Where We're At - A Most Awesome Rant......,

What Kunstler said; The US economy is crumbling because the way we conduct the activities of daily life is insane relative to our circumstances. We've spent sixty years ramping up a suburban living arrangement that has suddenly entered a state of failure, and all its accessories and furnishings are failing in concert. The far-flung McHouse tracts are becoming both useless and worthless in the face of gasoline prices that will never be cheap again. The strip malls and office "parks" are following the residential real estate off a cliff. The retail tenants of all those places are hemorrhaging customers who have maxed out every last credit card. The lack of business is now leading to substantial layoffs. The airline industry is dying and will probably cease to exist in its familiar form in 24 months. The trucking industry is dying, threatening the entire just-in-time distribution system of things that even people with little money to spend still need, like food.

These conditions will now get a lot worse, no matter whether the banks continue to conceal their problems. All of it leads to an inflection point that coincides with the November election. By then, I expect that quite a few banks will be toast, job layoffs will rise spectacularly, foreclosures and bankruptcies will be raging across the land, and homeowners north of the magnolia belt will be shattered by the cost of staying warm this winter.

All this hardship and woe will be blamed on the Republican party. It may actually kill off the party. Political parties do go out-of-business in American history, and this one deserves to die -- with its aggressive no-nothingism, its avaricious, punitive religious extremism (the religious part often being fake), its stunning inattention to financial malfeasance in areas under its direct supervision, and its gross incompetent mismanagement of the nation's strategic interests.

That said, I will feel a little sorry for Mr. Obama if he gets to the White House. He'll have to find a gentle way to tell the truth to the people who elected him, people who will be suffering mightily, and who will be very sore about their losses. He'll have to tell them that the previous "release" of the American Dream software is obsolete, and the new version will require a whole lot more of them in the way of earnest effort, delayed gratification, and revised expectations.

Global warming puts Russia under pressure ‘here and now’

The report says: 'The global academic community is convinced that the danger of climate change is not that much about 1 or 2 degrees C of global warming; it is more connected to the fact that the weather in different world regions is becoming less sustainable and extreme weather events more common.' WWF-Russia/OxfamGB

“We must understand that damage caused by climate change is here and now rather than a problem in the distant future, in distant lands. There’s a lot at stake, including our health and even our lives,” said Igor Chestin, WWF-Russia CEO.

The report – ‘Russia and neighbouring countries: environmental, economic and social impacts of climate change’ – highlights key evidence linking climate change to failing health.

Russia and neighboring countries: environmental, economic and social impacts of climate change (PDF, 2 Mb)

Jindal Creationist or Crass Opportunist?

In The Scientist; When the press refer to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, they inevitably mention that he is the youngest current governor (at 37), and the first Indian-American to serve the post. By all accounts the former Rhodes Scholar with a BS in biology from Brown University is an extraordinary individual. So, it was not surprising that his name appeared on John McCain's short list for potential Vice Presidential running mates. However, on June 27, he signed a bill that will turn Louisiana into an educational laughing stock for allowing the intelligent design brand of creationism to worm its way into science classes under the guise of academic freedom.

The Louisiana Science Education Act is yet another attempt to place creationism into science classes, orchestrated by the marketing geniuses behind the intelligent design movement. The bill, which easily passed both the state House and Senate, at first glance seems benign or even progressive: It allows teachers to use "supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials" to "create and foster an environment...that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied." Other than the false notion that the lack of supplemental materials in classrooms is hindering the state education system, what could be wrong with that?

The bill is derived from a model bill put forward by the Discovery Institute (yes, those guys again), and encourages examination of, you guessed it, "evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning." Louisiana is now the first state to pass the new generation creationist bill under the guise of academic freedom. Five other states have similar bills pending, including Alabama, Florida, Michigan, Missouri, and South Carolina.

