Can Nuclear Energy Solve the World Water Crisis

I just watched an episode of VICE, HBO’s answer to what 60 Minutes used to be. The subject matter was the growing water crisis worldwide. A Professor commented on the effect of the loss of vast portions of the Amazon Rain Forest and the environmental effects on the diminished creation of moisture flowing into the atmosphere as a result. It seems that the moisture given off by trees as they grow breathes water vapor into the atmosphere. Ultimately that water vapor forms a river of moisture laden air until it is released back to the land as rain. It does not take a scientist to figure out that if trees release the moisture that falls as rain somewhere else, remove the trees and rainfall diminishes. Add to that dynamic the fact that we are using water in irresponsible ways, draining our aquifers to pay for today at the expense of tomorrow, Add to that we live in a world where population growth increases demand at a time when we are actively diminishing supply and at some point in the not too distant future we will reach a tipping point where there won’t be enough water to go around.

That got me to thinking that if trees put moisture into the atmosphere and we are not adding trees what else can we do to put vast quantities of moisture back into the atmosphere. For those who remember the China Syndrome movie or for that matter any number of apocalyptic stories about the dangers of nuclear plants overheating and boiling away their cooling systems leading to a meltdown of the core which gets so hot it melts anything meant to contain it and a catastrophe results. Ok so what happens, I have to ask, if the water supply is such that it can never be boiled away it just keeps making steam and releasing it into the atmosphere.  It isn’t going to just stay there, it is going to turn into rain somewhere.  We use nuclear plants to drive steam turbines so the technology is already here. Add to this the sad fact that we have so much nuclear fuel already that this might be a good way to use it, turning seawater into steam and releasing it into the atmosphere. Now admittedly there are a couple of problems that we need to solve first, Seawater has salt dissolved in it and the salt does not stay with the steam so we need to figure out how to keep the salt from literally gumming up the works, not I think, an insurmountable problem. The second and more challenging hurdle is where to place these things where they would do the most good.

I don’t think we want to create more rain over the ocean and managing weather patterns has been the dream of climatologists for years.  We are getting sophisticated enough and technologically powerful enough to solve that problem too if we start soon enough to get to the answers before the problem turns into a crisis.  I suspect that given the relatively small amounts of heat needed to run a nuclear electric plant we are looking for a quantum leap in scale but that is merely a matter of size.  The simple truth is that if we do not solve this problem while there is still time, when time starts to run out, solutions will be much harder to come by. 

Tiptoeing Through the Realm of Theoretical Physics, II.

I just watched an intriguing program discussing “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy” and speculation on the role they play in the way the Universe acts and reacts. The first (actually the last) thing we were told in the documentary was that the ‘composition’ (or perhaps more correctly the components) of the universe are made up of three segments of a pie chart. Atoms were said to comprise 5% of the universe, Dark Matter 23%, and Dark Energy 72%. What intrigued me the most was that these phenomena, were discussed as if they were three separate, and by implication disconnected things that needed to be understood as if they were separate, and distinct when I have the temerity to think that they are but three iterations of the Mass-Energy continuum. In my untutored state and extrapolating from myself since no one is there to enlighten me but me, I posited that the universe in not the 13.7 billion years old that the Big Bang adherents believe it to be but that in fact (or in theory, to be more precise) it is much older.

If it’s age is presumed by tracing the trajectory of visible matter back in time and assuming that the rate that the universe in accelerating is a constant, then Dark Matter and Dark Energy must be separate, and apart. In my first flight of fancy I suggested that the cause of the accelerating universe was the gravitational pull of the first masses of star stuff to form from the Big Bang which had gone through its’ life cycle and was at the outer fringe of the known Universe pulling it ever faster to itself.

I learned today that what I suspect is the Dark Matter component of the mass-energy continuum, is not at the fringes as I originally assumed but is disbursed throughout the known universe bending light to identify where it is and it pops up all over the place. To explain it one need I think only posit that star stuff decays at different rates, that black holes which are the stuff of Dark Matter are made up of the stars that died sooner rather than later due to the composition of the fissionable material they were composed of or other interstellar catastrophe, and having become a black hole grew by encountering other black holes and the detritus of the stuff that is not fissionable, sucking it in to enable the black hole to form its’ own singularity and bend space time around it in the same odd ways as had been observed and described.

My flight of fancy goes something like this. When the Big Bang occurred, it did not spew forth a homogenized atomic soup but like explosions generally the stuff spewed out coalesced into different elements and elemental structures which in turn would cause them to live different lives as they ventured forth to form the Universe. Having different forms, they would have different life cycles and the ‘Dark Universe is comprised of the black holes found throughout the known Universe which is referred to as ‘Dark Matter’ because we can see the effect they have on space time, each in their own unique way and the whole concept of matter is that it has an observable effect.

