Beyond composting toilets

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-01/how-to-make-an-american-job-before-it-s-too-late-andy-grove.html

The linked article by Andy Grove, co-founder of Intel, is one of the smarter things I've ever read on how the USA could (but does not) create jobs in high-tech fields (h/t Willy). To summarize inadequately (because the essay is far clearer and more thorough than any summary I can present), America's irrational addiction to Free Market Fundamentalism puts us at a decisive disadvantage in "scaling up" high tech industries such as photovoltaics, wind turbines and lithium-ion batteries, all of which are being manufactured overseas (particularly in China) at ratios of 10:1 versus American production. Other countries, lacking our free market purity (and obsession with wars), invest government money in priority projects, rather than leaving the whole thing to "garage" startups, the fantasy approach advocated by New York Times columnists and other American "intellectual" leaders. This allows rapid scaling up of important industries so they produce jobs, and also establish the "high tech ecology" which permits other advances in related fields.

Alas, in the USA we listen to people like Thomas Friedman, who doesn't know anything about anything (including how to write) and to Paul Krugman, who writes the same, identical column twice a week, advocating more "stimulus" without ever specifying (a) how much or (b) where the money should be invested. It's not surprising; neither one of these guys knows anything about how business or high-tech is really done. Mr. Grove does. I suppose it's an advantage of a place like the PRC that they are not so dazzled by Celebrity Thinkers who lack all substance but are high profile nonetheless, like most things in this country. I doubt that Barack Obama, given his background, knows anything about how to actually prioritize and build business in the high-tech and alternative energy fields. He would rather chase the 50 al Qaeda members hiding in Waziristan than bring photovoltaics back to America. And note to Tom Friedman: I don't think you really should fantasize anymore about "cleaning China's clock" in the alternative energy field. Not while they're busy mopping the floor with us.

The Immigration Reform Speech

But before getting to that, an answer to John's question about Dmitry Orlov's onboard toilet facilities: my understanding is that the yacht is equipped with a composting toilet. My own very limited experience with such facilities suggests that a composting toilet aboard a a fairly small boat (32 feet) could present some olfactory challenges for the average American, who tends to be somewhat squeamish or sensitive about such matters, more so than (I'm guessing) a native of Orlov's homeland, the Soviet Union. Americans do not like body smells of any kind, actually, which is one of the reasons we have trouble with international travel. As for the rest of Orlov's carrying charges, I doubt he generates much trash or garbage, living as he does. The cost of berthing a boat in a metropolitan area probably varies by season, but I agree that's a major consideration. I took a tour around the berths of Orange County's Balboa Island recently, and the guide made it a point to impress us with the outrageous cost of berths, which often exceeded the rent on a good-sized apartment. Then again, if you're handy with oars you can moor the boat instead of berthing it. I suspect overall, however, that being freed up from mortgages and real property taxes (and paying much less for insurance) results in a far lower shelter cost, and Orlov, who's an engineer by training and very rigorous in his approach to, well, everything, no doubt has thought it all through. By the way, the picture is of the house of the infomercial king who came up with not just the Veg-o-matic, but Spray-On Hair, a monument to American entrepreneurship in one of its last bastions, the RepublicanLand of Orange County.

But what of the President's speech today on Immigration Reform? How can we let such a milestone pass without remarking on this singular event, and asking what one hopes are salient questions. Such as:

1. Why the hell is the President giving a speech on Immigration Reform?

That's all I can come up with right now.

Paul Krugman's Wild Week

Noted Nobel Laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently threatened Germany with U.S. Congressional action, followed that with a threat of trade sanctions against China for its currency manipulations, and then threw a tantrum in the form of an essay because no one is listening to his demand that the federal government dump some more stimulus money on the U.S. economy. Since we won't listen, he told us we were in for a Depression.

Krugman is kind of like a guy in a bar at 2 a.m. who's been spoiling for a fight all night long and can't find an opponent, so at last call he just starts hurling insults in all directions.

He may be right about the Depression, depending on how it's defined. Some definitions I've read set the bar at about 25% unemployment, a standard reached during the Depression of the 1930's. It's worth noting that Roosevelt tried everything to lift the country out of the Depression, including massive stimulus and public works, yet nothing really worked until after World War II, when the world lay in ruins (except the USA) and the Marshall Plan maintained the home industries at war pitch. What Krugman leaves out in his simplistic insistence on simply spending money in an undirected way is that the U.S. economy, prior to 2007, was running on the fumes of debt-propulsion. I think the United States is in much worse shape, vis-a-vis the rest of the world, than we were in, say, in 1937. We have this weird "consumerist" economy, one that requires 10.3 hectares (about 25 acres) of Earth's surface in order to supply the "basic resources" (and deal with the waste), most of it plastic junk, generated by each American citizen. Compare this to the figure for Germany (5.3) or to the average for China and India (1.0 hectare). The German "austerity" which Krugman is whining about is simply a cultural value; they're more efficient, less wasteful and more productive, and Krugman thinks that is unfair.

It's because Krugman, like all the "name" American economists, is a growth fetishist. That's all they ever learned and all they believe in: the economy has to keep growing, even if that simply means a greater transfer of wealth to the upper fractions of one percent of the population. The GDP must increase.

Well, not really. We would be very fortunate if the average American enjoyed a quality of life comparable to life in Germany or France, and they manage such a life while using much less energy, and generating much less waste, per capita than their American counterparts. Thus, the GDP could contract, and contract substantially, while the overall quality of life in the United States improved, if the national economy were reoriented toward productive work, fair wealth distribution and environmental sustainability built on a no-growth framework. We don't do these things because this country is the way it is, but blaming Germany or China for our problems is just stupid.

H D Thoreau as one of the original survivalists

Just a passing thought, but one that hadn't occurred to me before: while half-paying attention to this pretentious, boring, stultifying thing called the "G-20," where a group of political half-wits gather to decide the fate of the world, it occurred to me that Thoreau would, in modern contemplation, be called a "survivalist." I don't know why that never occurred to me before, but sometimes I get distracted. The thought came to me last night while reading a series of essays in Dmitry Orlov's print-on-demand book (I hold copy number 149 of a run of 500) called "Hold Your Applause." Dmitry and his wife live on a 32-foot sailboat in Boston Harbor, own no car, bicycle everywhere, and are apparently quite content. Probably more so, and understandably, than an unemployed carpenter who used to live in a suburban tract home in Riverside, now foreclosed, whose unemployment has run out and has no prospects for future work.

