What if.  How many times have you heard that?  What if something terrible is about to happen and you are the only one who can stop it?  What if you have to skirt the law to avert an imminent catastrophe?  These days the what ifs often involve terrorists and nuclear catastrophes.

Look, if you find out one morning that we now have five terrorists in the U.S. who are part of an active network who want to destroy New York City or Buffalo or Atlanta

The threat is terrible.  Time is short.  Only swift and decisive action can save the us.  What ifs has been used to justify everything from illegal wiretaps to torture.

This is the choice. We're going to have a nuclear weapon some day or a biological weapon that could kill millions of Americans. We have the technical ability to stop it. Now do you want us to be able to stop it or not?

Well I have a what if for you.  What if you knew that a small group of evil men were in position to threaten the peace and stability of the world?  Not just a city or two, but the entire world?  What if you knew they had access to a nuclear arsenal and the means to deliver terrible destruction to any city on the planet?

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig is another of those books that mark a major waypoint in the course plot of my life.  It is an exaggeration, but not much of one, to say that the book saved my life.  It was the right book at the right time to show me the way out of a very bad place I had wandered into.

Thank you, Phaedrus.

What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua ... that's the only name I can think of for it ... like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. "What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and "best" was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.

I can plot the course of my life by the books and authors that have influenced me.  Dune by Frank Herbert is one of those books.  I believe it will come to be seen as one of the defining books of my generation. So many tangled strands that were coming together as we came of age are exquisitely woven in this one astounding work of fiction.  It is a book about awareness.  Ecological awareness, awareness of the limits of imperialism, the false yet tantalizing promise of chemically induced forms of higher awareness, above all awareness of consequences.

Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is for gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.

 -Pardot Kynes
 First Planetologist of Arrakis

According to the Energy Information Administration at the US Department of Energy, coal-fired generation accounts for 49.7% of total electric production in the US.  Gas-fired generation accounts for another 18.7%.  Other fossil fuels account for another 3% or so.  Altogether about 71% of all electricity produced in America today comes from the burning of fossil fuels.  Let me try to put that in perspective, in terms that all of us can relate to.