Gore Pulls a JFK

While I’ve been watching what’s looking more and more like a melt-down in my former country, a speech from Al Gore got my attention. At first, it sounded like a rerun of the typical ‘Things are Getting Worse’ speech that makes up much of “An Inconvenient Truth”. However, after a survey of the most recent damage wrought by global warming (including the loss of the Polar Ice Caps, the melting of the glaciers in Greenland, etc.), he suddenly changed tack. Gore pointed out that the three major challenges facing the US right now; a bad economy, national security in peril, and natural disasters brought on by the changing climate, are all a result of the reliance of the country on carbon-based fuels.

We’re borrowing from money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf in order to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that has to change.

To address this, he makes an ambitious statement, a call to Americans:

…I’m proposing today a strategic initiative designed to free us from the crises that are holding us down and to regain control of our own destiny. It’s not the only thing we need to do. But this strategic challenge is the lynchpin of a bold new strategy needed to re-power America.

Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.

Why 10 years? It’s here that Gore first directly invokes Kennedy’s call for putting a man on the moon, which in my memory, is the proudest moment of the US in the twentieth century:

What should we do during the next 10 years? Some of our greatest accomplishments as a nation have resulted from commitments to reach a goal that fell well beyond the next election: the Marshall Plan, Social Security, the interstate highway system. But a political promise to do something 40 years from now is universally ignored because everyone knows that it’s meaningless. Ten years is about the maximum time that we as a nation can hold a steady aim and hit our target.

When President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely in 10 years, many people doubted we could accomplish that goal. But 8 years and 2 months later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon.

I believe that the biggest applause came with Gore’s indictment of Bush’s pathetic calls for ending the moratorium on offshore oil drilling:

It is only a truly dysfunctional system that would buy into the perverse logic that the short-term answer to high gasoline prices is drilling for more oil ten years from now.

Am I the only one who finds it strange that our government so often adopts a so-called solution that has absolutely nothing to do with the problem it is supposed to address? When people rightly complain about higher gasoline prices, we propose to give more money to the oil companies and pretend that they’re going to bring gasoline prices down? It will do nothing of the sort, and everyone knows it.

I have to admit that it’s easy to soar over Bush’s ridiculous suggestion. The only people truly in favour of potential oil slicks on the beaches of California and Florida, as well as further ignorance of the stupidity of burning more fossil fuels in the face of mounting evidence (and rising temperatures, hurricanes, wildfires and the like) are either Oil Company executives or others who would benefit from more drilling (as well as the willfully ignorant, who will blindly follow Bush into oblivion rather than admit that the man he cheated out of the Presidency was ever right about anything).

To seal the deal, Gore once more refers to the space program in a final dramatic finish:

On July 16, 1969, the United States of America was finally ready to meet President Kennedy’s challenge of landing Americans on the moon. I will never forget standing beside my father a few miles from the launch site, waiting for the giant Saturn 5 rocket to lift Apollo 11 into the sky. I was a young man, 21 years old, who had graduated from college a month before and was enlisting in the United States Army three weeks later.

I will never forget the inspiration of those minutes. The power and the vibration of the giant rocket’s engines shook my entire body. As I watched the rocket rise, slowly at first and then with great speed, the sound was deafening. We craned our necks to follow its path until we were looking straight up into the air. And then four days later, I watched along with hundreds of millions of others around the world as Neil Armstrong took one small step to the surface of the moon and changed the history of the human race.

We must now lift our nation to reach another goal that will change history. Our entire civilization depends upon us now embarking on a new journey of exploration and discovery. Our success depends on our willingness as a people to undertake this journey and to complete it within 10 years. Once again, we have an opportunity to take a giant leap for humankind.

Here’s the whole speech, a little less than a half hour in length. It’s worth hearing, if nothing else but as a piece of history:

Will the US rise to take on Gore’s challenge? Will they even pay attention? I have to admit that I’m not that optimistic. In a way, the achievement of Kennedy’s call for a man on the moon was a bittersweet victory, since he had been assassinated early on in the effort; it was, in retrospect, a memorial of sorts. I hope that this is not the only way that you can get past the bickering in the Executive and Legislative branches of American Government.

As for the public, it’s a very different Electorate in 2008 than it was in 1961. The majority of Americans were better educated back then, and the goal of putting a man on the moon was easier to grasp than 100% carbon-free electric power is (I’d even go as far as saying that a frighteningly large number of Americans don’t have a clue what ‘carbon-based’ means. They just plug something in and don’t care how it works).

Let’s hope that Gore’s clarion call hasn’t fallen upon deaf ears.

WPIUSH*, the Continuing Story

I got a link to this video from The Onion from a fellow blogger, Peter Quily of Adult ADD Strengths, and just had to share it:

I particularly loved (and identified with) the line about some citizens evacuating safely to Canada. Thanks so much, Pete.

*WPIUSH, for those not familiar with the acronym that I often use, stands for Worst President in US History.

