A lot of important primaries will be taking place this Tuesday in several states, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Arizona. Mc Cain is fighting for his job in Arizona being challenged by a republican candidate to the right sponsored by tea baggers. Mc Cain has moved way to the right to accomodate this people on such issues as tightening up the border to prevent illegal immigration. Now he wants that "dang fence" built quickly. Bllanch Lincoln is defending her democratic senate seat in Arkansas. She as you know was one of the trouble makers when the democrats were trying to get health care passed. If she loses to her democratic rival it will be fine with me. Then we move on to Kentucky where Rand Paul, son of Ron Paul is the tea party candidate of choice, but Kentucky's other senator, Mitch Mc Conell, is supporting the other guy who is not as whacked out conservative. Finally we come to Pennsylvania where Arlen Spector is defending his seat against a democratic challenger who some say is a "real democrat". In this case I think Spector should win because he has built up a lot of seniority. As Spector has pointed out, "It could be that I will be losing my job because I voted to save YOUR job" referring to the stimulus plan of last year. Some say Spector is an opportunist for switching parties. I am not one of these. I believe his conversion to the democratic party was genuine, and am a little surprised that he is now polling ten points behind and shows every indication of losing tomorrow. My hope is that in the news tomorrow they devote at least as much time to the results of these elections as they have to the build-up and hype. It's strange but sometimes a really important news story will run for thirty seconds, while they make space for five minutes of fluff.
Well now they have had success at last with that oil leak after one month of one failure after another. British Petrolium's problems didn't begin with the day of the platform fire, but there were warning signals and problems a month earlier that they chose to ignore. Much of British Patrolium's problems have stemmed from a desire to either drill faster than can be safely done by the equipment or try and implement a solution after the explosion that was overly hasty, whereas if they had taken a little more time they might have had success a lot sooner. Now they have inserted a mile long four inch diameter tube and it will be syphoning oil up to a ship at a pretty slow rate that really isn't taking care of the problem. In addition to this, there are several large underwater plumes of oil and one of these plumes is nearly the size of Manhattan or about ten miles long and three miles wide, and it's eating up the oxygen from the water and killing the marine life. People think "There's got to be a better way". You know one lady on C-Span yesterday said that "Once a new invention is implemented and catches on, defenders of the old ways go out of business." I only wish this were true with energy. Some things catch on - like the steam engine. James Watt was watching a heavy lid being lifted from a steaming pot and got the idea for the steam engine. But how many others must have observed the same thing and did nothing? Some say invention is being at the right place and the right time. People make a lot of the fact that England industries were all by rivers that provided torque, for instance to mill stones and the like. Pythagarus could not have invented the automobile no matter how smart he was because all of the other factors wern't in place. But the thing is getting back to my main point, we have had "alternative energy" for forty years. We have had solar cells since the 'sixties and have had wind turbines at least that long. I remember reading about harnessing tidal power for electric generation in a Time-Life book four decades ago. So what's the hold up? We really haven't had any major break-throughs in our space program in twenty years. With energy it's as if we were in a forty year time warp. The very same issues advocated on the very first Earth Day to save the planet, still are the ones that have yet to catch on today. They somehow still seem just as alien and futuristic. It seems the "drill baby drill" crowd wants to milk the very last drop of oil from the earth and after that is exhausted, maybe then we can think about what other energy sources we might want to use. But I don't see why we have to wait till then.
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