Continuing my dialog with Kevin, my second point was:

Second, we’re too dependent on ME oil. We’re going to do something about it, both by pushing conservation, expanding alternative energy, and expanding exploration. We’re going to build the damn windmills off of Cape Cod;

I’ve been reading up a bit on this (note that it’s a pretty information-rich subject, and unlike areas of political theory or strategy, where I feel free to just sit down and let it rip, I do think that some knowledge of fact is pretty important here – a knowledge which I’ll freely confess to lacking, and welcoming input from other, more-knowledgeable parties, to get), and really realize that energy security has to be dealt with in three overlapping arenas.
First, in recognizing that our economic well-being depends to a significant part on our ability to buy energy from people who don’t like us very much, and may at any time choose to stop selling it to us, or take military steps to keep other people from selling it to us. The nature of our response to this will determine a lot about our future: first in our willingness to accept the notion that people can boycott us, and that our response won’t be – as the Japanese was – military; second in that we may well have to project military power to keep the ‘people who don’t like us’ from militarily imposing their desire not to sell to us on others. And you betcha, I’m certainly aware of just how narrow and permeable is that distinction.

Second, in realizing that in strategic military and economic conflicts such as the ones we seem to be in today, that our ability to resiliently respond to changes in circumstance – our ability to adapt our economy and our political and military responses – is going to be a more fruitful path to take than one that attempts to build ever more massive defenses of rigid economic and social structures.

Third, in realizing that not all of the risks to our society through our use of energy come from hostile action. Happenstance (exemplified in the form of the recent blackout), our own bad behavior (as in the gaming of the California regulatory system),and unforeseen or unmanaged consequences (among others, environmental) all will come into play in trying to figure out how to approach these.

I initially wrote a 4,500 word screed, and quickly realized that a) it was just too damn long to post on a blog (unless you’re Bill Whittle!); and b) I was moving down into a level of detail not supported by my knowledge of the facts.

So let me lay out a couple of summary facts, and then some policy challenges and the directions (60,000 foot strategies) I think we ought to be considering in response.

First, we’re getting better at using energy efficiently. The EIA has a history. In 1972, the year before the OPEC embargo, we used 18,650 BTU per 1996 dollar of GDP. This was a slight improvement on the 1949 figure of 20,620. By 1982, we were using 14,890 BTU/dollar, and in 2002, we were using 10,310 BTU/dollar. We’re decoupling our economic strength from our direct consumption of energy, and that’s a good thing. It implies a kind of ‘systemic efficiency’ that we need to keep working to improve.

Second, our current exposure to Islamist boycott (what we’re really talking about here) is not today critical. Here are just a couple of numbers; they are 2002 numbers from the great www.eia.doe.gov site, unless noted.

Our total annual energy budget for 2002 was 97,350,684 billion BTU (bBTU).

Of that, the following % of our total energy consumption was from

|coal & coke: |22.9%|
|natural gas: |23.7%|
|oil: |39.2%|
|nuclear: |8.4%|
|pumped hydro: |-0.1%| (essentially, this consumes energy in order to create reserves for peak demand times )
|hydro: |2.7%|
|total renewable: |6.1%|

Of that total energy budget, 38,183,179 bBTU, or 39.2% of our annual budget was in the form of oil, and of that, approximately (I say approximately because the readily accessible numbers include other petroleum products that may not have been used for energy, but for chemical feedstocks, etc.) 19.7% of that was imported from the Persian Gulf states, and if you include Indonesia and Algeria, approximately 22.5% of our imports come from countries where the Islamist movement could feasibly take power. No natural gas was imported from Islamist states.

That suggests that about 8.8% of our annual energy budget is exposed to Islamist control. That number probably isn’t exact, but it probably isn’t too far off (note that if someone who knows more than I could learn about this in three or four hours of searching wants to pitch in here, I’d love to have my back-of-the-hand numbers validated or corrected).