Simplistically the difference between Dark Matter and Dark Energy is that the effect of Dark Matter is quantifiable in varying degrees and on a case by case basis due to the finite effect it has on an observable area of the space time continuum. Where it cannot be shown to have a point of presumed origin but rather its effect is on the Universe as a whole, it is classified as Dark Energy but over however  many billions of years it takes, Dark Matter begins the ‘digestion of mass into energy and as the ratio of mass to energy decreases, the ‘attractive’ power of ever consolidating black holes consumes what mass there is until a new singularity is created where all matter is compressed to the point where it explodes into another Big Bang and so on. If there is such a thing as a unified field theory where Einstein’s physics explains the entire life cycle of the Universe I suppose, simplistic as it admittedly is, E still=MC 2. It is upon the premise, that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, then perhaps it is simply the ebb and flow of matter to energy and back to matter which explains the life cycle of the universe as the journey from one state to the other and back again ad infinitum.

Why I can never vote for a Republican

It’s not because I am a liberal or that I believe in a woman’s right to choose, or that they have done all that they can to frustrate the ability to vote by those least likely to vote for them….not even because they have gerrymandered much of the country to make a registered minority into a voting majority by lumping all the Democrats together in district “A” while making district “B” Republican by a small majority. It’s not because they used that process to take control of state legislatures who in turn control everything from voting rights to redistricting. It is not even because they are happy to take away the access to healthcare recently granted to 16 million more Americans.

I cannot vote for a Republican because they have corrupted our constitutional system; because they have slowly, methodically, taken us back to the America of the 1890’s when money bought them President McKinley. When the few who were rich saw to it that labor could not organize, that the poor were kept poor to keep their cost of labor down. A time when power was more important than justice, and freedom was a keep that they kept to themselves.

They lied then and they lie now, and they have a Supreme Court that cares less about the law and the constitutional principles that offered such promise, then they do about using the law to keep their ideological proxies in power. I know that virtually every Supreme Court Justice who ever served from the founding of this nation until 1972, regardless of the party from whence they came, would agree that ‘Citizens United” was unconstitutional and a perversion of the electoral system that, up till then, had marched inexorably toward expanding the franchise for almost two centuries.

Make no mistake, we are on the brink of a new dark age where government exists to serve the few and oppress the many. Where the NRA is more powerful than every human rights organization combined, and where quality education is a commodity to be accessed by the rich and to further impoverish the middle class through a loan system that is designed to profit the government at the expense of those who must borrow against their future in order to have the chance to have one.

They spread fear about the debt to be passed on to future generations but do nothing to reduce the debt load their student loan programs strap on the backs of our children. For those who truly love this country and the promise it holds for future generations we must put a stop to this insidious perversion of a land that cannot be defeated from without but is slowly disintegrating from within.

What do we do with the CO2

Dwight Owen Schweitzer  4/21/12

On the 7^th of June 1942, the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown was sunk shortly after the battle of Midway. What is remarkable is not the manner of her sinking but that she did not sink earlier as a result of a Japanese aerial attack, when a bomb went through her flight deck and exploded below in the compartment where thousands of gallons of highly flammable airplane fuel were stored and being used to refuel the planes that were there. The resultant explosion would have sunk a similar Japanese aircraft carrier but that fire on the Yorktown was put out in a matter of minutes saving the ship and her crew.

The reason for this was remarkably simple. The United States Navy, when building that ship in 1937, installed what to that time, was a revolutionary fire suppression system. It consisted of filling the hold with CO2, an inert, ‘greenhouse’ gas that is heavier than air and does not support combustion. We know that CO2 has two distinct and beneficial properties; it enables plants to undergo photosynthesis and in the process use CO2 to produce Oxygen, and it puts out fires in enclosed areas where it can displace the oxygen that is the fuel of virtually all but chemical fires. The significance of this is also two fold. Imagine if we replaced all of the water held in storage in all of the water mains and sprinkler systems, and kept under pressure in the same way we pipe natural gas into homes and buildings throughout the country.

There has been much speculation and some research on what is called CO2 sequestration; the liquefying of CO2 emissions and storing the resultant liquid in underground caverns and this approach might have some merit, however, I see no direct economic benefit accruing from it. In the meantime we have a fire suppression system throughout the country that not only contains millions of gallons of water sequestered in it, but it is also a poor first choice to put out most fires due to the resultant time it takes and the water damage that ensues.

What I am suggesting is that we use the thousands of miles of water pipe presently held hostage to a possible fire and systematically replace that increasingly needed water with liquefied carbon dioxide. The downside risk is that were it to leak in an enclosed space undetected, people would die of carbon dioxide poisoning; a risk easily prevented by even present ‘smoke detectors’ and the gas could be impregnated with a die or a noxious odor much as gasoline and natural gas is today. While I do not have the exact figures of the amount of liquefied CO2 that could be stored in the present water based system, the simple truth is that it is a far better, safer, and infinitely less environmentally damaging, method of putting out fires than the water sprinklers we have today.

