gonewest

Republican plan for world peace and American hegemony:

Phase 1 - Find bee’s nest and whack with stick, repeat.
Phase 2 - …
Phase 3 - Celebrate world peace and American hegemony.

Sometimes you have to wonder about American conservatives; call them Republicans, neocons, modern conservatives, or right wing nut cases — it doesn’t really matter any more since they all get more extreme and harder to distinguish every year. I honestly think the underpants gnomes in an old South Park episode were more competent with their business plan than the Republicans are with anything that they get their hands on.

We were lied into a war in Iraq which took a stable, secular country that was (no matter how much we hated Saddam Hussein’s rule) a check against Iran’s influence in the middle east and turned it into a violent mess which is simultaneously:

1. A quagmire that consumes almost our entire capacity to field troops anywhere for anything (read: makes us little threat to anyone else).
2. A recruiting paradise for Sunni (i.e. Al Queda) terrorists.
3. An emerging ally of Iran (a Shia controlled country) which will probably help them cement their domination of the region in the long term.

This could not have turned out worse if we had let Colonel Klink run the war.

So how do we plan to fix this awful turn of events? Well, if you thought this country was lead by people who are grounded in reality, then you might guess that we are preparing to cut our losses and find a quick way out of Iraq that doesn’t require us to admit that we started an unnecessary war and then lost it (the “declare victory and go home” strategy) and then put some serious elbow grease into long term diplomatic efforts to re-stablize the region and limit the influence gain that we handed to Iran on a silver platter when we created this mess.

But then no one in the Whitehouse is actually sane these days, are they? According to this article in Vanity Fair, there is every reason to believe that we are about to try to fix our Iraq problem by launching a massive air and naval assault on Iran (with no ground troops to speak of to back it up, of course). Basically, having been stung by the bee’s nest in Iraq that we’ve been whacking for more than three years now, we are about to whack an even bigger nest with the naive belief that that will somehow solve our current problem.

I’m sure that will work though, after all, isn’t there an old saying that goes something like:

“If you accidently stir up a bee’s nest, be sure to find a hornet’s nest and stir it up too or you may get stung.”

Oh, and before you go trying to defend Republicans or other conservatives by claiming that this madness comes from the Whitehouse neocons and not the Republican party, remember that:

1. The Republicans in congress are still trying to give this administration’s insane Iraq policy cover by fighting tooth-and-nail against any votes to end, limit, or even disapprove of the war in Iraq or the recent antagonism toward Iran.
2. Neocons are still frequent guests on national media outlets and they are always treated as conservatives and as having “serious” opinions, even by other conservatives.
3. The more traditional conservative icons still frequent the national media outlets and still support the Iraq war (and the newer pre-attack “tough talk” on Iran) even when they are nominally critical of Bush.

Republicans, neocons, and conservatives may have recently started to lay the groundwork for distancing themselves from the miserable failure that is George W. Bush, but they also still support the insane policies that this administration has been driving for years and you can bet that 9 out of 10 of everyone who identifies as conservative still:

1. Hates Iran.
2. Knows the lyrics to the “Bomb Iran” song.
3. Would like to see it happen.

And that is just what Bush appears to be set on giving them.

I have read several of Jonathan’s Raban’s books and enjoyed them all, especially Passage to Juneau. He has a writing style that is notably cultured without being difficult to enjoy. I didn’t know until now that he ever dealt with political topics:

But September 18 is the real date to circle. That day, Congress rushed through its Authorisation For Use of Military Force (AUMF), entitling the President, as the nation’s commander in chief, to “use all necessary and appropriate force” against “those nations, organisations, or persons” that “he determines” were responsible for the September 11 atrocities, “…in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organisations, or persons.”

The essay linked above makes a very important point: everything didn’t change (as we Americans often like to say) on September 11, everything changed a week later when Congress handed semi-dictatorial powers to a president only too happy to abuse them.

A point worth remembering, and one of the first bits of legislation that must be revoked when [fingers and toes crossed] Democrats regain control of Congress in November.

