"All of the Above" Obamas done oil production no favors

The Tesoro Refinery at Anacortes, Washington. By Walter Siegmund, license C.C. a.s.a 3.0 unported

Before I continue, I must admit a certain amount of shock in having to write this. Then again, perhaps I shouldn't be shocked. Democrat presidents have a long and proud history of taking credit for things they didn't actually do: Clinton gets credit for balancing the budget, something Newt Gingrich achieved and earned himself "resignation in disgrace" at the hands of the House Ethics committee for doing, perhaps why it hasn't been done since. FDR gets credit for New Deal projects that had already begun under Hoover - the most famous of which is the Hoover Dam. LBJ gets credit for desegregation, which was really an achievement of Eisenhower that continued through the time of LBJ. All throughout this century, Democrats have earned credit for doing things they didn't actually do (to be fair, this also includes bailing out "Government Motors" and the big banks.) I really shouldn't have been shocked to see it happen once more, this time with Obama and oil.

But there's a difference: all those other things that Democrats earned credit for, they either only slightly opposed, or even slightly supported. Never has something been so vehemently and destructively harmed directly by a president, not even through Congress with him only behind it, only to end up to his credit when it works against his plans. "Obamacare" was far more the product of Reid and Pelosi then Obama directly, but Obamas conduct with the Bureau of Land Management, and the abusive EPA that Obama himself presides over, comes from him directly. No one but the Chief Executive of the United States Federal Government is responsible for them before the American people, or should be.

Noting that, lets look over the track record of precisely what he's actually done, pertaining to oil production, as Chief Executive:

• Cancelled oil leases in the largest shale deposit of them all, at the excuse of "we don't understand how much water and energy it would use." The result of such policies is that oil and gas production on BLM lands is down 40%. In most western states, BLM lands make up 30-90% of the states land area.
  
• Purposefully delayed the decision on the Keystone Pipeline for years without any attempt to gather information to make a decision, or any clear rationale for why a decision could not be made in a reasonable time frame.
  
• Issued a moratorium on offshore drilling without any real effort to fix the underlying problems (namely, the lack of proper response networks on the Gulf.)
• Since the moratorium ended, Obama's Department of the Interior has only permitted one offshore lease sale. In other words, the moratorium never truly ended - Obama just made it look like it is over.

In North Dakota, 1574 miles from the Oval Office, oil production doubled from 2008 to 2010. North Dakota is one of only three states west of the Mississippi river to not have any BLM lands, the other two being Texas and Washington state. The section of the same oil shale formation in Montana has not been similarly developed, and the BLM owns that land.

Although North Dakotas unemployment is a boom time 3.3%, Montana remains average for the country, despite containing the western third of the Bakken formation. In Texas, the other non-BLM oil containing state, a much smaller shale deposit has been massively developed, helping to stabilize unemployment there to a reasonable five. Lastly, the largest of all the shale deposits, equivalent to seven Middle Easts, contained in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Nevada (all heavily BLM states, with around 40-90% of land area owned by Federal Government as BLM lands) is totally off limits, and even permits issued under Bush are cancelled and replaced with "research leases."

North Dakota, with no BLM lands, would never be directly affected by the Presidents pen, although the pipeline that leads from North Dakota to the Gulf refineries would, and has. In states near North Dakota, especially Wyoming, Iowa, South Dakota and Missouri, manufacturing jobs making the equipment for oil fracking are reasonably abundant, but the amount of equipment coming out of the facilities cannot keep up with demand. Investment to build new fracking equipment factories has been scarce, since with a Federal Government that seems out to get them, and Obama testing the limits of how much a President can do to hurt it, the future of such technology seems uncertain. Just what will Mister President manage to do next? The reality is that the growth of Americas oil industry in spite of Obama proves nothing except that the Presidents powers are, thankfully, limited.

Yet Mr. President has the supreme audacity to claim credit for the doubling in oil in a state he has less authority in, while reducing production by 40% on what he does have authority over and harming the infrastructure. Not directly of course, that would be too obvious, instead he quotes the oil output nationwide, where the progress in North Dakota and Texas outpaces everything else. Than he tells us he wants "all of the above."

A quick note to readers: If you want to know my sources, click on the gray text.

Pipelines and Spoiled Brats

Obamas decision to reject the Keystone Pipeline was very disturbing in two ways: first, because it was precisely what was not needed right now here in America, and second because it shows our President to have no understanding what he is doing or why. At a time when the number one issue should be jobs, and the Keystone would not only provide these jobs in terms of construction and further development of the new oil shale fields that are Americas fastest growing industry right now, but also provide demand for manufactured goods like steel and foundry items from the suffering East and Midwest, our President, already facing a potentially difficult reelection, has decided that he will give up the last chance he has to make his reelection a cakewalk. If the economy booms, then none of the assorted clowns currently running for GOP candidate will even have a chance against him, but alas for Obama, this is one boat he has missed. His reason for this dismal choice for both himself and his country: the claims of some environmentalists.

Now the ball is in Canadas court. An alternate pipeline could run from the same locations in Alberta westward to a small, undeveloped port on an inlet 70 miles long called Kitimat in British Columbia. Not only would it carry oil to China, but it would also carry oil along the well developed Inside Passage seaway to the Puget Sound for refining at Anacortes, WA and the American market. But here, again, the Greens are not satisfied.

So why, precisely, are they not satisfied? The biggest reason they are not satisfied, though it is not the only reason, is because it will "delay the development of non-carbon energy sources." Now for environmentalists in America today, this means wind and solar. Wind is extremely unreliable, and solar is astronomically expensive. What's more, the fact that solar can operate off-grid gives it a natural niche market outside of the regular electric grid, so if it can't be successful with substantial government subsidies plus a niche market, then you know it really stinks. Wind, of course, is unreliable, and a smart grid that would make it more reliable by sharing power from different geographic points would also be so susceptible to electromagnetic storms from space as to naturally be completely destroyed and take months to rebuild every 8-10 years. The alternative proposition of battery farms would be outlandishly expensive and require constant maintenance. How precisely something that requires constant input of material resources can be "sustainable" is quite beyond me.

Another reason they're not satisfied is because extracting tar sands is energy intensive. This charge is true. However, extracting oil from shale by current methods is not energy intensive, and as shale drilling becomes more and more common (tar sands is slightly older technology) the less expensive energy cost will be a deciding factor in terms of switching away from tar sands production to shale production. Right now, the massive expansion of shale drilling, especially in North Dakota where unemployment is only 3.5% (and lower near Williston) as a result, has driven up the cost of purchasing equipment for shale drilling. This is a good thing in the long run as it means more capacity will be available in the future, but in the short run means that shale is unlikely to replace any existing production until this bottleneck is widened. In the long run, this capital cost will be gone and shale will replace tar sands, especially since just the (much smaller far southern tail) of the Bakken Formation in North Dakota contains at least 3.65 billion barrels of oil, and I suspect that this analysis by the USGS was understated partially by pressure from the Obama administration and paritally by laziness, or as the report puts it: "They also combined their findings with historical exploration and production analyses to determine the undiscovered, technically recoverable oil estimates." The first rule of engineering is if you want to be lazy, always understate your result so that nobody cares.

