Holiday give away

I have a bunch of gmail invites to give away. So if anyone out there doesn't yet have a gmail account and has been lusting after on then this could be your lucky year. If so send me email: blogger at longdarkteatime.com.

America's first coup

Most countries have numerous skeletons in their closet, if you go back far enough you'll reach a period when pretty much anything goes. As a Brit I can lay claim an exceptionally long history of colonial ills - its not something they teach in school either, its more a deeply entrenched part of the British psyche. We know we did wrong in India, in Africa, in... well pretty much everywhere we invaded and added to the British Empire.

As for America's prior indescretions overseas, well I guess I'm just slow to catch up on those - they certainly aren't on the tip of people's tongues. So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to learn that the CIA colluded with the Brits in 1953 to overthrow the elected leader of Iran and replace him with their own stooge. I've heard something about this, but never the full story. So here it is as signed off by Eisenhower himself and all driven by the lust for, get this... oil. Yes the Brits didn't want the elected leader Mohammad Mosaddeq to nationalize the British run oil business in Iran so they worked together with the USA who wanted to stop communists from being elected in Iran. Together they worked to "take care" of that little problem. The coup was recently acknowledge by Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, and was also written about in the New York Times along with a handy time-line of the whole sordid affair.

And you wonder why people march today in the streets with "No blood for oil" signs? Is it time for me to say again "History repeats"? Nah, why bother, no one even learns history these days, let alone learns from it.

Stingy States of America

Well I'm glad I wasn't the only one who thought that the USA was being stingy with their promise of a whopping $15 million of aid. Unlike poor Jan Egeland of the UN I don't have to do any back-peddling and hastily say I misinterpreted that figure and that it was actually "very generous". No, I can sit back and gloat as Bush back-peddles himself and suddenly forms another of his famous "collations", this time a "coalition of the giving". Obviously someone was listening to world opinion in the White House.

However, I'm lead to wonder why on earth the USA feels the need to form yet another coalition lead by the USA to deal with aid for the affected areas. Why not use this as an opportunity to back the UN and other world aid organizations and let them do what they are designed to do. In a years time I wonder how the world response to this disaster will be judged?

Somehow I'm reminded of 1984 when the worlds people got sick of big governments lack of action over the famine in Ethiopia. It took a bunch of pop stars to get together in the UK and raise 8 million GBP with their Band Aid "Do they know its Christmas?" single, and then globally raise over $100 million with the "Live Aid" concert (most of which came from European donations). It just so happens the "Band Aid 20" anniversary charity single has topped the charts for Christmas in the UK this year.

Maybe this time we shouldn't wait for the pop stars to solicit our donations, and we can all do better than the still stingy $0.10 per person the US government has pledged. I personally just donated 1000 times that amount so how about visiting the NPR tsunami relief donations page (or Network for Good) and selecting a charity of your choice to give some hard earned cash to?

Damaged business or improved service?

News.com just published a story about how the free Craigslist community web site has cost Bay Area newspapers $65 million in lost employment advertising revenue and damaged the local classified advertising business to the tune of millions. Well, that's how the Classified Intelligence report they cited spans it, but they would, wouldn't they?

From my perspective CraigsList has done nothing but good and anything that takes revenue away from the advertising business is inherently good. That could be because I don't work for an advertising company, or a company that derives most if not all of its revenue from advertising. But from that vantage point I'd say the CraigsList experience shows that people all over the world have discovered that doing business person to person works, just ask those who buy and sell daily on eBay.

Sure its a different way to do business, one of the most important differences is that buyers and sellers have to trust each other. For many its a huge leap of faith to complete their first such transaction on a person to person basis. Sure it is open to abuse, but the reality is that the huge majority of all such trades go well and the benefit of eliminating middle men, of creating a vast low overhead global market for obscure used (and even new) items, and a focused local market with no need for shipping, far outweigh the risk.

Besides, did you ever get ripped off in some way by a regular business, even by a huge supposedly trustworthy "efficient" corporation? Did you ever get such shoddy service you swore you'd never shop somewhere again, and did you ever by something that turned out to be a piece of crap and find you were unable to get satisfaction without resorting to legal action? Sure you have, and even if you think you haven't realise that consumers are exploited daily in a far more sinister way. Its a steady drip, drip, drip of price fixing, the consequences of efforts to stamp out competition in a market, or companies willfuly hiding information about harmful or faulty goods (think drugs, tires, and cigarettes) while continuing to sell them because the profit exceeds the eventual cost of compensation. It's no wonder we see giant class action suits, and no wonder corporations would rather support someone who would like to see such suits outlawed.

The benefit of doing business person to person is that by eliminating extraneous middle men the price can be lower and because buyers meet sellers more directly. Also CraigsList and eBay have managed to create huge markets for buying and selling used goods that might otherwise have just remained in closets, or been thrown out with the garbage. Again their ability to bring more buyers and sellers together creates a more efficient market, and by recycling items that are still worth more than their component materials they eliminate wastage in the economy. This allows resources that would otherwise have been utilized to recreate them, to be used in the production of something else - or to just stay unused for future use. Local markets all save on all those transportation costs - if you can buy someone elses used Ikea couch from around the corner then Ikea wont have to ship one all the way from Ikealand (Sweden) or more likely somewhere in Asia.

I should also point out that the inference that CraigsList is doing harm by "taking away" $65m in employment advertising revenue from other advertisers by some kind of magical and unfair means is pretty vaccuous. If you remember CraigsList employment ads are actually the one service it actually charges for. So it managed to compete in the employment advertising market by entirely fair means - and is doing very well at it. If anything CraigsList is at a disadvantage because it has to use all the profits from employment advertising to subsidize all its other services making them entirely free. That's opposed to the usual way of doing business which requires a significant amount of the profits being spent on staff to sell the advertising in the first place. The lesson to be learned is that the best places for advertising are the ones that don't ever ask for advertising.

When you think about it, the millions of revenue "lost" to sites like CraigsList or perhaps billions lost to eBay are not lost at all, it is just spent elsewhere. Money is only ever lost when its spent on something that is overpriced or that will never be utilized to its full potential. If I buy a car, keep it in the garage for ten years and then send it to the crusher well sure that provides jobs for the people who built the car and all the middlemen who got it to the showroom and the sales guy who sold it to me and the finance people who loaned me the money to buy it and the insurance agent who insured it etc. etc. But what a waste of resources if its value is never realized, the steel could have made surgical instruments or farm equiment or any number of other things and the people invovled in its lifecycle could have been spending their time doing something far more productive. If I can sell it for even a fraction of the original price then that's much better. Sure most people do sell their cars before they are worthless, but what about all that junk? How many have watch perfectly good junk get tossed away and carted off to the dump before even the local homeless population can salvage it?

Finally, realize that the advertising buisness is one that is like the media business with just a few very large companies doing the lions share of all advertising. Even in the classified world that is true. Does it really take a giant national classified adverts company to help people sell to each other? Far from being the most efficient way to do things, I believe its often the least efficient - there's no advertising executives, skyscrappers stuffed full of extraneous staff or three martini lunches involved when A places and ad on CraigsList and B responds to it and buys the item.

I think that people have simply forgotten how to do business with their neighbours and the hidden cost of this is that people have lost their essential feeling of existing in a community that is trustworthy and cares about them. If you can't even get enough trust in your community members to trade a used couch for a few bucks then how can you even think about the more important things in live that require trust? That cost is one that's hard to quantify, but we all, deep down, feel it. The inability to trust our neighbours, to leave cars on the street, our kids with a baby sitter, the feeling of insecurity even at home behind locked doors, the inevitability of graffiti on buildings, disrespect of personal property, and that inevitable tendency to label everyone untrustworthy until they have earned it.

I look forward to a day when community driven services like CraigsList are the norm and when regular businesses will eschew the steady slide to mediocrity because they are tempted by the lure of advertising dollars. For me I'll happily pay for my daily news if its good and free of advertising. I'll happily pay to watch TV shows I like on a per show basis if they are free of adverts and commercial influence, and I'd even happily pay to use Craigslist if he ever feels the need to charge for it.

How the poor have fallen, how have the mighty given?

Tsunami have always fascinated me and I've spent many an hour digging up photos and videos of them. I've always been able to separate the physical event from the death and destruction that they so often wreck. But that is no longer the case having seen the rows and rows of bodies laid out in streets, hospitals, school buildings, in pits for burial. When such numbers of dead are reported piecemeal over weeks, months and years, or abstractly as a statistic its hard to get a grasp on the sheer scale of human misery. The images from around the Indian ocean really bring home the sheer magnitude of destruction the tsunami caused along thousands of miles of coast line. I doubt I'll ever think about tsunami again without those images flashing to the front of my mind.

