kresge auditorium november 1967

the republican id

nytimes | This patch of southern Ohio between Cincinnati and Dayton is not the up-for-grabs Ohio you’ve read so much about. This is decided country, where House Speaker John Boehner is running for re-election unopposed, where “Defeat Obama” and “Romney/Ryan” lawn signs glisten in the chilly drizzle.

At the heart of it is a university whose students, according to a poll by the campus paper, favor Romney by 49 percent to 40 percent, and tend to think, as one senior half-joked, “that Sean Hannity is the news.” This is clearly not the place to gauge the last-minute mood swings of a state that many consider decisive.

It is, however, an interesting place to ponder the governing mentality of a Romney/Ryan administration, if that is what voters deliver on Tuesday. Miami University, a pretty grid of red brick, lawns and autumn foliage, is the place where Paul Ryan’s view of the world jelled, under the tutelage of an economist he describes as his mentor. I decided to spend my last column before the election peeking through this little window into the Republican id. If Mitt Romney is our next president, many in the party hope Ryan will play the role of chief ideologist. And if Romney loses, Ryan starts the 2016 campaign for his party’s nomination near the front of the line.

Ryan’s alma mater draws mostly white, upper-middle-class students from Midwest Republican families that are attracted to Miami as a place unlikely to turn their children against them. A well-endowed business school (Ryan majored in economics and political science) and a robust frat culture (Ryan was an enthusiastic Delta Tau Delta) tend to reinforce the conservative values represented by the Republican ticket — with one important asterisk we’ll get to later. In 2008, many Miami students veered out of character, thrilled by the historic Obama campaign, but now that enthusiasm has given way to disappointment and to something few of these kids have ever experienced: economic anxiety. 

if Obama wins, he will be the popular choice of latinos, blacks, single women and highly educated urban whites...,

esquire | In case you have misplaced you magic pundit decoder ring, the latest one-word euphemism for "Where The White Folk At?" is "demographics." If the president wins, it will be because of "demographics," which increasingly means, in Republican weaselspeak, that, despite the best efforts of our governors and secretaries of state, the wrong people are voting again. Or, as they put it around Casa Romney, The Help are revolting. Your Republican party may be a tribe of a single skin tone, but it is a tribe of many codes.

As is usually the case, Politico whittled the problem right down to the nub, and then hit itself between the eyes repeatedly with the nub.

If President Barack Obama wins, he will be the popular choice of Hispanics, African-Americans, single women and highly educated urban whites. That's what the polling has consistently shown in the final days of the campaign. It looks more likely than not that he will lose independents, and it's possible he will get a lower percentage of white voters than George W. Bush got of Hispanic voters in 2000.

A broad mandate this is not.

Bartender, a double Prestone, and make it snappy, my good man.

Apparently, only people who look like John Harris and Jim VandeHei can be said to make up a "mandate." (Remember, by the way, that this is the publication that got rid of Joe Williams for making the unremarkable statement that Willard Romney is more comfortable around white people. It is equally unremarkable to say that this also would seem to be the case with his former employers.) This is now part of the campaign dialogue. The panel with my man Chuck Todd chewed it over this morning, and only a very cynical person would suggest that this is the respectable objective-journalist parallel to the fact that the Republicans have been making things quite plain of late as to their belief that some people deserve the franchise, and that Certain People do not. Why, just yesterday, Romney was talking about how, if you voted for him, you "shouldn't expect" a check from the government. Fist tap Dale.

the permanent militarization of america

nytimes | Eisenhower understood the trade-offs between guns and butter. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he warned in 1953, early in his presidency. “The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”

He also knew that Congress was a big part of the problem. (In earlier drafts, he referred to the “military-industrial-Congressional” complex, but decided against alienating the legislature in his last days in office.) Today, there are just a select few in public life who are willing to question the military or its spending, and those who do — from the libertarian Ron Paul to the leftist Dennis J. Kucinich — are dismissed as unrealistic.

