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A Closed Circle

By BJ Bjornson

The following video has been doing the rounds today, and I do think it says something when even Pat Robertson realizes the GOP is going too far.:

As TPM puts it:

When Pat Robertson — yes, Pat Robertson — thinks the GOP base is too extreme, it might be time for some party soul searching.

Of course, soul searching isn’t too big on the right these days, and Paul Krugman helpfully explains why.

The key to understanding this, I’d suggest, is that movement conservatism has become a closed, inward-looking universe in which you get points not by sounding reasonable to uncommitted outsiders — although there are a few designated pundits who play that role professionally — but by outdoing your fellow movement members in zeal.

It’s sort of reminiscent of Stalinists going after Trotskyites in the old days: the Trotskyites were left deviationists, and also saboteurs working for the Nazis. Didn’t propagandists feel silly saying all that? Not at all: in their universe, extremism in defense of the larger truth was no vice, and you literally couldn’t go too far.

Many members of the commentariat don’t want to face up to the fact that this is what American politics has become; they cling to the notion that there are gentlemanly elder statesmen on the right who would come to the fore if only Obama said the right words. But the fact is that nobody on that side of the political spectrum wants to or can make deals with the Islamic atheist anti-military warmonger in the White House.

The really fun part is that we’ve easily got months of this to watch before the dust has settled enough for a clear winner to emerge from whoever manages to pose the biggest challenge to Multiple Choice Mitt (currently Cain, but Perry has deep enough pockets he may yet recover from his earlier stumbles).

Sure it’s crazy, but it does make for one hell of a spectator sport, so long as you don't think too much about the fact that there remains a very real chance one of these guys can win.

The Energy Trap

By BJ Bjornson

In a comment to my post regarding electricity use and cars, Bill H. said the following:

Well it doesn't really matter whether a car, electric or internal combustion, uses more or less electricity, but whether it uses more or less energy. Electricity is, for the near future, generated almost entirely with fossil fuel, but even when that eventually is no longer the case, the consumption of energy in any form is detrimental to some degree.

And there is still the matter of the amount of energy and natural resources consumed in manufacturing the car, the type and availability of resources needed to make the energy storage devices for the car, and the disposal of worn out cars and, in particular, expired energy storage devices for the cars.

We don't need to be thinking in terms of cars that use a little bit less energy, we need to make a quantum change in the way we interact with our planet, such as thinking of a way to live without cars at all.

The comment brought to mind this rather excellent post by Tom Murphy on the Energy Trap:

In brief, the idea is that once we enter a decline phase in fossil fuel availability—first in petroleum—our growth-based economic system will struggle to cope with a contraction of its very lifeblood. Fuel prices will skyrocket, some individuals and exporting nations will react by hoarding, and energy scarcity will quickly become the new norm. The invisible hand of the market will slap us silly demanding a new energy infrastructure based on non-fossil solutions. But here’s the rub. The construction of that shiny new infrastructure requires not just money, but…energy. And that’s the very commodity in short supply. Will we really be willing to sacrifice additional energy in the short term—effectively steepening the decline—for a long-term energy plan? It’s a trap!

He proceeds to lay out a pretty good analysis of the issue, and I encourage you to read through it. For my purposes, it is important to note that a major part of the reason for this trap is the significant upfront costs in energy for most renewable sources such as solar and wind. To use solar or wind power, you need to build all of the components and energy storage devices ahead of actually getting any energy out of it, and that upfront cost counts against what you have left over to use.

Best way to avoid having to deal with such an issue would be to invest in those upfront costs while enjoying a surplus, which on the energy front has been the case for most of the last several decades. The only problem being that we haven’t really worked all that hard in preparing for fossil fuels’ replacement, and we’re now getting to a point where the trap starts to limit our decisions.

Even more fun from a policy standpoint is the fact that fossil fuels don’t tend to fall into the same kind of trap.

For resources that do not require substantial up-front cost in the form of infrastructure, the trap does not apply. Fossil fuels tend to be of this sort. The energy required to deliver a barrel of oil or a ton of coal tends to be specific to the delivered unit, and is not dominated by up-front cost. It is similar for tar sands, which requires substantial energy to heat and process the sludge. Even at 5:1 EROEI, filling a 2-unit gap can be achieved by producing 2.5 units of output while losing 0.5 units to investment. Thus it is possible to maintain a steady energy supply. The fact that fossil fuels don’t trap us encourages us to stick with them. But being a finite resource, their attractiveness is the sound of the Siren, luring us to stay on the sinking ship. Or did the Sirens lure sailors from ships?  Either way, fossil fuels are already compatible with our transportation fleet, strengthening the death-grip.