So I have to say, as the cynic I am, that I was appalled last night that the US had promised $15 million in aid for the countries affected by the tsunami. Immediately I thought about how the USA is spending $1 billion a week in Iraq - that's $142 million a day, and all we can spare is $15 million? Sure those countries are not affluent Western countries, their damages in dollar value may end up been lower than those caused by the last hurricane season in Florida. However the scale of human misery is surely immeasurable by comparison and the US had a great opportunity to demonstrate world leading benevolence with a large and generous donation.

This morning, having clearly endured much criticism from overseas, the US added another $20 million to their donation. That still is clearly a drop in the ocean compared to what is needed. Granted the US is not the only wealthy country in the world, but that donation still only represents about 10 cents per person in our country. How about our government dig deep and find at least $1 per person? And how about we pledge to use all our technological know-how to help the countries around the Indian Ocean to set up a tsunami warning system such as we have protecting our own tsunami vulnerable Pacific shores.

The buoys used to detect tsunami mid-ocean cost about $250,000 each and we operate six in the Pacific. Just think of the difference it would have made if the many hours of warning available had been used to alert the coastal populations in Sri-Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, India and even Africa. What a triumph of technology that could have been and what a tragic failure it was. In this season of giving and good will to all men, not just our people, wouldn't that be the right thing to do?

Love, Poverty and War

My favourite contrarian, Christopher Hitchens, was on the radio this morning talking about his latest book Love, Poverty and War. Although Hitchens can be infuriating to listen to when you disagree with his usually contrarian views, he does make you think. Indeed most of the infuriation comes when you find yourself gently lulled into agreeing with him. At that point you jerk out of it with an angry and indignant start.

Hitchens' is still very much in support of the war - he rarely if ever changes his opinion on things like that. He was criticising "Fahrenheit 9/11", Michael Moore, and of course the liberal left for not supporting the war.

I emailed him a question hoping to draw him out on why he thought it was okay to pursue non-military means to bring down the North Korean regime, but not in Iraq. The question didn't get asked but I suppose his answer would be to repeat his comment that repeated military simulations of an attack on North Korea had predicted an attack on Seoul by North Korean artilery that is located within shelling range, just across the DMZ. But that wasn't my point - he had suggested non-military actions in north Korea to work and would hasten the fall of Kim's regime, so why didn't we just do that to Iraq which by all accounts was just as likely to teeter out of existance in a few years if we'd just stopped boosting Saddam's power by concentrating all our rage on him.

I also wanted Hitchens to say what he thought about what he described as Americas "imperial" aspirations in Iraq. Was that a good thing? Wasn't it more of the same of the awful things we've done elsewhere, especially in South America. My interpretation of Hitchens views is that he believes Iraq is finally a righteous war that the world should have gotten behind. A little late (about ten years), but righteous none-the-less. But if it was really done with the intent of building a democracy in Iraq why didn't Bush say that all along, and why isn't Bush charging ahead full steam against all non-democracies in the world - for instance Saudia Arabia? Why the special and expidited treated for Iraq?

Basically I'd just like to hear Hitchens focus his laser like perception and criticism in some other direction and perhaps come out with something, anything, negative about Bush and his motives for backing of war on Iraq. So far Hitchens seems to be keeping mum on that point - I haven't even heard any criticism of Bush's non-war policies but it could be that I haven't been looking or listening hard enough. Surely Hitchens doesn't think the Bush regime, so representative of its NeoCon backers, is entirely wholesome and wonderful for the world? Or is Hitchens deliberately keeping mum on that point so he can be welcomed deep into the Bush confidence only to later do a contrarian exposee of it?

The only glimmer of hope for something positively negative about Bush was the comment that Richard Perle (who was on the same radio show the day before) wasn't a person that Hitchens would want to spend any time with. Clearly he had some negative feelings or thoughts on Perle, one of the leaders of the NeoCon klan that is pulling the Bush puppet strings. It would be nice to hear some more of his thoughts but unfortunately this wasn't the show to get that opportunity.

Putting money where your mouth is

Mark Morford is suggesting that blue voters express themselves in the way that the red party understands - with their money. So when the going gets blue, the blue go shopping - but only at stores that donated more money to those blue people than those red people. To assist in this goal he points us to Choose The Blue which lists the campaign donations of various corporations under helpful consumer categories like groceries, household and automotic. Buy Blue also has a similar, albeit shorted list, and conveniently sells a bunch of T-shirts to publicize the buy blue campaign.

I'm inclined to agree that putting your consumer dollars where your mouth is can have an effect - corporations are legally obliged to do whatever it is they need to do to preserve shareholder value. If they believe that supporting one party of the other is in their best financial interests then they will - just as Sinclair Broadcasting did. If it can be shown that by doing so they will loose a significant market share and hence revenue and hence stock price then they may find themselves obliged to think again before dabbling in politics. However be warned, this is a quid-pro-quo situation and if blue voters end up shopping only at blue supporting businesses then pretty quickly all the red voters will do the same at their red stores. Since there are arguably more and wealthier red voters at present (if election results are to be believed) then they will win that fight. Once again corporations will argue that while the consumer base is spending with a political motive it is financially best off focusing on the red spenders. That necessarily limits them to about half of the market by people, but not by dollars...

The Buy Blue people make the argument that it will be good for the market to discover there is plenty of room for "blue alternative" stores to corner the market of those who only want to support "blue leaning" corporations. They say that workers will find such businesses better to work at, shoppers will find the workers happier, and communities will reap benefits all around from having more blue stores and fewer red ones. Its a fine theory - I'll sit back and see what happens, if anything. Not shopping at Amazon and Albertsons (a union store) will be hard to accomplish on a day to day basis - as will only buying gas from Shell. Making my next car a Toyota wont be so hard - my previous comments about Toyota and suining California withstanding, as for staying away from Wal-Mart - a piece of cake!

Our dreams

This week I received a nice new black T-shirt from Canada, it reads simply: "Our dreams don't fit on your ballots". Given my last post I think that's a fitting summation of how I feel. I can honestly say I've never voted in my life, except perhaps to select where lunch would be. 37 years on this planet and not a democratic vote to show for it, but I think the T-shirt is the explanation. Ask yourself the question, when you vote are you really feeling like you're voting for your dreams, or just voting against your nightmares?

Anyway, the T-shirt is a promotional item for a new documentary called "The Take". I haven't seen it yet but "The Take" is about workers in Argentina who seized abandoned factories belonging to bankrupt companies. It describes how they started democratic workers collectives to the factories back into production and their subsequent legal battles with the owners who all of a sudden want their factories back. While from a legal perspective you can label the workers as criminals, morally you know you're on their side. They just wanted to be working again and formed companies with the structure that people would work for under the post economic collapse conditions experienced in Argentina. If they had never put the factories back to work can you imagine that the owners would have ever done anything with the derilict buildings? Are the perhaps more interested in seizing on the capital created by pure human spirit?

"The Take" was made by Naomi Klein of No Logo and Ad Busters fame, and Avi Lewis of CBC's "Counter Spin". Watch the trailer in WMV or Quicktime. It will be playing in theaters around North America soon. In the mean time you can buy a T-shirt like me and follow your dreams.

The Power of Nightmares

I recently heard about a new three part documentary by Adam Curtis from the BBC called "The Power of Nightmares". Its subtitle is "The Rise of the Politics of Fear" and that's just what its about. Its basic premis is that two groups have, since the 70's, slowly replaced our age of utopian dreams with an age of nightmares. Those two parties are the Neo-conservative followers of Leo Strauss in the West, and a dedicated group of extremist Islamists in the East.

The followers of Strauss believe that the failure of liberal political parties to deliver on the utopian dreams they promised have left politicians powerless and mere managers of public life rather than true heros and giants of their times. Instead of delivering giant strides in peace, human welfare and great things they declined into mediocrity and servitude of the popular masses. In the East certain groups of Islamists became disgusted with the vision of Western culture and its pursuit of individualistic freedoms over the common good and that of Islam. Furthermore those who joined with democratic institutions were putting the values of the West before those of their religion and could justifiably be eliminated.

What follows in the three hours of "The Power of Nightmares" is a litany of how bit by bit the two sides built their individual cases and discovered that the one thing that could empower their particular vision could be the nightmare scenario that some evil opposition was plotting to eliminate them. From a fictional war against a mythicaly omnipotent world wide conspiracy of terror organistations, to a struggle against the West hellbent on elimating Islam and surpressing their religion and replacing it with Western "freedom".

In the West the politicians discovered the true power that could be delivered by their manufactured nightmare struggles. Initially against the Soviet Union in the cold war, in Afghanistan and later against Islam and the likes of Saddam Hussein and their invented foe Al Qaeda. They found keeping the people permanently in fear of the bogeyman was easier than delivering the dreams they had earlier promised, and coupled with a comforter of religion almost any action in the name of self defence of "freedom" could be justified.