So, in one of those "fractal" moments, I thought that this will probably be the shape of future American social evolution. No one other than those at the G-20 meetings and their thousands of hangers-on really wants to hear what they have to say about their "stimulus vs. austerity" arguments, their manipulation of electronic money, and the rest of their standard crap. Economies organized at the global level are really stupid and unworkable, and may it all go to hell. Meanwhile, as Orlov has demonstrated, the one great advantage of certain technological breakthroughs, such as photovoltaics and small-scale wind turbines, is that one can be a survivalist without giving up much in the way of modern convenience; indeed, the ability to convert solar energy at the very local level (micro application) means that you can derive everything that modern society actually can offer while unplugging from most of its useless, insane and environmentally destructive superfluities. Dmitri, for example, outfitted his sailboat with a few solar panels and a wind turbine. With the main expenses of life, a house and a car, out of the way, he can maintain his vital heat (and his wife's) without worrying about the G-20's call on whether to expand the Fed's balance sheet, e.g. Since the "captured" national government cannot find its way out of legacy industries, cannot lead the way to an alternative energy future because of its utter corruption and cluelessness, it will come about from the grassroots. Which is fine really, making expendable, as it does, the whole apparatus of Congress and the rest. Perhaps the changes will come about before macro-organized governments finish off the rest of the oceans.

Survivalism is obviously a growth industry, another demonstration that Henry David was always way, way ahead of his time. Many American manifestations of Thoreau's Walden cabin, of course, will feature .50 cal machine gun placements at 100 yards, but that's my country for you. Just set yourself up as far from such free-fire zones as possible.

Summertime, and the livin' should be easy

Pardon me while I step away from the keyboard for a while. If you feel like it, check back in August. Perhaps I'll be here again. A few parting thoughts:

1. Sure hope they stop the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. While humans, thinking (as always) it's all about them, concentrate on whose fault it is, millions of innocent marine mammals, birds, crustaceans, and fish are dying awful deaths. Just stop the damn flow, that's all.

2. It seems to me that the Obama team did a good job "shaking down" British Petroleum, if that's what they did. The basis of the Republican criticism, and concomitant coddling of BP (for which I hope they pay dearly in November), seems related to their absolute determination to conclude that Obama can never be good at anything. He was good at this. Deal with it.

3. James Kunstler posted a blog today in which he compared Obama to Millard Fillmore, and likened the death of the Whig Party to current Democratic troubles. He used the phrase, "history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes." You tell me if you've read any of that somewhere before.

4. The American economy seems to have entered a spin cycle in which it goes round and round, squeezing the water out, keeping bank accounts as worthless assets while allowing high-speed computers to rule the stock market, and getting nowhere. It's become very boring to write about it.

5. I'll never understand why Barack Obama's administration thinks it's a good idea to keep innocent people locked up forever in its Cuban concentration camp, fighting tooth and nail against release, even when a court rules "emphatically" on a habeas corpus petition that injustice has been done, as a court just did in the case of Mohammed Odaini, a Yemeni who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, at the age of 17 while studying religion, and detained despite evidence throughout his imprisonment that he has done nothing wrong.

A federal court this month granted his habeas petition for release, finding that the evidence "overwhelmingly supports Odaini's contention that he is unlawfully detained."

Worse, the court described the multiple times over the years -- beginning in 2002 and occurring as recently as 2009 -- when the U.S. Government itself concluded that Odaini was guilty of nothing, was mistakenly detained, and should be released (see here for the court's description of that history).

In the absence of a better explanation, one must conclude that both the war in Afghanistan, now in its 9th year, and the deliberate policy of incarcerating innocent people in cages whom the government knows to be innocent, are undertaken as part of a program of pandering to the Right Wing. This is craven and evil. I suppose it's my status as an officer of the court, and my desire to behave as a decent human being, that compel me to point this tyranny out.

Not writing about such stuff will be a great relief. That such things continue is disturbing to the conscience.

Let's drop the Big One and see what happens

Admittedly, I'm intrigued by the idea of using a nuclear bomb to stop the Deep Horizon spill. The science is fairly straightforward: drill down very deeply into the sea floor in the general area of the well head, plant an A-bomb, and kablooey! The rock formations are superheated by the nuclear fireball, converting them to glass and sealing the oil reservoir. Problem solved.

The Russians, naturally, have already done this kind of thing, although never underwater. When I read that the Soviet Union had exploded five A-bombs between 1966 and 1981 to seal off natural gas wells (usually because of uncontrollable fires), I thought: well, of course they did. If it's big and loud and environmentally catastrophic, the Russians have already tried it. Just the way they do stuff. We've got a natural gas fire burning out of control here, Comrade. What shall we do? Is pooting it out with nuclear bomb! It must be all the vodka.

But before I get Dmitri Orlov all pissed off at me (because he only likes comparisons where the Soviet Union comes out on top), we should probably consider just how bad this oil problem could get. I think that people (including your humble blogospondent) are having trouble coming to terms with this catastrophe. We're in a state of denial. We allowed a foreign company with a miserable record of safety compliance to drill a well under five thousand feet of water into a huge oil reservoir with no effective plan for dealing with a blowout of precisely the kind that occurred. We don't know how bad this situation will become, how far the oil will spread, how much oceanic water will be affected. We can't foresee the ecological consequences of this much oil contaminating the seas. You start thinking: given the intricacies of the web of life, the continuity of the seas, the inability to seal anything off from anything else, the delicate structure of the food chain - could we all wind up dying from this, directly or as the result of an unforeseeable and incalculable chain of causation?

Thus, people are getting freaked out. Matthew Simmons, the Oil Guru, doesn't help when he talks about the failure of "down hole" structures below the superstructure of the blowout preventer (BOP). Julia Whitty in Mother Jones was writing about that. Simmons is adamant that oil is leaking not just from the well head, but from the sea floor at some distance from the BOP. Which suggests that the uncontrolled rush of oil is eroding and damaging the subsurface piping. That's the true nightmare scenario, because if the subsurface pipes fail, there isn't going to be any way to confine the control efforts to the BOP superstructure. The relief wells thus become a race against time in a different sense: can they get there while the existing well is still mainly intact?

Simmons urges the use of a nuclear bomb.