Note that as domestic production flattens or declines, our demand for imports will probably increase, depending on the growth on the economy and efficiency in use.

So we need to replace approximately 10% of our energy budget in order to be secure from energy blackmail by Islamist states. This would imply, as an example, a 50% increase in renewable energy (mix of biomass, wind, and geothermal) for a gain of 3%, combined with approximately a 10% increase in domestic oil and gas production. combined with a 3% increase in efficiency to completely shield ourselves from the economic and political risk of a boycott. 50% of those changes would make the effects of a boycott relatively insignificant, and would probably go a long way toward discouraging such a boycott.

But a boycott isn’t the only risk we face.

First, our economic and social well-being is inextricably tied to the well-being of our wider community, which would include Europe and East Asia. Their political vulnerability is lower (i.e. they are less likely to be subject to a boycott), but they, like us, are vulnerable to disruptions in the infrastructure – which could be caused by a far smaller group than could effectively lead a peaceful boycott. So we need to work to secure the network at it’s most vulnerable nodes – the transshipment points, pipelines, and shipping lanes.

That won’t be easy, as long as they run through areas that are thinly populated, hard to control, and immediately accessible to the people who don’t like us very much.

As long as we’re talking about securing the network, let’s talk about our domestic networks, which are underfunded and maintained, overly complex, and highly vulnerable to temporary collapse through accident or sabotage.

I’ve talked in the past about redefining security to deal with 4G challenges; about creating, as Bruce Schneier says:

Where Schneier had sought one overarching technical fix, hard experience had taught him the quest was illusory. Indeed, yielding to the American penchant for all-in-one high-tech solutions can make us less safe—especially when it leads to enormous databases full of confidential information. Secrecy is important, of course, but it is also a trap. The more secrets necessary to a security system, the more vulnerable it becomes.

To forestall attacks, security systems need to be small-scale, redundant, and compartmentalized. Rather than large, sweeping programs, they should be carefully crafted mosaics, each piece aimed at a specific weakness. The federal government and the airlines are spending millions of dollars, Schneier points out, on systems that screen every passenger to keep knives and weapons out of planes. But what matters most is keeping dangerous passengers out of airline cockpits, which can be accomplished by reinforcing the door.

…

Good security [which] is built in overlapping, cross-checking layers, to slow down attacks; it reacts limberly to the unexpected. Its most important components are almost always human. “Governments have been relying on intelligent, trained guards for centuries,” Schneier says. “They spot people doing bad things and then use laws to arrest them. All in all, I have to say, it’s not a bad system.”

Amory Lovins, at the Rocky Mountain Institute, is making these same points about our energy infrastructure.

The energy that runs America is brittle – easily shattered by accident or malice. That fragility frustrates the efforts of our Armed Forces to defend a nation that literally can be turned off by a handful of people. It poses, indeed, a grave and growing threat to national security, life, and liberty.

This danger comes not from hostile ideology but from misapplied technology. It is not a threat imposed on us by enemies abroad. It is a threat we have heedlessly – and needlessly – imposed on ourselves.

Many Americans’ most basic functions depend, for example, on a continuous supply of electricity. Without it, subways and elevators stall, factories and offices grind to a halt, electric locks jam, intercoms and televisions stand mute, and we huddle without light, heat, or ventilation. A brief faltering of our energy pulse can reveal – sometimes as fatally as to astronauts in a spacecraft – the hidden brittleness of our interdependent, urbanized-society. Yet that continuous electrical supply now depends on many large and precise machines, rotating in exact synchrony across half a continent, and strung together by an easily severed network of aerial arteries whose failure is instantly disruptive. The size, complexity, pattern, and control structure of these electrical machines make them inherently vulnerable to large-scale failures: a vulnerability which government policies are systematically increasing. The same is true of the technologies that deliver oil, gas; and coal to run our vehicles, buildings, and industries. Our reliance on these delicately poised energy systems has unwittingly put at risk our whole way of life.

