Forty-six years later and still looking for an answer

© 2016 Michael Swickard, Ph.D.   Is it a hoax? How could anyone be skeptical of Manmade Catastrophic Global Climate Change? That’s what I get when I write that it seems to be a hoax. The controversy started about seventeen thousand days ago.

            April 22, 1970 was a pleasant Southern New Mexico day on the campus of New Mexico State University. I was a sophomore Journalism major covering the first Earth Day.

            It was a shock to me when an organizer proclaimed most people on Planet Earth would be dead within ten years (1980) from Manmade Global Cooling. This would drive the temperature of Earth down.

            I asked a question that afternoon that was not answered then nor has it been addressed in the forty-six years since even though I keep asking it. I’ll get to that question after I explain why I became a skeptic.

            That afternoon I thought it would be nice to drop the temperature in New Mexico though it would be a problem for farmers in Canada. Occasionally, over the next few years there would be stories predicting Global Cooling but nothing happened.

            Ten years later in 1980, the theory changed dramatically to identify a completely different danger: Manmade Global Warming. All people on planet Earth would be dead within ten years (1990) because the planet would become too hot. Shuckins, I thought, first cooling was going to kill us and now warming. I became skeptical and wrote that it seems a hoax to give government more power and money.

            Some readers roasted me for my skepticism in advance of the theoretical roasting from Manmade Global Warming. Then ten years went by without any change.

            In 1990, it was twenty years after the introduction of Manmade Global Cooling and then the change to Manmade Global Warming. The proponents of the theory now said we would all be dead within ten years (2000) unless everyone on the planet stopped using fossil fuel. Also, the word “Catastrophic” was added.

            Fast forward to the year 2000 when Catastrophic Manmade Global Warming was certainly going to kill everyone on the planet within ten years (2010) per the mainstream media. But our climate didn’t change as had been predicted for thirty years.

            With the Internet becoming so prevalent there came many false stories claiming vast climate changes unsupported by scientific data. Rather, political agendas drove the research where millions of dollars were awarded to universities for finding the desired political outcome: there is Global Warming.

            Example: recently we learned the United Kingdom gave $11 million to the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Warming but the organization just published findings of Climate Change without doing any research. This fraud and others have been discovered but the mainstream media doesn’t care.

            This is now in the category of a religion where you must believe in the political advocacy regardless of the real data. This year we’re told Catastrophic Manmade Global Climate Change is more dangerous than nuclear global war. What utter crap.

            Since this is political there’s a huge push to silence skeptics. Valerie Richardson in The Washington Times April 14, 2016 wrote, “Bill Nye, ‘the science guy’ says in a video interview released Thursday that he is open to the idea of jailing those who deviate from the climate change consensus.”

            Regardless, the question I have asked over and over during the last forty years has not been answered. If humans can change the climate of Earth, what’s the best temperature? Before we change Earth’s temperature we must consider what is the best for all humans?

            How do we decide this issue? We have the push to lower the temperature via carbon trapping but do we want the temperature of Planet Earth to go down and have less carbon available for plant growth?

            In 1970, at the first Earth Day, I was introduced to the theory of Global Cooling. Forty-six years later I still call this a hoax designed to give power to governments. I am still upset that no one will address the best temperature on Earth question.

            If telling the truth about this political hoax is a jailing offense in our country, I will serve my time in a country without a Constitutional First Amendment.

 Email: drswickard@comcast.net - Swickard’s new novel, Hideaway Hills, is available at Amazon.com

Forty-six years later and still looking for an answer

Swickard: Wind and solar are a-changin'

© 2016 Michael Swickard, Ph.D.   “I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.” Marshall McLuhan

            That’s the problem with the future which always creeps up on us. There are huge changes in our society coming but most people don’t see them because they don’t believe in relatively sudden technological changes.

            Example: many people don’t believe wind or solar power will have any effect upon them. They see it as the government throwing money so politicians can get votes and donations. Wind or solar to them are boondoggles when the government gets involved for political reasons. And in today’s world I must agree. Today’s world.

            That leaves the future of wind and solar generation which is much different and closer than most people realize. Currently, except for harvesting government subsidies these technologies are only of use in houses in the sticks where bringing a power line in would cost the same as building a battleship.