The second benefit of CO2 should also be utilized in creating automated vertical farming systems that enable our CO2 emissions to be captured and piped from the same grid and made available to nurture agriculture which in turn would shorten growing seasons, increase yields and add much needed oxygen to an atmosphere that is losing it due to the decimation of the rainforests of the Amazon basin and Indonesia that are a significant source of converting atmospheric CO2 into Oxygen.

While we do not know the degree to which CO2 emissions would be redirected from going into the atmosphere, it is safe to suggest that the amounts would be meaningful, especially if these measures were adopted as a world standard. In the process, slowing if not reversing, the catastrophic effects of global warming’s raising ocean levels at increasingly alarming rates. with dire consequences to virtually every country in the world which is less than 200 feet above sea level. That is the amount the oceans of the world will rise at present rates in less than two centuries as the melting of the polar ice caps accelerate at a time when the population of the world will be growing when the land mass to support it will be shrinking.

Falling in love in Cyberspace

;”>  My first memory is of her face, Out from the mist with many more. For she lived in a distant place, Where I had never been before. I am not sure what brought me there To that land so far away. I did not think the fates would care To take my loneliness away. But there are times the fates are kind And bring us gifts beyond our ken* As they watch over humankind And pity take, on hapless men. They must have picked me out it seems Seeing me sad and all alone, With empty hopes and careless dreams, Having no one to call my own. They must have searched so far and wide, To find the woman just for me, Oblivious to time and tide, What was to be, was to be. Else I can’t say how I found her, She who wraps me from the cold, Who oft tells me that I astound her When I am silver and she is gold. Though I have never heard her voice Nor felt her fingers on my face It is as if I have no choice She is my home, my human place. Dwight Owen Schweitzer July 2012 ____________________________ *’ken’ means ‘the ability to comprehend’

We Need to Stop Educating our Children as if They are the ‘Stem Cells’ of the Body Politic

By: Dwight Owen Schweitzer

The system of public education in the United States was designed before the founding of the Republic and in many ways, at least structurally; has not changed much since. It was, after all, at a time when most Americans never traveled more than 25 miles from where they lived during their entire lives and local control of education was not a choice, it was a necessity.

The legacy of that system that resonates most today is in the sad fact that of the thousands of school districts that exist throughout the country it is not hard to find huge disparities between them. In one, all the students have text books, access to computers, specialized programs and support services located next to another where the children share text books so they cannot take them home, have little access to computers and support services with larger class sizes, fewer class choices and lower paid teachers. We have standardized testing when we do not have standardized students.

Were this disparity not bad enough, there is superimposed on that inequality, the patina of equality by offering them a basic subject matter curriculum that finds it’s rational in the concept that all children are created equal with some minor accommodations being made in some districts for the gifted and those with disabilities. Unfortunately the mandate of the Federally imposed but unfunded Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (‘IDEA’) whose chief legacy has been better at demonstrating the government’s ability to create acronym’s than to foster real change as it is honored mostly in the breach. In the process thousands of children have been ‘left behind’. To that historical emphasis on teaching the 3 ‘R’s, came the imposition of the standardized testing to insure that ‘no (is) child left behind’ which, if put to the test, can be shown that the result has been a whole generation of students being left behind. Statistics validate the generally accepted truth that something is fundamentally wrong with how we chose to educate our children when compared with their peers in an increasing number of countries whose children rank higher than ours. Admittedly experiments have and are being tried to bring greater flexibility to the process, notably the creation of Charter Schools allowing new ideas to be brought to the choice of curriculum and learning method diversity.

The educational establishment is coming to realize that, overall, the present system is failing not only our children but our teachers as well. Our dropout rates are increasing, teacher dissatisfaction is widespread and there is no clear vision of which of the increasing number of band aids works best at a time when our students rank among the lowest in achievement in the civilized world. The greatest educational failure of recent times is the legacy of ‘no child left behind’ with its emphasis on instilling measurable proficiency in reading, math, and science with the result that teachers, ever more concerned with the effects on them of their students ‘falling behind’ their peers in the results of standardized tests, spend more and more time on those subjects at the expense of subject matter that they are not tested on such as history, geography, social studies, civics, art, and music.

In order to get a sense of the depth of the flaws in the system of how we educate our children, ask yourself this simple question. Of the things that you were required to learn in grades 1 through 12, how many of them have you used since? Let’s take a basic list: Algebra, geometry, chemistry, physics, a foreign language, (at the risk of being thought of as politically incorrect lets omit Spanish from the list). I suggest that the chances are good that most people would reply that, at least as to most of them, the answer is none, and this at a time when they project that technical information is doubling in months when not so long ago it took years.