The fact that both President Obama and Mitt Romney are calling for increases to the defense budget (in the latter case, above what the military has asked for) is further proof that the military is the true “third rail” of American politics. In this strange universe where those without military credentials can’t endorse defense cuts, it took a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen, to make the obvious point that the nation’s ballooning debt was the biggest threat to national security.

Uncritical support of all things martial is quickly becoming the new normal for our youth. Hardly any of my students at the Naval Academy remember a time when their nation wasn’t at war. Almost all think it ordinary to hear of drone strikes in Yemen or Taliban attacks in Afghanistan. The recent revelation of counterterrorism bases in Africa elicits no surprise in them, nor do the military ceremonies that are now regular features at sporting events. That which is left unexamined eventually becomes invisible, and as a result, few Americans today are giving sufficient consideration to the full range of violent activities the government undertakes in their names.

Were Eisenhower alive, he’d be aghast at our debt, deficits and still expanding military-industrial complex. And he would certainly be critical of the “insidious penetration of our minds” by video game companies and television networks, the news media and the partisan pundits. With so little knowledge of what Eisenhower called the “lingering sadness of war” and the “certain agony of the battlefield,” they have done as much as anyone to turn the hard work of national security into the crass business of politics and entertainment. Fist tap Arnach.

the neverending...,

mexican cartels enslave engineers to build radio network..,

wired | The Mexican military is trying to dismantle an extensive network of radio antennas built and operated by the notorious Zeta drug cartel. But the authorities haven’t had much luck shutting Radio Zeta down. Not only is much of the equipment super-easy to replace. But the cartel has also apparently found some unwilling — and alarming — assistance by kidnapping and enslaving technicians to help build it.

At least 36 engineers and technicians have been kidnapped in the past four years, according to a report from Mexican news site Animal Politico, with an English translation published by organized-crime monitoring group InSight. Worse, none of the engineers have been held for ransom — they’ve just disappeared. Among them include at least one IBM employee and several communications technicians from a firm owned by Mexico’s largest construction company. “The fact that skilled workers have been disappearing in these areas is no accident,” Felipe Gonzalez, head of Mexico’s Senate Security Committee, told the website.

“None of the systems engineers who disappeared have been found,” Gonzalez said. Unlike Colombia, where drug traffickers control large amounts of territory and can keep hostages for many years, Mexico’s drug territory is more in flux. “When they need specialists they catch them, use them, and discard them,” said the father of one kidnapped engineer.

For at least six years, Mexico’s cartels have relied in part on a sophisticated radio network to handle their communications. The Zetas hide radio antennas and signal relay stations deep inside remote and hard-to-reach terrain, connect them to solar panels, and then link the facilities to radio-receiving cellphones and Nextel devices. While the kingpins stay off the network — they use the internet to send messages — the radio network acts as a shadow communication system for the cartels’ lower-level players and lookouts, and a tool to hijack military radios.

One network spread across northeastern Mexico and dismantled last year included 167 radio antennas alone. As recently as September, Mexican marines found a 295-foot-high transmission tower in Veracruz state. And while the founding leadership of the Zetas originated in the Mexican special forces — and who might have had the know-how to set up a radio system — relatively few of the ex-commando types are still active today. Fist tap Dale.

obama was not politically produced by the black community...,

Guardian | ...but presented to it after he had made his way through the mostly white elites. His political ties to the black community are not organic but symbolic. His arrival in the political class is hailed as the progress of a community when in fact it is the advancement of an individual.

"[Obama] is being consumed as the embodiment of color blindness," Angela Davis, professor of history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told me in late 2007. "It's the notion that we have moved beyond racism by not taking race into account. That's what makes him conceivable as a presidential candidate. He's become the model of diversity in this period … a model of diversity as the difference that makes no difference. The change that brings no change."

That is why criticisms of him for "not doing enough for his own people" both miss and devalue the point. The demand to close the racial gaps bequeathed by centuries of discrimination is not a sectional interest but a national one. Demands for equality and racial justice should be made to any president of whatever race or party.

