An amusing faux pas from or misquote of Delegate Dan Poling in the Parkersburg News Sentinel:
“I know House Speaker Earl Ray Tomblin is open-minded to looking at what is cost effective,” he said. ["]We need to look at where the money is needed most, everyday things for people to go to work. I don’t want to look at one thing.”
Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them than he said to his squire: “Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless.
- Miquel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
In our search to create a carbon neutral world, we have begun to harness small, but not insignificant, amounts of wind energy. Until recently my knowledge of wind energy was limited to a vague notion that there were a lot of windmills (not true) and wooden shoes in Holland.
Today I know a lot more about wind energy. That knowledge makes me appreciate that making environmentally-correct decisions can be very complicated. Some of the issues:
Unlike Don Quixote’s imaginary enemies, our environmental enemies – global warming, destroyed ecosystems, polluted streams – are quite real. But slaying these real enemies might prove just as difficult for us as slaying imaginary enemies was for Don Quixote.
Despite being championed/cynically exploited by three Governors and a whole host of political leaders, Vision Shared has not been very successful. Why?
The first problem, I daresay, is with Vision Shared’s mission: “To bridge social, political and economic gaps by BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER to confront the issues and needs facing West Virginia.” I realize that bringing people together, which is better known as event planning or party planning to the uninitiated, can be quite an accomplishment, but it is hardly a “meaningful” accomplishment for an organization in existence for almost a decade. During my eight years working in government, I quickly learned that the problem with getting things done rarely is that key stakeholders don’t meet – the public policy world is filled with party planners. Rather it was that no one ever does much of anything after being brought together. An organization that makes bringing people together its primary mission is destined to fail at accomplishing much of anything else, regardless of whom it brings together.I find this story in the Charleston Gazette, particularly the second to last paragraph, very interesting. Knowing what I do about the federal criminal justice system, I have a hunch we’ll be hearing more about Mr. Diehl.
I don’t know enough to know precisely where this investigation may be headed, but I’d be really surprised if it’s over.
… Senator Robert C. Byrd only seems to get better with age. I first began to appreciate our Senior Senator when he was the lone voice in the wilderness urging President Bush, Congress and the American people to reconsider their headlong rush into a war in Iraq. During that debate, he used his tremendous grasp of history to explain that we had never before gone to war in the absence of a clear and imminent threat to our nation. America paid a heavy price for failing to heed Senator’s Byrd’s message.
Today Senator Byrd speaks truth to power about coal. His theme: “The time has come to have an open and honest dialogue about coal’s future in West Virginia.”
West Virginia will pay a heavy price if it fails to heed Senator Byrd’s message.
