Memnison Journal

I’m actively interested in your poisition on this matter.  Feel free to sound off inside *politely*.

My own struggles on this:

And reformers can be undone by machines, when they trade their aspirations for power:

I’m getting seriously tired of the ‘let’s out-dehumanize’ thread in politics, especially as passed along by ‘I got nothing to run on, but my opponent’s a thespian’ candidates.  Or maybe they’re just nuts:

• Lieberman (now being considered as McCain’s VP) saying that Obama’s unpatriotic
• The Penn memos being leaked out that had him trying to push Obama as ‘un-American’ (Given Meredith’s concept that has stuck around for years with her that European / white = ‘American’, it doesn’t take a genius to know which way that idea was supposed to go. )
  
• A Republican congressional candidate in Colorado saying that his Democratic opponent wants to cut the throats of US soldiers
• James Dobson’s organization asking for a prayer for “rain of biblical proportions” to rain out Obama’s acceptance speech in Denver later this month
• Cong. Bachmann (R, MN): The Democratic agenda is to force us all back into the cities, to force us onto light rail, and live in tenements.  She also believes that there’s no wildlife in ANWR, that drilling in ANWR will reduce gas prices back to $2, and that efforts to save the planet from global warming are unnecessary, since Jesus Christ already saved the planet 2000 years ago.

There’s a huge demand right now in the bicycle trade for spare 27-inch tires. No bikes are presently made with that size, but older bikes being dug out of storage for use in a world where gas is way expensive use those tires.

At various times, I get into research projects; some simmer on for decades in various forms, and some break off and pick up speed because I happen to run into something that really fuels the fire, so to speak.

My library here is largely one that I use for reference. I have a huge amount of material that isn’t in book form, and I’m going through that all the time and hacking away at it to be able to organize and marshal the stuff. At present, the idea is to digitize everything, and use various management utilities to be able to find and figure out what’s what.

Here’s a *short* list of the topics I’m still digging for:

There’s a new report out that is predicting $7 a gallon gas by 2010 and a serious collapse of the gasoline car market by that time as people start to seriously give up having a car around.

This would force the working poor off the roads, but having them use public transport only works in places where such things are available.  In most of the USA, this isn’t possible outside BIG cities.  I remember when I was in Kentucky this spring camping that the local kids were talking about ride-sharing as the only way to get around the rising costs.

See also Rapid Transit.net and TheThirdRail.net for historical background, and The Great American Streeetcar Scandal for an idea of how we got here.

As a kid in Dayton, Ohio, I was used to the electric trolley system to et around town, but it didn’t cover anything outside the city limits then.  It’s a good deal broader in coverage now, but most of that is due to the addition of buses.  Light rail stuff was proposed way back, but is still dead in the water.

And here’s the Ohio Hub idea of improving mass transit with more between-cities lines and trains.   Possibly pie in the sky, but…

There’s all sorts of allied things to this - here’s a guy in NYC who had lined up a Toyota Prius and wasn’t getting it delivered:

He told me quite a tale. His dealership used to get, from Toyota Corporate, about 30 Priuses a month to sell. But starting in May, his allocations inexplicably dropped to about four cars—and base-model cars, at that. He said he’s actually calling people on the waiting list to offer them these stripped-down models, since the better equipped cars they wanted aren’t available—and they’re taking them!

So when might I get the new Prius? “We’ve got 50 people ahead of you on the waiting list,” he said. “And we’re getting about three or four cars a month. You do the math.” (As for the call I’d gotten that said they’d found the car I was looking for: the manager had no explanation. He said he’d look into it.)

But then came the punch line. “You’re not the only customer accusing us of selling your car out from under you,” the manager told me. “But you know what? I think Toyota’s selling our cars out from under us! They’re manufacturing the same number of cars, but we’re just not seeing ‘em. So I figure they’re selling them in Europe, where they can get much more money for them.”

It’s no surprise that every car model with good gas mileage is white-hot at the dealerships these days. But it had never occurred to me that we, the local customers, aren’t the only ones jockeying for them. It’s an international game now, folks, and the car companies are making hay while the sun shines.

