Archive - 2006

Happy New Years!

I just wrote an article for energista.org encouraging people to adopt a New Year's Resolution to use less electricity in 2007. We can all increase our efficiency and reduce our footprint.

Please take a few minutes to read the article and commit yourself to the changes I recommend. Not only can it save you money, improving efficiency is the best approach to a cleaner environment with lessened global climate change. Thank you.

If you are confused about purchasing green tags or wind credits, this post discusses them to a greater depth than you probably care to read.

Happy New Year.

I can only hope that is 1 day into his 30,000 year Promethian punishment. Prometheus was punished by Zeus by having an eagle eat his liver every day. Each night it grew back and Prometheus could look forward to another day of torture.

Though I think his death did nothing to help the situation in Iraq and may even worsen it in the medium term, I'm glad they stretched his neck.

Wired ran an article in the November, 2006 issue called "The Church of the Non-Believers" by Gary Wolf. It is an interesting portrait of some in the modern movement of atheism. The focus is heavily on Richard Dawkins, a man of supreme intellect.

I have some reservations about atheism - most have been captured by this article. I particularly appreciated this passage:

The New Atheists never propose realistic solutions to the damage religion can cause. For instance, the Catholic Church opposes condom use, which makes it complicit in the spread of AIDS. But among the most powerful voices against this tragic mistake are liberals within the Church – exactly those allies the New Atheists reject. The New Atheists care mainly about correct belief. This makes them hopeless, politically.

But on the other hand, the New Atheism does not aim at success by conventional political means. It does not balance interests, it does not make compromises, it does not seek common ground. The New Atheism, outwardly at least, is a straightforward appeal to our intellect. Atheists make their stand upon the truth.

I am a compromiser. A team player. I tend to believe that we can all get along if we do not insist on unconditional victory. Most of all, when it comes to human progress, I'm patient.

Trying to convert people from above tends to be ineffective. When religious missionaries traverse the globe to convert people, they do not try to convince them with words. They do deeds and recognize that the conversion process can take time. They have to be patient. While atheists are undoubtedly loathe to copy the missionaries they despise, the atheists must choose between what they perceive as the moral high ground and what is actually effective.

Of course, they have no reason to listen to me. I'm yet another annoying fence-sitter on this whole debate. As someone who deeply respects the scientific process though, I did appreciate this dig at supernaturalism:

Unsolved problems in diverse fields, along with a skepticism about knowledge in general, are used to demonstrate that a deity might not be impossible. The problem with this, for defenders of faith, is that they've implicitly accepted science as the arbiter of what is real. This leaves the atheists with the upper hand.

That's because when secular investigations take the lead, sacred doctrines collapse. There's barely a field of modern research – cosmology, biology, archaeology, anthropology, psychology – in which competing religious explanations have survived unscathed. Even the lowly humanities, which began the demolition job more than 200 years ago with textual criticism of the Bible, continue to make things difficult for believers through careful analysis of the historical origins of religious texts.

One of the reasons Bush decided to invade Iraq was because of a man named Natan Sharansky. He wrote a book called The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny & Terror. Evidently, someone summarized the cliff notes of the book to Bush and he became enamored with the idea of forcing the Middle East to embrace democratic government (while pursuing authoritarian reforms in his own country).

Bush awarded Sharansky the Presidential Medal of Freedom - the highest civilian award this country bestows. I will be reviewing some of Sharansky's book below, but first I want to note that these medals are meaningless. They gave a Nobel Peace prize to Kissenger and the Medal of Freedom to the Iraq Occupation Bungler Bremer (and now Sharansky for a wretched book). After they give the Pulitzer lifetime achievement award to TV Host Oprah, all big awards will be meaningless.

Moving onward: The Case for Democracy. This review has 2 parts. The second part deals entirely with Sharansky's poor treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian situation and will be posted in a few days. Today I cover all my other beefs with his book. Despite Sharansky's shaky grasp on reality, debunking his arguments is both a fun and instructive process.

I agree with Sharansky that democracy is for everyone. Most people want to have control over their lives, and that is the general point of democracy. I may frequently demean our attempts at democracy, but I find the pure concept appealing. Those who say that Arabs or other groups don't want or aren't ready for democracy miss the point that it takes any group of people time to adjust to a new system.