Simmons said the US government should immediately take the effort to plug the leak out of the hands of BP and put the military in charge. "Probably the only thing we can do is create a weapons system and send it down 18,000 feet and detonate it, hopefully encasing the oil," he said.

In some ways, I like this approach just because I'd love to hear Barack Obama, who tends to be a little on the cautious and measured side, announce the plan. "The beaches of the Gulf will be more beautiful than ever," he intones, "but first we have to hit them with an A-bomb."

It's all kind of surreal. We currently won't even let Dutch skimmers help us out with technology they possess but we don't, which involves sucking up oil-contaminated seawater, separating out the oil, and discharging the seawater overboard, the reason being: there is a small residue of oil in the discharge. (h/t Gary). This is the kind of fussiness which prevented Louisiana from constructing sand berms on a hurry-up basis. We're determined to use bureaucracy to get in our own way in dealing with the problem, but not to prevent the problem in the first place.

Of course, no one has ever drilled down 18,000 feet into a sea bottom 5,000 feet beneath the surface and detonated a nuclear bomb. No one can say for certain it will work, although the Russians are confident. But then they think that nuclear explosions are the answer to everything.

Unless BP has a nuclear capability (and maybe they do, they have more resources than some of the countries that have A-bombs), it looks like it's time to call in the guys from Lawrence Livermore and order up something kind of special.

Not even wrong

I've been reading a very good book about theoretical physics titled Quantum, by an English philosopher-physicist named Manjit Kumar. It's all about the debate between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr about the nature of reality at the subatomic level. Like most liberal arts types with intellectual pretensions, I like to read this kind of stuff so I can throw around terms like "quantum jump" and "valence electrons" and "uncertainty principle" (that's the formula pictured) and sound real rigorous and, you know, smart. Kumar even allows the lay reader some respect: he uses actual formulas in his book. Imagine that. American scientists who write for the general public might throw in E=mc2, but that's as far as they'll go. Otherwise, they lose book sales, of course.

Among the colorful characters and anecdotes, Kumar recites one I had heard before about Wolfgang Pauli, the Austrian physicist who many considered a virtual peer of Einstein. Einstein and Bohr agreed that Pauli's immense intellect and mental quickness, coupled with his scathing wit, intimidated them both. That seems like quite an achievement: to intimidate Albert Einstein intellectually. Goes to show, I guess: there's always somebody faster. At one point, Pauli, commenting on a paper written about quantum physics by another, lesser light, dismissed it as "not even wrong." I'd heard that before but didn't try to figure out what he meant. So thinking about it, and coupling it with something I had read recently by Richard Feynman (I take my pretensions seriously, you see) in which Feynman said that the true method of science was trial and error, that we learn by mistakes and constant improvement of accepted knowledge, I thought I had a glimmer. What Pauli was saying was that the work in question was worthless even as elimination of a wrong approach. It didn't suggest a different approach to other scientists (enlightened by the failed analysis in question), it wasn't even "in error," it was simply irrelevant. It was so far off it didn't have anything to do with anything. Pretty funny, thought about that way. The depth of some minds...

Okay, so watching the Obama speech last night about the BP oil spill, I had the same kind of reaction. Obama is not even wrong. His leadership has become so completely irrelevant that it cannot be judged as helpful or counterproductive. His way of approaching things cannot be used to suggest another, better way of handling things. All that you can do at this point is to say that whatever it is that he's doing has nothing to do anymore with the fate of the nation.

I don't know if you've seen this clip from The Daily Show, but here it is in living color: Jon Stewart going through Obama's complete repetition of the Bush-era transgressions against civil liberties:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/16/stewart-critiques-obama-f_n_613937.html.

Glenn Greenwald has been writing about these things in meticulous detail for a long time, and I suppose I have, too. I just don't get it. What is he doing? I have no idea. Anthony Romero, head of the ACLU, began a speech recently in which he stated, quite frankly, that he was "disgusted" by the Obama Administration's approach to due process and civil liberties.

There's really no hope here, none at all. If Obama abdicates the throne and does not run in 2012, then the ascension of the Right Wing is a virtual given. 2012 is so far away, and economically the country just keeps sinking. The commercial real estate market, the public pension plans, the state budgets -- they're all in dire peril, in danger of failing. The level of national indebtedness and the delta between tax receipts and government spending have moved to absolutely preposterous dimensions. There is no movement to reorder public spending away from military campaigns, even though the obviousness of their unaffordability is ridiculously apparent. There is simply no plan, nothing, a complete vacuum.

Adrift upon a sea of oil-filled troubles, with no captain, no one to lead us to try anything new. No one even wrong.

High Tea in the Empire Room

But while I throw the term around, often (admittedly) in a pejorative tone: just what is The Tea Party? Is it presided over by the Mad Hatter, does it represent the modern-day avatars of the Sons of Liberty, is it a Support Group for Political Lunatics? Does it exist just to give people who are over 50, and white, and broke, an excuse to leave their trailers and get together in the rec room?

No, it's none of these things, actually. Lewis Carroll did not write the platform, the "Contract from America." The Tea Party might best be described as the Libertarian Wing of the Republican Party, and it's coming on strong. The party had the muscle to get rid of Robert Bennett of Utah, for example. It has nominated Rand Paul and Sharron Angle, it assisted Scott Brown in Massachusetts. It seems, really, never to lose any race it enters, and it did not really exist before 2009. It has the Big Mo', and it's for real. The Establishment Parties are scared shitless, as are their Mainstream Media sponsors. The MSM do not necessarily have any kind of foothold with the Tea Party, which means they don't know how to "access" them, and tap into them for "sources" and remarks made "on background" and "off the record." Thus, it is in the interests of the MSM to marginalize the Tea Party, because the fate of the existing media depends on maintenance of the status quo, which is a world inhabited solely by the Usual Democrats and the Usual Republicans. Whom, increasingly, absolutely everybody hates.

For these reasons alone, you kinda gotta like the Tea Party.

Let us drop the relentless snark, then, and actually look at a prototypical representation of the Tea Party platform, this one from Wikipedia, and not dissimilar from the Maine GOP platform which officially and explicitly adopts the Tea Party agenda. So here we go, with comments by your faithful blogger, a man sorta trained in Constitutional law, just as our President is sorta trained.

1. Identify constitutionality of every new law: Require each bill to identify the specific provision of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to do what the bill does (82.03%).

