Catching The Political Trade Winds

We The People don't get to decide who will be President on our own, and in truth the Founders never meant us to. The system was designed by elites, first and foremost for elites, and the people usually only get to have a provisional say. Often the choice is not much different than our children being able to decide which hat they wear to one of two Day Cares. I'm not a big fan of Day Care in general, but it's raining outside, so a hat makes sense, and looking forward to switching providers is not to "kid" ourselves. We'll still be forcibly compelled to attend. We'll still be controlled by strangers paid to feed, watch, and discipline us from afar. Most of us aren't rich enough to have our own nannies, tutors, and servants, and do we not know from experience how vastly different Montessori, Catholic, and Evangelical pre-schools can be?

David Wilhelm is a bellwether. Interviewed in the video above, he's a former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman and Clinton I national campaign manager. He is currently an Ohio super-delegate, a director of the Environmental Law and Policy Center, and the head of a venture capital fund focused on developing alternative energy in the Midwest. His endorsement of Barack Obama likely marks the first swell of Party super-delegates, at least half of whom remain uncommitted, to the Change camp. His defection is a signal to other supers like New Mexico's governor Bill Richardson, who has refused to endorse Hillary Clinton after intense pressure from her husband. (Who reportedly remarked, "weren't two Cabinet appointments enough for you?!") Wilhelm's endorsement and Richardson's non-endorsement resonate as a cumbrous Democratic Party creaks and hauls, not yet certain if it can catch the wind, heel over, and sail large on a new tack.

This election is not just one Party or another, even though most or all in our lifetimes have been; these atmospherics are stirring up more profound effects. The Obama religion is propelled less by soaring rhetoric than by circumstances and decisions made years ago, combining to provoke desire and a path for a dramatically different direction. Ships of state have tremendous inertia, it is very difficult to turn them more than a few degrees, and most elections are struggles over partial control of the rudder. But in this cycle, something remarkably rare has occurred: the other side took complete control of the steering, so both the proles and the elites have begun doing the same dance. Such has happened only three times before in this country: before the American Revolution, the Civil War, and after the Great Crash of '29. Each of these epochal events was defined by an "Enough!" moment which turned into a movement. Each movement was primarily motivated against a specific abuse which had gone too far, each was still opposed by a die-hard 30% of the domestic populace, and each defined its philosophical justification well after its formation.

By 2002, a significant minority of the financial aristocracy had become decidedly uncomfortable over blatant, big-thinking BushCo corruptions, ones which practically guaranteed fiascoes the like to dwarf Vietnam. By 2003, many doubted Kerry's capacities to win the ship, or steer it, so they unveiled a charismatic orator at the 2004 Democratic Convention who could be relied upon to electrify and perhaps resuscitate a Party with little remaining pulse. He was being groomed and financed, just as Bill Clinton once was, as heir apparent, as backup plan, and perhaps as something more over the horizon. People in Chicago knew he was dynamite, and given the condition of the Party and country, they pushed him onto a bigger stage.

Post-Kerry, a consensus began to spread and concretize. Not only were elites and proles alike deeply cynical over the stolen elections, finances, and freedoms, but a realization built that a Great Game itself was drawing to a close. The Bush Doctrine would have to be scuttled, exorcised, and entombed; with acknowledgments to how difficult achieving even one of the three would be, arguments raged over what should be done next, and how. They boiled down to a lower-risk Clinton approach (If I Could Turn Back Time) vs. a higher-risk Obama approach (We'll Invest In You, If You Invest In Us). With an incumbent and a challenger, a certain "let the best man win" dynamic remained in place. As a hint at the aristocracy's desire for change, the two approaches were heavily financed by elites in nearly equal measure, despite the higher-risk option trailing distantly in the polls, by 25+ points as little as three months ago.

For all practical purposes, winning high-margin popular victories and gaining traction in the Party Establishment both require steady backing by favorable media (which live to "get religion") and by the super-well-offegates such as Rupert Murdoch who own them. The news is primarily written for and about the elites, so as a group they're even more consensus-driven and media-influenced than regular janes and joes. The media has gravitated into Obama's orbit like particles orienting themselves around a strange attractor, amplifying his charisma, recently starting to air much more unflattering angles on the Clinton campaign. Even Murdoch's NY Post endorsed Obama, and the Wall Street Journal released a damning story this morning detailing the turmoil among Hillary staffers. It went out on Page One, and if the Clintons enjoyed the pull they had last year on Wall Street, the story wouldn't have run, not with its brass knuckles on.

Many observers take it as given that elites control how proles vote, and while that is more true than not, in this case the nomination's outcome is taking its cues from the popular votes. 500,000 people have also given money to Obama's campaign. Super-delegates have been talking amongst themselves for months, waiting for a chance to break from the Clintons; they feel the barometer falling, too. As for elites, they're sensitized to money-making opportunities, looking to maintain or increase their own (and to some extent America's) wealth and leverage. They have much more than a vote or campaign contributions to lose--if they nod the wrong way, they lose not only influence, but may face active years of retribution.

The next White House is going to be hit with a huge crisis, three heads of the same monster; debt, dollar revaluation, and foreign policy overshoot. To move forward, we're going have to find a bigger, better, more convincing bubble. Alternative energy is the only bubble big enough to float the ones which came before it. As it happens, an American consensus is gathering, one which believes we should craft a world which does not see fossil fuels as a primary energy source. Which is also getting serious about energy independence as a goal. I see it in my neighborhood, the bikes and scooters, the diesels, the subcompacts, the electric cars, the bios, the hybrids are all over the place. I'm starting to see solar panels in Seattle. The popular will is there, and so is the gasoline price.

Freeing our culture's soul from fossils isn't going to be easy. It will mean fights with oil companies who cannot be kept out of buying into a new energy grid, fights with NIMBYs, it will mean short-term compromises on coal-burning power plants--but it will also mean job creation, an ability to steadily de-escalate our foreign occupations, and a new domestic industry unleashing tremendous innovation. Once America's imagination, its most precious resource, is focused on a clear objective--beat the rest of the world on alternative energy production--we can go ahead and do it. The initiatives will extend right down to the municipal and household levels. That will mean not only choices, it will mean betting the farm because we're already in the hole, and it'll probably be seen by many as fascism. But facism's de facto right now--the next government will be involved in energy production, sure, but it already is involved in a spectacularly dysfunctional way. Fascist or not, our resources will be better allocated.

We've bet the farm before to invest against rampant abuse, and even if it wasn't always pretty, we always emerged as a nation, and one greater. Any sensible person would doubt after the past two terms, after the past 50 years, that we are about to change. Particularly on a week in which the Pentagon got another 7.5% budget increase for next year, not including supplementals. Just watch David Wilhelm's interview, and consider his motivations on alternative energy. He knows we've got plenty of lemons, and wants to make a fortune making lemonade. This is where the wind is starting to blow, and it's going to be blowing in a new direction for a long time.

Happy Valentine's Day: This Is Your Brain On Orgasm

Short summary of the latest research on the complex physiology of what I will euphemistically term Pleasurable Reproductive Responses (PRRs): "Birds do it. Bees do it. Even epileptic seizures do it." From the LA Times:

In an orgasm orchestra, the genitalia may be the instruments, but the central nervous system is the conductor.

Armed with new lab tools and fearless volunteers, scientists are getting first-ever glimpses of how the brain lights up (and, in places, shuts down) when the orgasmic fireworks go off. They're tracing nerves and finding new pathways for pleasure that help explain how people with shattered spinal cords can defy sexual expectations.

