Truthiness Ascendant

All politics is local, so stay with me here. I'll roll around to the big picture soon enough.

I'm not going to say that those who tried to derail the city's general obligation bonds are wrong or downright stupid. We can all disagree on exactly what things in hard budgetary times fall into buckets such as "necessary investment" or "wasteful spending." Two people can look at the same line item -- say paving a parking lot or replacing a squad car -- and have completely different opinions about whether that purchase is really necessary. And that's okay. Democracy is good. We'll just have to vote on it.

But the problem is; if the electorate is incapable or unwilling to recognize objective fact and use that in their decision making then what you get is a public discourse that is incapable of reaching compromise or consensus because the two (or more sides) are speaking completely different languages. If two sides can't even agree on basic facts e.g. the Constitution prohibits the president from conducting warrantless searches of American citizens with no oversight by anyone, then the chances are pretty slim that one will ever see a useful compromise on the problem. If that's too abstract for you, let's look at a more local problem. If I raise say, $11 million in 15 year bonds but if I completely pay off my 2007 Dodge Charger Police Cruiser(And if they don't by the Dodge, why not? But I digress...) after 36 months -- by this I mean pay car's note in full -- have I financed the car for 36 months or 180?

I admit it sounds like a poser. Like one of those annoying story problems from ninth grade math. But you know what? That's why you had those problems in ninth grade! These are real-world questions, not just the teacher's sadistic way of passing time. Clarke's Third Law states, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Perhaps for the sake of many of our brothers and sisters here in Clinton we should amend that to read, Any math sufficiently advanced beyond ninth grade is indistinguishable from magic.

It seems our increasingly complex society is simply demanding too much of our simple simian brains. When faced with seemingly intractable issues such as "what happens when I turn my computer on?" or "I'm scared of Mexicans but if we kick them all out of the country, who will do my lawn?" the higher reasoning centers just shut down and we go with our gut, right or wrong. So insecure are we in what we understand about the world that we take that gut feeling and then insert it into the parts of our brain where actual, provable facts normally live and presto! Truthiness! Example:: Even though the law on petitions is very clear and available with a very simple Google search and states

If at any time before the date fixed ... for taking action on issuance of the bonds, a petition is filed with the county auditor (or any other governing body -- ed.) in the manner provided by section 331.306 asking that the question of issuing the bonds be submitted to the registered voters of the county, the board shall either by resolution declare the proposal abandoned or shall direct the county commissioner of elections to call a special election upon the question of issuing the bonds

Because I feelthat my petition to force an election should be valid even though it is late, you should still accept it and hold the elections anyway. Never mind that one would think that anyone who would go to the trouble of 240 signatures would take the five minutes to check when the filing deadline was. But again, I digress...

For how are we to govern ourselves if one part of the population uses empirical evidence, repeatable experiments and the evidence of our own eyes a.k.a. reality to view and analyze the world and its worries and another part cares not a whit for what the evidence says, because whatever they feel strongly about must be true? What we get is a citizenry that is encouraging of the basest demagogues, susceptible to rumor and just generally unfit to govern itself.

Which is a pity really, because like that conference on the mound scene in Bull Durham, we're dealing with a lot of shit here. And all of it requires people to be relatively clear-eyed and switched on. Those two attributes seem to be in pretty short supply in the body politic right now.

Postscript:People -- especially elected officials -- who bitch about 'bloggers' spreading rumors need to wake up and smell the coffee. The toothpaste is never going back in the tube. The Internet is the new town hall, the new speaker's corner. If you aren't out here and mixing it up then you are increasingly as the words of Bruce Sterling have it, "legacy people."