Unfortunately, Louisiana is no stranger to urine in the education pool. The legal case that forced creationists to rethink their strategy of ramming religion into science classes, Edwards v. Aguillard, started in the Bayou State. That case ended with the Supreme Court ruling in 1987 that Louisiana's Creationism Act was unconstitutional because it specifically forbade the teaching of evolution in public schools unless "creation science" was also taught. In other words, it openly pushed religion into science classrooms. As a direct result of that case, the intelligent design movement was born to manufacture support for the phony science of intelligent design creationism.

Barak to US: Time running out on Iran

From the Jerusalem Post;

In a series of consultations apparently aimed at coordinating policies against the Iranian nuclear threat, Defense Minister Ehud Barak will head to the US on Monday for talks at the Pentagon, days after Mossad chief Meir Dagan was in Washington for meetings with key intelligence officials. Sources say Israel is urgently trying to convince the US that Iran is closer to passing the nuclear threshold than Washington believes.

Dagan's visit came as Iran held a second day of military maneuvers on Thursday and claimed to have test-fired more long-range missiles meant to show that the country can defend itself against any attack by the US or Israel.

Barak will spend three days in the US for talks with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Defense officials said he would likely also meet with President George W. Bush.

A week after Barak's visit, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi will head to Washington for his own round of talks with American defense chiefs, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen, who was in Israel two weeks ago.

Barak hinted at Israeli readiness to attack the Islamic Republic on Thursday.

"The Iranian issue is a challenge not just for Israel but for the entire world," Barak told a meeting of the Labor Party faction. "Israel is the strongest country in the region and we have proven in the past that we are not deterred from acting when our vital interests are at stake."

But he quickly noted that "the reactions of [Israel's] enemies need to be taken into consideration as well."

Undeniable, Unsustainable, and Politically Untouchable

Quoth David Walker, former comptroller general of the US;

“I think the future of the country is at risk. I think we have a number of serious sustainability challenges that current elected officials are not taking seriously.”

Walker estimates that the federal government has run up $52.7 trillion in federal liabilities and unfunded promises. That amounts to $175,000 for each citizen, he says.

If no corrective action is taken, Walker said the potential consequences could be more significant than the subprime mortgage crisis that has hammered the US housing market. “We have a super subprime crisis on the horizon and that super-subprime crisis is the federal government’s finances. The same conditions that led to the mortgage based subprime crisis exist for the federal government’s finances,”

So, how exactly is it again that the government could bail out Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac? This would be that light and airy meringue undergirding the proverbial financial house of cards. In any event, the Christian Science Monitor details the announcement of a new foundation to tackle U.S. federal debt.

Fannie and Freddie Doomsday Scenario

Having put the distraction du jour to bed, it's time to get back on mission and address yet another bit of "end of the world as we know it" gossip.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government-sponsored enterprises that help the mortgage market function by purchasing pools of loans and packaging them into securities. If one or both couldn't function, the result would be chaos.




At the end of last year, Fannie alone had packaged and guaranteed about $2.8 trillion worth of mortgages, approximately 23% of all outstanding U.S. mortgage debt. And these securities are highly rated and sold to investors all over the world.

"If Fannie or Freddie failed, it would be far worse than the fall of [investment bank] Bear Stearns," says Sean Egan, head of credit ratings firm Egan Jones. "It could throw the economy into depression or something close to it."

Fannie and Freddie are among the most highly-leveraged companies around, meaning the amount of capital they have on hand is nowhere close to the level of assets they control. However, as a practical matter, the government can't let these institutions fail because they are being counted on to help fix the mortgage mess. As per my favorite new coinage from David Mills, yet another "house of cards built on a foundation of meringue".

OPEC Leader Issues Warning About Iran and Oil Supply

In today's NYTimes; The head of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries warned on Thursday that oil prices would experience an “unlimited” increase in the event of a military conflict involving Iran because the group’s members would be unable to make up the lost production.