In the East a series of haphazard attempts to further the cause of a Islamic State were pursued setting radicals against governments corrupted by Western money, and radical groups against themselves. Eventually the events leading up to and the response after 9/11 allowed the Islamists to create their own nightmare scenario of unconditional Western aggression against Islam. Any organisation that rejected Western values and religions would now live in fear of elimination by the West, manifest primarily by the actions of the United States.

And so, as the documentary posits, the symbiotic relationship of nightmares in the East and West began and the symbiotic power struggle at the expense of the collected peoples of the East and West ensued.

To me its all very believable, the message goes down very easily - even more so than Fahrenheit 9/11 since it is delivered deadpan and within skiping a breath for lampooning George Bush or Saddam. All parties involved are portrayed as pure cold hearted plotters quietly engineering their way to power with whatever tools that present themselves. Indeed I found the entire premis so easy to swallow and the conclusions so radically transformative that it was like you were Neo in The Matrix and had just stepped out of the rabbit hole that started when you poped the red pill. Except, this is real life, these are true events. Instead of sitting on the cold steel floor of the Nebuchadnezzar you find yourself sitting in your living room contemplating another four years of George W. Bush, his kabal of neo-conservatives and the omnipresent cheerleaders of the fanatical religious right. If in four short years they could invade two countries, squander trillions of dollars of wealth, turn their back on the global opinions of 95% of the world and turn the clock back decades in respect for the environment and human rights, what then could - in the name of fear - they achieve by 2008?

The only solution is for everyone to realize the nightmare is just that, a nightmare. Its something we can all wake up from and leave behind. The global terror networks conspiring to destroy the USA are actually just handfuls of people conspiring to create similar nightmares among their own people. The diciples of fear and loathing are quickly sooth when their prophets are eliminated, and the best thing we can do is just stop listening, refute and shout the "Emperor has no clothes" until the cry is heard the world over. So I urge you, go watch "The Power of Nightmares" by whatever means you can and tell all your friends and have them tell their friends. For obvious reasons this documentary will never bee shown on US TV - its message is even more potent than Fahrenheit 9/11 - but you can easily locate it on the Internet.

To get you started I'll point you to the Information Clearinghouse which has all three parts watchable as a Realmedia stream. Its tiny and with poor audio but the message is the same. Several Indymedia sites have better quality versions, and for full high quality versions you should go download all 1.3GB via the BitTorrent file. If you don't know what BitTorrent is then you should go read this how to and download one of the clients - I recommend the Java powered Azureus client myself. If you're still really stuck, or know me in person I can give you access to the DiVx encoded AVI files or deliver you them on CD along with the appropriate DiVx decoder and player.

Every journey begins with one step

It's one small step for workers in Jonquière, Canada - but its one giant pain in the ass for Wal-Mart. You see folks, over 50% of the Wal-Mart employees in that town have signed union membership cards and they are about to become the first unionized Wal-Mart store - the only one of 5,000 stores. Naturally the Wal-Martians have been up to their usual tricks, most recently by threatening to close the store because its suddenly not economical viable (perhaps because they are blowing all their profits on fighting the unionization in court?).

However it looks like this time it will really happen. Furthermore a handful of other stores throughout Canada are also on the verge of unionizing. Apparently workers unions are also playing hardball in China to stop Wal-Mart preventing unionizing of Chinese Wal-Mart workers. By all accounts they have recently succeeded in this goal.

I just wonder how long it will be before an American Wal-Mart store unionizes? With over 900,000 workers worldwide it could be a huge turning point for the great decline in union memberships in the USA.

Short Light Comedy Time - The Grey Video

The little comic moments that appear in the The Grey Video (22Mb Quicktime) really made me laugh. Courtesy of tech blog Waxy.org.

Drive a hybrid today - enlist now!

As I've previously revealed on this blog, when I was a kid I played soldiers just like all the other kids. Running around with cap guns or a cocked finger (oh er) going "Bang! Bang! You're dead!" was just they way kids did things back then. Back then it seemed like the military had all the cool toys - night vision, lasers, things that went fast, and lots of exploding things for killing people.

Of late it seems like the military is having problems getting anything more advanced than a plain of G.I. Joe on the ground. This was clearly demonstrated yesterday by the uproarious applause after one such G.I. Joe asked why the emperors army has no armour, and why as a result they are having to dig around on scrap heaps for it. I'm lead to wonder what has happened to Spc. Thomas Wilson since that fateful question was asked. The troops clearly loved him, he asked the unaskable for them, but I know people out there who are thinking like this... Surely such a question, embarrassing as it was to Rumsfeld and ipso facto the President, was unpatriotic? And being unpatriotic about the war, its like, not-supporting the troops, and if you're not supporting the troops your supporting those insurgents. Surely, they are thinking, for such an unpatriotic, damaged show of bravado Spc. Thomas Wilson should be taken out around the back and court martialed, or even better sent out armourless to the front?

I expect the military (or more likely Karl Rove) probably have something better lined up for him - "that Wilson boy", they are thinking, "his upper management written all over him". I'll lay money on Wilson turning up in about ten year in the five sided hell hole of "military intelligence" otherwise known as the Pentagon. After ten years stuck behind a desk tracking armour and bullet proof glass production statistics poor Spc. Thomas Wilson will be sorry for all that he ever said and be filled with nothing but love for the government.

By now you're thinking, "Would you just get on with it Gently and give us our phreaking hybrid story!". Well, okay but I promise its connected to the preceding comments.

Just yesterday I was reading about how Toyota of all companies, has joined an auto company led suit against California contesting its CO2 emissions laws. According to the NY Times, the auto companies are claiming that since they have no way to reduce CO2 emissions without reducing fuel consumption, then the laws are effectively state regulation of fuel consumption, which is illegal because only the Federal government can regulate that. Well I say, tough titties - go and invent a gizmo to sequester the CO2 in tail pipe emissions. If the oil production business can do it then so can you.

What I'm particularly upset about is that Toyota, creators of the hugely successful Prius hybrid car, have joined this suit. Even if they stood to gain from it, they could at least have made a stand by not joining it. Its ironic that the Prius is one of the few cars today that would meet California's emission standards, all they have to do is keep up the good work and covert even more of their fleet to hybrid technologies. Lets face it, the auto maker corporations are in the unique position to stay "f**k it, lets all make only hybrids and save the planet from global warming - they'll thank us for it later". But, no they wont do that until they are forced to, or because there is money to be made doing it and right now there is still money to be made not doing it.

So, not only is Toyota suing California, so are General Motors, Ford, Daimler-Chrysler, BMW, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Porsche and Volkswagen. That leaves only Honda and Nissan out on the side-lines for now, although both of them say they oppose the California regulations. Unfortunately that leaves just about no car company at all to buy a fuel efficient car from that isn't busy opposing emissions regulations that might force them to do it. Sigh.

Having read this story I joked to Agent J that with all the other auto makers in the dog house we'd probably end up waiting for Hummer to build a hybrid for us to drive. Knowing how much we both loath that behemoth it seemed like a particularly cruel twist of fate we'd have to endure. But you know, fate delivers her cruel twists in double-quick time these days. So with out further ado, let me introduce to you...

The diesel hybrid humvee

Yes folks, Military.com is reporting that those frightfully clever folks in the Defense Department have decided the best way to get all those danged tree hunging left-liberals to enlist is to give them a nice hybrid armoured Humvee to drive. Called the Shadow RST-V it uses half the fuel per mission that the classic gas guzzling hummer does, can drive up to 20 miles in electric stealth mode (ideal for appreciating the finer points of "Ride of the Valkyries" that you are blasting from the sound system), and has over 100hp of electric power to boost the 138hp diesel engine.

What particularly pisses me off is that I've been wondering for ages where all the diesel hybrids are. If you have a diesel engine you can shove organically produced, CO2 neutral vegetable oils into it, and have great gas mileage. Its the ideal solution so long as you can get a grip on the particulate emissions, a problem that surely someone, somewhere has solved and just isn't letting on. Then you don't even need a hydrogen economy, or solar and wind power with tons of batteries. Just clean safe home grown vegetable oil delivered straight to the door with your groceries (okay I know, WebVan is dead now).

Why is it the military (it turns out the project was co-sponsoured by DARPA, who also brought us the Internet) gets to create and drive around diesel hybrids and Joe Public doesn't? So, if you wanna drive a diesel hybrid before the Germans, you'd better enlist now!^*

^* See, I told you I'd get around to the point eventually

Homeland insecurity

The Bush government has an Orwellian tendancy to name its bills to be the opposite of what they really are, like the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, the Clean Skies Initiative and now the Clean Water Act. All these acts promise one thing and deliver another, but like household products, if the label looks good people buy it. Over breakfast today I mentioned the idea that "they" should just bite the bullet and rename their government departments in the same spirit.

So, the Department of Homeland Security becomes the Department of Homeland Insecurity ensuring that we all feel insecure 24/7. The Department of Defence becomes the Department of Agression, no explanation required there. A few agencies will keep their name but trade roles - the FDA will concentrate on keeping legal drugs from overseas out of the country to protect our drug company monopolies, the DEA will stay the DEA but with the role of ensuring everyone takes their drugs (see THX1138).

