THINKING OUTSIDE THE TANK

Today is the Feast Day of Saint Francis. Happy Feast Day to you.

It is also the 50 anniversary of Sputnik. What could those two possibly have in common? Answer: Hillary Clinton.
Huh? you say.

Sputnik, explained Hillary today in a address at the Carnegie Institute for Science in Washington launched a period in American history where we were excited and inspired by the unlimited potential for science to advance us forward in multi-dimensioned areas of improvements in health, space exploration and unprecedented economic opportunities created by development of entirely new industries. Sputnik launched rockets of an attitude about the potential and hope of Science. After Sputnik laid the challenge, America rose to it, after suffering a depression and a World War, and the economy was launched into an unparalleled period of expansive growth with the creation of entirely new industries. America became the leader of the Western World economically and technologically. Computers, which 40 years ago were the size of a room are now something you can carry in your palm.

Subsequently during the Presidency of her husband, the discovery/invention of the potential of the Internet launched a technological revolution whose significance parallels the Gutenberg press and movable type. This transformed business and industry into a new Century. The fact that you can read this blog is a direct result. This could not have happened without a government that created a hospitable environment for such revolutionary technological innovation.

After Sputnik, the American genius was unleashed, the economy responded, and it eventually threw cold water on a Cold War as the world cooperated in the Space Program and brought down a Berlin Wall bloodlessly.

This was all because of an attitude about the Promise and Hope of Science. We need to regain this attitude, and not attempt to conform facts to our superimposed biased theories or make science an enemy. Science is not the enemy of morality.

The current challenges to the environmental degradation attendant to climate change, she argued can be met with innovation. We can regain the competitive edge that is partially lost to Europeans who are far ahead of us in carbon capping and recapturing environmental and atmospheric toxins. The current administration, she noted is not only hostile to addressing the need clearly, but is engaged in a "war on science" in which it suppresses facts, truth and honest scientific inquiry/research in a variety of disturbing areas to obscure the real seriousness of our challenges. It even re-writes reports.
Not until recently, seven ( 7 )years into his Presidency did Bush even admit there was a serious global warming climate change crisis- after the UN dedicated an entire session to it because the rest of the world has passed him and us by on noticing. The record of suppressing Truth, people pursuing it and fabricating conclusions or records by selective redactions, factual suppression and industry edits on governmental reports is more than disturbing, it is flatly dangerous. Hillary will reverse the disturbing trend.
She will inspire kids to want to become engineers, scientists of all flavors and explorers on the cutting edge of research and scientific exploration.

All doubts about Hillary's Presidential stature were dispelled when she hit her stride in speaking about the need to spur on green alternative energy technological innovation, with concrete visionary plans which include restructuring and budgeting departments, incentivized with grants and awards to get us off our dependency on foreign oil. Industries that can barely be imagined now, can with the right hospitable governmental environment save us from our dependency on foreign oil which is fueling more than our cars; it is fueling a distorted foreign policy. Green technologies can be exportable to redress balance of trade deficit issues. We are now overtaken by Europeans who are on the ball with this already and surpassing us in alternative sustainable energy technologies. That does not have to be the case and it is a scandal that it is. Why is the most popular hybrid a Japanese Toyota for example.

Here is where Saint Francis is looking out for us. Few people realize that Saint Francis was a soldier from Assisi warring with other Italian city states prior to his conversion where he became, among other things, an Apostle of Peace. He forsook the lance and sword, for a life following Jesus, the Prince of Peace in as pure a form as he could possibly live. He went on mission to address the Turkish Sultan in a time when religious wars abounded to promote Peace.

War simply breaks the heart of God. And we have been at it far too long.

There is no doubt that oil and the oil industry feature strongly in our perpetually warring foreign policy. Hillary wants to create the governmental platform where we don't need to factor oil into the equation, thus minimizing our self interest geopolitically in regions where people would rather kill us. She wants to invest in new green technologies and roll back some of the unnecessary subsidies currently favoring the oil industry which does not need them.

The natural consequence of these reshaped priorities will certainly foster Peace.

A budget is a moral document. Ours is way out of balance in favor of war supplementals and financing the mechanics, personnel and products of War. War. Not kids health care, not upgrading and building schools, not clean water sanitation in developing countries, not medical care, not promotion of scientific health biomedical research, not caring for indigents and homeless. Just War and More War; The business of killing people as an instrument of Foreign Policy-because diplomacy failed.

Hillary noted that as a child with a pair of binoculars looking for Sputnik in her suburban Chicago backyard she was so inspired by the space program she wrote a letter asking how she could become an Astronaut. She received an official letter back explaining that women were not considered for the program. The Poetic Justice of the same woman now running for the job that would make her the boss of NASA and everyone who could possibly write such a letter is too sweet for words. But she isn't gloating. No time for that. Neither is she "strident", "inappropriately aggressive", "angry" or any stereotype of a successful woman Yalie attorney aspiring to the highest public service office in the land.

She is just really SMART. So Smart you and I can't possibly know how smart.
She has vision coupled with strategic astuteness.
There is a reason she has the most money
of anyone running.

Some of the same people/groups are still going to have the same ideological objections to her wanting to reverse the ban on stem-cell research, without looking at the possibilities that advanced scientific research will hold in, for example, the area of increased effectiveness of fertility treatments (without the need to create more embryos than necessary for implantation) in addition to the life saving cures of all manner of diseases that this research may offer. Some people will still think it morally objectionable to make legal Plan B contraceptives, without noticing that the government would not in any case force or mandate anyone to take them.

Whatever your moral persuasion along those lines, for her sheer Brilliance, Integrity, Intellectual honesty in appreciating and tackling the most serious issues of the time, and for the compassionate heart of a Mother, watching Mothers who receive flag draped coffins returning from Iraq, SENATOR HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON should be the next President.

And so, as we pray as we are taught, for all leaders and public servants, please pray with me:

LORD, MAKE HER AN INSTRUMENT OF YOUR PEACE.

Deceit is in the mind of those who plan evil, but those who counsel peace have joy.
- Proverbs 12:20-20