Why I would now put money on Obama

A friend and former coworker of mine told me a story about political correctness (or lack thereof) and cognitive dissonance. My friend (I'll call him T) is a talented mechanical engineer who has worked for a number of companies. T was sent down as a consultant to a large chemical plant in Texas. Now, T's last name is uncommon, and one that you couldn't peg as to origin without a web search. When he introduced himself to the plant manager, the manager asked about his name. T told him that his ancestors were Polish Jews, getting a noncommittal “Oh” in reply. Later, T was in a meeting with the manager and a maintenance foreman. T started listing all the ripping a tearing that needed to be done and the foreman said “No way!” The manager got mad. “Goddammit, Cleetus! I'm payin' top dollar for this New York City Jew boy (no offense, son), and you're gonna do every damn thing he says!” And Cleetus did.

I heard an interview on All Things Considered the other day that reminded me of T's story. An ATC reporter was doing the classic set of small town diner interviews in Bloomer, Wisconsin, just before the primary. One of the people she interviewed was a retired trucker who was a life long Republican. He had decided to vote Democratic this year, for the first time ever. The reporter asked him which of the Democrats was he considering, Clinton or Obama? “I'm leaning towards the black boy now. Just a little bit...Seemed like he's got it up here...Somebody who could straighten it out, the mess we're in.”

Here you have a dedicated blue collar Republican. From his reference to Obama as the “black boy” you can tell that he wouldn't recognize political correctness if it landed on his front lawn in a space ship and shut down the planet for half an hour. And yet he acknowledges Obama's brains and infers that he has the ability to solve the nation's problems. If Barack Obama can win the vote of this guy, he can win the vote of anybody this side of David Duke. The GOP should be worried.

We're seeing a combination of factors here. One is the long overdue realization among many blue collar Republicans that their party has completely blown it, fiscally, morally, and politically. Another is the white hot, deep, abiding, misogynistic hatred of Hillary Clinton. Love or hate her politics, but Hillary Clinton is an intelligent, well educated, successful, opinionated woman, and that frightens and angers many Americans. We can't discount the creeping progress we have made towards the acceptance of African Americans in prominent roles in government. Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell have made it commonplace. Obama himself deserves much credit. It isn't so much his policy positions as his vital understanding that campaigning is an emotional process, not an intellectual one. In his speeches he hits the hortatory notes as if he is playing a set of bells, every one tuned and true.

As it turned out, Obama won Wisconsin with 58% of the vote. He's ahead in the delegate count at the moment, and seems to be encroaching on Clinton's key demographic groups. The all-but-anointed GOP contender, John McCain, is vulnerable. Obama could start off by quoting him on the subject of keeping troops in Iraq for a hundred years. When it comes down to issues, Obama can take a walk on the wonk side, just for a moment, and let McCain do his Miss Teen South Carolina imitation. The Republican strategy for campaigning against Obama was openly laid out by Karl Rove himself. It almost seems unfair. But then, as a military savant once wrote, “If you find yourself in a fair fight it means that you didn't prepare your mission well enough.” Obama seems prepared.

Be all that you can be, really

Ever since the invasion of Afghanistan by U.S. forces I have seen articles about the volunteer military and people's motivations for joining. This editorial piece on Alternet by William J. Astore, a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force is representative. He writes about the desire of young people to test themselves, prove themselves, live up to their own sense of patriotism, and make their own way in the world. People are looking for something to belong to, and something to do that they can be proud of. For some, admittedly, the military is an economic default, especially in areas with severe unemployment. This is all common sense, but Astore writes what to me is a very inspiring paragraph.

The challenge for progressives is to recognize this and then to work to create viable alternatives to military service in which masculinity and patriotism can be demonstrated in non-lethal settings. An example is my father's service as a forest laborer and firefighter in the Civilian Conservation Corps in Oregon from 1935 to 1937. There could be many opportunities for our young men to assert their masculinity in non-military and nonviolent settings -- fixing our nation's roads and bridges, rebuilding our inner cities, rescuing places torn apart by disaster, natural or otherwise, like New Orleans; and from these, too, funded educational openings and future career possibilities could arise.