In my mind, what it comes down to is whether you want to be able to redress your grievances. Do you want to live in a system where people running the government can do whatever they want -- take your family, your property, or make arbitrary decisions about where you can travel? No. Everyone wants accountability. No ones wants to live in a perpetual state of being bullied. How much we want it depends on how much it costs (in effort as well as dollars)

At any rate, I largely agree with Sharansky on the power of freedom and importance of democracy. That being said, he writes like someone who spent way too much time being imprisoned by the Soviets. This is because he spent way too much time being imprisoned by the Soviets. The man is obsessed with ideas of political freedom to the detriment of all other aspects of life and security. This obsession leads him to poor conclusions regarding the power of freedom.

Much of his book juxtaposes a "fear" society to a "free" society. Free societies recognize the basic liberties of all citizens though they may not have achieved justice. For example, in the U.S., we have a Bill of Rights. We sure don't respect it, but we have recognized it in ways that despotic regimes do not.

A society is free if people have a right to express their views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm.

Thus, he uses 'free' in a totally political sense. This makes sense, because we have long associated freedom with political freedom. However, many have noted that freedom has little meaning for those who are hungry and unemployed. Perhaps conceptual freedom should have some aspect of economic security tied into it. Otherwise, according to Kris Kristofferson (popularized by Janis Joplin), it just means having nothing left to lose.

By contrast, a fear society does not offer political freedoms. In a fear society, you cannot speak your mind. If you do, you may find yourself and/or your loved ones abducted in the middle of the night by government agents.

The problem with Sharansky's framework is that the fear and free societies are not mutually exclusive. No one wants to live in fear. But people have more fears than just political ones. Again, Sharansky's background readily explains why he misses this important point.

While people in the Middle East undoubtedly desire to live in a free society, my travels there taught me that they believe the United States is a fear society. Though we (the U.S.) can do much better, we protect freedom of speech better than pretty much any other country and our protections for minorities are also world class (which speaks more to the problems in other countries than our own flawed institutions). Nonetheless, our high crime rates and newly found fear of terrorism (due in larger part to our government's ineptitude than actual danger from terrorists) suggest we are both a fear and a free society simultaneously.

If forced to choose between the U.S. that they perceive - one wracked with crime and racial antagonism - and continuing to live without political freedom, many will choose the latter. The simple fact is that few prioritize political freedom above economic security. People would rather feed their family than criticize the government. Of course, we all want to do both.

Finally, Sharansky's argument is premised largely on his misunderstanding of the demise of the Soviet Union. Whether it is the Reagan-lovers or Sharansky crediting Reagan with the demise of the USSR, they are foolish to identify one reason for the failure of the USSR.

Sharansky (and many Reagan-lovers) argue that the USSR dissolved because of Reagan's hard-line policies against it. Reagan called it the Evil Empire and escalated military spending in order to drive up their military spending. Not long after, the USSR fell apart. These people have argued that Reagan spent the USSR into disaster.

Such an argument has some merit, but ignores the crucial role of Saudi Arabia in bringing down the Soviet Union. Stratfor.com Intelligence ran an article that discussed this briefly: Saudi Arabia: Consequences of Stepping Into the Iraqi Fray on
November 30, 2006 (membership required).

The last time Riyadh felt it necessary to adopt a strategic policy to counter a major power, the target was the Soviet Union. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan convinced Riyadh that Moscow's end goal was the occupation of the Persian Gulf oil fields, so the Saudis created a multifaceted policy to counter the Soviet empire and ultimately contribute to its destruction. The two most significant arcs of this policy were sponsoring a religion-inspired crusade that supplied militants and money to Afghanistan in order to battle the Soviets, and flooding markets with extra oil to pressure the Soviet budget. The result bled the Soviet Union militarily and financially and contributed heavily to its dissolution.

To be fair, my understanding is that Reagan pressured the Saudi Kingdom to keep oil prices low. So he may have had something to do with it. The real irony of the whole what-killed-the-USSR argument is that it ignores the fact that the Soviet Union was built upon a wretched economic system. Right-wingers have argued for decades that the Soviet system was inferior to ours (due to its denial of both political freedoms and the power of the market) while simultaneously arguing that it must have been U.S. actions that killed it rather than the inadequacies of its very foundation.

