Vote for Joe

I recently interviewed a local astronomist who said, these days, that we’re absolutely awash in “light pollution.” And yeah, light pollution diminishes night visibility for astronomers, and such, but it’s way more than that. According to www.darksky.org, about 15 million tons of carbon dioxide are emitted each year in America, just to power outdoor residential lights. That equates to the emissions of about three million autos and adds up to 40,000 tons of CO2 a day. (And this is just residential lighting. It doesn’t include business lighting.) The organization also explains to offset this amount of CO2, the U.S. would have to plant 600 million trees annually. As president, I’d advocate for a department that specifically dealt with light pollution, given what a big problem it’s becoming. For more about our position on energy, go to… Note: This astronomer told me that one of the biggest light wastes can be found in many of our municipalities’ street lighting. Instead of streetlights with “down-shine” fixtures just to train the light down, many streetlights (like the one in the photo above) disperse light sideways and up — neither of which is necessary — and a tremendous waste of energy.

I was re-reading part of this book the other night. At one point, the author proposes a major paradigm shift. For instance, he recommends we enlarge the CIA mission to gather “intelligence” about other nations, other cultures, in order to learn from them to put us in a better position to interact with people in foreign lands. Likewise, he proposes a shift in another part of the military complex. He proposes “weapons of war” be turned into “weapons for peace.” For instance, some U.S. tanks could be turned into road building machines for developing countries. Those making chemical warfare products could shift their focus to creating chemical fertilizers, and the like, Peck writes. Our position paper on a U.S. Department of Peace proposes this kind of shift as well. We propose America become a Humanitarian Aid Super-Power.

I spent part of last night reading a story in a recent National Geographic Magazine edition titled: “T-Minus Getting There.” It was a look at the New Space Age 2.0. NASA, for instance, is spending billions of dollars to get back to the moon, while concurrently working stridently on eventual Mars missions. What’s more, private companies like Space X, Boeing, Blue Origin, and so on, are racing to get space tourism, planet/asteroid mining, and eventually space colonizing, on-line. In fact, the article notes that one of Elon Musk’s (Tesla) goals is to colonize Mars. “Much of today’s [private] rocketry is fueled by an intense competition among a few super billionaires whose ambitions (and egos) appear to be out of this world,” the piece reads. The article also cites Bill Nye, who is television’s “Science Guy,” and CEO of The Planetary Society: It’s noted he rolled his eyes when asked about colonies on Mars: “It’s incredibly cold, there’s hardly any water, and by the way, there’s nothing to breathe.” Translated spiritually, if God wanted us living there, wouldn’t He have provided this stuff? And staying with this theme, wouldn’t it make more sense, common sense, to be spending these exorbitant amounts of money on fixing the problems on this planet? A second Space Age? Our administration would nix NASA’s involvement in that, and re-direct the money toward all types of global humanitarian and environmental causes, again, on this planet. Note: Several years ago, I explained this part of our platform to a reporter from the Wapakoneta News. Wapakoneta, incidentally, is the hometown of astronaut Neil (“One small step for man…”) Armstrong. You can see why we didn’t carry Wapakoneta that particular election cycle. LOL, Lots Of Lunar (lunacy).

Catching up on the last several months (continued)… Over the Christmas holidays, I did a story on two wood carvers. One, a local man named Dale Way, who, after long days as a handyman, would work in the evenings carving a big wooden Nativity scene he put in his front yard. It took him the better part of a winter to complete it. It took Jerry Taufler 20 years to complete his wooden sculpture. We met him in Le Mars, Iowa while we were out campaigning in 2000. He was a postal carrier in Le Mars. At night, after eating dinner and spending some time with his kids, he’d go out to a wood shop in the back of his modest home. There he’d spend a few hours carving a life-size rendition of “The Last Supper.” He intended to donate it to the Trinity Heights Shrine in Sioux, City, Iowa. Shortly before it was completed, a man offered Jerry, the carver/postal carrier, $1 million for it. Jerry said no. He told me he said to the man: “My reward is somewhere else.” Pretty amazing response… I recently did an article about a rare (at least these days) 1957 Nash Metropolitan. (See photo.) A local man had recently bought it from someone in Pennsylvania. He said when he was driving it back to Ohio, people were driving by him on the freeway taking pictures, he couldn’t stop in a gas station without people coming up, and so on. Yeah, on one level, I’m sure it was the look of the car. But on another level, perhaps, and quite unconsciously, the car reminded them of a time in America when the pace of life was slower, simpler, and more wholesome. Our campaign promotes a return to some of that… I was reading a story in a recent edition of National Geographic titled: A World on the Move. It was saying that with seas rising, crops withering, wars erupting… “humankind seeks shelter in another place.” It’s essential, in our campaign’s opinion, that we do not turn our First World backs, or tighten our First World borders for that matter, on these refugees in dire straits. And our foreign policy position’s ethos demonstrates this.

While traveling across Ohio recently, I stopped at the Red Tomato (That’s right. Dan Quayle couldn’t spell tomato right (Or was that potato?), but I can — thanks to spell check.) in Mt. Eaton. The gentleman in the blue shirt (standing) owned this 1950 Chevrolet. Mint! After admiring it a bit, I talked to him about my candidacy and passed on a campaign card. I talk, in our campaign, about it being somewhat retro. That is, we would like to see the country, in a number of aspects, go back to the 1950s, when things were slower, more wholesome, and so on. I also wrote a column about homelessness recently. A USA Today article noted that a recent poll indicated a whopping 45% of Los Angeles residents believe homelessness is the biggest problem facing the city. Homeless tent encampments, for instance, now seem virtually everywhere there — including even at some city parking lots. “We all agree that no one wants people living in a parking lot,” said Eric Tars, legal director for the National Homelessness Law Center. “But the way to end the homeless encampments is to make them unnecessary, not illegal.” Our family intentionally moved to a hardscrabble part of Cleveland, Ohio for five years doing outreach to the poor and researching the systemic causes of metropolitan poverty and homelessness. For a look at some of what we found, see…