My question to you, and the general discussion on this blog, has to do with forests though, not queers. Sorry if that boors you, but that’s how it is. So please, if you want to participate here, let us in on this one of your little secrets: what do queers think about forests? Do you all want them burned to the ground in holocausts, or do queers prefer responsible forest stewardship? Inquiring minds wish to know.

Or are queers indifferent to forests, burned or unburned? That would also be useful information, to those of us engaged in saving forests.

His statement was obviously exaggerated, but I am sure he meant only to display his rage at Craig’s betrayal of his word and the trust placed in him. That betrayal is tantamount to treason, because Craig is an elected representative in a democracy.

In dictatorships like Iran, the punishment for treason is swift and sure. In democracies like ours, Craig will not be punished at all. He will retain his salary and pension at the taxpayers’ expense. His new ineffectualness will punish the people of Idaho, not Larry.

At it will punish our forests. Or not… Larry has been ineffectual in that regard for quite some time.

What I do not understand, James, is how the radical queer Left can perpetrate giant scare stories about queers in mortal danger, when they aren’t, and ignore the mortal peril our forests are so obviously in. Why is it that you are all exercised about a myth, and so indifferent to reality?

What did forests ever do to you that you now wish for their extinction? What is the official queer position on megafires destroying America’s priceless, heritage forests?

Larry violated the trust that was placed in him. He was sent to Washington DC to protect and defend Idaho, and to help save Idaho from ruin. He failed, especially in regard to protecting, maintaining, and perpetuating Idaho’s forests, but people were willing to forgive him in that, because he made some token effort. What Idahoans are unwilling to forgive are the violations of trust.

Soliciting sex in airport bathrooms is not appropriate behavior for a US Senator. Nor is the solicitation of sex from pages by a powerful Congressman appropriate behavior. Nor is the solicitation of sex from an intern by a US President appropriate behavior.

In all cases mentioned, the sex acts themselves are somewhat secondary to the inappropriate exercise of power. We do not elevate people to power in this country so that they might abuse that power, by debasing or using for pleasure underlings, passersby, bathroom visitors, pages, interns, or anyone.

We do not elevate them to power so that they they might accumulate graft, or bribes, or political payoffs, either.

We elevate our elected and appointed officials to protect and defend us from overweaning power: from the abuse of our individual rights, from the destruction of our landscapes, from the destruction of our communities.

That is the trust emplaced. When violated, the whole game is over. The Craig case is not about homosexuality. It is about violation of trust.

The Roman Empire once contained most of the known world. The Caesars kept the Empire together with Roman roads, the kind their armies traveled upon. The army generals traveled by chariot, and the Roman roads would get rutted by the chariot wheels.

So in one of the first known major bureaucratic decisions in history, the Romans decreed that all chariots would have the same wheelbase, 4 feet 8 inches, or roughly the width of a horse’s ass. All the chariots fit the ruts, and broken axles were less frequent.

The English kept that standard on their horse-drawn carriages, for the same reason. And when they built the first railroads nearly two thousand years later, they set the track width at 4 feet 8 inches. That fit their roads and bridges. This distance became, and still is, the standard railroad track width in America.

In the 1990’s Morton-Thiokol Inc. in Utah landed the contract to build the booster rockets that power the space shuttle. Those rockets, built in sections, had to pass through tunnels in the Rockies to get to Florida and Cape Kennedy/Canaveral (where NASA launches the space shuttle).

Those are railroad tunnels. They are just big enough to let a railroad train through, a railroad train with a wheelbase of 4 feet 8 inches. The rockets could not be any bigger in diameter than the tunnels, right?

Bottom line? The most advanced transportation system ever created, the space shuttle, is designed and built to certain limiting specs, i.e. the width of a horse’s ass.

And the moral? Our lives are run by horse’s asses, have been since the days of the Roman Empire, and there is sadly nothing that you or I can do about it.

So if you are a mega-conglomerate like Siemens, do you get a free pass on being a corporate greed monger if you are making faulty hardware to secure the Green Dream? Is the Sales Division selling a product the Engineering Division can’t design right, but that the Production Division is not going to quit making?

I see the problem is the old Interstate System bridge and overpass height issue. Engineering can only make the turbine/windmill bases as large as the highway system will allow to be carried on the lowest of lowbed trailers. And customers want taller windmills with longer blades and bigger electrical outputs. So we get too tall, too skinny, matchstick windmills that tip over. Sales and Customers pushing Engineering through an extruder.

That is the limit on home designs and construction: trusses are made according to the maximum that a truck can pack down the highway and get under the overpasses. So we get a lot of big box houses with little truss roofs. No large diameter timber so ranch homes essentially can no longer be built with any sort of economy. They can’t cut the joists it takes to make the spans, and the truss outfits can’t get the trusses needed hauled. So it has to be the two piece trusses, without the open beam ceiling. Just like the wind turbines can only be so tall because they can’t haul a wider base on the highway.

Now you have to wonder how many will fall over in the next couple of years. How much blood to be spilled to make green electricity.

http://roguepundit.typepad.com/roguepundit/2007/08/wind-turbine-pr.html

“…One man was killed and another injured Saturday after a wind turbine collapsed in Sherman County.

Deputy Shull with the Sherman County Sheriff’s office said the two men involved were working on a non-operational turbine at the Klondike Wind Farms east of Wasco Oregon.

Officials said one worker who was at the top of the turbine was killed when it buckled. A second man had to be rescued from the barrel of the collapsed structure. He was taken to an area hospital where his condition was unknown.

There are two Klondike wind farms and a third under construction. They all belong to PPM energy, which is owned by ScottishPower.

It was a Siemens turbine at Klondike III, which is still under construction [that collapsed]…” — from the Rogue Pundit