Then there is simply the old environmentalist hatred of economic development. This is somewhat connected to the very last concern of environmentalists to be listed here, but this really is where I begin doubting the character of environmentalists as people. The reality is that, far from being some Garden of Eden, the third world is a place where illegal loggers destroy rainforests, poachers with machine guns kill off endangered species, massive sprawling cities come up over night and coal plants put mercury and radiation in to the air by the bucket full. It is also a place where in Monrovia, Liberia, the people poop on the beach, allowing untreated human sewage to go straight in to an aquifer while also stinking up the air and despoiling a beautiful 5-mile strip of pristine sand. The problem with environmentalists is they expect the full regulatory ability of a first-world country without the society or, frankly, resources, that made it possible. In short, they are spoiled brats.

And that brings us to our final environmentalist objection: locality. I shall begin by discussing the Canadian pipeline, as it is simply their most egregious abuse. All throughout the internet and journalism, we find various environmentalists and journalists, who know nothing about how development takes place, put up pictures of this pristine, perfect wilderness of tremendous natural beauty (that is, for the record, almost completely contained in an archipelago of Canadian National Parks and Provincial Parks) that supposedly will be completely destroyed by the pipeline and economic development.

To put it bluntly, no it won't. People only think it will because they don't live there. If they did live there, they would know that mountains rise straight out of the sea on both sides of the Kitimat Inlet, making any kind of construction enormously expensive, and that Kitimat is at the eastern end of that inlet and the beginning of a long, and nowhere near as pristine or beautiful, flat typical river valley. It also is located SEVENTY MILES EAST of where most of the wilderness is. In fact, this is why the pipeline is sent so far north instead of simply going to Vancouver - to avoid those eternally annoying in the sense that only an engineer can understand mountains. They would also know that if there's one thing the coastline of British Columbia has an overabundance of, its beautiful, pristine, undeveloped coastline. There are no roads on the coast of British Columbia and Alaska running North-South from the Vancouver Suburbs to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of 800 miles, the reason why the most common accidental death in Alaska is plane crashes. It also won't because these areas are already protected as parks, both at the provincial and Canadian federal level, and there are far too many flatter, more valuable, riverside pieces of real estate nearer to Kitimat and the pipeline for lobbying by the businesses to even be profitable to them. It is also true that with a tidal range near 20 feet, any oil spill would not last very long but be swept out to sea pretty fast. But environmentalists think their asinine, immature, irrational fears justify the shutting down of an entire part of the world in economic activity, when everything that even can be done to protect that wilderness already is.

The original locality makes somewhat more sense, but only somewhat, to protest. That of course is the lands through the plains that the original Keystone XL would've run through. Of course, unlike BC, there are plenty of roads in the Plains, and even more in Texas. Lots of 2-lane or 4-lane roads going passed corn fields, unused infrastructure, tiny cities and all. This is true. It is also true that the Great Plains aquifer is pretty big, though one could counter that being so big its really not that easy to substantially impurify, and what oil would do is certainly no worse then what farmlands already do with fertilizers and pesticides. Oil also has the advantage over farmlands with their pesticides and fertilizers that it is not generally to the advantage of oil companies for their pipelines to be constantly leaking. It has yet another advantage that increasing land prices may drive the farms with their pesticides and fertilizers out of business. Further, there is the little matter of refining at Wood River, Illinois and Steele, Nebraska, right over the aquifer and the Mississippi River, where oil leaks and all manner of chemical spills are much more likely to happen then at the pipeline, and where the final expansion to Houston and Port Arthur could've eventually replaced those refineries by economies of scale, in the middle of a swamp where bacteria and a chemical-recycling ecosystem already can handle most water purity issues.

Yet even here, the same picture of the environmentalist as a spoiled brat emerges - unshaking, unwilling to compromise, loud, sort of like a toddler. Instead of seeing that some development, even if not constrained by the great mountains of the Kitimat Inlet, is neccesary to finance and safeguard environmental protection, they would rather shout and scream and yell and let everything go to some third world country where no chance exists for proper controls or procedures to prevent what they want to prevent. The result is that for every ton of smog they prevent in Southern California, two tons come across the pacific blown by winds from China, and the prairie starves, and no one even really pays close attention to what they are saying or any way of making a reasonable solution to the problem. There answer is to criticize China, a country doing its best to get out of poverty, who has no special interest in listening to much of anyone who lives on this side of the Pacific. The result also is that eventually, as people become poorer and poorer, the toddler who cried wolf may really get eaten after all.

We'll all be sad that day, just like any parent would be, but it doesn't change the fact that it happened, and that the child is gone forever and not coming back. When you yourself feed on irrationality, don't be too surprised if you eventually get fed to it. Environmentalists with no respect for reason will not be given reasonable attention, and this will be a collective judgement, not an individual one, applied to all environmentalists everywhere, whether they were part of the problem or not. They will not be heard, nor will anyone else about our very real environmental problems.

The Great Confusion - a critique of "socially-conscious" enterprise

Wind farm in the Techape Mountains, CA, by Stan Shebs, license c.c. a.s.a 3.0 unported

Whether its renewable energy, microlending in Asia, or low-income housing, we end up hearing "socially-conscious" or "social entrepreneurship" frequently enough to nauseate. As I look through the news, at "socially minded entrepreneurs," I cannot help but notice just how insignificant they really are. For all of their "changing the world," only microlending appears to have changed much, and microlending was not started as "social entrepreneurship" but rather adopted by the figurative guild of "social entrepreneurs" later.

One of the great dangers of social entrepreneurship is the tendency to treat profit as a hurdle instead of an objective. Whereas standard business aims to sell enough at a good enough price to justify its existence, expand and attract others to compete, social entrepreneurship does just barely well enough to exist. Worse, sometimes it doesn't even do that, but rather siphons off funds from the taxpayers through government edict that could be put to better use. In the end, this destabilizes governments and entire economies, as America is only now finding out.

Sometimes people claim that social entrepreneurship can fulfill aspects of true progress that standard entrepreneurship could not. This, simply, is a lie. Take green energy for example. The claim is that we cannot create carbon-free/pollution-free energy without some kind of government investment, but the reality is that we already have such things. We have at least two extremely profitable carbon-free power sources: hydroelectric and uranium-based fission nuclear. We also have a moderately profitable one called Geothermal. Detractors will argue that uranium creates nuclear waste, hydroelectric floods land and threatens biodiveristy, and geothermal takes land in natural areas like the Valles Caldera. And yet they advance wind, which takes up far more land in natural areas then geothermal ever would, and hydro would in some cases, and harms biodiversity by destroying migratory birds, and solar, which, like all semiconductors, requires dangerous chemicals and chemical wastes in the production of solar panels, or else, in the form of solar-thermal, takes up vast land and destroys entire habitats like wind, while taking astronomical costs to build and in the end not being sustainable for the simple and basic reason that nothing built can last forever.

Another claim is bringing third-world countries out of poverty, but alas, every first-world nation was once a third-world nation, and every one of them was brought out of this condition by the expansion of private business. And today, in India, Brazil, Russia, Rwanda, Uganda and China, private business is bringing a few more home. Does this mean there is no role for government or charity? Hardly, this is all collectivist we have not even looked at taking care of individuals yet, but it does mean that your "social entrepreneuers" are wrong about precisely what that role is.