Cultivating PRRs has a lot to do with having an undamaged vagus nerve, a sleepy lateral orbitofrontal cortex, and getting the hots for a certain someone helps immensely. Most surprisingly, a precise location in the spinal cord has recently been discovered, which, when shocked, triggers full female responses in the absence of other stimuli. The spines seem to have it, and attendant parasympathetic pattern responses are dazzlingly complex, neurologically resembling an epileptic seizure. A fact with which most of you are thoroughly aware.

To deepen the complexity, even people with severed spinal cords can experience full-on PRRs, and those no-doubt-welcome phenomena flummox the sum total of four thousand years of Western medicinal anatomy: it was considered theoretically impossible, yet it appears to happen via the vagus nerve. That's the longest nerve, which does not travel down the spine but rather along the neck, beside the heart down to below the stomach. The symbol for Valentine's Day, the heart with an arrow through it, was chosen in wisdom, and the archaic "the way to a man's heart is through his stomach" is newly apropos. In toto, PRRs seem to be more peripherally distributed around the body than previously realized, and presumably coordinate via processes which, although now being mapped as enthusiastically as treasure trails, are not yet understood.

Flowers and chocolates are stimulants by their own rights, proxies to enliven some of the same pleasure centers, dimming the lights on the same frontal areas of reasoning. But the Orgasmatron is coming, having already been successfully used in applied research. So, a question...in terms of etiquette, are electronic gifts OK on Valentine's Day?

(Thanks, SLL, for the articles.)

The Brighter Side Of Waterboarding

The original headline said, "Senate votes to ban waterboarding," but is a Congressional bill ever that simple?

The prohibition was contained in a bill authorizing intelligence activities for the current year, which the Senate approved on a 51-45 vote. It would restrict the CIA to the 19 interrogation techniques outlined in the Army field manual. That manual prohibits waterboarding, a method that makes an interrogation subject feel he is drowning.

So the clause was nestled into a much larger bill. Bush may veto it, given that he has sworn not to constrain intelligence from the full array of techniques. Twenty or so years ago, waterboarding didn't exist (to my knowledge) as a term of art. It was accurately enough called "water torture" since you actually drown or suffocate to death when it's done to you.

Torture has been used by everybody, including the United States, even when it was officially banned. It's not something that needs any encouragement, and people who decide to employ it should at least be desperate enough to put themselves on the wrong side of the law. It'll be really cool for a lot of people when this finally does get banned again, and it'll benefit all of us regular Amis, especially those of us who travel overseas.

Bush Signs Economic Stimulus Plan

Jon sent this cartoon along awhile back, and now the bill has been signed into law. I feel so...stimulated. Being a great American, I'm going to take our $1,200 check right on out and buy something, like maybe a new SUV!

(Or maybe gold.)

Geothermal Breakthrough: Distributed Energy Source

Highly interesting technology, via Popular Mechanics:

The whine of the power plant sounds like a jet engine as refrigerant blasts through the turbine at 1000 mph. Though the equipment is compact, the din fills the vast hangar, and mechanical engineer Gwen Holdmann has to shout to be heard: “What you see here is very Alaskan. It’s not painted. It’s not pretty. But it’s real.” I place my hand on the steel door capping the plant’s evaporator; it’s warm to the touch, filled with Alaska’s most promising new energy source—plain water.

It’s midnight at Chena Hot Springs Resort, 56 miles northeast of Fairbanks, and outside, the July sun has only just slipped below the horizon. Holdmann’s blond hair escapes a loose ponytail as she climbs onto a metal walkway to point out the heat exchanger. A black-eared husky named Amberlynn watches her every move from below. “The cool thing about this ... ,” she begins, as she does most sentences, and it occurs to me that it’s appropriate every time: This is cool. It is Alaska’s first geothermal plant, and it’s producing electricity from lower temperature water than any plant in the world.

Heat stored beneath the Earth’s surface holds 50,000 times the energy of all the oil and gas in the worl combined. If it could be harnessed, it would be an ideal source of base-load power: Geothermal is cleaner than fossil fuels, and more reliable than alternative sources like tidal, wind, wave and solar. Today, geothermal plants in the United States generate nearly 3000 megawatts of electricity—enough to power South Dakota. Almost all of it comes from reservoirs that are at least 300 F.

The water rising through a fracture in the granite pluton under Chena is only 165 F. Experts didn’t think it was hot enough to produce serious power. But with the nearest electrical grid 32 miles away and generators burning through $1000 worth of diesel fuel daily, Chena had the incentive to prove the experts wrong. Now, its tepid water not only generates electricity, it heats the resort’s buildings, maintains a greenhouse and keeps an ice museum frozen year-round. There are thousands of such low- to moderate-temperature geothermal systems scattered throughout Alaska and the rest of the country. Power plants like the one at Chena could tap them to produce tens of thousands of megawatts of electricity.

“I think we have an opportunity here in Alaska to be leaders in moving toward a more renewable energy economy,” Holdmann says, her voice an equal mix of practical and impassioned. “The cost of power can be exorbitant in our villages—as high as a dollar a kilowatt-hour. It’s a real bummer for a lot of these communities, but it can also be a real motivating factor.” She pauses at the door of the hangar. “We’re an oil-producing state and we’re worried about our energy costs. It’s just a matter of time before the rest of the country catches up to where we are.”

Chena Hot Springs is the kind of resort one would expect to find on an episode of Northern Exposure. Nestled deep in a valley of birch and aspen, it has a comfortable, well-appointed lodge, an activities center, indoor plumbing and a resident masseuse. It also has a team of sled dogs, a 3500-ft. dirt runway, outhouses and, at this moment, a moose nonchalantly grazing near a geothermal production well.

Holdmann is well-cast for the setting. A professional dog musher, she lives off the grid with her husband and 80 huskies and commutes to work in a Jeep Liberty that runs on vegetable oil. She came to Chena four years ago as a hydropower consultant, but quickly determined that the water flowing under the resort was more valuable than the water flowing past it.

The only hitch: “Some of the reports I read from research on Chena concluded there was no way you could ever generate power out of this resource,” Holdmann says. “I started to look into why, and began to realize it was a bit of a misconception.”

When water cooler than 350 F is released from the pressure of a geothermal reservoir, it doesn’t convert to steam efficiently enough to drive a turbine directly. Anything less than 230 F was considered too marginal for the alternative: a binary system that uses water to heat a fluid with a lower boiling point. But that threshold was a product of geography, not technical feasibility, Holdmann realized. A binary system just requires a heat source and sink: 165 F water can produce electricity if the ambient air or surface water temperature is at least 100 degrees lower. While that may be tough to find in the deserts of Nevada, in Alaska cold air and water are abundant resources.

Now all she needed was a plant, built to one important spec: “We need things that work up here,” Holdmann says. “We don’t need a bunch of things that, yeah, you can do in a lab. We need something we can take to a village and use normal people to run it. And run it every day, because we don’t need it only half the time.”

Fortunately, United Technologies Corp. was looking for a partner to collaborate on a pilot project: an air-conditioning unit that had been reverse-engineered to run off geothermal water. Instead of putting in electric power to create areas of high and low temperature, Chena provides the heat differential and the plant puts out electric power.

The technology has the added benefit of solving two remaining hurdles to low-temperature power generation. First, air-conditioning refrigerant operates more efficiently at low temperatures than isopentane and other fluids typically used in power plants. Second, the components are already mass produced, which cuts the cost of a small, modular plant in half.

Chena’s two 200-kilowatt modules provide more than enough power for the entire resort and have reduced the cost of electricity from 30 cents a kwh to only 5 cents. With a capital cost of $2.2 million, including exploration and drilling, the project is expected to pay for itself in four to five years.

The Finest Kiss

I just learned this weekend that a real-world friend links here, and that he also happens to run the best Seattle music blog in the known universe, small as mine is on the subject. Toby's a lover of indie music to the extent he can accurately be called an expert, and his local reportage of bands is even better than the professional efforts around the Sound.