WS: Okay. What's wrong with that? Even if Congress just says, "Article I." Although I know what the TP is driving at. It's the absurd expansion of the Commerce Clause and the Ninth Amendment to allow any damn thing that Congress wants to do, even if the 10th Amendment suggests the states should have the primary right. Score: TP 1, Congress 0.

2. Reject emissions trading: Stop the "cap and trade" administrative approach used to control pollution by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of pollutants. (72.20%).

WS: Well, see - they didn't want to say "carbon dioxide," because they don't believe in the theory (the "theory" in this case being "Science.") It doesn't have to be cap and trade, but we have to do something, and if you think the extractive and polluting industries are going to do so on their own, I have two letters for you: BP. Score: Push, because Congress sucks on this issue too.

3. Demand a balanced federal budget: Begin the Constitutional amendment process to require a balanced budget with a two-thirds majority needed for any tax modification. (69.69%)

Well, I don't think you need the 2/3rds requirement if you just enforce the first part. California has used that 2/3rds thing for a long time, and we're about to file B/K. But yeah - why shouldn't the federal government live within its means? Curiously, however, where is the mention of Pentagon spending? TP 1.5, Congress 0.

4. Simplify the tax system: Adopt a single-rate tax system; eliminate the internal revenue code and replace it with one that is no longer than 4,543 words. (64.90%).

Personally, I believe the correct number is 4,527 words. If there is no Internal Revenue Code, however, where do we put the 4,543 words? In the D.C. phone book? Much depends also on the "single rate." Talk about a blank check.

Unable to score.

5. Audit federal government agencies for constitutionality: Create a Blue Ribbon taskforce that engages in an audit of federal agencies and programs, assessing their Constitutionality, and identifying duplication, waste, ineffectiveness, and agencies and programs better left for the states or local authorities. (63.37%)

Let's be honest, people, if we're going to start fresh. Just come out and say you want to get rid of the Department of Education, Health & Human Services and the EPA. Score: subtract one point for disingenuousness. And please - no more Blue Ribbon Committees. That's why we never do anything. We "study" it to death. Score: TP 1/2, Congress 0.

6. Limit annual growth in federal spending: Impose a statutory cap limiting the annual growth in total federal spending to the sum of the inflation rate plus the percentage of population growth. (56.57%).

Not a good idea. What if there's a true emergency? The balanced budget plank covers this. Penalty of 1/2 point for missing the obvious. Score: TP 0, Congress 0.

7. Repeal the health care legislation passed on March 23, 2010: Defund, repeal and replace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. (56.39%).

Fine with me. It's a piece of sell-out junk, and by the time it takes effect, doctors will get paid with cows. No credit, though, because the system if still completely broken.

8. Pass an 'All-of-the-Above' Energy Policy: Authorize the exploration of additional energy reserves to reduce American dependence on foreign energy sources and reduce regulatory barriers to all other forms of energy creation. (55%).

This is the "burn coal," drill-baby-drill & build nukes plank. TP: -1, Congress, irrelevant.

9. Reduce Earmarks: Place a moratorium on all earmarks until the budget is balanced, and then require a 2/3 majority to pass any earmark. (55.47%).

Just eliminate earmarks. If a Congress member wants a pork deal for his state or district, don't allow it as an attachment to a general bill. Make him/her/it introduce it as a free-standing pander.. Swing and a miss.

10. Reduce Taxes: Permanently repeal all recent tax increases, and extend permanently the George W. Bush temporary reductions in income tax, capital gains tax and estate taxes, currently scheduled to end in 2011. (53.38%).

Oh hell, there's your dead giveaway. I thought we were going to have a brand new tax code. Why include a plank just to help "Bush's Base"? This plank betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what's going on. Minus 2 points for overt pro-Republican sloganeering.. Score: -3.5.

As noted, there's nothing in the platform about out-of-control defense spending, illegal surveillance by the government, the abridgement of due process, or anything else that might offend Sean Hannity. Thus, the Tea Party platform lacks a coherent philosophy. It fails to address the problem of a huge military-industrial-security complex which drains $1 trillion per year from the national treasury, leads to a militarized, perpetual-war foreign policy, and infringes liberties at home. How do the Tea Party people miss this?

Not very encouraging. An aggressive, belligerent, militarized federal government which is simultaneously "small" and "limited." These conditions do not coexist in the Real Universe. As Eisenhower warned, if you persist in maintaining a huge MIC, you have to have a large federal bureaucracy to protect the citizenry from it. Otherwise, you wind up with a society as once existed in Germany between 1932 and 1945. Of course, Eisenhower was a fluoride-loving Communist.

Take me back to the days

One distinctive aspect of the dimming hopes for the Obama Presidency is that his eclipse will definitely usher in a truly nutty interregnum of bizarre politics in America. Indeed, we're well on our way. Sharron Angle is the Republican nominee for Harry Reid's Senate seat in November. Which made me recall this scene from 'Dr. Strangelove:"

Ripper: Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water, or rain water, and only pure grain alcohol?

Mandrake: Well it did occur to me, Jack, yes.

Ripper: Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?

Mandrake: Ah, yes, I have heard of that, Jack. Yes.

Ripper: Well do you now what it is?

Mandrake: No. No, I don't know what it is. No.

Ripper: Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?

General Ripper's solution to the problem of flouridation was to set in motion a series of events confounding the American "fail-safe" program, thus ending the world in a nuclear holocaust. It was a bout of sexual impotence which alerted Ripper to the insidious effects of flouride in the drinking water. Was his diagnosis right, or wrong? It doesn't matter; all human life was destroyed anyway.

The theory that flouride in the drinking water was a Communist plot was promulgated chiefly by the John Birch Society, founded in 1958 by the American candy manufacturer Robert Welch. Welch and his brother James invented the caramel-on-a-stick candy called the Sugar Daddy, which no doubt potentiated the formation of caries in many American mouths during the 1950's, providing as it did an ideal sugary, adhesive matrix for bacterial growth on the teeth. As I write those words, I can almost taste a Sugar Daddy in my own mouth, and feel its treacly essence against my teeth. If you bit into a Sugar Daddy, it could momentarily lock your upper and lower mandibles together. It was powerful candy. Thus, ironically (or was it?) Welch's anti-flouride campaign played directly into the hands of the Communist plot, weakening the enamel (and moral fiber) of American children.