And then there's the matter of precisely what profit is. When most people here the word, they think of some fat guy in a suit who already has too much money (in this day and age, that more accurately describes politicians.) Most business today is done by a combination of ma and pa business and joint stock ventures, depending upon the sector. Indeed, "fat suit guy sole proprietor" has not been the dominant model since the late 1800's.

Joint stock ventures are made up of 1,000's of investors of every social status, both wealthy seeking more wealth and workers seeking a retirement through 401K's, putting money towards a limited liability venture that they are not in control of but still suffer the gains and losses of through stock price and dividend. When you create profit for your joint stock venture, that's a larger 401K for a soon to be old man as well as a larger portfolio for a serious investor (who is not always, but usually is, rich.)

But that's not all profit does! Profit also means that a large enough number of people will contribute a large enough sum to your product to make it more then worthwhile to produce. It also creates new investor groups, both ma and pa and joint stock, to create more production of the desired thing. This virtuous cycle puts out WHAT PEOPLE WANT IN THE GREATEST SENSE, instead of what is desired by a small "ecologically friendly" elite. Indeed, it is far more democratic then democracy, as democracy only considers yes or no and not the degree to which something is desired. Democracy is like a net of thick rope with 4 inch gaps and the free market is like the finest of satins - its holes nearly invisible.

Profit too prevents the waste of resources - if building space, workers and raw materials are demanded by a more profitable enterprise, the price will increase until finally the less profitable either go out of business or rearrange their assets, freeing up the building space, workers and raw materials. As our society decided "getting off of foreign oil" was the highest of all goals, E85 drove up the price of food to cause many of our poor to starve by taking tons of corn and turning it in to small quantities of motor oil. Meanwhile, oil prices continue to rise astronomically, and a few foolish legislators suggested increasing Ethanol content beyond what engines can take without corrosion.

The reality is that profit is a very lofty and socially honorable thing, that very much does empower all of society, and create the best world the given conditions can create for the common man. Treating it as a problem, instead of a solution, will lead to hubris and a small elite dictating things as "the right thing to do" instead of allowing nature and the common man to decide amongst themselves. There is no one so ignorant as one who thinks he knows what's good for his neighbor, and so much of the 20th century has been ruled and ruined by such men.

Full Extent of the Pacific Electric Railway, circa 1920. Public domain work of US Federal Gov't.

The Gospel of Joseph Stalin, Chapter 5: The Parable of the Green Fool

Secretary General and Loving Father Stalin, who only sends those who really need it to Siberia to be worked to death. Photo taken by CCCP, public domain for all good comrades. Here

"Someone in the crowd said to him, “Liberal, tell my brother to divide the tax money with my solar power company.”

"¹⁴ Comrade Stalin replied, “Individuals, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you? Can't you tell I have the general will to look out for...” ¹⁵ Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; you might turn in to a conservative! But for now you're just a useful idiot...”

¹⁶ And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain country yielded an abundant economic harvest. ¹⁷ He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no way to prevent the world from changing.’

¹⁸ “Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my coal power plants and build bigger solar panels across miles of beautiful, open Desert, and there I will have my electricity. ¹⁹ And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of power laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’

²⁰ “But the general will, now extended to include the cute, furry creatures of the forest, said to him, ‘You fool! Yellowstone will erupt this very night, cover the Western United States with lava and block the sun for 50 years. Then where will this stable world you have prepared for yourself go to?’

²¹ “This is how it will be with whosoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich towards the general will."

California Nightmares

The Delta Smelt, Work of USFWS, public domain

It seems, not long ago, the world dreamed of California - its gold, its industrial power, its great cities and farmland. Today, the state is in massive debt, farmers are strangled of water for a 2-inch fish, unprecedented regulation strangles every aspect of innovation and industry, the notion of private property becomes less and less meaningful, and unemployment in the once-fertile Central Valley skyrockets to over 50% in some places. Worse, it seems somewhere down the road California lost its soul, as even where business is still strong, it is driven by people from out of the state.

What we find today is a coastal California more interested in complaining about insensitive jokes in the film "Juno" then building business or making things work, and an inland California slowly being sacrificed at the altar of a fish. We find a state legislature that refuses to cut spending or authorize new industry, preferring instead to bleed their state dry with taxes as fat cat administrators take home six-figure salaries. We find a constitution with specific language banning an entire industry, nuclear power, and communities that plot to prevent new industrial development because they're scared for their land values, while factory after factory shuts down. We find a state that has totally lost touch with who or what built it, and a new race of man who not only does not know how to provide for himself, but refuses to, preferring instead to take and take and take and finding building too ugly for his tastes.

Perhaps most disgusting about California is the absolute willingness of the people on the coast to annihilate the welfare of the rest of the state, and that brings us to the point of this blogpost. A plan needs to be made to protect the people of the rest of the state from the coasters. What the coasters do to themselves is their own problem - I hope someday they will learn, but if they don't at least I won't be responsible for it. They must, however, not be able to destroy all of this land that has never agreed with them or signed on to what they do.

It seems most rational to cut California in to 4 states, so as to create as logical of a configuration as possible and best serve the needs of the people. A proposal already exists for the state of Jefferson, and for the Southeastern desertlands. For the Central Valley in between, I propose creating the somewhat historic land of American River corresponding to the area that the Spanish authorized for American settlement in the early 1800's and the famous river named for that event. In addition, I took the liberty of including conservative Orange County in the proposed "South California" (here renamed "Mojave") state. This way, the Coasters can be stupid in peace. We'll even give them a stretch of coastal wilderness, west of the Santa Lucias.

public domain

The Vain Hubris of Sustainability

Whenever anyone talks about sustainability, there are three basic facts that need to be understood:

1 - Nothing you build will last forever.

2 - There's no such thing as something for nothing.

3 - Throughout history, industrial economies have changed from one resource to another, usually without so much as a headline in the newspaper.

Since number three is the fact that is most surprising to many, I will begin with it. 200 years ago, houses and buildings were constructed almost exclusively from wood and brick. In those days, efficient methods for making both were common, but steel took days to manufacture, and had to be made from already well processed pure iron. Both the fuel and time needs were tremendous to conduct two separate chemical processes each taking days. Further, the quantities made were whatever you could fit in a single crucible.

Bessemer discovered a fast process for making steel in 1855, so fast in fact that it only took 10-20 minutes. The result was the first steel buildings and ships. With Steel, the size of structures increased tremendously, and the skyscraper, along with its steel elevator, became not only a possibility but something neccesary to provide commercial space for the fast growing cities. It also allowed for the internal combustion engine, whose fine moving parts cannot be made effectively from other materials, and with it the car and the airplane.

The Bessemer process could remove many impurities from the original iron ore, and together with the Blast Furnace, silion and silicates, manganese and permanganates, carbon, and sulfur could all be effectively removed. The one thing it could not effectively remove, however, was phosphate, so for the process to work, low-phosphate ores had to be used.

Unfortunately the world began running out of low-phosphate ores in the 1950's, so what did the invisible hand "do"? It introduced two new processes. The first was the Basic Oxygen Process, which took slightly longer (30-40 minutes) but could remove phosphate from the molten steel and had tighter control over the chemistry, allowing new alloys such as Boron Steel to be produced for the first time, and Stainless Steel (also known as Chromium Steel) to be produced inexpensively, and the exact carbon content to be dictated to a hundredth of a percent. The cost is a little higher, but you get higher quality with it. The second was the Electric Arc Process, which for inexpensive steel needs would recycle scrap metal effectively. Between these two, quality improved, new resources were used, and the world did not end, while the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur would set a record for the tallest building in the world a few decades later.