He points out, in this document (pdf) that:

*Tightly coupled system: 20 years ago, U.S. had
a few months’ usable total storage, well-head-tocar;
refineries had 3 – 5 days, pipeline customers
5 – 10 days; generally far less now
*>50% of U.S. refinery capacity was in three
states (TX, LA, CA), >69% was in six states
*Refinery concentration and specialization have
increased markedly since 1981
*In 1978, sabotage of 77 refineries would cut cap.
by 2/3, “shatter” economy (GAO); takes one
RPG, wrench, rifle,…at each site
*~84% of U.S. interstate gas flowed from or
through Louisiana
*A few people could shut off, for 1 y, 3/4 of gas
and oil supply to eastern U.S. in 1 night w/o
leaving Louisiana

Lovins’ prescriptions are a little more extreme than the one’s I’d advocate today – not because I think he’s necessarily wrong, but because I think that a less-radical approach is both more politically attainable – but in a nutshell, his policy hierarchy looks like this:

Designing for resilience

* Fine-grained, modular structure
* Early fault detection
* Redundancy and substitutability
* Optional interconnection
* Diversity
* Standardization
* Dispersion
* Hierarchical embedding
* Stability
* Simplicity
* Limited demands on social stability
* Accessibility/vernacularity

His specific policy prescriptions are centered around:

* Conservation
* Dispersed Generation
* Demand-based Pricing

Basically, what he suggests is that we work to become intelligent about using energy (note that this isn’t the Hard Green ‘let’s all go live in agrarian villages’-type conservation, this is the let’s encourage fuel-efficient vehicles, rather than subsidizing the purchase of light trucks for passenger use, as we do today. Personal note: I needed a vehicle that had three rows of seats for trips with the three boys, plus storage behind the third seat for camping and ski gear, plus the ability to tow 1,500 pounds of trailer and racebike. In 2000, I had three options: Large SUV (Suburban, Excursion), Full-size van (Ford Econoline), or minivan (Honda Odyssey). I chose the Odyssey, which gets 24mpg in everyday use, tows the trailered racebike over Highway 14 to Rosamond without complaint, and has as much interior volume as a Suburban. But it’s easy to park, and handles better. If everyone who bought a SUV between 2000 and 2003 made the same decision, we’d have made a dent in the 6% exposure we have to Islamist energy.

Dispersed generation suggests that a strategy based on a fragile, complex, and undefendable energy infrastructure may not be the right way to go. The efficiencies of smaller package generators are increasing, and when combined with the flexibility of power-on-demand and the absence of transmission risk and loss, there can be some significant advantages to them. This suggests that nukes, which are by definition large and inflexible generators of power, may not be the best way to go. Note that I don’t have the ‘ohmigawd, uranium’ issues around nuclear power (which kills far fewer people per kilowatt-hour than, say, coal). But I do think that large-centralized plants aren’t where we should be putting our focus, and further that ramping down the economy in fissionables ought to be a good idea. But I’m not adamant about it.

Demand-based pricing is also a critical feature of the model, in which we simply charge the true cost of the peak-load supply at times when it must be brought online.

That’s a key point; building economic policies that attempt, as closely as possible to mirror the true cost of the goods purchased. (On the Wal-Mart issue, one issue I have is the lack of health coverage for a substantial number of their associates – coverage which I help pay for, even if I don’t shop there, because I pay for the public health care burden the employees impose through my taxes)

So here’s the mix of policies I’d support after a week of thought (obviously subject to change as I learn more from all the commenters who will pile on):

* Improve vehicle fuel efficiency by doing four things:

# Increasing CAFE standards, and setting a more-ambitious schedule of improvements;
# Defining light-duty trucks (SUV’s and pickups) clearly designed and sold for passenger use as passenger cars for CAFE and safety standard purposes;
# eliminating tax incentives to buy fuel-inefficient vehicles;
# explore tax credits for improvements in fuel efficiency in trucking (a large user of energy where there ought to be big incentives to save)

Note that I’d trade all these for phased-in increases in gas (and diesel) taxes (maybe we could implement Andrew Tobias’ notion of paying for a minimal vehicle insurance pool via a gas tax as well).