Now factor into the mix, the ability of computers to solve problems and disgorge information that ‘PC’ (‘pre-computer’) we had to solve for ourselves, and in ways that were much more time consuming.  Even today, in an educational context, computers are seen as offering students support for the curriculum rather than offering them an ability to replace it. This, despite the fact that students now can, and often do, have access to two ‘brains’ 24/7 and one ought not have to do the tasks or learn the lessons more easily done or already known by the other, absent a demonstrative need to do so. I say need to do so because while a computer can tell a student what to think it cannot teach him or her how to think. Make no mistake gaining the skill of how to think is more valuable than ever before as the world of ideas is becoming increasing more complex. The capability to analyze and distill the needed information from the primordial soup of an expanding universe of data we are increasingly besieged with is infinitely more valuable than learning what to think. ‘How to think’ is simply the mental process of distilling ‘the answer’ between whatever choices are there to beguile and confuse you.

In short, teaching a child how to use his computer to find the right answer that his computer can give quicker and with greater accuracy, will offer our children the time and resources to study the things a computer cannot do for them. Education would then build on the synergy between two different types of ‘brains’ working in tandem so that to the greatest degree possible neither does a task more easily and economically done by the other. Creating that synergy brings me to the fundamental premise of how to design an educational model that takes into account the realities of the world we now live in. A system that prepares and empowers our children to better cope with the world they will be confronted with in the future. A future, I suggest, that will be at least as different from today as today was from the world that existed a generation ago.

What is needed is not evolutionary change but revolutionary change. The process begins by accepting that each child is quite literally unique and not an educational fungible anchored in the premise that one size fits all. Rather, what is needed is ‘assessment based education’ or ‘ABE’. Virtually everyone knows that while we all have common denominators of personality, capacity, interests, skills, capabilities, deficits and incapacities, the permutations of those make even identical twins unique. It is in how we capitalize on those disparities and in the process empower parents and their children to take charge of their educational experience, that is the focus and the goal of assessment based education. In the process we will prepare our children to the greatest degree we can to make available to them a process that will best position them to be successful in life.

It begins, at the earliest age, with children being tested to first map out their strengths and weaknesses in everything from fine motor skills, to how they process information, in short measuring all the things they bring to the educational table. The net result is to determine those areas where they can, by their inherent capabilities and capacities, be best equipped by their educational experience to be successfully employed in later life. We already have the capacity to do this type of assessment testing, we are doing it for children who have learning disabilities to assess what educational support should be offered them to level the playing field and get the accommodations needed for them to access a meaningful educational experience.

The goal of assessment based education is to offer, not to proscribe, to every student from the earliest age, an idea of what their learning strengths and weaknesses are and as a result are empowered to make their own educational choices that best fit what they ought to learn to most likely prepare them to be successful in life. The first and most fundamental benefit of such a process is that it offers the child the opportunity to design an educational process that invests them with the tools for personal success. They know from the onset those things within themselves that, properly enhanced over the course of their educational experience, however long or short, will best enable them to be ‘all that they can be’. This process is not to be imposed on our children, it is simply part of an ongoing guide for them (along with their parents) to design their own educational path that takes into account their interests, resources and capabilities and gives them a curriculum that is most likely to focus them through an educational system that is meaningful to them and for them from the earliest possible time. Think of it like college where students can pick and choose from a range of educational choices with minimal base requirements chosen simply on the basis of their interests.

This is essentially a process that already exists in varying degrees as children progress through the present system where the range of their choices increases as they progress from grade school through college. The difference, and it is a fundamental one, is that ABE removes the haphazard paths offered today with a much more systematized process that offers them an informed choice of creating a meaningful curriculum for themselves at the earliest possible time in their educational life. If an adolescent had been in an educational environment from an early age that he or she knows is most likely to prepare them to literally make a living at something they are uniquely qualified to do, they now have an investment in their educational experience which is more likely to keep them in school as they literally know why they are there from the earliest possible time.

Assessment Based Education  would also allow teachers to teach in those specialties which they are best capable to teach and are now able to be specialists not generalists at the earliest age of their students. Just imagine a second or third grader whose parents have been given the data suggested by this approach. They can then design a curriculum with the school that takes into account not only their child’s interests, but focuses on developing their inherent skills and coping with their deficits as well. Anecdotal information suggests that we would produce more scientists, more engineers, more technicians and indeed a better and more productive work force by enabling informed parents and children to create a learning environment from the earliest possible time that they know points their child in a direction that is, and will continue to be, truly meaningful to them over the course of their lives. No one argues that we need to teach our children basic coping skills, the need to read, to write, to have an understanding of the theory of mathematics (which is quite different from learning addition, subtraction, division etc. let alone algebra and geometry as requirements not electives.