It wasn't the music that got me out here, but I grew to appreciate it fast. Since the late 80s the Pac Northwest has continued to grow into one of the most vibrant and nurturing emerging music scenes, the birthplace of the grungy "garage band" sound. It was a sarcastic revolt against the glammy, over-produced metal, pop, and alternative stuff that dominated the late 70s and 80s, so it was by definition anti-corporate. It was edgy and dangerous as a snakebite, dangerous as an OD, revelling in its alienation and managed to retain that feel even after bands like Nirvana, Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and a score of lesser-known bands like Gruntruck were hitting it big world-wide and it attracted the trust-fund babies, who could actually afford heroin.

The originators were gone or cooled down, bands such as Green River, Mudhoney, and the Melvins (Kurt Cobain was a devoted fan and helped them out as a stage hand) were starting to pass the torch, but Seattle was as music-mad as Liverpool in the 1960s. Even my button-down friends and I in MBA School went down to the Off-Ramp every Tuesday for open mike night. We saw the worst band in history (Zeke) there. The lead singer came out wearing nothing except a gold lame' G-string, and it got worse when they started to play. Funny enough, they're a local-venue band stalwart 16 years later.

The Northwest was a perfect incubator for garage bands, and still is. You sure as hell can't play much music outside, and most parents would've rather parked their cars out on the street than have proto-punk metal/Iggy Pop fusion playing in the house. So grunge happened. Lord Running Boy had his first experience with Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath last night, which he immediately went wild over: "No, no, turn it up, it's gotta be louder," he cried, grabbing the volume knob and turning it up to Eleven, whirly-gigging and turning his cousin's living room into a mosh pit for the balance of the album. (Yes. Yes, I am terrified.)

The Finest Kiss is named for a song by the Boo Radleys, a UK group Toby heard when he was living in Caen. They have a website up now, and you can listen to the song here. By going to Toby's site, I also learned that Australian legend Paul Kelly, the greatest singer-songwriter you've never heard of, will be playing at the Triple Door in March, right where I first ran into him. We're going. And I'll be enjoying the future of music via the Finest Kiss.

I'm Glad This Exists, Because I Have Nothing To Hide!

The FBI Deputizes Coroporations, via the Progressive:

Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does—and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to “shoot to kill” in the event of martial law.
InfraGard is “a child of the FBI,” says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm.

InfraGard started in Cleveland back in 1996, when the private sector there cooperated with the FBI to investigate cyber threats.

“Then the FBI cloned it,” says Phyllis Schneck, chairman of the board of directors of the InfraGard National Members Alliance, and the prime mover behind the growth of InfraGard over the last several years.

InfraGard itself is still an FBI operation, with FBI agents in each state overseeing the local InfraGard chapters. (There are now eighty-six of them.) The alliance is a nonprofit organization of private sector InfraGard members.

“We are the owners, operators, and experts of our critical infrastructure, from the CEO of a large company in agriculture or high finance to the guy who turns the valve at the water utility,” says Schneck, who by day is the vice president of research integration at Secure Computing.

“At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the private sector,” the InfraGard website states. “InfraGard chapters are geographically linked with FBI Field Office territories.”

In November 2001, InfraGard had around 1,700 members. As of late January, InfraGard had 23,682 members, according to its website, www.infragard.net, which adds that “350 of our nation’s Fortune 500 have a representative in InfraGard.”

To join, each person must be sponsored by “an existing InfraGard member, chapter, or partner organization.” The FBI then vets the applicant. On the application form, prospective members are asked which aspect of the critical infrastructure their organization deals with. These include: agriculture, banking and finance, the chemical industry, defense, energy, food, information and telecommunications, law enforcement, public health, and transportation.

FBI Director Robert Mueller addressed an InfraGard convention on August 9, 2005. At that time, the group had less than half as many members as it does today. “To date, there are more than 11,000 members of InfraGard,” he said. “From our perspective that amounts to 11,000 contacts . . . and 11,000 partners in our mission to protect America.” He added a little later, “Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense.”

He urged InfraGard members to contact the FBI if they “note suspicious activity or an unusual event.” And he said they could sic the FBI on “disgruntled employees who will use knowledge gained on the job against their employers.”

In an interview with InfraGard after the conference, which is featured prominently on the InfraGard members’ website, Mueller says: “It’s a great program.”

The ACLU is not so sanguine.

“There is evidence that InfraGard may be closer to a corporate TIPS program, turning private-sector corporations—some of which may be in a position to observe the activities of millions of individual customers—into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI,” the ACLU warned in its August 2004 report The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: How the American Government Is Conscripting Businesses and Individuals in the Construction of a Surveillance Society.

German World Record

The world’s largest wind turbine is now the E-126. This turbine has a rotor blade length of 126 meters (413 feet). The E-126 is a more sophisticated version of the E-112, formerly the world’s largest wind turbine and rated at 6 megawatts.

The windmill is officially rated at 6 megawatts, but will most likely produce 7+ megawatts, or roughly 20 million kilowatt hours per year. That’s enough to power about 5,000 households of four in Europe. In the US, the calculation would be 938 kwh per home per month, multiplied by 12 months, or 11,256 kwh per year per house. Good for a very patriotic 1,776 American homes on one wind turbine. The turbine is being erected in Emden, Germany by Enercon.

A few days ago a friend and I were discussing how to improve another record, the world's longest floating bridge, which extends across Lake Washington. The pontoon portion of the bridge (which has capsized and sunk twice, and closed for extended times) has an inconvenient tendency to buckle northwards as water piles up on its southern-facing side due to a strongly prevailing wind direction. You can often see whitecaps on its southern side, while just across the four lane of the bridge, the waters are as smooth as glass. Breakers will splash across the lanes, and the bridge usually must be closed during periods of high winds.

We thought, "Why not turn the 520 floating point bridge into a wind generation platform?" Each wind turbine platform, probably up to ten of them, could be linked with a short bridge section, the route could be stabilized and generate electricity for up to 20,000 homes. It would be a worthy place to spend my state's tax dollars, improve a route that is the bane of many a commuter's existence, and might even be enough to make the Germans envious.

Tom Waits: Downtown Train

The above song was a #1 hit for Rod Stewart, and my grandmother worked overtime, supervising the night shift making cassettes along with the last vinyl cut records ever mass-produced. At Decca Records, just as she was about to retire. Somewhat surprisingly to me, she became a big fan of Rod Stewart. I was fondly bemused, and had hopes she was recovering from the death of my grandfather. But she never did, and Rod Stewart didn't write that song. We all thought he did at the time but he just sang it like so many others. Nobody saw the man behind the lyrical curtain, a misshapen unforgiven dwarf who whittled patterns many other voices would take into fashion.

The dwarf's voice is a rock crusher. It makes gravel out of washboards, asphalt, and car parts floating in on tides of bourbon. As a child, he taught himself to play on a neighbor's piano, where he took refuge while his schoolteacher parents were acrimoniously divorcing in Pomona, California when he was 8 and 9. His father was named Frank, his mother Alma, and it was 1958 or '57, depending on how you calculate prodigy. He later played in an R&B band in high school, but his heart wasn't in it. You can almost hear a music teacher saying, "Class...please pay attention, and excuse Tom."

While the 60s revolutions raged, he listened to Bing Crosby to figure out his timing. He studied Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, Lord Buckley, Hoagy Carmichael, Marty Robbins, and Raymond Chandler. He started playing lounges and strip clubs in San Diego when he was 18, and he was so good that word got out--Martha and the Vandellas, Charlie Rich, and Frank Zappa asked him to tour with them. He strove to make art with words and eventually mused a magnum opus on his father's absence in an album called Frank's Wild Years. While he steadily closed in on genius as a pauper, the Eagles, Rod Stewart, and Bruce Springsteen made millions of dollars singing his songs as their own.