“We really cannot replace Iran’s production — it’s not feasible to replace it,” Abdalla Salem el-Badri, the OPEC secretary general, said in an interview.

Iran, the second-largest producing country in OPEC after Saudi Arabia, produces about four million barrels of oil a day out of the daily worldwide production of close to 87 million barrels.

The country has been locked in a long dispute with Western nations over its nuclear ambitions.

In recent weeks, the price of oil has risen higher on speculation that Israel could be preparing an attack on the country’s nuclear facilities. The saber rattling intensified this week with missile tests by Iran.

That has further unnerved oil markets because of concerns that any conflict with Iran could disrupt oil shipments from the gulf. In New York, crude oil climbed $5.60, to $141.65 a barrel.

“The prices would go unlimited,” Mr. Badri said during the interview, referring to the effect of a military conflict. “I can’t give you a number.”

Iran has insisted that its nuclear program is for purely peaceful purposes.

Mr. Badri, a former oil executive who has headed the oil industry in Libya and served as deputy prime minister of that country, called for a peaceful solution, and he hinted that an additional conflict in the Middle East besides the continuing conflict in Iraq would be severe and long-lasting.

“If something happened there, nobody would be able to solve it,” he said, referring to a war involving Iran.

Chicago-Style Nut Cutting.....,

John Kass does an excellent job with the distraction du jour, seasoning it with some old school Chicago packing-house type flavor;

The tape was on the Fox News' "The O'Reilly Factor," and host Bill O'Reilly offered it with glee at the top of his show, with Jackson muttering about Obama's desire to carry on the Bush White House policy of funding faith-based programs.

"See, Barack's been talking down to black people on this faith-based—," Jackson says during a break in taping. "I want to cut his nuts out."

The national media was stunned, as if they'd just found out Obama is a Chicago politician rather than a mythic hero of Kennedyesque proportions, who drew the great sword Axelrod from the cornerstone of Chicago's City Hall.

So stunned, they missed the truly freaky part, Jackson twisting his right wrist, as if he held a curved blade, giving a little pull, grunting for emphasis, like a butcher of the old school, if you will.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

Here in Chicago we're not shocked. Chicago was once the hog butcher for the world, so our politics is stuffed with meat metaphors and references to animal reproductive parts.

Without race-hustling buffoons like Billo and the entire faux news organization, this type of thing would never garner the extraneous public attention that he's lavished upon it. Without distractions like this, however, Billo and all his confederate cronies wouldn't know what to do with themselves.

Arctic Zeppelin

Named the Jess Heavy Lifter after Pete Jess, SkyHook International's president, the JHL-40 is designed to address the limitations and expense of transporting equipment and materials in remote regions and harsh environments such as the Canadian Arctic and Alaska. Conventional land and water transportation in these undeveloped regions is inadequate, unreliable and costly. When flying without a load, the JHL-40 will have a ferry range of 800 nautical miles (921 miles), so it will be able to deploy itself to remote locations where it is needed.

St. Louis, Mo.-based Boeing Integrated Defense Systems, the Boeing unit that will build the JHL-40, says it already has received from SkyHook the first increment of a multi-year contract to develop the new aircraft. Privately owned SkyHook expects the JHL-40 to support several industries, including energy, mining and logging.

"There is a definite need for this technology. The list of customers waiting for SkyHook's services is extensive, and they enthusiastically support the development of the JHL-40," said Pete Jess, SkyHook's president and chief operating officer.

"Companies have suggested this new technology will enable them to modify their current operational strategy and begin working much sooner on projects that were thought to be 15 to 20 years away," added Jess. "This Boeing-SkyHook technology represents an environmentally acceptable solution for these companies' heavy-lift short-haul challenges, and it's the only way many projects will be able to progress economically."

The Pickens Plan

From U.S. News; Billionaire oilman and corporate raider T. Boone Pickens is taking his fight for American energy independence public today, outlining his plan to wean America off its $700 billion-a-year foreign crude habit.

