In response to a letter published in the LTE of the Camera on 2009-09-15.
PAUL DOUGAN : “And if you want to stop further Nat Turners, being harsher with the enslaved won`t help. You need to abolish slavery.”
There are two solutions to the problem. More terror or freedom.
The Roman Empire had Spartacus. He terrorized far far more than Nat Turner. The Roman Empire crushed his rebellion and further terrorized the slaves. It was a successful strategy of terror that worked for five hundred years. So, yes, being harsher does help.
Continuing to crush the slaves cost the Roman Empire dearly. Instead of having people who contributed to their society willingly, the Romans had to allocate vast resources to suppress people’s very intense desire to be free. Is it any wonder that Spartacus managed to raise an army of 100,000 slaves; many of them well-trained gladiators (as Spartacus was)?
The enslavement of all those people was part of a “Bread and Circuses” culture that celebrated violence and entitlement. Did the Roman Empire fall when Spartacus failed. No. Rome fell into disarray five hundred years later, which, in turn, led to the Dark Ages.
Our politicians have learned well from the Romans: Give them bread, wine, and circuses (i.e. free stuff) and stay in power.
Would Rome have been far better off not having slaves and a Bread and Circuses (Welfare and Entertainment) culture? This Libertarian thinks so.
This Libertarian knows in his gut that it would be so.
Ralph Shnelvar
Chair
Libertarian Party of Boulder County
Lessons not learned
Apparently, we still don`t grasp the lessons of 9/11. Let`s make an analogy: In 1831, African-American slave Nat Turner gathered some followers and began slaughtering whites, including innocent children. Was Turner a terrorist? Of course: his “justice” was wanton. Still, any reasonable person would see Turner`s terrorism as a function of the institutionalized violence of slavery. And if you want to stop further Nat Turners, being harsher with the enslaved won`t help. You need to abolish slavery.
Today, most Americans are in denial about our foreign policy, preferring a fantasy world of faulty World War II analogies, where we always fight for noble “freedom” and in defense of homeland. In fact, we run an empire. We wouldn`t tolerate another nation`s military on our soil, yet our over 700 military bases circle the globe. With other Western nations, we also dominate underdeveloped nations politically and economically. We have in effect created an international plantation where billions are born into debt to Western bankers and remain so their entire lives. For an insider`s account of how this international “plantation” operates, see John Perkins` Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
No one likes being on the receiving end of empire; if you dominate, humiliate and exploit another person or nation, they will hate you, and want to hurt you. As President Carter`s former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski pointed out, our modern Nat Turner, Osama bin Laden, became violently anti-American due to the construction of U.S. military bases in his native Saudi Arabia. So, it`s not so much that these anti-American terrorists want to conquer us as it is that they want us to stop conquering them.
As the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass pointed out, slave masters never slept well, fearing slave violence. So, if we want to stop anti-American terrorism, let`s end American empire. Let`s abolish our master-servant relationship with the majority of humanity; let us free our slaves.
PAUL DOUGAN
Posted by RalphShnelvar on April 30, 2009 at 2:44 a.m.
NESHAMA ABRAHAM: “Boulder, we have the talent and knowledge to reduce our city’s contribution to global warming and be a leader nationwide for innovative environmental ideas. Let’s make rooftop PV arrays on nonresidential rooftops a long-term sustainable solution that one day, when we look back, we’ll say ‘well done!’”
One good rule of thumb measure for how much energy something consumes to make is how much it costs.
Assuming that you think that CO2 is the evil that I think that it isn’t, and …
If it costs $40,000 (not some phony subsidized price) to produce enough electricity to run the average home …
You have to ask yourself, is it worth the carbon footprint to produce that $40,000 device compared to the carbon used to generate that same electricity for 25 years?
$40K is, at high market prices, 10,000 gallons of gasoline.
The average household in the United States uses about 8,900 kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/B…)
10,000 gallons of gasoline is roughly equivalent to 366,000 kilowatt-hours. (http://www.convertunits.com/from/gall…)
Over the current 25-year useful life of a PV systems, the average American home would consume 222,500 kilowatt-hours. (25 x 8900).
Thus … a PV system costs the environment 366,000 gallons of gasoline versus 222,500 gallons for a conventional electric grid.
One can, of course, redo the numbers for coal or natural gas but it remains that PV is NOT a panacea.
Thus it costs the environment AND the economy about twice as much (in CO2 _and_ dollars) to install PV than to simply use the current grid (which, presumably, uses gasoline-equivalents).
Assuming that my computations are correct,
NESHAMA ABRAHAM, do you want to change your mind about PV?
More to the point … if it is _proved_ that the carbon footprint associated with the production and installation of PV is worse than simply using the current power grid, will you change your mind?
Ralph Shnelvar
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I also replied to another poster in the same day’s blog:
gilbysm: Go tour a PV manufacturing facility. They all have big PV arrays on the roof, which they use to power their manufacturing equipment, which means that PV panels are made using solar electricity.
As others have said, you simply cannot run a plant on the power produced on the roof of a building.
Just go to Home Depot and look at the roughly one square meter panel the sells for about $300. It produces a whopping 45 watts of power.
From: http://solarpowerauthority.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-install-solar-on-an-average-us-house/
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A conservative value to use for a solar panel’s generating capacity is 10 watts/sq. ft. This represents a panel conversion efficiency of about 12% which is typical. That means that for every kW you need to generate, you’d need about 100 sq. ft. of solar panels.
One kilowatt doesn’t even run a hair dryer. Do you really think you can run an entire plant if you cover the roof?
And, if you were producing wind towers, wouldn’t you put a wind tower(s) on your property as an example of what you are producing?
gilbysm: Furthermore, equating dollars to gallons of gasoline is asinine. It’s like saying a dollar spent on Coors coal-powered beer in an aluminum can is the same as a dollar spent on an apple at the farmer’s market. Surely with all of your vast knowledge of markets and the evils of market distortion, you know that fossil fuel prices exclude the vast majority of their real costs.
Of course it is. That dollar that goes into the apple represents: the energy cost of the fertilizer, the harvester, the transportation. What else is involved?
gilbysm: Add to that the fact that PV panels generate more electric energy than the total energy used in their construction (the same cannot be said of fossil fuel plants, which merely deplete existing stocks of energy-dense material very inefficiently), and your comment makes even less sense.
As others have asked … please prove that. I will cite an article I wrote showing that I _did_ do the research and that PV is net energy negative: www.dailycamera.com/blogs/letters-editor-blog/2007/sep/12/shnelvar/
gilbysm : Just admit that you love cheaply priced fossil fuels and the privileges they afford you at the expense of everyone else, already. Your grandkids will sure love you for burning over half the fossil fuels ever created in your lifetime, so they can tell each other stories about how you wasted so many precious, non-renewable resources while they struggle to subsist on the leftovers 50 years from now.
gilbysm , you are not paying attention. I am delighted when there is a technology that will efficiently convert solar power to electricity in an economically reasonable way.
What you are doing when you promote PV _now_ is to make a bad problem worse. It is you that is spending precious nonrenewable resources in an ideological quest for clean power.
Just because it looks green does not make it so.
Ralph Shnelvar