Identity: Will the Real Me Please Stand Up?

Yup. Eric Shcmidt, heads up, buddy!  I'm outing myself.

Unless Google changes its hive-mind policy on identity, I'll be moving shortly. Google chairman Eric Schmidt thinks I'm a fraud.  I think he knows better, but he chooses to peddle his snake oil anyway.  He's right about one thing, though:  Google, Google+, Blogspot... these are optional. 

Yesterday in the Guardian there's a good essay on what's wrong with the Google identity policy, and I'm not going to rehash it.  Go read, if you like.  Watch out, though.  It was written by "Cory Doctorow" and I have to wonder about a famous last name like that.  In my youth I sometimes signed unimportant stuff with famous names, just to see if anyone noticed.  (Nobody did.)  Pen names and stage names have been around forever, and I'm not worried about Cory. I don't care what name is on his passport. He wrote a good piece. Mark Twain wrote good pieces, too, but that wasn't the name on his steamboat license.

At least until the Department of Homeland Security came along, there has never been anything illegal about using any name you choose.  Not in the U.S., anyway.  It's done all the time, and has been for centuries. Silence Dogood showed up in 1722 from soon-to-be   notorious bad boy and traitor to his king Ben Franklin.  A pseudonym only becomes an "alias" if you do something illegal.

Okay, as much as I may be a legend in my own mind, especially if drinking heavily, I agree with you.  I'm not Ben Franklin, or even Cory Doctorow.  Not Mark Twain, not Joseph Conrad, not William Shakespeare.  I blog a little bit.  I was in the newspaper business once, long ago.  I could blog under "Wilma Flintstone" and it would make no difference to anyone but me. 

I set this blog up under "Red Sparrow" because I wanted something that sounded vaguely partisan. My mission, after all, and insofar as I have one, is to follow in the footsteps of Jesus by comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.  I'm much better at the second part. What's a poor girl to do? Answer: Play to your strong suit, even if it's only clubs.

It's not too hard to figure out that my "real" identity is Sparrow Letov.  But hold on.  Don't call 411 just yet. Sparrow Letov was born 13 Novemeber 2007, courtesy of Linden Labs and Second Life. At that time, when you created an SL account, you had to pick a last name from a list of a few dozen options.  I picked "Letov" because it's short, easy to remember, has a good beat and it's easy to dance to, and because Russian writers and poets are so wonderfully tragic and romantic.  Or as we used to say back in the day, they're kozmic. 

"Sparrow" has nothing to do with the moronic pirate movies.  That comes from an excellent novel, Bone Dance, by Emma Bull, now sadly out of print. 

If the DHS or the NSA or the FBI want the name printed on my driver's license, that's easy. Linden Labs has that information, and so does Comcast, my ISP for many years.  A few folks in my Google+ circle have it, though very few and only in cases where (a) there's a reason, and (b) trust is pretty damn total.  Of course, the name on my driver's license isn't the same as the ones on either of my two very valid birth certificates.  And those two documents show different names. My old-old passport shows a different name than my old passport. So all you identity wankers who agree with Eric Schmidt, tell me:  What's my real name?  Must be the one on my credit card, huh?

If you've entrusted a bunch of computer geeks and corporate buccaneers at Google and Facebook with your personal information, or hung it out there in public, I think you're a fool, frankly. You've made yourself part of a target-rich environment for every sociopath and evil-doer on the planet.  Good luck. My friends and my family have my phone number and address.  They're free to use them anytime.  And that works both ways. If I went to high school with you in 1963 and we haven't seen each other since, don't expect me to be very interested in what's gone on in your life.  I'm not.  And I'm not interested in telling you about mine.  You're not an "old friend" I can "reconnect" with, you're merely another stranger in this strange land. That's not a bad thing, it's just the way it is.  The past exists only in our minds, and very imperfectly. 

Safety on in the Internet?  Not likely.  Careful as I try to be, anyone who hacks any one of several databases can clean out my debit account.  They could come knocking on my door anytime. So be it.  I'll take those risks.  At least they won't know who's going to answer the door, and they might be surprised. 