This is not the only example. When strikes and labor politics made the price of coal more expensive, Americans switched to heating with oil and natural gas. Before this, Europeans had switched from firewood to coal as the great forests of Europe were gradually axed away during the Middle Ages, but those castles, those great Cathedrals, and all the splendor of medieval art and music was made with fireplaces burning wood, and those were still around when the wood went away, and before then, it was far easier to go outside to axe a tree then to go underground and risk your neck mining for coal.

No power plant or road we build today is going to last 60 years, so why are we thinking in terms of 600? We should only consider what power sources will still be available 60 years from now when building that plant, and the free market has a device for that too, it's called a futures market. Investors buy up resources now to sell them later at a higher prices, creating a clean and smooth and flat distribution of resources when the market is sufficiently large and well informed, and they do try to be both for their own self-interest. And if people really will benefit from more expense now to avoid expense later (e.g. flourescents), they will buy them, but they probably don't, as they are already in debt and one dollar not repaid now will be a dollar repaid with interest later.

Lastly, and addressing number two, whenever something is used, something is lost, and that includes the materials to build solar panels, and the materials used to make the materials to make solar panels, as plastics and long complex molecules are almost always involved. There is always chemistry involved, and always wasteage, and the free market is a far better evaluator of what the true costs of that wastage is then some government bureaucrat whose never had a job outside of bureaucracy, or scientist specifically trained to only see from the perspective of his field. There is more to cost then electricity and fuel - even things like transportation, labor, land, and the space and finances lost from holding inventory are significant. The reality is that sustainability is not sustainable, as nothing is and we will see when the climate changes and the wind no longer blows where it did, or we run out of some chemical required in the manufacture of solar panels, or even great dust and ash from a supervolcano eruption block the sun. Everything must shift with its right and proper season, and this includes all sources of energy. Sustainability is a vain and impossible notion.

A Hippie and Me

Walden Pond, MA, where Henry David Thoreau spent two years of his life living as naturally as possible. Work of QuarterCircleS, license: c.c.a.s.a 2.5 gen

One of the great joys of riding Greyhound is all the interesting people you meet along the way.

On my way from Atlanta to Seattle, I believe the Missouri portion of the route, I met a man who lives his principles every day. A radical environmentalist, not of the political sort but the real kind, he was on his way to a commune that his friend had set up in the mountains of Colorado. There they import nearly nothing, live almost totally off the land, and recycle every last thing they can.

They use no electricity and have no modern communications except a single old telegraph line to the ranger station reserved for emergencies. There are no roads near where they live, and they wake up every morning to a Rocky Mountain sunrise and a day of their own maintenance. He has been living this way for 40 years now, and is extremely satisfied with his life, where he eats the fruit of his own hands and sleeps under the roof of his own construction. He works FOR no employer, but rather works WITH his friends. He has little material wealth, but lots of heart, and a high quality of life.

As you probably know by now, I am not a radical environmentalist. Still, of this kind I can very much appreciate as I suspect anyone can who has an open mind. We talked of many things, about how you can catch rainwater on your roof, clean it, and drink it, about how vegetables made at home are better then the ones you buy at the store (which my family, many of whose members still grow their own vegetables, knows very much for certain to be true) and sensible policies towards hunting. We talked about business ideas, and how to bring recycling and good living to the people of the cities.

I brought up recycling human urine, a relatively easy process and one that can render high quality drinking water. He thought it was a great idea, for people like me. Unfortunately its greatest likely customer, California, probably wouldn't agree. They would think of it as icky, even if it makes sense and gives them cleaner, safer water then their own pipes, which it does, as there is not one ounce of open soil in a closed, above ground machine.

Here's another idea: theoretically, you can put nuclear waste in a highly shielded barrel, and then drop it in a large pool of seawater. The result will be that as the barrel absorbs the radiation, it will heat to a tremendous temperature, and then turn the seawater in to steam. The salt and impurities and all uncleanness will be left behind and you will have as close to pure water as can be acquired anywhere deposited in a pool by gravity, just like the earths own rain. This would provide a great practical use for nuclear waste, and lower the price of water throughout the world while saving the earths aquifers and ecosystems from drainage and tampering by urban water systems.

But California wouldn't do that either.

He thought it was interesting to meet someone on the opposite side of the spectrum from him, someone who works with society rather then removing oneself from it. Unlike the hypocritical SUV environmentalists of California, he had no anger, no venom, no dislike, and no insecurity. He knew he was doing what he was able to do, and he needn't do more. The peace he had inside of himself grew outward, and came to include anyone in his presence.

Perhaps the environmental advantages of environmental legislation are overwhelmed by the spiritual malaise they create. No law, no order, no head of state made my friend become a hippie, he did it out of his own heart, and he desired none, but the people of California grow old in a place where every aspect of economic action is dictated by government, where as a utilities company, I don't have the option of saving aquifers by using nuclear waste to desalinize seawater, because the government has a law against that. I don't have the option to recycle my own urine, because I don't have a license for that, and even if I did I couldn't mass produce the machine so I couldn't afford it. I don't have the option of creating a commune near San Simeon, because the land, though cheap, is off-limits to all development heavier then ranching. I can't collect my seawater, because that would be against zoning laws. I can't raise pigs and chickens in my backyard, because that would be uncivilized. Indeed, we are too civilized, far too civilized perhaps even to live.

One of the unsung virtues of the free market is that it actually creates hippies. This is something Jefferson understood as he confronted a form of big government far more minor then todays in the name of a peaceful agrarianism. Men in black ties and suits, unless they are volunteers, must be forced and manufactured, and business does not have the ability to do this by itself. Train systems only become irreparable when an AMTRAK takes over their routes.

The Amish built primitivist towns and small farms in the Midwest centuries before bureaucracy, but bureaucracy today creates Monsanto, Cargill, and other huge agricultural companies that have replaced the small family farmer with legions of Mexican, often illegal, immigrants, who do not even know the language of the land, have no real home or place to call their own, raise their children in a constant, hateful flux, and are entitled to almost none of the fruit of their labors. When they grow too old, they are illegal, so no one can take care of them, and they are illegal because the INS is too big. Monsanto also once patented a new biogenetically engineered seed, and when the wind carried it to a neighboring farm, sued the owner for copyright infringement. The name of that case was Monsanto vs. Schmeiser, a textbook example of the law being right, and the morality being wrong.

The reality is that no matter how we choose to live, like my hippie, we must take responsibility for our lives. If that means recycling our urine to support our urban resources and having factories by our houses, we must take this as the just price for living so well in other ways. The people of California had once seen their standard of living rise, and now that they have stifled their commerce, destroyed their car factories, ruined their peoples creativity, frozen their once dynamic cities and neighborhoods, and plundered their farmland, they demand to keep what they had when they were useful. Not only is this hypocrisy a damnable disgrace, and deserves the very wrath of God, but its consequences are seen in the spirit of the people, now a small, petty people of soft, worthless disagreements, judgmental notions of class, paranoia and hate. I suspect very strongly that these people don't live full lives, and their crime rate indicates a toxic level of personal brokenness. Just like my hippie, we must live with our cities maintained and our nation growing, or leave, with our way of living behind us, to somewhere we can live. Our tenacity is an illusion created by our prosperity, and our prosperity lasts only as long as we work to maintain it.

