Lots of Uglies

            A blog reader just took me to task for calling windmills ugly. She proceeded to list her own "uglies," including strip mining, fracking, critics of President Obama, power companies, and industries that don't clean up their messes.

            Fine. She is entitled to her own opinion, as am I. But she should be careful to get her facts straight before firing broadsides in every direction. And she should concede that there are valid arguments on both sides.
            Take coal, for instance. Sure, strip mining does scar the landscape, and coal-fired plants do emit CO2 into the atmosphere. But coal presently accounts for almost half of our electricity production, compared to 0.9% for wind and 0.1 % for solar. Clearly, renewable energy sources are not about to replace fossil fuels anytime soon. Yet, this has not stopped our president from wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on failures like Solyndra, Beacon, Ener1 and Abound, while waging war on the coal industry with regulations that make it prohibitively expensive to build new power plants or upgrade old ones.
            Is this a just war? Let's ask the million people who would lose their jobs as a result of an Obama victory. And how will we all feel when Obama's prediction that "costs of electricity will necessarily skyrocket under my administration" becomes a reality?
            The president's war on fossil fuels extends to oil as well. The only way to reduce the price of gas at the pump is to reduce our reliance on imports from OPEC. Yet, this administration has done everything to prevent an increase in our domestic production. When he boasts that domestic production is higher today than at any time since 2003, he is mouthing a clever lie. The fact is that today's production level is not based on anything he has done, but on decisions made before he became president and by private companies, not the government.       

            Further, the assertion by my critic that "more oil and drilling has taken place on federal land than in any previous time" is flat out wrong. The fact is that fossil fuel production on federal lands recently hit its lowest point in nine years. How did the administration do it? 1) By cancelling oil and gas leases in Utah, the western Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic coast; 2) by delaying exploration off the coast of Alaska and keeping onshore areas off limits; 3) by erecting more regulatory hurdles to onshore oil and gas production; and 4) by pursuing climate change lawsuits that have prevented oil and gas exploration in places like Montana.

            One final point on those bad guys, the oil companies. My critic seems to have a problem with oil companies making a profit. OK, let's pick on Exxon Mobil for starters. In the five years prior to 2010 It earned  $40.5 billion domestically.. But it paid $59 billion in total U.S. taxes. That's $1.45 in taxes for every dollar in profits. Worse, in 2010 its tax bill was three times larger than its domestic profits. The administration should be deliriously grateful for such a generous contribution.
           The oil industry as a whole has an effective tax rate of 41.1% compared to 26.5% for other manufacturers. Still Obama must be calling that not paying a fair share, because his latest budget would raise another $85 billion in new taxes on oil companies over the next decade.
           There arre ways to solve our energy crisis other than by destroying a vital industry like coal or killing the golden oil goose. I don't have room here to discuss natural gas and fourth generation nulear plants, both of which hold great promise for the long term. But first we should stop the vilification of fossil fuels and release OPEC's strangle hold by accessing the vast resources we have in the ground and off our shores.

The Next Revolution

            The Hearst Corporation is the largest privately-owned communications company in the nation. In addition to 15 newspapers, 29 television stations, and cable properties that it owns in whole or in part (The History Channel, A&E, ESPN), it publishes 20 nationaL magazines like Good Housekeeping, Redbook, O, Esquire, Popular Mechanics, Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire, and Road & Tack, among others. When I went to work for Hearst in New York in 1969, magazine subscriber lists were maintained on a phalanx of enormous IBM computers that worked day and night. Today, all that information can be accessed on a desktop.

            We are in the midst of a technological revolution. Just ask anyone who owns an I-Pad or streams Netflix on his TV...or works for Hearst. New applications are coming out so fast, they leave old guys like me in the dust. But the transformation brought on by computers is far from over.

            I think the next revolution affecting families will be in education. It has already begun. Go into any elementary or high school today, and you are likely to see kids sitting in front of computer screens learning math, science, history, and more. They love it and are good at it, because they have grown up in the computer environment.

