So I’m bored this evening at work (11PM to 7AM; the Graveyard Shift, so named because if you pull it long enough YOU WILL FUCKING PERISH) and started reading back over some of my old blog posts.  Mostly correcting spelling errors (of which I’m not proud; I prefer all my drafts to be FINAL drafts), but also reassessing my views at the time of writing and reconciling them with the information at my disposal now.  For example, I’m gonna have to write a “Taking Hostages, Part 3″ article pretty soon about how, although I grudgingly supported the original Auto Industry Bailout, I now believe we should NOT give the Big 3 ANOTHER bailout because they claim the first one wasn’t big enough.  If those incompetent assclowns are now asking for an additional $21 billion while simultaneously complaining about the oversight measures that come along with the “Ok, We’ll Save Your Incompetent Clown Asses” funds… look, I’m sorry, I’m just strongly philosophically opposed to the attempt to legislate competition-crushing business acumen.  If you’re refereeing a rugby game and one side is losing big time because they’re having barbecues and doing kegstands and shit instead of playing the damn game, you don’t pause the game, issue Mk 19′s and pillboxes to the entire losing team (“because if we don’t bail them out, they might LOSE!”), and then call “time-in” as if you have a fair game going on now.

I’m actually rather fond of that last metaphor.  It’s not entirely coherent, perhaps I could have gone with something more pertinant to the idea of giving a company enough funds to crowd their successful competitors out of the market… but I really, really like the idea of a rugby team trying to run against a platoon of emplaced machine-gun grenade launchers.  Somehow, I see a solution to our overcrowded-prisons-problem in that metaphor, as well.  Someone oughta make a movie.  Anyways.

IF I ever do make some kind of effort to actually get elected President, integrity is going to be my primary qualification.  I’m not going to have many others of a governmental bent.  The best course might be to go for something more local, like a Senate seat or something, do that gig for a while, and then try for the Presidency with the qualifications of both integrity and having not fucked up while in the Senate, which appears to be extremely difficult and should thus be pretty damn laudable nowadays.  The Bill Janklow one there is my favorite: how, exactly, does one manage to get away with 100 days in jail and three years probation after running a stop sign and fucking killing someone?  Wait, wait, what? Fucking hypoglycemia, are you fucking kidding me?  Are you telling me that if I give myself Type II Diabetes by eating horrible shit food every day for years and then starve myself a bit before I go shoot up a daycare then I, too, can receive a punishment far out of proportion to my crime?  Or do I have to be a FUCKING CONGRESSMAN FIRST?!?

But I digress.  The point here (I THINK I’ve been aiming at one… maybe this is one of my rare “venting” articles) is that a big part of my decisionmaking process with respect to a given issue involves the assimilation and application of new data into my baseline for that issue.  There’s a cool decisionmaking cycle I found in a sniper training manual called OODA, for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act; the cycle derives best possible action from constant reevaluation of baseline.  “Baseline” is a concept that encompasses one’s sum total understanding of a situation; for a sniper, it involves facets of both enemy, ROE, terrain, mission, and what one had for breakfast; for me, all the data/facts surrounding an issue combined with my ethical/philosophical derivation from those data/facts could be said to compose my baseline.  For a person, especially a leader or lawmaker, to adopt a position or platform and then fail to abandon – or at least revise – that position upon receiving information that invalidates that position… such a thing denotes a lack of integrity, and a lack of integrity renders that person unfit to lead.  I am undoubtedly biased in this respect, but I don’t particularly give a shit what career qualifications a person who would lead possesses; I am much more concerned with a person’s ability to attempt to determine the course of action in any given situation that is “best” for the people dependant upon him for leadership.  I realize that the value of “best” is debatable from differeing ethical value systems (thus the constant conflict between (D) and (R) in whatever sphere you care to name); I contend that only value systems derived from reality (and not wishful thinking (the D’s), a lack of intercultural competence (the R’s), or a gross misunderstanding of human nature (both)) are valid benchmarks for determining “best” in any given context; I further contend that only a philosophy that is based in observable data and is in a constant state of reevaluation of its own precepts in the light of new data can be considered “derived from reality”.

