Harvard Glee Club celebrates 150th anniversary (and Father's Day) in Great Falls
A few years ago in this Bulletin, I wrote about "The Fight at Aldie Gap" about a Civil War engagement between the great John Singleton Mosby and his rangers, and "the fighting Major," William Hathaway Forbes, at Aldie Gap in northern Virginia. I had come into possession of a privately printed study of this battle by one of Major Forbes' descendents via Birdie Emerson Dundee. Other local interest includes the fact that Colonel Shaw, for whom our Fort Shaw was named (1st Black regiment, portrayed in the film "Glory", and later known as the "Buffalo Soldiers") was Forbes' cousin, and also a friend of the Emerson's.
Major Forbes married one of Ralph Waldo Emerson's daughters, and later became the first Chairman of AT&T, as well as the Burlington Railroad. Emerson, Thoreau, Forbes, and most of those "Boston Brahmins" were Harvard graduates, of course. One of the interesting sidelights to that fight was that Forbes and his bugler (the essential signal-giver in cavalry tactics) were both members of the Harvard Glee Club. After being defeated and captured, it was recorded that they sang choruses from Carl Maria von Weber's "Der Freischutz," an early romantic opera about a sharp-shooter.
Mosby went on after the war (with the assistance of Forbes' father - a major force in the Republican Party) to become Consul to Hong Kong (a British colony) and later attorney for Leland Stanford's Southern Pacific Railroad in California. In the various accounts I read, there are many conflicting stories. Some held that President Grant maintained a grudge against Mosby, while others say that they became close friends, and that Grant was responsible for Mosby's later appointments to important positions.
Here's a brief summary of the battle from Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_at_Mount_Zion_Church
The Action at Mount Zion Church was an American Civil War skirmish that took place on July 6, 1864 between Union forces under Major William H. Forbes and Confederate forces under Colonel John S. Mosby near Aldie, Virginia in Loudoun County as part of Mosby's Operations in Northern Virginia. The fight resulted in a Confederate victory.
[Basically, it was a rout. Mosby's men were each equipped with 2 or more six-shot pistols, while Forbes' men didn't have side-arms (except sabers), and they weren't even trained to fire their new Spencer repeating carbines from horseback. Thus, Mosby's men could fire twelve or more shots at close quarters, before having to reload. And they had a small cannon as well, which scared the enemy's horses at the start of an engagement. I'm told that Mosby's tactics are still studied in military colleges. -- PHS]
This led me to read Mosby's own Memoirs. You can download it free from
That, in turn, led me to read Alexander Hamilton Stephens's biography (Mosby spoke highly of him, and considered him the South's true leader), which fundamentally changed my views on the Civil War and my own family history.
Suffice to say, I'm much more conciliatory, anti-war, and pro-"state-rights" ("grassroots democracy) than I ever was, before.
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An open letter to local officials about public transportation
Dear city and county officials,
It's been more than a year, now, since the clutch went out on my pickup. I haven't repaired it, and have used only a bicycle and walking for transportation since that time, with a couple of Great Falls Transit rides, as well. I am fit and able to walk several miles at a stretch, so it's been a net gain for me. However, I'm hearing more and more from elderly, disabled, and other people who are very concerned about the proposed reductions in Great Falls Transit services due to the rapid increase in the price of fuel.
Surely this is a golden opportunity to rethink our local public transportation system, and greatly expand and diversify it to meet local needs. Other cities have already done this, and there is a considerable movement statewide to re-establish bus, train, and airline systems between cities and smaller, rural communities across the state. The goal should be to make it possible for everyone to travel cheaply and reliably to most destinations without the use of a personal automobile.
This would require a vastly improved and upgraded taxi service, various shuttles and dispatched vans owned by local businesses, Aging Services, and other public entities as well as night-time transportation systems to serve the patrons of bars and restaurants, theaters, education institutions, etc. Obviously, there are no easy solutions, and I anticipate that this will be going on state-wide and nationally as well as locally. Your responsibility includes the City of Great Falls, and perhaps some regular links to outlying towns in Cascade County. Some of these can be organized cooperatively for commuters to and from Belt, Cascade, etc. There are also a number of suburban areas like Flood Road, Bootlegger, Lower River Road, Sun Prairie, etc. where a large number of the residents commute to and from town on a daily basis. Expanded public transportation to these areas could provide huge savings in fuel and vehicle maintenance to these residents.