What possible reason could California republicans have for trying to pad their registered voter roles with people who are not likely to actually vote republican?

duarf noitcele :rewsna

FUH2

One of these represents an invitation to those who long to be free, the other a longing to impose a belief upon others.

Can you tell which is which?.

It’s no secret that I am a proponent of pervasive mass transit (my preference is for monorail or grade separated metro systems) and that I would prefer we return to the well defined urban/rural divide with small, walkable suburbs like we had for most of this country’s history (believe it or not, the car-centric culture did not arrive in the US until sometime around 1930, and suburbia did not take over until after WWII). I am not against suburbs per se, it’s just that I believe that the vast suburban wastelands that our recent auto-centric culture has created offer few advantages and have huge downsides.

I have often read that automobiles are the least efficient way to travel (excepting air travel, of course, but this post isn’t about long distance travel), but numbers have been hard to come by. Finally, I have found a source for comparison between some modes of travel that demonstrates just how bad autos really are.

A car is the obvious fastest (and easiest) way for a person to get from point A to point B, but what would surprise most people is the fact that autos are actually a pretty lousy way of moving people from point A to point B. This is because, while a car can get you to your destination at high speeds in little or no traffic, cars and the space between them needed for safety make road ways a very low density avenue of travel; and as everyone knows too well, when you try to increase that density more than a little bit, traffic can quickly grind to a halt.

Look at the figures for persons per hour in the link: while someone in a car can get one mile down a road in a minute (assuming little to no traffic and a speed limit of 60 mph), a pedestrian would require 20 minutes to walk the same distance (assuming a reasonable walking speed of 3 mph). That same roadway, however, has a capacity to move over 20 times more people down that one mile stretch each hour if they are walking rather than driving [it would be interesting to calculate at what capacity the travel time for autos and walking converge, but I don't have the time or energy to figure out the math for that right now, maybe I'll post on that later].

Now, while most people (we Americans, anyway) would not want to walk that mile, that isn’t our only option: looking at the reference numbers reveals that auto travel is unique in how bad it is at getting large numbers of people from place to place. The next rung up from auto travel is biking which would be much more palatable to people (especially if using e-bikes) than walking for short distances and would get you down that one mile road in six minutes (assuming a leisurely 10 mph ride, and with an e-bike, you could do 20 mph with little effort) while still moving about 9 times more people per hour than autos. The other choices just get better with metro topping the list.

As bad as cars are at getting large numbers of people from point A to point B, the energy efficiency of auto travel is much more relevant to today’s concerns (i.e. rising energy prices) and autos are the worst of the lot here too. Even buses are twice as efficient as cars (to be fair, we should assume that this figure requires that the bus routes are used close to capacity). And bikes are the clear winners for energy efficiency — can you believe that it is less work to ride a bike than it is to walk?.

With these figures, I think it is obvious that the best way to move people short distances (say less than 10 miles) is with e-bikes (or light electric scooters), preferably models that don’t require pedaling so that even those that are in very poor shape can use them with ease. For any route travelled heavily enough to warrant the investment, a light rail or monorail system should be installed (grade separated if possible so that it does not interfere with other modes of travel) to handle the truly massive numbers that dense urban corridors can generate. This not only increases the capacity of routes, reducing traffic congestion, but saves energy as well. There will always be a need for some auto traffic, so urban centers would keep some of the roadways, but they would be devoted to commuter bus, utility vehicles, and commercial cargo traffic. Personal auto transit would, of course, remain available but it would stay where it belongs: in rural areas where mass transit and alternatives like bikes just don’t make sense.

After reading this, you may think that I have something against car-culture, but the truth is that I am just as fond of cars as the next American. The difference is that, while I always want to have a car handy (my own or easy access to a rental), I don’t ever want to need a car. To me, a car is a symbol of freedom. It is a means to get out of town and away from the rest of the world when I want to take a break from the day-to-day routine. A car that is required to get to work or the grocery store or to handle everyday needs isn’t a symbol of freedom, it’s just another expense.