Sharansky argues that whenever the U.S. took anything less than a hard-line approach against the USSR, it lengthened the Soviet lifetime. He goes so far as to say:

Had Reagan chosen to cooperate with the Soviet regime rather than compete with it, accommodate it rather than confront it, the hundreds of millions of people he helped free would still be living under tyranny.

Is he insane? Sharansky appears to honestly believe that the Soviet Union would have survived until now if Reagan hadn't decided to call it an evil empire. This is nuts. The Soviet system was doomed. It did well for awhile but in the end, the Soviet Union's system relied too heavily on bureaucrats to make decisions better suited to the market (this is a condemnation of the USSR system, not an endorsement of the absurd Chicago-style free market system).

At any rate, the USSR collapse resulted from many factors. Claiming that one overwhelming reason caused it is generally erroneous. That being said, the low price of oil seriously hurt Russian exports and undoubtedly sped its descent. With a higher price of oil, increasing its military spending would not have resulted in a collapse during Reagan's time.

To finish this review, I want to end on a light note. Sharansky has more political sophistication than the entire neocon philosophy. He understands that building democracy takes more than blue fingers and seemingly successful elections. It requires a free press, the rule of law, independent courts, and political parties. Elections are a symptom of a free and open society, not a cause.

This review will continue with Part II - my problems with everything Sharansky writes about the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

I just posted an article on Energista about the situation in Iraq regarding its electrical grid. My summary covers some of the many issues, but I encourage you to read the original article. The problems with rebuilding Iraq's grid are accessible to non-engineers and quite interesting.

Are you familiar with sunk cost? You should be - you cannot be a rational economic actor if you don't know about sunk cost. Wikipedia illustrates sunk cost thusly:

For example, when one pre-orders a non-refundable movie ticket, the price of the ticket becomes a sunk cost. Even if the ticket-buyer decides that he would rather not go to the movie, there is no way to get back the money he originally paid.

In order to drive this point home, in my economics class last year, we discussed the fact that if you pay $100 for concert tickets weeks in advance but decide on the day of the show that you don't want to go, you should not go. You cannot get that $100 back regardless. If you decide to go because of the sunk cost, you will effectively be spending money (gas and such) and time to do something you don't want to do.

Naturally, this conflicts with much of our natural instinct. We feel an obligation to force ourselves to enjoy these sunk costs. If you do this, you are only wasting your time. You cannot change your past decision - accept it and move on.

This sets the ground for a quote from Richard Clarke's piece in The New Republic's Iraqi special issue of 4 December.

Too often in the Iraq debate, we have let intuition, slogans, and appealing thoughts cloud logic. Perhaps the most troublesome example is the argument that we must honor the American dead by staying until we can build something worthy of their sacrifice. Stripped of its emotional tones, this argument is, in economic analysis, an appeal to sunk cost.

An MIT professor once promised to fail me if I ever justified actions based on sunk cost -- so I learned that what is gone is gone, and what is left we should conserve, cherish, and employ wisely.

In the United States, we have often chosen to be irrational economic actors when it comes to failed wars. Some refuse to admit we lost Vietnam and many still think it was a noble endeavor. No one wants to say we tossed away so many lives for little reason and no gain. We did. Now Bush is doing it again. We won't hold him or his administration accountable though. We never do. We will choose to pretend that the soldiers died nobly to protect U.S. freedom when in fact so many people died and suffered because of an unnecessary war, conducted in a criminally negligent fashion.

The soldiers are doing their job. They trust the civilian government to use them where necessary and not to abuse their trust. They trust the President and Congress not to carelessly throw their lives away on wasted causes. Historically, the government has very rarely lived up to its side of the bargain. This is only the most egregious ineptitude in a long-running trend of politicians throwing grunts lives away for reasons that have little to do with protecting American freedoms.

I hope you are spending time with your families and loved ones today.

Update: My Christmas wishes came true today as my father returned home from the hospital; I met many of Michelle's relatives, including her parents; and the Eagles trounced the Cowboys.

I joined Michelle's family Christmas and met many relatives, including her parents before I made the 1 hour drive back to my parents' place to see them. They literally live in a diametrically opposed location across the entire Twin Cities from Michelle's place. At any rate, it was a good start.

