I joined Daily Kos in 2005 while still living in the little town of Sebastopol in Sonoma County, California. I was a regular reader — and an occasional blogger and commenter — until fully retiring and becoming an expat in 2012. Now, I am nearly 75 years old, and had a mild heart attack this past February — but the prognosis is good.
I am living out my remaining days — hopefully quite a few more years — living as an expatriate in a wonderful community in the cool mountain highlands of western Panama near the Costa Rica border. They call the little high-elevation valley where my town of Boquete is located “the land of eternal spring and rainbows.” The people are happy and friendly, and I really like this place. (Plus, some of the best coffee in the world is grown here!)
After moving to Panama’s mountains, I pretty much left U.S. politics behind — especially the active progressive energy of Daily Kos, but stopped by occasionally to see what was happening. However, the 2016 election cycle - and the frightening rise to power of the clueless and dangerous narcissist demagogue Donald Trump — prompted me to return on a regular basis to follow the election cycle.
The solid progressive core and attitudes of this website remain. Quite simply, I feel that there is no better place on the internet to follow progressive U.S. politics and feel the strength of the committed people who are at the heart of this website.
Electing Hillary Clinton is vital to continuing the fight against climate change. Having a Democratic majority in the senate will help, although a Republican-majority House of Representatives could seriously impede funding of climate scientific and cause further obstruction with costly, time consuming — and utterly useless — committee-based investigations.
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And now — for those who have a bit of time — here are some detailed personal musings...
Although I have no children of my own, I feel a sadness for the younger generations of not only Americans, but all other nations. The U.S. is no longer truly a totally dominant “world leader,” and in many ways has been reduced to being a global bully with still dominant military power,but steadily decreasing political power and influence. Domestically, the U.S. is divided like never before — at least since before the Civil War of the 19th century.
I was raised in a conservative family in the Midwest, graduating from high school in Chicago in 1960. In 1962, after dropping out of college, I joined the U.S. Navy and relocated to California. I changed my political orientation during the Viet Nam War while serving as a Hospital Corpsman at the Oakland Naval Hospital until the end of 1966. Taking care of wounded and maimed Marines and seeing no real moral purpose to the war had a profound influence on me.
Ten years later, I finally finished college, earning a B.S. degree in Conservation of Natural Resources from U.C.Berkeley. After selling solar heating systems and other technical products for a number of years, in the mid-1980’s, I ended up working for Jandel Scientific, a Marin County software company. Our products were personal computer software packages used for scientific graphing, measuring and basic statistics.
What prompted me to write this entry was a current blog entry on the upcoming annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). One year in the late 1980’s we (the sales and marketing staff of Jandel Scientific) had a booth at the “trade-show” section of the annual AGU meeting. Being there and interacting with earth scientists made for a very exciting several days for this life-long science enthusiast. The energy and enthusiasm of the AGU scientists from young to old was a wonderful thing to experience.
Ten years later, I landed a one-year contract doing Novell network and Windows desktop support for the planning and quality department executives at Chevron’s San Francisco world HQ — and had a private office on the 36th floor of the Chevron Tower.
As a result, I have seen the world of science and resource exploitation from the “inside” both from the pure science perspective and on the inside in the fossil fuel industry.
It is sad to see rapidly rising attendance costs hurting the AGU conference, and especially seeing young scientists being denied the opportunity of mingling with international mentors and peers. The big money in natural resources and earth sciences is associated with corporate exploitation of minerals — including gas, oil, coal and raw materials. That sector is currently under big pressure — and rightfully so — because AGW/CC (Anthropogenic Global Warming / Climate Change) is caused by the burning of fossil fuels. The loss of their “sponsorship” of the AGU conference is unfortunate.
But regarding research funding in general, the political pressure in the U.S. to make private funding of scientific research dominant is a real negative in my opinion. Important international meetings like AGU — are a very important component communication and collaboration between scientists. As a result of privatization and increasing costs of U.S. scientific research and conferences and meetings, other countries are beginning to overtake the U.S. in many areas of science. Consider the European collaboration on science and weather, the Japanese Himiwari weather satellite, and China’s new heavy-lift rocket that will help them build their newer, bigger third-generation space station in low-earth orbit, and it is easy to see that the U.S. leadership position is weakening.
With science (and AGW/CC) denial running rampant in U.S. politics and society, and nationalism and racism rearing their heads, reason and logic and are being pushed aside and replaced by ideological partisan anger, there are fewer opportunities for cooperation — and denial and obstruction pose serious problems that hamper facing and dealing with many problems in today’s societies.