In sum, by taking each child and offering them an investment in their educational experience, knowing from the earliest possible time that it will prepare them to meet the challenges that the future will offer them, they will be more likely to stay in school and succeed there. There is a societal benefit as well. It is not just a matter of having a better educated work force, it is also the heightened ability to focus scarce resources on those who will benefit the most from them because they receive them by informed choice, not mandated enforcement. Yes, it will likely place the less gifted together but it will also be by choice and the competition is with themselves and not their peers. Our children will then be graded by what they have achieved in relation to the goals they have set for themselves; a system that motivates our children, not frustrates them, as we presently do by placing them in an educational system that they increasingly see as irrelevant to their achieving meaningful success in their future lives.

My Curriculum Vitae

 

Dwight Owen Schweitzer

Curriculum Vitae:

650 West Avenue, Miami Beach, Florida 33139 Email dwightowen.schweitzer@gmail.com Tel. 786 222-7622

Significant Background in:  Law, Finance, Project Management, Public Affairs & Publishing

Professional Profile:

Specialties:

Green Energy Consulting & Capital Formation:   (Principal of Joint Energy Development Corporation)

Writing & Editing:  Knight Ridder-Tribune News Service; Internationally Syndicated Editorial and Opinion writer

Newspaper Publishing: CEO of a $1,000,000.00 + newspaper

Real Estate Acquisition and Development, Entrepreneurial Activities, Lawyer (Doctor of Jurisprudence, Vanderbilt Law School), Management Consulting, Community Relations, Guest Lecturer on Politics and Public Affairs

Significant Work Experience:

In May of 2000, at the invitation of the President of the Miami Herald Publishing Company, I accepted the position of Editor and Publisher of the Jewish Herald (later renamed The Jewish Star Times) a weekly community newspaper aimed at the Jewish community of Dade County and during my tenure, expanded to Broward and South Palm Beach Counties as well. Shortly after my arrival I was invited by the Editor and the Publisher of the Miami Herald newspaper to become a member of the Editorial Board to recommend Editorial content for the Miami Herald Editorial Pages.

As Editor and Publisher of The Jewish Star Times, I took full responsibility for all aspects of the paper including budget, design, layout, content, format, sales, community relations and management of the business while writing an editorial and a ‘Message Piece’ weekly. I took circulation of The Jewish Star Times from 35,000 in one county when I began, to a high of 135,000 and three counties (Miami-Dade, Broward and South Palm Beach) Florida.

When I arrived the newspaper was losing $4,000.00 per week. After I took over management in June of 2000 through the last quarter of 2002 revenues over expenses turned around by over $400,000.00 and during its last full operating quarter in 2002 the paper showed a profit of over $40,000.00 against a projected loss for the quarter of $15,000.00.

In 2001, at the suggestion of Norman Braman, President of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, made to Tony Ridder, Ch. of Knight Ridder Corp., the Knight Ridder-Tribune News service invited me to send them my editorials and opinion pieces from The Jewish Star Times for syndication through the Knight Ridder-Tribune News Service for international syndication to its’ 435 member newspapers. In any given week my readership world-wide was estimated to be  in excess of 2,000,000 readers, in newspapers as far away as Taiwan.  I was the invited guest of the Taiwan government to visit their country during the showing of the Einstein Exhibition there.

Hits to The Jewish Star Times web site went from about 5000 per month when I began to almost 100,000 by November 2002, the last month of tabulation. A decision was made in September of 2002 to close the paper in early December as part of a reorganization of the Miami Herald Publishing Company.

During my tenure as the Editor & Publisher of the Jewish Star Times, I recruited 14 members of the community to write features for the newspaper weekly, and for free. At the end of my tenure I was awarded a bonus of one year’s salary in recognition of my work there over the preceding two and a half years.

Recent Activities:

2009-2 to Present

Activity: Green Energy consulting with a concentration on LED and other energy-efficient lighting alternatives and briefly served as COO of BAM Solar.

2006-9 to 2009-2: Activity: Corporate Financial and Management Consulting & Brokerage

I have been a source for people and businesses to help define and reach both short-term and long-term financial goals, create or restructure existing business models, advise on strategic planning, and in the process to find and secure capital to meet their needs.

2002/12-2006-8 Activity: Healthcare Cost Solutions Industry Type: E-commerce

Position: Principal

Duties:

I created a new business model for an ‘E-business’ which selects for the consumer all forms of insurance and risk management approaches which are then underwritten, and sold over the Internet. The business model is unique internationally and has several proprietary features which form the basis for a business methods patent to protect the unique and distinguishing features of the architecture and delivery system. The process, as envisioned in the business model results in the ability to interactively underwrite and package multiple risk protection  products simultaneously while performing other complementary financial services for the consumer, and doing so on an ongoing basis. It is a relationship building method whereby the consumer sees the business as his/her partner in configuring and packaging risk protection for all forms of insurable as well as uninsurable risks over the course of their lives.