From there I returned home in time to watch the Eagles v. Cowboys game with my family - who TiVo'd it and waited patiently for my return to watch it. It was a great game, I'm glad they waited.

As I write this, my sister (who has had too much to drink) is actually reading it over my shoulder. So I'll pause here and gently dissuade her from annoying me...

We'll see how that turns out.

In any event, watching Garcia lead the Eagles to victory over a publicly boo'ed T. Owens was excellent. The Eagle underdogs rocked the Cowboys from the start and Owens did nothing but further his dubious lead in the most dropped-balls category.

Owens was an amazing athlete. Now he is barely a joke. Meanwhile, the quarterback he ridiculed years ago is leading the Eagles to victory over T.O.'s new team.

Merry Christmas - here's to hoping your was as good as mine.

Merry Christmas Eve all! And Happy Holidays to those of you intent on a path to hell.

My dad just had his left knee replaced and is doing well. He is doing well and will be coming home from the hospital on Christmas day. I'll be spending a lot of time at the house with him, watching movies and football.

Yesterday, I drove down to visit him. On the way home, I evidently drove over something, for when I attempted to leave my parents' house this morning, the car felt odd as I reversed down the driveway. A careful inspection revealed an utter vacuum in the front left tire.

Awesome. Last night, it had air. This morning, none. I actually had checked it yesterday morning before putting 160 miles on it, so I'm fairly certain it was going flat previously.

So I started to take the tire off with one of those lame little tire irons and destroyed my lower back. It hurts. Alot. Walking is fine, but going into a sitting position, or picking something off the ground makes it scream. Awesome.

So the whole Christmas Eve thing isn't working out so hot for me. On the other hand, Kimmi has returned home and will be sleeping with the dogs tonight, so I'll actually probably get better sleep tonight despite the blown back.

From now on, I plan on taking a proper tire iron (the ones that look like a plus sign) with me rather than relying on those stupid mini ones.

As I sit here, temporarily hobbled, in my parents' house, I'm reminded of my surgery 10 months ago on my ankle. As I have now received a couple of emails from people about that and my recovery, I thought I would do an official blog update.

10 months ago, I had surgery to correct a microfracture of an osteochondral defect of the talus. After the surgery, the Doc said there was so much damage, I wouldn't be running or jumping again.

6 months after the surgery, I did a 30 mile hike over 2 days with a 25lb pack. It was hard on my legs, but I did it. True to his words though, I cannot run or jump (well, land) and even when I attempt a light jog, I pay a price in pain. Impact is right out.

However, I still rock climb fairly regularly and I can swim when motivated without significant pain. In order to get some good cardio, I bike on a trainer (indoors in MN winters). When I bike, the ankle hurts for a couple of days afterward as I walk around, but it isn't enough to dissuade me from trying to trim some pounds.

At any rate, for those who are also going through this surgery, I am glad I did it. I'm still in pain and look forward to more surgeries over the years as the pain increases again. I think my experiences are not representative due to the excessive damage (resulting from the long delay in my diagnosis).

So it goes. A little bit of pain builds character.

Happy Holidays everyone!

I was taking stock of my unedited photos when I realized I had never finished my Twincities Marathon photos. I went out to support my friend Ildiko and ended up taking a lot of photos of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society runners. All the marathon photos are in a gallery now.

So that Bush guy gave a press conference on Wednesday. I caught his speech and listened to as much of the Q&A as I could before I feared I would succumb to brain rot. I thought I would review the transcript and make some comments.

He started by talking superficially about Gates taking over the utterly incompetent and thankfully now former Secretary of Defense. Before jumping into additional snarkiness, I want to point out that even without Rumsfeld's utter incompetence, the Bush Administration would have likely still bungled the war in Iraq.

This is because they sent a bunch starry-eyed inexperienced fundamentalist true believers to build the Iraqi government. I desperately want to read Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran because it details the backstory behind that (largely underreported) fiasco.

Back to Bush.

This war on terror is the calling of a new generation; it is the calling of our generation. Success is essential to securing a future of peace for our children and grandchildren. And securing this peace for the future is going to require a sustained commitment from the American people and our military.