            Dropping out of high school before graduation continues to be a problem. But now, kids don't have to go to night school to earn a GED like in the old days. They can earn one online at a very reasonable cost through programs offered by companies like Lincoln Academy.

            But here's the big one: I predict that  within ten years (and maybe a lot less), kids who want to go to college but can't afford it will be able to earn a college degree online. Already under development are MOOCs and MOOSes (Massive Open Online Courses and Seminars). Sure, kids with parents who can afford it will want to get that "college experience." But if tuition at a big private school costs upwards of $40,000 a year now, what will it cost ten years from now? Why not have access to the country's best professors right in your own living room at a tiny fraction of the cost?

            There are problems to be worked out, like testing and accreditation, but they are not insurmountable. My oldest granddaughter, who attends North Florida University while holding down a part-time job, is already doing supplemental course work at home and is excited about fitting more course work around her tight schedule.

            Not every college course can be taught online, of course. I doubt you will ever be able to earn a degree is medical forensics from your living room couch, no matter how many episodes of CSI you watch. But humanities? Why not?

            Wouldn't it be nice someday if those snobbish Ivy League schools had to compete for students?

The Nationalized Family

            Driving down I-95 recently I caught part of a conversation on talk radio on the subject of the nationalized family. The term refers to the usurpation of traditional family roles by the government. We've seen examples of this in socialist-leaning countries of Europe. Now we're seeing it at home, as we look not to the family, but to the nanny state to take care of us.

            The nationalized family  began in earnest in 1935 when Social Security was instituted under FDR. Before then, families took care of their aging parents when they were no longer able to care for themselves. That's what families did. With Social Security they didn't have to.

            Enter Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society. In 1965 the government decided that seniors and poor people needed help with their medical bills. Thus Medicare and Medicaid were born, relieving families of this burden as well. Once again the government replaced the family as primary care givers.      

            Of course it didn't stop there. Again under Lyndon Johnson, food stamps gained legal status with the Food Stamp Act. Available at first only to those with incomes of less than $30 a month, by 2011 over 46 million people received an average of $133 a month in food stamps. These people now rely on the government to put food on their table.

            And then there's welfare. Government provides aid to a variety of qualified recipients for education, housing, child care, insurance, transportation, and more in the form of subsidies, vouchers, and direct grants. Total spending for welfare programs in 2010 was $888 billion. They are projected to cost $10.3 trillion over the next 10 years.

            The trend continues. True to his promise to fundamentally change America, President Obama gave us Obamacare, which eventually will put health care under government control and is projected to subsidize health care for an additional 30 million people. And let's not forget the 37 tsars he appointed to make decisions for us without our having a say.

            I grew up in a small mill town where luxuries were unheard of. Families had fathers who were the breadwinners, and parents provided for all the necessities. And they raised their children without government subsidies and welfare programs.

            The trend is very clear: the family is  becoming less and less the basic provider. Government, the nationalized family, is replacing the traditional family unit. We now have to look to Washington bureaucrats to find out what's best for us.           

            With fathers becoming increasingly irrelevant, Is it any surprise that 46% of all births are now to unmarried women, with 70% the number for black women?  What are chances that these babies will grow up in poverty and trapped in a cycle of government dependency? How many will become social misfits in the absence of a male role model?

            Is the nationalized family truly qualified to teach our children about responsibility, morality, care giving, and self-reliance?  I think not.

Forest of Windmills

            If you drive east from Los Angeles on I-10 past San Bernadino, you soon come to a stretch of prime real estate with names like Palm Springs, Rancho Mirage, and Indian Wells. Nestled between the Santa Rosa mountains and the high desert of Joshua Tree National Park, this is a valley of great natural beauty, not to mention the artificial splendor of over eighty golf courses whose fairways snake along some of the most opulent domiciles in the country.

