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Monday, September 19, 2011

What planet is this?

You wanna burn coal? No problemo! You wanna
power your home with wind, fuhgeddaboutit!
Wake me up when the wind ban is over. 

By Linda Felaco

For the past week, I've been feeling like Dr. McCoy in the "City on the Edge of Forever" episode of Star Trek when he accidentally injects himself with an overdose of cordrazine and gets teleported to 20th century Earth and runs around asking everyone he sees, "What planet is this?" I keep reading and rereading the wind ordinance trying to find the part that allows me to use wind to power my home as the CCA and the Westerly Sun insist I can. Maybe they're the ones on cordrazine, because the ordinance is quite clear, no wind, no way, no how. 

So why are they trying so hard to convince us that black is actually white? Maybe because the whole idea of banning a form of renewable energy when even optimistic projections have us running out of oil in a matter of decades is so obviously wrongheaded that they can't even admit to themselves that that's what they've done.

Then again, under the oft-repeated Platner principle, wind energy was never legal to begin with, so why even bother to ban it, much less go to such lengths to pretend it hasn't been banned? So we find ourselves in the absurd position where we can install coal-burning stoves in our homes—coal in fact can be mined right here in the Biggest Little—but we can't convert wind to electricity.

Really, it all makes me feel like my eyeballs are going to explode. So I'm going to lock myself in a darkened room with a cold compress on my head and hope when I wake up the town council will have returned to its senses. Actually, first I'm going to grind up a handful of Extra Strength Tylenol and inject it into my veins to try to make the pain go away (no health insurance, can't afford to see a doctor to get a prescription for migraine meds). If I have an aneurysm and end up in a coma, y'all won't let Ron Paul come finish me off, will you? Wake me up when the wind ban is over.

Peace, Out.