The Lemmeys Lay an Egg in the Chagos

Chagos Islanders helping the Seabees, Diego Garcia, 1971

Okay, imagine this, you have a home, a large home on 14 square miles, shared between you and 1100 other people. You are told, mysteriously, by the British government that you will be evicted to build a military base. If you have an extremely long ancestry on the island, you're entitled to some compensation, and only a little bit, several years too late to help you out in any significant manner, but if it's only you or your mother or your grandfather, you're entitled to none. Worse, brutal measure including depravation of supplies, threats of bombing, and the destruction of domesticated animals are used to achieve these ends.

But here's the strange part: the military base isn't even in your chain of islands, but on a larger island 30 miles away.

And thus you have the Chagossians. They've been forced out of a home that wasn't even needed for anything, and at one point, the British did not believe they were entitled to any compensation. They described them as "Tarzans" and "Man Fridays," and dumped them on the nearby island of Mauritus without so much as food and water to fend for themselves in the Port Louis slums. At most, an eviction of Diego Garcia might have been in order, probably to the other islands, and certainly not by these means.

This leads me to wonder, just what are they doing with those islands? There are allegations of black sites by the US Intelligence community on those islands. There are also large areas of solid farmland and excellent mineral resources and fishing completely off limits to any economic development. And then there are the poor souls forced to live in urban slums because some idiot in London, or DC (the story varies), decided this was honestly a good idea.

Mauritus is now seeking control of the islands. While the US millitary has a legitimate claim to the neccessity of Diego Garcia, I see no reason at all that they should so much as whine at some reasonable level of economic development on a bunch of islands that aren't even reasonably near them. If they had been willing to make the people there American or British citizens on the Chagos Islands, and only rearrange the lives of those directly affected by the military base, maybe my feelings would be different, but after 39 years of reckless unethical behavior towards an entire society, methinks that neither London nor DC nor Port Louis, Mauritus, who sold their people out for 3 million pounds, can be trusted at all with the greatest Lemon of Lemmeyland. This is totally irresponsible, and no official associated with these acts should be allowed to keep their job, and no bureau associated with the duties regarding the British Indian Ocean Territory should avoid thorough scourging and discipline.

Those people have a home they have been deprived of. Now, the UK wants to declare a giant nature preserve to keep them out of their home forever. This is not the first time that eco-nazism has hurt the people of the Chagos - another proposed site for the current base at Diego Garcia was an uninhabited atoll rejected because it was the site of a rare breed of turtle. Please, please, please let them come back, and there is no reason at this point why someone else should not control those islands, especially when the British have abused them so thoroughly:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." -The Declaration of Independence

Government comes from the people, and thus the British Government has lost it's right to the British Indian Ocean Territory, pure and simple. Who will it go to instead? I don't know. Not Mauritus, not the UK, and not America, that much has to be certain.

National Hunting Parks

Source of the Carbon River, public domain, US Government

The Evergreen State already has substantial parkland, but the one thing we do not have is a hunting park. Though Washingtonians can hunt in open land that is unowned or owned by lumber companies and conditionally open use, the state has not preserved land for sportsmen in a strong way.

An environmental group there is currently trying to protect the Carbon River, but right now I doubt voters in any state are much interested in spending on parks and recreation, and especially not one that already has so much of it. A spokesman of their group said they would try to get funds from the Stimulus bill, but if for some reason they don't, their next best hope is to offer Washington something it doesn't currently have - a different kind of park and one that will help preserve a national tradition.

See, in Medieval Europe, peasants were not allowed to hunt wildlife, sometimes (in the case of France) even if it was eating their crops. When the Irish, Germans and other groups that came to this land in poverty took their land claims, they not only could hunt, but it became an important part of their life. The word "buck" is used for dollar because early Americans would often trade buckskins instead of using the rare gold bullion that England forced, with mercantilism, back to its own borders.

Go to a Western lodge off a rural highway, even today, the ultimate symbol of land ownership for the common, frontier man, and at the end of the great timber floored hall, prominently over the fire place, the head of a deer or elk, and many other preserved animals like Cougars, Owls and Hawks. You may also be served venison, and use a deerskin as a blanket.

The Carbon River controversy centers on development along WA-165 of the Tacoma metropolitan area. This makes the park both very accessible to city slickers who normally don't hunt, and very in danger of development. "Developing" it as a reserve for hunters and their prey would nearly guarantee its preservation, and be very political tenable as it is something both locked and loaded Republicans like me and greenminded Liberals can agree on. Similar parks can be established in other states, near cities, to give the common man a real chance to engage in this great tradition.

The Gospel of Joseph Stalin, Episode 1: Lazarus and Obama

Secretary General and Loving Father Stalin, who only sends those who really need it to Siberia to be worked to death. Photo taken by CCCP, public domain for all good comrades. Here

"There was once a very succesful politician who feasted sumptuously on the contributions of political lobbyists everyday. Outside his door was a politically hated Leper named the Republican Party. The Leper was very sick, and had nothing to eat in years since he was deemed unclean by the entire population of the world 4 years ago.

"Everyday he waited outside of the succesful politicians doors, asking only for the scraps given to the Europeans and Iranians. Worse, the Europeans and Iranians, after eating said scraps, licked his sores and called him a nitwit. Later that year, he caught a terrible case of Teaitis, and passed away. Teaitis is contagious, and so the succesful politician caught it too, along with a bunch of Illegal Immigrants in Arizona, and was laid to rest in a healthcare plan.

"The Leper was carried to the bosom of Sarah Palin, to a supremely comfortable midterm election with lots of lobbyists to provide them with everything they want, even Learjets! Meanwhile, the succesful poltician was burned over and over again in Political Hell by his own Death Panels. He cried out "Mother Palin, have mercy on me! Come send the Lazarus person with a large batch of Earl Grey to put out these flames all over me and make me think I still have Arugula money!"

"But Mother Palin replied, "Son, you had nothing but good things a couple Novembers ago, while he had nothing but bad, but beyond that, we would love to help you Dem man, but a great Gulf of Mexico has been fixed between us, so that anyone who goes there is considered an asshole, and anyone who comes here is considered a paranoid freak who most assuredly is far too paranoid and radical to do anything irresponsible with free money, I mean, campaign funds."

A Conservative Plan to Help the Poor

For about 50 years now, liberals have held dominance over the issue of helping Americas least fortunate and reducing poverty. With this dominance, they have done little, poverty has declined minimally, and perhaps, when adjusted for the level of economic growth, even gone backwards, and the states they have dominated the most (like California) have seen their middle classes shrink from some of the largest in America, to some of the smallest.

There is an inherent assumption that economic conservatives, being somewhat less directly interested, cannot help the poor, as if unintended effects of decisions never happen, and yet, it seems to me some of the most vital reforms required to break the ceiling for our poor are, in fact, economically conservative things to do:

1) Eliminate Property Taxes - it is very difficult to help the poor at the neighborhood or small town level when the minute the neighborhood improves, the poor can no longer afford to live there. Not only do current home owners face the potential of eviction if their property values go up, or their income goes down, but the change in rental prices is magnified, leading to those who rent apartments or houses being driven out much more quickly then they need be.