Be safe.  Work for peace. Be careful.  It's dangerous out there.

Looking Over the Edge

New Jersey from the ISS.  Very pretty.  But where does the food come from?

In the fantasy land of my own romantic imagination I'm a post-apocalypse kind of gal.  Or  I was until I read The Road.  Or tried to.  Frankly, if I have to choose, I'll take a nice clean asteroid impact anytime, over a wasted planet where we become our own last food supply.  I don't think our prognosis is necessarily terminal, but no pom-poms or snappy cheers from me.  Our response to the unfolding climate disaster, especially, shows that we're collectively not much smarter that those deer I wrote about who yard up and die for lack of critical thinking.  But we might survive what we've done to ourselves. It's possible.

We are developing good technology to solve our energy issues.  We might be able to survive the next couple of centuries' worth of climatic consequences if we move fast enough.  But our core problem is paradoxically the one that's both the easiest and hardest to fix; population growth. I've tried to explore how our energy and population problems are converging. No matter how much sunshine you smoke, it's pretty clear that the rest of this century is liable to be a  horror show. But a lot depends on how fast we can adapt to the end of oil. 

Our brightest hope is hydrogen, the original stuff of the universe. (At least matter-wise.)  This really can be a permanent solution to the energy problem if we get our numbers stabilize at a sustainable level. We just need to find practical technologies for using it.  There's actually a new technology that looks big, as least initially:  nano-porous micro beads.

Cella Energy reportedly has a found a low-cost way to trap hydride compounds inside nano-porous polymer micro beads, thus creating a safe way to store and use hydrogen as safe liquid fuel.

"The hydrogen storage materials are stored at ambient temperatures and pressures, this means that the Cella Energy hydrogen storage materials can be packaged in a regular shaped fuel tank. They do not require the large heavy cylinders designed to withstand high pressures normally associated with hydrogen storage."

Reportedly these micro beads can even be mixed with conventional petroleum fuels and used in existing vehicles with little or no modification.  If this really works and has no unacceptable down-side, this could provide a way to transition off petroleum fuels using existing infrastructure and  resources.  It really could happen, and start happening almost immediately.  Very good news. It could mean we won't have to strip-mine the US and further foul our planetary nest with a massive synthetic fuels program. 

There's still hope for hydrogen fusion, too, although it's hard to be optimistic after 50 years of "just around the corner." 

But we've got to manage our population.  As Issac Asimov and others have pointed out many times, liberty, prosperity, human dignity, and ultimately we ourselves, cannot survive population growth, no matter how slow it may be.  The simple math will kill every last human on earth, just as it did on Easter Island.  For all we know the universe is littered with the ruins of civilizations that did just what we're doing now; ran off the edge of the population cliff at full speed while cutting down every last tree on the island.  Let's hope we can wake up in time. 

San Francisco Bay from the ISS

Be well.  Work for peace.  Keep your powder dry. Don't make babies.   - RS

Consider the Coal-Fired B-52

                            A B-52 flying out of Minot, ND, reportedly on 50-50 synthetic fuel.

There's no such thing as a coal-fired B-52.  Or is there?  It seems there is. 

The US Air Force has been looking at synthetic fuel for years. I found a paper written by Dr Carlo Kopp, a well-known civilian defense analyst and author. His paper, The US Air Force Synthetic Fuels Program, was published by Air Power Australia, an air defense think tank he founded. The paper was last updated in 2008. It's very interesting reading.  I will also point out that the author, Dr. Kopp, is not some cheezy internet blogger pulling nonsense out of his butt. He's a senior member of both the IEEE and the AIAA, and a working computer scientist and EWAR researcher.

He states:

In the US, the Defense Department launched its Assured Fuels Initiative (AFI) in 2001, with the aim of developing domestic sources of clean fuels, using coal and natural gas. This is an ambitious effort intended to break dependency on imported crude oil products. The US Air Force alone burns around 3 billion gallons of aviation kerosene annually, more than half the consumption of the whole US military machine.