Two things of further note. We are already at peak production of oil, which is why we’re seeing such wild swings in prices with major upswings whenever the economy starts to show signs of life and people start driving and using more energy again. While sinking our resources into new and improved ways of extracting the resource (and continuing the doom that is climate change and just plain old pollution) will help in flattening out the decline, it won’t stop it, and will likely assist in our reaching the peaks of other fossil fuels even faster.

The second point is that the analysis in Tom’s post assumed a constant energy need or usage, at least in respect to fossil fuels. Even at that point, we’re looking at painful shortages if we want to replace the source of that energy with renewables, but the situation is in some respects even worse.

The reality is that we’ve been increasing our energy needs year by year, even despite greater efficiency is our use of said energy. This is mostly due to more people using that energy, as living standards in even the Third World start increasing, but the end result is that the coming crunch will be worse due to the fact that we won’t just be trying to maintain a constant amount of energy for our use, but trying to find a way to continue increasing the energy available.

This is where you run into the reality that such a solution is just plain impossible. As the economist Graeme Maxton noted in a video Ron posted last week, “on a finite planet, the only people who believe we can grow forever are the mad, or economists.”

All of which brings us back to Bill’s point that we need a quantum leap in the way we deal with our planet. We are, and have been for some time, living well beyond our means, pilfering the planet’s inheritance at an astonishing and ever accelerating rate. This holds most obviously with fossil fuels, but also includes nominally renewable resources such as aquifers, forests, fish stocks, and numerous others, and it simply cannot last.

One way or another, we are going to be forced back into balance with nature, either through some incredibly tough choices or our effective self-destruction. Given our history, I wouldn’t put very good odds on the former, which means your best hope is probably something along the lines of John Robb’s resilient communities idea, where you hope you can leverage local surpluses now to create places that can survive the coming disruptions intact.

Any way you look at it, the future isn’t looking to be all that bright a place for humanity.

Improvements

By Dave Anderson:

I went to a jock high school  During my senior year, we won at least four state titles.  Our crowds were boisterous, obnoxious jerks.  We would identify a few players on the other team and have five hundred people mock them in unison for the entire match.  Our tactics varied as we used class-based, sexuality based, misogny and slut shaming attacks on a regular basis.  The only type of attack that we did not use was ethnic/racial.  This was for two reasons.  First, my school was ethnically and racially diverse so it was often a Domincan, a Cape Verdean, a Puerto Rican and two red-headed Irish Catholics coming up with the chants.  Secondly, we knew that if we went racial, we were getting tossed from the stadium as the school and league administration had no tolerance. 

Last night, I was refereeing a WPIAL soccer play-off game.  The game was at a neutral site, but the white team was from three miles down the road while the blue team was thirty miles down the river.  The crowd was overwhelmingly for the white team.  The crowd started to get into the game and found their player to pick on.  They mocked his shoes.  They mocked his lack of a left foot.  They mocked his unwillingness to play through contact.  They mocked everything about the player. 

And then I heard "Hey #77 is a faggot"...

And within fifteen seconds, the rest of the crowd turned on the idiot who had just said that and hustled him out of the stadium.  And then the crowd started right back on 77's case. 

Minor progress here as that crowd self-policing behavior would never have happened at my high school when I was there. 

Somali conflict heats up

By BJ Bjornson

It has been a little over a week since Kenya sent its army across the border into Somalia to battle the Islamist militant group al-Shaba, which controls most of southern Somalia. It also appears that the French, apparently feeling their oats now that the Libyan campaign has pretty much ended, have decided to join in.

Following French shelling of rebel positions in Somalia, Kenyan officials acknowledged a Western partner had joined the fight against al-Shabaab.

The Kenyan military last week launched an offensive against al-Shabaab, al-Qaida's affiliate in Somalia.

The French navy struck several rebel positions inside Somalia last weekend, the Kenyan military said. Maj. Emmanuel Chirchir, a spokesman for Kenya's armed forces, was quoted by The New York Times as saying "one of the partners," which the Times said was a reference to the U.S. or French militaries, was behind recent airstrikes in Somalia.

The BBC reports this morning that the French are denying responsibility for the shelling, but are saying that they are providing logistical support to the Kenyans. Hard to say who is being truthful at this stage.