Incompetence obscures the real issue. Bush’s conservative philosophy is what has damaged this country and it is his philosophy of conservatism that must be rejected, whoever endorses it.

I try not to inject too much politics into this blog since that is not the reason for its existence, but I just had to link to this article because it makes a fundamental point about the folly of believing that the failing of this administration is primarily due to incompetence — a trap which I have at least partially fallen into myself on many occasions.

If you think this administration has been a benefit to the country… Well, I just don’t know how to respond to that. But if you think it has been bad for the country like the rest of us do, then it is critical to realize that the damage has been done not from incompetence (though that certainly hasn’t helped), but from the political philosophy that has driven this administration to make the disastrous decisions that it has.

Anyway, read the article, as the importance of the point it makes cannot be understated.

Being lucky enough to live in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the US (Seattle is #15 of 361) I get access to quite a few movies that are not in general release across the country. Sunday afternoon I went to see one of those, An Inconvenient Truth.

This movie lives up to the hype and I recommend that you see it whether you think that you’ll like the politics (of which I can assure you there is relatively little) of it or not. Even if you think global climate change is BS (are there any of you that still exist?), seeing the movie will help illustrate what the concern is about and what the scientific consensus on the issue really is.

And if you are a conservative tempted to see the movie but holding back because you don’t want to help make some “liberal movie” successful, then you can be certain that you won’t make any difference there. Here are the box office rankings for the movie’s first weekend where it ranked 22nd, and this second weekend where it ranks 9th. When you view those links, take special note of the theater counts and the average sales per theater — that figure of $91,000 for the first week is apparently an all time record for any movie in any genre, and the second week ranking of #9 (which is based on gross sales for the weekend, not the per theater average) is a movie breaking into the top ten while still showing in only 77 theaters. The lowest theater count for any movie ranking better than #9 is 1270 which is 16 times greater. If the ranking was based of per theater sales instead, then An Inconvenient Truth would not only rank #1 but would be beating the pants off every other movie on the list except The Break-Up which is currently in its opening weekend high. There has been fair amount of rather dismissive commentary about the movie from the pundits of mainstream media, and I am sure that conservative blogs are trying to minimize it as much as they can, but box office numbers like these will prove to be very inconvenient for that effort.

Oh, and this was my first time visiting the AMC Pacific Place mall and cinema in downtown Seattle; I must say that I am impressed with both and will be back. Now if they would just finish fixing the monorail which has a stop two blocks away.

UPDATE: Further research reveals that the comment about the per theater sales for this movie setting an all time record is incorrect; it appears that it is only number 24 on that list so far. It does appear to be the record breaker for non-fiction, however.

The Bush administration is [finally] going down in flames. The only wonder is that it took so long for public opinion to sour on what may very well go down in history as the worst president this country has ever had.

29% and sinking….. (don’t click more unless you want to read a strongly political rant)

But hidden in this welcome turn of events is a very disturbing tactic popping up in conservative circles of labeling Bush as a closet liberal (it is beginning to be commented on in several liberal blogs but Digby was probably the first to predict it). It is one thing for self described conservative leaders (bloggers, pundits, journalists, etc) to get a clue and try to disavow the cement block that is Bush before he single hand-idly sinks the whole movement, but claiming that Bush is bad because he is actually a liberal goes far beyond simple inaccuracy.

Speaking as one of the many liberals, none of whom have ever given a shred of support to the embarrassment that is the Bush administration (excepting the rare liberal who grudgingly supported the Iraq invasion early on — and now regrets it), I have to say that the image of “Bush the liberal” is as silly as it is insulting. You conservatives may not like Bush and his cronies (though you all seemed to think he was peachy king back when he was still popular), but to attempt to insulate yourselves from the fallout by labeling this administration as liberal reveals just how unprincipled you can be as well as how empty that term really is for conservatives.