Michael A. Aimone, the US Air Force assistant deputy chief of staff for logistics, recently commented 'Our goal is by 2025 to have 70 percent of our aviation fuel coming from coal-based sources'. This is an aggressive but clearly very achievable planning goal.

Conventional oil reserves with essentially be gone very soon—within decades. This is no secret except to those who don't want to think about it. For the Peak Oil doomsday theorists, this is the end of the trail for industrial civilization. Well, not so fast. Not quite.

You can't power a jet fighter or a tractor with coal. (Actually, you could a tractor but it would be ugly.) But there are many mature technologies for converting coal, oil shale, and natural gas to liquid fuels just as good as gasoline or diesel. Canada and China are both doing it today. China is investing heavily in this effort.

Kopp gives a good summary of the available technologies. He also makes several striking statements. Here's one:

In terms of coal reserves, the US is well positioned as it is ranked first globally with 26 percent, followed by Russia with 23 percent, China with 12 percent, and Australia with 8 percent. No less importantly, the US has large reserves of oil shale in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado, forming the Green River formation, which is estimated to contain around 1.5 trillion barrels of oil, cited as 'more than five times the stated reserves of Saudi Arabia'.

Natural gas as a potential feedstock for synthetic fuels is no less abundant, with Russia ranked first, the US ranked sixth, and Canada nineteenth.

Great news, huh?  We're out of the woods.  The sky isn't falling! 

Not so fast, there, Chicken Little.  You've got that nonsense in your head about "500 years of coal reserves," don't you?  That "500 years" is probably less than 50 when you start plugging in what might happen to demand.   And we're going to have to strip-mine a lot of the country to get at it.  Synthetic fuel production processes are dirty.  Coal mining is dirty.  Environmental concerns?  Forget those.  They're gone.  We can't afford them. We've got a greedy world to fight off, mouths to feed, and a landscape to rape.  You tree-huggers better shut up if you know what's good for you. 

If oil consumption goes up just 7 percent per year, that means it doubles in 10 years.  And we know that globally, it's going up a lot faster than 7 percent. 

Coal fuels most of the power grid in the eastern US, and coal and natural gas together fuel almost all of US electricity production.  Nuclear and renewable sources contribute tiny fractions to the total. That's not likely to change. Right now demand is essentially flat. But consider what happens to demand for coal and gas when we start wholesale conversion to synthetic liquid fuels. 

Let's be conservative and say that as we start a wholesale shift to synthetic fuels, demand for coal increases 10 percent per year for awhile.  That's not much, right?  That's a believable number.  Well, that means we have to double our coal production every 7 years.
Put another way, we will have to mine more coal in the next 7 years than we have so far in our entire history.  That's what "doubling time" means. 

If demand for coal rises 30 percent per year, for even a few years, that means coal production has to double every 70/50 = 2.3 years!   

Here's a last tidbit to consider.  Those nice Canadians have all that oil up there. Right now it looks like a lot, and they're happy to sell it to us. The party is going fine so far.  We buy more oil from Canada than from anyone else.  (Think about that Keystone pipeline again.)  But the US is a greedy energy pig, and one day soon the Canadians may realize that their oil reserves aren't really that big at all.  What happens then? 

Whose Oil Should We Use First?

The graphic above is from our friends at Wiki.  It shows the world's proven oil reserves.  Darker = more.  Let's assume this is reasonably accurate and close enough for our purposes.

First, it's important to understand that oil is running out quickly.  We're at peak world production now, meaning plus or minus perhaps five years.  During the latter part of this century world oil production will be a fraction of what it is today. We have increasing demand pursuing a finite resource and there's only one way that can end.  If you don't believe this, you don't understand exponential growth.  Go here and learn.  It's a little arithmetic lesson by physicist Al Bartlett. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&feature=related 

Of course, you can bat your eyelashes and titter something moronic about never being good at math.  Cute dosen't fix stupid, but that's okay.  You'll be happier if you don't know what's really going on.   