* Improve residential and commercial fuel efficiency through changes in building codes.

* Review of utility and building regulation to reduce the regulatory barriers to small-scale ‘package’ generation.

Note that this last will get me in trouble with a number of enviro types, who want the smaller power plants (like the one in Redondo Beach near me) shut down. They’d rather have electric cars and power plants in remote areas; but the true cost of that kind of overcentralized system is blackouts and an insecure infrastructure.

From today’s NYT:

The trail that investigators have uncovered, partly from reading computer hard drives found in Baghdad and partly from interviews with captured members of Mr. Hussein’s inner circle, shows that a month before the American invasion, Iraqi officials traveled to Syria to demand that North Korea refund $1.9 million because it had failed to meet deadlines for delivering its first shipment of goods.

From WoC in May:

So you get ‘Potemkin weapons’; reports, promises, trailers filled with impressive-looking technical equipment, UAV’s that are really just oversized model airplanes. Occasionally, some competent or especially frightened technician might actually produce something – but almost certainly not on the scale that the dictator believes.

So Saddam believes he has them, and from that, we infer that he does, and what is really going on is a bunch of nervous paper-shuffling.

Ayup.

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving at my brother’s; his wife cooked a yummy Southern holiday meal (all great, except for her insistence on boiling the stringbeans until they were limp and gray – a characteristic of Southern cooking I’ll never understand). As usual, the Beaujolais Nouveau went incredibly well with the turkey.

They live in a lovely duplex in South Pasadena; they are talking about moving, though because the living room isn’t big enough to contain their television set. It’s one of the ones that’s about 5′ wide and 3′ tall, and they have it hooked to a satellite dish that numbers it’s channels in the 100’s. They’re both sports fanatics (unlike me) and we spent quite a bit of the pre-meal warmup drinking martinis and watching the Dolphins-Cowboys game. I know the basic rules of football, but the appeal is lost on me. Same with baseball – although an August evening game at Dodger Stadium has its pleasures. I’ll fess up to asking friends to tape Tour de France coverage or coverage of Motorcycle Grand Prix racing, so I’m not a total sports teetotaler.So we drank and snacked and chatted about all and sundry, with a substantial detour into politics – they’re both big moveon.org supporters – when the game paused, and halftime began.

The halftime show was elaborate, and somehow brought Larry McMurtry to my mind – and it featured a performance by country singer Toby Keith.

I’ve talked about the divide between the country-music part of America and the non-country-music part of America before, and while my sister-in-law isn’t too fond of Toby’s politics (as expressed in his music), she does like him a lot.

The show was – surprise – highly patriotically themed, and I recall that he chose both ‘American Soldier‘ and ‘Beer For My Horses,’ both sung in front of a giant American flag backdrop, with video insets of troops in uniform.

I looked at my brother and said – “That’s why the Democrats are in trouble. The imagery right there is currently owned by the GOP, and until the Democrats figure out how to stand in front of it without looking silly, they’ll have a hard time winning national elections.”

We’d been discussing the election. He & his wife are of the visceral hate-Bush crowd, and my mother wants desperately to oppose Bush, but is anxious about national defense – i.e. is in my mind the perfectly typical voter.

I made my point, and they sat glumly watching the halftime show.

I was reminded of this because I just caught something on my homepage, Google News.

Liberal columnist Tom Teepen has an op-ed up: ‘Nasty nonsense, yes, but Democrats must answer.’

The Democrats who would be president are fuming over a TV ad the Republican National Committee is running in Iowa, where the nominating caucuses are near.

