In this poll, Ayn Rand’s works appear second only to the Bible as people’s most “life changing” books.

Now granted, the computer geeks tend to be of the personalty type that believes that if only everyone realized how intelligent they were they would be the next messiah and get all those chicks that don’t like them. Therefore, the for the masturbatory Ayn Rand novels is a perfect fit.

But I can’t understand this one bit. As a teenager, I briefly fell under the spell of libertarianism. Most people are led there by Rand. Rand is who chased me away. After a few chapters of one of her books (don’t remember which one it was) I realized what was really going on here: social Darwinism.

Only in such a self-centered, self-aggrandizing era can this be the case. (Telling every kid they too cna be an astronaut or president in school is probably not helpful here.) Our era has contempt for all things public. Who wants to be around all of those betas, anyway, right?

The Bible being number one can be looked at two ways. It could negate my hypothesis here–people take the message of Jesus and/or Torah seriously, or it could just be seen as an instruction manual for personal salvation and personal spirituality.

Chances are, it’s the latter.

If I was on global TV and had one chance to make one argument against Christianty, just one polemic, I would focus on the fact that it is a personal religion. Your acts. Your thoughts. Your grace. Your eternal soul. Even the more racist forms of Judaism see it as about the chosen people–but the more liberal streams see it as a faith of life, people, and repairing the world.

Something tells me that that’s a miniscule fraction of those Bible readers and that the ones that somehow can harmonize Deuteronomy and the sermon on the mount with Ayn Rand are in the majority.

Sign of the times.

If McCain really wants to be a maverick and tell conservatives to fuck off, I’ve got his VP: Linda Lingle, the two term governor of Hawaii. A (allegedly, yeah right) lesbian Jewish liberal probably would not be too welcomed by the GOP. Then again, it could really bring in some of those Hillary voters.

I’m not holding my breath, but it’s an interesting dark horse idea.

Since energy will be the defining issue of the 2010s it is important to get a few basics straight. The number one elemental aspect of energy that all ideological sides of our polity get wrong is the assumption of a profound symbiotic relationship between the grid energy that powers our homes and businesses, and the crude oil that powers our vehicles. While the two are related, this relationship is tangential enough that it renders the notion that an increase of grid energy will reduce the need for crude to be false in any practical sense. The oft spoken claim that an increase in nuclear or renewable (wind, solar, biomass, etc.) generation will reduce our reliance on foreign oil does not pass the laugh test.

A modicum of critical thinking problematizes the increase in grid energy = decrease in fuel energy maxim. It is currently impossible for the overwhelming majority of Americans to use grid electricity to propel their automobiles. A different version of the same oil that feeds your car does produce a little bit of grid energy in New England and does provide heat for about 8.1 million homes, mostly in the Northeast, but a wholesale magic wand replacement of this oil grid energy with any other source would not reduce America’s reliance on foreign oil in any meaningful way. While both grid energy and fuel energy are “energy” they perform tasks that are almost independent of one another.

The connection between grid energy and fuel energy is strongest with Natural Gas. Natural Gas, largely but by no means completely, comes from the same places and even the same wells as crude oil. The geography and extraction is similar enough that the price of natural gas is correlated with the price of crude oil. Natural Gas makes up enough of the USA grid energy market, that the price of a megawatt of any generation is correlated with the price of Natural Gas. In this tertiary sense grid energy is correlated to crude oil. Creating enough grid energy from a source other than Natural Gas to both decommission existing natural gas generation and meet load growth would help shield the grid energy market from price increases associated by the cost of oil, but it would do nothing to end American dependence on oil. Nuclear and renewables, even couple with a heroic conservation effort, are unlikely to pull off this trick any time soon for reasons that will be discussed in a future post.

Grid energy can reduce American dependence of foreign oil when grid energy can be used as a replacement for the oil used to propel our automobiles. Luckily, this is already possible. For $100,000 a Tesla Roadster will go 220 miles per charge — thereby obviating Bush Patsy McSame’s ridiculous gambit of offering 300 million dollars for anyone that will produce a technology that already exists. Two hundred and twenty miles is enough for even the most outrageous commute. Combining a Tesla battery with some gas or biodiesel capability for rare long trips would go a tremendous way towards reducing America’s dependence on foreign crude oil, while maintaining cars capable of doing the same tasks that they do now. The limiting factors are cost and availability of grid energy “Fill Up” stations. These are the sort of problems that can be addressed with subsidies, a gas guzzler buy back program, tax incentives, and, most of all, a massive, government-led if need be, effort to develop plentiful grid energy Fill Up stations.

Of course, once automobiles become a major consumer of grid electricity they will increase the need for additional grid energy supply, which could create new problems, or a different version of the old reliance on foreign oil if this new supply is largely met by Natural Gas. Similar problems arise when solar, wind, and other intermittent renewables become more than a bit player on the grid.

A creative, intertwined solution to these problems is to come.

So, apparently there is some flooding in some third world country called Illinoise, along the same river as third world country Minneapolis where bridges randomly collapse and third world country Na’awlinz where the whole fucking city was underwater.