OMFG! I'm a Grup!

http://newyorkmetro.com/news/features/16529/index.html

Let’s start with a question. A few questions, actually: When did it become normal for your average 35-year-old New Yorker to (a) walk around with an iPod plugged into his ears at all times, listening to the latest from Bloc Party; (b) regularly buy his clothes at Urban Outfitters; (c) take her toddler to a Mommy’s Happy Hour at a Brooklyn bar; (d) stay out till 4 A.M. because he just can’t miss the latest New Pornographers show, because who knows when Neko Case will decide to stop touring with them, and everyone knows she’s the heart of the band; (e) spend $250 on a pair of jeans that are artfully shredded to look like they just fell through a wheat thresher and are designed, eventually, to artfully fall totally apart; (f) decide that Sufjan Stevens is the perfect music to play for her 2-year-old, because, let’s face it, 2-year-olds have lousy taste in music, and we will not listen to the Wiggles in this house; (g) wear sneakers as a fashion statement; (h) wear the same vintage New Balance sneakers that he wore on his first day of school in the seventh grade as a fashion statement; (i) wear said sneakers to the office; (j) quit the office job because—you know what?—screw the office and screw jockeying for that promotion to VP, because isn’t promotion just another word for “slavery”?; (k) and besides, now that she’s a freelancer, working on her own projects, on her own terms, it’s that much easier to kick off in the middle of the week for a quick snowboarding trip to Sugarbush, because she’s got to have some balance, right? And she can write it off, too, because who knows? She might bump into Spike Jonze on the slopes; (l) wear a Misfits T-shirt; (m) make his 2-year-old wear a Misfits T-shirt; (n) never shave; (o) take pride in never shaving; (p) take pride in never shaving while spending $200 on a bedhead haircut and $600 on a messenger bag, because, seriously, only his grandfather or some frat-boy Wall Street flunky still carries a briefcase; or (q) all of the above?
...

“You have to have a little bit of Dora the Explorer in your life,” he says. “But you can do what you can to mute its influence.” Okay. “And there’s no shame, when your kid’s watching a show, and you don’t like it, in telling him it sucks.” Yeah! There’s no—wait. What? “If you start telling him it sucks, maybe he might develop an aesthetic.” Sorry, son. No more Thomas the Tank Engine for you. Thomas sucks. Stop crying. Daddy’s helping you develop an aesthetic. Now Daddy’s going to go put on some thunder music.

If you subtract the New York-specific parts and the multi-Cnote accessories this is pretty much my life. Sadly the laissez faire attitude regarding fashion has not yet been internalized in the world of midwestern CPA firms, so I'm still expected to wear the suit everyday. However, under the dark colored dress shirt is more often than not a Clash T-shirt.

Major Industrial Development in Clinton

This is without a doubt a very interesting project. The short version is that ADM will be building a new corn-based plastics plant in Clinton. The plant will use microbial fermentation to produce PHA, a form of plastic that is microwave safe and biodegradable. The technology behind this stuff is pretty mind-boggling. It uses genetically modified bacteria (e. coli) to basically eat corn mash and crap out plastic. Economically, I daresay that this could be one of the most important things to happen to Clinton and Iowa in a long time.

Definitely very exciting. But is this really "sustainable" or "green" plastics production? Well, that's a bit more complicated. It is a process that does not turn oil into plastic but...

An August 2000 2000 Scientific American paper states that PHA production from corn was AT THAT TIME not very energy efficient:

In our most recent study, completed this past spring, we and our colleagues found that making one kilogram of PHA from genetically modified corn plants would require about 300 percent more energy than the 29 megajoules needed to manufacture an equal amount of fossil fuel-based polyethylene (PE). To our disappointment, the benefit of using corn instead of oil as a raw material could not offset this substantially higher energy demand.

Based on current patterns of energy use in the corn-processing industry, it would take 2.65 kilograms of fossil fuel to power the production of a single kilogram of PHA. Using data collected by the Association of European Plastics Manufacturers for 36 European plastic factories, we estimated that one kilogram of polyethylene, in contrast, requires about 2.2 kilograms of oil and natural gas, nearly half of which ends up in the final product. That means only 60 percent of the total--or 1.3 kilograms--is burned to generate energy.