The Democrats’ anger is understandable, but the ad is doing them a service. It makes plain, and inescapable, the challenge their nominee will have to meet if he is to have something better than the proverbial snowball’s chance of contesting President Bush’s reelection.

…

It is not enough for the Democratic contenders to pound on the president’s assorted missteps and misrepresentations in the Iraq War. An increasing number of Americans share that unease, but the terrorist threat remains real — and the abiding question is how it can best be confronted, contained and defeated.

…

The executive director of Amnesty International USA makes the same point the Republican ad does. William Schulz says junk slogans like “Regime change at home” and “No blood for oil” mask a liberal “failure to give necessary attention, analysis and strategizing to the effort to counter terrorism and protect our fundamental right to security.”

When you are hearing the same message from both your friends and your opponents, it would be wise to listen.

Word.

I desperately want to want a Democrat to win in 2004 (no, that’s not a typo). I’m unhappy as hell with Bush’s domestic policies; I think the GOP ‘hand the keys to the Treasury to our donor base’ is arguably worse than the Democratic version of the same thing; I doubt that the kind of tax, employment, energy or domestic security policies that I want to see implemented will make the grade in a Republican Administration.

But I’ve got two large roadblocks in my path.

The first is that I need to see a credible response to what I see as a multinational Islamist threat. Note that ‘using the criminal justice system’ and ‘seeking UN action’ is not, prima facie, a credible response.

Bush has done a lot wrong as I note, but he seems to be doing one thing right.

Yes, the postwar was imperfectly planned. But perfect plans only exist in movies made by Joel Silver. reality is be definition messy, contingent, and frightening – as we are seeing today. His trip and speech meant a lot to me; I’ve demanded for a while that he show an ‘iron butt’, and I’d have to say it will be hard for him to get up from the table after what he’s done now.

The second is that I want to see a Democratic ideology that embraces America instead of holding it at arm’s length.

I know that one comment or one blog post doesn’t define even the individual who wrote it. But I see things out there that lead me to believe certain things.

Here’s a post from Alas, A Blog, a major left blog (note that I’ve had some great and productive discussions with Barry; the quoted post is a Thanksgiving post by his co-blogger Bean):

…many of us (myself included) will also be telling ourselves that we aren’t celebrating the “real” Thanksgiving and all its racist and genocidal history, but rather enjoying the long weekend that allows out-of-town friends and family to visit, the excuse to eat lots of good food, and treating it as any other holiday, with or without awareness of what this day has historically meant. Why should it be any different from the way we celebrate any other holiday — Memorial Day, Labor Day, and (for some of us, at least) Christmas or Passover?

But today is not Thanksgiving for many of our fellow Americans. And, while I will be spending my time with friends and eating good food today, I would like to take a moment to reflect on another “holiday” taking place today.

This was written by a dear friend of mine, Nikkiru, and my thoughts will be with her today.

As many of you are aware, The official U.S. “Thanksgiving” is observed by many indigenous people and allies as the National Day of Mourning. Some may not be aware of the history behind that.

I don’t single this post out to encourage people to rush over and hassle Bean or Barry. I don’t even disagree with them that much of the history of this nation (as all other nations) is written in blood – even often innocent blood.

I do completely disagree over the response to that history. And I do believe that my political party – the Democrats – and many of the supporters of their leading candidate – Howard Dean – are closer to Bean than to me in their view of how to value America.

That’s a problem for me. It’s also a problem for them, since they are really damn unlikely to get the votes of the Toby Keith fans who stood and cheered him on during his performance.

Even though those fans are the ones who would benefit substantially from policies tilted more toward the working and away from the owning. Because people don’t just vote their economic interests.

Sometimes they vote their hearts.

And sometimes they vote their fears.

Right now, both would seem to be in play.

Mickey Kaus has a post up comparing & contrasting two NYT stories on the housing market. Since this (unlike, say, energy) is something I actually know something about, I’m just thrilled to lay out why both stories are true, and his concern misplaced.