My final contention, indeed the postulate of my entire personal philosophy, is that only true, unbiased open-mindedness enables an entity (person, group, government, etc.) sufficient susceptibility to new data to form responsible opinions and courses of action.  Admittedly, that last sentence there is a mouthful, and is likely to be interrupted with spurious cries of “nuh-uh!” (or your local equivalent; I’m paraphrasing here) before it can be successfully posited.  Therefore, I choose to give a name to this philosophy, so that it may be introduced with the maximum of alacrity and a minimum of jackassus interruptus potential:  I choose to call this the Sentient philosophy.

The entire force of moral righteousness (though I cringe a bit to use such a term) of the Sentient philosophy derives from this ridiculously high degree of intellectual integrity.  The reasoning behind the bizarre title of this article (look, I know YOU might not find much funny about Rock beating his wife Scissors and the beaten Scissors going on to take out her rage at society upon fellow convict Paper as they cross the prison yard in April of 2013 (thus completing the traditional Rochambeau cycle and proving forever that you give what you get) but it did give me a chuckle as Paper eventually recovered from her injuries, became a model inmate, left prison on good behavior and went on to become a Congressperson… and we all know those guys defeat Integrity on a regular basis, so there.  Satire!) is that the platforms of the Democrats and Republicans are just that: platforms.  Having a combined set of unshakable beliefs/values gives the members of the respective parties a strong (ok, maybe not “strong”, but at least definite; “We very definitely believe in the stupid shit we believe in, regardless of its utility to society or its grounding in the real world we all theoretically inhabit”) foundation from which to speak… and when challenged with fact, the platform serves as a Rock (rather like faith, amusingly enough) to which the challenged can retreat and stand upon confidently and throw poo at the assailant.  But if, as I think I’ve tentatively established, the Rock of conviction is seated upon sand… upon a set of supporting ideas that cannot be said to be truly derived from the Real, but rather more from expediency and prejudice and blind idealism… then exactly how strong is the Rock of conviction?  It seems, from both an ethical, philosophical, and intellectual point of view, that Integrity (and, by association, the Sentient philosophy) can much more successfully provide what is “best”, or at least what is effective.  Integrity does, indeed, cover Rock.  IF, that is, the American People give a shit about improving their lot.  Such remains to be seen.

…Comma Bitches.

Look, it’s not that we don’t have the technology, even now, to make most of this stuff happen.  The approach I’ll be describing – indeed, the ultimate point of me writing this article in the first place – is designed to lean our society towards whatever future options may emerge with the progress of science.  Hell, we’ve already got a lab out in Germany that’s developed teleportation (admittedly, only a few molecules at a time at present, but now that we’ve DISCOVERED the shit, it’ll just take some scaling, like damn electricity back in the day)… once a viable form of fusion comes along all our earlier harping on landfills could be rendered moot.  There’s also an interesting technology called Blacklight that seems to technically violate the laws of quantum physics and produce energy from water… but we’ll see how that one pans out.  The keynote to this part of the issue – and the reason I feel I might be able to contribute something useful via this blog – is that the usage of electricity as the predominant form of energy exchange (in lieu of, say, fossil fuels) will allow us as a society to depend on energy sources that may be generated completely independent of geographical displacement of resources.

We’re also not particularly lacking in desire; our population (and that of most other countries) is very much in favor of clean, renewable energy sources.  The problem is that our desire and our means to pursue and bring to fruition that desire are too often not collocated.  It is with a noble spirit that people attempt – individually, wherein lies the problem – to “do their part” in helping resolve the problem of energy.  Such efforts are admirable… but futile in a zoomed-out context.  The most reasonable way to reduce a person’s carbon footprint (or insert the Environmental Impact Measurement Term of your choice) is to make the source of consumption clean.  Doing so requires an imposingly large amount of investment to achieve on a meaningful level;  most people who have the desire lack the means to act on a large scale individually… and most people who have the means fail to do so through the primacy of other, means-related considerations, like profit and conservative spirit.

