Tag: Midnight Oil

Excerpted from Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence (8 August 2008), in the Burning the Midnight Oil blog-within-a-blog, hosted by the EENR

Would California have HSR today if it had been settled by France? That’s what Michael Mahoney argued last Friday in the SFGate Open Forum.

The French, according to Mr. Mahoney, have a straightforward approach. The High Speed Rail train leaves the city on regular tracks running like an ordinary interurban express. When it gets out into the countryside, the HSR tracks start and it kicks up to full speed … 220mph and over, depending on the specific train. Then when it gets to into the urban area of its destination, it switches to regular tracks and back to running like an interurban express.

Most of the route is through the countryside, and that’s where its cheapest to build … both directly, and in terms of cutting down on the cost of overpasses.

SO … what did they do in California?

Now in the Midnight Oil … also up at Agent Orange, so tipping and rec’ing that diary might help get the word out in a small way.

What do you do when you are a Congressional candidate … your Presidential candidate is campaigning on the basis of Potemkin Energy policies like drilling for an extra 100,000 barrels of oil a day starting a decade from now (when a Saudi announcement of an extra 500,000 barrels later this year did not move prices by any discernable amount) … and a gas tax holiday …

… especially when in the last contentious Ohio State highway funding fight, you as the Republican voted for Governor Taft’s gas tax hike, and your Democratic opponent voted against it?

Simple: you lie.

Well, of course, this is a Republican candidate for Congress we are talking about here … you don’t lie yourself, you have an “independent group” with a name like Freedom’s Watch lie for you.

{Soon to be a Midnight Thought in Burning the Midnight Oil, also available in Blue and Yellow}

I have been reading the commentary in recent transit oriented posts on Matthew Yglesias’ blog (explicit links below the fold) … well, I’ll admit it, skimming the commentary of the troll that tries to sidetrack any transit posting by Yglesias … and as far as I can tell, the idea of the Great American Suburban Retrofit (detailed links below the fold) just has not sunk in at all … not even a little bit.

Instead its the usual “big city transit user saying we all need to live in walkable big cities” versus “happy suburbanite lecturing on how we not only don’t all live in Big Eastern Seaboard Cities, but many of use don’t want” … kind of talking past each other.

So Once More Into the Breach: We can Retrofit American Suburbia to make it Far Easier to Use Public Transit and offer Walkable Communities as a Suburban Option … without necessarily abandoning the suburbs and everyone moving to the closest big city.

Join me for a design challenge, below the fold.

Rough draft in Orange

Excerpted from Burning the Midnight Oil for the Next American Revolution (14 May 08),

in the Burning the Midnight Oil blog-within-a-blog, hosted by kos,

though to the best of my knowledge he doesn’t know it.

Lets not be under any illusions about the difficulty of the coming election.

And that is: if there is any difficulty, we have made it for ourselves. We are being handed the opportunity of a generation on a silver platter. And while many of use have been distracted by the side issue of who is going to be nominated to run for the Presidency, in another week or so there will be no more excuse for getting sidetracked.

And we can turn our attention to building a House majority so large that the so-called “Blue Dogs” lose their leverage.

Excerpted from

Burning the Midnight Oil for the Economics of Freedom (Fri May 09, 2008),

in the Burning the Midnight Oil blog-within-a-blog

(hosted by kos, though as far as I know, he doesn’t know it).

What is the Economics of Freedom?

The Economics of Freedom from Want?

The Economics of Freedom from Despair?

The Economics of Freedom from Tyranny?

The Economics of Freedom for our Children and Grandchildren to Enjoy the Same?

Excerpted from Burning the Midnight Oil for the Next American Revolution (28 April 08), in the Burning the Midnight Oil blog-within-a-blog, hosted by kos,

though to the best of my knowledge he doesn’t know it.

Roiling through the blogosphere in a slow boil is the fact that the Administration has been caught red-handed engaged in the crime of the precise kind of torture that we tried and convicted Japanese for after WWII … and for the mess media, the oligopress, its not really any big deal.

And of course it wouldn’t be. Avoiding absolutes of right and wrong is precisely what the “he said / she said” style of journalism is supposed to avoid. And there cannot be anything more absolute than the question of whether you will engage in torture … no ends every justify means that do not work, so torture is not only an evil, but an evil that can never be justified on the basis of preventing any greater evil.

The only word I can use to describe it is abomination.

Excerpted from Burning the Midnight Oil for Progressive Populism,

in the Burning the Midnight Oil blog-within-a-blog, hosted by kos,

though to the best of my knowledge he doesn’t know it.

So, how is our fight going a Progressive Populist People’s Chamber?

I did a round up before the Ohio primary … and Ohio is where I live, so I naturally start here (TGAL) … Burning the Midnight Oil for Edwards’ Victories in the Fall

Two of these are listed among some MSM lists of House Races most likely to flip:

John Boccieri, Democratic Challenger for OH-16

John Boccieri’s “Get Involved” page

and

Mary Jo Kilroy, Democratic Challenger for OH-15

Join Team Kilroy Sign-Up Page

If you are of a mind to be pushing now in the most marginal races, those are two good ones to support.

Also requiring mention when thinking of flipping seats from Actual Republicans to Actual, Real Deal Democrats, friend of the EENR, Larry Kissell, Democratic Challenger in NC-08.

But the list, as the cliche tells us, goes on.

Excerpted from Burning the Midnight Oil for the Arc of the Sun (6 April 08),

in the Burning the Midnight Oil blog-within-a-blog, hosted by kos,

though to the best of my knowledge he doesn’t know it.