The stories he quotes can be found under his Friday, November 28 dateline, so scroll down. Does anyone out there know how to link directly to his stories? If not, Mickey, if you read this, could the MS folks help you out on this sometime? Helllp….Back to the issue at hand. They have the following ledes:

“Apartment Glut Forces Owners to Cut Rents in Much of U.S. … While rents have continued to rise in many big cities on the coasts, including New York and Los Angeles, they are falling in more than 80 percent of metropolitan areas across the country.”

—NYT, David Leonhardt, November 29, 2003

and

“Poor Workers Finding Modest Housing Unaffordable, Study Says… With the rise in housing costs outpacing that of wages, there is no state where a low-income worker can reasonably afford a modest one- or two-bedroom rental unit, according to a study issued today by the National Low Income Housing Coalition …. “When low-income families are paying so much of their income on housing, they are left to skimp on other necessities like food, medicine, clothes and time spent with children,” said Sheila Crowley, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.”

—NYT, Lynette Clemetson, September 9, 2003

Here’s the deal. The housing market isn’t “a” market, it’s a collection of submarkets, each of which has links of varying strength to its neighbors. The submarkets are defined loosely by cost and location (there are other social/cultural selectors as well, but these two really drive the markets), each of which serves to isolate a submarket somewhat from its neighbors. In my personal case, I can’t legally move (under the terms of my Marital Settlement Agreement) from an area roughly one mile on a side – but other people are also connected to a location, by schools, jobs, or family ties. They can’t simply pick up and move to another region of a city, much less another a city, because of job issues or social ties. This means that they can’t transparently make the economically rational choice to move from, say Los Angeles to Pahrumph Nevada. They do – at increasing rates, as many of the low-housing-cost regions see some measure of population inflows. But the reality is that many low-housing-cost regions are also low-wage regions, so the choice isn’t quite so easy to make.

And within a geographic area, there are a series of horizontal markets defined largely by price (although obviously the low-cost ones tend to cluster in or within neighborhoods). And it’s here that we see the explanation for both articles – apparently contradictory but equally true.

At the top of the rental housing market is luxury or near-luxury housing, which competes with for-sale housing for tenants. They have the means and credit to buy a home, should they choose to, and when interest rates are low and the housing markets are strong, they do – sucking much of the demand out of the top of the market.

Below that – all the way to the bottom, if we choose – is a series of markets of people who realistically are not going to be confronted with the option of homeownership anytime soon. The pressing issue in those markets is simply affordability (which gets tweaked, as Mickey notes, but only because the rents in the marketplace are so high and costs of new development so expensive that otherwise no landlord would rent to certificate holders and no developer could afford to build new affordable housing – note that I’ll question whether they should build new affordable housing, but that’s a policy argument for another day).

Make sense?

So in the submarkets appealing to high-wage workers, they are abandoning rentals for ownership (probably a good thing). In the submarkets available to low-wage workers, they are increasingly crunched between flat incomes and rising rents.

Both are true, and there’s nothing to bust anyone over, so move right along…

A friend of TG’s just emailed us an invitation:

“With your help, on Sunday, December 7th, we’ll hold thousands of house parties across the country to screen the new documentary Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War. The parties will be brought together through a huge cross-country conference call. At 5:30p PST / 8:30p EST, party attendees will be able to dial in to a call featuring director Robert Greenwald, the MoveOn team, and guests from parties all over the country. You’ll also be able to submit questions for Mr. Greenwald and the team online.

This’ll be fun, but it’s also strategic.