2) Simplify zoning - Simpler zoning laws lead to more walkable communities, by allowing nearly any business to open anywhere that is logical, that can support small, family owned business, and allow the natural expansion of industrial development in poorer areas. Not only does such industry provide jobs for the poor, but it stabilizes land prices by creating small nuisances to couple with gains in more meaningful areas, like education, and provides a tax base for communities that otherwise will receive little taxation.

3) Improve railbanking regulation - Currently, to reopen a closed rail line you must perform an entirely new environmental study and face major injunctions by the local community. Allowing any former line (it was there before, and the world didn't explode) to be reopened at any time, we can improve American freight handling, lowering distribution costs for consumer goods and freight, and increasing the profitability of American industry and the kind of jobs that CAN pay well: an assemblyline worker can easily produce a hundred grand a year of revenue for his business. In addition, the rail construction itself will also increase employment for underskilled workers, as it is largely manual labor.

4) Nuclear energy - Nuclear energy will lower electric bills nationwide, lowering the cost of American made goods, both for our people, and for export. Washington State built an entire industrial economy off of cheap electricity, one that is still growing today.

5) Eliminate ethanol and other subsidies, and pharmaceutical tariffs - These subsidies lower the availability of food and other economic goods that the poor need to survive, while tariffs against foreign drug manufacturers increase the price of health insurance and perscriptions for the people who can already barely afford them.

6) Simplify accounting standards - If you hire an accountant at $20 an hour to oversee the work of five productive workers, for your business to be as profitable, you must effectively take $4 an hour off of those five workers paychecks, as the accountant contributes nothing to the businesses profitability. This also, by lowering the maximum profitable wage, causes layoffs at a lower wage level.

7) Free trade - You have a choice, make the poor buy more expensive goods from ineffective producers who hold a relative monopoly over the market, and retain jobs that produce less, lowering the wage ceiling for the entire country by causing layoffs when the wage gets too high, or allow a few ineffective businesses to go away, and allow those workers to be hired by the companies that are willing to pay a higher wage as the workers here in the US will actually produce at that level, while lowering the price of goods, and thus the effective wage, for all.

There are likely many other examples, but these come to mind.

By focusing on the individual factors that actually hurt the poor and make them in need of help to begin with, we may find that their interests lie in liberty rather then theft that, in the end, finds itself stealing from them as well.

Railbanking

Union Pacific Rail Trail, Summit County, UT. Public domain, by GreenGlass1972

According to the Rails-to-Trails conservancy, 1500 former railroads have been transformed (1250 since they started up) in to trails for bicycles and pedestrians. Western Washington is a classic example of places that have been transformed by Rails-To-Trails

Soon to be included in the 1500 Rail-Trails is the former loop around the Lake, one of the oldest railroads in King County, just shut down in the past two years, that comprised the railroad backbone for the Eastside of Seattle, shutdown a local business that was becoming an important part of their culture (The Spirit of Washington dinner train) and makes bypassing Seattle on rail nearly impossible for most routes (as the NP Railway goes too far South), negatively affecting industry to the North and South. Also included were the railways running to Issaquah, despite the fact that there is still a reasonable amount of industry there, and all the railroads running to the rich farming regions of the Snoqualmie Valley and the far east of King County, except for a few miles of shot-haul railroad between two towns used for entertaining tourists...

Canadian National Railway in the Chicago Suburbs recently acquired a series of rail corridors with the intention of creating a belt line to divert traffic around Chicago. As usual, they also cried environmentalism. State Senator Holmes (D-Aurora) called upon Obama to make staffing decisions "that will protect communities from the unnecessary safety and economic concerns that can be caused by railroad expansion." Nowhere in this reasoning was the economic benefits that railroad expansion can bring, that was nowhere addressed. Nor, for that matter, was the "unneccesary" backed up with good solid reasoning, and I know exactly how shaky their understanding is first hand.

A little under a year ago, I took an AMTRAK train from Atlanta, GA to Seattle, WA, along three rail lines: The Crescent to DC, the Capitol Limited to Chicago, and finally, the Empire Builder to Seattle. When anywhere near Chicago or the Great Lakes, the train would be stopped for an hour at a time waiting for freight trains to pass it. (And to think this was during a recession, when there is less cargo to carry...) As for "safety," how can putting that many large metal objects travelling at 60 MPH on the same piece of rail be safe? And as for "environment," train collisions can leak toxic chemicals all over the landscape, and freight traffic being more expensive on rail leads to more of it on the roads in the form of trucking. The situation is clear, they want to interfere with the free rights of a railroad company to operate in order to shift their burden environmentally and safety-wise to other communities, and increase it. They want to beg their neighbors for $6 to avoid paying $5 themselves!

And as for economic benefits - increased cargo capacity and cheaper freight transportation, not too much higher rail speed will benefit industries of every kind set up along the tracks, creating good, solid work for Americans of every educational level from high school dropout (the assembly line) to PhD Engineer (advanced design work) and consulting services of every kind. Every aspect of society will benefit from more manufacturing. And for the environment, more track and more ease of use makes for easier high-speed and passenger service, possibly, if regulations become light enough, even with private money.

Update 3/15/2010: This New York Times Editorial about Acela is very informative regarding the state and growth restraints of rail service in America, and especially along the Northeast Corridor. It's also a short read.

Update 10/15/2010: This local story from Ballard, Seattle, WA is about a successful shortline railroad that has seen its traffic increase signficiantly in the last couple years and is expanding its business. Excerpt:

"Traffic on the Ballard Terminal's railroads was up 47 percent in 2007 and Cole predicts 2008 will be even better. This is due in large part to businesses reassessing the cost benefit of using rail for their transportation needs. According to Cole, each rail car can carry 100 tons while an 18-wheel truck can only carry 25 tons. Trains are more efficient as a freight engine can move one ton 400 miles on one gallon of diesel fuel while a truck can only move the same weight only 75 miles."

It is worth noting that trains can also be electrified, a technology that reached its zenith in the 1930's and has since been in decline. This article speaks in more detail about railroad electrification and why it never materialized to the degree that it was originally envisioned. Cheap electric costs through relatively non-polluting sources such as nuclear, geothermal and wind could once again make railroad electrification an attractive option combined with rising gasoline costs.

Photobucket. Image of Ballard Terminal Railroad on Shilshole Avenue.

The Copenhagen Post

Looking at many articles pertaining to Climate Change (and many of the stories revolve around Denmark), I have found a rare gem.

This quality Danish newspaper is concise, informative, intelligent, and has a wonderful English language edition. Very few of their newstories are over half a page, and yet they give you five pages worth of information. I especially loved this gem on public opinnion related to Nuclear power: "'Nej Tak' to nuclear after all".

They started by mentioning the two polls and their collosally different results. They then briefly mentioned the question that one of the polls asked versus the other. Then they gave a simple and clear reason - "did not ask respondents about the actual placement of nuclear power plants in Denmark" (4th paragraph, last sentence) - for the discrepency. It followed this up with a one-sentence explanation (without making it clear that it was an explanation) for why they looked in to this to begin with, and finished with the status (in the last paragraph) of Danish political parties on the issue.