"Our dependence on imported oil is killing our economy. It is the single biggest problem facing America today," Pickens said. "As we import more and more of our energy, we are participating in the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind, sending billions of our dollars overseas to buy oil for a commodity that lasts 90 days until burned in our gas tanks."

Here's his list of fixes, from a characteristically bombastic press release:

Step #1: Using the United States' wind corridor, private industry will fund the installation of thousands of wind turbines in the wind belt, generating enough power to provide 20 percent or more of our electricity supply

Step #2: Again funded by the private sector, electric power transmission lines will be built, connecting these wind power generating sites with power plants providing energy to the population centers in the Midwest, South, and Western regions of the country.

Step #3: With the energy from wind now available to operate power plants serving the large population centers in key areas of the country, the natural gas that was historically utilized to fuel these power plants can be redirected and used to replace imported gasoline and diesel as a fuel for thousands of vehicles in our transportation system.

Pickens, a vocal promoter of "peak oil" theory, has already signed on to build a $2 billion wind farm in the Texas Panhandle and reportedly could spend $10 billion on the project.

He's also funding an advertising campaign to garner support in pushing the incoming administration to act on his plan. His website is live today, and Pickens told USA Today that he wants to "elevate that question to the presidential debate, to make it the No. 1 issue of the campaign this year."

For those of you who enjoy watching rich Texans draw on whiteboards, here's the Pickens' Plan pitch:

As Oceans Empty of Fish, Fishermen Cling On....,

George Monbiot brought the hardline; All over the world, protesters are engaged in a heroic battle with reality. They block roads, picket fuel depots, throw missiles and turn over cars in an effort to hold it at bay. The oil is running out and governments, they insist, must do something about it. When they've sorted it out, what about the fact that the days are getting shorter? What do we pay our taxes for?

The latest people to join these surreal protests are the world's fishermen. They are on strike in Italy, Spain, Portugal, France and Japan, and demonstrating in scores of maritime countries. Last month in Brussels they threw rocks and flares at the police, who have been conspiring with the world's sedimentary basins to keep the price of oil high. The fishermen warn that if something isn't done to help them, thousands could be forced to scrap their boats and hang up their nets. It's an appalling prospect, which we should greet with heartfelt indifference.

Just as the oil price now seems to be all that stands between us and runaway climate change, it is also the only factor which offers a glimmer of hope to the world's marine ecosystems. No east Asian government was prepared to conserve the stocks of tuna; now one-third of the tuna boats in Japan, China, Taiwan and South Korea will stay in dock for the next few months because they can't afford to sail. The unsustainable quotas set on the US Pacific seaboard won't be met this year, because the price of oil is rising faster than the price of fish. The indefinite strike called by Spanish fishermen is the best news European fisheries have had for years. Beam trawlermen - who trash the seafloor and scoop up a massive bycatch of unwanted species - warn that their industry could collapse within a year. Hurray to that too.

It would, of course, be better for everyone if these unsustainable practices could be shut down gently without the need for a crisis or the loss of jobs, but this seems to be more than human nature can bear.

Map of Pain

That's the current IMF map of food and fuel cost pain. This is a summary of the Freakonomics analysis of where the climate change apocalypse is likely to hit hardest; Let’s say you are convinced that climate change is a huge threat and will have catastrophic consequences for humankind in the foreseeable future. How exactly do you envision that catastrophe playing out?

Most people I speak with, and most accounts I’ve read and seen, lean toward the apocalyptic. But what are the mechanisms by which disaster strikes? Where does it occur? Who is most likely to suffer?

According to a fascinating new working paper (abstract here; download available here) by Melissa Dell, Benjamin F. Jones, and Benjamin A. Olken, the answer to that last question may be an easy one: poor countries.