            However, the use of wind and solar will change. As 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Bob Dylan wrote in 1964: For the times they are a-changin’ You must believe to see the changes coming. That may catch people and governments unaware and could mean they are today investing in the wrong technologies.

            Solar and wind generation has three major shortfalls compared to traditional generation: first, the density of the power while generating it. Secondly, the continuous dependability of the power. Finally, the transmission and generation cost. All three are deal breakers for adopting wind or solar in today’s world.

            There is another problem adopting the current commercial wind and solar generation. It is the thousands of dead birds smacked by wind generation blades or fried from flying into solar death rays. Our current efforts are not the way to have these technologies become mainstream.

            The change that will enable solar and wind generation to become mainstream is when innovation dramatically lowers the cost to store that wind and solar power cheaply at the end-user’s home. This would allow wind and solar generation to become the technology of choice without any government subsidies.

            Can this happen? Yes, here’s a way to look at that possibility of massive change.

            Twenty years ago, the technology in my life involved seven different media devices. I used a Canon F1 camera, a Sony tape recorder/player; a Motorola cell phone, a Gateway home computer with modem, a digital storage unit to back up my computer files and a VHS video player plugged into my Sony television.

            Seven devices that are now contained in my Samsung smartphone. And, I now have Wi-Fi which allows me as a writer to do things I could only dream of doing twenty years ago. Twenty years ago I had no idea so much change was on the horizon.

            That is the same scenario for the dramatic shift to home-based electrical generation and storage. It starts with the move to power vehicles with stored electricity rather than fossil fuel. Currently, the cost per mile of an electric vehicle is above that of gas or diesel powered vehicles. But like the change in my media devices, the core issue is the cost of storage which is dropping dramatically.

            Take computer memory sticks. Just a few years ago it was ten dollars for one megabyte of storage in a memory stick. Now it is ten dollars for a hundred gigabytes. All in a couple years. The same will happen in power storage which will allow homeowners to have their own wind or solar storage.

            I could write more but that is enough to point out that having the expectation of oil and gas being a major benefit to budgets in years to come might just be proven wrong by the dropping storage costs in whole home batteries.

            Stanford University’s Tony Seba has written about this in, “Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation: The industrial age of energy and transportation will be over by 2030.” It is a very thought provoking dialog about how technology will change our world soon.

            It isn’t if conventional power will end being useful, only when. That point is when home power storage costs less than the transmission of traditional energy. Then it will make sense to change.

 Email: drswickard@comcast.net - Swickard’s new novel, Hideaway Hills, is availableat Amazon.com

Swickard: Wind and solar are a-changin'

Swickard: Unspoken terrorism in New Mexico

© 2016 Michael Swickard, Ph.D.  This month is the centennial celebration of a large dam in Southern New Mexico that was officially named the Woodrow Wilson Dam. Nope, that name didn’t stick. We know it as Elephant Butte Dam.

            The celebrations this month tell many stories about how the Rio Grande Project was started and how the engineers constructed the first phase of the dam, completing it by 1916. At the time it was constructed, Elephant Butte Dam was the largest man made dam and lake in the world. Electric generation was added in the 1930s.

            But there is more to the story of this dam. If we were alive one hundred years ago we would have been aware of German sponsored terrorism in the United States. Most people remember the Pancho Villa Raid on Columbus New Mexico in March 1916 but there was more terrorism going on at that time.

            There was even an attempt to destroy Elephant Butte Dam which historians note but isn’t mentioned in any of the celebrations. New Mexico author Eugene Rhodes wrote a story of this attempt entitled, No Mean City, in the May 17 and 24, 1919 Saturday Evening Post.

            Rhodes died in 1934. In 1975 there was a collection of his stories published: The Rhodes Reader: Stories of virgins, villains, and varmints. This is where I found the story. The book is still in print at Amazon.com.

            The September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center was not the first major terrorist attack on New York City. There was a large terrorist attack on New York City at 2:08 a.m., July 30, 1916. The target was a huge munitions supply terminal called Black Tom Island.

            German terrorists attacked Black Tom Island because it was shipping ammunition, powder and artillery shells to the Allies. These were loaded onto ships bound for France and Great Britain.