This makes eminent sense to me, not just as an opportunity for young people (not just men) to find themselves, but as a tool of enlightened foreign policy. It brings to mind an idea I have had rolling around in the back of my head for a while. I think this alternative to military service should be formalized and funded as a branch of the federal government.

My working title for it is the United States Humanitarian Relief Service. It would be a hybrid of the Peace Corps, elite military forces such as the Navy Seals, and the Red Cross. It would be an unarmed group of rigorously trained recruits, organized on military principles, and provided with the same kind of logistical capabilities as the U.S. military. The mission and training, however, would be entirely focused on providing humanitarian relief services to people all over the world.

There always seems to be a sudden humanitarian crisis happening somewhere in the world. There are floods, fires, mudslides, hurricanes, tsunamis, and earthquakes. What if we had a well equipped, mobile force ready, not to attack, but to rescue? What if we could place search and rescue teams, portable hospitals, food supplies, temporary shelters, water purification units, and a corps of disaster relief specialists anywhere on the planet within 48 hours? It would be a huge step in alleviating human suffering and would have the side effect of improving our national standing in the world. It would give our young (and maybe not as young) people the opportunity to learn useful skills, learn about themselves, and serve their country by serving others.

It would not be for everybody. When I say elite, I mean elite. These people would be thrust into the most chaotic and dangerous situations, and would need to be in top physical and mental shape. They would need to be trained in core survival skills, foreign languages and operational specialties. They would have to work as disciplined teams, supported buy the same kind of logistics and coordinated by the same kind of command structures that we now apply to invading Middle Eastern countries. Say what you like about the U.S. military in terms of mission, but they tend to get that mission done. Turn that mission into saving lives and we could accomplish wonders.

Another thing to consider is the opportunity for developing bilateral relationships with otherwise suspicious or hostile countries. In the event of a natural disaster we couldn't waste time negotiating the terms of the H.R.S. response with the country in question. We would have to set up individual disaster response plans with each country beforehand so that the mission could be launched the instant the request came in. That would automatically put us in an friendly mode on at least one front with every participating country. We would be viewed as a potential rescuer instead of a potential attacker.

Of course, the H.R.S. would have domestic applications as well, as a sort of souped up National Guard. The National Guard itself, given its normal pre-Iraq role as the local disaster relief force, could coordinate with the H.R.S., calling upon it when needed. There could be much useful cooperation in terms of training, information gathering, and personnel exchange.

As our atmosphere heats up, both climatically and politically, storms of all sorts will be breaking out with greater frequency. The desire among young people for challenge, camaraderie, and adventure will always be there. The Humanitarian Relief Service would be a smart response to all these needs. We should redirect some of the money we now spend on having the world's largest military to having the world's largest rescue team.

Steady Current

Many years ago I was talking with a family friend at a party, an economics professor at Middlebury College named Klaus Wolff. I was in high school and the U.S. was in the middle of the energy crisis of the 1970's. Professor Wolff assured me that the next great and world changing inventions in energy technology would be in the field of energy storage, not energy production. I think that history will prove him right, although more in terms of the problem than the solution.

Our planet faces the imminent decline of the rate of production of oil, coal, natural gas, and perhaps even uranium. As we extract less and less energy per year out of the ground we will have to use less and extract more out of the sky. That is, we will become more dependent upon direct and indirect solar energy, whether that is from photovoltaic panels, solar hot water collectors, wind turbines, hydroelectric plants, biomass fuels, or wave and tidal power.

The problem with these burgeoning forms of energy collection is that they are variable and intermittent. The sun and wind come and go as they will, and are only very roughly predictable in their intensity from day to day. Hydroelectric production varies from season to season and rainstorm to dry spell. Tidal power is eminently predictable, but has pauses at its high and low points. We are used to tapping into millions of years of stored solar energy in the form of fossil fuels, which allows us to have a continuous flow of power into our homes and businesses. When the sun isn't there, it's called night, and nobody thinks anything of it. When the electricity isn't there, it's called a power outage and the phone rings off the hook at the local utility.