…and besides, unlike the wife, I’ve never gotten through his works.

Regular readers will note that the tags I put on posts are plentiful and sometimes sound goofy; that may be because it’s conceptual shorthand to me. ‘kubler-ross’, ‘renmin’, or ’sep_reality’, for example. The first has to deal with posts on death and dying, the second has to deal with the corruptions of the Chinese Communist Party system, and the last has to do with who think they can make up their own reality as they go along, and has most pointedly been used against George W Bush and his pals for this sort of thing:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

I have studied this at length. Maybe it’s because of my love of understanding The Big Picture, maybe my love of historical alternates, my love of politics, or a number of allied areas. Certainly, it’s from my deep dislike of people’s approaches to life that involve huge amounts of denial and fantasy to avoid things. I can understand a little of it; but I’ve seen too many that let it take over their lives.

The central component of the Bushian approach is to use propaganda, PR and control of the methods and means of communication to build up a shining concept of what they’re doing that will ensure, as my grandmother would have put it, that ‘their $h!t don’t stink’. If someone calls you on it, pull out the blackjacks (metaphorically speaking) and either pressure them into silence or drown them out in loud catcalls.

Of course, the problem with this approach is that such people are sure of their situation, sure that they’re going to get away with whatever, and will scrap to the end to push it. They are not terribly interested in doing something for the public good, but for the good of their bloc of supporters and their internal safety net, and loyalty to The Vision, whatever the party line happens to be today, is paramount.

Which means that while they can and will hire good, expensive lawyers to throw at you as necessary, anyone inside that group tends to have a poor and unclear notion about what’s *really* going on. Competence isn’t important if loyalty is, and having your internal idea that the world is supposed to work this way because the party line requires it will blind you to the oncoming truck on your side of the road.

Another element here is that you can’t deal with Bad News. You don’t admit that it exists. If the house is on fire because you were smoking in bed, you can either deny that the dropped cigarette and lighter caused it, or blame it on an outside plot, or deny that the house is on fire at all.

It’s a funny sort of morale thing. Bush has said over and over that he doesn’t admit to mistakes except in the most empirical manner possible, and admitting defeat openly would cause everyone in Bushco, troops, whatever, to lose hope in the greater vision, so you don’t admit that either. There’s no recession coming, no oil crisis, no failures in Iraq, no nothing. Unless he can figure out a way to blame it on the people he opposes.

When it was pointed out that drilling in the coastal regions and ANWR would not produce any extra oil for many years, and not much at that, McCain said - well, yeah, but the psychological impact of knowing that that oil would be on the way someday would cause everything to be all right in the oil markets now, so it’s the only answer to the crisis. (Bush has said that sort of thing tons of times before, as if believing that there’s no crisis will fix things.)

Going over McCain’s campaign stuff, it’s obvious that there’s a major disconnect in what he says to which people. The only things that seem to be constant are re-iterations of Bush’s policies - which he gives to red-meat Bush followers.

To the rest, he throws out references to his older stands in an oblique ‘trust me, you know I’m a good guy maverick’ manner that leans on his 2000 race. But if you start trying to pin him down to specific policies, especially ‘what do you do to fix Bush’s mess’ or ‘how do you differ from Bush’, the specifics vanish. Everything becomes very vague or aspirational (”I’d like to have the war over by 2013″ ) with no plan as to how you get there.

Even how he intends to maintain the burden of the tax cuts (and more tax cuts) and the war and whatnot is vague. He keeps going on about cutting pork, but so did Bush, and it sure didn’t happen.

Solving any problem becomes a  matter of applying message control. Tell the EPA you don’t want to read their email that says CO2 needs to be regulated. Set up a photo-op but neglect to send help. Deregulate to ‘get the government off the backs of business’ to the point that business can do anything it wants - put out contaminated food and drugs, inflate the price of oil, you name it.

Right now, hearings are going on where the the regulators of oil and other commodities are admitting they haven’t a clue as to what’s the ‘real’ price of oil or how much the commodity traders and hedge funds have pushed the prices into the stratosphere.  Part of it is that they’ve been told at the highest levels and through controls placed on them by Bush and McCain (such as the ‘Enron loophole’) that they’re not really supposed to regulate or enforce the regulations in any meaningful way, so why should they keep that close track of things?