The irony of that last statement is that “conservative spirit” can mean a preference for renewability in an environmental sense, but prevailingly means the opposite in a political sense.  The big reason why I can’t call myself a conservative (political) is because the entire conservative ethos revolves around the ideal of support for the status quo.  There’ll be a much bigger (read: separate) article on why I believe Stephen Colbert (et. al.) is actually RIGHT when he says that reality has a liberal bias: it is sufficient for our purposes today that we note that the world is in a CONSTANT state of change, mostly towards higher technology regardless of who you happen to be on the planet.  More importantly, our communications infrastructure is also adapting and expanding, bringing the world in general closer together and increasing the information available to any person at any given time.  Therefore, doesn’t it seem to make a big more sense/almost be necessary for people to get at least a touch of liberalism in their thinking?  Otherwise, before long conservatism will only be viable to people living in either caves or extremely nationalistic countries… like the conservatives seem to want our own to become.  Huh.  It’s almost like they thought this one through.  Anyways, back to energy.

For any corporation to attempt to fix the energy problem would require some kind of profit margin present, otherwise they won’t even make the effort.  Look, this is a Capitalist society, and I know it’s, like, totally uncool for me to talk bad about a corporation’s motives like that.  But as long as there exist forms of energy generation that require less initial investment to turn a profit (and the producers of fuel for those forms keep hiring lobbyists) it is extremely unlikely that we will see any movement towards renewables from the private sector.  At least, not until all the oil dries up and we have a few world wars over the remaining supply.  In the immediate future, the best place to find a combination of both the means to invest in renewables on a large scale AND the potential desire to do so is government.  Most of the projects I’ve been able to find something about on the Internets have been either commissioned or fully built by a government agency.  Even IF corporations start to expand into this area, it would still behoove us as a society to have government owned and operated power sources that will never run out of fuel.  Ok, look, that “never” part was rhetorical: the Sun WILL go red giant and envelop the Earth in roughly 5 billion years… but by then, I’m sure we’ll have OTHER problems on our minds.

So here’s my idea: right now, at this point in our scientific development, we have a goodly number of viable technologies available that, if implemented on a sufficiently large scale, can completely replace fossil fuels within our power grid.  I like solar, myself, mostly because the idea of grabbing energy directly from the Sun every day appeals to me, but there are lots of other sources from which we can draw with varying degrees of environmental impact.  Some even have a directly positive impact; algae biofuel cells actually decrease the carbon dioxide levels in their vicinity (as the algae uses CO2 for photosynthesis; I always knew that first grade science would come in handy one day).  Now, per the Pickens Plan, which I think is both a pretty good idea and a REALLY good compromise, normal consumer vehicles would be transitioned to electric power (which, if run off a clean grid, are clean themselves) and commercial vehicles would run off natural gas, which is both clean burning AND plenty abundant in the US… and should buy us time to start putting some actual effort into electricity storage (battery) technology.  I propose a further step of switching over our freight train systems to all-electric operation, as running off the grid will become more viable as the grid sources are improved.

The destination is thus: if the government decides to use their resources (i.e., taxpayer monies) to invest in a sufficiently large renewable power generation system, then we could theoretically provide our citizens with electricity and transportation at next to no cost.  Alternately, we could provide the same at half present cost and use the funds thus generated to fund additional governmental programs (such as the one discussed in my last article).  Even discounting the benefits to environment and disassociation from foreign fuel dependancy, the fact that the government has the necessary funds for initial investment AND the ability to expand that investment to the point that the oil and coal guys are undercut means that the government can begin to generate its OWN funds instead of just shaking down its citizens.  I think this is a good (with multiple meanings) way to do so.