Oil is food.  Agriculture is the process of converting petroleum into food.  World population already exceeds the carrying capacity of the earth by at least 4 billion people. That's how many people eat today only because of oil production.  No oil, no food.  And there are lots more people arriving every day. 

A lot of us have been concerned about the levels of oil imports and the national security implications.  I made some noise about that here, the other day.  I've listened to T. Boone Pikens and wondered why the government isn't listening.  Well, I think I figured it out. 

Imagine you're elected President and you're suddenly confronted with what our intelligence planners know; oil is going to be very, very scarce in only a few decades.  Those intel folks understand exponential growth vs. finite resources every bit as well as Dr. Bartlett in his video.  From a national security standpoint, it's very important to be the last country standing with oil  It makes far more sense to hoard your own reserves now and buy foreign oil in todays dollars, which will be worth less tomorrow through inflation. We're still in deep trouble.  We're still running out.  But the rest of the world may run out before North America does.  We'll fend off mass starvation longer. We'll be able to defend ourselves longer. 

So why doesn't anyone talk about ths?   

Do you want to be a President or politician who stands up and starts telling America that the world really is running out of oil, and your children and grandchildren may well face starvation and a collapse of civilization as we know it?  Do you want to try to explain why we need population decline, not growth?  Or economic contraction rather than expansion? Welcome to recession, the new normal. Would anyone listen?  Is anyone listening to those who are saying it now? 

The data's all there, folks.  It's all available.  Do the math for yourself.  Every major news outlet fails to do the math, or else does the math and then lies for their own purposes. 

Don't drink the kool-aid.  Do the math yourself. 

Keystone XL Protest is Bone-Headed

I know I'm about to piss off some of my good friends with this.  I'm sorry.  I have to call them like I see them.

The facts:  The Keystone XL pipeline, when completed, will carry crude oil extracted from the Alberta tar sands to refineries in the U.S.  Pres. Obama has to sign off on the permit for the pipeline.  Congress is not directly in play on this one.  The protest effort, including a petition, protest, and civil disobedience at the White House, is underway this month.  Here are the details: http://www.tarsandsaction.org/

I think this protest effort is based on poor thinking, wrong conclusions, and generally dunder-headed analysis.  It's a misdirection of valuable energy and resources.  To wit:

We're stuck with a petroleum-fueled infrastructure and it's going to take time and a lot of fighting to change that. Canada and the U.S have been extracting crude from the Alberta deposits for years already.  That's not going to stop. If the US doesn't want the oil, the rest of the world, esp. Japan and China, will gladly buy it.  They already are.  But sure, let's dump the pipeline idea and buy more oil from Saudi Arabia...you know...that country that was complicit in the 9/11 attacks.  That's a really good idea, isn't it?  Why would we send our money to those pesky hockey-crazed Canadians when we can give it to a repressive monarchy that helped kill over 3,000 Americans and never stopped smiling?

Are you nuts?  Come on!  Get a grip, people!

It almost gags me to say this, but we need the oil industry.  They've murdered, robbed, and trashed the environment for almost 200 years.  They destroyed mass transit in America.   They need their fingers stomped on, and hard.  Better yet, let's nationalize them.  But we do need them.  There aren't any really good alternatives to petroleum fuels.  None. Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) is the best and closest technologically, but that comes with extraction problems and a carbon penalty, too. If you think electric cars are practical, you've never lived in snow country and you don't know anything about batteries.  I wish they were practical.  Maybe they will be. But they're not an answer now.  Not a practical, affordable one. You want to run cars on ethanol?  Check the grocery prices and think again.  Bio-diesel?  Any commercial drivers reading this?  I was until last year.  Put bio-diesel in a truck or bus that's been running the real stuff and let me know how that works for you.  And don't forget your cell phone or you'll be walking. 