A Memorable Journey

I’ll do a wrap-up post on my time at WWDC, but I felt that I had to write about this first. On the way back to Vancouver from San Francisco, I had scheduled a shuttle, but at the last minute, canceled and decided to use BART again. It was one of those decisions that I’ll no doubt look back on and think, it’s a good thing, because otherwise I wouldn’t have had the experience that I had. Friday the 13th has always been lucky for me, and this June 13th was no exception.

After boarding the train at Civic Center, after 2 or 3 stops, 2 men in suits got on the train. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Navy blue suit, blue eyes and gray hair, a US Flag lapel… it was Howard Dean. Yes that Howard Dean, the former Governor of Vermont, front-runner candidate for President in 2004 (whose campaign I worked on) and currently, the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. ‘I’m never going to have another chance like this,’ I said to myself. In a moment or two, I got up the nerve and introduced myself to him, telling him that I had worked on his campaign (He immediately said ‘Thank you’ for that) and that I was a great admirer of his. He was on his way to some meetings at hotels at the airport, and to avoid the traffic, had decided to take BART. I told him where we had moved (and why). He had many questions about Vancouver; he hadn’t visited the city for 40 years. He did mention, that he loved Canada, and often went to a family house in Nova Scotia, near Bras d’Or Lake (since Vermont is so close to the Canadian border). Pam and I had gone to that area for our honeymoon. He talked about how cosmopolitan a reputation that Vancouver has, and that he could absolutely understand our move here. He asked if we were going to get Canadian citizenship, and that obviously, being a techie, I would have had no problem getting landed immigrant status. We chatted about a number of subjects: the Primary, What President Barack Obama will do to help put the country back on the right track (and whether we’d return after that), even a bit about our land in Vermont (”You should hang on to that”, Dean said. “When we get out of this Real Estate slump, that’s going to be worth some serious money.”). We reminisced a bit about when I had last seen him on the campaign, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when he spoke by the river, with boats with his banners floating back and forth behind him. When I commented on the flag pin on his lapel, he said that it was “to show the Republicans that they don’t own the flag”. He laughed when I suggested that perhaps the Democrats could have a slightly different (and maybe a more elegant) design for it.

To prove that this is not what it sounds like, a ‘tall tale’, I got his assistant to take a picture of the two of us, seated on the BART seat:

We parted as he went off to his meeting, and I headed to my check-in for the flight home, feeling as if I were in the air already. At the gate, I immediately called family all over North America to tell them of my good fortune and began this post.

My lasting impression of Dean is pretty much how I imagined him one-on-one. He seemed interested and charming, intelligent, a good listener and a smart businessman. He was very gracious, and seemed genuinely interested and engaged. In short, I was not disappointed.

I suspect that the average person has a shot at meeting and talking to, perhaps 1 or 2 famous people in their lifetime. You hope that those celebrities are people that you’d also like to meet and perhaps even someone who you admire. I’ve actually had more than my share of meetings with famous people in my life so far. I’ve met and even had some conversations with several composers, including Olivier Messiaen, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thompson, Ned Rorem, Elliott Carter, Steve Reich and Leonard Bernstein, playwright Edward Albee, the writers Isaac Asimov and William Gibson, and some brief moments where I shared a transit ride with Michael Dukakis and William Weld (It’s odd how I always meet the politicians when riding on mass transit) I’ve even met some luminaries in software and business, including John Sculley (the first CEO of Apple Computer while Steve Jobs was in exile) and Bill Atkinson, one of the more interesting figures in the history of computers (he invented 2 early pieces of software for the Mac, which became the first of 2 categories of software, MacPaint, which begot bitmap editors and HyperCard, which it may be argued, was a precursor to the World-wide Web and has been said to be the inspiration behind the concept of the Wiki). As Nearly-Canadians (and as I’ve noted in previous posts in this blog), Pam and I even shared a picnic table with actress Nancy Robertson (who plays Wanda on “Corner Gas”) and briefly met Roch Carrier, the author of The Hockey Sweater, a classic story, animated film and keystone of Canadian identity.

Nevertheless, it was great to finally be able to tell Howard Dean how much I had looked up to him. On June 13, 2008, without any warning, I got a chance to talk to one of my personal heroes, and I’m thrilled.

I Agree: Some Words are Off Limits During a Campaign

Even from our vantage point here, outside the US, it’s still hard to ignore how ugly and sordid the campaign for the Democratic Nomination has become. However, I don’t think we ever heard anything as ghoulish as what was reported this morning. Apparently, Hillary Clinton said this during a recent interview:

My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it…

I was only eight years old when Bobby Kennedy, the younger brother of JFK, was assassinated. I later learned in school that his campaign was notable partly because of the number of young people who were working for him, and that he was trying very hard to heal and unify a stricken US, disillusioned and fearful (by the trauma of his brother’s recent murder) and involved in a war they did not support. Sound familiar?