But the real situation comes back to bite at the worst times.

Spend no money on government programs that don’t include sizable rakeoffs for your supporters…and borrow rather than tax. If you can endlessly spend and borrow more, who cares about paying it off someday?

But no money for vital infrastructure, and roads, bridges, canals, levees, dams and whatnot fall apart. No money for education, and the level of the schools goes to hell.

Ignore the injured and damaged warriors, and you don’t have to spend any money on the saps that bought the part about ‘fighting for freedom’ while you gut the Constitution and let your pals get rich from war profiteering. Ignore the hurricanes and the floods and the damage therefrom and have your battier supporters blame it on God’s Wrath that we don’t toast faggots over an open fire and let them Parade In The Streets - rather than spend money on the little guy.

This isn’t Republicanism. This isn’t Conservativism. This is just blind greed and a sloppy, stupid will to power. This is ’screw-you-jack-I-got-mine’ at its worst.

And there’s a very good chance that people are seeing through this because it’s gotten pretty damn obvious enough that they can’t run the country anywhere but into the ground. Now, if we can just keep people from going on about Flag pins or who-knows-Osama-might-kill-you-if-you-don’t-vote-for-us out of the airwaves and people’s heads, we may actually get a Congress and a President interested in straightening out this mess.  And since McCain is not interested in bucking the real Bushco system, his only way through is to  (as Charlie Black, his campaign manager said the other day and McCain himself has said in 2004 and the more recent past that) think that a real terrorist attack will be a huge boon to the campaign.

Or if it isn’t coming, scare people into believing it might, and that a black guy with an ay-rab name might just join in and show his deep moo-slim self.

Some issues-oriented campaign.

On T. Boone Pickens trying to corner part of the water market, especially out of the Ogalalla Aquifer:

In all, Pickens, CRMWA, and Amarillo have spent about $150 million to buy up nearly 80% of the water rights in Roberts County, undermining and outbidding one another along the way. One unsurprising effect of their competition is that the price of an acre of water has in some places doubled, to $600.

Pickens intended to pull water from an aquifer that is pretty much the sole source for the Panhandle, and that isn’t refilled quickly, and sell it to a place like Dallas, whose water use is the highest of any city in Texas.

“Water is a commodity,” he says. “Heck, isn’t it like oil? You have to come back to who owns the water. The groundwater is owned by the landowner. That’s it.” When it comes to potential buyers, Pickens cares about only one thing: how much they’re willing to pay. “Do I care what Dallas does with the water? Hell no.”

Pickens moved quickly to take advantage of the new rules. Over the summer of 2007, he sold eight acres on the back side of his ranch to five people in his employ: Stillwell, who resides in Houston, two of his executives in Dallas, and the couple who manage his ranch, Alton and Lu Boone. A few days later, Mesa Water filed a petition to create an eight-acre water-supply district with those five as the directors and sole members. On Nov. 6, Roberts County held an election to decide whether to form the new district. Only two people were qualified to take part: Alton and Lu Boone. The vote was unanimous. With that, Pickens won the right to issue tax-free bonds for his pipeline and electrical lines as well as the extraordinary power to claim land across swaths of the state.

Isn’t greed and legal connivance wonderful to watch in action?  Of course, aside of all of this, pumping the Aquifer out would possibly happen in another 25-30 years of dry weather in the west.  This just speeds things up in a big way.

From my recent read on Brian Fagan’s THE GREAT WARMING:

Batu, a grandson of Ginghis [Khan], soon conquered the Crimea, then ravaged what is now Bulgaria as well as fourteen Russian cities, turning their shattered remnants into vassal states. Next he turned his atention to Europe, with the objective of reaching “the ultimate sea.” The Mongols under General Subatai divided into three groups, conquered Poland and Hungary, and swept into Austria, where they prepared for a probe into the heart of Europe in 1241. At that moment, Ogotai Khan [son of Ginghis] died. Batu Khan was a potential candidate for Great Khan, so he withdrew his forces to the steppes. In the event, he was not chosen and devoted his efforts to consolidating his conquests around the Urals. He held sway over the Cuman steppes and over various Russian kingdoms and never returned to the scene of his former conquests.