This answer may not surprise you very much, but Dell, Jones, and Olken have done a good job of showing the relationship between climate and the economy, and their paper may substantially inform the way that people — especially in the U.S. and other rich countries — consider the possible effects of climate change.

More Exploitative Distraction from Faux News...,

The Rev. Jesse Jackson apologized today for comments he made about Barack Obama's speeches in black churches during what he thought was a private conversation with a reporter.

Jackson told CNN's Wolf Blitzer today that his comments made Sunday were in response to a question from a Fox News reporter about speeches on morality the Democratic presidential candidate has given at black churches.

The civil rights leader said today he felt there were other important issues to be addressed in the black community, such as unemployment, the mortgage crisis and the number of blacks in prison.

Jackson told The Associated Press today that he doesn't remember exactly what he said Sunday but that he was "very sorry" for his comments about Obama.

His apology came a few hours before Fox News was scheduled to air the remarks.

Jackson called his comments "a side light in a broader conversation about urban disparities."

Billo the clown will of course be leading with this sidelight on his show tonight. It will be his top story and the subject of his talking points memo and in the fashion in which he's been deployed here-to-date by Roger Ailes - Billo will work this distraction in hopes of gaining traction and continuing his relentless, non-issue oriented identity politics oriented memetic assault on Obama.

About that Roger Ailes; Roger Eugene Ailes (born May 15, 1940) is the president of Fox News Channel and chairman of the Fox Television Stations Group. He was a media consultant for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, as well as Rudy Giuliani’s first mayoral campaign in 1989.

Presencing of the Other...,

"Whether the subject is crop circles, orbs, alien abductions, UFOs, miraculous appearances of the Virgin, spirit encounters in psychedelic states, and so on, we face the question of the existence of "the Other," of entities or intentionalized energies that seem to exist largely beyond the current range of our perceptions, yet touch upon our world. Philosophers would agree that we don't know "things in themselves," but only those aspects of a thing that can be perceived by our senses and cognized by our mind. It is also clear that perception involves a tremendous amount of choice, and that choice is based upon our psychological disposition. We don't see the world as it, but to a large extent we see the world as we are.

I think this is true with all phenomena, but it is especially true with phenomena that lingers on the outer edge of the cultural imagination, such as otherworldly apparitions. It is almost as if we require a multisensory approach to these areas, as ordinary sense itself - logic or rationality - seems too limited. Rudolf Steiner defined higher modes of cognition as intuition, imagination, and inspiration. We can seek to make use of the faculty of "intellectual intuition" as a tool for exploration, taking care not to confuse thinking about something from believing in it, or feeling something from thinking we have knowledge about it. Making sure to keep thinking, feeling, believing, and willing separate requires intellectual discipline, and is the only way to approach what Steiner described as "the spiritual world" without getting lost in our own projections.

In my personal explorations of shamanism and my study of extraterrestrials, spirits, and so on, I have developed the hypothesis that this phenomena is neither real or imaginary. What seems to be happening is something subtler and harder to define: the alien "Other" is coming to presence within the human Psyche." Daniel Pinchbeck at Glastonbury this weekend.

Psychogeography

Psychologists have shown that human personalities can be classified along five key dimensions: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience. And each of these dimensions has been found to affect key life outcomes from life expectancy and divorce to political ideology, job choices and performance, and innovation and creativity.

What's more, it turns out these personality types are not spread evenly across the country. They cluster. And how they cluster tells us much: What city someone might want to move to, the broader character of regions, and even the creative and economic futures of broad swaths of the nation.

Drawing on a database of hundreds of thousands of individual personality surveys compiled by psychologists Jason Rentfrow, Sam Gosling, and Jeff Porter, my team and I were able to map the distribution of personality types across the United States. The result is a fascinating new way of looking at the country's terrain.

Click on the maps image to access the original article in the Boston Globe.