The idea that a young leader — a leader who has even been compared to Bobby Kennedy—will soon find a bullet heading for him in late summer, isn’t something we should be forced to contemplate, or discuss, or even hear mumblings about. It’s certainly not what I expected the ‘Talking Heads’ to be chattering about this week. Leaving the thought hanging out there, that ‘Assassinations tend to happen in June, so I better stick around’ (as if the month were like some kind of hurricane season), is bad enough. But to invoke that particular kind of horrible event during an interview while running for President is just sick.

Whenever I talk to Canadians about the US, the subject of violence, in particular gun violence comes up. The US is seen as a violent place, where violent people have easy access to guns, and Americans are perfectly OK with that. Often, this observation is delivered with nervous laughter, as if the country to our South were just some crazy Aunt we hope stays in the cellar, and that some day she won’t come barreling up the stairs with a rifle, doing that slaughtering thing she does from time to time.

What I’ve often felt was the worst thing about America, was the fact that so many Presidents (and presidential candidates) have been either targeted for death or killed. Hillary’s offhanded reference reminds me that I’ve frequently had to mull over the thought that Obama’s running mate had better be someone I trust in the White House, because by golly, he’s going to get shot, sooner or later. I agree with Keith Olbermann of MSNBC. We all must acknowledge that assassination is (for lack of a better word) a loaded word.

Here’s his response (in 2 parts). For those who don’t want to watch the video, I’ll try and find a transcript. Nevertheless, I don’t think it will communicate just how outraged he is, and I am.

Update: It looks like Dick Morris. a former adviser to the Clintons has a similar, if not identical opinion:

Everybody who has thought seriously about the Obama candidacy, including me and probably including the Senator himself, have reflected on the horrible possibility that he would be assassinated. One cannot think about Obama, the Kennedy-esque candidate without worrying about his safety. But we all observe the discipline of not raising the issue in public. We all worry that to do so would be to encourage some maniac to take a shot. Now Hillary has violated this unstated but heretofore universal taboo and brought up the possibility. That is not to say that she is hoping for a murder. But it is to say that the possibility is uppermost in her mind and a significant part of her rationale for staying in the race. And, by raising it, she has made it more possible.

(From dickmorris.com )

I Get To Attend an Opening…Again

Ah yes, I remember it well: The long lines in the Cambridgeside Galleria Mall, the T-Shirts for those nearer to the front of the line, the excitement as the doors finally opened… The Apple Store opening in Cambridge, Massachusetts was one of the first ones that Apple had. We were used to the fact that although we weren’t Cupertino (or even San Francisco), Cambridge was one of the East Coast centres for Apple’s presence. After all, in the early days of Macworld Expo (and I doubt if many people who own an Apple product know this at this point), there was a West Coast Macworld Expo in San Francisco in January and an East Coast Macworld Expo in Boston, usually during the hottest week in August. It wasn’t until that fateful day when Bill Gates’s 20-foot face appeared on the screen behind Steve Jobs during his keynote (and it was hissed by the crowd) that Steve made sure that there would be no more MacWorlds in Boston.

I know, I know, there were probably other reasons, but Jobs’s annoyance at the disagreement of the Boston crowd with his strategy of having Microsoft invest in Apple during their darkest hour probably didn’t help the show. In the following year, Jobs refused to give the keynote, and the show moved to New York City. It continued on a few years there at the Javitts Center, but attendance at that venue quickly petered out. As many have pointed out, the Internet can now disperse information about products far faster and farther than any show floor could. There is now only one MacWorld Expo, each January, and it remains a San Francisco tradition.

When we moved to Vancouver, I missed that sense of being on Apple’s radar. Despite the fact that many here use the Mac (in fact, in recent years it’s increased), I found the local Certified Apple Dealers a bit ramshackle, with relatively small variety of peripherals and messy, poorly maintained display areas. My first job was working for someone who hated the Mac, and he was relieved when I didn’t insist that I use one in his small office (I would have been the only Mac user in the shop). At IBM, we all were assigned Thinkpads, of course. The consultants from Victoria often had Macs. At Blogger and smaller business events, the Mac was predominant. Nevertheless, the absence of the iPhone in Canada, the higher prices for products, and constantly hearing the rumors that Apple Hated Canada didn’t help matters.

Our days of living in a relatively less important spot in the Apple universe are about to end. On this coming Saturday morning, I hope to be in line for the opening of the first Apple store in Vancouver. We’ve been waiting for this for some time. Its going to be in the heart of downtown, at the Pacific Centre Mall (actually the previous location of Holt Renfrew, a high end Department Store, who have moved into new digs nearby). I believe that it’s only the fifth store in Canada, with the other three in Toronto and one in Laval.

To put things in a bit of perspective, another Apple store opened in Boston (across the river from Cambridge, but certainly near our old home) last week. It’s the largest Apple Store in the world, taking up three floors and sporting an all glass facade, on Boylston Street. Oh well, I guess Boston still looms larger in Apple’s realm, but at least we’re no longer off the map.