"This Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as the most generous and possibly the least appreciated people on all the earth.
    Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts. None of these countries is today paying even the interest on its remaining debts to the United States.
    When France was in danger of collapsing in 1956, it was the Americans who propped it up, and their reward was to be insulted and swindled on the streets of Paris. I was there. I saw it.
    When earthquakes hit distant cities, it is the United States that hurries in to help. This spring, 59 American communities were flattened by tornadoes. Nobody helped.
    The Marshall Plan and the Truman Policy pumped billions of dollars into discouraged countries. Now newspapers in those countries are writing about the decadent, warmongering Americans.
    I'd like to see just one of those countries that is gloating over the erosion of the United States dollar build its own airplane. Does any other country in the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tri-Star, or the Douglas DC10? If so, why don't they fly them? Why do all the International lines except Russia fly American Planes?
    Why does no other land on earth even consider putting a man or woman on the moon? You talk

about Japanese technocracy, and you get radios. You talk about German technocracy, and you get automobiles. You talk about American technocracy, and you find men on the moon - not once, but several times and safely home again.
    You talk about scandals, and the Americans put theirs right in the store window for everybody to look at. Even their draft-dodgers are not pursued and hounded. They are here on our streets, and most of them, unless they are breaking Canadian laws, are getting American dollars from ma and pa at home to spend here.
    When the railways of France, Germany and India were breaking down through age, it was the Americans who rebuilt them. When the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central went broke, nobody loaned them an old caboose. Both are still broke.
    I can name you 5000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble. Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble?
    I don't think there was outside help even during the San Francisco earthquake.
    Our neighbors have faced it alone, and I'm one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them get kicked around. They will come out of this thing with their flag high. And when they do, they are entitled to thumb their nose at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles. I hope Canada is not one of those."
Stand proud, America!

    In our quest to save our planet from the dangers of CO₂ we are concentrating on energy sources that are not only unreliable but expensive and dangerous as well, trading one environmental hazard for another.
    The sun might produce more power in a single hour than the entire world consumes in an year but to get a few hundred megawatts of electricity from the sun requires millions of solar panels and the destruction of massive areas of land.
    Most people see solar as a "clean" source of energy but the manufacture and use of PV solar panels is neither "clean" nor "green."
    The manufacture of Photovoltaic solar cells requires toxic chemicals and energy from fossil fuels for furnaces running at 2000º C. The panels themselves contain toxic chemicals, some of which are tens of thousands of times more toxic than CO₂.
    Solar panels can be damaged by lightening, hailstorms, tornados, hurricanes and earthquakes. When panels are cracked or broken, they cannot be disposed of in landfills. Cadmium, the 6th most deadly chemical known, can be washed out of the panels by rain and into the soil where it can leach into water supplies.
    The cost of solar energy in the U.S. today is reported to be 12.2 cents per kWh but that rate does not include waste disposal. And soon there will be plenty of waste.
    Solar energy produces 300 times more hazardous waste per unit of energy than nuclear plants and it is the only source of electricity that does not include the cost of waste disposal.
    In 2017 the U.S. installed 35 million new panels. At the end of their 20-25 year life there will be 1.9 million tons of cadmium waste with no dedicated national program or requirement for disposal and no money set aside to replace or recycle the old panels.
    The "trickle" of electricity we get from solar farms is not worth its carbon footprint, toxic health risks, devastating affects on landscapes, interference with rainfall and drainage or the loss of wildlife habitats, their injury or death.
    Together Topaz Solar and Desert Sunlight in the California desert use 18.7 million PV panels that cover an area 2/3 the size of Manhattan. Each farm is "rated" at 550 megagwats. But solar farms only produce electricity during sunlight hours. After dusk their hundreds of miles of transmission lines hang idle from their massive steel towers.
    Turning our attention to "Thermal Solar" doesn't improve solar's image as a worthwhile energy source either.
    Thermal Solar uses mirrors to concentrate the sun's heat toward "boilers" that create steam that is piped to steam turbines which generate electricity.

    Ivanpah Solar Electric uses 173,500 double-mirrored heliostats which turn to beam sunlight toward "boilers" located on top of three 40 story towers. Invanpah cost $2.2 billion and is a failure in many ways.
    It produces only 392 megawatts at 3 times the cost of traditional power sources. It burns gas at night and during cloud cover to keep the water in the boilers heated.
    The light from its mirrors attracts insects. The insects attract birds. An estimated 6,000 birds a year are instantly incinerated as they fly into the 1000º F beams of concentrated sunlight.
    Wind energy does not disrupt the use of land for agricultural or other purposes but wind energy also requires fossil fuel for back-up.
    Today, wind farms can cover 100,000 acres with thousands of turbines as tall as 30-story buildings; their spinning rotors as wide as a passenger jet's wingspan reaching speeds up to 170 mph at the tips.
    Wind enthusiasts only talk about "installed capacity." That's simply adding up the factory rating on all the turbines. But wind farms are not 100% productive. When the wind blows too slow the turbines are shut down for economic reasons. When the wind blows too hard the turbines are shut down for safety reasons. When the wind is dormant, there's no electricity.
    With an average production of 40%, the 4,731 turbines of the Alta Wind Energy Center, for example, will only generate about 618 megawatts; not the 1,547 megawatt "capacity" it claims.
    That 1,547 megawatts might sound like a lot of electricity but like solar, it is a "trickle." Palo Verde Nuclear Station produces 3,700 megawatts every day, all day long. Not just when the wind blows or the sun shines.
    Palo Verde is 45 miles west of Phoenix, AZ. This 4,000 acre plant has produced electricity for 4 million people every day for 25 years.
    If the US recycled used nuclear fuel, there is enough in our dumps to provide electricity to EVERY American household for the next 12 years with no new uranium input. And, nuclear waste would be reduced to just 1 cubic yard per plant.
    Nuclear plants do not produce CO₂ or greenhouse gases or destroy land, forests and bays nor do they displace and kill wildlife. No dangerous radiation has ever been released in the US in the history of nuclear energy.
    The reality of Three Mile Island was significantly less than the mass hysteria. The reactor containment vessel worked exactly as designed and contained nearly all of the radioactive isotopes in the core. The amount of radiation that anyone near Harrisburg, PA received as a result of the accident was equivalent to that of a chest xray.