When I heard Rod Stewart singing Downtown Train, I heard a tom-cat reasonably asking for free sex. Later, when I first heard Tom Waits singing his own creation, I heard someone describing people traveling into Manhattan, girls who hung from the straps on the downtown lines, also the people who came in preserved from New Jersey, people I worked alongside with thick accents and frank assessments. So I knew how fully he shook their essence down like a perfumer who bottled souls. Once an old guard on the exchange laughed long at me one morning when I first wore a new blue Italian silk pinstripe suit my mentor had given me, and I asked what was the matter. He said--"You look like a million bucks," and I said right back to him, his name was Jesse, "I'm shinin' like a new dime!"

Once you hear Tom Waits sing his own creations, Rod Stewart and everybody else scatters like crows.

The lyrics to Downtown Train:

Outside another yellow moon
punched a hole in the nighttime, yes
I climb through the window and down the street
I'm shining like a new dime
the downtown trains are full--with all those Brooklyn girls
they try so hard to break out of their little worlds

You wave your hand, and they scatter like crows
they have nothing that will ever capture your heart
they're just thorns without the rose
be careful of them in the dark
oh if I was the one!
you chose to be your only one
oh baby, can't you hear me now

Will I see you tonight?
on a downtown train
every night, every night is just the same
you leave me lonely now

I know your window, and I know it's late
I know your stairs and your doorway
I walk down your street and past your gate
I stand by the light at the four way

You watch them as they fall
and baby they all have heart attacks
they stay at the carnival,
but they'll never win you back!

Chorus

Will I see you tonight?
On a downtown train...
where every night is just the same
(you leave me lonely)
will I see you tonight?
On a downtown train...
all of my dreams just fall like rain
ooh baby on a downtown train

Washington State Caucus: My First Politics

Just back from the Washington state caucus. The key swing issue there was electability–the Clintons enrage and mobilize the conservatives, giving McCain a chance in red states, and in states where he shouldn’t have one at all. Even the most eloquent and/or impassioned advocates (points were experience, Bill backs her up, health care, pro-choice, experience) couldn’t defend that point. About 3/4s of the undecideds in my caucus went to Obama, and 75% of caucus-goers in the most democratic, highest-turnout district in all of Washington state voted for him.

The debate was quite high-quality went from positive to invigorating and then it started to devolve into Not Pretty. The Obama campaign had sent out emails this morning urging everybody to dwell on the positives, and to not attack. At precisely twenty minutes into debate, the Clinton supporters started becoming more vocal, then comparatively acrimonious, hogging the chair, finally going negative, and at the end at least 5 of them (females) shot my loved one extended dirty looks while she was speaking, and after. Then the Undecideds got to confer, ask questions for 10 minutes, and choose a candidate. All but one did.

Of course, due to local circumstances, our anecdotes and results may not indicate much nationally due to the last race for Governor here. A Pug candidate with no political experience (Dino Rossi) came within about 40 votes in a bitterly re-counted election of taking the governorship on little more than a commercial of holding up a baby, smiling like a state patrol officer, and saying he was strong on family values. A few votes in Seattle were the only reason our governor (Christine Gregoire, Obama endorser) is a Democrat. She's a fine governor, but many feel a much stronger candidate should've been allowed to run, and there seems to be little remaining trust in the Democratic party in a state that went 70% for Gore in 2000. A taste for new ways of doing things is in the air here, and today's turnout was brim-full-to-overflowing.

Easily the most popular caucus attendee was an older man squarely in the Clinton demographic group who stood up and said, “Our generation brought in the most divisive politics in the 20th century. Hillary Clinton only brings more divisiveness, and our time has passed. The currency of the 21st century will be diversity, and no one has more appreciation of diversity, from where and how he grew up and what he's done thus far, than Barack Obama.”

Lord Wife bravely volunteered to take notes, brave because the high school gymnasiums and classrooms were all mobbed and quite noisy, but she did a professional job. She was then encouraged to run as a delegate by a couple 23-year old supporters who liked what she had to say.

I suspect they may have also been supporting the MILF ticket, but as the debate was drawing to a close, my better half made a very effective rebuttal to a claim that Clinton's public health plan is superior to Obama's. Shorter Lord Wife: "I work in public health research, so I've compared the two plans very carefully. The Clinton health care plan is mandated, mandated plans in California and Massachusetts have already failed, and it further sucks on vectors x, y, and z." She was subsequently elected to be a delegate to the state convention, as was the aging boomer, an 18-year old of Pakistani descent, a young executive of Indian descent, and a woman who works with special needs kids. My wife was tickled pink. (And she wants to write a post comparing health care plans soon.)

The Clinton supporters were barely able to eke out 2 delegates out of seven. I wondered how they did it, given the shrinking numbers of undecideds. Then I realized they had persuaded one last person to stay undecided, so that the Clinton delegate share went up mathematically from 1.488 to 1.5, thus allowing it to be rounded up to 2. Otherwise it would've been 6-1.

Overall it was quite an experience to caucus, that is, to participate in politics for the very first time. We live in one of the most impregnable of Democratic strongholds, probably one of the most Democratic neighborhoods in the country. Our House rep is that lightning rod of conservatives Jim McDermott, our state rep is a single-issue candidate (gay marriage), and everybody seems to be driving bio-diesels, Priuses, Honda Fits, scooters, and bikes. We're safe territory that wasn't even supposed to have mattered in the primary, and the Clinton campaign didn't even have an office here until this week. I'm not sure how far away this can be extrapolated, but we went in a landslide for Obama.

Linking To Squirmelicious

I was introduced to Squirmelicious a few days back by my news filter, Psyche. He correctly, correctly so far at least, sensed the 'Gang of Four' (Gore, Dean, Kerry, Kennedy) support for Obama. He runs an astute, objective political blog mixed with some current affairs. As he describes it:

Squirmelicious is a daily jam on politics, culture, technology, sports, or whatever the hell is clogging my noodle.

After waiting a decent interval and reading more of his excellent posts, I decided to link away. Welcome, Mr. Squirmel! I'll try to come up with a more flattering yet evocative cephalopod image.

The Idiocy Of Hope

"Hope" is a conspicuosly deridable catch-phrase, almost as chumpy as "Change." Why would anyone who wished to be taken seriously choose to use such words?

"America is just a country, and Obama is just a politician," says ueber-blogger IOZ. Comedy writer Jon Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution even quotes him in the context of criticizing the liberals:

American liberals understand the invasion and occupation as a terribly aberrant, uniquely un-American act foisted on a frightened country and unprepared world by the avatar of awfulness, notre dauphin, Gee-Dub Bush. Their liberalism is essentially personality-driven—ironically, given their loud disdain for the Bushite personality cult. It is the liberal-progressive conviction that the necessary component for good government is good people. People, you know, like them.

Yeah. True enough. We're all idiots, all in denial of our worser selves. Yet maybe there's a basis for wanting people more, as Jon and IOZ say, like us. I'm as skeptical as they come; disillusions have piled up on me like six feet of snow. Schools, cities, churches, friends, nations, sanities, businesses, bodies. I'm wanted in four countries, and know it's all lies, and I know evil, too, up close and personal, in places IOZ or Jon Schwarz will be lucky to never get near.

The only chance at redemption is borne on faith. Faith requires hope. Hope is the lottery, the little lies you tell yourself to keep moving, striving for something better. Hope is "I believe, O Lord, please help me in mine unbelief." Hope needs goals, things to live and take that next tired step for, and it doesn't take a genius to know that a "necessary component of good government is good people." When you're freezing and dying and wondering what's the point, every step becomes a harder choice, and that's where our country is at. We are ruled by robbers, murderers, and corporate rapists who know they are poisoning us. Let us now come out and speak the unspeakable, my friends: America is dying, and may be past hope.