This war on terror would not take a generation's effort if Bush had not totally botched it. His incompetence in creating a 'war on terror' in Iraq effectively lost the war in Afghanistan (the one place we actually could have slowed the terrorist threat).

So long as humans live on this planet, some will turn to the tool of terror. Trying to stamp it out is stupid and the hallmark of a fool like Bush. I'm not saying he is dumb, I'm saying he is a fool - anyone can be delusional.

We have an obligation to ensure our military is capable of sustaining this war over the long haul, and in performing the many tasks that we ask of them. I'm inclined to believe that we need to increase in the permanent size of both the United States Army and the United States Marines.

You can double the size of the entire U.S. military, and it will not be able to carry out fool's errands. So long as Bush makes decisions by faith in God rather than reason, and his advisors view the world through their neo-con lenses, increasing the military will only give the U.S.'s enemies more targets.

We enter this new year clear-eyed about the challenges in Iraq, and equally clear about our purpose.

Clear-eyed? Boy, you got flies in your eyes! (If you missed that reference, I'm considering refusing to consider anyone an American who has not read Catch-22).

My administration will work with Republicans and Democrats to fashion a new way forward that can succeed in Iraq. We'll listen to ideas from every quarter; we'll change our strategy and tactics to meet the realities on the ground.

Bear in mind that every time someone suggests a strategy that differs from the President's, he (or Press Secretary Snow) says it is a "nonstarter" and dismisses it.

The unemployment rate has remained low, at 4.5 percent. A recent report on retail sales shows a strong beginning to the holiday shopping season across the country -- and I encourage you all to go shopping more.

Bush's economic cure is indicative of his entire strategy. The man is entirely short term. Encouraging Americans to strengthen the economy by shopping (and therefore running up credit card debts) delays today's problems and compounds them for the future. Bush's entire philosophy is aptly summed up by Michael Franti's lyrics:

They tellin' you to worry about the future
They tellin' you to never worry about the torture
They tellin' you that you'll never see the horror
Spend it all today and we will bill you tomorrow

Bush claimed he was going to bring responsibility to the White House. He failed. Where are all those people who supported him on that basis? For everyone who wants to know why I don't vote for politicians, this is why. Americans vote for style over substance damn near every chance they get. And they seem to get what they deserve.

The American people expect us to be good stewards of their tax dollars here in Washington.

No, they don't. They wish you were good stewards. Thanks to popular cynicism (well placed in many cases), anyone who announced that they expected Washington to be a good steward of tax revenue will be evaluated by the men in white.

So we must step up our research and investment in hydrogen fuel cells, hybrid plug-in and battery-powered cars, renewable fuels like ethanol and cellulosic ethanol and biodiesel, clean coal technology and clean sources of electricity like nuclear, solar and wind power.

Research is good and helpful. Maybe you should stop slashing its funding. Despite the promise of future technologies, we need to implement policy NOW. We don't need additional technology to make a difference now - we need ambitious policies that use the market to spread renewable fuels.

Congress has extended the production tax credit for wind power producers by one year. This extension is great news for wind power. But it should be extended for 5 years in order to allow the industry to plan for the future. We will see a much larger gain in the renewable sector if they can count on that tax credit to keep wind competitively priced against nuclear and coal (both of which are subsidized by the gov as well in several ways).

Calling for more research is not a policy. Bush's hesitancy is not because we don't have the technology - it is because he is funded by energy companies that jealously guard their government subsidies and don't want to share with renewable fuels.

Finally, there is no such thing as clean coal. It is industry-spin. There are technologies that reduce its impact on the environment, but it would take Harry Potter to create a "clean" coal.

To achieve these and other key goals we need to put aside our partisan differences, and work constructively to address the vital issues confronting our nation.

The Bush Administration has taken partisan politics to a whole new level over the previous six years. Sadly, it has largely worked for them because of their ability to "stay on message." As long as Americans refuse to pay attention to what really happens in D.C., why should partisan politics change?

The message of the fall election was clear: Americans want us to work together to make progress for our country. And that's what we're going to do in the coming year.

The message of the fall election was indeed clear. Clearly garbled for the Bush Administration. People rejected the overt corruption of the Republican majority. In response, they put the Dems into power and will probably keep them their until their corruption surpasses the high tolerance of American voters.