A grassroots movement to elect Michael Palin for President has begun. He is being touted as the preferred Palin. Good luck and God’s speed, Michael!
Michael Palin For President!
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Category Archives: Politics
Palin Delivers to RNC Smugfest
Until last night, I thought that an Obama win was uncertain only by how big the margin would be. After listening to the speech by VP candidate Palin, I’m not so sure now. Palin delivered what can only be regarded as a superb speech in terms of a crisp delivery and scrappy rhetorical barbs. With the best speech writers PAC money can buy, and with a large dollop of natural Ability, she delivered at the big event. Check out Mudflats for a fun post.
The St. Paul event center was packed to the rafters with plump, pasty-faced plutocrats and a few blond Barbie-Doll delegates within easy camera range. Conventions are engineered specifically for television and both the DNC and RNC have talented empressarios to put on a memorable show.
No matter what you think of any of the candidates, it is bound to be an interesting home stretch to election day.
I have a dream too!
I have a dream. I dream of a time when election crazed talking heads find some new metaphores. I dream of a time when networks lengthen the news sampling interval from 5 minutes to something greater. I dream of a time when microanalysis of the faintest political nuance is recognized for what it is- gossip. I dream of a time when broadcast news people understand the concept of signal to noise ratio.
Finally, I dream of a time when people focus on the core of MLK’s dream- nonviolence- rather than the attention deficit parroting of the 4 words for the sake of loftiness.
Self-Imposed Complexity and the Ratchet Principle
The portfolio of laws that American citizens are subject to seems to grow without bounds. Every year our congress drafts a new collection of laws to submit to the process of enactment. State legislatures, county and city governments all are able to add new rules and constraints on our degrees of freedom. As if that weren’t enough, people willingly move into convenant controlled communities where they sign away basic freedoms like the freedom to choose house paint or to leave the garage door open.
We are gradually fencing in all of the free space where conduct is unregulated. Our Nanny State leaders are scaring the bejeebers out of us through defense initiatives and dire warnings about what could happen if terrorists took an interest in disrupting industry and infrastructure.
Our town of 6,000 has to comply with Homeland Security requirements by fencing in the town water tank in a certain way. Some terrorist could poison the water. In fact, that fiend would probably be a psychotic local citizen bent on retribution, not a Shiite saboteur in sandals. Collectively, we are at much more risk from fellow citizens than from foreign bad guys. Perhaps that is the hidden agenda.
Citizens are turning over priceless freedom artifacts in exchange for promissory notes claiming to protect the bearer. Once we give up degrees of freedom in the conduct of our lives, we can never get them back. Govennment will not refund units of control. As we increase the complexity of our world through an ever increasing statutory web of control, we forfeit degrees of freedom. It is like a ratchet. You can click forward, but there is no going back.
New subject. Read Jim Kunstlers post “Reality Bites“.
Bacevich on Consumerism and the Imperial Presidency
While I have been struggling in my usual caveman way to express my frustrations with our national governance, whom should I stumble into but Andrew J. Bacevich, Boston Univ professor of history and international relations, who has been working on this matter for some time. Bacevich has written a book called The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. This exceptionally articulate fellow was recently interviewed by Bill Moyers on public television.
His thesis comes down to the notion that American demand for consumer goods and credit has resulted in a kind of consumer imperialism. To facilitate this “domestic disfunction” or “crisis of profligacy”, the executive branch has acquired an excessive reach that exists only by the wither and atrophy of congress. By fiat of the executive, and the mumbling consent of a passive congress, our military adventures have distracted Americans from an examination of our continuous and undisclipined consumerism and indebtedness.
Georgia on my mind
I’m glad that the USA is able to scold CCCP Russia for its invasion of Georgia from our lofty position on the moral high ground. I suppose that the irony of our warning to Russia could be discounted as the delerium of a petroleum besotted empire in decline. While it may not be that bad yet, we certainly have been driven by our political leaders to a remote location in the desert and abandoned.
Western Civilization classes of the future will note that the inability of the USA to constructively engage post-communist Russia was perhaps one of the greatest opportunities lost of the 20th Century.
From NIMBY to BANANA
The 2005 government report entitled Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management, by Hirsch, Bezdek, and Wendling, is a sobering tally of the current picture of oil production and consumption in the world today. Often referred to as the Hirsch Report, the authors take a “now shot” of the global oil production scene and speak directly to the matter of mitigating the approaching economic disruption that must usher an unprepared nation into a future of peak and declining oil production.
If you read the Hirsch Report and pay attention to current events, you may be gripped by a kind of cognitve dissonance, or a haunting sense resembling a schizophrenic episode of contradictory voices in the collective consciousness. While the global warming showboat is paddling up and down the Mississippi blowing steam and calliope music, nationalized oil producers are failing to answer calls for increased production in reply to a dramatic ramp-up in petroleum demand. Some call for increased exploration and others call for drop in replacements for petroleum. All the while, evidence accumulates that the ecosystem suffering from consumption and waste generation.
