of the oil has to be consumed in order to free the remaining oil. Canada is continuing to expand its shale oil production. It is definitely something that America will have to do. However if you think strip mining leaves the land a mess I assure you that mining oil shale is even more destructive to the landscape.

See: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=bakken+oil&spell=1

As I see it we have two limits on carbon based fuels. The first is their decreasing availability and their escalating cost. The second is the environmental considerations. The level of atmospheric CO2 is far higher than it should be and control of CO2 levels simply must be part of any overall energy policy.

I have been trying to establish the parameters for using high growth algae to harvest the CO2 and turn it into cells. These algae cells could be sun dried and then burned as fuel in a generating plant. There is of course a lot of math and some genetic work that must be done. Such an approach creates a solar driven carbon dioxide recycling energy generation system. The overall carbon foot print would be zero and yet energy would be generated. Such a system would continue to generate energy on cloudy days.

Over sizing the algae ponds initially would mean the carbon footprint could become negative until these ponds brought better balance to the earth’s atmosphere. Where we store the excess dried algae might become a problem. Perhaps it could be formed into sludge and pumped back into the oil fields we have depleted.