Our year-end fam­ily rit­ual is to reflect upon the good things the year brought and we typ­i­cally ring in the New Year with a grand toast, a series of toasts, in grat­i­tude for bless­ings past. This year my fam­ily has so much to be grate­ful for and I want to her­ald in the new with a nod to the past.
To so many I owe so much for help­ing our fam­ily help my war­rior son, John, on that long hard jour­ney from com­bat to home­com­ing. There were times when his night­mares, two or three a night, became too much for all of us and a friend would lend a shoul­der to cry on or a safe har­bor to rest in.
Thank you to his broth­ers in arms from ear­lier wars that alone knew all too well what he suf­fered and the impact upon his fam­ily and ral­lied to help him climb the dark side of the moun­tain and turn his face into the sun. After almost three months in the VA hos­pi­tal he learned to tame his demons, to respond rather than react and made life­long friends.
Espe­cially I am grate­ful to John’s own dogged Marine deter­mi­na­tion to reroute his neu­rons and relearn to be a pro­duc­tive mem­ber of soci­ety. Today he lives in a won­der­ful com­mu­nity in Cal­i­for­nia that under­stands and sup­ports our vet­er­ans and is attend­ing a col­lege that has put spe­cial empha­sis on adapt­ing to the spe­cial needs of com­bat vet­er­ans.
John now works with col­lege regents and plan­ners to help other vet­er­ans be suc­cess­ful in school and speaks at many pub­lic func­tions in sup­port of these goals. His movie star good looks and new found speak­ing skills has brought him to the atten­tion of doc­u­men­tary film mak­ers and he will be work­ing both in front of and behind the cam­era to pro­duce media to help our vet­er­ans.
Thank you to John’s baby brother, Chris, who gave up his own plans to stick with us and endured so much hard­ship in the process, we couldn’t have done it with­out you. Thank you to his sis­ters, Sarah and Shan­ley, for under­stand­ing, (most of the time any­way).
For John’s mother, she is eter­nally grate­ful to all who helped him make these strides and while his life is still a strug­gle and he will never be the same, she now knows that he will still be won­der­ful. Thank you to all who helped us through this dif­fi­cult time.
Also, I want to thank every­one who has con­tributed to the V-LIM tur­bine. Ric Mor­risonn, my fab­ri­ca­tor has put together an amaz­ing team of gifted and tal­ented local engi­neers and arti­sans to bring the LIM to real­ity. Peo­ple around the globe have con­tributed valu­able data from mate­r­ial har­monic stress lev­els, torque cal­cu­la­tions and dozens of empir­i­cal obser­va­tions.
Coos County, with­out even know­ing it, has been the recip­i­ent of tremen­dous good­will from all over the world. Engi­neers and sci­en­tists from Ams­ter­dam to Dubai to Bei­jing to Port­land are push­ing for the suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion of the pro­to­type.
Thank you to Jean Ivey, edi­tor of The Sen­tinel for allow­ing me to share an alter­na­tive point of view with her read­ers each week and thank you, dear read­ers, for your kind words and feed­back. Happy New Year everyone!

Our future pres­i­dent speaks to fam­i­lies and mil­i­tary abroad… let us hope he rethinks his strat­egy of increas­ing troop lev­els rather than herald­ing diplo­macy and bring­ing all our troops home.

Many troops are serv­ing their sec­ond, third, or fourth tour of duty. And we are reminded that they are more than ded­i­cated Sol­diers, Sailors, Air­men, Marines and Coast Guard – they are devoted fathers and moth­ers; hus­bands and wives; sons and daugh­ters; and sis­ters and brothers.

This hol­i­day sea­son, their fam­i­lies cel­e­brate with a joy that is muted know­ing that a loved one is absent, and some­times in dan­ger. In towns and cities across Amer­ica, there is an empty seat at the din­ner table; in dis­tant bases and on ships at sea, our ser­vice­men and women can only won­der at the look on their child’s face as they open a gift back home.

Wish­ing every­one a won­der­ful Christ­mas and New Year. Weather per­mit­ting I will be view­ing the tree on the right up close and per­sonal shortly.