Given this comparison, it is impossible to argue that plastic grown in corn and extracted with energy from fossil fuels would conserve fossil resources. What is gained by substituting the renewable resource for the finite one is lost in the additional requirement for energy. In an earlier study, one of us (Gerngross) discovered that producing a kilogram of PHA by microbial fermentation requires a similar quantity--2.39 kilograms--of fossil fuel. These disheartening realizations are part of the reason that Monsanto, the technological leader in the area of plant-derived PHA, announced late last year that it would terminate development of these plastic-production systems.

It is pretty much recognized in the agri-sciences and among serious economists that using corn (or other biomass) as substitutes for petroleum-based products, e.g. plastic, diesel fuel, present a conundrum: it takes more energy to produce the substitute product than it does to produce the petroleum-based product. One gets less energy out of the process than one puts in. Since almost all of our energy is produced through burning of fossil-fuels, especially oil and natural gas production of ethanol and biodiesel through current methods equal a net loss.

That said, Metabolix who owns the technology for the process to be used at the new plant, says they know this and are committed to production of PHA bio-based polymers and biomass energy. So, what is the current and future fuel of the ADM complex? Coal.

Now, this is a technology in it's infancy. A Google search for PHA plastic returns the Metabolix web page as the second hit. But Metabolix isn't (currently) in the business of building plants, right now they are just licensing their intellectual property. The shareholder's were probably not going to finance the whole enchilada; rail spur, biomass energy plant, PHA plant. Getting a return on their probably multimillion dollar R&D investment is their goal.

So, do we really need an inefficiently produced oil-substitute plastic product that will degrade in our landfills? Does it really advance the cause of American energy independence? Does it do anything to advance people's thinking about what they consume and how they consume? I'm thinking the answer to all these questions is, no. Not really. This kind of plastic really just helps perpetuate a throw-away culture of convenience über alles. Despite all the cool tech and the fact that it is made with renewable corn, it is really just the same old crap except that it dissolves in the ground when you throw it away. So, at the end of the day we are pouring millions of dollars and BTU's of irreplaceable fossil fuels into a process that basically takes corn and turns it into low-grade fertilizer.

That's the big picture. The realpolitik, what's in it for me Jack? side of the equation is much brighter. I mean, first of all this is a first-in-the-world project that is going up in Clinton, Iowa. When was the last time Clinton was first in the world at anything? We're talking about a lot of new jobs; highly skilled, white collar jobs for people with Ph.D.'s in biochemistry and genetics no less. How many jobs? Who knows? The possibility of Clinton attracting those kinds of jobs and those kinds of families to the city is not to be underestimated.

End-use production follows raw material production. Businesspeople - especially in an age of high transport costs - like to build their factories as close as possible to the raw materials. So, I would not be surprised to see some follow-on business growth due to this plant's operation.

See above for my general enthusiasm about Clinton being a world leader in something, especially something that is potentially a world-changing technology.

Democratic Strategy: Cower and Hope

I've been a bit boresighted on work. Has the Senate finally tried to investigate and take action in the domestic spying case? No? Right then, nose back to the grindstone.

I guess we can all be forgiven for not knowing much about Sen. Feingold's attempt to have the President censured. Now, I personally think that practically and leagally speaking, censure is a bit premature as we haven't actually had any hearings. Cant sentence anyone without some actual facts to go on now can we?

So, yes this is all a bit of grandstanding by the Wisconsin Senator and increasingly likely 2008 presidential candidate. In my eyes Sen. Feingold can be forgiven for some grandstanding as the majority party has barred all legitimate inquiry into these activities. Every day in every way the Republican Party more closely resembles an organized criminal enterprise than the ruling party of the United States of America. So yeah, a little jupmping up and down is probably called for.