But for a few name changes I think we're pretty much there already. When did the defence department actually do anything to defend us? For the two hostile attacks on American soil in the last hundred years (9/11 and Pearl Harbour) they were strangely caught napping. Doesn't today's attack in Saudi Arabia just go to show that even the most heavily defended areas on this planet are still vulnerable and that back in the US of A Homeland Security is surely a myth worthy of celebrating with its own national holiday? We can all have another day of turkey and heavily armed charity workers can loiter outside supermarkets ringing a bell and handing out free nail clippers and knitting needles...

One express elevator to hell

Okay pop quiz 2 for this month, what is this...

No idea? Well to explain this entry's title - you know the world is going to hell in a hand basket when it starts gold plating umbilical cords. Yes, seriously, that little sucker is a gold plated umbilical cord. According to a news article in Korea keeping your baby's cord (I guess it gets dried like a stick of human jerky) is quite normal, but really gold plating it? Order yours today from U&I Impression. While you're at it make sure you get that baby hair calligraphy brush from Agamo.

I, Bush Episode 2 - Take 2

I have to admit I laughed out loud when I heard that in Canada today Bush said "we just had a poll in our country where people decided that the foreign policy of the Bush administration ought to be - stay in place for four more years." and followed up with a comment that US trade with foreign countries is at record levels as if the latter is an International endorsement of the former.

Huh?

Well of course our trade with foreign countries is at record levels - having decimated our own manufacturing industries we're doomed to import boat loads of foreign produce from overseas no matter what. Currently that's to the tune of $590 billion, up 19% over the previous year. No matter what foreign countries think of Bush Co's foreign policy its a dead cert that they will keep taking our money all the way to the bitter end. This spirally foreign trade defict certainly has more than a little to do with the pathetic weakness of the dollar.

In case you haven't been following international exchange rates (I know its a chore) that is 35% decline against the Euro since its peak just before Bush was elected.

So basically our nations wealth has been devalued by half against the second most important internation currency since Bush was elected. For a country and President that likes to boast and rate itself by its economic strenght what does that say? Basically its like the stock price of America just dropped by 35%. Wither Team USA Inc....

WMD - right or privilege?

Pop quiz - what is owend by most families, used almost daily and kills 40 to 50 thousand people and seriously injures several million each year?

Hopefully you got it right - WMD - that's Weapons of Mass Driving, aka America's favourite consumer toy, the automobile. Sure we can loath Saddam for taking out hundreds of thousands, if not millions (if you include those that starved to death) of his own people, but in the same twenty five year period our friendly American auto drivers crashed, smashed, and splashed their way through an an insane one million lives, not to mention over 75 million injuries.

Now what do Americans generally do with dangerous things that are killing people with reckless abandon? Yes, they roll out the cluster bombs, the precision bombs, the smart bombs, the cruise missiles and blow them to bits. So why is it we continue to put up with inherently unsafe vehicles in the hands of inherently incompetant and willfully thrill seeking drivers? Even your average driver momentarily distracted is a menance to themselves and others, if you don't believe me just try closing your eyes and taking your hands of the wheel and counting to three next time you're cruising along the freeway. Don't want to do it? I wonder why...

So when Dave over at Chicken or Beef? blogs about the teen driver black box (which was also recently test deployed in the UK by insurance companies) I'm given to say "Bring it on!". I agree with him, driving is a privilege and no gun toting libertarian is ever going to convince me that the founding fathers meant the second amendment to include the automobile as "arms" and hence they have a right to drive and mame with them. I'll give you the second amendment as written and as it has been ruled on twice in the Supreme Court: you can raise your militia if you really want (if you really wanted to go shooting and defend the country you'd all be signing up to fight in Eye-Rack right now wouldn't you?) but you're going to have to walk to drill practice if you so much as get a speeding ticket.

I've always wondered why it is that car makers are allowed to produced cars that are inherently dangerous. Yes there's always that pesky argument "look at the utility we get from cars" - I guess that's about 40 to 50 thousands peoples lives of utility. What other devices do most househoulds own one or more of, use daily and are supposedly of great utility? Yes folks, the TV.

Imagine if your TV was as inherently dangerous as the automobile - next time you have a few too many beers and flip to the wrong channel - bam, go to jail. Next time you fall asleep in front of The Late Show, bam, wake up as paraplegic. Do you think we'd put up with such a device? Hell no, sue those TV manufacturers and ban the TV just like we banned Vioxx when someone finally woke up enough to break the FDA/Merck circle of lies and deception about its 50,000+ death toll so far.

So yes, I'm completely up for having that device on my car, or more importantly everyones car - just so long as the information in it belongs to me and isn't accessible to the government when they are tracking and deporting all the non-red voters (but when they are doing that its probably time to leave anyway). Sure withholding my information to escape conviction will be an option, just as the fifth is. But what does that say about me if I choose to do that. What insurance company will take on someone who has ever withheld their driving record following an accident? And that's another thing I think all cars should do before starting - check that you have valid liability insurance. Such checks, along with the required sobriety should be mandatory in all cars.

If you can't afford liability insurance to drive then you shouldn't be allowed the privilege to drive - get the bus, train, or walk. Better still stay at home in front of the TV and stick to the shopping channel for your consumer exploits. Remember, Safeway delivers so there's really no excuse to leave your couch for Monday Night Football, pizza and beer - the true trinity of the neo-American dream. Fortunately for you TVs are virtually idiot proof and even safe for young rug crawling proto-consumers.

Operating Enduring Turkey Freedom - not

Cynical old me used to think Thanksgiving was something to do with Americans celebrating their escape from the Brits. It turns out the first national celebration of Turkey Day actually occurred in 1777 after the war of independence, so perhaps I was half right. Cruising around the local cornucopia in a warehouse otherwise known as Albertsons, I started wondering just how many turkeys are culled each Thanksgiving - and then each Christmas. I haven't yet found that figure, but believe it or not the US Census Bureau does issue a Thanksgiving bulletin which states the US raised 263 million turkeys in 2003 with a net weight of 7.3 billion pounds. Holy smokes that's a lot of big bird. There was 658 million pounds of cranberries produced to go with that (okay, so obviously a lot of it turns into juice not jelly or sauce).

Seriously though, while celebrating family, friendships and food on the table is a fine thing, as national holidays go this is another one steeped in irony. Its right up there with Columbus Day as things we shouldn't be celebrating at least with the current name. Yeah, I'm a kill joy - but I have worked for enough companies who are enlightened enough to have a Holiday Party instead of a Christmas Party so why not a Friendship Day or a Community Day?

Its time we recognized that happy tales of the original Thanksgiving are quite a long way from the truth, and that quaint old dinner party in the past was just the start of the rape of the commons and genocide of the commoners already in North America. Following in the footsteps of Columbus the Calvinist Puritans wasted no time in instituting a scalp bounty for their former table guests. If I was an ancestor of those indigenous people I can't imagine how I would feel about Thanksgiving and continued teaching at school of the rose tinted tales of harmony that accompany it. Here is an essay on the subject written by just such an ancestor.

Judgement day

A long while back I reported on a theory that said the US was poised on the point of fiscal disaster if the oil producing nations started pricing their oil in euros instead of dollars. This would cause countries like Russia, Japan and China to liquidate their dollar reserves and start buying euros so that are not exposed to dollar currency fluctuations. Today the dollar took a hit after Russia hinted it had too many dollars and hence might need to switch to euros.

This was just a hint - no actually move. The problem is this is one of those things that will happen precipitously, like a catastrophic change in the earths weather patterns. As soon as it is percieved that the dollar is significantly at risk then it will begin to tumble out of control and the other countries will rapidly have to dump their dollars to avoid being burned. The cost of oil will leap up as the oil producing nations reprice to account for the devalued dollar since they don't buy all their products from the USA. The effect on the US economy will be bad, very bad - the US will have to hike interest rates way high to attract investment to fill the huge void left by foreign diversification. Remember about 50% of the US debt is financed by overseas countries, primarily Japan.

So clearly Russia is flexing its muscle and firing a few warning shots over the US bows - first it was joining Kyoto and now its economic body blows. What next? How long before the USA declares Russia and the entire Euro trading block a mortal enemy of the US? Why is Russia doing this? Well its clearly passing judgement on our unilateralist policies and giving us warning that a country that has only 5% of the worlds population can no longer be the big bully on the block it is used to being.

I'll give us no more than four more years to continue to avoid the economic judgement day, remember folks - shit happens!

People to People Politics

I'm sure many people, especially those who read this blog, have seen the Sorry Everybody website. For some reason it just does it for me - gives me a warm and fuzzy that maybe the world isn't so f**ked up after all. Today I saw the site Apologies Accepted and that made me feel even better. Not only do some Americans humbly apologize for how half of the voters voted, but also the rest of the world understands.