Yes, we need to get rid of the oil-fueled infrastructure.  It's a save-the-planet issue, although I think it's already too late to save the climate.  If you want to protest something, work on that.  Or remember the war in Afghanistan?  Almost nobody gives a shit about that, and this fact alone convinces me that getting rid of the draft was a really bad idea.    Or work on getting our schizoid immigration non-system fixed.  Or figure out a solution to half our population being functionally illiterate. Spend your energy trying to stop the rapid slide of the US towards Third World Shithole status. 

I suggest that getting arrested in front of the White House over this issue has a lot more to do with Mr. McKidden's street cred as a protest organizer than it does with a pipeline that will get built anyway. 

Critical Thinking in the Deer Yard

In the last post I used deer as a metaphor, more or less in passing. For whatever reasons, I woke up this morning thinking about that. Maybe it's because I was an avid deer hunter for a couple of decades in central Minnesota, sitting in tree forts...errr... deer stands in cold, wind, snow, and silence while chickadees landed on my head and my rifle barrel. (I also got to be a pretty hot cribbage player.) Whitetail deer is a subject I know something about. I've read extensively and studied them in the field over many years. I've dissected well over a dozen specimens and studied their anatomy intently. (It's called field-dressing.) But it all came to an end one November morning circa 1995. I was up a tree, studying two big does through my rifle scope, They were 75 yards away, across a small ravine. I steadied on the largest. She was broadside to me and an easy shot. I was in the act of squeezing the trigger when I had “moment” and realized I didn't want to shoot anymore deer. I unloaded the rifle and climbed my sorry butt down out of the tree, and that was that. Don't ask me. I don't know. These things happen, I guess. Anyway, let's get on with the business at hand.

There isn't any accurate way to know how many whitetail deer there were in North America before the Euro-trash arrived, but it was certainly far fewer than it is today. Deer don't thrive in mature forest. There's not much to eat if the trees are big and there's little growing on the forest floor. Given a choice, deer prefer the margins between deep cover and fields or grassland. Logging and agriculture creates wonderful habitat for deer. (So does modern suburban residential development.) But deer were also very much in the human food chain, and by 1900 they were in danger of being hunted to extinction.

Nowadays the damn things have overrun a lot of the country.  They're a bane to farmers and gardeners, and a serious traffic hazard. We've eradicated many of their natural predators because we're too chickenshit to coexist with wolves and big cats. The only real predator deer have left in most places is us. And since most of us object to bullets and arrows flying around our neighborhoods, we aren't too effective at preying on them locally. Except with our cars. So in many parts of the US there are chronic local over-population problems. I live in the city, but along the Mississippi River bluffs, which are steep and heavily wooded. I watch deer prance across the street here almost every day. A couple of times I've had to stop my car in the street to let small groups of does and fawns cross.

Deer care about some of the same things we do; food, water, our children, staying warm and dry, and avoiding getting killed for as long as possible. And here in the north they face an energy crisis* every winter. As cold weather grinds on, there's less and less to eat, i.e. less and less energy to stay warm. If the snow gets deep, it takes more and more energy to look for less and less food. What do they do? They huddle up in refugee camps* called “deer yards.” That sounds vaguely pleasant and pastoral, but that's not the truth. Deer yards for many are no more than places to die. The food runs out, and they die slowly. Coyotes or wolves may take some, if there are wolves or coyotes available. Deer are strictly herbivores, so cannibalism doesn't come up they way it does for humans. For lucky individuals the snow pack will melt soon enough for them to make it. Or not.

Why deer yard up like this isn't settled science.** It's not hard-coded genetically. It's learned, adaptive behavior that has a survival value we don't fully understand. But while the behavior may be the best thing for the species, it's not necessarily the best choice for individual deer. They're smart, adaptable animals. But critical thinking isn't something they're good at and don't seem to be able to learn. Once yarded up, they tend to stay that way even when the future is obvious.

