15 Arrested Outside Presidential Debate in Protest Led by Iraq Veterans Against the War
KRISTOFER GOLDSMITH: My question is addressed to Senator John McCain. Senator, as a veteran who claims that he has been endorsed by every major veterans’ organization in America, you continually refused to fund the VA. In the years 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, you have refused or voted against VA funding. We currently have 1,000 servicemembers, 1,000 veterans, attempting suicide each month in this country. We have an average of seventeen or eighteen succeeding in killing themselves each month in this country. Senator McCain, what are you doing? Are you prepared to fully fund the VA system? Are you prepared to fully staff the VA system? And what are you going to do about your poor voting record according to Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and the Disabled American Veterans?
CROWD: Let them in! Let them in! Let them in! Let them in! Let them in!
MATTHIS CHIROUX: Freedom! Justice! Democracy!
CROWD: Let them in! Let them in! Let them in! Let them in!
PROTESTER: You just stepped on his head!
PROTESTER: The police arrested the members of Iraq Veterans Against the War. And we were standing in solidarity with them in the line of people in this rally, and the police continued to charge their horses at the protesters, at the activists, at the civilians, at the people who care about this country, resulting in the stepping on an Iraq veteran, or at least one Iraq veteran, by a horse. And I believe that that veteran is receiving medical attention right now.
Obama will make history just by being elected, but will have to deal with the wars, the coming recession, and anything else that goes wrong. He has shown himself to be ready for challenges, but the remnants of the right will mount a nonstop, none-too-subtle, racist campaign to discredit him at every turn. As Orlando noted, some people are already writing his obituary, but even as a former Edwards guy, I’d rather see Obama in charge during these tough times than anyone else on the scene.
Fusion will be cracked “within 30 years”
ITER, or “the way” in Latin, is an experimental reactor being built in Cadarache, southern France, which has a practical goal: to establish whether fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the sun and the hydrogen bomb, can be tamed to generate useful power on Earth.
The idea is to fuse two atoms of hydrogen using powerful magnets to form helium. A small amount of mass is lost when the hydrogen atoms combine, in the process releasing vast quantities of energy.
The science is very interesting, and the rewards would be enormous, but fusion has proven to be a tough nut to crack. In the 1980s I read a DOE report on fusion, and they described the same laser and plasma strategies I had read in sci-fi books in the 1960s. As one of the commenters notes, nuclear fusion has always been just a few decades away.
McCain and Obama Economic Advisers Debate
Held at the UW at Madison. I watched until my connection broke up (notes after the jump):
A Tour of Brutus, Shell's off-shore tension leg platform (TLP) 16 minutes
165 miles southwest of Louisana, Brutus operates in around 3000 feet of water, and produces oil and gas from target zones between 12,500 and 17,500 feet below the seabed. Brutus is a Tension-Leg Platform (TLP), tethered to the sea floor by tendons. (Yes, there's also a Popeye, and even a Bullwinkle)
This video gives a feel for the complexity of work involved in extracting crude oil from underwater deposits. When Matt Simmons talks about availability of rigs, think of the topside and hull you see here. When they say, "Drill, Baby, Drill!" answer, "Show Me the Rigs!" Some of the highly-touted newer deepwater finds are so much deeper that the pressures and temperatures involved have been compared to working in outer space.
Russia Prepares for New Era of Low-priced Oil 3 minutes
"The era of record profits from oil and gas is over - that's according to Russia's Finance Minister Alexey Kudrin. 2008 is likely to be the year of peak oil and gas production in the country."
So Russia expects to be hit by a double whammy of less oil to sell, and lower prices to sell it.
A lot of people have emailed me lately asking me what I expect to have happen, so that they can make plans. This is not something I'm totally wild about - I'd personally rather you base this on your own analysis. I have been doing fairly well at the prediction game so far - I predicted a deflationary depression with rising food prices just about a year ago and my annual New Year's predictions are now officially 8 for 10, but I also would have predicted oil prices to remain fairly high for a while into the recession, and I've long said that I though the fundamentals of the economy were so bizarre and unstable that I didn't understand why it hadn't crashed already. That is, I do not think that every word that comes out of my mouth was put there by a divine being, and neither should you. I'm wrong sometimes, and you should remember that. But because so many people are asking me to give them a sense of what we're facing, I'm going to do that, if you promise not to make any life decisions solely based upon my thinking.
So here are my bets for what we're facing the coming decade in re: food, energy, etc...
- That in retrospect, the current economic shifts will last at least 7 years, and probably a decade or more before stabilizing, almost certainly at a new, lower economic and energy level. ...
- Markets will still exist after this. This seems obvious, but I've had people ask if there will still be a stock market after this. The answer is yes, certainly. ...
- This one is more an intuition than a fully formed and reasoned thought, but I'm coming to suspect that we may find ourselves unable to import some, or many goods at some point in the not-too-distant future. ...
- I'd expect to lose your job. ...
- I may be wrong here, but I don't expect most people to lose their homes, nationally. I think millions will, but the enormous build out of homes has left us with more housing than we can possibly use in any rational system. ...
- I think that most people's kids aren't going to college for a while. ...
- I don't expect short term loss of utilities or food, but I do expect a lot of people to struggle to pay for them. ...
- I have said this before, but I expect that generations are going to have to come to terms with one another really soon. ...
- I expect that in the coming years there will be a lot of misery and unhappiness. And also a lot of surprising moments of happiness. ...
Plan A - More and dirtier fuels like tar sands, oil shale, coal-to-liquids, and "clean" coal (bury CO2) to keep up with growing energy consumption.
Plan B - The "clean and green" approach proposes using large-scale renewables like wind, solar, biofuels and hydrogen to maintain our high energy way of life and keep us complacent and consuming.
Plan C - Our strategy of culture change, conservation and curtailment.
There are about 100,000,000 (One hundred million) pet dogs in the U.S., many will be released by their owners to run free as their owners experience unemployment and the inability to purchase food for their pet animal. Dog owners are reluctant to kill their pets, and will simply set them loose - these animals will gather and run in packs, easily capable of killing an unarmed man. Every year many children are mauled by dogs, many suffer disfigurement and permanent injury . This danger will not be something most people will consider until it is too late. Expect the danger of attack and injury by will dogs to increase exponentially after 2010 - 2012. This is only one of the many unexpected dangers that will be present in the post-carbon era.
Eventually, by 2050 or so, the civil disorder will subside, and a new civilization will arise from the ashes. Sky scrapers, super highways and bridges will be abandoned and in ruins, the final reminders of an oil-based civilization that once dominated the landscape. Law and order will probably never return, at least not for several lifetimes.
Taylor wants to do all of this work at home partly to stay near his kids — but he's also preparing for a future with dwindling oil reserves. "I have the sense that energy will become more and more expensive, and people will need to exist in a more local way," he says. "And I feel sort of like a citizen of New England. I like living here and working here, so it may just be that my efforts are more and more sort of locally focused as time goes by."
He glances out his kitchen windows, at a vista of snowy hills and valleys. "When you have young kids, you sort of re-up your commitment to the future. And I can't seem to stop thinking about sustainability and about human activity on the Earth and whether or not what we're doing can continue. It can't. The thing I fear is that we'll have a collapse — and that will finally get people's attention."
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