Obama should do more for black people – not because he is black but because black people are the citizens suffering most. Black people have every right to make demands on Obama – not because they're black but because they gave him a greater percentage of their votes than any other group, and he owes his presidency to them. Like any president, he should be constantly pressured to put the issue of racial injustice front and centre and if black people aren't going to apply that pressure then nobody else will.

But in fact precisely the opposite has been happening. With Obama in the White House African Americans representatives have been backpedalling. Black politicians, too, have held their fire.

"With 14% unemployment, if we had a white president we'd be marching around the White House," said the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), Emmanuel Cleaver. "The president knows we are going to act in deference to him in a way we wouldn't to someone white." That's pathetic and counterproductive. These are the very people who are now showing up with empty hands and trying to galvanise the black community to go to the polls.

Their reticence is partly explained by the fear of a backlash. "If we go after the president too hard, you're going after us," Maxine Waters, a California Democrat in the House, told a largely black audience in Detroit last year. But then that's what leadership is about. Explaining to those audiences that there are large numbers of people lobbying for Obama's attention, including people with huge amounts of money and power. If the black community wants it they must demand it.

Some have spoken out. In August after a month-long round of job fairs organised by the CBC across the nation John Conyers, the longest serving black American in Congress said. "We want [Obama] to know from this day forward that we've had it. We want him to come out on our side and advocate, and not to watch and wait … We're suffering." Unfortunately it was followed by little in the way of action.

In the absence of that pressure Obama has felt little need to focus his attention on the problem, even rhetorically. In his first two years in office he talked about race less than any Democratic president since 1961. In all of his state of the union speeches he mentioned poverty just three times: last year's was the first since 1948 to not mention poverty or the poor at all. When he did talk about it it was to preach better parenting, healthy meals and greater discipline.

At a Congressional Black Caucus meeting in September he told his former colleagues: "Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying." Compare that to the meeting he had with bankers not long after he was elected when they thought he was going to impose serious regulation. "I'm the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks. I'm not out there to go after you," he told them. "I'm protecting you."

This would not be the first time that the black Americans have shown great loyalty to a Democratic president who did not return the favour. Bill Clinton is still revered even though when he ran in 1992 he made a special trip back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector – a black, lobotomised inmate so mentally incapacitated that when given his last meal, he opted to save the dessert for after the execution. When in power he signed off on a welfare reform that would prove devastating to large numbers of black families, especially women. He presided over an economic boom Obama does not even have that.

an overcrowded city devoid of nature overcrowded by millions of increasingly desperate killer-apes...,

Hundreds of thousands of people in New York City, Long Island and New Jersey may not have power restored for up to 10 more days, officials warned Thursday. Meanwhile, weather forecasters said a winter storm could hit the Northeast next week Meanwhile, FEMA and the National Guard dropped off diapers and water in the Bronx, where there has been no running water or electricity, NBC New York reported. Residents there said that people had broken into a supermarket to steal water and that the streets had grown dangerous. Without electricity, there's no light, and without cell service, there's no way to call for help. The areas taking the longest, spokeswoman Sara Banda told NBCNews.com are those with overhead lines. "It's taking a bit longer," she said, noting that crews have had to deal with 100,000 downed lines.

just-in-time consumption-supply chains - intensely vulnerable to slow infrastructure repairs...,

WaPo | The slow pace of recovery from Hurricane Sandy generated frustration and anger across the New York region Friday as residents struggled with shortages of fuel, enduring power outages and a sense among those in the city’s outer boroughs that their suffering was being overlooked.

In Staten Island, where 19 people have died as a result of the storm, more than in any other New York City borough, exasperation at the lack of city, state and federal assistance mixed with bitterness and despair.

“I don’t see the Corps of Engineers,” Jim Brennan, a retired New York firefighter, said as he stepped over fragments of boat hulls and other debris blown onto his seafront lawn. “No National Guard. No Red Cross. No FEMA. No [New York Department of Environmental Protection]. No garbage trucks. American flags are flying all over this neighborhood. Where is our government?”