            In 1916, America was technically neutral in the European War. However, America leaned heavily toward the Allies by supplying munitions to the French and British. The German High Command considered America an enemy so they created a terrorist organization inside America.

            The German saboteurs started fires in the ammunition transportation areas. The resultant blast leveled Black Tom Island and peppered the Statue of Liberty with shrapnel. Citizens in the New York City area were terrorized by the explosions that broke most of the windows in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

            The story is detailed in a 1989 book by Jules Witcover, Sabotage at Black Tom: Imperial Germany’s Secret War in America, 1914 -1917.

            The perpetrators were agents of the German government. In that era, the largest terrorist supporting government in the world was Germany. There were more than fifty major acts of terrorism in the United States from 1914 to 1917 sponsored by the German government.

            That same month, German agents attacked the Senate Chamber of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. Several people were killed in that attack. Financier J. P. Morgan was shot but survived a terrorist attack. America struggled with how to control terrorism.

            But what is not part of that discussion was the attack on New Mexico’s Elephant Butte Dam. After talking to several historians, it seems plausible that the ultimate aim of the destruction of the dam was to keep our country home dealing with this instead of coming to the side of France and England. Our country already had ten thousand soldiers in Mexico trying to capture and bring to justice Pancho Villa.

            Even though the Germans were engaged in the destruction it appears there was an attempt to make it seem Mexico did this because of our invasion of their country. Or, worse, British agents did this to try to pin it on Germany.

            In 1993 I wrote a screenplay, Hero’s Choice: between duty and honor lies every hero’s choice. Unfortunately, the eight saboteurs were killed in the attack on the dam so much of what I could write had to be fiction because there were no German survivors to tell their side of the story.

            Still, in celebrating the one hundred years of Elephant Butte Dam, we should acknowledge some of the rest of the history. It was a dangerous time back then as it is now.

Email: drswickard@comcast.net - Swickard’s new novel, Hideaway Hills, is availableat Amazon.com

Swickard: Unspoken terrorism in New Mexico

Swickard: A nice society without punching

© 2016 Michael Swickard, Ph.D.   As a youngster, I had hopes for when I grew up that technology would help America become a better place to live. It was standard dinner table conversation to talk about the advances of technology. Why, we even had a telephone. That was something that my grandparents never had on the ranch.

            When I was seven we were at my grandparent’s ranch and witnessed the first object sent into space, the Soviet Launched Sputnik as it flew West to East. My uncle said to me, “Remember this moment for the rest of your life because with that up there our world is changing.”

            We didn’t have pavement at the ranch south of Carrizozo so it was a long dirt road to go to Alamogordo. When we were just North of Tularosa there was an overpass which was paved and then the road was paved the rest of the way into town. We would all say at once, “Ah” and revel in how smooth the road was when paved.

            When I was eleven we even got a television set, black and white of course. And then the world was at our call by getting a kid to turn the channel changer or deal with the volume or smack the side when the picture would roll.

            I was one of the side smackers when the horizontal oscillator would go out and the picture would roll. My brother and I would jump up and smack the roll out of the television until it stopped rolling. Occasionally, the television would just go dark. Go figure.

            We were a community with good and bad people, with saints and sinners side by side. But there was an overarching rule that people had to act decent within the community or would be cast out. The reason I am thinking fondly of a kinder gentler time is because I am up to my neck in rude people.

            When technology gave us a connection to most of the seven billion people on Earth I never thought that I would regret that technology. But I do since it seems to have brought out the very worst in our citizens. In the older days including when I lived as a young man in several small communities there was a price to pay for being rude to someone.

            Often it was a punch in the snout. And since everyone saw everyone at the Post Office and the local café if you were snarky to someone there would be an immediate consequence from that person and likely several of the town elders who didn’t like that kind of behavior.

            But we have a society that screams rudeness because even if you do not like the way you are treated it is next to impossible to find the culprit and administer the thrashing that the skunk deserves. So many citizens just write something snarky back and the circle continues.

            Worse, in politics it is required for people to lose whatever tiny bit of genteelness and be as rude and disgusting as their vocabulary allows, all in the name of politics. Where will this end? Who knows?

