Public Service Announcement

This is not directed at anyone y’all know, but recent events (some personal, some not) have led me to conclude that I need to remind certain persons who shall remain nameless that today we celebrate the creation of the United States of America. That’s USA with a U, not a C. I would further like to remind said persons that the last time around, they got pwned, and that since then the Yankees have got the Hydrogen Bomb, so I would think long and hard about whether you want some more.

Stars and Stripes Forever, father-muckers, and don’t you forget it.

I notice in the Chron…

…that we’re now down to 3 tree-sitters. Even the euphoniously-named Dumpster Muffin has deserted her post.

Three means you could clean house with a pump shotgun without having to reload. I’m just sayin’.

Let’s be honest: this is going to end badly at some point, and the University of California will come in for an assload of wrangling and histrionics and crocodile tears for their horrible, horrible conduct. And yet, there are a few simple things to bear in mind:

1) There is a fundamental disconnect between the University of California (it’s in Berkeley) and the city of Berkeley, California. The University is an odd hybrid of 1925 and 2015, while the city is an odd hybrid of 1970 and 1981, neither in a good way.

2) Everything at dispute here is within the University grounds and pretty much out of the jurisdiction of the city.

3) Aside from some documentation issues which the court would like to clear up, the judge pretty much found for the university every step of the way, so why those bong-watered granola-shavers were celebrating last week is quite frankly beyond me.

4) (BIG IMPORTANT POINT) This is how civil disobedience does not work: you break the law and then say that the law is unjust and therefore you should face no consequences for it. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, fucking wrong, Peach Seed. The way civil disobedience works is that you break the law, knowing full well what the consequences are, and accept those consequences fully, trusting in the civil conscience to be forced into questioning itself. That’s how Gandhi did it, that’s how Dr. King did it, that’s how Fred Shuttlesworth did it*, and it’s worked out pretty well so far.** Basically, it boils down to a motto which I wish I knew how to render into Latin (three dozen Catholics in my life and nobody speaks Latin? Nobody? WTF?): buy the ticket, take the ride. The reason people feared for the life of Martin Luther King, Jr, when he came into Birmingham, was because there was a very real possibility that the consequences of breaking the law would be extra-judicial murder.

In short, all civil disobedience ultimately comes down to one question: are you prepared to die in the service of your cause? If the cause is the freedom of a subcontinent, or the end of racial tyranny, then maybe you can say yes, if you have a lot more character than a wuss like myself. SO what Potstem and Crotchrot and the rest of the Symbionese Junior Liberation Front need to ask themselves is “Am I willing to give my life to prevent these particular trees from being replaced by triple the number of generally similar trees in a different location?”

At that point, we can accurately judge the wisdom and sanity of the protest. I hate to annoy the time-warps on Telegraph***, but I have to say that I’m not betting heavily on a “yes” response.

* Look it up. Seriously, I mean it. Go look up Fred Shuttlesworth. What MLK dealt with for a matter of months in Birmingham, Rev. Shuttlesworth faced down for the better part of a decade, and now the one-time “Wild Man of Birmingham” is about to see the city airport renamed for him in the twilight of his life, which I am sure was completely unfathomable fifty years ago. I mean it. Go go go. Wiki wiki.

** Stark Industries gets a nickel.

*** A great whopping stinking lie of the first order. Come on, I have two degrees in political science, I took entire course groups in forswearing and deception, you should expect this of me by now. At least I have the decency to tell you when I’m lying my ass off.

Revision to previous thesis

American politics will never be saved until the last Boomer candidate is choked to death with the entrails of the last Boomer reporter.

Seriously folks – if you can’t get over your manhood issues and Vietnam guilt, fine but STOP USING ELECTORAL POLITICS AS GROUP THERAPY. It’s gotten old for anyone born after the Tet Offensive and quite frankly you’re starting to really piss me off.

I’m The Magnificent

So we finally figured out what it takes to beat me: line up me on one side and two dozen Boomers on the other, take all the questions from the Baby Boomer edition of Trivial Pursuit, lean heavy on the Broadway musical and pop culture categories, let them keep yelling out answers until somebody gets it right, and don’t start until I’m already three beers in…

…except that it was essentially a draw.

I still got it. Somebody may eventually come take it away, but not this weekend. Meanwhile, for all my micks at the NDNation Tournament of Champions, consider your thunder officially shaken down. =)

CLINT-IN PORTIS NUMBER ONE

The ceiling is officially lifted on what I am prepared to believe about Clinton Portis.
Seriously, this guy is your #1 entertainment value in a league that is proverbially bereft of entertainment value. As long as Portis is slowly slipping into insanity in the full view of the public, you can no longer call it the No Fun League.
(If you don’t think I’m writing in Prime Minister Yah Mon for every office on my ballot this November, you’re crazy.)