The Coming Revolution in Africa, is how G. Pascal Zachary titles his piece for the Wilson Quarterly (Winter 2008, Vol. XXXII, no. 1, pp. 50-66.^{1}) …

… and yes, it takes a journalist to see the coming Revolution clearly, since so much of the so-called “development” profession has a conflict of interest. As Pascal notes well into his piece:

Even as a steady diet of stories about “urgent” food crises in Africa dominated public discussion, these successes became impossible to ignore. In 2004, the International Food and Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) published a series of papers titled “Successes in African Agriculture”. The papers both reflected and provoked a revolution in thinking about African farming. They also ended a long conspiracy of silence among aid agencies and professional Africanists. For decades the “food mafia,” led by the World Food program and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, had refused to acknowledge any good news about African farming out of fear that evidence of bright spots would reduce the flow of charitable donations to the UN’s massive “famine” bureaucracy, designed to feed the hungry.

Excerpted from Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence, in the Burning the Midnight Oil blog-within-a-blog, hosted by kos, though to the best of my knowledge he doesn’t know it.

I just recently discussed Tiny Houses as one extreme end of a range of a more sustainable approach to housing. And, because they strike me as really cool, the examples I focused on where the kind of Tiny Houses that can be picked up, put on a trailer, and hauled around, like an old fashioned Shepherd’s Wagon, except with inside plumbing, excellent insulation, and 11 foot ceilings in the main living space.

Mind you, I always thought that the old-fashioned Shepherd’s Wagon was kind of cool, so add all those “except for’s”, and its no surprise I thought these were cool.

However, just as cool in their own way are the Tiny Houses intended to be built from modular parts on a foundation on site. And as a one-time Mother Earth News reader (back when it was more of a back to the land for dirty stinking hippies magazine), I was interested when the Tiny House Blog mentioned that the post-80’s yuppified “Mother Earth News” has been recently focusing heavily on SIP’s, or Structural Insulated Panels.

Excerpted from Burning the Midnight Oil for the Coalition Change Strategy (24 March), in the Burning the Midnight Oil blog-within-a-blog, hosted by kos, though to the best of my knowledge he doesn’t know it.

What about the farmers, you ask?

Doesn’t seem like a big deal, if you look at the occupations by share of the population.

However, appearances can be deceiving, that way. The thing is, when you look at employment in any local area, you can put the employment into two mental boxes … export base employment, and local multiplier employment. The export base employment brings money into the local area, and the local multiplier employment spreads it around … one time around providing services to the export base employees, two times around providing services to the local multiplier employees employed by the first round … and so on.

Of course, at every go-round, some money leaks out of the local area, so this process is no perpetual motion machine … just extra leverage to the income that flows into a local area.

(Sometimes a set of jobs get some demand from one box and some from another, but we’re people, not robots, so we can are able to see a fuzzy borderline as a normal part of the real world and move on.)

And so that means that when that export base employment leaves an area, it takes additional local multiplier employment with it … which is something people up here in Northeast Ohio feel in their bones, and can explain in very clear language, even if it is language you will not normally here used in Church on Easter Morning.

Now, go out into a rural area, and they know, equally clearly even if not in these exact terms, that farmers are a big part of their export base employment. So leaving farmers out of the coalition leaves a lot of rural areas out of the coalition.

Even that may not be so impressive if someone is looking at national shares of urban, inner suburban, outer suburban, and rural population. However, shift attention from national averages to national politics, and suddenly one thing jumps out. The killing ground for more progressive populist reforms than any other institution in our political landscape … even more than the Supreme Court.

The Senate.

We have, after all, a Federal system, so when particular types of communities are important in the politics of a particular set of states, that is reflected in national politics. In other words, while in a unitary parliamentary system urban populations would be free to exercise a tyranny of a majority over rural populations and ride roughshod over the concerns of rural communities, in a Federal system like ours, there are safeguards put in place against tyrannies … even majoritarian tyrannies.

So, yes, the farmers.

Excerpted from Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence, forthcoming], in the [Burning the Midnight Oil blog-within-a-blog, hosted by kos, though to the best of my knowledge he doesn’t know it.

I’ve been looking at Tiny Houses, and man, do they strike me as cool.

For example, these above are from The Tumbleweed Tiny House Company. Their smallest house is the 70 square foot Biensi … but, of course, some people would not consider that a house, since it has no bathroom or shower. To get that, you need to “supersize” to their second smallest floorplan, the XS-House, at 75 square feet.

Tumbleweed only sells the finished houses that can be towed as a trailer … for the very largest of their houses, like the 770 square foot monster the Ernesti (pictured above left, at the size that 770 sq. feet must seem in the age of McMansions), they only sell plans, as it must be built on site.

Excerpted from Burning the Midnight Oil for the Arc of the Sun, in the Burning the Midnight Oil blog-within-a-blog, hosted by kos, though to the best of my knowledge he doesn’t know it.

What if They Threw an Empire, and Nobody Came?

Sometimes there is nothing more tedious than an argument over the meaning of terms. It often gets called an argument over semantics but semantics … that is meaning … is what is important arguing over.

The trivial argument that brings “arguing over semantics” into disrepute is which meanings to attach to which word. And, of course, if you want to call that an “argument over semantics” and leave the “of words” implied, be my guest … if I can work out what you are trying to say, that’s good enough.

One of those words that spark endless argument is “Empire”. Is there an American Empire? Well, like what Empire? Like the British Empire? Like the Austro-Hungarian Empire? Like the multiple Chinese Empires? Like the several Roman Empires? Like the Zulu Empire?

Whether we call it an Empire or Empire-ish or The Natural and Automatic Consequence of Being the Latest Greatest Country on the Face of the Earth … is there an alternative?