All Over The Map
My head is spinning - only partly because of the moonshine my parents brought home from Macedonia.
So many potential projects, so many places and people and issues on my mind.
I'm researching trout streams in Tierra del Fuego, reading Darwin's Journal of the Beagle, learning about the indigenous peoples of Patagonia, getting a taste of their language and culture, so deeply rooted in the land、they were hunted down like dogs, exterminated.
Vermont's Energy Future. The conference - there is so much to write. Windmills, big, white windmills on the ridge-lines, General Electric design. I could spend the next 40 years here in Vermont working on the transition to homegrown, renewable energy sources and be perfectly fulfilled, challenged, content.
Or I could stay in Patagonia. The island of Chiloe in Chile look nice. I was looking at pictures.
And thinking today - gosh - I should really go to Siberia, get a sense of the scale, tour the old gulags.
Thinking also - if I was born a little earlier, somewhere else, thinking as I do - would I have been sent to the labor camps? Would I have been shot in the back of the head?
Anything could happen. If Rudy is elected president, all could be lost. I'm scared and exhilarated and wondering about things like insulation and why the Chinese communists simplified the written Chinese language.
Integrity? Wind power or electric or none at all?
"That's why we need to reprocess the uranium we already have," the Entergy spokesman told me.
'But wouldn't that create weapons grade plutonium?" I asked.
"Well, yeah," he said. "You gotta be careful."
Last night, I spent almost an hour looking at photos from nuclear bomb tests. Nuclear energy is safe, clean, reliable and efficient. Right. Tell that to Hiroshima. Tell that to the New York I hope to God my children never know.
Listening to Ben Bernanke on the radio today, thinking about credit markets, thinking about China, thinking about sanity, eating some bread and cheese, adding a log to the fire.
山水。
There's too much - too many books to write, too many friends to contact, too many fish to catch, too many hearts to touch and break and heal.
moving, moving, always moving on.
So many potential projects, so many places and people and issues on my mind.
I'm researching trout streams in Tierra del Fuego, reading Darwin's Journal of the Beagle, learning about the indigenous peoples of Patagonia, getting a taste of their language and culture, so deeply rooted in the land、they were hunted down like dogs, exterminated.
Vermont's Energy Future. The conference - there is so much to write. Windmills, big, white windmills on the ridge-lines, General Electric design. I could spend the next 40 years here in Vermont working on the transition to homegrown, renewable energy sources and be perfectly fulfilled, challenged, content.
Or I could stay in Patagonia. The island of Chiloe in Chile look nice. I was looking at pictures.
And thinking today - gosh - I should really go to Siberia, get a sense of the scale, tour the old gulags.
Thinking also - if I was born a little earlier, somewhere else, thinking as I do - would I have been sent to the labor camps? Would I have been shot in the back of the head?
Anything could happen. If Rudy is elected president, all could be lost. I'm scared and exhilarated and wondering about things like insulation and why the Chinese communists simplified the written Chinese language.
Integrity? Wind power or electric or none at all?
"That's why we need to reprocess the uranium we already have," the Entergy spokesman told me.
'But wouldn't that create weapons grade plutonium?" I asked.
"Well, yeah," he said. "You gotta be careful."
Last night, I spent almost an hour looking at photos from nuclear bomb tests. Nuclear energy is safe, clean, reliable and efficient. Right. Tell that to Hiroshima. Tell that to the New York I hope to God my children never know.
Listening to Ben Bernanke on the radio today, thinking about credit markets, thinking about China, thinking about sanity, eating some bread and cheese, adding a log to the fire.
山水。
There's too much - too many books to write, too many friends to contact, too many fish to catch, too many hearts to touch and break and heal.
moving, moving, always moving on.
posted by Tim at
10:30 PM
3 Comments:
hilarious posting, this one. i am in complete agreement with your rudy comment. i WILL leave the country and never come back.
love your new interviews.
am halfway through my solo vs. companion article and i don't like it. maybe you can look over what i have so far??
if you go to chile say, in december, let me know cause i'll be in ecuador. off to st john tomorrow night.
the life of a fledgling travel writer. i say stick with you gut and your passion. all will work itself out.
Nukyuhlur energy sucks. But we need energy, barring wholesale societal collapse. What are the alternatives? Wind and solar are promising, but realistically at least 20-30 years away from being able to provide the energy needs of a significant portion of the population simply due to construction limitations. We need to bridge that gap somehow, and the choice is between immediate poison with fossil fuels and delayed poison from nukes.
If you're ever going to Siberia, give me a call. I almost took the T-S railroad from Moscow to Beijing this summer on a whim - it's only a few hundred bucks, and you can get off your train, spend a day anywhere, and get onto the next one without a problem.
I'm not too worried about Rudy. Not enough support from within the GOP, and too many skeletons to be nationally electable. His only chance would come if he's facing a candidate with a similarly weak resume... shit.
Hi. Regarding nuclear energy, you might want to look into pebble bed reactors. This technology is being developed in China and is literally, due to well understood laws of physics, incapable of a meltdown.
(By the way, don't you think it's a little unfair to compare the application of a technology in a manner specifically designed to kill people to another application of the same technology that is not? That's like saying your laptop is a horror since computers were first used to calculate artillery and ballistic missile trajectories.)
The dangers of global warming (fossil fuels) are unknown and difficult, if not impossible, to mitigate. The dangers of nuclear power are better understood (after 50+ years) and a failure there has a smaller scale (compared to global warming). (Chernobyl was bad but limited to Europe. Global warming is not limited to a single region.)
Wind power and other "sustainable" sources can block views (creating visual pollution) and migration routes. When scaled out to the level required to maintain even a fraction of our current infrastructure (that supports your life and work -- think computer networks and jet airplanes) those technologies would require what are now considered unreasonable amounts of land.
Take your pick. There is no such thing as zero impact for any species.
Neat blog, by the way.
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