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) canceled Sunday’s running of the New York City Marathon, yielding to critics who said it was insensitive to host a sporting event while authorities were still pulling the dead from the storm’s wreckage.

“While life in much of our city is getting back to normal, for New Yorkers that have lost loved ones, the storm left a wound that I think will never heal,” Bloomberg told reporters earlier Friday. “For those that lost homes or businesses, recovery will be long and difficult.”

hmm..., one wonders?

Fist tap Arnach.

Radioisotope Stirling Engine Powered Airship for Low Altitude Operation on Venus

nasa | The feasibility of a Stirling engine powered airship for the near surface exploration of Venus was evaluated. The heat source for the Stirling engine was limited to 10 general purpose heat source (GPHS) blocks. The baseline airship utilized hydrogen as the lifting gas and the electronics and payload were enclosed in a cooled insulated pressure vessel to maintain the internal temperature at 320 K and 1 Bar pressure. The propulsion system consisted of an electric motor driving a propeller. An analysis was set up to size the airship that could operate near the Venus surface based on the available thermal power. The atmospheric conditions on Venus were modeled and used in the analysis. The analysis was an iterative process between sizing the airship to carry a specified payload and the power required to operate the electronics, payload and cooling system as well as provide power to the propulsion system to overcome the drag on the airship. A baseline configuration was determined that could meet the power requirements and operate near the Venus surface. From this baseline design additional trades were made to see how other factors affected the design such as the internal temperature of the payload chamber and the flight altitude. In addition other lifting methods were evaluated such as an evacuated chamber, heated atmospheric gas and augmented heated lifting gas. However none of these methods proved viable.

TALISE would paddle across Titan's vast hydrocarbon sea...,

nationalgeographic | Titan's allure is manyfold: It has a thick atmosphere—the only moon in the solar system to have one—stable liquid on its surface, and a landscape of lakes, seas, and dunes. So it's no surprise that astronomers are keeping an eye on Saturn's largest satellite.

Scientists now say the Huygens probe that landed on Titan in 2005 did so with a bounce, slide, and wobble, yielding new clues about its Earthlike terrain.

Meanwhile, a Spanish team has proposed sending a boatlike probe that could paddle or propel itself across Ligeia Mare, a vast, liquid hydrocarbon lake near Titan's north pole. The inspiration for the probe's design includes Mississippi River paddleboats and an amphibious Soviet vehicle with screwlike propellers.

"We thought, why not be capable of moving after landing so you can study the landing site, cruise to the shore, and explore the shore?" said Igone Urdampilleta, an aerospace engineer with SENER, a private Spanish engineering firm.

SENER is developing the design—presented at the European Planetary Science Congress in Madrid in September—with Madrid's Centro de Astrobiología.

The still conceptual probe, called the Titan Lake In-situ Sampling Propelled Explorer (TALISE), would take both liquid and soil samples to learn more about Titan's organically rich environment.

Titan Atmosphere Like "Oil Refinery"

Imagine a world shrouded in an orange-brownish fog where it rains methane, the temperature is minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit (nearly 180 below zero Celsius), and a year lasts 29.5 Earth years.

"If you were to bottle some of Titan's atmosphere, then opened the bottle on Earth, it might smell a bit like an oil refinery," said Titan expert Ralph Lorenz of the University of Arizona. "Titan is so much colder, [so] what might be sticky goop on Earth is literally rock hard on Titan."