The simple truth is that the word “liberal” has just become a way for a modern conservative to call someone a [insert expletive here] without getting bleeped or told to watch their language. In the conservative mind it seems, all that is good must somehow be “conservative” while all that is bad must somehow be “liberal”. After all, when you are certain that your ideology is the “right one” and most of the tenets of that ideology are as rigid as conservative philosophy has become (case in point: try to get a “real conservative” to name a tax that isn’t bad), then any failure of conservatism must be remade a failure of a practitioner of conservatism; otherwise the whole world view begins to crumble. Yin-yang, good-bad, conservative-liberal; this is the false dichotomy that conservatives have internalized to simplify their world view (and conservatives just love for everything to be simple). If there is an appropriate dichotomy here, then it is conservative-radical, but even that does not imply a uniform match up with good-bad.

Liberalism, on the other hand, is built upon very general principles (such as that government is responsible to help ensure the welfare of its citizens rather than program X=good or bad, government=big or small or taxes=good or bad) while pragmatism and empiricism help determine the more concrete tenets and goals. Because of this, liberalism is not so tightly tied to specific value statements and can adjust to “self correct” when necessary without damaging its validity as a world view. Liberalism can therefore tolerate much more introspection and self criticism from its practitioners than can conservatism and, in fact, you can argue that such self criticism is necessary for liberalism to thrive. All of this introspection, of course, is not conducive to the ways of modern media which leads to the “mushiness” and lack of catchy sound bites for which liberals are so often faulted on the talking head shows.

This “Bush the liberal” tactic should be hilarious as almost everything he has done (while sometimes more radical than conservative in nature) is the polar opposite of what a liberal would do. The danger is the fact that the tenacity, message discipline, and pervasiveness of the conservative media machine makes it conceivable that this deceitful and disgusting tactic might actually work (long enough at least to fool the dups who helped vote in Bush and the current batch of corrupt Republicans to get duped again in November).

So, for all you conservatives out there who think you are capable of expanding your horizons and moving past this “liberal is a four letter word” stage, then please learn a little about what conservatism and liberalism really mean. And for those of you who would prefer to simultaneously run away from Dear Leader and smear all of us liberals by trying to foist that miserable failure on us, then I say fuck you and the worst-horse-in-the-history-of-this-country that you rode in on (see, we liberals don’t need to hide behind a fake definition of conservative when we want to insult someone ;-)).

I had to fill the tank this morning at a cost of $35 for my little Miata. Here in Seattle the going price for regular unleaded is about $3.35 (though you can find it for around $3.10 if you get at least ten miles away from downtown) and premium runs around $3.55. We are into the annual summer spike right now so prices should relax a little by the fall, but I am starting to wonder if we might see $4 gas before they do.

I am a believer that peak oil has (or is just about to) hit and that gas prices have begun a relentless upward spiral that will not stop — allowing for seasonal ups and downs, of course — but I have been assuming that gas would not hit $4 until next year and $5 wouldn’t hit until a year or two after that. Our economy is heavily dependent on energy (the cost of trucking materials and products long distances is factored into practically everything we consume) and I feel that the US economy will start to nose dive over energy costs somewhere not far above the $5 gas point (this assumes, of course, that it has not already tanked for other reasons such as our ballooning deficit).

I believe that we can avoid a lot of the pain of high energy (read: high oil) costs if we act intelligently and start preparing now, but how much hope can we have that a government that still is not doing much to help New Orleans recover from Katrina will do anything about a coming oil shock? So if the government won’t prepare, then we as individuals have to — but that takes time.

I am really hoping to have at least 2-3 years to get ready for any shocks to our economy, but if we breach $4 this year, then my confidence that we have a few more years to prepare will be greatly shaken.

I guess I should at least be happy that I need my car so little out here (I’ve been here for about three months and this is the first fill up since the post-drive-to-Seattle refuel). Another plus is that Washington state is the #1 hydro-power producer in the US, so while all the commuters may be dumping half their paychecks into their fuel tanks in the coming years, at least the utility bills should stay fairly low.