Although my own conspiracy theory is that Robert Welch knew this when he founded the John Birch Society. He wanted us to have cavities! There is absolutely nothing easier on God's Green Earth than hatching your very own conspiracy idea, and I'm kind of proud of mine. It's just a matter of adding two plus two. Welch built on his theory with the allegation that Dwight Eisenhower, hero of V-E Day, was a paid operative of the Communist Party. The Paranoid Style of the Right Wing, the historian Richard Hofstadter called it in 1964. Ah yes, I remember it well.

Now comes this good news about Sharron Angle:

The Nevada state Assembly voted 26-16 to fluoridate the water of two Nevada counties. Angle voted against the bill.

History, as the wit said, does not necessarily repeat itself, but it does rhyme. This was really the kind of thing I was hoping for in the Tea Party Movement. Most of their ideas are incoherent, a matter of flailing in impotent rage against a Federal-Big Finance oligopoly which is strangling the country and impoverishing millions. Most fair-minded people can see that at this point; Washington's corruption is utterly complete, Wall Street is rigged in favor of a few large banks which make millions on every single trading day, the middle class is falling through the floor, the national budgetary priorities permit only war and bailouts while health care and Social Security go slowly bankrupt. There is no coherent opposition to these developments because it is essentially an Inside Job.

As long as the country is falling completely apart in the wake of the Obama debacle, however, I am at least grateful that things will be colorful and insane, the way they often were in the 1950's, the Golden Age of the Self-Made Millionaire Political Nut Job. The key point in contradistinction, however, being that America was definitely on the way up in the 1950's. Now it is just as evidently on the way down. Our incompetence and unwillingness to take our problems seriously perhaps find their best metaphor in this: the Gulf of Mexico is filling up with the oil of a foreign corporation which was under no obligation even to sell that oil to us. While our President takes lessons in Method Acting so that he can project just the right attitude of outrage to satisfy the cable news programs.

Against this kind of madness, Sharron Angle (and thank God for those two, distinctive R's in her first name! Isn't that somehow more interesting?) is diverting, appropriate and just what the doctor ordered. The know-it-alls are already laughing her off. This is a gift to Reid, they say. She's the easiest candidate to beat, because she's so loony. An anti-flouride zealot! Ha ha ha! I would say to those confident political pundits that they really need to get out more. It would not surprise me at all to see Sharron Angle in the Senate. Maybe she'll become the Majority Leader. Maybe General Jack D. Ripper did not destroy the world in vain.

My Mash Note to Sarah Palin

Dear Sarah,

First, I don't think I've written much about you at all on my blog. It's not that I haven't been thinking about you, because I have. You're very much in my thoughts. For example, I've found the "Delete Blog" command on my Blogger Dashboard, and that's really all about you. Hey, don't jump to conclusions, Sally. If you were President, who needs to write one of these silly things? Not me! So let's say it's shortly after election day, November, 2012, and this blog just sort of disappears. Is that cowardice? Heck no. Is it because I would consider my work done? You betcha!

Blogs are dumb. They're written out of frustration, megalomania, ego, despair, all kinds of reasons. They're an expression of Free Speech rights, but as we all know, people can get carried away with such liberties and play right into the hands of America's Enemies. We're at war, all over the place. With Terrorists, of course, and Iran and North Korea and the Liberal Media and the ACLU and the Democrat Party and...hell, you tell me. It's a jungle out there. This place shouldn't be run by a Community Organizer. A helicopter moose hunter is more like it, someone who isn't squeamish about getting elbow-deep in the gore of a gut-shot caribou as she field dresses it during a blizzard. You think those Muslims won't think about that one? Heh-heh. I know I will.

Though I'll be keeping my thoughts to myself. I'll just ogle your legs. You have nice legs, Sarah, the best of any female Presidential candidate so far. I know you're thinkin': damned by faint praise. Well, you wouldn't say it like that. You'd say, gimme a break, Dude! But what I mean is, a lot of these ancient horndogs, like Rush and John McCain and Bill Kristol, just have a lech for you, they think you're really cute and everything, but do they really respect you? I mean, like I do? I think they're condescending, frankly, and that's strictly entre-nous. That means "between us" in Frenchie, not that anyone should care how French people talk, and I'm not parading my education or anything, though perhaps it's a little superior and maybe more settled than yours, which, as I understand things, was undertaken at about 23 different undergraduate institutions. On the other hand, was I ever the Governor of Alaska? Who's got better legs, me or you? That's what I'm talking about.

Not writing the blog anymore after you're elected won't bother me. My guess is that I'll have other things on my mind. I'll be building a nuclear fallout shelter, for one thing, so I hope you'll urge all Americans to do the same so I don't look, you know, paranoid. But since everyone will be walking around with automatic weapons and wearing camo, I'm not sure paranoia will even mean much when you're in charge. I'll just need enough armament to keep people from siphoning the gas from my Humvee, that's all. I'm not going to get carried away.

Did I mention I think you're cute? Okay, covered that. Beyond that opinion (and it's sincere, Sarah, I mean it), I confess to having a little trouble concerning just what you and the Tea Party are really about, you know? The funny feeling I have is that you're so worried about your Freedoms that we're not going to be able to do a lot of the things we currently take for granted. Kind of paradoxical, huh? To use one of those Obama words. And it's ironic that what will make your Presidency possible at all is that things have gotten so bad. Ain't people just the livin' end sometimes? Oh sure, a lot of people will liken the coming of the Tea Party, and you as Number 45, to the rise of the Third Reich, a desperation movement for a humiliated people out of work, broke, foreclosed, threatened and with a pervasive sense of grievance against....shit, everybody. I don't see it. For example, did you ever see the bandy legs on that little Chaplin-mustached knucklehead? Not in your league, Sally.

So it's all good. I understand it, really I do. Someday, around 2014 or so, depending on where I am and everything, I'm going to wish we hadn't had to go quite so far to try to make things Right, that maybe it would have been better if the old style pols had pulled off an American turnaround using what we might think of then, looking back, as "traditional methods." But as you would say -- coulda, woulda, shoulda. You would say that, right? Oh I remember - you betcha!

Love & kisses,

Wally

The Cargo Cult Economic Recovery Under the Rahm Emanuel Administration

Sometimes I say to myself, "Self (for I want to get my attention), what's the deal with this Obama Administration? Why is it setting the table for the Tea Party?" I'm willing, you see, to ask myself the tough questions. Others may dodge them, but in the privacy of my own mind, I follow the facts where they lead.