            Kids learn potty words from watching movies and are incredibly inappropriate with each other and adults. Yes, I understand that there is free speech, but that just means someone can say that your mother is a big pile of dog snot legally. And often illegally you will punch them in the snout. But not if they are online and there is no way to bring them to a moment of atonement.

            The worse thing about this rudeness in politics is we Americans who inherited a mighty fine nation from our parents and grandparents are not being good shepherds of that trust. Rather, we ignore the incredible debt being place around the heads of our children and grandchildren while we complain that we haven’t gotten enough political plunder for our votes.

            All I do now is shun those rude people when I notice them on Facebook or at a meeting. I have reached a time and station in life where punching people in the snout is not an option. Maybe I should design an app called the Snout Puncher.

 Email: drswickard@comcast.net - Swickard’s newnovel, Hideaway Hills, is available at Amazon.com

Swickard: A nice society without punching

Swickard: Arresting citizens before they commit crimes

© 2016 Michael Swickard, Ph.D. “…society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind. It is really extraordinary that our people refuse to apply to human beings such elementary knowledge as every successful farmer is obliged to apply to his own stock breeding.” Former President Theodore Roosevelt, 1913.

             It is revolting that the philosophy of eugenics from the past is raising its head again. Reasonable people destroyed the eugenics movement in the last century but we must confront eugenic thinking as it rises again.

            Note: America should take Theodore Roosevelt off Mount Rushmore and replace him with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., or movie star and WWII B-24 pilot Jimmy Stewart. I respect Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln but despise Progressive Era eugenicist Theodore Roosevelt.

            In the late 19th and early 20th century the Progressive Era Movement embraced the philosophy of eugenics as a method of improving the dominant population by weeding out what elites considered undesirables. The German Nazi Party took eugenics to an extreme by killing millions of people.

            Fast forward to elites in today’s society advocating eugenics without the name. Example: people are saying the government must stop crime before it happens by identifying those undesirables who are going to murder, rape and rob in the future.

            They say an all-powerful government is needed to insure our safety. Already the elitist government can take property from citizens who are neither charged nor convicted of a crime. It is called, Civil Forfeiture, which the elites in government love for the power and money it brings. That leads to something even worse.

            In the website American Intelligence Report, Kristan Harris reports: (Chicago) Police are arresting people for crimes they’ve not committed yet using a new computer algorithm software that identifies criminal behavior and predicts future crime. Suspects were arrested this year as a result of being put on a predictive policing Strategic Subject List and Chicago Special Order S10-06 which equips law-enforcement with the ability to arrest citizens before they commit a crime.

            My concern is that the government will extend this to other classes of citizens. With the bitter fight for gun control in our nation perhaps the government will start with gun owners. They are already tagging members of the military and former members as potentially dangerous.

            But it isn’t just now that this is mainstream. Bill Mauldin in his 1947 book, Back Home, wrote: During a period when veterans were big news, every time an ex-soldier got himself in a jam the fact that he was a vet was pointed out in the headline… But the sad fact was that such headlines gave added impetus to the rumor that always appears in every country after a war that the returning soldiers are trained in killing and assaults and are potential menaces to society.”

            There isn’t more of a betrayal than to send citizens into battle and then view them as a class of killers who are dangerous to the society because of what they learned and did to protect our freedom. Today the leaders of our country, in general, didn’t serve in the military nor do their children serve.

            Returning veterans are not treated well for their sacrifices and as Bill Mauldin pointed out it goes back into World War Two and beyond. Journalist Tom Brokaw in his book, The Greatest Generation, praises the soldiers of World War Two fifty years after they served.

            But we have the 1947 words of Bill Mauldin to remind us that WWII soldiers faced an ungrateful society when they came home. As did the Korean and Vietnam soldiers.

            The politicians who see our former military members as dangerous and take action before these men and women do something are as bad as all of the eugenic progressives combined. We are already betraying our former soldiers by having a Veterans Administration that is shameful in provided care.

            Who knows what will come of the Chicago “arrest them before they commit a crime” but I sense that former military and gun owners are in the cross-hairs of this all-powerful government. Their eugenic moves must be stopped. And we should honor our military and former military members. Without them America would not be a free nation.

 Email: drswickard@comcast.net - Swickard’s new novel, Hideaway Hills, is availableat Amazon.com

Swickard: Arresting citizens before they commit crimes