By the same token, methane and ethane—components of natural gas on Earth and thought to be prevalent on Titan—would exist in liquid form there.  According to Lorenz, scientists are "99-plus percent" certain that Ligeia Mare consists mostly of liquid ethane and methane, with the lake stretching several hundred meters across and at least 33 feet (10 meters) deep.

turning natural material resources into garbage via manufactured demand...,

thestoryofbottledwater | The Story of Bottled Water, released on March 22, 2010 (World Water Day) employs the Story of Stuff style to tell the story of manufactured demand—how you get Americans to buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week when it already flows from the tap. Over five minutes, the film explores the bottled water industrys attacks on tap water and its use of seductive, environmental-themed advertising to cover up the mountains of plastic waste it produces. The film concludes with a call to take back the tap, not only by making a personal commitment to avoid bottled water, but by supporting investments in clean, available tap water for all.

these humans and the essential water cycle...,

thescientist | A massive fish die-off in the Des Moines River this summer wasn’t just local news. An initial body count of 40,000 shovelnose sturgeon attracted the attention of the national media—and raised concern among conservationists around the world.

Indeed, the Des Moines die-off was not an isolated event. Fish biologists in Nebraska dealt with the deaths of thousands of dead sturgeon, catfish, and carp, and officials in Illinois reported dead large- and small-mouth bass and channel catfish. The cause isn’t a mystery. At least 62 percent of the contiguous United States experienced moderate to exceptional drought this summer. Flows of major Midwestern rivers hit record lows. In some places, such as Illinois’ Aux Sable Creek, the largest habitat for the state-endangered greater redhorse fish, the water dried up completely. For those streams, rivers, and lakes that remained, temperatures were abnormally warm, like tepid bathwater. Warm water can be lethal outright to some fish species. It also fosters diseases that weaken or kill others. Furthermore, warm water holds less oxygen than cool water, so an overheated stream can literally suffocate its inhabitants.

This ongoing dilemma is bigger than just one or two exceptionally warm summers, and it is more complex than the effects of a warming climate. To an ecologist, it is clear that human modifications of the landscape play as large a role in these piscine disasters as rising global temperatures.

Broken connections

For millennia, the hydrologic cycle has simply worked, with water circulating through the air and ground in ways that support all life on Earth. Water evaporates from oceans and lakes, falling back to the earth as rain and snow. This same water percolates through the surface of the earth into underground aquifers. It is cooled and filtered in the process, gradually re-emerging in seeps and springs that flow into the planet’s streams and rivers, and back into its oceans and lakes.

In times of heat and drought, slow incursion of cool ground water counteract the effects of rising air temperature on our lakes and streams, sustaining surface water temperatures favorable to a diversity of aquatic life. But in the past decade, something seems to have happened to this natural temperature regulation, resulting in fish die-offs that are increasing in magnitude and frequency.

It seems that the very plumbing of our nation’s rivers, lakes, and streams is broken. The natural hydrologic connectivity of landscapes has been ruptured, blocked, and re-routed in innumerable ways—by dams, roads, buildings, agriculture, and more.

sandy flushes some toxic abscesses...,

huffpo | Raw sewage, industrial chemicals and floating debris filled flooded waterways around New York City on Tuesday.

Left in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the toxic stew may threaten the health of residents already dealing with more direct damages from the disaster.

"Normally, sewer overflows are just discharged into waterways and humans that generate the sewage can avoid the consequences by avoiding the water," said John Lipscomb of the clean water advocacy group Riverkeeper. "But in this case, that waste has come back into our communities."

One particular concern is the Gowanus neighborhood in Brooklyn, which abuts a 1.8 mile canal that was recently designated a Superfund cleanup site by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency due to a legacy of industrial pollution and sewage discharges.

While a storm surge of up to 11 feet had been predicted, the confluence of Sandy and a full-moon high tide exceeded expectations: Waters rose a record 13 feet in New York Harbor.

Judith Enck, regional administrator for the EPA region that includes New York, told The Huffington Post that preparations for such a pollution event are difficult regardless of how accurate the weather forecast.

"Little can be done in the hours or days in advance of major storms that were experienced last night," said Enck. "Instead, multi-year improvements need to be made. The situation illustrated the need to clean up urban waters and the benefits of a comprehensive Superfund cleanup."

The best officials could do was urge residents to steer clear of the contaminated waters.