What I'm coming around to is the slow realization that the country is actually led by Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel. If I think of it that way, it mostly makes sense. Rahm is Old School, a political deal-maker who operates pretty much as his brother Ari does in the show biz agency game. If you want to get things done, what you do is get a bunch of power players in one room and cut a deal. This is how Pragmatic People get things done. It's not a lot of airy-fairy, Hopey-Changey bullshit. That's fine for getting elected - give the suckers what they want to hear. But once you're in charge, you have to act like a grownup, and grownups deal with the possible.

Health care "reform" was done this way, the energy bill will be done this way, financial "reform"

is being done this way. Emanuel and his Democratic Leadership Council cohorts are running a kind of Names Project where the big bills have the titles of real change without any of the substance. You want Health Care Reform? Here. And what you get is a large, unfunded expansion of the Medicaid program, and not much else. That looks doable to the Big Boyz, so they do that. Financial reform? Okay, we'll limit what the Bank of America can charge you when you get cash back at Safeway on your ATM. Satisfied? Who cares if you aren't satisfied.

The people summoned to the back offices of the West Wing of the White House do fine under the existing economy, so they don't want to change much. In this sense, Barack is useful to them. Obama, I get the feeling, is something of a naif, a political neophyte, and more or less a tool for the Powers That Be. He's in over his head. His natural inclinations are conciliatory and "compromising," which the political sharks swimming around him take as an invitation to do things their way. It's kind of endearing and touching that Barack has this enduring belief in the good intentions of all the assholes in the federal government, but it's massively displaced and it has shanghaied his Presidency and made him ineffective.

The only satisfaction I get out of watching the U.S. economy thrash and struggle in the La Brea Tar Pits of the current Depression is the realization that Rahm Emanuel's Cargo Cult expectation that the economy will spontaneously "recover" is being systematically destroyed before our eyes. It isn't happening. Barack, Joltin' Joe and Rahm have been reduced to using Census Bureau overhiring (at ridiculous levels) as a sign of recovery. Nothing of the sort is happening. This is not a "cyclical downturn," and blaming all of what is happening on a "subprime crisis" is simply wishful thinking. We are experiencing the natural result of about three decades of allowing the U.S. middle class to be hollowed out and wrecked, and of permitting ever greater fractions of national wealth to be concentrated in financial elites who operate at the multinational level. It's really that simple. The middle class was kept viable for a couple of decades by massive borrowing, but now the collateral for such borrowing has been destroyed, average income will not support the previous standard of living, and the Moment of Truth has arrived.

To extend and pretend for a while longer, the U.S. has led the international community in taking private debt on to the public ledger, running huge deficits and turning what was a private catastrophe into a sovereign debt crisis. The alternative was to face the truth, something the political system will not allow. It would have taken a very forceful, self-confident, visionary, intellectual-sprung-from-the-head-of-Zeus leader to take us in the right direction, and Obama is not that person. Nor is Rahm Emanuel, who is running the show, although he is a great deal more savvy than the President. Rahm decided that it was innovative enough just for Obama to be the first minority President; beyond that, it was to be business as usual, with the Clinton Presidency as the cultural and political model. Thus, vacations on Martha's Vineyard, dinners in Georgetown, flexing of American military muscle to keep the Right Wing off balance, forgiveness of war crimes, continuation of Bush/Cheney outrages in detainee civil liberties abuses, expansion of unnecessary wars. All the same stuff, including (and unlike Clinton) an actual increase in military spending.

The only hope for the American economy in the long run is (a) a fundamental change in the energy paradigm and (b) protectionism in the form of tariffs and abandonment of the free trade fetish. The economy runs on energy. So many people could be employed, so much could be done at so little environmental cost, if we moved to solar power, in all its various forms, on a massive basis. And it here that Obama-Emanuel have been all talk and no effective action. The money, as always, goes to the Pentagon. From the 2011 Federal Budget description:

Encourages the Early Commercial Use of

New, Innovative Energy Technologies that

Will Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions.

The Budget substantially expands support for

DOE loan guarantees for innovative energy

technologies, by adding $36 billion in new loan

authority (for a total of $54.5 billion) for nuclear

power facilities and an additional $500 million

in credit subsidy to support $3 to $5 billion in

loan guarantees for innovative energy efficiency

and renewable energy projects. The loan guarantee

program also will continue to support a

range of commercial renewable energy programs

and other facilities that help reduce pollutants

and greenhouse gases while simultaneously

creating clean energy jobs and contributing to

long-term economic growth and international

competitiveness.

There you have it. All of those "millions of Green Jobs" that Obama talked about on the campaign trail: that's what is supposed to get it done. "Loan guarantees" for innovative energy efficiency and renewable energy projects. And the cost of maintaining the military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq under the new budget? $170 billion, as part of $700 billion in official Pentagon spending. Obama/Emanuel do not want to give the Right Wing ammunition for the accusation that they are "Socialist," so they will not do what needs to be done, a true Manhattan Project for alternative energy. Too "radical." Politics is the art of the possible, and that just isn't possible. I understand the difficulty, I believe, but it doesn't make sense to be pragmatic when practicality keeps a country mired in stagnation. If you're going to Change things, you really have to be willing to Change things. Alas, it is not to be.

So let's wait, like the South Sea Islanders, for the cargo to float ashore again, as it has in years gone by. Let's pay about 16 bucks an hour to one in every 500 Americans to count the rest of us and call it "job growth." Let's screw around and just keep doing the same things and expecting different results. Let's all go to hell in a handbasket, but look Presidential doing it.

Hire Everyone for the Census

Although I'm personally down on the Census. While in Florida recently, I stayed at a condo in Delray Beach owned by a colleague at work. One Sunday night, a census worker, a woman in perhaps late middle-age, nervous, suspicious, slightly creepy, came to the door. She identified herself with various badges, certificates and other paraphernalia. I had the sense that she had staked out this condo for several weeks, waiting for a light to come on. I invited her in, we pulled up a couple of cane chairs at the round table in the kitchenette. The following conversation ensued:

Census: Do you live here?

Walden: No.

C: Do you know who does?

W: Yes, a colleague in California, although he doesn't actually live here.