Writing projects:

During this period, I have also been writing a book entitled “Of Thee I Sing…A Vision For Americas’ Future”.  The subject traces American History from the writing of the Constitution to today and attempts to draw the distinction between freedom and license. It tries to flesh out how personal freedom is defined and fostered and the changes in society felt necessary to encourage constructive citizenship and in the process to strengthen the cohesion between the government and the governed.

The process focuses on recommended changes to our educational system, our judicial system, information dissemination systems and other institutional changes which offer the hope of creating a more cohesive and productive society while defining and promoting personal liberty and social responsibility.

Prior work experience:

Upon graduation from Vanderbilt Law School (top 25%) I joined Neighborhood Legal Services of Hartford as a senior staff attorney for two+ years. I was nationally recognized for my work by the Legal Services Corporation, headed by Donald Rumsfeld, later Secretary of Defense in the Bush Administration.

Significant litigation and other activities:

Shortly after going into private practice I was asked by Ralph Nader, (later, on 2 occasions, a candidate for President of the United States) to represent him and others in opposing the takeover of The Hartford Fire Insurance Company by the ITT Corporation; the largest private antitrust case in American history. I took the deposition of Harold Geneen, CEO & Chairman of ITT Corporation, and as a result of the information I obtained, I am prominently mentioned in the book ”The Sovereign State of ITT”, by Anthony Sampson.

One aspect of the case went up for argument before the Supreme Court of the United States in 1975. Were it not for the appearance of a conflict of interest due to the ITT litigation, I was under consideration to serve as an Associate Counsel to the Watergate Commission whose activities ultimately resulted in the resignation from office of then President Richard M. Nixon.

During 1986, I  served  as  the  Publisher  and  CFO  of  The  Greater Hartford Business Magazine.

In 1988-1994 I formed and headed a real estate development company developing raw land into entry-level single family detached housing and other building projects including developing government sponsored single and multi-family housing. My development firm ran an organization of 14 full-time employee’s, 5-7 part-time employees, and 30 to 40 sub-contractors. I built 80 single family entry-level homes and 32 units of multi-family housing. After the collapse of the Connecticut economy in 1992, I returned to the private practice of’ law in 1993 through late May of 2000, when I relocated to Florida to be the editor and Publisher of a Knight Ridder owned newspaper. (see above)

During my legal career, I participated in various significant cases and have several existing precedents decided by the Supreme Court of the state of Connecticut. At various times, I also served as an Associate Editor of the Connecticut Bar Journal, represented the student government of Central Connecticut. State University, served as Legislative Counsel for the Connecticut Consumers Association and acted as an advisor to the Community Renewal Team of Hartford on capital formation and economic development strategies for the inner city.

At the invitation of the Governor and the President Pro-Tem of the Senate of the State of Connecticut, I served on the State Privatization Commission to study and recommend how best to outsource various Governmental functions to the private sector.

Education:

Vanderbilt University School of Law Degree: Doctor of Jurisprudence (top 25%)

University of Hartford Degree: Bachelor of Arts (Deans List)

Interests:

My hobbies include golf, tennis, sailing, skiing, skeet shooting; I collect antiques, I ride horses on occasion, am a PADI certified advanced open water scuba diver. I am an avid reader, requested speaker and writer on politics and world affairs.

I particularly enjoy reading history and historical fiction, writing poetry and am a published author and poet. I am also a lecturer on a range of topics including American History, Politics and World Affairs and as a motivational speaker. I am presently writing a book entitled, “Of Thee I Sing … A Vision for America’s Future”.

Past and Present Groups & Associations:

Connecticut Bar Association

Hartford County Bar Association

American Trial Lawyers Association

California Insurance Association

Connecticut Earth Action Group (Co-Founder)

South Park Inn Homeless Shelter (Co-Founder)

Jewish Press Association

Honors/Awards/Significant Activities:

I was chosen as one of the top 25 Legal Services Attorneys in the United States (out of over 6000) to take part in a colloquium’ on the future role of the National Legal Services Program, in Vail, CO.  Our collective objection to government interference in how Legal Services Attorneys represented their clients in suits to redress state and local governmental abuses was featured in an article in Time Magazine.

Early in my career I served as legal counsel to Congressman Emilio Q. Daddario, candidate for Governor of the State of Connecticut. Some years later I was asked to serve as an aid to the Finance Chair of the Democratic National Committee at both the Mondale and Dukakis Democratic National Conventions. I was the endorsed candidate of the Democratic Party of the state of Connecticut for the State Legislature once and for State Senator twice.

Ohio Senator (and former astronaut) John Glenn asked me to serve as the Connecticut Coordinator of his presidential campaign and to be a member of his National Policy Advisory Committee. I was a personal invitee of then Governor William Jefferson Clinton to his first nominating convention and was his invited guest at his first inauguration as President of the United States.

During my tenure as the Editor & Publisher of The Jewish Star Times, I was the invited guest of the Governments of Spain, Germany, Israel, and Taiwan to visit their countries as the guest of their respective governments.