In the case of heating with biomass, the storage of renewable energy is no big deal. Lots of houses in Vermont and elsewhere have a big stack of firewood in a shed or under some tin roofing out back. In the case of electricity, it is a huge problem. Batteries for storing solar electricity are large, heavy, expensive, and all too mortal. Our regional power grids are far too large to use batteries as a solution for intermittency. There is no storage in the system. At present we use natural gas fueled turbines to adjust to the variability in electrical demand. The multi-megawatt output of these turbines is ramped up and down as millions of people push down the toast in the morning or turn off the lights at night.

As natural gas production drops off in the near future (See my earlier essay Gloom and Sunshine), the cost of this conveniently adjustable natural gas fueled electricity will become prohibitive. What then? Coal and nuclear power plants do not adjust their output efficiently or quickly, and those fuels will eventually, inevitably become scarce themselves. We need to go elsewhere for our variable power needs.

Several options make sense. The simplest, at least in terms of existing technology, is hydroelectric power. While hydro can't be ramped up beyond the limits of seasonal water flow, it can be adjusted within its limits to a variable demand. There would have to be some financial arrangement between hydroelectric plant operators and utilities to reimburse the operators for unused capacity, but convenience always has its price. In Vermont we have 137 megawatts of hydroelectric power in operation and somewhere between 15 and 25 megawatts of prime hydroelectric sites waiting to be developed. There are many more existing dam sites that could be developed economically in anticipation of increased electricity prices. (There are also 550 megawatts of hydroelectric plants on the Connecticut River that our Governor, Jim Douglas, recently failed to buy. Give it ten years and this failure will be recognized as the lost opportunity of the century.)

Another option is load shedding. Large buildings could have their air conditioning systems placed under joint control of the building manager and the utility. In the event of a high peak load in the summer, the building could have its thermostat raised by a critical degree or two for a critical hour or two in mid-afternoon. Added to a thousand other large buildings with the same system, the savings could shave the top off of an untenable electrical demand. Industries could coordinate the timing of their energy intensive processes with each other and the utility to smooth out the overall power demand curve. A business with enough flexibility might schedule an activity to correspond with a predicted sunny day or windy night. It would be a new way of thinking about business practice and energy use, but a necessary adaptation to the decline of unconstrained fossil fuel supply.

There is one technology that is just appearing on the market that offers great promise. That is Stirling cycle cogeneration. I'll spare you the physics of the Stirling cycle engine, except to explain that it is a 200 year old design that has finally come into its own with the advent of modern high temperature materials and computer aided thermodynamic design. Heat one end of the engine and cool the other and you get power output. The fuel can be anything from diesel to wood pellets. Cogeneration is the practice of burning fuel in an engine to make electricity and then collecting the waste heat to do something useful, such as heating your home. Cogeneration is common in Europe, and less so here, but usually confined to industrial-scale operations. The technology hasn't been available to make small cogeneration economically viable. Enter the Stirling cycle furnace. A homeowner would be burning something anyway, just to heat the house or a tank of hot water. Why not extract some electricity along the way? Such furnace/generator combinations are soon to be being marketed in Europe and Asia. It would make perfect sense, especially if the devices were paired with some hot water storage and the same kind of shared control as the load shedding I mentioned above. A utility could call on a few thousand homes for a few megawatts of instant power, and the homes would get credit on their electrical bill plus a tank of hot water.

It's not a matter of choice, actually. As natural gas gets more scarce and expensive, power producers and consumers will have to get more imaginative about balancing the ever changing supply and demand. Eventually we will either have to change our expectations about continuous electrical supply or manage the challenges of entirely renewable generation.

Breaking the grip

(It occurs to me that I should reference the essays that lead into this one. If you haven't already read them, I would recommend that you go first to The Stonemason and the Gunman, then Hyperscopic life, and then Sharing the bottle.)

In my last essay on hyperscopic life I wrote about the importance of law in the physiology of the corporation. It is the sinew that holds together the physical assets of a corporation, the DNA that defines its structure, and the set of boundaries that restrict its actions. The problem we face is that corporations presently have overwhelming influence in making the laws that define and restrict them. Given the blind pursuit of growth and profit that characterizes corporations, it is akin to letting crack dealers and addicts write drug laws.