On the other hand, for us humans critical thinking is something we can learn, and as we've already noted, it's a good survival skill. As individuals, it serves us very well when we bother to do it. The trouble is, we don't seem to be able to do it in packs or herds. Unless we're under duress, we're lazy. If there happens to be a smart, strong Alpha who cares about the pack or herd more than his own skin, the critical thinking may get done and be acted on. The pack might thrive. The herd may eat well. But often that's not the case. Most of the time, when we make it through a winter. it's on the strength of social or economic momentum, or sheer dumb luck.

Just something for you to think about the next time you turn on your TV. And if you think you hear an odd noise in the woods, remember to look up.

* I try to flag metaphors with something obvious, but don't blame me if you miss any.

**Here's a good article on deer yarding if you're interested: http://www.deeranddeerhunting.com/biology/why-do-deer-starve-themselves-in-winter

3 Billion Seats, 9 Billion Tickets

The photo above is of Athens, Greece. It was taken from the ISS orbiting 400 km above. More about that in a little bit. 

In Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe there's a fictional rock band, Disaster Area, inspired by Pink Floyd. They're so loud that the audience listens from bunkers thirty seven miles away.  Their PA system violates stategic arms limitation treaties. Just doing their accounting and tax returns requires the invention of a new branch of mathematics. 

Most of us have probably been to a concert of some sort, and paid a lot of money for tickets.  So you can imagine if Diaster Area gives a performance and sells 9 billion ticketsm and when those folks start arriving, imagine there are only 3 billion seats inside those bunkers.  What do you suppose happens next?  Yeah...pretty ugly, I think.

World populations is expected to be over 9 billion by 2050.  Yes, the rate of growth peaked in 1989 and has declined every year since. But that doesn't mean much.  It's growing slower, but it's still growing.  The math is inexorable.  If it keeps growing, eventually the earth is full.

Take another look at Athens.

The actual carrying capacity of the earth for humans is unknown, but estimates are usually 2-3 billion.  Right now population is approaching 7.2 billion.  At the end of WW II it was about 2 billion--pretty near the carrying capacity of the planet. 

We currently convert energy, mostly from petroleum, into food and water.  That's how we make up the difference between carrying capacity and population.  It's not just fuel for tractors or fishing boats.  Think about all the industrial processing and fuel requited to turn Kansas wheat or Iowa corn or Chinese rice into something you or I can buy locally.  Meat, by the way, takes at least 100 times the energy input of rice or wheat.  Think about all the transportation, refrigeration, processing, reprocessing, packaging, the lights in the processing plants, the machinery, and getting the workers to and from work. 

Got it in your head?  Okay, now cut world oil production by half and increase demand by..oh...20 percent.   What do you suppose happens to the price of food in your local store?  In Athens? 

For some chilling reading try the Hirsch Report, prepared for the US D.O.E. in 2005.
http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/others/pdf/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf

Take another look at Athens, and consider that the planet isn't ever going to look like that.  The earth isn't going to ever "fill up" with people. 

Deer don't control their population, so nature does it for them.  You find them in the woods around here sometimes, usually in the spring.  Sometimes people feed them corn or deer pellets to get them through the months of deep snow and starvation, but a lot of folks have stopped doing that because the costs have risen so much, and the economy is so bad.  In severely over-populated areas the state encourages predition by humans, i.e. more deer hunting. 

Three billion seats, nine billion tickets.  It won't work.  That's six billion too many. For every three people on earth, two won't get a seat at the dinner table. 





 

On Romney, Obama and Roaches

Yesterday I wrote about the Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case, and the Orwellian notions that (1) free speech applies to corporate entities, and (2) giving someone money constitutes speech. That wasn't anything new to anyone who's been paying attention. Obama slapped the court around over this in his 2011 State of the Union speech, and that brought some short-lived media attention to the issue. But memories are pretty damn short. Yesterday Mitt Romney said, “Corporations are people, too.” and that's getting all sorts of media attention. But I haven't heard any of our alleged pundits connect the dots yet.

As usual, I find myself muttering, “WTF?” under my breath.