Personal Homepage & Blog: https://dwightowenschweitzer.wordpress.com/

In November ’09 I was invited by the Public Broadcasting Service to be a guest lecturer on a PBS sponsored Media Cruise where I delivered a 4 Part Lecture Series on:

 ‘Improving our Educational System’, ‘Our Ability to Compete in the new World Economy’,

 ‘The Meaning and Significance of Globalization’, and  ‘My Thoughts on what the Obama Administration will try to accomplish’.

They can be seen on ‘YouTUBE’:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puq5TboQdcY

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The Oil Sands Pipeline…A Lesson in Lunacy

 By Dwight Owen Schweitzer December 7^th 2011

I am sure most of the cognoscenti at least, are aware of the novel idea put forth by Exxon Mobil and their Canadian partners of building a pipeline from Canada to Texas to bring what appear to be a substantial reserve of poor quality oil called ‘oil sands’ to the refineries there. If my memory serves me it has been at least 20 years since we have built a new refinery in the United States and world refining capacity is inadequate to meet present let alone future demand. Russia is particularly hard hit by it’s lack of refining capacity and is relying on it’s admittedly huge natural gas reserves to bring in the hard currency on which it’s economic growth depends, being a ‘Mifiaocracy’ not withstanding.

 

While I have no hard figures on the cost to build this pipeline it is reasonable to assume that today’s number is at best a low ball guess although no one would argue that whatever the cost they certainly have the money. What troubles me however, is the simple question of why bring the mountain to Mohammed when, at least to me, it makes a lot more sense to build a new refinery not only a lot closer to the location of the deposits in Canada which apparently are sufficient to keep it in the black (pardon the pun) but a west coast accessible refinery could be a profit center pulling in refinable petroleum from present and both known and suspected potential sources around the Pacific rim. More importantly, it is generally known that the oil contained in the Canadian oil sands is ‘dirty’ oil and in order to be made ‘clean’ the refining process needs to be state of the art, a far cry from what exists today at the other end of the proposed pipeline. The actual and potential environmental damage from the pipeline is another issue of significant concern in a area of the country that is not immune from potential threats both natural and man made. Let us not forget that we are in a state of seige or so the Patriot Act tells us, and if we cannot seal out border with Mexico I tend to doubt that we can keep a 1500+ mile pipeline free from some spare semtex and a creative terrorist or two.

 

Refining capacity is the bottleneck through which supply meets demand and whoever controls refining capacity determines the price of gas at the pump here and around the world. It is common to hear proponents of more exploration cry about the need for us to have greater control over our energy supplies but I have yet to hear any whining about the state of our refining capacity and yet it is refining capacity that makes that black goo into the innumerable products the kracking process from refining enables the owner of the refinery to create. A bit of history here; the Rockefeller fortune came from controlling access to refining because if you don’t have the ability to add the ‘gold’ to the ‘black’, all you have is a lot of gunk that has potential.

 

For those of you who decry the governments involvement in keeping us healthy and safe or at least trying to keep ahead of those who would happily sell us any number of dangerous goods and illegal services, they have a positive role to play here. One of the impediments to adding to our refining capacity is an abundance of local, state and federal regulations, often at odds with each other. There is a national need for adding to our refining capacity and as the government can get in the way it can also pave the way when our national interest is at stake. Here is the perfect opportunity for the federal government to play a positive role in moving the building of a new, state of the art, refinery located in a place in the pacific northwest where it could open up new markets, keep us from a 1500 mile boondoggle, and get it built within a reasonable time. It is worth keeping in mind during all this, that up to now at least, refining has been left up to big oil to decide when and how much petroleum products to produce, resulting in a strangle hold on the price of our most crucial national resource and the one upon which our economy depends.

Comodities Futures 101: How the Obama Administration can (and should) control the price of gas at the pump

Why does the price of gas go up and down ‘ you’ (which means almost everybody) might ask.  Someone will pop up and say it is all a matter of supply and demand, and think that is all that there is to it. Wrong! But not entirely wrong.  It is not the supply and demand of today that causes the price of gas at the pump to rise or fall; it is the perception by Oil speculators in the commodity futures market guessing what the future supply and demand will be. They are not buying Oil for today, they are buying based upon what they think the price might be in a month, or 6 months or a year and that is what determines the price at the pump today.  Now join me on a trip to the here and now.

The United States, more years ago than even I can remember, but certainly during the early stages of the Cold War, began to buy Oil and created the ‘Strategic Oil Reserve’. It was to make sure that our supply of Oil and Gas would not be interrupted by a war or other major catastrophe.  While no one (at least that I know who will actually tell me)  knows the measure of the amount of Oil and gas deemed ‘strategic’,  common sense suggests that it is a percentage of consumption and as consumption has increased,  presumably so has the size of the reserve.