C: I wouldn't be coy with the census if I were you.

W: Wouldn't you...or couldn't you?

(Okay, that part didn't happen. It's from "Bananas.")

C: Do you know who was here on April 1?

W: No.

C: Who would?

W: [gives (up) name of colleague]

C: Would he know who was here?

W: I would imagine.

C: Can you give me his number?

W: I don't think I would actually feel comfortable giving it out.

C: I'll give you my number, and can you have him call me?

[Gives me her number.]

W: The thing is, it doesn't really matter who was here on April 1. Anyone staying here, including the owner, actually lives somewhere else and would be counted there. Wouldn't they?

C: For each address, we're supposed to find out who was there on April 1.

W: Okay, suppose we say that no one was here. That's probably true, too.

C: Do you know that for a fact?

W: No.

Two days passed. Naturally, since I was on vacation, I didn't disturb my colleague; meaning, I didn't follow up. Personally, I don't want Florida to have any more votes than they have now. I haven't forgotten the 2000 election. Arriving home on Tuesday night, I went upstairs and, fatefully, turned on the light. A few minutes later there was a knock at the door.

C: Were you able to reach your friend? I didn't get a call.

W: I haven't been able to reach him. (Technically true. It's hard to reach people you haven't called.)

C: Well, I need to find out who was here on April 1.

I decided not to revisit our earlier dialogue touching on the logic of this quest, feeling it was adequately covered in the previous interview.

Later that night, leaving the condo, I saw the census worker a few doors away, questioning another suspect. I went downstairs to my rental car, and noticed, a few spaces away, a car with an American flag suction-cupped to the right passenger window. I returned in about an hour. The car was still there. The U.S. Census, laboring long into the night. The next morning I came down to the car, noticing first that the Census car was gone, and then observing that there was a gouge in the right passenger door of my rented Korean sedan, as if someone had struck the panel with a golf club and scraped it along the side. Let's just say I immediately had my suspicions and let it go at that. I used up the rest of my vacation time taking the car in for an estimate to protect my insurer from an outrageous claim from Budget, photographing the damage with my iPhone and emailing that to the insurer, calling the local sheriff to report an act of vandalism, and in general acting like a responsible adult about this unfortunate episode. No hard feelings; this country believes in doing what it has to, to get people to talk.

Sheriff: Any suspects?

W: Well...not really.

Sheriff: Is this a gated community?

(What isn't, in South Florida?)

W: Yes.

Sheriff: Could be security cameras then.

Visions of a case under the Federal Tort Claims Act danced in my head, but only for a moment. The country has enough problems.

The USA has hired 600,000 temporary workers for the census program. Let's assume there are about 320 million American citizens. News reports indicate that about 75% of American households responded by mail. That leaves 80 million people presently uncounted. With 600,000 workers canvassing for reluctant citizens (or those on the lam, or hiding from ex-wives), we've got one canvasser for every 133 people. Most of our recent "job growth" is attributable to two things only: Birth/Death of business estimates (total guesswork) and census hires. I begin to see that my slightly desperate census worker was just working the tiny territory alloted to her, and working it very hard. I almost feel bad. It's just that it didn't make any sense...

This is No Country for Old Men, nor for those who insist on rationality. If hiring one of out of about every 500 Americans to count the rest of us makes any sense, and if we're going to call that "economic recovery," then logic is hardly our first priority.

Tell you what: let's just say I was there on April 1.

Robert Frost, slightly updated

Stopping by the Gulf on an Oily Evening

Whose gulf this is, I have no clue,

Does it belong to me and you?

Well, you won't mind me stopping here,

To watch our gulf fill up with goo.

My SUV must think it queer,

To stop without a BP near,

Between a dying duck and drake,

The shittiest evening of the year.

My Navigator gives a shake

To ask if there is some mistake;

The only other sound's the seep

Of all that oil we had to take.

The gulf was lovely, dark and deep

Till we drilled oil wells on the cheap

And left this place without a peep,

And all the dolphins went to sleep.

Oh Gulf of Mexico, Never Really Been & I Don't Wanna Go

Not completely true: when my uncle worked for Nabisco, he lived in Galveston with my aunt and their three boys. We visited them in the summer, and I remember that the Gulf felt like a warm bath. My maternal grandmother could never get the name right; kept calling it "Galwestern," so it's just as well my uncle and family moved back to Arlington. That kind of confusion can get on your nerves after a few decades. And Jimmy Webb would have gotten nowhere writing a song about Galwestern.

before I dry the tears she's cryin',

before I watch your sea birds flyin'...

but all gucked up!

They're all f**ked up!

It does not appear that any method of capping the Deep Horizon well is going to work after all. One might note, if one tended toward the cynical, that British Petroleum chose their order of solutions in a way consistent with maximal commercial recovery of the spouting oil. There was the box, which clogged up with methane hydrates, but would have allowed BP a way to pump oil from the gusher to a surface ship. And then sell the oil. The "topkill" and "junkshot" approaches are end-of-the-line methods, seemingly easier, but with no oil-sale payoff.

Anyway, nothing worked, and that's not really surprising. This is a formidable gusher, rising with enough force to overcome water pressures of 1,700 pounds per square inch at the seabed. So - great news! - there must really be a lot of oil in that reservoir BP tapped into! So the race is on: will BP's relief well get there before the reservoir plays itself out? I imagine that someone on Wall Street is figuring out a credit default swap on that one so we can all wager.

It's difficult to find a consistent figure for the quantity of oil entering the Gulf of Mexico. The ranges I have read go from 5,000 barrels on the low side up to 70,000 barrels. Again, I would imagine there is a huge margin of error involved here; while it's easy to talk about fixing this thing, or measuring the flow, it's difficult, for me at least, to envision what it's like to try to operate machinery in an intricate manner, by remote control, in pitch blackness, at a depth 5,000 feet beneath the surface. It's a wonder they can even find the well.

A consensus guess puts the flow at 20,000 barrels. Figuring 55 gallons to the barrel, we're looking at 1.1 million gallons a day. To give myself some mental picture of what that number means, I looked up the cubic volume of an Olympic swimming pool 50 meters long, 25 meters wide and 2 meters deep. Such a pool holds about 660,000 gallons. So we're not far away (or maybe even over, if the higher end estimates of oil flow are more accurate) from two Olympic-sized pools full of black, gooey petroleum entering the seas off Galwestern on a daily basis, as has been the case for about the last 6 weeks. And which will continue, probably, until August, unless the "riser cut" approach pans out, which does not look promising. So looking at 120 days of this stuff, we will dump about 240 Oly-sized pools into the Gulf of Mexico before this thing is brought under control. Since oil has a lower specific gravity than water (at least at comparable temperatures), eventually all of this goo will get to the surface where it can coat everything and do maximal damage.