My partner Agent J is the perpetual optimist about human nature, I'm the big pessimist. Taking an economics course this year didn't help me pessimistic attitude either - the entire basis of economics is that people will always make the choice which maximises their gain and minimizes their cost, i.e. the greedy selfish choice. For the most part that is the choice I associate with the current Republican philosophy and those that vote for them. Be it national defense, abortion, environment, or gay marriage voting for GWB was the me, me, me choice.

I do believe its possible to make economic choices that aren't selfish - it just requires the collective people of the earth to realize that we are all impacted by each other, that we are all sitting on this great ball of dirt in space, we are all vulnerable and we all have to just be considerate, accept diversity, make allowances, share resources, be understanding of mistakes and nurture and cherish good citizenship. As my old boss used to say "Share the love!". Which is I guess, why those two web sites strike a good and positive chord with me. I don't want to get too soppy, but I think I can just about hear "All you need is love" or Lennon's "Imagine" playing in the background somewhere...

Rorschach test

So here's a test for you. What is the image below?

If you answered George W. Bush's liver I'll give you a half point but the correct answer is - its a cartogram. That is a map in which regions have been rescaled according to their population. In this particular case the regions are the US counties, and the color of each region has been keyed according to the percentage of democratic and republican voters. 100% dem = blue and 100% republican = red, 50/50 = purple. The map was produced by some guys at the University of Michigan, the rest are here.

Its pretty fasinating huh? Especially when the traditional county voting map the Republicans would have you look at is like this:

That is basically their justification (even more conclusive than the state-by-state map) for claiming they were given a "mandate" in the 2004 election. The folly of interpreting such a map in that way is the folly that will befall all those lacking the skill of critical analysis and judgement. Votes are a per person thing and shouldn't be represented by a pure geographical mapping when population density isn't constant. It also illustrates precisely the folly of describing the electoral college system of selecting a president based on the electoral college system - although to be fair the electoral college map does do a bit better than the county by county map.

But whatever way you slice and dice the information, the reality is, if one party has one vote more than another in a critical state then the election can swing to that party. The remaining population gets zero representation at the presidential level, in a closely contested election one party or the other will always feel cheated. The senate is no good either - with two senators a piece the most populous states are clearly under-represented, under the current constitution the only solution to balance out the senate would be to redistribute the population evenly among the states! House prices in some states might plummet, and Rhode Island would find itself quite sqashed ( I'm sure any Hong Kong native would feel right at home. ) but on average I think the senate would be better balanced. As far as I know the electoral college would then balance itself out too.

Without constitutional changes or mass migration only the house leaves some hope having yielding true democracy. With its many more representatives and smaller districts you'd expect it to be more, well, representative. However those seats have fallen victim to the dirty trick of gerrymandering that deliberately distorts districts to ensure encumbants stay in power and to take seats away from the opposition in marginal districts.

I think the ideas presented in Krist Novoselic's book "Of Grunge and Government" are probably the best to fix our warped democracy. Instant runoff voting will give the people the opportuntity to vote for who they want without fear of voting for a "spoiler", proportional representation via super constituencies will allow for a great diversity of candidates beyond our current tweedledum and tweedledee two party system, more importantly it will allow that diversity to be represented at government level in proportion to its percentage popularity with the population. Only these things can really give us government by the people and for the people.

I, Bush Episode 2 - Take 1

Here it comes, the first of the "Bush the emperor" motions to slap down the troublesome evil-doers formerly known as citizens. This time its a new copyright bill which will, among other things (several of which are all fine and good), allow movie companies to force you to watch commercials attached to their content. No more skipping the previews either, you'll be forced to sit through them as well. This is clearly a bash at TiVo users and don't expect them to take it laying down - on the couch or not.

All your molecules are belong to us!

And libertarians think defending their right to keep an assault rifle under their beds will keep them safe from evil-doers? When the government is boiling their skins with their new aircraft mounted insurgency suppressor they'd better hope that AK-47 doesn't start glowing red hot like a CD in a microwave...

PS. The title is a misquote of "All your base are belong to us"

Do you feel safer already?

So has anyone noticed how long its taking to reinvade one small city in Iraq? Fallujah is about 9 square miles, whereas Iraq is over 171,000 square miles. The population of Fallujah, as best we know, is about 300,000 (less than say Oakland, California) compared to a total of 22 million in Iraq. 10,000 troops thrown at it and goodness knows how much military firepower and its still taking days just to get some semblance of control over it.

Does that instill you with any confidence that 150,000 troops could bring peace to the entire country - that's more than 10,000 times the land, and 100 times the number of people? Could it be, that perhaps the great pacifier of freedom haters, GWB is about to re-flop (as opposed to flip-flop) as he did in Afghanistan. The only problem this time is that the whole world is watching. The whole world wants Bush to fail this time whereas the result of invading Afghanistan could be quietly forgotten about^*.

Now think about the difficulty of eradicating all those terrorists using an intense and concentrated effort by Americas finest freedom fighters. What hope does that give you that America could ever "win" a "war on terror"? As I've said before, such a thing is clearly futile. Even in an overly pacified country like the USA terrorists still pop up from time to time do their biding against the country. Shouldn't Bush be being a bit more rigorous about what he means by winning this war on terror? Is he really going to kill every single person that would raise arms against the US given a chance? Is he going to get 90% of them? Or maybe 50%? Or perhaps 10%? Yes, like a school boy out stomping on ants, our commander-in-chief really must be asking himself, just how many of these terrorists do I have to kill before people can be convinced I've killed them all, or enough?

I mean, just what is Bush thinking about... is he going to kill enough of those pesky meddling terrorists to make a decent pile of bodies. Then he can declare the war on terror won - mission re-accomplished - and have a nice ticker tape parade down Fifth Avenue to celebrate the end of terrorism. Is that the way he thinks its going to be? Because if he doesn't then he should remember, that's the way he basically sold it this election. Vote for me - I'll end terror so you can sleep safe at night again.

Bush should come clean - the war on terror can never be won. The war on terror is a misnomer, a fiction, a figment of a deranged mindset that believes the only way to bring peace is with war. It bugged me no end that Kerry got on this bandwagon too and started ranting about the war on terror and hunting down and killing Osama like it was some turkey shoot. Sure Osama claims responsibility for at least three thousand US lives and he should get about the same treatment as any other mass murderer or war criminal would get. But you know someone in the US government really doesn't want him taken alive and you all should know why that is by now.

If Kerry had been smarter and bolder, more like a true leader than "the other white meat", he would have pointed out the fallacy of Bush's war on terror, what a huge waste of human life, money and time it has been and how it has done nothing to make us safer yet and probably never will. He should have pointed out the moral bankruptcy of invading a country in the way that Bush did, and of waging a war against people just because they hate you.

But alas Kerry didn't do anything of the sort, he jumped right on the fear-factory band wagon and got right into the grove with his message of "I'm going to make you safer than the other guy buy winning wars and killing terrorists more effectively than Bush". Great, that's like telling the school he'll fix the problem of bullying by teaching the bully to fight more effectively so no one will stand up against him - only the bully isn't terrorists, its US - Team F**king America.

In my dreams he might have said something like "I'm going to keep my armies at home defending my country at home until someone attacks me, and I'm going to figure out what it is that the USA is doing to make everyone hate us more than any other country in the world". Unfortunately Kerry wasn't about to make a bold stand on anything, least of all something involving less force in Iraq, less war on terror and less gung-ho aggression by the USA. Which is why the ill-defined flip-flopper label stuck and the un-Bush label didn't, and that's why we have to face four more years of death and destruction targeted by and at America which will make no one any safer than they are today.

^* Until that is the Taliban take control again and remind everyone that the pacification of Afghanistan amounted to little more than a invasion of Kabul, a quick foray into the hills and then the resumption of rule by warring factions hell bent on churning out as much opium as possible.

Post election humour

Today's Dilbert seemed to me to be a comment on the 2004 election result, i.e. voting for another four years of Bush is like choosing to eat a gigantic shard filled donut. As the French would say, "Bon Appetit!"

The secular-religious divide

Today's KQED Forum discussed the issue of whether there is a secular-religious divide in the USA. The conclusion was clearly there is, however beyond that not much progress was made regarding what can and should be done to heal that divide. As I just pointed out in my previous post, I simply cannot believe that those who seek to increase religious influence in government policy would stop just at overturning Roe vs. Wade, banning same sex marriage and permitting prayer in schools. These are simply sticking points on the start of a long and slippery slope towards an extreme that is quite simply un-American. Indeed it would be very, very far from what the majority of this country really want - even most of those who align themselves with a Christian religion of any sort, let alone those non-Christians and atheists amongst us.