The heckler who called Romney out on that statement was right on the mark, but that's beside the point. This notion is a key piece of the Big Lie that's been peddled by what we now call conservatives since the founding of America. This notion of “corporate personhood” was very much on the table when the Constitution was written. Thomas Jefferson warned George Washington that we should, “crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government.” The first Supreme Court decision on this issue came in 1819. Now, almost 200 years later, it seems to be all but settled.

When politicians peddle lower tax rates for the “job creators” this issue is at the unspoken core of the argument.

If you don't think history is worth studying, here's a perfect example of why you're full of shit.

If you think American public education is designed to crank out obedient workers with very little capacity for critical thinking, you're right and this is a perfect example of why it's been deliberately designed to do just that. (It fails even at that limited goal, but that's another discussion.)

Romney defended his statement by saying that corporate profits go to “people.” Well, now Mitt, that's an abuse of logic worthy of Palin or Bachmann. And I don't know about Palin, but I'm pretty damn certain both Romney and Bachmann have visited this corporate personhood issue before. Bachmann is an attorney. Romney has a law degree from Harvard.

In theory, we could have a constitutional amendment to define, limit, or eliminate corporate personhood. If it were sold the right way, I think most Americans would jump all over it. But it won't ever happen because almost every elected official, of either party, is a tool of that aristocracy Jefferson warned Washington about in 1816, and anyone who supported such a thing would be squished like a roach under that aristocratic heel. Obama may rant about that Supreme Court decision in public, but he understands the issue and the fix better than most people in the country. He's a constitutional law professor, besides being President. But he's powerless, too. Just like the rest of us.

I didn't set out to write a political blog. If I write about politics a lot, it's because I don't know how the hell to keep my balance in this rolling flood of stinking brown slop. I've tagged myself a “liberal” all my life, but I don't even know what that label means anymore. For example, the recall elections last Tuesday in Wisconsin, my neighbor 20 miles to the east... Some of those political ads aired here. They were so devoid of meaningful content that they would have persuaded me of nothing except to stay home. I don't like organized labor any better than I like Koch Industries. Those two played Dueling Dollars, labor lost, and the public employees never had a chance.

But hey, that's nothing. Just wait until the house/senate uber-committee tries to negotiate a budget deal. We ain't seen nothin' yet. (And if you haven't rescued your 401k from the stock market yet, just sit back and try to enjoy the ride until you black out at 8 or 12 g's.) The best budget advice I've seen comes from a guy in Alaska named Jim Wright, who writes a wonderful blog at www.stonekettle.com:

You ever hear of old people before Social Security? No, no you did not. That’s right, Social Security causes old people! No Social Security, no old people. We’ll live forever! Get rid of Welfare and we’ll cure poverty too! Double Rainbow!


Blame isn't very helpful, but it feels good.  I blame the Supreme Court, at least for the moment. Socrates warned us that democracy was a bad idea and suggested we go with a group of philosopher-kings.  The SC is the closest thing we have, and they've saved our bacon more than once.  But this time they screwed the pooch big time. I refer, of course, to Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.  (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=08-205#other1)

The gist of the SC ruling here is that restricting campaign contributions by corporations violates freedom of speech.  Think about that a minute.  Is GE or Koch Industries entitled to freedom of speech?  Is giving someone money even "speech?" 

In the dissenting opinion, Justice Stevens says:

In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office. Because they may be managed and controlled by nonresidents, their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of eligible voters. The financial resources, legal structure, and instrumental orientation of corporations raise legitimate concerns about their role in the electoral process. Our lawmakers have a compelling constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races.

A majority of the court didn't see it that way, and the floodgates were opened.  Justice Kennedy wrote the ruling.  It's about as long as Orwell's 1984, and it's similar in other ways, too.  You can read it at the link posted above if you're a masochist.

It's my sincere hope that as the budget battles and electioneering heat up, a great mass of Americans will exercise their right to self-defense, shoot their TVs, and toss the carcasses into the streets. 

And I swear... If we elect another Texan to the White House I'm walking north and never looking back.