As with any discussion involving economics, it is possible for people to speak imprecisely when discussing supply and demand. Econobrowser takes Hirsch to task in this manner. It seems that many of us confuse demand with desire.
Supply equals demand today, supply will equal demand in 2025, and supply will equal demand in 2050. Whatever Hirsch means by “peaking of world conventional oil production,” it certainly isn’t the condition that “production will no longer satisfy demand.”
Our news media, now almost fully morphed into a perverse mix of gibbering Bill O’Reilly clones and entertainment news programming, prattles endlessly about the hurtful gasoline prices and truncated vacation plans. Government makes flatulent noises about more drilling, but hardly a peep about reduced consumption. Where is the journalist corps? Who is asking the tough questions?
In isolation, either climate change or an exponential oil shock are more complex than nimrods leaders in the Bush administration can process. Together, these stresses add up to a major challenge to the way we live. Maybe the situation is more complex than any nation can reasonably respond to. With global prosperity comes global demand for resources. Western nations have built a house of cards based on cheap petroleum. Instead of wage growth in the past 20 years, we have been given easier access to credit. Instead of increased savings, we have found ways to burn up discretionary income.
A major part of what has to happen to adapt to the new reality of petroleum scarcity is a remodel of our infrastructure. We need more passenger rail lines and terminals with the necessary right-of-way issues taken care of. Workers need to live closer to their place of employment. The airlines have to figure out how to operate profitably with reduced passenger miles. We must upgrade our electric power distribution system to accommodate the increasing reliance on electrical energy. If wages do not change, we must adapt to having less discretionary income to spend.
But a remodel of infrastructure will require that we adapt to living nearer to it. In the past, a proposal to build a power plant is met with a chorus of outrage or “concern”. It used to be called NIMBY- Not-In-My-Back-Yard. The latest acronym is BANANA- Build-Absolutely-Nothing-Anywhere-Near-Anything. New power transmission lines and generating plants will have to go up and it will have to happen somewhere. People naturally fret about real estate prices and their view from the dining room window. I foresee more exercise of eminent domain in the future.
New Book by Lewis Black
Lewis Black has a new book out called “Me of Little Faith“. He has some video exerpts on his website that are fairly amusing.
Farewell George Carlin
June 22, 2008, Santa Monica, California. Comedian and satirist George Carlin died sunday evening after checking into a Santa Monica hospital complaining of chest pains. He was 71.
Carlin was a brilliant social satirist and comic. He had the ability to look at ordinary things from a different angle and see the obvious obsurdity in things most of us accept as simple background noise. This is one of the key attributes of a successful satirist and comedian.
I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.
The very existence of flamethrowers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, “You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.”
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, “Where’s the self-help section?” She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.
There’s no present. There’s only the immediate future and the recent past.
Not only do I not know what’s going on, I wouldn’t know what to do about it if I did.
-George Carlin
Carlin was a serial quipster who pushed the boundaries of social norms. His Seven Dirty Words ended up as the center of a 1978 Supreme Court ruling that affirmed the right of the state to bar “indecent” of speech on the public airwaves.
While it is common for contemporary comedians to exploit “indecent” speech for shock value today, few seem to have the facility with language that Carlin had. He was able to reduce to a few short humorous sentences the dark uncertainties that many of us have with common subjects. Carlin’s observations on taboo subjects put him well ahead of his time.
Verbund Manufacturing
German manufacturing culture does many things very well, but a few things particularly stand out. One of these items pertains to the concept of verbund manufacturing. Verbund simply means “integrated” or “linked”. Verbund manufacturing sites are clusters of manufacturing units that take advantage of proximity. Clustering can offer certain logistic and energy advantages if done intelligently.
A cluster of manufacturing sites can operate and share a co-generation plant for the distribution of steam, waste heat, and electricity. Large capital items like steam plants can be shared so funds can be plowed into larger scale for better economy. Rail operations and other transportation resources can be shared as well. Clustering also provides for the possibility of vertically integrated manufacturing on site and a reduction in transportation costs.
Clustered manufacturing may also have the effect of concentrating the supply of skilled workers for the labor pool. A manufacturing nexus can attract community colleges and other vocational opportunities for the next generation of employees.
The USA has many manufacturing sites where similar industries congregate. Look at the Gulf coast with all of the refinery locations. But the extent to which there are synergistic interactions between companies is unclear.
In the US, corporations tend to behave as the Republic of Exxon or the Republic of the Union Pacific. This kind of a fragmented confederation of corporate states is becoming obsolete as we go up against nationalized business entities that control key resources and trade. The key to future vitality is greater efficiency with resources. Synergistic cooperation is one model that is available. But to do this requires trust and the desire to cooperate for mutual benefit. Competition begets gamesmanship and posturing which works against the verbund model for US businesses.
US corporations have much to learn from this business model.
Lamentations on Chemistry 