Here’s a little more about Uncovered:

MoveOn.org doesn’t usually sponsor documentary films, but this movie is a really important one. It’s built around interviews with over 20 intelligence and military experts, many of whom are speaking out for the first time. True to the MoveOn ethic, director Robert Greenwald lets the facts speak for themselves. And the results are pretty shocking. Uncovered combines expert interviews with extensive research to go behind the walls of government. Interviewees include:

* Joe Wilson, the former Ambassador to Iraq who exposed that the famous “16 words” in Bush’s State of the Union address about uranium in Niger were false. In retaliation, senior White House officials appear to have blown the cover of Wilson’s wife, an undercover CIA agent.
* John Dean, White House lawyer for President Nixon during the Watergate scandal.
* Rand Beers, former Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for combating terrorism.
* David Albright, a physicist, nuclear weapons expert, and former weapons inspector with the IAEA Action team.
* Rt. Hon. Clare Short, the British Member of Parliament who recently resigned her position as Tony Blair’s secretary for international development because Blair did not support a UN coalition to rebuild Iraq.”

Just to whet your appetite, the film’s poster is at: http://action.moveon.org/meet/content/UncoveredArt.pdf So please RSVP by signing up at: http://action.moveon.org/meet/selectmtg.html?event_ids=416″

Think I ought to go? Or should I host my own party?

Backtracking through Technorati (which I do once a day), I came upon a post on a blog called ‘Osama Bin Laden Is Winning‘ about my dialog with Calpundit.The author took intelligent issue with my prescription for perseverance as a path to success; I commented, and he replied, suggesting I read his essay on terrorism.

I did, and think that we agree in a broad set of areas, and disagree in others – and definitely think that a dialog would be productive. I was going to make these points on a comment on his blog, but thought a post would send some other readers his way, and open a broader dialog.I only have the mental/temporal capacity for one dialog at a time, so I have to move the Calpundit discussion ahead a bit before I really engage here. I’d like to suggest that folks go over and take a look, and that the author, who goes by ‘obliw’ take a look at some of my older stuff on terrorism as well.

At Armed Liberal:

Romanticism & Terrorism

Terrorism Pt. 1

The War on Bad Philosophy

Here at WoC

On Being a Liberal Hawk

It’s Not a ‘Schtick,’ Kevin

It’s 11:00 pm, and Middle Guy (who just got a brilliant almost-perfect report card, and pretty darn good SAT scores as well) is wrapping up a study group in his bedroom downstairs. He’s got two friends over, prepping for a math test tomorrow.

They’re playing their music kinda loud (small objects on my office floor are rattling), and I’d like them to turn it down; but they won’t hear me from the top of the stairs, and they’re on the phone (both lines, it appears) getting outside help, so I can’t call…I may actually have to walk downstairs and knock on his door.
…wait! I can IM him!

me: TURN IT DOWN!!
him: Turn what down? I can’t hear you, the music is too loud…
me: OK, I’m shutting down the router then.
him: NOOOOO! Ok, I’ll turn it down…

…and he did. Order is restored within the household, thanks to internet messaging protocols.

An acquaintance of mine has just taken on the role of executive director and conductor of a classical music – thing which I can’t explicitly talk about because of my damn pseudonymity thing. I’ve suggested to him that he start doing a blog about it, but can’t point him to any blogs like what I’m talking about. Does anyone out there know of any blogs being done by working classical musicians or artists?I’d like to show him some examples.

In reading up about energy, I’ve spent a bunch of time over at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (www.csis.org) – a Washington-based think tank with some apparent connections to conservative Democrats. I find their work interesting, and while I don’t know them or their biases enough to decide where I stand relative to them, I do think they are looking at the right issues.

In browsing around, I found an interesting paper on Iraq that echoes a number of my thoughts about the war, by Anthony Cordesman, called “Iraq, Too Uncertain To Call” (pdf). Here are a couple of quotes. It opens:

There is a tendency to see the situation in Iraq either in terms of inevitable victory or inevitable defeat, or to polarize an assessment on the basis of political attitudes towards the war. In practice, Iraq seems to be a remarkably fluid and dynamic situation field with uncertainties that dominate both the present and the future.