The influence of corporations over lawmaking is threefold. First, corporations and their highly paid managers provide most of the money to an electoral system that has been designed to require large infusions of private cash. This acts as a filtration system, mostly eliminating those aspirants to office who might be threats to corporate interests. (See my earlier essay, First Things First) Second, corporations provide selected information to these preselected officials through a system of lobbyists. The services of these lobbyists are expensive, thus giving the most access to the minds of government officials to those entities with large lobbying budgets. (See my earlier essay, Second Things Second) Third, most informational outlets in this country have been consolidated under the ownership of five corporate conglomerates, some of which have extensive business interests outside of the news business. Most U.S. citizens receive their information about the world and government policy through a corporate-controlled filter. As a result, much of the information truly necessary for making informed political decisions never makes its way to your average American.

This is a powerful, interlocking triple threat. The question that confronts us is how to break the corporate grip over corporate law and wrestle that power back into the hands of the majority of human beings in this country. There is a reason I titled me essay on campaign finance reform “First Things First.” Media consolidation is a problem of law that is not resolvable while media conglomerates have such influence over legislation. Lobbying reform likewise. That brings us to the catch-22 of campaign finance law. Money is the lifeblood of political campaigns, and the ability to bring the largest quantity of money to a campaign is the determining factor, nine times out of ten.

So how can we convince those selected by the big money system to abandon the big money system? It is going to have to be analogous to the civil rights movement. It will be easier, in a way, because we'll have 99.9% of Americans naturally on our side of the line, instead of being partially split on racial lines. The movement will have some necessary characteristics.

It will have to be a movement outside the two party system and the legislative system, but bringing pressure to bear inside the system. It does not have to run its own candidates for office, but it will have to review and approve or disapprove of party candidates according to its principles. The pressure mechanisms will be the bundling of votes and, to a lesser extent, money. Despite all, they still need our votes to get elected. We need to organize a voting bloc dedicated to getting the money out of politics. It might take the form of a pledge by individual voters to exclude from consideration any candidate who fails to make campaign finance reform a priority. At the same time, we can influence some campaigns by bundling our small donations into large ones dedicated to reform candidates.

It will have to do most of its communications and outreach outside the usual news media system. The movement can expect to be ignored, misinterpreted, belittled, or savaged by the mainstream news media. Thankfully, we still have a relatively free internet. Since this is not a movement of the wealthy, all communications methodologies will have to pass the cheapness test.

It will have to be decentralized, but linked by common principle. National movements with charismatic national leaders are vulnerable to intimidation, assassination, and co-option. They also tend to waste a lot of time on internal politics and a lot of money on national infrastructure. (The present national parties are more money vending machines than associations based on shared principles.) The movement I am proposing would have a few fundamental principles about electoral reform, honest practices, and non-violence carved in stone, and that's it. If you agree with and practice the principles, you're in. All other belief systems are optional. I could see an association of state or sub-state organizations cooperating on whatever levels work for a particular project.

The methodologies used by the movement would have to be non-demanding in terms of the time and money of individuals. Everybody seems to be working extra hours for less money these days. Driving long distances to rallies is out. Long weekday evening meetings are out. Buying TV airtime (see above) is out. The movement needs to lay out strategies at the beginning, make them adaptable to local conditions, and provide them in an easy to use format to interested people. The movement needs to have a learning mechanism built in to modify strategies as it runs up against obstacles.

In actuality, we would be creating a dispersed hyperscopic political organism. It would be designed to spread its democratic, egalitarian genes. It would operate in the environments in between those dominated by corporate media and corporate politics. Most importantly, it would be focused like a laser beam on the means by which we select our political representatives.

Anybody can lie on a bed of nails, but nobody can lie on a bed of one nail. The physics behind the bed of nails trick is that the performer's weight is distributed over hundreds of nails. No one nail exerts enough pressure to do damage. So it is with politics. A flurry of effort on a flock of issues is like firing a cannon full of feathers.