Great leaders study possibilities, and know how to nurture and coax out the best. Tyrants simply destroy these qualities and rule on fear. And what have we lived under for the past 7 years but tyrants so craving and ghastly they'll cheerfully kill their own people as a ruse? Smart people keep telling me the election doesn't matter, that there's no policy differences between Clinton and Obama, and McCain is on the same kabuki stage anyway, nothing will change. I say "Bullshit!" Answer me some questions on this day, and tell me leadership and goals make no difference:

1) Would having John Edwards as Attorney General instead of Abu Gonzales have made a difference in the Justice Department's actions, and to the poor bastards we've tortured and threatened across the world in the name of gilded freedom?

2) Would having Dennis Kucinich as Secretary of State make a difference when dealing with other countries, versus dealing with hissing oil wraiths who fly in on Nazguls?

3) Do you want to have lived for 36 (8+4+8+8+a possible 8) years under White Houses continually occupied with Bushes and Clintons, and do you think Hillary Clinton will throw her precious lobbyists over for you? (Of whom she says, "Lobbyists are constituents, too.")

4) Will you want to call yourself an American after Bomber McCain's elected?

5) What would the rest of the world think if they see America has elected a black man? Might that not send a message that the American people can CHANGE?

Yeah, I'm playing the race card, and it's a bad-ass ace, an ace of spades who is the most successful disciple of a populist radical (see Alinsky, Rules for Radicals). To those who dimiss symbology, I say it's paramount; why do you think Ronald Reagan chose a fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered, to give his "states' rights" speech promoting segregation in August, 1980? And if you think that was coincidence, what was he symbolizing when he later laid wreathes on the graves of SS soldiers in Bitburg? I'll tell you a secret: it wasn't "Up With People."

As Peggy Noonan said yesterday, she who wrote the speech for the thousand points of Bush-light, "Barack Obama isn't Bambi. He's bulletproof." She also said the democratic party doesn't know what it's got with him. I used to link to Peggy Noonan, even though I despise everything she stands for, because she's an oracle of the Other Side. And she's right. Most Democrats don't know just how powerful and radical Obama is. Most have even forgotten that he demonstrated on the streets of Chicago in October 2002, and stood to speak against the coming invasion of Iraq. Whereas is opponent was the first one to use the post-9/11 phrase, "if you're not with us, you're against us." Don't believe me? Use the Google.

Only one remaining candidate actually has goals for this country, goals like single-payer health care. For one possible motivation, he said, "On the day she died of cancer at the young age of 53, my mother's biggest worry was her health care bills." Is that somebody too LIKE US, IOZ? Does that strike you as manipulative, pro-lib cult-of-personality shit to you, Jon Schwarz? Whereas, let's examine the Clintons' goal for health care...having previously failed, they think the only path is to alleviate corporations of the burden of paying for benefits, and keep the insurance companies happy. But that's a goal for corporations, not for people. Does that goal matter?

In studying how to keep uppity countries under foot and thumb, intelligence agencies in the 20th century codified a principle which was intuitively obvious, yet highly profound: the most resource-efficient way to suppress opposition is to eliminate its reasons for hope. In fact the doctrine was called Killing Hope. All through a system, you must allow your opposition no chink easily exploited through non-violent means. Control the unions, break the strikes, control the ballot boxes and the vote-counts. Usually, this will frustrate the opposition into violence, and once they resort to it, you have them: you can call overkill down upon them. Get them to give up hope, to despair, and all you'll have to put up with is the bitter laughter which takes suppression's hand out for an occasional dance. It worked all over South and Central America, in the Caribbean, in Africa. Getting people to despair on voting and collective action worked.

Lord Wife and I are heading out the door to go caucus for just a politician, in an America that is just a country. We don't even have to hope. We don't have to look forward to airing all the gangrenous sins of the Bush Administration. We just have to admit that every other actor remaining to wear a mask on our annoying, dissonant, decrepit kabuki stage is a ghoul, a proven carrion-eater who will work with immortal entities called corporations to kill our hope and our children. The difference is, Barack Obama might not be.

Rules For Radicals: Saul Alinsky

Page 78: A well-integrated political schizoid:

The organizer must become schizoid, politically, in order not to slip into becoming a true believer. Before men can act an issue must become polarized. Men will act when they become convinced that their cause is 100 percent on the side of the angels and that the opposition are 100 percent on the side of the devil. He knows that there can be no action until issues are polarized to this degree. I have already discussed an example in the Declaration of Independence--the Bill of Particulars that conspicuously omitted all the advantages the colonies had gained from the British and cited only the disadvantages.

What I am saying is that the organizer must be able to split himself into two parts--one part in the arena of action where he polarizes the issue to 100 to nothing, and helps to lead his forces into conflict, while the other part knows that when the time comes for negotiations that it really is only a 10 percent difference--and yet both parts have to live comfortably with each other. Only a well-organized person can split and stay together. But this is what the organizer must do.

Saul Alinsky (1909-1972) is known as the father of community organizing in the United States.

Information Warfare: Mid-East Has Its Intertubes Tied

It's worth wondering why the fiber optic cables to Iran, Egypt, and Dubai were cut. While making some sport of it in my first post, and the title of this one, it's also cause for serious concerns. Ones I didn't vent at first. Conspiracy theories? Uhn-uh. To think 5 cables got cut in a total of 6 places from ships dropping anchors, the only explanation offered thus far, is to buy a lifetime membership in the Ignorance Is Bliss Gated Community.

Under current US and Israeli war doctrines, knocking out the enemy's communications infrastructure is Priority One. Those undersea cables would be the first thing to go, because if you're making war, crippling them is risk-free, high-payoff. It not only seriously degrades the enemy's advanced communications, but it also gives you mastery of the public relations message to the world. Al-Jazeera can't transfer, upload, or air video over the internet in real time. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), not to mention the virulent nation itself, knows that it is first and foremost a propaganda machine. An awesomely effective one. (Remember, it's The Holocaust, and none other holocausts shalt come before it.)

Israel has to be the prime suspect in this gig, with the US a close second or an outright participant. Various other possibilities readily present themselves: countries wanting more censorship, Islamic extremists, a self-inflicted test, a psy-op...but each of these is also relatively easy to dismiss.

Naj from Iran Facts finds the censorship angle ludicrous, since manual, ad hoc measures are fully effective in the eyes of her former government. It's highly doubtful Islamic extremists possess the coordination or inclination to carry out such an operation, nor with such a light touch. A self-inflicted test on infrastructure effects carries some appeal, yet it's a stretch to imagine exactly what multinational Mid-east body would've wanted to conduct one. An intelligence psy-op study is even more appealing, but it would almost have to be a rogue operation, one whose scale makes it unlikely; the Mid-East is an active war zone where the military takes precedence.

A telecommunications professional of long acquaintance briefly mused that the cables may be tapped; while technically possible, bouncing light signals out of thousands of underwater optic strands is arduous and, due to signal loss, obvious, compared to sniffing right on the server nodes. Still, surveillance can't be ruled out, with resulting service disruption playing nicely into multiple purposes.

While very bad, I don't think the internet vasectomy signals immediate war as an attack would've (probably) already happened. It would be difficult to imagine, even granting the past and current imperial wooden-headedness in the region, giving an enemy so much time to re-adjust. This incident reads more like a message of mastery, an ape beating its chest and thumbing its nose. Strategically, it's an excellent way to signal you're escalating the threat level up another notch. You can safely sit back, gleefully gauge the reaction, and send a witty note to make your point. As mentioned in the first post below, the countries in the region are about to break down the fence and stampede off the dollar farm, and giving them electric collar shocks is just about the only means of non-violent control either primary suspect has left.