I also found a wonderful article there about an accounting scandals involving carbon credits and a VAT carousel. It involves a classic conflict-of-interest scenario, where registering the VAT you paid to buy your goods for resale, you drop the VAT Receivable of the “cooperating” businesses without collection, and run off to a foreign country before you have to pay the VAT yourself. The "chum" businesses who "sold" you the goods also disappear, leaving no complete recursion for the collection of the tax.

Look at it yourself any time:

http://www.cphpost.dk/index.php

Trash Trash Trash

Image courtesy Nick of Canberra (Wikipedia username dsfrg.msc)

I was walking down 68th Street from Alki Beach in Seattle, when I saw the most trash next to a sidewalk I'd ever witnessed. Coffee lids, napkins, beer bottles, various varieties of broken glass, very used straws, food and slightly decomposed food containers, all lined the street and in some cases were underneath the tires of cars. The worse part is that a public trash can was available, slightly under a block away.

So you literers out there, tell me, why must you deposit trash? Why must you leave your mark on every neighborhood like a little doggy? Why do your legs seem unable to carry you an extra 50 feet to that nearest trashcan? Is there any kind of service, like little kids on bicycles with a big trash bin on their front, that we could provide you with to make fulfilling the law slightly easier? Do you just plain hate the city? If so, are there any buildings, services or roads we could remove to make you hate the city less?

If so, please call the city police immediately, notify them you are a literer interested in changing the city, give them your address, your phone number, precisely when & where you littered last, and, just to prove it, the name of a few people who were with you and they'll handle the rest. Trust me, this kind of stuff makes their day!

Cap-And-Trade Roll-Call - Naming the Guilty

In this weeks house roll call vote to push through Cap and Trade, the democrats passed the bill 219-211. But 8 GOP congressmen defected! Now, this is still considerably less then the number of Dems who defected (hence the margin being narrow) but nonetheless, it is clear that some of our conservative friends should have a guilty conscience. If only four of those GOP congresssmen had stuck to their side of the aisle, the vote would have been a tie. Three of these GOP congressmen are from New Jersey.

Well, one truly guilty face is Seattle's own Dave Reichert. Representing the 8th District, and the only Republican congressioanl district West of the Mountians in Washington State, Reichert has long been known to be considerably more environmentalist then is normal for a Republican. In a previous life, he was awarded Sheriff of the Year in 2004 for his exceptional conduct as King County Sheriff, including catching the Green River Killer, but has since held few significant policy stands or achievements.

Another guilty face is Matt Kirk in his district to the north of Chicago. Like Reichert, he too has been known to support environmentalism. His agenda, however, is much more clearly suburban. Both Reichert & Kirk's districts are Obama Republican, meaning that despite a Republican congressman, they voted for Obama in the Presidential election.

Mary Bono Mack's district in Southern California also voted for Obama, but by only 51%, unlike 60% for each of Reichert & Kirk's districts. The district used to be clearly Republican, but in recent years has slid more and more liberal. She is a fiscal-environmentalist conservative who has won simultaneous awards from both Sunline Transit Agency & Americans for Tax Reform.

Our fourth fiend is Mike Castle from Delaware's At-Large district. He's mostly a social conservative anyways, representing a state that is liberal to the bone, a district even more liberal then those previously mentioned.

Chris Smith of New Jersey's 4th has considerably less of an excuse. His district voted a comfortable 52% for McCain in 2008 and 56% for Bush in 2004. He, however, is primarilly a social conservative, being a major figure in the pro-life movement and the author of several antiabortion bills. He has strong ties to ORGANIZED LABOR, and as such can be considered a member of the Christian Left.


Congressman John McHugh represents the 23rd District of New York as a Republican moderate. He recently received several earmarks in a defense appropriation bill that he celebrates on his website...

Representative Lance of New Jersey's 7th votes with his party 88% of the time, making this particular exception somewhat odd. On his website, he justifies this vote with his strong commitment to renewable energy. Overall, however, he has very little policy information (total: 10 long sentences, though 4 on the environment) on his website (circa 06-27-09) and so one finds his sincerity of intent questionable. His district is obviosly very gerrimandered, like an ameoba on his district map, and has not had a Democrat representative since 1980. Its' median income is 75 grand.

Lastly, Representative Frank LoBiondo of New Jerseys 2nd (includes Atlantic City) voted in support of this bill. LoBiondo is a member of Newt Gingrich's freshmen class, having taken his seat in the 1994 congressional sweep after a failed 1992 run. He is a member of the moderate "Republican Main Street Partnership." Unlike Lance, his policy stands are very detailed, almost too detailed, and his "news" section on his website holds very candid and angry stands on almost every detail of Economic, Energy, Defense, Veterans, and legislation related to local beaches.

Ahn Cao, interestingly, did not vote for it, despite being a moderate republican from an obscenely liberal district (Downtown New Orleans, voted 85% for Barack Obama, 65% African American). He also did not vote for the stimulus, and, according to Orange Juice, may be facing a recall attempt as a result. This immigrant came to America as the son of a former South Vietnamese army officer, attended law school after almost becoming a Catholic Priest, and built his own law firm in New Orleans.


CONCLUSION

Of the 8 who did vote for Cap and Trade, Smith, Bono Mack, Lance, and McHugh would probably have been the easiest to persuade. Reichert is a maybe, as is Kirk. The other two could not have been persuaded, as one district was too liberal.

Jesus has commandeered this blog! Hallelujah!

I know I have not always placed my priorities well in life. I've been worried, been working myself beyond prudence, have even occasionally missed the day of rest. That's why God inflicted me with an ulcer, a peptic ulcer, even though I'm only 20 years old.

See, in life, nervousness is a common decision, an understandable decision, and the worse decision we ever make. It makes us worse drivers, worse thinkers, worse performers of good works. But even more then that, focusing our lives on everyday concerns drains us away from what we should really be concerned about, what we do with our life!

Jesus wants us to lighten up, trust him a little, and be thankful for all the beauty, friendship, and bounty he surrounds us with. And if you don't believe in him, still, reconsider letting your life revolve around worry, and at least appreciate the glory of the mountains, the sun, and human love and heroism.

So next time your life seems to be running itself down the drain, ask yourself, what am I living for?

CARPE DIEM!

Nough' Complaining, let's make a plan

I myself on this blog have been guilty often of complaining about what the liberals have proposed economically and not suggesting my own alternative. This is common, human, and an easy reaction to being in the minority, but if I want to be out of the minority we (that's means you) have to bring something to the table. And so, here it goes:

1. Advance Nuclear Energy - energy is critical to the functioning of any industrial economy. With Nuclear Power, we can build a cheap, carbon-free, easy to maintain energy grid that will not run out, if accompanied with reprocessing or breeder reactors, for hundreds of years. Best of all, we can get rid of our coal power while lowering the cost of energy. Critics will say that it is still nonrenewable. This is mostly true (although nuclear recycling by both methods has been achieved up to 90%), but it is also true that no power plant built in the US will last forever, and this power source is guaranteed to outlive the power plants that are built for it. Which is more long-term, a nuclear plant that will remain in service for 100 years or a wind/solar plant that must be rebuilt every 20? Yes, thinking is involved.