            But there is more. To the north runs the endless depression of the San Andreas Fault, a visual reminder of nature's potential for disaster. Next to it is the Colorado River Aqueduct that diverts liquid life from the border of Arizona to the Los Angeles basin. The Fault and the Aqueduct are not visible from I-10, but something else is. A forest. Not of oak or Ponderosa pine, but a forest nonetheless, one of arresting ugliness in my view: hundreds of windmills.

            Say what you want about the desirability of renewable energy. For me, the despoliation of a magnificent landscape just isn't worth it, and especially not for such a miniscule return.

            Dr.Chu, our Nobel Prize-winning Energy Secretary, is quite outspoken about our need to reduce our reliance on foreign oil by developing sources of renewable energy. He has no problem with prices at the pump rising to European levels of $8 or $9 a gallon, if this gets us to turn away from fossil fuels. Nor does he have a problem with the government handing out billions of dollars in taxpayer money to guaranteed failures like Solyndra. It's the Green Agenda at any cost. What a vision!

            President Obama preaches the need for green energy because, he says, we consume 20% of the world's energy, but have only 2% of the world's oil reserves. I'm not sure he says that out of sheer ignorance or deceit. The fact is that the U.S. Geological Service has been telling us since April 2008 that we have more oil in the ground than all the Middle East oil producers put together. By Energy Information Administration estimates, the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana have over 500 BILLION barrels of oil only one thousand feet below the surface.  And we now have the technology, called fracking, for getting it out.

            You would think that the president would be encouraging the extraction from our rich oil fields. Instead, he has the EPA trying to stop it with unsustainable charges that fracking contaminates ground water. What he should be doing is making it possible to explore known deposits under public lands. On the contrary, he has opposed it, just as he has blocked offshore drilling in Alaska, the Gulf and off both coasts.

            The good news is that unemployment in North Dakota is around 3%, fast food workers are making $20 an hour, and there aren't enough truck drivers to transport all that sweet crude coming out of the ground, which, by the way, costs about $16 a barrel.

            But windmills are so pretty!

Ashamed of Bennett

    On February 11 I was in Phoenix to see my two granddaughters perform in a cheerleading competition in the city's Convention Center.
    All-Star Cheerleading, I learned, is a pretty big deal. On this day, the sport attracted 80 teams of 20-25 kids, each performing 2 1/2 minute routines in front of an audience of over 5,000 spectators. These athletes, all decked out in hair bows and sparkling uniforms, dazzled the audience with jumps, hand sprints, basket tosses, pyramids, stunt sequences, and marvelously coordinated choreography. I was simply amazed, and thrilled when my granddaughters' teams brought in a first and a second in their respective divisions.
    If there was a negative for me, it was the dance routines of four hip-hop teams. The routines did not lack in precision, but they mirrored the familiar moves of rap artists that included simulated punches to the face and gunshots to the head. What are we teaching these kids? Is moral decay to be featured on stage now?
    On that same day the world learned of the death of Whitney Houston. This amazing talent was dead after years of drug abuse. The following days were filled with praise for the beloved diva and sadness at her tragic passing.
    One comment, however, just blew my mind. It came from Tony Bennett during a performance. He said that Whitney Houston's death argued for the legalization of drugs. Are we now to believe that not only Whitney Houston, but also Janis Joplin, Michael Jackson, and Elvis would have enjoyed a long life if cocaine, heroine, and meth had been available to them legally?
    Bennett said that it was time to end the insanity of illegal-drug laws. I was appalled when I heard this. I love Tony Bennett and his music, but I will no longer be able to listen to another of his songs without recalling the insanity of his remarks.
    To me, Tony Bennett missed a golden opportunity. Instead of pleading for the legalization of drugs, he could have reminded his audience of the destructive effect of drugs on the lives of so many of his fellow performers.
    He could have lectured his drug-abusing friends in the entertainment industry on the negatiuve influence of their behavior on their fans.
    He could have mentioned that drug abuse in this country is responsible for the thousands of Mexican lives lost in competition for the lucrative drug market in Hollywood and elsewhere.
    I love Tony Bennett. But now I am ashamed of him.