Unfortunately, the move is openly aggressive, illustrates what a wider regional war would first look like, and gives the Mid-East abundant and well-founded reason to stock up on three things: paranoia, desire for payback, and making communications infrastructure and procedures more redundant and secure.

Psyche's News Roundup

Time: Romney quits race ("Clinton and Obama: ... cannot be a part of aiding a surrender to terror"

TheMishMash.com: Religious Zealots Say the Darndest Things

Media Matters - Matthews, Russert ignored record Democratic turnout in suggesting lack of broad appeal

TPM Muckraker | administration has blundered its way into its recent pro-waterboarding PR offensive

Emptywheel - » Mukasey Refuses to Say Whether He Was Instructed Not to Enforce Subpoenas

BBC NEWS | UK | Sharia law in UK is 'unavoidable'

Clarity Sought on Electronics Searches - washingtonpost.com

Bloomberg.com: Exploding ARMs Roil Bernanke's Drive to Calm Markets

LiveNewsCameras.com - Watch Live Streaming News From the USA & World - Beta Version

The Potential for Danger in Particle Collider Experiments

Cable Cut Fever Grips the Web | Threat Level from Wired.com

Horizon: What on Earth is Wrong With Gravity?

TheStar.com | sciencetech | Turning physics on its ear - Has dropout created a perpetual motion machine?

Clintons Claim Super Tuesday Victory

Present circumstances often remind one of wonderful anecdotes from the past's trove. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's economic advisor, John Kenneth Galbraith, was sent to debrief Albert Speer after Germany's surrendur. Speer had been his "opposite number" in terms of wartime economic planning. In an aside, Speer mentioned that it was perfectly obvious to him since 1943 that Germany would lose the war. By what economic metrics, Galbraith asked, did he arrive at the conclusion? Was it grain prices? Synthetic oil costs? The lack of rubber? "No, no, not at all," Speer answered. "It was because our heroic victories kept getting closer to Berlin."

After steady and nearly complete erosion of a seemingly insurmountable early lead, the Clinton camp's claims of victory on Super Tuesday bear comparison. It was the Clintons who had pushed for a Super Tuesday in the first place, planning it as a knockout punch. Crying "hooray!" while hauling ass off the terrain of your choosing is always incongruous, often unbecoming. The same day it claimed victory, the campaign announced it wouldn't cover most upcoming states, rather planning to concentrate its resources on Ohio. Today staffers started passing rumors that the Clintons believe caucusing is undemocratic cheating, and one described an atmosphere of desperation and rage. While dipping into their personal fortune for a $5 million loan and asking staffers to go unpaid, the Clintons started openly pointing at all the Florida and Michigan delegates, saying they're way ahead if you count those.

Question...why would Dims in Florida and Michigan knowingly violate their own party's bylaws, thereby invalidating all their delegates? And why would Clinton be the only name on the ballot?

Strange Mid-East Intertube Outages

What are the odds all these undersea fiber optic cables got cut by burrowing mollusks?

Mena Report:

A total of five cables being operated by two submarine cable operators have been damaged with a fault in each. These are SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4) near Penang, Malaysia, the FLAG Europe-Asia near Alexandria, FLAG near the Dubai coast, FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran and SeaMeWe-4, also near Alexandria.

A hundred million people in the Mid-East are without fast internet:

Internet connectivity still remains slow in several Middle East countries due to the cable damage near Egypt, Iran and Dubai. An improvement is not expected soon as operators claim there are many complexities involved in fixing the problem. In addition, all voice calls, corporate data and video traffic were also affected.

The first two cables, off Alexandria in Egypt, were cut on January 23. Over the weekend a looped cable in the Gulf waters was cut in two points, off Dubai and off Iran's Bandar Abbas. The cuts have raised many conspiracy theories on their reasons.

However, the International Cable Protection Committee, an association of 86 submarine cable operators dedicated to safeguarding undersea cables, has declined to speculate on the cause of the breaches, adding investigations were underway.

In possibly related news, Saudi Arabia unpegged its interest rates, not following the September 18th drop by the Federal Reserve Bank. The Saudi currency (the riyal) has risen to a 20-year high against the dollar. A meeting of the Saudi financial advisory council is scheduled for February 17th, when it is widely expected that other oil suppliers will decide to revalue their currencies against the dollar. Maybe on the verge of connecting too many dots here, but somebody cut those cables, and I doubt it was "The Evil-Doers."

The "Tribal Belt"

My friend Still Life Living alerted me to analysts on NPR who kept referring, in the kind of catchy-code from which surges are spun, to a "tribal belt" in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Perhaps by that phrasing we are meant to believe that pesky tribes, though poorer than Africans, are the problem. (Oops. Pardon me. Hang on a sec while I spray my office with Rant-B-Gone.....ok, it seems to be helping. Aaaah. Blood flow, good. Air, check. Al-righty, then.)

It would probably be best to simply look at a few maps. This is the most volatile border in the world, territory where our past sins, unknown as they may be, are manifold; clicking on any of the maps shows closer views. The conflict locus:


The tribe probably targeted most by the "tribal belt" descriptor, which is but one of more than thirty others in 'Afghakistan:'


The Federally Administrated (Unaided, Uncontrolled) Tribal Areas:

Pakistan is unwilling to let the tribal areas inside its borders go because of a deep love for denuded, arid mountains, increasingly hostile refugees, dust, and a bracing climate. (All maps courtesy of the helpful Jesus del Norte.)

Squirmelicious Insights On Men Behind The Dim Curtain

From blogger Squirmelicious:

The Gang of Four, a quartet of influential and rabidly anti-Clinton Democrats, are waiting for the perfect time to drive a stake through the heart of Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions. The question is, with 72 hours to go before the Super Tuesday primaries, is time slipping away? The cadre—Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, and John Kerry—has vowed personally and collectively to do whatever necessary to keep the nomination from Clinton, each possessing compelling reasons to revile the former First Lady.

Kennedy and Gore have long hated the centrist ground staked out by Bill and Hillary, and were disgusted with the Senator’s support for the war in Iraq. Gore further resented the Clinton’s lack of support in his own presidential campaign of 2000, feeling crucial democratic resources were diverted to Hillary’s New York Senate campaign in that same year. As for Dean, it is well known that Bill Clinton worked feverishly behind the scenes in keeping fellow democrats from supporting Dean’s candidacy. Fearing that a Kerry win in ‘04 would choke off any opportunity for Hillary to run in ‘08, Clinton provided little support for that campaign as well, incensing John Kerry, and perhaps making the difference in George Bush’s razor like win that year. Obama’s campaign gained significant momentum when Ted Kennedy, on the heels of Obama’s sweeping victory in South Carolina, joined Kerry in endorsing the candidate.

Dean and Kerry Gore have held their preference close to the vest thus far. As chairman of the DNC, Dean’s work in promoting an Obama candidacy would likely be done behind the scenes leaving it to Gore, whose endorsement could truly define this race. The buzz in political circles is that Gore is waiting to see if Obama wins Super Tuesday and will then endorse, perhaps driving the final nail in Hillary’s coffin. Our question is, why wait? If Gore endorses, it could provide the final burst of momentum to insure an Obama win Tuesday. Recent polls show that Obama has closed the gap to 4 points. Can he make up the balance in the remaining hours? With Gore’s help it would be more likely. Go for it Al.

Found this searching on my hunch on a Howard Dean Vendetta against Team Clinton, one that could play out in back rooms well before the Convention. Interesting speculation, and I'll ask him about why the Kennedys publicly left their long association with B/Hill to endorse Obama.

Exxon Mobil Makes Monster Profit

Wonder where all this money will end up going...