Late Tuesday morning, City Councilmember Brad Lunder, who serves the neighborhoods around the Gowanus Canal, sent an email message to his constituents.

"If you live near the canal, do not touch standing water in the area, or any sediment or debris left by Gowanus flood-waters," he wrote. "After the storm, the EPA and DEP are committed to work together to conduct any sampling needed to address potential issues of toxicity created by the flooding."

Unfortunately, said Linda Mariano of Gowanus, people in her neighborhood didn't have Internet service Tuesday morning to retrieve the email. Before she had read his note, Mariano was walking the streets near the canal scoping out the damage. She was surrounded by families, including young children, doing the same.

A similar post-Sandy scene played out at New York City's other Superfund site, Newtown Creek, a waterway that forms the border between Brooklyn and Queens.

exploitation of arctic resources WILL happen...,

spiegel | September 16, 2012 was a historic date. According to the statistics of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in the US, Arctic sea ice shrank to cover an area of just 3.41 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles) on that day. It was the lowest coverage measured since the beginning of satellite observations in 1979 -- some 760,000 square kilometers lower than the previous record minimum in 2007.

The extent of the shrinkage indicates that the Arctic is changing at a breathtaking pace; a new ocean is opening up.

At the same time, interest in both shorter shipping routes through the far north and Arctic mineral deposits is growing. Norway is one of the five countries bordering the Arctic that can benefit from their proximity to the region's presumed riches. The decades-long exploitation of oil and natural gas in waters further south has made the country extremely wealthy -- and hungry for more. At the same time, polar countries like Norway have to deal with increasing pressure from politicians and environmental groups, which complain about the risks of resource extraction and would like to see them remain untapped. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, Norway's new Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide talks about the politics of resource extraction in the region.

monetary fascism - the rise of the financial industrial congressional complex

counterpunch | Challenging Monetary Fascism is much more dangerous for political leaders representing countries outside the G-20.  Populist leaders who put forward Nationalist policies are automatically in violation of one or more international ‘free trade’ agreements.  Non-conformity with these agreements ultimately results in trade sanctions, IMF or World Bank imposed austerity, or worse…

Friedman’s ideology is global and his rules of ‘free trade’ are deeply integrated into the laws of international trade.  All of our Nation’s international treaties on trade and banking are a series of interlocking agreements that force all nations to subvert their sovereignty and conform to Monetary Fascism.  It is a global pandemic built on a world-wide transmission system with universal powers of enforcement.  Sovereign Nations comply or they lose their credit rating.  Considering the world wide mass escalation of debt to GDP for most western nations, a small increase in the cost of borrowing would easily result in default and bankruptcy.

Today, Nation States face nothing less than financial Armageddon – the Sampson Option, if they do not comply with the demands of the global banking industry.  And it is with this weapon that the Financial Class has come to dominate the State.

Forget Al Qaeda, the only legitimate threat to U.S. and international security is the financial class.  They have created Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction (Financial WMDs) and they stand ready to take down the world economy.  They are more dangerous than any ‘terrorist group’, or even all of the ‘terrorist groups combined.

Exaggeration – consider what Friedman’s ‘free market’ banking system has done to Iceland, Ireland, Spain, Greece, Estonia, etc.  How many western nations has Islam overthrown?  Not one, and by comparison that should scare you.

Money has become the state and the traditional state is forced to serve money’s interests.  Everywhere the Financial Class is openly lording over sovereign nations.  Ireland, Greece and Spain are subject to ultimatums and remember Hank Paulson’s $700 billion extortion from the U.S. Congress.  The $700 billion was just the wedge.  Thanks to unlimited access to the Discount Window, Quantitative Easing and other taxpayer funded debt-swap bailouts the total transfers to the financial industry exceeded $16 trillion as of July 2010 according to a Federal Reserve Audit.  All of this was dumped on the taxpayer and it is still growing.