Space Based Solar Power Generation

So a momentary heavy-thread erupted over at Prometheus 6's blog. P6 is one of the original, heavily political bloggers and he has developed national recognition and a high-profile platform from which to hold forth. He is heard from time to time on Farai Chidaya's NPR blogger's roundtable. What instigated the discussion was an assertion that P6 posted about - in which it was claimed that the deep structure of Obama's thinking is opaque and mysterious. I instead argued on that thread that Obama is not a mystery, but that his campaign and election production company - headed by David Axelrod and giving every appearance of being a firmly establishmentarian Brookings Institute production - may instead by hobbling Obama's public pronouncements and policy agenda by preventing the Senator from tapping into the powerful, open-source intellectual groundswell that has marshalled in support of his candidacy.

My respected colleague PTCruiser summed up my concern most elegantly;

"Still, a closer look at Obama's online effort reveals many opportunities for work, and few opportunities for what I consider to be intelligent participation. We can sign up to make phone calls, send emails, volunteer in the streets, or become precinct captains. But where's the participatory democracy wiki? Where do we get involved in the conversations that help shape his policy positions? How is he incorporating the massive intelligence of his support network into his philosophy of governance? BarackObama.com is a great example of crowd-sourcing, but it's a far cry from even a fledgling effort at open source democracy."

I have been troubled too by the lack real participation and penetration.

In the course of the discussion, I pointed out some very specific policy agendas that could be driven exclusively by the POTUS and which could have a profound impact on the current perfect storm crisis affecting energy, the armed services, and the finance and banking arenas. Specifically, I referred to the mass and scale of the DoD as a change agent in both energy market practices, and, as the primary employer of research scientists in the U.S. as the potential source of major energy resource innovation. This topic has previously been addressed here at Subrealism with no small measure of disappointment in the direction that the USAF has decided to take. In the interest of fairness, I want to share the other parts of what is possible and doable if the political will and popular support are marshaled in time to make it so.

Full-monty here - excerpt from the paper's conclusion; Several major challenges will need to be overcome to make SBSP a reality, including the creation of low‐cost space access and a supporting infrastructure system on Earth and in space. Several past studies have shown that the opportunity to export energy as the first marketable commodity from space will motivate commercial sector solutions to these challenges. The delivered commodity can be used for a variety of purposes to include base‐load terrestrial electrical power, wide‐area broadcast power, carbon‐neutral synthetic fuels production, or as an in‐space satellite energy utility. Solving these space access and operations challenges for SBSP will in turn also open space for a host of other activities that include space tourism, manufacturing, lunar or asteroid resource utilization, and eventually expansion of human presence and permanent settlement within our solar system.

A repeated review finding is that the commercial sector will need Government to accomplish three major tasks in order to catalyze SBSP development. The first is to retire a major portion of the early technical risks. This can be accomplished via an incremental research and development program that culminates with a space‐borne proof‐of‐concept demonstration in the next decade. The second is to facilitate the policy, regulatory, legal, and organizational instruments that will be necessary to create the partnerships and relationships (commercial‐commercial, government‐commercial, and government‐government) needed for this concept to succeed. The final Government contribution is to become a direct early adopter and to incentivize other early adopters much as is accomplished on a regular basis with other renewable energy systems coming on‐line today.

For the DoD specifically, beamed energy from space in quantities greater than 5 MWe has the potential to be a disruptive game changer on the battlefield. SBSP and its enabling wireless power transmission technology could facilitate extremely flexible “energy on demand” for combat units and installations across an entire theater, while significantly reducing dependence on vulnerable over‐land fuel deliveries. SBSP could also enable entirely new force structures and capabilities such as ultra long‐endurance airborne or terrestrial surveillance or combat systems to include the individual soldier himself. More routinely, SBSP could provide the ability to deliver rapid and sustainable humanitarian energy to a disaster area or to a local population undergoing nation‐building activities. SBSP could also facilitate base “islanding” such that each installation has the ability to operate independent of vulnerable ground‐based energy delivery infrastructures. In addition to helping American and Allied defense establishments remain relevant over the entire 21st Century through more secure supply lines, perhaps the greatest military benefit of SBSP is to lessen the chances of conflict due to energy scarcity by providing access to a strategically security energy supply.

