Aug 5, 2006 by Naomi.

With the entire USA into temperatures over one hundred degrees in the sun, people will cope one way or another in order to continue their routines or simply stay alive. Offices and many residences run air conditioners at temperatures too low to maintain the power and electrical sources fail. So far shortages have occurred in some metropolitan areas. But not many.

We are beginning to understand our environment and realize we do not have to live in 68 degrees inside during the hot summer. Just as we understand we do not always have to turn our heat sources to 80 degrees in the winter. But stress on the electrical generation facilities is going to continue unless populated areas figure out some way of producing electricity close by the user instead of relying on grids and networks from hundreds of miles away. Small nuclear reactors could solve that problem once folks realize there in not always deathly danger from radionuclides.

Better yet, let’s develop new technology. People readily accept brushing up against or welcoming isotope technology when they suffer from illness or want immunization from disease, or longer shelf life for foods. Technology is already providing those amenities. So let’s perfect our electrity transmission. Somebody must invent or discover a better way to transmit the helpful little atoms or whatever those active ions are that run all the wonderful applicances I rely on every day.

There must be a more elemental way to physically deliver 120 volts than put it on board wires above or below ground. It actually does not flow inside the copper wire, it rides along the surface as if the wire was a rail, not a tube.

So come on, Scotty, beam it across from generater to user. I know you can do it.

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Aug 2, 2006 by Naomi.

Reading is a compulsion for me. I cannot come across those symbols we call letters without reading. Even while walking my very young grandchildren, we stopped to puzzle letters on round iron manhole covers in the street — water. sewer. ironworks — and the manufacturer’s name often imprinted in durable raised letters for posterity.

All printed words are a source of information and it struck me when reading a popular novel of the seventies in the wake of the Roe v Wade decision on women’s right to abortion. In the first printing the story goes — a not too young unmarried woman’s birth control failed and she found herself pregnant. She discussed the problem with an understanding father who listened to her admit that she wanted to keep the child, for good reasons. The stud was willing to marry her or pay for an abortion. It was a fair discussion where a decision would be made later.

However in a later extended version of the book, father said abortion was too clean a name, it was outright infanticide, pure and simple. But the morality issue was put on the mother who was taught morality was based on The Right to Life, — had been the basis of Western morality for two thousand years.

How many readers let that influence actions they took can never be ascertained. Am I the only one to look at it as politics? Maybe. The author went on to pull the plug on a brain dead hit and run victim, killed babies and children of every age with an ongoing disease throughout the story. No matter. The point was made early on in the very well developed story.

My point is that in my fiction writing I want to craft characters as well as well-read author’s characters are crafted to get my political views across. It is an effective way to propagandize.

Isn’t that what words are all about?

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