I recently watched the documentary "Voices of Iraq" which features interviews and video footage of Iraq filmed by hundreds of Iraqis during the last year. One interview in particular struck me, a Moslem man was stating how his religion had suffered under Saddam's regime. He said words to the effect of "In the USA you worry about keeping your government free of religious interference. In Iraq we worry about keeping our religion free from interference by the government."

Its a subtle but important point and I think its one that Americans will soon be able to experience first hand if the American government keeps down the path of defining what is right and wrong from a religious perspective. If the government is using religious values and faith based initiatives then the question will soon become "Which values" and "Whose faith?", is it those of Baptists, Evangelicals, Methodists, Catholics, Mormons? Presidential candidates will be campaigning based on which particular church they come from and which particular laws and faith based principles they will enforce.

At that point we'll have many people like that man in Iraq wishing that the government would leave their religious beliefs and practices well alone - maybe then they'll understand the true importance of separation of church and state. They will find that they have to fight as hard to keep the state out of their churches as we now fight to keep the church out of the state. Good luck to them - as a godless atheist I'm afraid I'll be long gone.

They are loving it and we are leaving it - but who exactly are they and who are we?

Joke maps of the US are flying about the Internet with the blue States joined up with Canada as The United States of Canada, and the rest variously dubbed as "USA" or "Jesus Land" (take your pick - I know people who'll be offended by either or both). Like Dave over at Chicken or Beef I'm not averse to the notion of one or several states proposing to leave the USA. Four years ago people would have just joked about that and it would be termed "unthinkable". But as a matter of fact I think at the moment a majority of this country would probably find that idea very acceptable. Why not leave all those unpatriotic baby killing, queer loving, tree huggers behind and just get on with life?

Now a letter has surfaced on Boing Boing (which I located by chance after some Googling because I don't read Boing Boing). The letter entitled "My Modest Proposal" that proposes just that - albeit with a more quid-pro-quo settlement in mind. Less of an abandonment, or runaway, more of an amicable divorce, after all in this oh-so-Christian family loving country, divorce is still the American way right? How many have drawn the line from banning gay marriage, to repealing Roe Vs. Wade, to banning contraception, to banning pornography, to banning liquor (again), to outlawing teaching of Darwinism, to requiring school prayer - twice a day (and for the parents too), to banning skirts above the ankle, to banning divorce, to outlawing shopping at Wal-Mart on Sunday, to declaring the Earth flat again and having the sun revolving around the Earth again, and finally to incarcerating or executing the "possessed" i.e. anyone that begs to differ form the official American scriptures (oops, I meant to type "schoolbooks").

Well that's basically what "my modest proposal" suggests is the end game for the United Stated of America the Red. They can have it and love it and we'll just get on fine without such impositions thank you very much. The only problem become then, that California and other dissenting states would just become part of the problem. As Dave pointed out, in leaving the USA, as opposed to loving it, we'd all become victims of its own foreign policy - one that's notoriously intolerant and xenophobic. If you think the USA Mexico border is long, just think how long the USA-Red, USA-Blue border would be and more to the point think how popular it would be for the red staters to run, swim, sail, climb, fly and cross that border via any means they could. Pretty soon USA-Red would have to start building a giant wall or fence all around itself rather like a certain other country is busy doing. Once a wall was in place they'd have to make owning a shovel, spade, pickaxe or any other digging implement a felony too, and you forget about flying - not a chance, even feathers and wax would be banned.

Gentlepersons, the true definition of freedom is that which you don't have when your country creates walls of any kind to prevent you from leaving its brand of "freedom". Thom Hartmann and Howard Zinn have both made interesting studies of why the Union didn't want the Confederate States go and shed countless millions of lives to ensure they didn't. Let me assure you, they both conclude it had little if anything to do with the preservation of the freedom of the people, and especially the freedom of slaves. Be they black, brown, yellow, white or whatever race, creed or color the preservation of the United States wall all to do with maintenance of a system characterized by government of a vast underclass of slaves and working class people by a few very rich families (a plutocratic oligarchy).

You don't believe me? Well if the civil war brought freedom for the slaves of the south via the Fourteenth Amendment then why was it that between 1868 and 1896 of the 150 14th Amendment cases heard by the Supreme Court, 15 involved the rights of black Americans and the other 135 (90%) involved the rights of business entities? Wasn't the civil war and 14th Amendment supposed to be to emancipate all those slaves, just why were businesses lining up in court to use it? For a full answer you'll just have to head over to Reclaim Democracy" to find out. But trust me, like I said, it had more than a little to do with why the North didn't want the South to walk away with all the power brought to it by centuries of exploitation by slavery.

Strangely it was those rich peoples dislike for paying taxes to another set of wealthy entities - British corporations - that lead to them to split with Britain in the first place. So instead of seeing Californians, "flaming liberals" or "crunchy granola eating tree huggers" as the rogue individuals in society, it is more appropriate to see Republicans who don't want to pay taxes "to the man" as the rogue breakaway individuals in society. They are after all doing just exactly what their forefathers did and trying to evade their taxes in one form or another. But from the invent moral high-ground of the Republican platform, they paint the rest of us as the ones who are breaking away from their absolute truths of moral standards. We all assumed those were the same absolute truths that "we hold to be self-evident", but apparently they aren't.

So, if its to be reds on the right and blues on the left then so be it. At least I'm starting on the right side of the fence!

History repeats as do the titles - whatever

Well I get to reuse "history repeats" a lot, but I'm so what, if the shoe fits... So without further ado is the story of John Adams, the US President who would be dictator. If it happened once it can happen again, but Adam's got overthrown as his persecution of opposers spread down to the man on the street and public outrage finally got the better of him. Remember that in the early 1800s voting was still restricted to the property owning white males of the country - but even they knew a threat to freedom when they saw it.

Hopefully four more year of Republicans is about all it will take for the injustices of their puritanical ministrations to spread far and wide enough that peoples blinkered moral standards will finally let loose a wave of revulsion against the cult of the greenback and the plutocratic oligarchical worshipers who have been calling the shots since 2001 in the name of "freedom" and "moral superiority".

Four more years

This morning almost 300 million Americans will wake up as I did, to learn that George W. Bush has been re-elected as the President of the United States of America. If cast votes are representative of the overall population then almost exactly 50% of Americans will be elated that their candidate won and that four more years of George Walker Bush will ensue. For the remaining 50% of Americans "morning in America", a phrase coined by Ronald Reagan in the Eighties, never looked so bad.

As a British citizen living in California for ten years I have enjoyed a fascinating perspective of the American political system, and indeed America itself. But until four years ago I didn't have much interest at all in what was going on in American politics, it really didn't seem to matter much at all - life was simply business as usual. Coming to America at the start of the Clinton era I had been enjoying the benefits of life in a period of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity, while simultaneously watching the blooming of the Internet as a world communication system and a mechanism for deliverance of people power. In 1994 when I landed as a "non-resident alien" email and the web browser were just interesting novelty technologies, ten years later as a "resident alien" (green card holder) they are a way of life.

But something else important happened in the intervening years. The slow and steady creep of corporate influence into American politics reached a point where it could dominate how politicians and elections are funded, and how the media sells the candidates to the American people. Simultaneously the Internet has achieved a critical mass of users where it has also become a powerful influence in American politics. More and more the individual people of America are using it to communicate among themselves without a multi-billion dollar media company involved in the process, and more and more they are discovering something very interesting: America really is full of people with an incredible diversity of opinions, beliefs and ideologies, and yet, when it comes to the polling booth, is an amazingly evenly divided country. Tools like the Internet have only served to bring that big melting pot of American culture, ethnicities and religion to a fiercer boiling point than ever. Take all that energy and then force it one way or the other and something or someone is bound to get hurt.

This election the Internet was primarily utilized to polarize Americans as either with Bush or against him. Within the narrow confines of America's two-party winner-takes-all electoral system voters everywhere realized that in spite of all the complexities of running a country, they would ultimately be asked to choose just one of two candidates with apparently diametrically opposed opinions on almost every important issue. As with many second term elections this one rapidly became a vote for or against Bush and Kerry became not the Democratic candidate but the anti-Bush candidate. Those that didn't like Bush, regardless of their political persuasion held their noses and voted for Kerry. Voting for anyone else like Ralph Nader was a waste of time and effectively a vote for Bush, as was not voting at all - a form or silent consent for the status quo. Thus many Americans have taken a heightened interest in this years election even dubbing it "the most important in their life". And if the election was the most important then surely the so is the outcome.

Back in 2000 few Americans, even Republican politicians, could have predicted how the years 2001 through 2004 would have turned out under President Bush. Except that is a select cabal of Neo Conservatives thinkers in Washington who had Bush's ear, and through complex web of personal connections and a long history of Bush involvement in the Middle East and the oil industry, had his heart and mind too. That group self described as "The Project for the New American Century" and now dubbed "Neo Conservatives" advocated a stronger, more interventionist American foreign policy. America, they said could only stay number one in the world if it actively and preemptively asserted its right to be so. By doing so, they claimed, world peace and stability would be ensured. All the world needs is a strong leader that shows everyone right from wrong and has a big enough stick to enforce right over wrong. This is exactly how Bush sold himself in the election debates - over and over we heard how he is the strong, decisive leader and Kerry was the flip-flopper who'd go running to the UN at every opportunity. Kerry only once countered this with a quip "You can be certain AND be wrong" but never prevailed in eliminating the flip-flopping label even though Bush was easily as guilty of policy changes and contradictory stands during his Presidential term.