Sun's so hot, I forgot to go home, guess I'll have to go now...

As for Presidential "optics," I don't personally care whether President Obama spends every day on the beach in Louisiana or not. He's got the wardrobe part down pat, having watched other "hands-on" Presidents take their turn at natural disaster management. No tie, windbreaker, some kind of hokey shoes, like Timberlands. Bending over thoughtfully and picking up a tar ball. A dead pelican would be more like it, or even...an albatross, but it doesn't really matter. I assume that Obama has no independent expertise in plugging deep-water oil wells. Modern politicians specialize in photo-ops and image creation rather than substantive competence. They're more in the way than anything else, and while they're in town there must be so much trouble over "advance men," and making sure the right local political hacks are in the frame with the Head Man, and the right Moments of Empathy are caught on film that it's probably better if Obama stays in D.C., or Chicago, or wherever, and allows the other federal know-nothings to nod sagely as people who actually work in the field of oil drilling talk out loud about their next futile strategy.

Time for a Break

Have a great weekend and honor the brave men and women who put it all on the line to defend America and the world. Pull for BP and the topkill; there needs to be a limit to selbstschadenfreude. Consider, for just two things, the pelicans and the dolphins. When we get to the point where "shorting the biosphere" seems like a good play, we have surely lost our minds completely.

Lines from a great mind about the nature of overload and the failure to appreciate the beauty of the world, which is how we get into these jams:

THE WORLD is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,	5
The winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gather’d now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for every thing, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,—	10
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathéd horn. h/t William Wordsworth

Sweet Home, America

(Click on the box to see the whole thing, if necessary.) Oddly enough, for such a hip, urban, secular guy (I don't care what you think, I was describing me), I'm originally from Alabama, the Heart of Dixie, as was my mother and a bunch of ancestors before me. Where the magnolias bloom and the oil-soaked waves gently lap the shore in Mobile. However, I've been in California since the age of six months or so (with a brief timeout in Denver, CO), so I don't retain much in the way of Southernness. Goes to show the power of acculturation; I've got all these wacky ideas most closely associated with Northern California, which for many people in the USA may as well be an alternate universe. We think differently out here, that's for sure, and the gap widens as time passes.

Changes occur to the whole country over time, of course. I'm old enough to descry significant changes in American culture which have occurred over my lifetime, brief as it's been. Sometimes such moments of recognition happen when I'm reading a book written during my time here on Earth but from a significantly different era, such as the Fifties or Sixties. These can be good sources of comparison, more reliable than a contemporary book written about the same era, because a modern writer is influenced by his immediate environment. I have a lot of old books around the house which have somehow managed to survive my periodic purges, which take the form of (a) throwing away (recycling), (b) lending and never seeing again, and (c) donating to the local public library. I found one the other day by Richard Feynman called The Meaning of It All, actually a transcribed series of lectures (the John Danz Lectures) given in April, 1963, which Professor Feynman gave at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Feynman's reference to the "meaning of it all" should be taken literally: that's what he was talking about, life's meaning. In his characteristic no-nonsense, colloquial, simple (yet profoundly deep) way, Feynman spoke about the effect of science education on belief in God. Feynam was an atheist, but he had no difficulty accepting religious belief in others. He did share some of the attitudes of the modern "atheist movement" (Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris), but he didn't get too worked up about it. He saw religion's pernicious qualities, its tendency to encourage dogmatic irrationality, pogroms, the Inquisition, religious wars, et cetera, but he was not on a crusade. It's amusing to wonder whether he would have the same equanimity now.

Anyway, in his usual brilliant way, Feynman describes what happens to the thinking of an intelligent person when he encounters formal scientific education at the college level. He first learns the advantage of doubt and skepticism in general, as necessary for scientific thinking. The tentative nature of theory and hypothesis, epistemological uncertainty in general. This creates a scientific "attitude" of questioning everything, even religious beliefs. The student then learns about the actual structure of the Universe, the speck of dust on which humans live, our similarity to animals (and to plants, such as the benzene ring found in chlorophyll, the benzene ring found in hemoglobin), the fact that our speck of dust orbits one star among billions of such stars in our own galaxy, and that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of many billions of galaxies in the known Universe...and the student begins to wonder, wasn't this a rather complicated arrangement for Somebody to put together if the whole thing is just about humans? Doesn't the religious view make more sense as the anthropocentric (not that Feynman would ever use such a ten dollar word) conceit of primitives who didn't know about all this other stuff?

I didn't know exactly what was going on in my own mind when I traveled that journey myself, but that describes pretty well how it all happened I think. Feynman concluded part of the lectures by saying, "There was another tremendous argument when it was found likely that man descended from the animals. Most religions have retreated once again from the metaphysical position that it wasn't true."

April, 1963. I think it's important to note the month, because all of us who were alive and cognizant of what was going on at the time remember what happened about 7 months later. That was a watershed in American history. I don't think the country was ever the same after the Kennedy assassination. In some ways, I think the whole Kennedy conspiracy industry is an unconscious revolt at the idea it can be explained as the act of one madman, because the effects were too momentous. A pall hung over the nation, a pall that has never really lifted. Before Kennedy died, the country was in its stride; after...not so much.

I think Richard Feynman might be surprised to see the rise of Obscurantism in modern American society. When you analyze the Pew Poll above, you come away with the dismal realization that today, 2010, only about 26% of all Americans actually subscribe to the sunny generalization in Feynman's lecture. 74% of Americans do not believe in a straight-up, secular, scientific belief in human evolution occurring through random mutation and adaptation. States want to outlaw its teaching in schools, or "supplement" it with education in Intelligent Design or Creationism. A sea change has occurred in America since April, 1963, and I don't know how to describe it exactly, but it is definitely a movement away from the scientific Enlightenment that Richard Feynman was talking about. It is a rejection of (or reflects the inadequacy of) American education in general, and a popular movement toward superstition and myth. History counsels us that such things usually don't end particularly well.