I'll leave aside the utterly unsuprising nearly uniform dismissal by mainstream press' of Sen. Feingold's attempt to shame the United States Senate into investigating what has every appearance of an very illegal overreach by the Bush Administration. Next person who says the words, "liberal media" to me gets punched in the face, okay?

No, what really ticks me off is the fact that pretty much everyone in the Democratic party has run for cover. No one even has the courage to say anything along the lines, "Sen. Feingold may be jumping the gun a bit but his slight excaggeration is as nothing compared to the willfull ignorance, malfeasance and downright accessory to criminal behavior of the Republican leadership."

So it is little wonder that Sen Feingold said the following:

"I’m amazed at Democrats, cowering with this president’s numbers so low. The administration just has to raise the specter of the war and the Democrats run and hide. … Too many Democrats are going to do the same thing they did in 2000 and 2004. In the face of this, they’ll say we’d better just focus on domestic issues. … [Democrats shouldn’t] cower to the argument, that whatever you do, if you question the administration, you’re helping the terrorists."

The Democratic Party leadership needs to realize a few things:

1. Just because the other party is deeply unpopular, doesn't neccessarily mean that you are very popular.


2. Voters have a long history of holding their noses and voting.


3. No matter what the papers say, it isn't just "the left wing" of the party that is angry about this stuff.


4. If you don't stand up for something, you stand for nothing.

Bush's poll numbers will probably give the Democratic party a few new seats in Congress. But the Democratic party is never going to retake the leadership of this nation if cannot find the backbone to confront the GOP and its commercial media noise machine and display some moral backbone. Most people already assume the Democrats are just as crooked as the Republicans, they just steal less obviously. The leadership is doing nothing to dispel that myth.

Fractally F***ed Up

With apoligies to Neal Stephenson...

Later, he was to decide that the Bush Administration was fractally fucked up. That is, you could take any small piece of it and examine it in detail and it, in and of itself, would turn out to be just as complicated and fucked up as the whole thing in its entirety.

Cribbed from Cryptonomicon

The Eternal Struggle Pt. 1

No, I'm not talking about God vs. Satan. You should know me better than that. I'm referring to a much more secular topic, the struggle between individual liberty and totalitarianism. Lately I've been enchanted by the unusually clear-eyed, libertarian-tinged, liberalism of David Brin as he methodically demolishes Neoconservativisim and all its works.

Brin's key thesis is that we have emerged from the (somewhat false) Hegelian Left vs. Right world of the Cold War but have failed to realize one key thing. Just as in most post-dictatorial states, age-old conflicts once kept under control by the jackbooted heel of the dictator instantly resurface as virulent as ever; so too has that age-old struggle between those who would declare they know what is best for the masses and those who would put the state under the control of the people.

The essential problem for those of us on the progressive end of things is that we and most of the public have not successfully adjusted to this shift back to the default state of politics. However, the Neocons never left it and successfully use the old left-right rhetoric to keep progressives on the defensive while continually edging themselves forward.

More soon. But for now...

EXHIBIT #1 THE ETERNAL STRUGGLE
From a post over at Brad Delong, an excerpt from the end of C.V. Wedgewood's William the Silent, a biography of William of Nausau, Prince of Orange, 1533-1584, proof that it was ever thus.

The work to which [William] had devoted his life, and for which he had died, was never to be accomplished. The Netherlands, as he had known them, were never to be one nation. The struggle for their liberation had transmuted the past and destroyed the possibility of its revival. What he had done was to create a new State, the United Provinces of the coming century, the 'Holland' of the future. Even though it fell short of what he had wanted, his achievement was very great. For it was a hard and desperate task, to restore the self-respect and freedom of a people borne down by apparently inescapable doom, to fight a great power with such small instruments, and to fight it for five years without hope and alone.

It was a strange, almost a unique, thing to be the idol of a nation and remain uncorrupted, to be yourself the guardian of the people's rights sometimes against the emotional impulse of the people themselves. In times of emergency and war, in political crisis and national danger it is often expedient to sacrifice the forms--even the spirit--of popular government. Was not this one of the chief reasons why popular governments [have] withered in so many lands during this stormy [twentieth] century?