This interim report accomplished a significant review of the overall concept and many components in a very short period of time and no cost. As has been demonstrated repeatedly in the new internet‐interconnected world, this type of horizontal, collaborative approach to problem solving is very effective in rapidly collecting and building knowledge. It has also had the effect of rapidly building (almost exponentially) action networks and informing otherwise disconnected individuals of this concept. It is a model that the DoD may wish to consider for future problem‐solving endeavors.

The Big Sort

This goes SO MUCH DEEPER than the red state blue state political dichotomy that's used to delineate the phenomenon. I heard the story on Talk of the Nation on my way to a meeting downtown yesterday and couldn't wait to post it for your consideration this morning. Well worth your listen I believe.

In 1976, less than a quarter of Americans lived in places where the presidential election was a landslide. By 2004, nearly half of all voters lived in landslide counties. When people move, they also make choices about who their neighbors will be and who will share their new lives. Those are now political decisions, and they are having a profound effect on the nation's public life. It wasn't just my neighborhood that had tipped to become politically monogamous.

Discovering the Big Sort

The "red" and "blue" states shown on television maps during the past several national elections depict a country in a static standoff. On this scale, politics is a game of Risk. What will it take for Republicans to capture Michigan? For Democrats to regain Ohio? But people don't live in states. They live in communities. And those communities are not close to being in equipoise, even within solidly blue or red states. They are, most of them, becoming even more Democratic or Republican. As Americans have moved over the past three decades, they have clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs, and, in the end, politics. Little, if any, of this political migration was by design, a conscious effort by people to live among like-voting neighbors. When my wife and I moved to Austin, we didn't go hunting for the most Democratic neighborhood in town. But the result was the same: moving to Travis Heights, we took a side and fell into a stark geographic pattern of political belief, one that has grown more distinct in presidential elections since 1976.

Over the past thirty years, the United States has been sorting itself, sifting at the most microscopic levels of society, as people have packed children, CDs, and the family hound and moved. Between 4 and 5 percent of the population moves each year from one county to another — 100 million Americans in the past decade. They are moving to take jobs, to be close to family, or to follow the sun. When they look for a place to live, they run through a checklist of amenities: Is there the right kind of church nearby? The right kind of coffee shop? How close is the neighborhood to the center of the city? What are the rents? Is the place safe?

The political *sort* is symptomatic of far deeper psychological tendencies emergent in collectives. These authors have drilled down to some extent on the phenomenon, but the questions left begging are rather dazzling.

Asleep at the Spigot

The NYTimes made another incremental disclosure in the direction of peak oil yesterday;

Over the last 25 years, opportunities to head off the current crisis were ignored, missed or deliberately blocked, according to analysts, politicians and veterans of the oil and automobile industries. What’s more, for all the surprise at just how high oil prices have climbed, and fears for the future, this is one crisis we were warned about. Ever since the oil shortages of the 1970s, one report after another has cautioned against America’s oil addiction.

Even as politicians heatedly debate opening new regions to drilling, corralling energy speculators, or starting an Apollo-like effort to find renewable energy supplies, analysts say the real source of the problem is closer to home. In fact, it’s parked in our driveways.

Nearly 70 percent of the 21 million barrels of oil the United States consumes every day goes for transportation, with the bulk of that burned by individual drivers, according to the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan research group that advises Congress.

SO despite the fierce debate over what’s behind the recent spike in prices, no one differs on what’s really responsible for all that underlying demand here for black gold: the automobile, fueled not only by gasoline but also by Americans’ famous propensity for voracious consumption.

Beginning with the indictment of our way of life - and sequeing into the fundamental complicity of our political processes in service to this way of life.