(AP) Exxon Mobil Corp. on Friday posted the largest annual profit by a U.S. company - $40.6 billion - as the world's largest publicly traded oil company benefited from historic crude prices at year's end.

Exxon Mobil also set a U.S. record for the biggest quarterly profit, posting net income of $11.7 billion for the final three months of 2007, besting its own mark of $10.71 billion in the fourth quarter of 2005.

The previous record for annual profit was $39.5 billion, which Exxon Mobil reported for 2006.

The eye-popping results weren't a surprise given record prices for a barrel of oil at the end of 2007. For much of the fourth quarter, they hovered around $90 a barrel, more than 50 percent higher than a year ago.

Crude prices reached an all-time trading high of $100.09 on Jan. 3 but have fallen about 10 percent since.

Super Tuesday Eve

1,668 delegates are at stake tomorrow for the Democratic presidential nomination. (No matter what happens, we won't have to put up with the creatures cutting up the cake above.) That's excluding super-delegates, who don't respond to actual votes, just to their own whims or to "cash support" given to them by the Hillary or Obama campaigns. Hillary Clinton paid off the campaign debts of (Iowa Governor) Tom Vilsack, in addition to cash donations, insisting there was no quid pro quo in garnering his early support and making him a campaign co-chair.

Divvying up campaign money is the simple part; probably only professional pols and staffers can begin to fully understand nominational mechanics, which vary widely depending on state. Michigan, for example, carried only Hillary on its ballot because it violated convention rules, rendering its substantial number of delegates technically unallowable. Same for Florida. Why, one might ask? Here's One Shoe Dropping:

Trying to ramp up the importance of Florida's Democratic presidential primary, Hillary Clinton on Friday called for her Democratic rivals to join her in helping get Florida delegates seated for the national convention.... "I hear all the time from people in Florida and Michigan that they want their voices heard in selecting the Democratic nominee," the New York senator said in a statement. "I believe our nominee will need the enthusiastic support of Democrats in these states to win the general election, and so I will ask my Democratic convention delegates to support seating the delegations from Florida and Michigan."

In other words, the Clintons want to count Florida's 210 delegates as their own, probably Michigan's as well, even though those two primaries went so far out of bounds (violating Party rules) that no other Democratic candidates would appear on the ballots. To me, allocating those delegates to either candidate would negate their nomination's legitimacy. Michigan and Florida decided to violate their party's rules, so their delegates should be disqualified. If not, shouldn't the Party just ignore all their other rules? Howard Dean will play a powerful role in deciding what to do.

While I will take these people over the Bushes any day, I keenly remember who they are. So do others:

"Mrs. Clinton claims that her time in that role was an active one. (Bill) can hardly be expected to show less involvement when he returns to the scene of his time in power as the resident expert. He is not the kind to be a potted plant in the White House...Which raises an important matter. Do we really want a plural presidency? " (Garry Wills, a professor emeritus of history at Northwestern)

"Do Bill Clinton’s red-faced eruptions and fact-challenged rants enhance or diminish his wife as a woman and a candidate?...Absent from this debate is any sober recognition that a Hillary Clinton nomination, if it happens, will send the Democrats into the general election with a new and huge peril that may well dwarf the current wars over race, gender and who said what about Ronald Reagan." (NYT: Frank Rich)

Most of Bill’s tantrums were behind closed doors. But during Hillary’s presidential campaign, we’ve seen the real Bill boiling with rage... But don’t think that he can’t stage blowing his top when he thinks it will be strategically useful...Bill’s tantrums are causing the press to focus on him and not Hillary. That’s what he wants. No more questions about her experience, her ethics, her flip-flops. Now it's all about Bill. (Former Clinton advisor, Dick Morris)

"The Clinton camp knows what it’s doing, and its slimy maneuvers have been working. .. But the damage to Senator Obama has been real, and so have the benefits to Senator Clinton of these and other lowlife tactics." (NYT: Bob Herbert)

I remember when Bill Clinton personally ordered, without convening the Chiefs of Staff, the bombing campaign in Kosovo; it started 8 hours before the Senate was meeting to impeach him, the House having already done so. The Senate said impeachment would be inappropriate during a time of war. Yes, Bill and Hillary were subject to Republican jihads for Whitewater and Monica, but it must also be admitted that clearing up the first merely required handing over a few financial papers, and clearing up the second would've been easier without Bill's history as a sexual predator.

I can see why people would vote for Hillary, and respect the position. She's a policy wonk, and at least she's an adult. Tactical handling of issues will improve, and the Clintons are better than the Bushes. But let's not kid ourselves: these people, both of them, are dirty. They're not going to roll back the Patriot Act, Iraq, FISA, torture, or much else. They're not even very good leaders, and we're going to need great leadership. Which happens to be a quality Barack Obama has consistently exhibited over his entire adulthood.

If Hillary Clinton is elected, it would unify Republican reaction to such an extent as to literally endanger the union. For that reason alone, I cannot welcome their return to the Presidency of this country. They had their chance. But there's another, even bigger reason: I would not welcome John McCain, who would have an excellent, unthinkable chance of winning against a Hillary ticket.

Petroliana, Part Two

In Part One, I related the pleasant memories of my grandparents filling up their Mercury Comet at the Atomic station north of Mayfield, New York, with me in the backseat killing brain cells, huffing the intoxicating fumes of leaded gas. For a decade and more thereafter, the long-chain benzene smell of gasoline would fairly infuse my being with happiness, building into full consciousness. The characteristic smell is tinged at this remove with varied resins of regret--for declined villages of my youth; for the freedoms of the travels I later embarked upon; and for the creeping realization of the oft-gruesome lengths to which I and my culture have gone to procure and command the substance itself.

It was gasoline ripped apart my village. My family. Me. To my undiscerning, innocent eyes, my world was still a serene harbor of middle-class, working-class enjoyments, rather than a small failing mill town basking in the temporary wake of a Great War which had won a prosperous respite. Despite my illegitimate situation, the insecurity of which has never left me, my family loved me, and I dearly loved them even if I felt apart from not having or knowing my dad. But I had a family, it was just there, pre-packaged, and I didn't have to go and figure out how to build another like some idiotic refugee.

It was deemed perfectly safe to walk to kindergarten, a lovely anachronism compared to a city where even in the safest neighborhoods children of any description hoofing it down a sidewalk are about as common as meteorites. In my village, near inhabitants were known of long acquaintance, and by force of sustained probity, civic duty, or commonality, virtually all were well-liked. I will not sketch paradise, not at all, there were those who were marked as those to be avoided, but the structures and scales of the village were decidedly more Victorian than modern, more early industrial than late. Although delight in internal combustion engines and their shiny steel envelopes was in full bloom, walking across town was still very common among adults.

And it wasn't all delight. No. Cars killed and maimed more people than died in wars, and I was not even allowed to ride with my great aunt Lil. Nor with my neighbor, mentor, and dear, dear friend Walt Allen who first taught me, starting when I was 4 years old, how to mow lawns and women. Going with them was forbidden, their driving techniques demonstrably learned on inappropriate things, she on stagecoaches delivering mail in the Adirondacks, he on bulldozers making airfields on the Aleutian Islands.

Driving had not fully defined my local environment, and nationally, Eisenhower's Interstate Road System (intended for rapid nuclear missile deployments) was not yet complete. My path to school would usually cross between three imposing, four or five-storied wooden buildings, leather mills sited along a stream, two of them nearing a hundred years old, one for rendering, one for tanning, and a newer one for cutting animal hides. The stream had strained to aid industry since Colonial times, and its noxious sludges and vapors ran the visible gamut of a chemical rainbow, and smelled like something which could probably dissolve you. Nonetheless it was still common for five-year olds to cross a train trestle over the Cayadutta creek in Gloversville, New York, hopping from tie to tie over the pickled waters below. That was the tiny scale of our commute, a naughty word most of us would learn only much later in adulthood.