Why must the people of Ireland or Iceland accept the losses of the private banking sector as a public obligation?  Why must Greece accept austerity because its politician’s entered into a series of deals structured by Goldman Sachs specifically designed to deceive its EU partners?  If Goldman Sachs authored documents with the intent of fraud then Goldman Sachs is required to bear the losses and prosecution.  The taxpayer had no hand in this.

It is breathtaking.  Within the last 40 years ‘money’ has gained total control of each and every one of us.  Generations to come will enter this world burdened with the debts of their fathers.  It is inescapable and ubiquitous.  More than just a spider’s web, or a money-sucking vampire squid, it is a global pandemic that infects our very DNA.  It is the Original Sin of money – subject to compound interest, converted into a derivative, hypothecated and rolled into a CMO and then leveraged through CDSs.

The uber-wealthy will continue to aggregate wealth.  The banking system will continue to make ‘risk free bets,’ booking gains and shifting the losses to the public.  As these losses accumulate on the public balance sheet the state will be forced to seek austerity measures from the public. As austerity and debt levels increase the global economy will continue ‘circling of the bowl’ with increasing speed until we suddenly plunge into the vortex.

not the 1%, the 99%, the 47%, but the 70% that are increasingly pissed!

zerohedge | people that care about civil liberties will vote for Romney saying that he will at least be better on economic policy, yet that is the exact same thing people did with Obama in reverse.  They ended up being disappointed with him and Romney will disappoint as well.  These guys are both big government, crony capitalist puppets and that’s the bottom line.

Another thing that must be considered is basic math about the U.S. political landscape.  According to the latest Gallup poll, 32% of Americans identify themselves as Democrats, 28% as Republican and 38% as Independents.  Now of course, amongst the Independents a majority lean more toward one party or the other, but this is much less the case today than it was in 2008 or in any election prior.  Furthermore, the mere fact that so many choose to identify in this manner makes it clear that they are unhappy with either of these political gangs.  These Independents want legitimate third, fourth or fifth party options but instead end up herded into the mainstream parties by a sophisticated corporate scam, part of which centers around the Commission on Presidential Debates, the gatekeeper of these circuses which ensures no alternative candidates can debate and excludes any difficult or uncomfortable questions.

There was a fantastic article written in the Huffington Post yesterday that examines the rampant frustration within the Republican Party titled: Frightened Republicans Try to Close Down Election Competitors, Such as Gary Johnson.  I thought the most powerful quote was:

Both the Republican and the Democratic presidential candidates talk about liberty, freedom, fiscal responsibility, free enterprise, choice and the Constitution. But neither candidate believes in those principles. Elect either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, and government will be bigger, spending will be higher, regulation will be more intrusive, the military will be fighting more wars, more service personnel will be dying, more money will be wasted abroad, civil liberties of more people will be violated, and more privacy of more citizens will be invaded. Overall, the free society will continue to retreat.

The above is invariably true and brings me to the key point of this article.  Should Romney win, the 28% of Americans that identify as Republican will be thrilled, and the remaining 72% will be largely upset and on edge.  Should Obama win, similarly, the 32% registered Democrat with be thrilled and the remaining 68% will be upset and on edge.  Hence, the 70% referred to in the title of this article.  This is a recipe ripe for social unrest and it will be coming to our shores as I outlined recently in The Global Spring.

Personally, I am done with the two part system and will be voting for Jill Stein.  I am not playing their games any longer and I will not fall for any more of their scams.  In my brief voting years I have pulled the lever for both Republicans and Democrats, but I do not think I will vote for any one of them ever again.  I implore everyone to do the same, no matter who you vote for, vote third party.  The only wasted vote I see is one for either Mitt Romney or Barrack Obama.

copper thieves - and other infrastructure parasites - will have to be executed on sight!

theautomaticearth | Renewable energy is never going to be a strategy for continuing on our present expansionist path. It is not a good fit for the central station model of modern power systems, and threatens to destabilize them, limiting rather than extending our ability to sustain business as usual. The current plans attempt to develop it in the most technologically complex, capital and infrastructure dependent manner, mostly dependent on government largesse that is about to disappear. It is being deployed in a way that minimizes a low energy profit ratio, when that ratio is already likely too low to sustain a society complex enough to produce energy in this fashion.