2. Proposed TARP III Requirement - "any bank that accepts TARP III money must lend it's offices, facillities and other resources to corporations with large cash reserves that wish to do their own banking..." so Microsoft and other cash-rich businesses can invest their huge cash holdings in growth industries without the capital overhead of a bank. Basically, we're giving AIG and Citigroup to Bill Gates, and could you find a better steward?

3. Place Limitations on Zoning - Large swaths of strategic lands were placed off limits to non-residential development to protect land-values. Although I can understand protecting natural lands for all to visit, I cannot understand using the destruction of industry to profit small numbers of residential home-owners. This kind of behavior is part of what spurred our subprime crisis, as we were effectively subsidizing the real estate industry, and as the real estate industry grew unnaturally in size, it also grew in influence, eventually conquering the state of California's jobs market, and it used that influence for evil. Always be suspicious of an industry that doesn't make anything. (Of course, that's not all it did; it also drove up the land costs of factories to the point where many industries, like metallurgical industries, that are capital intensive and thus natural for America to have, were instead driven to Taiwan, which doesn't have cheap labor but does have many of the same intellectual property, consumer market, and infrastructure advantages as America.)

4. Consumer protections - Institute more rigorous antiusury laws that cap interest rates and remove loopholes. Also institute laws protecting American goods against mercury content and other such fun stuff; won't help the stock market, but what good is prosperity if what you're buying is crap. I have no problem with banks and other corporations making scandalously large profits provided no one gets ripped off.

5. Transportation & Water - If any more stimuli are drafted, make sure they focus on transportation (both road and rail) and water. Investments in such will both increase demands for goods and increase future forecasts through their "stage two" benefits to the supply-side. Also rush construction, so that the money is spent now. Instead, we've taken a philosophy, publicly, of mindless, unneccesary, and heavilly corrupt (cough cough General Motors) spending = good, thus proving that the people who drafted our economic policy are either horrifyingly cruel sadists or have the same mental age as a toddler. I'll guess the first.

With this economic plan, I believe our present situtation, and future, can be addressed. Comments are welcome.

Populism vis-a-vis Anarchosocialism

For a debate between two philosophies (Populism and Anarchosocialism) both extremely related and not similar at all at the same time, follow this link. It was with fellow blogger and mostly anarchist Anok of Identity Check.

The primary subject is money and supply and demand. Comments are nearly mandatory (enforced by Confederate Army) and you are welcome dispute points from both sides on this site.



(Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 1862, photo courtesy of US Army)

Guidelines for Effective Mass-Transit, discuss

As an engineer, if I were to outline five rules for effective mass-transit, they would be these:

1 - Focus on rails - Buses give one advantage over cars to their consumer, you don't have to park them. Rails, be them light or heavy, still give this advantage, but also give the advantage of not being part of the road network and thus ignoring traffic and stop lights, and this combined with the guiding force of the rails for turning leads to a higher effective speed, often in excess of 60 MPH in what would otherwise be 30 MPH driving territory for at least sections. They also have greater energy efficiency and can be built with a 0 carbon footprint if electrified with nuclear or wind power.

2 - Focus on natural lines - places where you have a very high density of traffic flowing between effective points on a single line.

3 - Ignore the Park & Ride - if people have to drive a car to use your system, they will need to park that car somewhere, and to remove a sufficient quantity of traffic to make rail construction worthwhile you would need Airport-size garages. That level of volume would also create new traffic problems of its own.

4 - Widen Sidewalks - Not technically part of the system, but if people feel comfortable to walk, they will travel further to and from stations, widening the effective radius of any particular station or stop.

5 - Focus on the Inner City - Natural lines, and the heaviest use natural lines, will lie within the city almost by definition, as it is where the highest density, and thus highest likelihood, exist. It is also generally the most pedestrian friendly place and the place where the most utility (potential places to work, shop, play) exist within a certain distance of a station. Don't even consider building to the suburbs until the inner city is covered or the folks in the burbs will have nowhere to go.

6 - The system is for the people, and not the other way around. (This isn't a rule so much as a general attitude.)


Comments, questions, objections, queries, fact checks, discussion of examples, and personal insults are all perfectly welcome!

Cowboys and Indiankillers

The Western United States has a split personality. The film that exemplifies what I'm talking about is Serenity. In that movie, Earth, too overpopulated to sustain those on it, is left by large numbers of settlers for a new solar system. The Inner Planets form a totalitarian Interplanetary Alliance, while the Outer Planets remain essentially freewheeling and libertine. I guess you could compare the first set to:

- Washington State: Where the City of Seattle has a bottomless supply of schemes to force (notice I didn't say encourage) people out of automobiles.
- California: Where at one point they were attempting to make homeschooling illegal.
- Oregon: I'm not quite sure exactly what they are doing but this state gives me the creeps. --Austin, TX/Denver, CO: the twin towers of Southwestern-style doom, which watch the West Coast in admiration and are emulating them.

While the second set would be more comparable to Montana, Eastern Washington/Eastside of Seattle, Wyoming, Colorado, West Texas, Idaho, Nevada.

Really, it comes down to the people who created the West. On one hand, you had the corporate men, the government, the cavalry, the people who came more for money or power then freedom, land, or a simple life, and they attached themselves to high convoluted ideas like, Manifest Destiny, and if you and yours didn't fit in to their little vision, you had better get out of town because they would find you and kill you, just as they did with the Indians. They wanted to make Europe, wanted to make a grand civilization, and then they started Starbucks. They may be city people, and they may act effeminate and drink Lattes, but don't let that fool you, they are mean nasty dudes. If the gangs in Philly saw these guys riding over the ridge, they'd wimper, they'd cry, they'd quake in their boots and they'd get out of town immediately, and to their credit, some of the cities with this mentality (like Seattle) have low crime rates.

Now, in this day and age, they don't really kill people much - maybe they softened up a little, or maybe they just know that now lawman has arrived, you can't get away with that kind of BS anymore. But that doesn't mean they don't still want Eurotopia. They build mass-transit systems, and then insist people ride them, as if the people are for the train, and not the train for the people. And if you don't listen, they throw a $6 toll on the bridge from your town in to the city, and if you still don't listen, they restrict parking and shut down all garages beyond a certain size. And in California, to get their little slice of heaven, they take a useful industrial town and use a wacky combination of environmental activism, population limits, and bizarre byzantine regulation to push all useful business out of the town and make it in to a Hacienda for the rich and glamorous - it's called Santa Barbara.

But then theirs the other western mentality, the one that John Wayne tried to portray on TV and was usually showcased (not very well) in the Western's. The loud, but humble, ambitious, but simple, open-minded, but honorable, lawless, but responsible, American Cowboy. He's the guy who just want's to be left alone and go on his way, and he's like the crew of Serenity. See, he wasn't the one who killed the Indians. He thought they were just folk. He wouldn't have done it, he wouldn't have seen it as right. It was all the pretty people off in LA and SF who did that dirty work, plus the law men, or contracted out the Army to do it, and even to this day they still try to rid the West of all that isn't European. One target down, so many to go.

Of course, the way Obama, and California, is going, who knows, 2012 could be their last stand! But, probably not, probably just a minor setback.... (notice I'm trying to incite an argument.)