My grandparents and their contemporaries, in fact most adults I knew, were part of 'the greatest generation,' the one celebrated for winning a war advertised as Good. They were heroes enough to me, for sure, but they would've shared a good laugh at both appellations. Then, they would have paused and looked up to solemnly thank their luck. Not only for making it through ok, but for the houses they bought, the families they grew, the businesses they started, and any educations they pursued were financed with easy-going GI Bill loans--worth more than $100,000 is today, available to every veteran.

My Uncle Franz, or Frank, affectionately known to his two older brothers as "the Professor," went to college and later became Controller of a national timber and paper company. The veterans and cronies felt lucky to be Americans, not Japanese, Russians, or Germans. They were well aware that if any single thing had made the fighting easier, it was America's ability to fill tankers with abundant petroleum products and send them off, on bargain-basement terms, to dodge torpedoes and fuel the foreign allies. To serve deep purposes. To them, it was simple. They won because the enemy had run out of fuel. Dick Guggenberger was a marine from Guadalcanal until Okinawa, everybody knew without him saying so that he'd killed more Nips than seismic activity, and he said, "Shooting them took way too long. We only won because we hit the refineries and sank the tankers, just like with the Krauts."

Five-year olds can remember things like they were yesterday. America was gushing oil in the 1940s. Germany was decidedly not, and amongst other powers such as the United States, it was conniving for control over unimaginably vast Mid-east oil fields. When I once asked assembled vets why the Nazis lost after instigating such dreaded perturbations, my uncle Hank, or Heinrich, answered: "No gas."

By contrast, in early 1945 he had enough spare juice for his halftrack to once drive a considerable distance east to his aunt's house in Czechoslovakia, clear outside a war zone (I assume as part of Patton's "Creeping Offensive"), to personally deliver Red Cross packages to her. Here is Uncle Hank's full dissertation on his lengthy participation in the Battle of the Bulge, all the firefights, the unthinkable attacks into the Hurtgen Forest, winning his medals and capturing scores of German soldiers: "It was cold." Then he took a few gulps of Genessee in the firelight. US control of the region's oil was secured by secret coup in 1953 Iran (see Iran's Short, Iterative History), then by British/French humiliations at the Suez Canal, by their indebtedness to America, and by secret unilateral treaty with Saudi Arabia in 1958 (see The Return Of Containment).

It was my pleasure to be the Bringer of Cold Beer to these men and their friends, who in my mind's eye still sit around a stone chimney they had built on top of the long reddened pine needles on summer evenings, fire-flies phosphoring, mosquitoes trying to brave the smoke, men analyzing news of the world with ancient heat under an overarching canopy. They joked and and reminisced while I fed needles into the fire, listening waiting for the smoke to come and the sudden burst into flame. I got to hear them talk unguarded, so their thoughts, as honestly as they would share them with each other, were shared with me and absorbed. When I die, theirs is the council fire to which I will return.

Not an officer among them, but they all grasped the conflict's essential nature, and each voiced measures of horror, disgust, skeptical perspective...from what they said, I suspect they knew the Second World War was fought over access to energy. As was the First, somewhat less obviously. They would not have known, nor desired to know, the energy's exact extent and particulars which had been won. But they knew victory was huge, they had been used and got lucky in some ways, they knew defeat would have been more huge. Their lives had been bet, they won, and it all had to do with oil.

Modern war runs on combustion, and the extent of petroleum's importance in deciding the 'Good War' is difficult to overstate. One example: Franco, the fascist victor of the Spanish Civil War, stayed neutral in exchange for oil, making Allied victories less costly and perhaps saving my beer quaffers' lives. As they served in uniform, the US agreed to supply 80% of Spain's pre-1940 rate of consumption, so it may be surmised that from 1940-1945, nearly all petroleum used in that country came from the US (and, technically, Britain). When in 1942 Franco supplied "volunteers" to the Eastern Front, encouraged a vehemently pro-Axis press, and victualled German subs at Vigo, the spigot was shut off, and Franco was quickly forced to acquiesce. Again. He beseeched Germany for oil, but none came. Not a drop.

Had Spain not been neutralized, Gibraltar, the British Navy's bottle cap to the Mediterranean, would probably have been taken by the Germans, who itched to undertake Operation Felix. It never came off, the price, oil, too steep for Hitler. And not taking Gibraltar was the same as not taking Russia. Churchill's desperate war in North Africa to wall off the oil fields was nearly lost despite keeping that maritime keystone, and it must have been lost if a fascist dictator who owed his very rule to Hitler and Mussolini, his country a mere rope's length across the Straits of Gibraltar, had not been bribed away.

The year I remember best under the pines was probably 1968, when America's relative prosperity and oil productio happened to be near their peaks. Sometimes before fetching my grandfather's beer, a Genesee, I asked if it was ok to take a sip. He said yes, but just a little. I will bring you a six-pack when I come back, grandfather. Before he came home in 1945, the US was producing 1.7 billion barrels of oil per year, and as I popped the top in 1968, output had doubled to 3.4 billion barrels per year, all downhill from there. My grandparents would soon upgrade from their Comet to a big-ass Chevy Impala. It was the hay-day of the muscle car, auto manufacturers were engaging in horsepower wars and, in all earnestness, trying to figure out...how to consume more gasoline.

There was a good deal of uneasiness about Vietnam around the evening fireplace, even disagreement, both about the military conflict itself and the bubbling fallout, social discords fully or semi-connected. My mother, uncle, and aunt were each in their own way harbingers of dislocation, my mother by having me, my uncle by commuting to General Electric an hour distant, my aunt by running entirely away with a hippie who could've played the role of Jesus in a movie.

My beloved cousin David, who was so kind to me, was a new college-graduated engineer at Dow Chemical. He was Uncle Hank's son, and his Corvette went off the New York State Thruway with his fiancee' when he was driving his beautiful fiancee home late one night, two weeks away from their wedding. No skid marks. Both dead. My family never recovered. His mother my aunt Sophie walked to his headstone every day for the rest of her life and prayed over it in snow and rain, and my Uncle Rocky his brother asked, "Why couldn't God have taken me?" That was my first worst day, when I first contemplated nothingness, terrifying nothingness, I saw it and asked my mother, "What happens when we die?" I can still hear my grandmother's cries just as they occurred, perfectly preserved, when she answered the phone that morning in the still-dark-outside, her voice, always disposed to kindness, begging god and fate itself for another chance, another reality. Because sometimes it's best to deny this one.

Gasoline. Enough of it to burn the bodies of my heroes and my village and their children with. Still, nothing seemed directly, fundamentally amiss in greater Petroliana. How could it? "There's nothin' like the face, of a kid eating a Hershey bar," sang a jingle on TV, and my grandfather would then watch hippies on the nightly news and be moved to yell, "Get your hair cut!" I would peer out happily from underneath the coffee table and wait for a visitor to drop in by the expediently unlocked back door and say, "Hi, how ya doin'? Whatcha got cookin', Evvy?" I wanted to screw Mary Anne on Gilligan's Island first I saw her, and can't turn down such bread and circuses.

We dimly apprehended the intrusion of another dimension, an entirely additional plane on which we would have to compete, one trumping the familial interdependence and community fellowship we so took for granted. There's a lot of ways to kill a man, there's a lot of ways to die. Few of them are quick. Humans are pretty tough. But we had no idea our domain started to end in 1971, and when it happened, it wasn't on the nightly news, or if it was, it was beyond the ken of us and Walter Cronkite. We couldn't identify the source of the calamities to come, sufficiently numerous and significant to require a Part Three.