Nom­i­nees for the annual awards pre­sented to the most cor­rupt politi­cians. I am root­ing for Bill

Or more accu­rately, when will the county bill for $9M from the Dept of Inte­rior? Bob Main has writ­ten a lengthy chron­i­cle of the bizarre han­dling of the Coos Bay Wagon Road tim­ber prop­erty, in this week’s Sen­tinel and asks why the finan­cially strapped county hasn’t billed for $9M in assessed prop­erty taxes? As of Decem­ber 16, 2008…

…Coos County has not sent the $9,000,000 + bill to the Depart­ment of Inte­rior. What are they wait­ing for? $9,000,000 is $3,000,000 more than they were receiv­ing from both O & C and Wagon Road lands at full county employ­ment. With $9,000,000 we could have a full jail staff, restore the sheriff’s depart­ment, add back the assis­tant DA’s that were cut, etc., and have money left over to fix county roads and not ask cit­i­zens for more tax money. To this day, I am puz­zled why the bill has not been sent!

This is a very good ques­tion and brings to the fore­front one of many ques­tions as to the han­dling of county busi­ness. More on this soon.

Win­ter weather has brought about more wide spread power out­ages from Illi­nois, Ohio and east to New Eng­land. The West­ern States are not expected to fare much bet­ter accord­ing to the North Amer­ica Elec­tric Reli­a­bil­ity Cor­po­ra­tion, which over­sees reli­a­bil­ity of the U.S. elec­tric power grid, is pro­ject­ing an increas­ing risk for black­outs because of the lack of avail­able power.
The annual rev­enue pro­jected for a build out of 20% energy from wind is esti­mated to be $23 Tril­lion. To put that in per­spec­tive our annual bud­get for 2008 was $3.1T and we receipted $2.8T with the deficit applied to our national debt now at over $10T. So in one year, earn­ings from renew­able energy pro­duc­tion could run our coun­try at cur­rent costs for over seven years or pay off our national debt twice.
Yet Con­gress does not choose to invest our tax dol­lars in energy pre­fer­ring to leave it to the pri­vate sec­tor. Energy is up from 2008 but still accounts for less than 3% com­pared to 21% for the Global War on Ter­ror and util­ity costs to the con­sumer have risen steeply in the last ten years.
GE inked a $500B deal to pro­vide gas and coal pow­ered elec­tric gen­er­a­tors for power in Iraq on a con­tin­ued course of cen­tral­ized power despite repeated fail­ures such as we are suf­fer­ing here. Clearly there is money to be made in energy and energy pro­duc­tion and the same holds true for more reli­able decen­tral­ized energy.
Decen­tral­iz­ing allows smaller invest­ments in local energy pro­duc­tion $5M projects rather than $500B and affords the oppor­tu­nity for com­mu­ni­ties and neigh­bor­hoods to share in rev­enue that would nor­mally be sent to a dis­tant investor owned util­ity. The money nor­mally paid in util­i­ties can cover the debt ser­vice on local gen­er­a­tion and net prof­its rein­vested in schools, roads and infra­struc­ture.
Begin­ning in early Jan­u­ary I begin work­ing, once again, with Port­land State Uni­ver­sity to design new motor con­trol cir­cuitry for the V-LIM gen­er­a­tor as well as data col­lec­tion to deter­mine out­put, wind speed, ambi­ent and coil tem­per­a­ture and other para­me­ters. The PSU Soft­ware Engi­neer­ing Cap­stone pro­vides stu­dents with a real­is­tic soft­ware devel­op­ment expe­ri­ence that uti­lizes the skills and knowl­edge acquired dur­ing the first three years of their program.

Our pres­i­dent elect is res­ur­rect­ing sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy in our coun­try and announced his President’s Coun­cil of Advi­sors on Sci­ence and Technology—or PCAST nam­ing a new panel of experts. Jane Lubchenco, “an Ore­gon State Uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sor spe­cial­iz­ing in over­fish­ing and cli­mate change, will be the first woman to head NOAA.”

Watch his speech below or read it here

I am con­fi­dent that if we recom­mit our­selves to dis­cov­ery; if we sup­port sci­ence edu­ca­tion to cre­ate the next gen­er­a­tion of sci­en­tists and engi­neers right here in Amer­ica; if we have the vision to believe and invest in things unseen, then we can lead the world into a new future of peace and prosperity.