Like Shakespeare's Macbeth, the Neo-Cons believed they had seen a vision of the future with a strong America and that they must pro-actively proceed with policies to ensure it happens. That for the most part, with Bush in control, is the Republican view of the world and what Republican voters are buying into, even if subconsciously. It is after all most closely aligned with "the American way"- your future is in your own hands and you have the power to achieve anything you desire should you make the effort. In this years election Bush continued to sell the message that America's role is the de-facto world leader and that its security can only be ensured if it continues in that role - to be safe you must be strong, be certain and above all be a winner. That, it turns out, was a very popular message with America's voters this year.

Which brings us to the rest of the world...

While 300 million Americans are digesting the news over their morning coffee, bagel and cream cheese, for the remaining 95% of the world's population it may not be breakfast time but they will be learning exactly the same news. If recent international polls are to be believed, the opinion of the vast majority of the world will be that America has now morphed from a nation lead by an unpopular and dangerously unilateralist President, into a unpopular and dangerously unilateralist nation. With the re-election of Bush the ability of American people to dissociate themselves with the actions of their government will diminish, as will the willingness of other countries to make a distinction between America the nation state and America the people. The partisan politics that have slowly but surely split America itself, will continue to propagate beyond its borders worldwide and divisively lead to nations labeled as "with us or against us". Americans notoriously patriotic and there is no such thing as a "stiff upper lip" in America - an attack on their country in any way is like waving a red flag to a bull. So the increase in international rhetoric and actions against America will surely increase unrest at home as the pro-Bush supporters become more incensed and the anti-Bush supporters become more willing to dissociate themselves from the image of America that George Bush is projecting. This will only serve to inflame tensions at home as well as abroad.

One can only speculate over what impact this will have on global peace and the number of acts of terrorism against America and those countries that line up behind it. For those that oppose Bush it seems to be a self fulfilling prophecy - the more America deems it necessary to project its military power the world over to eliminate terrorism the more countries and people we will find to fight against us. "What became", they ask, "of that goofy compassionate conservative whose idea of interventionism would be spending the weekend clearing scrub on this ranch in Texas?".

Thus four more years of George W. Bush will certainly bring a shock to the many Americans who had believed the story sold to them over the past two years, hat there is a huge international coalition of support for their actions in Iraq. Indeed during the election debates Bush continued to repeat this claim even though Kerry was kind enough to interject that a few thousand troops from the UK, Spain and Poland do not represent any such a thing. More and more Americans will encounter incredulity as to its continuing actions around the world. More and more they may find themselves alienated from the rest of the world and more and more they may find themselves becoming either disillusioned with Bush's impact on America's image, or adopting isolationist opinions about the rest of the world - which path they take will depend on their knowledge of the rest of the world.

Unfortunately Americans, are for the most part not well traveled (less than 20% hold a US passport), and in spite of their "melting pot" culture are, on the whole, notoriously ignorant of foreign cultures and exhibit a low tolerance for a multiplicity of ideologies. Those that stay at home are subject to an American media is dominated by programming made in America by Americans for Americans. This results in an incredibly narrow perspective of the rest of the world - in the extreme case Americans expect the rest of the world to be just like them - eager capitalists seeking the essential individualistic freedoms of wealth and property manifest by the right to shop, or completely unlike them - dangerous freedom haters who eschew the cult of the individual and shopping. These may seem like simplistic generalizations, but listening to Bush campaign for the 2004 election confirms that this is indeed how he sells himself to his base of voters, which he famously labeled as "the haves, and the have mores". Recently I encountered an example of an America who came back from a holiday in Spain very irate - he just could not believe the level of interest and anti-Bush rhetoric the Spaniards exhibited. To have interest in our election is one thing, actually give a damn about the result seemed to be too much, especially when it contradicted the pretty portrait painted by Bush of Spain as America's great ally in Iraq. If Americans get irate when other countries feel like they have some say in our local politics or take liberty to ridicule or leaders, how then, I asked myself, do the people of other countries feel when they are unceremoniously labeled as part of the "Axis of Evil", their leaders labeled as dictators and tyrants, and their people consigned to the level of freedom haters?

In the next four years anything could happen as the last four years clearly showed. The anti-Bush voters certainly fear we'll see massive escalation of military actions by the USA requiring huge increases in military spending, sky-rocketing deficits and the national debt (all at record levels already). Worst of all they fear reinstatement of the draft to get enough people to serve in the armed forces which is already enacting every measure possible to stop people leaving its service. Anti-Bushites fear the "with us or against us" ethos will continue to polarize feelings towards America leading to more terrorist attacks and those countries all its supporters. Likewise America's policy of preemption in Iraq will become a standard setting one for nations across the world who have a grudge against their neighbors and enemies, and become a justification for arms escalation from those that fear such preemption - North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons being a case in point. All-in-all the fear is America's new found aggressive preemptive foreign policy will lead to a net decrease in the safety of all people across the world.

Even if the Bush war on terror ultimately runs out of money and support, there is a fear that American society itself will be attacked as the ultimate arbiter of Americas identity - the Supreme Court - is stuffed full of conservative judges. An overturning of the landmark Roe vs. Wade decision on a womans right to choose abortion is widely anticipated, along with further decisions that will attack the constitutional separation of church and state that has so far largely kept religion out of US politics. The government may then create more "faith based agencies" that spend federal money but discriminate against recipients based on their religion (or lack thereof). Also feared are more rulings in favor of the rights of corporations (especially their influence in the political process and rights to conduct business in any way they see fit without government intervention), and against the rights of people especially their privacy, right to dissent and organize against the status quo without being labeled terrorists or enemies of the state and locked up indefinitely without any recourse. A given is that Bush will continue his efforts for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as being between a man a woman only - in direct contravention of his 2000 election campaign stance that gay marriage was an issue for individual states to decide and not a federal issue.

Even without the Supreme Court on his side it is clear that George Bush fully intends to continue with his policy of letting money do the talking. His policy is continuing to cut taxes and let the money in peoples and corporations pockets define the economic future of the country. He wants to cut social security, he wants medical care even more privatized and he wants to put more and more kids into schools run by businesses instead of local government. But statistics from the US government itself show that the trend in America really does obey the rule that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Income and wealth has shifted alarmingly out of the middle and working class (and you thought America didn't have a class system!) and into the top 5% of wealthy, or even more alarmingly into the top 1%. A greater percentage than ever of Americans is not working (as opposed to purely unemployed, a statistic that does not include those who have given up looking for work), and a greater percentage than ever have no health insurance and are existing with an income level classed as poverty. America has been in this place before - it during the gilded age before the social upheaval of the depression era and subsequent massive changes instigated by Franklin .D. Roosevelt that brought in workers rights and social security and limits to the power of large corporations.

What will become of the beleaguered anti-Bushites during his next four years? From my California home I've met many sane, intelligent people seriously contemplate moving overseas - Europe or Canada is the most mentioned destination. Such relocations are unlikely to occur, few people have the luxury to uproot on a whim, but certainly they are an indication of how seriously people take the re-election of Bush. It shows that they believe that America is becoming, or has become, a country they just don't feel comfortable living in anymore. I'm not sure why it is that Republicans choose to hunker down and fight against a President they don't like (see the documentary "The Hunting of the President"), but Democrats choose to stay home, talk and anguish about it or just plain run away. If Michael Moore and a few other prominent voices are to be believed democrats just need to organize, get off their apathetic rear-ends and fight the good fight bringing democracy to the streets in whatever way is necessary. No matter what happens, clearly many people believe - on both sides of the Bush fence - at stake is the very identity of America and what it stands for.

The most pessimistic of the anti-Bushites believe that in the Bush Presidency, America has lost its way, become deluded by some gilded false idol, and a siren song of fear uncertainty and doubt that has caused us to relinquish essential freedoms and put personal gain over the common good of American society and even the world. Unless something moves to stop it, there will be a return to global instability along with a new gilded age reminiscent of the 1800s when plutocratic wealthy corporate barons were running the country for their own benefit.

The documentary "Berkeley in the Sixties" paints a grim picture of how student unrest and dissent against the Vietnam war spiraled out of control into running battles with authorities, cars overturned and how such civil unrest became a national phenomenon that ultimately shut down the war in Vietnam. Many people believe that any effort to re-instate the draft will have a similar effect in America. People may trade their vote for a tax cut and a promise of personal safety, but when it comes to their and their children's lives a higher standard is going to be used to judge the government, one that will surely not garner a majority support.