In possible retaliation, there were two explosions reported in the Kenyan capitol of Nairobi, though at this point it remains unclear if al-Shabab was responsible, though such certainly wouldn’t surprise anyone.

Also hard to say just how much U.S. involvement there is in the Kenyan campaign at this point, although the Kenyans don’t appear to be anywhere near the local proxies doing the dirty work for their sponsor like the Ethiopians were when they invaded to take down the Islamic Courts Union in 2007.

The question now is just what the Kenyans plan for this incursion. Is it just a punitive expedition with the object of deterring al-Shabab’s purported activities in Kenya? Or is it something more ambitious?

If we’ve learned anything over the last couple of decades of conflict, it is that the more ambitious the goals, the less likely they are to turn out well for the aggressor. We can only hope the Kenyans remember that before finding themselves drawn into another Somali quagmire.

OWS -- Robin Hood Tax & Drum Circle Note

By John Ballard

Via Katrina vanden Heuvel we learn of the next direct action from OWS. 

Rise Up and Fight for the Robin Hood Tax!

On October 29th, as the Presidents and Leaders of the Group of 20 Nations meets in France, people across the world will rise up and demand that our G20 leaders immediate impose a 1% #ROBINHOOD tax on all financial transactions and currency trades.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1. Financial Speculation Tax: This tax, less than one percent, would tax short term and often speculative activity- the sort of thing that helped create the crisis- and generate billions of dollars of revenue. For ordinary investors, the cost would barely be noticeable, but for Wall Street traders’ activities, it is estimated that such a tax could generate up to $150 billion a year.
2. Fairness in Taxation: Not in our nation’s history since before the New Deal have those with the most contributed the least. During the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations at the heart of America’s greatest economic boom, marginal tax rates were 90% on the wealthiest among us. The marginal tax rates must be raised across the board and tax avoidance like the “carried interest” or “hedge-fund managers’” loophole must be closed. 
3. Bush Tax cuts for he wealthiest should expire: Over $700 billion dollars in revenue would be generated in the next ten years by allowing these tax cuts to run their course. Income growth over the last thirty years has largely been captured by the top one percent of earners. Tax cuts for the wealthy, as demonstrated above, do not make their way into the economy as a whole and do not create jobs. Everyday people, Wall Street, Big Banks and the wealthy must all pay their fair share for our economic recovery.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In other news

New rule: If you don't know what a
paradiddle is or can't perform one at
varying speeds, stay out of the drum circle.
#occupydrumcircles

If you need a tutorial, here is a link to a You Tube instruction video. 

"What's a drum circle?" 
If you don't already know, you have You Tube homework to do. Notice how old some of these videos are. They've been around for years. But OWS is giving them new life. Think of them as the new frisbee. 

Chemical bomb tossed into Occupy Maine encampment

By BJ Bjornson

Via John Robb on Twitter:

Portland police are looking for the person who threw a chemical bomb at the Occupy Maine encampment in Portland during the early morning hours on Sunday.

Sgt. Glen McGary said police responded around 4 a.m. Sunday to an explosion in Lincoln Park at Congress and Pearl streets.

Though no one was injured, McGary said the homemade bomb, which consisted of chemicals poured into a plastic Gatorade container could have caused serious injury.

Anyone want to lay odds that this little act of terrorism will be mostly ignored by the media much like the bomb discovered in Spokane along the route of a march to honour MLK Jr. was?

WikiLeaks suspends publication

By BJ Bjornson

It appears that the effort to shut down WikiLeaks by making it next to impossible for its supporters to donate money to the organization has been successful.

One of the world's most notorious secret-spillers is going silent.

WikiLeaks said in a statement Monday that it would stop publishing in order to focus on making money — explaining that the blockade imposed by financial companies including Visa, MasterCard, Western Union and PayPal left it with no choice.

. . .

U.S.-based financial companies pulled the plug on WikiLeaks shortly after it began publishing some 250,000 U.S. State Department cables last year. The group says the restrictions starved it of nearly all its revenue.

I would also note that the timing of those financial companies pulling the plug also happened to coincide with reports that WikiLeaks next big document drop was going to be from the financial industry itself. Self-preservation is a major incentive for wanting the gatherer and publisher of such leaks starved of funds.

Holding accountable and even at times embarrassing the powerful by exposing their secrets was once a job the mainstream media was expected to do and for a time even reveled in, but that time is long past, and we’re now left with media organizations that self-censor even if they haven’t been totally captured by the people they are ostensibly covering.