Batu Khan’s withdrawal coincided with the return of cooler, wetter conditions, which brought improved pasturage to the steppes. His kingdom flourished during generations of good pasturage, when warfare died down. Although Batu always maintained ambitions of returning west, good grazing conditions at home allowed his people to pasture a huge territory from the Volga-Don to Bulgaria. There were no incentives for ambitious conquests when grazing was plentiful and trade flourished with lands to the south.

But what would have happened if the climatic pendulum had not swung, and if droughts had intesified on the steppe? To judge from earlier centuries, warfare and restless movement would have continued, and almost certainly, Batu Khan and his generals would have returned to the west. His spies had already given him a clear picture of the kingdoms that confronted them, and of their armies with their heavily armored knights, who had proved no match for Mongolian archers and horsemen. He would have followed his original plans, drawn up with General Subatai: invade Austria and destroy Vienna first, then move against the German principalities before turning his attention to Italy. If all went well, he would have then marched into France and Spain. Within a few years, perhaps as early as 1250, Europe would have become part of a huge western Mongolian empire.

• Recycling silicon chip level pure stuff to use for solar panels
• Sunny Queensland town to become pure solar in two years
• The waste heat recovery business in Chicago
• The climate debate in a nutshell
• Reusing chopsticks and bras

…for his work on alerting the world to the Climate Change issue.  Many congratulations to Mr. Gore!

No, I don’t think he’ll run.  Some things are more important.

…or any effects on mankind or the environment.  Like hell.

tip to the Mactavish.

From 1978 to 1983, I was living with my Mom in Findlay, Ohio, about an hour’s drive south of Toledo and not far from the law school that I attended during that time. She lived there until she died in 2003, and I’ve been there many, many times. Still have friends there. (Waves at a Kat!)

The recent stories about flooding in Ohio caught my eye, and when one of them mentioned that Interstate 75 was closed by water, that grabbed me - where in the world would I-75 be in that sort of flat, poorly drained - oh, crap, must be - yep, Findlay. Here’s a slideshow of photos from all of that. I would imagine that the folks who bought my Mom’s house are now dealing with a flooded basement…

Right now, I’m down in my office in the basement, overseeing the sump pump, which wasn’t working earlier, and water was starting to seep up into the office area. More on that below.

I thought I’d heard the end of orphanage-abuse stories for a while.  I was wrong.   This one’s in Iraq.

Chinese air pollution from coal emissions have now made it the top CO2 emitter in the world. One of the big culprits - cement production.  Think about the stuff behind that…the size and reasons for making that much cement…

The story: did Yale frat boys steal Geronimo’s bones?  Well, his relations want them back.

An inconvenient truth: a zillion Japanese legislators are now saying that the Nanking Massacre was all made up, and that 150-300,000 people were not killed for funsies by the Japanese Army.  Ignore those photos and mass burial sites.

• The debate on Ron Paul. (Interesting stuff, re the back and forth, but I agree on the statement that it would be nice if both parties had someone you didn’t look at with utter revulsion or despair).
• Are you a Sunni spy for Iraq, or are you a Sunni spy for Iraq?  Decisions, Decisions.
• The Big Gay Bomb, written in cheek in tongue.  Just in case it isn’t clear, the writer is gay.
• Meredith was asking me the other day if there were still such things as pirates.  Yes, there are, and they’re busy.
• Some debate on the use of coal for energy demands - using liquefied coal, etc.    See also this Wikipedia article, and this and this DOE link on the subject.  As a EPA guy, I’m against pollution and global warming, but I’m all for useful solutions to the energy crisis.  Just shooting down answers without some thought and debate, to me, is silly to ridiculous.
• See also this government information link on coal use.
• See also this set of materials on Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer and his ideas on coal: from ‘The Oil Drum‘, and the Daily Kos.