Now keep in mind that the reserve was primarily in place in case a war of sufficient magnitude interrupted out ability to import enough to meet our needs however those ‘needs’ may be defined, but that was then and this is now.  I think it is reasonable to assume that the supply in our strategic oil reserve is more than prudence says we need ‘just in case’. So, if you are with me so far, it is not a huge leap of faith to assume that the government can control the futures market simply by letting the commodities market know that when the price at the pump reaches say $3.75 a gallon the government will release whatever percentage of its’ reserves  necessary to  insure that the price does not exceed that amount.  If as a result of government intervention in the market, the price drops to say $3.25 a gallon the government can then become a buyer to replenish the reserve.  By taking out the speculation in the commodities futures market the price of gas at the pump would actually be what it should; a price based upon present supply and demand. If that were so, the world supply if priced against world demand today, as surprising as it may seem,  would probably cut the price of gas at the pump by around 75 cents a gallon.

Why the imbalance you might ask? Well we have some concerns about Libia and other oil-producing nations in the region, drug lords running amuck in Mexico, instability in Venezuela, unknown future demand in China and India, all make futures traders salivate. Of course coincidentally we are seeing advertisements daily from Exxon and others telling us that we have lots of domestic oil in oil sands and natural gas here to last us for the next hundred years. I did get a bit confused when I saw a spokesman for Exxon on TV telling us that we had all this ‘hidden’ petroleum in ‘oil sands’ to last us for all that time, and all the jobs it would create……….in Canada (???)

Now a lot of  ‘main  street folks’ are really pissed off that the banks got money and Wall Street got money and we are going to have to pay it back or put it on the backs of our children, while the one common denominator that effects all Americans is that they are now paying on average, about 8% of their weekly income on gas, up 100% in just two years.  Nothing touches the economy more fundamentally than the availability and cost of petroleum based products which include everything from home heating oil to plastics to fertilizers.

The President tells us that the economy isn’t adversely effected until gas at the pump exceeds $4.00 and he might be right.  Where he is missing the point, is that if $4.00 gas won’t hurt us, $3.00 gas would certainly help us, especially if we knew that the cost had a ceiling so we were not taking a crap shoot on a line item in the business budgets of almost every employer (and potential employer) in the country?  Cheap gasoline drove our economy in the past and it can again.  We just need a bit more creative thinking at the top which, I thought, was why we elected him in the first place.

The Art of War

By Dwight Owen Schweitzer  4/27/11 

We learned a painful lesson when we armed the Mujahedeen to help them oust the Russians from Afghanistan . Once the Russians were defeated our proxy fighters in that war became the Taliban and used our weapons against us. We are now seeing popular uprisings in the Arab world, and that lesson is dictating our policy. We hear many talking heads of different stripes wondering who might be the grey eminence behind this sudden awakening of self-determination in parts of the world where the forces of good are often indistinguishable from the forces of evil.  

The conundrum is nowhere more evident than in Libya, where we have a dictator who we are reasonably sure is not of the same stripe as Hamas or Hezbollah or the other Moslem extremists who want to see the establishment of the Caliphate throughout the world. We do know that their success will result in a new dark age visited upon humankind. Colonel Qadhafi is the classic ‘Devil you know’ when we are not at all sure what the other devil might look like. If and when a regime change comes to that, or any of the other countries for that matter, where the spark given off in Tunisia has ignited an apparent quest for some degree of personal freedom and self determination if not democracy. As things stand, we have to ask ourselves, if we arm the insurgents, will we have enabled another Taliban who will, in time, use those arms against us? 

The regime change in Tunisia ignited fires all across the Arab world, sometimes, as in Syria, with great suffering meted out on those who, at least in the name of self-determination and democracy, are risking life and limb to achieve it.  There is an answer to this new type of proxy war to avoid the risk of ultimately aiding a theosophy that sees the United States as ‘the great Satan’.  Although we are the most powerful nation on the face of the earth,  a few men willing to give up their lives came within an hour of killing 60,000 people,  had the twin towers been full of the employees due to arrive later that morning on 9/11, not to mention the consequences avoided by a few brave hero’s  who gave their lives to crash a plane short of its’ reaching the White House, it’s intended target . 

The answer is a feature of our technology.  We can, and must, develop a unique class of weapons that depend on us to function, and are equipped with a self destruct mechanism if misused.  Use them in ways we approve of and we will enable them. Use them against us and we will disable them.  We can also make ammunition that cannot be duplicated by the forces arrayed against us. What we need to do is develop weapons systems that are specifically designed and manufactured to equip potential enemies, weapons that cannot be modified to make them free of ongoing dependence upon us to work.  We have the technology, and if such weapons were available today I have no doubt that we would be arming the insurgent forces in Libya, and hopefully reap the benefits of their success while avoiding the consequences of the past, if it turned out that we has armed the wrong side.