Renewable electricity is not truly renewable, thanks to non-renewable integral components. It can be deployed for a period of time in such a way as to cushion the inevitable transition to a lower energy society. To do this, it makes sense to capitalize on renewable energy's inherent advantages while minimizing its disadvantages. Minimizing the infrastructure requirement, by producing power adjacent to demand, and therefore moving power as little distance as possible, will make the most of the energy profit ratio. The simplest strategy is generally the most robust, but all the big plans for renewables have gone in the opposite direction. In moving towards hugely complex mechanisms for wheeling gargantuan quantities of power over long distances, we create a system that is highly brittle and prone to cascading system failure.

In a period of sharp economic contraction, we will not be able to afford expensive complexity. Having set up a very vulnerable system, we are going to have to accept that the the lights are not necessarily going to come on every time we flick a switch. Our demand will be much lower for a while, as economic depression deepens, and that may buy the system some time by lowering some of the stresses upon it. The lack of investment will take its toll over time however.

While a grid can function at some level even under very challenging conditions - witness India - it is living on borrowed time. We would do well to learn from the actions, and daily frustrations, of those who live under grid-challenged conditions, and do what we can to build resilience at a community level. Governments and large institutions will not be able to do this at a large scale, so we must act locally.

As with many aspects of society navigating a crunch period, decentralization can be the most appropriate response. The difficulty is that there will be little time or money to build micro-grids based on local generation. It may work in a few places blessed with resources such as a local hydro station, but likely not elsewhere in the time available. The next best solution will be minimizing demand in advance, and obtaining back up generators and local storage capacity, as they use in India and many other places with unstable grids. These are relatively affordable and currently readily available solutions, but do require some thought, such as fuel storage or determining which are essential loads that should be connected to batteries and inverters with a limited capacity. Later on, such solutions are much less likely to be available, so acting quickly is important.

Minimizing demand in a planned manner greatly reduces dependency, so that limited supply can serve the most essential purposes. It is much better than reducing demand haphazardly through deprivation in the depths of a crisis. Providing a storage component can cover grid downtime, so that one no longer has to worry so much when the power will be available, so long as it is there for some time each day. Given that even degraded systems starved of investment for years can deliver something, storage can provide a degree of peace of mind. It is typically safer than storing generator fuel.

Some will be able to install renewable generation, but it will not make sense to do this with debt on the promise of a feed-in tariff contract that stands to be repudiated. Those who can afford it will be those who can do it with no debt and no income stream, in other words those who do it for the energy security rather than for the money, and do not over-stretch themselves in the process. Sadly this will be very few people. Pooling resources in order to act at a community scale can increase the possibilities, although it may be difficult to convince enough people to participate.

It is difficult to say what power grids might look like following an economic depression, or what it will be possible to restore in the years to come. The answers are likely to vary widely with location and local circumstances. Depression years are very hard on vital economic sectors such as energy supply. Falling demand undercuts price support, and prices fall more quickly than the cost of production, so that margins are brutally squeezed. Even as prices fall, purchasing power falls faster, so that affordability gets worse. Consumers are squeezed, leading to further demand destruction in a positive feedback loop.

Under these circumstances, the energy sector is likely to be starved of investment for many years. When the economy tries to recover, it is likely to find itself hitting a hard ceiling at a much lower level of energy supply. With less energy available, society will not be able to climb the heights of complexity again, and therefore many former energy sources dependent on complex means of production will not longer be available to simpler future societies. Widespread electrification may well be a casualty of the complexity crash.

We are likely to realize at that point just how unusual the era of high energy profit ratio fossil fuels really was, and what incredible benefits we had in our hands. Sadly we squandered much of this inheritance before realizing its unique and irreplaceable value. The future will look very different.