A visit to Iraq makes it clear that no one is really a current expert on this country. Too much is changing. Even if most prewar statistics had been valid, they would not be valid now. The security situation is evolving by the day. The local and provincial leadership elites are in a state of flux, and the Governing Council is deeply divided and has not yet taken hold in terms of winning popular support. The economic situation may be improving in broad terms, but the day-to-day of ordinary Iraqis varies sharply by area and by individual, and much of the aid program is just beginning to take hold.

More broadly, political, economic, social and military forces have been unleashed by the fall of Saddam Hussein that are only beginning to play out and which will take years to have their full effect. No Iraqi can credibly predict the end result, much less an outsider. In fact, trying to understand the uncertainties at work is probably far more important than trying to make assessments and predictions which cannot be based on past knowledge, current facts, or stable trends.

and continues:

The US can, however, also lose for internal and political reasons, and these may prove to be as much, or more of a threat. The ways the US could lose are:

–A popular perception in the US that the war after the war is pointless, casualties and costs are too high, and nation building cannot succeed. So far, the Administration is preparing for such a defeat by underplaying the risks, issuing provocative and jingoistic speeches, and minimizing real-world costs and risks. The weakness of the Governing Council, a failure to convince the Iraqi’s that the US is committed to a true and early end to occupation, and a failure to communicate the scale and future impact of the US aid effort, currently increase the risks.

and:

Grand strategy is the key to victory, and victory or defeat is tied as much to politics as to warfighting. This means the Bush Administration faces some hard choices. It seems very unlikely that the current level of fighting will be over before February at the earliest, and may well continue until June or longer. Some casualties and major incidents seem like to occur through the November 2004 election and may well go on as long as the US is in Iraq.

Any effort to “spin” these unpleasant realities out of existence is going to broaden the credibility problem the Administration has developed by underplaying the risks before, during, and immediately after the war. The sooner the Administration prepares the American people and its allies for a long period of low intensity conflict and continuing casualties, the better.

That’s what I’ve been trying to say for months, and that’s very much what I mean by ‘showing determination.’ Go read the whole article.

So Calpundit Kevin replied to my post on “sticking it out” below, and nailed me on one point that I thought I’d covered, but on rereading realized I truly hadn’t.

He interprets my post as suggesting that the reason to stay in Iraq was less to rebuild the country than to show determination. Note that I think that would be a silly damn thing to do, and a waste of lives and treasure (which I thought I’d pointed out with the Schaar quote) and wish I’d written more clearly to make that point. We’re there to remove an evil dictatorship and to prevent the resources of that country from being used against us, against the people of the region, and against the people of the country itself. I believe that doing this will ultimately have a positive effect on a broader conflict which I perceive we are in. I think that to succeed in either of those efforts, we will have to both be determined and show determination.What I mean by ‘determination’ isn’t so much in the day-to-day policy arena as in the overarching goals and in how we communicate those goals. A bit more Churchill and a bit less Hamlet, if that makes any sense. And my point in doing that is that I genuinely believe that we are in a dialog between peoples, a dialog that is in ideas and words as well as blood. The hope is that through handling one well, we won’t need to handle the other.

Speaking of which I went over to Calpundit’s comments section and walked away kind of depressed. It’s not that they don’t like me – hell, lots of people in the real world don’t like me, which tells me that I’m an actual person as opposed to a Beanie Baby – it’s that I really and truly just don’t get the worldview that they are speaking from. I spend a lot of time on the left side of the media and blog world, and am increasingly finding islands there where the words are English and yet I just don’t understand the concepts laid out in those words, and I’m finding that depressing and frustrating, given my goal of creating constructive dialog.

That’s my problem – I ought to be smart and flexible enough to understand arguments I may or may not agree with. And I need to do some work on that; there are too many people sharing a beliefset for there not to be an argument there, and I need to figure out what the hell those arguments are and what it is about them I object to so strongly.

Meanwhile I’m reading boatloads of energy papers, and will get around to writing something about it soon.