Will the anti-Bushites resort to such tactics? Will civil unrest become the hallmark of the second Bush term? One of the most caustic Bush critics I have talked to pointed out that historically a great revolution required a long period of oppression under a brutal dictator or regime, implying that another four years of Bush may be enough to awaken the American people to revolt. Personally I somehow doubt it even though riots in America are certainly not a thing of the past - recent experiences in Los Angeles during the Nineties proved that and show how easily even the worlds number one democracy can lose control of its populace.

Yes, the re-elected Bush and his supporters will probably be insufferably arrogant and take re-election as a carte-blanch endorsement to achieve as much as they possibly can. However the humiliating loss by Kerry against a president widely labeled as "the worst ever" will be enough to revitalize the Democrats and other opponents. Efforts to improve the American democratic system by eliminating the electoral college, eliminating corporate money from politics, allowing transferable votes, and proportional representation will take much longer than four years to have effect, perhaps lifetimes or centuries if America as an institution survives that long. In the mean time Democratic and anti-Bush supporters will continue to organize more and more effectively until a populist candidate can emerge to fight the 2008 election -when we know for sure that George W Bush will not be on the ticket There are even signs that the American media system is beginning to wither under public pressure for more objectivity. Strongly partisan TV companies are being widely identified as such thus weakening their efficacy. More people are writing to newspapers and protesting media bias, or simply setting up their own independent news sources and counter-spin channels.

Some say that Hilary Clinton could be the candidate to beat the Republicans in 2008 but its too early to say - if Bush continues to foul up badly enough even a glove puppet fielded by the Democrats could win in 2008. Two more years of Bush could be enough to end it all - the congress and senate could swing far enough to the congress in 2006 that Bush becomes a lame duck President unable to do anything that he wants. Regardless, Bush opposition will continue - four more years of dissent and protest may wear down the Bush opponents but it will be character building stuff that will define a generation and invigorate political participation in a way unseen since the Vietnam era and the social unrest of the 1930s depression era.

Ultimately the Achilles heel of Bush's second term in office will be his very golden idol - money. In hist first term Bush set simultaneous records for tax cuts and increases in government spending in a way that instigated long lasting impacts on the financial well being of America. Tax cuts and increased government spending may be the double dose of recessionary recovery medicine, but the impact of four more years of Bushanomics - huge deficits - will have a devastating effect on this countries viability. Foreign investment and confidence in America will dwindle, exchange rates will hurt our imports for essential foreign resources we have become dependent on, and Bush will then face an embarrassing quagmire at home as well as overseas. Economic failure and a war were end of the George Bush Senior era and they will definitely usher out his son, even if it is four years late. Even if the people of America are still enveloped in a cloud of fear those people that worry about only money from day to day - corporations - will bring him down. Seven years of America at war spending billions every week on bringing freedom to everywhere but home will have hurt them so badly that they will not be willing to continue to endorse a continuation of Republican profligacy - something they always assumed Democrats were fond of.

Where did Kerry go wrong? I believe Kerry didn't go wrong at all, Kerry was just himself all along and he was chosen to be himself. I believe it was the Democratic party that went wrong by fielding a candidate that was just too middle of the road to inspire support. Bush supporters were always going to vote for Bush, but swing voters and the non-voters needed something more than Kerry to get their X on the ballot form. Howard Dean may have been mocked by the media, may have been controversial by wanting to get out of Iraq, and put his foot in his mouth from time to time, but he was ideologically their strongest candidate - even if he had lost against Bush he would have defined an identity for Democrats that was something other than just being the anti-Bush party. I don't think Dean would have baulked at being labeled a liberal, and I don't think he would have been afraid to point out that Bush the emperor has no clothes on. Personally I believe that Dean would have been able to get a sufficient number of apathetic non-voters to the polls in addition to the anti-Bush voters who, regardless of the candidate, would "hold their noses and vote" as many did for Kerry.

If Bush had campaigned in 2000 with his 2004 message of "fear, uncertainty and doubt" dictating global interventionism and empire building he would never have beaten Gore. Such a message of doom and gloom, contrasted with the bubbling dot-com era that preceded 2000 would never have won the hearts and minds of America. However Bush did campaign and win with that message in 2004 and the reason that it worked is still the terrorist attacks on America of September 11th 2001. What we have learned since then is that Osama bin Laden got Bush and the American people on the run by using their own fear against them and three years on the fear is still working against them. bin Laden hasn't even needed to launch another terrorist attack - even the idea that they are vulnerable, and every American knows they are, is enough. And America will always be vulnerable to terrorism, as will every nation knows and there is simply no such thing as winning a war against terrorism. America needs to look to other nations that have successfully dealt with terrorism and aggression against them by disillusioned unhappy factions. After two world wars the rest of the world has mostly learned that there is no such thing as military eradication of beliefs and ideologies, just individuals and economic wealth. If America continues to insist on use of military might to try and preemptively eradicate anti-Americanism and regimes it views as undemocratic then it will eventually find it necessary to do the same to do the same against its own people that disagree with those actions, something that is the very antithesis of the America dream of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That's a dream that could be shared by everyone - I look forward to the return of the country to a President that believes that there is a way to deliver that dream other than at gun point.

Game over man - now what are we going to do?

The vote counting is not complete, yet I know enough statistics to tell you that, unless there is some exposure and successful prosecution of a massive voter fraud - Bush won. It pains me to acknowledge that, baring some high velocity lead aimed in the appropriate direction, I'll have to endure another 1/10th of my lifetime in a country run by that smug little beady eyed f**ker George W. Bush. How, after all these years of screwing up can we be expected to endure this? When it comes down to it those that voted for him will get what they deserve.

So now half the country will get back to see the other half be proved wrong as the Republicans foul up beyond all reason, the entire country. It'll be an interesting experience I suppose, perhaps enough to send me back home before the four years are over, who knows. I'm guessing that could depend on what is happening back home which also has its own election to face in the near future. Running for the border was never part of my plan although Agent J had threatened it even four years ago, we'll just have to see how bad it gets before 2008. In the mean time I'll leave you with a pre-canned article I wrote on four more year with Bush that I penned for a local newpaper back in England a few days ago (and yes, I wrote one on four years of Kerry too).

The Republican Trinity of Fear - 9/11, WMD, terrorists

Quite late I stumbled into an awesome site Internet Vets For Truth full of videos and clips. Yes its Democratic propoganda for sure but still worth checking out. My favourite so far is The RNC Platform of Fear. With some music mixed in it could give the Dan Rather "Rocked by Rape" number a run for its money.

Must listen radio for election day

By the time you read this the results may already be in. Even if they are, the Swing Set edition of "This American Life" is a fascinating listen. There's infuriating story of the seemingly intelligent doctor who is going to vote for Bush because "he can make an unpopular decision" even though he disagrees with almost every decision Bush has made, and every misconception he holds about Kerry is shown to be false. It really worries me that someone like that can be a doctor - using his logic I should pick him as doctor because say, he can make the tough decision to amputate my leg even though I've just stubbed my toe and only need a band aid.

There's a story that highlights litany of election fraud perpetrated across the country and coordinated by Bush campaign people at the very highest level (not to mention with the assistance of brother Jeb in Florida). There's also the story about the mother and two sons raised with a strong religious and military background who start off sounding like prime candidates to be three Bush voters. One by one we hear how they start to see the light, ending with two strong Kerry votes and a maybe for Kerry. Click on the Real Audio icon or here to listen to it (its a one hour show).

Comedy break: Bush and his advisors

Care to flip-flop Mr. Rumsfeld?

I was just watching a Frontline documentary called "Rumsfeld's War" when up cropped a fantastic quote from Don the do-wrong-wrong. It comes from his April 11, 2003 Pentagon briefing:

I picked up a newspaper today, and I couldn't believe it. I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest, and it just was "Henny-Penny, the sky is falling." I've never seen anything like it.

And here is a country that's being liberated. Here are people who are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator and they're free. And all this newspaper could do with eight or 10 headlines -- they showed a man bleeding, a civilian who they claimed we had shot, one thing after another. It's just unbelievable how people can take that away from what is happening in that country.

Do I think those words are unrepresentative? Yes.

Hundreds of US and thousands of Iraqi lives later, I wonder if he'd care to make that kind of statement again and not be laughed out of office? Just who is it that trusted him then when he made this comment that still trusts him now? Why does anyone wonder why over 50% of Americans don't trust "Bush and the New Cons" (aka NeoCons) to run this country and the vast majority of the rest of the world are actually paying careful interest in our little game of democracy-come-mediocracy?

I've heard from two Americans recently who had traveled to Spain and Germany and were both shocked at how much interest there was in who the next president would be and how overwhelmingly they were against Bush being that person. Its time for America to get its head out of the sand (or out of its ass) and take a sniff of reality.