There lies his greatest claim to recognition: he sought not to impose his own will on the embryo nation, but to let the nation create and form itself. He belonged in spirit to an earlier, a more generous and more cultured age than this [late sixteenth century] of narrowness and authority, and thin, sectarian hatred. But he belongs also to a later age; his deep and genuine interest in the people he ruled, his faith in their development, his toleration, his convinced belief in government by consent--all these reach out from the mediaeval world towards a wider time.

Few statesmen in any period, none in his own, cared so deeply for the ordinary comfort and the trivial happiness of the thousands of individuals who are 'the people'. He neither idealized nor overestimated them and he knew they were often wrong, for what political education had they yet had? But he believed in them, not merely as a theoretical concept, but a individuals, as men. Therein lay the secret of the profound and enduring love between him and them. Wise, wary, slow to judge and slow to act, patient, stubborn, and undiscouraged, no other man could have sustained so difficult a cause for so long, could have opposed with so little sacrifice of public right, the concentrated power of a government that disregarded it. He respected in all men what he wished to have respected in himself, the right to an opinion.

There have been politicians more successful, or more subtle; there have been none more tenacious or more tolerant. 'The wisest, gentlest and bravest man who ever led a nation', he is one of that small band of statesmen whose service to humanity is greater than their service to their time or their people. In spite of the differences of speech or political theory, the conventions and complexities which make one age incomprehensible to another, some men have a quality of greatness which gives their lives universal significance. Such men, in whatever walk of life, in whatever chapter of fame, mystic or saint, scientist or doctor, poet or philosopher, and even--but how rarely--soldier or statesman, exist to shame the cynic, and to renew the faith of humanity in itself.

Of this number was William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, called the Silent.

Iraq Chaos Talking Points

As usual, the Rude Pundit just cuts through all the bull and gets right to the heart of the matter.

[A]t some point soon, some right wing bag of douche is going to proclaim that liberals are "happy" or "thrilled" by a civil war in Iraq. Liberals can be accused of enabling terrorists by using the dwindling "freedom of speech" we're allowed, and it's a pretty small rhetorical leap from saying the left wants American soldiers to die (which the right has done) to saying the left loves us some civil war. Yes, liberals will be viciously insulted (defamed, even) by conservative commentators, bloggers, Freeper frothers, as if somewhere, in an oh-so-hip underground club, liberals are gathered in an orgy of celebration over the infinite bloodletting in Iraq, chanting gleefully, "Told you so, told you so, told you so" as they toast with cosmos and down sushi.

So let's just say it up front here: over here in Liberalburg, we weren't happy when Ronald Reagan was cozying up to Saddam Hussein back in the 1980s. We weren't happy that the United States was backing a brutal, murderous, raping thug, giving him weapons and such. We weren't happy with the first Persian Gulf War. We weren't happy with sanctions that decimated the poorest people in Iraq. We weren't happy that the President wouldn't allow weapons inspectors to finish their work.

We weren't happy with this war to start with, saying, for instance, that a civil war was the inevitable outcome. We're not happy to be proven right. We're not happy, simply, when people are dying for no good cause, with no good outcome on the horizon, and no good way out. Frankly, oh, dear, sweet right wing, on the whole, we'd've rather been wrong and had tens of thousands of people not killed, tens of thousands of America soldiers not wounded. We'd've eaten the crow and, trust us, wonderful, fair right wing, you'd've shoved our faces in the plate of that black bird.

But since we were right, maybe, just maybe, someone oughta pay a political price for being so goddamned wrong. Instead, though, the right's gonna try to turn it around and blame the left and those who "didn't support the war" for its failure. Which would, for all intents and purposes, finally seal the deal on Vietnam redux.

Read it, learn it, live it baby.