The old days

Man guilty of having 13 in Volvo
I don’t think this even used to be a crime. I distinctly remember an incident in Jacksonville in 1989 where we had 13 people in a Honda Accord, including one in the trunk. (Which we did right after the lot of us had gone to Krystal and ordered 100 Krystals and a Diet Coke. I have a picture of the stack of boxes, a.k.a. the Krystal Palace, somewhere in my stuff at home…)

Killing time

I never thought this would happen to me…but I have found that I really do like getting to work earlier than everyone else. If I can walk in with my coffee at 7:45, knowing that nobody will come in or call for at least an hour or more, and I’m able to work through my email, change the tapes on the backup servers, and generally ease into the workday – everything goes so much better. I don’t really have set coverage hours here, but I have sort of chiseled out the standard 8-5 (by the way, the cliche is “9 to 5”, how on earth did we end up with 8-5? Somebody wanna explain this?) and found that the best hour of the day is the first one.
I think the coffee helps. In the interest of saving money and helping force me up in the morning, I’m trying to grind my own beans again. Whole Peruvian beans from the farmer’s market (roasted on Saturday, no less, they’ve just finished oiling out to the point I can start using them tomorrow), a grinder and a French Press (or the little one-cup filter-drip unit the wife put me onto) – and if I can get 15 minutes before leaving, I can leave with a full thermos bottle and maybe another mug besides. Whether I should drink quite that much coffee in a day is another matter. Back in the day, a cup of coffee was 8 oz – now there are some places whose large coffee is triple that size. And I know the coffee’s more potent now than it was back in the day when it was half Sanka, half sawdust.
I know it’s still a while until college football starts, but I am seriously fighting the urge to go out and buy a pile of Vanderbilt stuff (water bottle, valve caps, foam rubber sword, visor, etc etc). I think I may be back on the “grasp for Vandy to be my official alma mater” tip. I won’t go on endlessly about that again, but suffice to say that if you had a choice between Vanderbilt and Actual Alma Mater, you’d grasp too.
BTW, that little Nokia 1112 has been on continuously for almost 3 days now and still shows a full 5 bars of battery life. I am now committed to using this until the battery dies, and at this rate, I may not go back to the iPhone before the new firmware comes out.

It’s never coming back

When OPEC first embargoed oil to help pay for the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the price of a barrel of oil quadrupled in only a couple of months. That kind of artificially-imposed shortage was massively disruptive, but it’s the sort of thing that could be remedied easily. The problem we have now is that almost nothing about this is artificial – it’s taken a decade for the price to quadruple, but here it is. Growing demand from emerging markets will sustain the price hike – Econ 101 again, remember – and as long as the dollar is weak and the price of oil is demarcated in dollars, the cost of oil will be disproportionately high in the United States.

So what is to be done? There’s a lot of talk about windfall profits taxation and pursuing speculators, but there’s very little there there. See above about how this has not been a speedy artificially-induced shock. You might nip a little back from ExxonMobil, but not enough to make a material difference. OK, how about ramping up production? If we approved unlimited offshore drilling and opened up ANWR right this second, you wouldn’t see the oil start to flow for almost a decade – and when it did, the material impact on a gallon of gas might be a nickel. For all the hue and cry about it, there’s not some massively huge vat of oil that we could have by Wednesday if it weren’t for those meddling kids pesky environmentalists.

Other options – tar sands, oil shale, biodiesel, etc etc – are only commercially viable now because the price of oil is through the roof. These are not things that are going to bring back the days of glorious cheap fuel – they are things that will help keep the current price from exploding, because they will produce more goods to fulfill demand and thus maintain equilibrium. If the price of oil dropped by 25% tomorrow, there would be no point in commercial development of these alternatives, because they wouldn’t be profitable.

Face facts, people: you will never again in your life see plain old 87-octane gasoline at $2 a gallon. Hell, you may never see it at $3 a gallon. This price increase is the result of market forces, which means that the price of oil is never going to drop precipitously until demand plummets or supply explodes. Which ain’t gonna happen.

So what is to be done?

In the short term, not much. Everything is planning for the long term. We’re just going to suffer for a few years while we come up with the workaround. In this respect, maybe more drilling seems palatable, but you’re just kicking the can down the road at that point.

Things that need to be done: more transit. Problem is, outside an urban environment, it’s tough to push transit – thinking of where I lived growing up, I don’t know that there’s any way a town bus could have been useful, because everyone’s too scattered. The transit solution involves getting it somewhere it could be useful – take Birmingham, for instance, which desperately needs some sort of commuter rail down 280 and 65 between downtown and the white-flight suburbs to the south. In a town with no commuter infrastructure, where an undrained valley means that the wrong sort of weather holds smog in one place for five straight days, the potential improvements in congestion and climate just from cutting rush hour traffic are plentiful.

Something else that needs to be done: different vehicles. Here in SiliValley, people are starting to go for the ol’ Vespa scooter in a big way. There are anecdotal tales of families selling one of the his-and-hers Priuses (Prii?) for a Vespa, because the Prius can be sold for exactly what they paid for it and a scooter with double the gas mileage purchased for an order of magnitude less. I know for a fact that I could totally get by on a 150cc scooter for my commute, which would get me at least triple the mileage I get now (although to be honest, it would probably take years and years before the fuel savings would pay for a scooter). People are grasping for old Geo Metros and Honda Civic VX cars from the early 90s that get in the 40s with a plain ol’ gasoline engine. Hell, people are buying the Smart Fortwo out here. I am sure that the VW Polo Bluemotion would go like crazy in urban areas. And then there’s the Chevy Volt, which is not a hybrid so much as it is an electric car with an onboard generator which is completely unconnected with the drive system; it’s just there to charge the battery when it’s not plugged in. The auto industry doesn’t turn on a dime, though, so I suspect it’ll be a couple or three years before that gets retooled.

Long story short: we’re going to be here a while. Better start adjusting, because we’re never getting back to normal. This is the new normal.