In most cases, grants or other funding is available to cover many of the costs. Shelby and Toole County has established a service to bring people to and from Great Falls, Helena, and the Veteran's Hospitals. Other smaller towns might want to do the same.
I've pasted in a series of articles from Vancouver, British Columbia which describes various public transportation systems in other parts of the world. I don't know whose primary responsibility for this might be, but the City and County Commissioners and executive staff could form a committee to begin this process, instead of going ahead with the recently announced cuts to the Great Falls Transit system.
Thank you very much for your interest and concern.
Paul Stephens, CasCoGreens
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Fare-Free Public Transit Could Be Headed to a City Near You
By Dave Olsen, The Tyee
http://www.alternet.org/story/57802/
The time has come to stop making people pay to take public transit.
Why do we have any barriers to using buses and urban trains? The threat of global warming is no longer in doubt. The hue and cry of the traffic-jammed driver grows louder every commute. And politicians are getting the message. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has ordered his staff to seriously examine the costs of charging people to ride public transit. And Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, recently voiced to a reporter
Consider this sampling of communities providing free rides on trolleys, buses, trams and ferries: Staten Island, N.Y.; Island County, Wash.; Chapel Hill, N.C.; Vail, Colo.; Logan and Cache Valley, Utah; Clemson, S.C.; Commerce, Calif.; Châteauroux, Vitré, and Compiègne, France; Hasselt, Belgium; Lubben, Germany; Mariehamn, Finland; Nova Gorica, Slovenia; Türi, Estonia; and Övertorneå, Sweden.
Or speak, as I have, with transit officials in parts of Belgium and the state of Washington, where fare-free transit has hummed along smoothly now for years.
read more>> http://www.alternet.org/story/57802/
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KENT MESPLAY (BLACKFOOT) GREEN PARTY CAMPAIGN for President
SUSTAINABLE ENERGY LEADS TO SECURITY AND DEMOCRACY
Kent Mesplay delegates and supporters, please come join us at Kent Mesplay for President! on Green Party Nexus:
where we'll be organizing ourselves for Chicago and beyond!
Mesplay 4 Prez!
Drew Johnson, CoCoordinator Kent Mesplay for President '08 & Kat Swift for President 08 campaigns
MISSION: To improve our security and to reform politics.
"All the energy stored in the earth's reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas is matched by the energy from 20 days of sunshine."
- Union of Concerned Scientists
Mesplay for President
We "vote" with our dollars every day. Currently we are continuing to enable Big Oil to continue to keep us addicted to oil. We and the whole planet is paying are paying them dearly for our enslavement and to prop up Big Oil and Empire America. As fellow Green Tian Harter likes to say, we need to "Stop voting for oil companies at the gas pump!"
In this David v Goliath picture how do we, the numerically overwhelmed Greens, go about breaking America's oil addiction, move towards security for America, reform American politics with Grassroots Democracy and bring an end to Empire America? By leveraging the high moral ground our values naturally give us to connect heart to heart with the vast majority of Americans who agree with our core Peace Values and by inspiring and leading a mass movement to go "cold turkey" on our oil addiction and aggressively pursue the new alternative energy technologies that are available right now today; and
There is intense collusion from both within the American political process and from the noncompetitive not-so-free markets to maintain this addition to oil. Elected officials such as Bush and Cheney are essentially just shills for the petroleum industry. They and others in public office through their actions giving tax breaks and other forms of Corporate Welfare to Big Oil actually make it more difficult for market forces to come into play. If real free market forces were allowed to operate Big Oil would naturally either die off or transform into sustainable energy producers.
We Americans are propping up Big Oil by trading the blood of American soldiers and innocent civilians for oil and empire. Blood for oil is a completely immoral trade that we Greens must spotlight and call a halt to. An honest approach to assessing the true cost of oil would include factors such as war and pollution. These costs are externalized and placed on the shoulders of American tax-payers as well as the people of the world, just so America can have its empire and Big Oil can remain artificially propped up. Is it any wonder that we American's reckless disregard for human life in pursuit of Empire America's interests-at-all-costs continue to inspire hatred around the world and deadly opposition to our Empire America? If we want security we must end this Empire America madness.