According to energy policy experts, it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s — during the administrations of President George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton — that things began to go wrong.

Before that point, the country reaped the benefits of the first fuel-economy standards, passed in 1975, known as corporate average fuel economy, or CAFE. Between 1974 and 1989, the efficiency of a typical car sold in the United States almost doubled, to 27.5 miles per gallon from 13.8.

Bringing us back full circle to Mark Whitaker's notion about the political barriers to sustainable living;

He proposes that instead of sustainability being an issue of population scale, managerial economics, or technocratic planning, an overhaul of formal democratic institutions is required. This is because environmental degradation has more to do with the biased interactions of formal institutions and informal corruption. Because of corruption, we have environmental degradation. Current formal democratic institutions of states are forms of informal gatekeeping, and as such, intentionally maintain democracy as ecologically “out of sync”. He argues that we are unable to reach sustainability without a host of additional ecological checks and balances. These ecological checks and balances would demote corrupt uses of formal institutions by removing capacities for gatekeeping against democratic feedback. Sustainability is a politics that is already here—only waiting to be formally organized.

Should be interesting to hear what the man of the moment has in mind for addressing the sociopolitical Great Filter that we're presently up against? I can't find it in his position statements, and I don't see it in the coalition he's built. Maybe I should just join the faithful and "believe" - confident that when wishes become horses, all we beggars will ride...,

Now it's Catalytic Converters!!!

Will the wonders of crystal methamphetamine fueled collapse criminality never cease? First it was gas drilled out of gas tanks, now it's catalytic converters sawed right out from the undercarriage for their miniscule concentration of precious metals. What's next in this increasingly Mad Max looking vehicular ecology?

A half-dozen office colleagues had told him about that roar after their own catalytic converters were stolen, a crime that has been rising rapidly across the country from riverside parking lots in Cincinnati to highways along the California coast.

The pollution-reducing converters contain small amounts of the precious metals platinum and palladium, and they've joined copper wire and sewer grates on the long list of metal items targeted by thieves eager to cash in on climbing metal commodity prices.

Converter thieves slip under vehicles with battery-powered saws, sometimes in daylight, and in a matter of minutes leave owners with shocking repair bills.

The thefts were only a sporadic problem nationally until about a year ago but have grown to a near-epidemic, said Frank Scafidi, a spokesman for the National Insurance Crime Bureau. Scafidi received an overwhelming response when he recently questioned bureau agents.

"Everybody was seeing reports of this, hearing reports of this, talking to the local cops — all over the country," he said.

Better start booby trapping these jalopies with some nasty surprises to deter this funky invasive scavaging.

Commodity Ecology

Here's a fascinating premise, and, an intriguing and creative method for using blogger. Not to mention the content which appears to be a treasure trove well worth your consideration.

Launched to provide a parallel information service connected with Toward a Bioregional State, the book; this parallel blog is the commentary, your questions and my answers, on technological and material science news from around the world related to the issues of sustainability and unsustainability and how to institutionalize it in particular watersheds anywhere in the world, in a running muse on various issues of concern or inspiration.

Mark D. Whitaker is a comparative historical researcher on the politics of environmental degradation and sustainability. Toward A Bioregional State is his novel approach to development and to sustainability. He proposes that instead of sustainability being an issue of population scale, managerial economics, or technocratic planning, an overhaul of formal democratic institutions is required. This is because environmental degradation has more to do with the biased interactions of formal institutions and informal corruption. Because of corruption, we have environmental degradation. Current formal democratic institutions of states are forms of informal gatekeeping, and as such, intentionally maintain democracy as ecologically “out of sync”. He argues that we are unable to reach sustainability without a host of additional ecological checks and balances. These ecological checks and balances would demote corrupt uses of formal institutions by removing capacities for gatekeeping against democratic feedback. Sustainability is a politics that is already here—only waiting to be formally organized.