I agree — there is a chance McCain will drop out for “health” reasons if the polls continue to show what they’re showing now.

Here’s the full quote from John McCain:

Q: If it’s working, senator, do you now have a better estimate of when American forces can come home from Iraq?

McCAIN: No, but that’s not too important. What’s important is the casualties in Iraq. Americans are in South Korea. Americans are in Japan. American troops are in Germany. That’s all fine.

Now, remember this one?

Last month, at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire, a crowd member asked McCain about a Bush statement that troops could stay in Iraq for 50 years.

“Maybe 100,” McCain replied. “As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, it’s fine with me and I hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al Qaeda is training, recruiting, equipping and motivating people every single day.”

The significance here is not so much that McCain is saying that it’s “not important” when the troops come home, it’s his continued pattern of defining the mission in Iraq as permanent in parallel with Korea and Germany. That is the genesis of the “100 years” comment and the “not important” comment.

What he is saying is that the US will pacify Iraq and then use it as some kind of strategic reward ops center in the region. What I can’t quite get is why we would need more forces in the Middle East than we already have bases for in Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait. With strong allies Turkey and Israel right there as well, I’m unclear on what we need bases in Iraq for.

South Korea is a different situation, because there never has been a peace treaty. There still technically is a war, and there is one strongly defined nation and region that is our ally (unlike Viet Nam or Iraq…) Germany unconditionally surrendered and became the front line in the cold war. They’ve grown accustomed to our mostly benign presence and in some aspects rely on the integrated NATO command for defense. However, we have begun to move many of our operations out of Germany, the UK, and old NATO countries into new NATO countries to assist them with anti-Russian security.

The biggest stupid mistake that the US has made in all of its post WWII military operations is to pretend that each war would be a re-run of WWII. It wasn’t in Korea; it wasn’t in Viet Nam; and even if it looked that way in Gulf I, we settled for less in the end. And it’s not in Iraq.

We will never be able to clean up enough friendly turf, or get some huge sect (maybe–maybe the Kurds if they don’t think we’ve fucked them over enough) in order to maintain stable bases. And anything more than de facto Kurdish sovereignty would compromise our relationship with Turkey and provoke Iran.

It’s not just that McCain is some crusty mean war hawk who wants to kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out. He’s an ignoramus that thinks every war is a broken-record repeat of WWII no matter what the conditions are. He thinks that we can just go around the world overthrowing tinpot dictators and creating new democracies that are bolstered by our troop presence. (This is presumably the case in Afghanistan as well…)

It’s wrong. It’s demonstrably wrong. Cuba resisted us for decades. The Philipines did too, until the Japanese came. The Vietnamese kicked us out. These were all imperial wars, not wars like WWII.

If our mission in Iraq was to prevent WMD creation and remove Saddam, we acheived that years ago. It’s time to let what will happen in Iraq happen.

Look, I hate to piss all over… no I don’t. Look, I’m going to piss all over the Boomer mythos here, but it has to be done.

The Kennedys are remembered as they are largely because of the simple fact that they were assassinated. JFK conducted himself well during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but his foreign policy record was mixed. Was it his Civil Rights bill or Johnson’s? We’ll never know if it would have passed without the support that came with JFK’s assassination.

And why am I supposed to believe that JFK would have ended Vietnam? It was all of his people that kept it going, not just Johnson. The Gulf of Tonkin incident might have been a Johnsonian trick, but it’s not something the Kennedys were incapable of.

And then there’s RFK, the red-baiting, Democratic version of Roy Cohn. Is that harsh? Maybe, maybe too harsh. But Jack and Bobby were both carefully crafted media creations of their family in a way not too different from the Bushes or Rockefellers or, perhaps, the Clintons. (Bribery for Pulitzer prizes, anyone?)

RFK didn’t even enter the race until Gene McCarthy showed that LBJ was vulnerable. And RFK may have won, but the country was in the incipient stages of a rightward turn. I’m not sure that could have been averted, even by a superhuman president.

Those Boomers who think that things would have been “different” if these men hadn’t been shot are correct. But how they would be different is unknowable–that there would be some kind of utopia is the kind of pining for the Good Ole’ Days that created 20th century conservatism.

The spirit of the 60s wasn’t killed by two or three assassinations. It was killed by a society that had grown wealthy by social welfare programs and community sacrifice that didn’t want to share it’s gains anymore. When people went from “get” mode to “keep” mode in the 60s, after the New Deal built the middle class, that is what killed the 60s. Millions and millions of New Deal middle class folks who had risen up started taking all the credit for themselves, and stopped seeing the need for helping those less forunate.

Nixon, Reagan, Gingrch, and Bush II were the result. And it wasn’t three bullets. It was a million little sparks of spite aimed at minorities and the poor and the ethos of a generation that, even worse, took those gains their parents had become to feel entitled to after hard work for granted with or without work. I don’t think either of the Kennedys could have done much about that.

This is the short list:

Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards, Evan Bayh, Kathleen Sebelius, Ted Strickland, Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, Jim Webb, Bill Nelson, Jack Reed, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Tom Daschle, and Sam Nunn.