Greens can and must lead the way to a sane and fair national energy policy. Oil money helped many politicians who are now an impediment to progress get to where they are today. Waiting for those in Porkopolis D.C. to solve our energy problems is to wait for disaster. The current system of campaign finance renders politicians almost completely disabled from doing what's best for the country.
It is for lack of political will that we do not have solar and wind as the back-bone of all energy production in this nation. Now that policy-makers such as Californian Governor Schwarzenegger see the light of the value in power from the sun we are closer to achieving and maintaining a security-enhancing energy policy nation-wide, since California leads the nation in so many ways. No new power plants need to be built once we develop the mind-set of every structure becoming its own power plant (with existing power lines as back-up, of course). The existing power grid can be reduced and stabilized through distributed generation from wind and solar sources, with biodiesel, methanol and other diversified sources reducing our risk.
Nuclear power is only one-seventh as effective at keeping carbon out of the atmosphere as is conservation and improved energy efficiency. We certainly do not need more nuclear power plants. Iran and other nations are struggling to make the same mistakes our country has made by investing in nuclear power. Wind comes out on top when judging the true cost of nuclear power and its heavy subsidy, long lead times, hours of non-operation, eventual decommissioning and disposal of toxic components: costs we bear as tax-payers. Nuclear-power-and-weapons have had their day. Iran has been working on developing nuclear power for some thirty years. It would have made more sense for Iran to design architecture with appropriate thermal inertia and to invest heavily in energy efficiency and renewable energy. A world-wide ban on all uranium enrichment would be a good thing.
For real energy security we need improved conservation so that our structures don't waste well over half of the energy they use. We also need representatives in office who will sensibly support methanol over hydrogen, more fuel-cell research and development, biodiesel based upon castor beans, and generally a more integrated, systems-oriented energy design in how we live and in what we do.
An acquaintance, Jim Bell, points out how every dollar we save in the San Diego / Tijuana area by not importing energy would become another dollar available for investment in local economies. In California, those who support and take advantage of incentives to install solar panels are being patriotic and are helping us become more secure. I inspected a large facility having, in addition to other air-quality-effecting equipment, a diesel-powered emergency generator. When I asked where the generator disappeared to, the site contact pointed upwards and said, "it's on the roof in the form of solar panels," regularly providing seasonal power. The investment made good economic sense to the company, what with rising energy costs.
As a graphic depiction of the worth of photo-voltaics (P.V.), a solar array 100 miles on each side, situated in the Mojave desert could produce all the energy that we currently sloppily use in our nation. Not that we would want to "put all our eggs in one basket," ruin a desert and lose to transmission line losses, but the point is that we have the technology to phase out the petroleum industry even faster than it may want to have
happen. I want an improved political process that allows good candidates to run so that we have public officials who treat science with respect and who actually work to make us more secure rather than catering to their favorite businesses.
As I said before, we "vote" with our dollars every day. I encourage those whose finances allow consideration of installing P.V. panels to carry through and to do so, (especially in California because of the California Solar Roofs Bill, S.B. 1 and other supportive legislation). Not only does solar energy benefit the individual or business, but an eventual distributed grid of power generation makes us more secure when the umbilical cords of power lines and gas lines are severed. During our next major power outage more people will have time to reflect upon this.
To cite a specific example, in San Diego where I'm from I am opposed to the proposed Sunrise Power Link as it is a step in the wrong direction. It would be far more cost effective and less damaging and devaluing to property and natural environments for Sempra to invest in getting residents in San Diego county off the grid. We need to first conserve the energy that our buildings and lifestyles waste, then invest in p.v. panels
on our rooftops (especially schools, which should be "survival centers"), then consider locating appropriately designed factories in the remote regions to take advantage of the "green" energy production and labor available in areas with more affordable housing out in the desert.
Expend a little energy and register Green
Energy matters. So does voting. Register Green. Vote Mesplay
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