People who are dissatisfied with the way decisions are made in Washington need to focus on how the decision makers are chosen. If we can change that, then we can focus on how the decision makers are influenced, both in terms of lobbying and news media. Then, and only then, can we have a chance of curing the other ills of society. I propose an acronym for ending political squabbles withing the movement: A.C.E., meaning (We'll fight that one out) After Clean Elections.

I have to admit that I am taken aback by what I am proposing. It is nothing less than an inter-species war for power. The concept of hyperscopic life is probably tough enough for people to accept all by itself. Add to that the concept that we have to engage in mortal combat with this species within which we live, whose existence we didn't even consider, and that we can't directly perceive. It is, however, necessary for homo sapiens to gain dominance over the corporate species if we are to survive.

Medical news you will like

I guess that pain is the mother of knowledge. Your all-too-human Minor Heretic was felled by a virus last weekend and has spent the last several nights engaging in the following minute-by-minute ritual:

1)Clutch ribcage
2)Cough up lung(s)
3)Retrieve and reinsert lung(s)
4)Moan quietly

I tried every cough remedy readily available to me – Robitussin, zinc lozenges, slippery elm lozenges, inhaling steam, hot tea, hot peppers, honey and lemon, honey and whiskey, just whiskey – all to no avail.

I spoke to a friend on the phone, a physician's assistant, who recommended an asthma remedy called Proventil, which apparently outperforms codeine, the champion of cough suppression. Codeine is prescription-only and tough to get, due to its narcotic and addictive properties. I hit the Internet and started researching. I went to sites such as Medline, which provide abstracts of clinical studies for practicing physicians, in order to get something beyond marketing and superstition. What I found on the cough suppression front was both sweeping and surprising.

First, anything that you can get without a prescription at your local pharmacy or supermarket is no better than a placebo. The clinical results range from “placebo” to “statistically indeterminate.” That includes the standard products containing Dextromethorphan and Guaifenesin.

Some of you may say, “But I use NyQuil, and it gets me to sleep.” Of course it does. NyQuil is 50 proof alcohol (whiskey is 84 proof) mixed with Doxylamine succinate, an antihistamine/hypnotic. It's good old Thunderbird and downers in a socially acceptable and convenient package. To paraphrase the advertising slogan, its the cheapjack-wino-garbagehead-junkie-so-you-can-sleep-in-a-box-in-an-alley medicine.

Proventil failed in the double blind studies, but another asthma inhaler succeeded. Atrovent, generically Ipratropium bromide, actually provided relief from coughing. It has two problems. First, it is a prescription drug, and second, it costs $90 a bottle. So much for that.

Then, in the process of searching for better Atrovent pricing, I found the Holy Grail of cough suppression research. According to researchers from Imperial College London and Royal Brompton Hospital, there is a substance that is 33% more effective than codeine – theobromine. Theobromine is one of the chemicals naturally found in chocolate. The London researchers used 1000 mg of theobromine, roughly the amount found in two to three ounces of dark chocolate or two cups of cocoa. Sometimes life is kind.

Of course, if you want this treatment to work you can't use the brown crayon that passes for chocolate in much of the U.S. Ordinary milk chocolate doesn't have enough cocoa in it to pack sufficient theobromine punch. Go for the high-end 80 to 90% cocoa chocolate bars, or better yet, make yourself a cup of cocoa from 100% bakers cocoa. The hot liquid version will have less fat and you can add just enough sweetener for your taste. I'd also recommend that you look for “Fair Trade” cocoa and chocolate to insure that the folks on the other end of your medicinal supply chain got a fair shake.

As I write this I am sipping from a mug containing 1 cup hot water, 3 tablespoons Equal Exchange 100% bakers cocoa, and a tablespoon of honey. My lungs are staying in their proper place.

I am reminded of a scene in the Woody Allen movie “Sleeper.” Allen's character has been woken up from several hundred years of suspended animation and finds himself in a science fiction world of the future. The doctors in charge of him are discussing his strange requests for wheat germ and organic carrots. One of them asks, “Doesn't he know about health foods such as deep fat and hot fudge?” Woody got it half right.