I wasn’t always in agreement with what WikiLeaks was publishing, but in these days of almost compulsive government secrecy, watching them being squeezed into silence is a sad day for transparency and the freedom of information.

I’m not wasting time, it’s therapy

By BJ Bjornson

I guess it’s time to accept that I’ve reached that age where I start bitching about how good “the kids these days” have things on a regular basis, because I honestly couldn’t think of any other reaction to this story:

At the American Academy of Opthalmology's annual meeting in Orlando, Florida, a team led by Somen Ghosh of the Micro Surgical Eye Clinic in Kolkata, India, reported that video game therapy improved the visual acuity of 10- to 18-year-olds with amblyopia, or "lazy eye".

This comes hot on the heels of similar findings from a study of adults with the condition, published in PLoS Biology by a team led by Roger Li and Dennis Levi of the University of California, Berkeley. Even more impressive results may be on the horizon, as video games are combined with another approach, known as "perceptual learning".

. . .

The idea of using video games stemmed from the discovery that expert gamers have unusually strong visual skills. Subsequent studies have shown that action games can improve contrast sensitivity in people with normal vision.

I mean, what an excellent excuse to while away the hours in front of a screen. No way I would have ever gotten away with that as a kid.

Ah well, speaking as someone whose eyesight is less than optimal, I can at least take comfort in the possibility that I may actually enjoy some of the new treatments coming down the pipe to improve that condition.

Iraq and Multiple Choice Mitt

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Mitt Romney has once again proved he has no ideology or substance  with this:

President Obama’s astonishing failure to secure an orderly transition in Iraq has unnecessarily put at risk the victories that were won through the blood and sacrifice of thousands of American men and women,” Romney wrote. “The unavoidable question is whether this decision is the result of a naked political calculation or simply sheer ineptitude in negotiations with the Iraqi government. The American people deserve to hear the recommendations that were made by our military commanders in Iraq.

Of course we all know that if Obama had announced that troops were staying Romney would have attacked that as well.  That's what someone who is 100% politician does. But some of the best take downs of Romney have been ironically from the right.  My friend Jazz Shaw and I used to do right-left blogging.  We didn't agree on much but we were both opposed to the Iraq war from day one and Jazz actually left the Republican party because of Bush/Cheney and the Iraq war.  Over at wingnut central, Hot Air, Jazz had this to say:

What would be different if we left in January? Or in 2013? or 2015? It was always going to end eventually and, given the nature of the region, I doubt it was ever going to end well. Our troops acted in the greatest tradition of our nation. They followed their orders and achieved all of the real victories on a day to day basis which ever truly mattered. But the end approaches and we need to thank them once again and close this chapter. It’s time to come home, and almost ten years too late at that.

I was surprised that the comments section was for the most part supportive of Jazz's views.  I think Jazz would agree that the same applies to Afghanistan.  But that's not all.  Over at the American Spectator, a has been wingnut central, Reid Smith takes Romney to the wood shed:

To answer Mr. Romney's two part question about our exit from Iraq, I suggest that the move is absolutely political, but it's also compulsory. We have run out of options in Iraq, but make no mistake, American troops are leaving because the Iraqis don't want us there.

First of all, the politics of the matter. President Obama owed it to his political base to end the war effort. To do so, he needs only follow the roadmap outlined the Status of Forces Agreement mapped out by President Bush in 2008. It was not a coincidence that the words "as promised" were dealt into his speech today.

As far as our "sheer ineptitude," I think Mr. Romney's frustration with the profile of our exit demonstrates a misplaced presumption that the United States could maintain an insufficient troop presence to prevent a catastrophic collapse of state.

After all these years, one remarkably simple lesson escapes him. We cannot continue fighting what our presence makes inevitable. We cannot prevent civil war, state failure, or safe haven for terror by providing tinder for all of the above - unless this country is ready and willing to dramatically augment the shape and stature of its Mesopotamian military presence. I do not believe it is. Perhaps more importantly, the Iraqis are similarly disobliged.

The major complaint from the neocon right is that Iran will gain influence as the US leaves.  Many of us who opposed the war predicted this from the beginning. Bush/Cheney wanted a war – Iran wanted Saddam out. Iranian agent Ahmed Chalabi told Bush and Cheney what they wanted to hear and bingo- Saddam is gone, the Sunni are out of power and the Iranian friendly Shia are in.  The US was played as a fool - Iran wins. 

Occupation of countries has nothing to do with Democracy or nation building - it's all about empire.  And the US can no longer afford empire.

Tea Party and OWS Chart

From John's Twitter timeline...