On Research, and Letting Things Lay

I've been researching lately. I don't know why I started (actually I do), but it will be a while before I finish. I am writing in the meantime, working on bits for a new novel (which the research is geared towards), which means I have more projects on my plate than I really should have, but I feel, at least on a day like today, that its all worthwhile and I would prefer to have a whole bunch of things to focus on than none at all, so I'll keep listening to the New York Dolls and letting today just keep on raining. Every drop's another story, from a certain perspective. I'd like to blame Neil Gaiman for my concern with perspectives, but he just gave me some solider grounding for that sort of thing. I like the word solider and will continue to use it.

The research has been geared heavily toward Global Climate Change and the issues of Water Shortage/Water Rights. Last night, in a kind of break, I stopped off to meet some friends for a fete of the release of 2666, the final novel by the amazing Roberto Bolano, and not only did I get to chat a bit and hang out with some people I ever so rarely get to hang out with because I am dodgy and far too encumbered by life, but I managed to find some excellent further reading into the issues at hand.

They are intensely important issues and from here until the rest of this post I rail with the utmost vehemence (you are forewarned). People need water to live, let us try to keep that in mind. Just every day, keep that in mind.

One of the absolute necessities I see for the soon to be Obama Administration will be the elevation of Director of the EPA to a cabinet level position, or creation of an equal level position with the same purview, and Obama's choice to fill that position will be the MOST important decision he has to make.

That we have only a few months left of the abysmal direction of the EPA by Stephen L. Johnson, who for a scientist, is an utter travesty of an intellect, a waste of education and brain cells, and from a purely personal standpoint, a fuck of a human being.

If that offends some, I feel justified as he so greatly offends me, on every level, as a human being. His attitudes, his lay-like-a-rug allowance of the worst president in history to dictate in the face of all scientific research, of expert opinion, and of dire, apocalyptic warnings policies totally devoid of solutions and replete with exasperation of the problems totally in line with the interests of nearly archaic fuel source suppliers is the epitome of monsterdom. That he should act in complete opposition to the platform of State's rights so espoused by the republican party and threaten the very sanctity of life so fervently and wrong-headedly fought for by conservatives, is painfully sickening hypocrisy. That he should so pettily, so meekly and spinelessly gamble with the future of our world, with the lives of so many living on this planet and yet unborn is, with no other word to match the enormity of the crime, a sin.

So let us be clear. My name is William Arthur Owen, and Stephen L. Johnson, you are a monster. Good day, and good luck.