Year of the Rat: A 2008 Campaign Diary By Matt Taibbi

Over at the afore-mentioned National Affairs Daily blog, run by Rolling Stone. Matt Taibbi is the author of one wonderful article detailing the idiot belief in Fukuyama’s End of History (you ought to give it a read), and what it has meant for applied government (here, specifically, but elsewhere, certainly).

He is also, unfortunately the writer of a reference to Hillary Clinton as an “unsmiling promilitary curmudgeon with a fast-rusting vagina”, which is more-or-less not forgivable. As though anyone (least of all Matt Taibbi) asked me. I simply am disappointed, continuously, with gender-bashing in the media (especially of Hillary Clinton, for whom it would appear telling the truth was long-ago decided a properly tacky thing to do. Go figure).

Mind you, according to Rate My Professor (or one student therein, who I do hope got the D they clearly earned) said I’m a misogynist. So what would I know? Besides, apparently, definitions of things like irony, sarcasm and misogyny.

So to Matt Taibbi 2K: the 2008 Campaign Diarian.

In advance of Council Bluffs some of the hacks on the bus commiserated about their reporting strategies. A loud British reporter two seats in front expressed hope that he’d get something really real. “I hope we get some real, you know, interaction with a voter,” he gushed. Others were talking with editors via cell phone about their pre-fab article theses – Thompson as the only guy who can beat Hillary, Thompson as Reagan, Thompson the too-late candidate. Then I watched as we actually poured out into the crowd at Bayliss Park in downtown Council Bluffs, and these same guys went from Iowan to Iowan in search of the needed quotes, literally shaking audience members like fruit trees until they coughed up the right answers. The only-Thompson-can-beat-Hillary guy – actually a female wire reporter – was moving quickly, trying in the 30-odd minutes we had on the ground to get at least one or two folks to say that they were supporting Thompson for the right reasons.

“Do you think Thompson is the only guy who can beat Hillary?”
“Uh, I don’t know…”

At that the reporter frowned and quickly moved on to the next local:

“Why do you support Thompson?”

“I just think he can beat Hillary.”

“Why do you think he can beat Hillary?”

And so on. I walked away.

…

A youngish kid with long hair and a red t-shirt in this crowd started telling me his story, about how he’d been busted for possession of drug paraphernalia. “It was a couple of pipes…” he began.

I waved him off and explained that, as a member of the national campaign press, I was here to write about what I wanted him to say, not what he wanted himself to say.

“Look,” I said, holding up a bill. “I’m willing to pay twenty bucks to the first person who’ll say whatever I want him to say about Fred Thompson.”

About ten sets of hands flew up, including the kid in front of me. I held up the twenty.

“Name,” I barked.

“Gary Blakeman,” he said.

“Age,” I said.

“Seventeen.”

I wrote that down. “Gary, does Fred Thompson look like a pedophile to you?”

He looked at me pleadingly. “Yes, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“Yes, he does,” he answered.

“So what you’re saying, Gary,” I prompted, “is that you wouldn’t be at all surprised to walk into a room and see this candidate’s penis in a four year-old child?”

“Of course not!” the kid said. “Because he looks like a fucking pedophile, dude!”

“Mmm-hmm,” I said. “And what kind of face would you expect him to be making at that moment?”

The kid grit his teeth and strained his neck muscles. “He’d be like, unnnnhh!” he shouted.

“Thanks,” I said, handing him the twenty. He took it and walked off with his hands over his head in triumph. I looked over at the wire-service girl, who was still humping an old couple about the Hillary thing. Amateur, I thought.

You’re welcome to explain why you don’t think that’s exactly how brainless mainstream media shit-heads poison your previously correctly-functioning brain.

Also, you ought to return to the Rolling Stone, periodically, and follow Taibbi around for nothing like the greatest, but clearly set to be about the longest and most expensive (someone compare the campaign to a U2 or Rolling Stones tour, will you?) show on earth.

Going postal

I have such a thing for postal economics.

EU delaying opening up of competition in Europe’s postal sector

European Union governments on Monday pushed back the full opening up of competition in Europe’s €88 billion postal sector by two years, until 2011, in the face of strong pressure from some national postal monopolies.

Although resistance was led by countries nervous about foreign competitors poised to swoop in, EU officials rejected suggestions that nationalist politics were at play in the $125 billion market.

Well, yes. They would.

This is, of course (and as I painfully revisit) while Britain’s Royal Mail lost its monopoly, lost it early, lost more customers than we could count, faster than we could count them anyway, and now faces the likes of TNT.

So … Britain’s reaction?

The commission, backed by Britain and Germany, has said that it was unfair that some countries had fully opened competition while others had done nothing. It has demanded that all EU nations open up their postal services and put independent regulators in charge.

So far Sweden, Britain and Finland are the only EU countries to have scrapped their postal monopolies completely. Plans are under way do so in Germany and the Netherlands by January. In Germany, new competitors have already emerged to challenge Deutsche Post in certain areas, giving them ready-made networks when full competition takes effect.

British officials welcomed the proposal, saying that the opening up of the British postal sector in January 2006 had vastly improved the performance of Royal Mail, the national postal operator.

Given this whole agenda was apparently laid out some 15 years ago, it is taking on positively NAFTA-esque dimensions (Eco 1 students will recognise that as a reference to Mexican sugar).

Finally, the International Herald Tribune was also kind enough to bring this to our delighted attention:

“This does not signal a victory for the forces of protectionism in Europe,” said Oliver Drewes, a spokesman for Charlie McCreevy, the EU’s internal market commissioner. “This will enhance competition.”

Brussels. The gift that keeps on giving (go read about Boris Johnson’s poor daughter, some time).

From the islands of Fiji

Rushing for the bus back out (turtle moved successfully, although a potential adopter has come along), I grabbed a bottle of Fiji water – not something I’ve gotten, previously. For purchasing bottled water I have a preference for Evian (Volvic is also good, but not an American-found water). My wife and I (more my wife – she drinks more water, but is also better at this) tend to re-use bottles to death.

Reading its label, as I sought to determine why it was so popular with the types of people sufficient to make it sound like Water for Wankers, I discovered the following, mind-blowing attempt at marketing (a similar passage can be found at their website):

The purest water comes from the purest clouds. Our rainfall is purified by trade winds as it travels thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean to the islands of Fiji. A continent away from acid rain and other pollutants, FIJI Water is preserved and protected by one of the last virgin ecosystems on Earth.

Then we went into that last virgin ecosystem! And took its water! And put it in bottles we had made in China and flown to us (bottles that use 6.74 times more water to construct and transport than you just drank – but it was only water Chinese people would have drunk from a tap, or something. Morons), then flew it back across thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean! Enjoy.

So. I believe I hate Fiji water, and the people who bottle the stuff. It does taste nice, though.

Portugal and England make big moves on renewable energy

First, England!

Barrage of turbines across the Severn could provide 5% of UK’s electricity

Tidal power generated from more than 200 turbines in a 10-mile long barrage across the Severn estuary could provide nearly 5% of Britain’s electricity for 120 years with minimal climate change emissions and should be investigated urgently, government advisers said yesterday.

But what would be Britain’s largest power project and one of the most ambitious civil engineering challenges in the world would significantly affect the visual and marine environment for up to 30 miles around it and have mixed long-term economic and ecological impacts, said the Sustainable Development Commission.

It would mean the loss of 11,000 hectares of inter-tidal and other protected land, could limit the expansion of shipping in the estuary and would affect miles of beaches as well as the Severn bore. But it could also provide a much needed river crossing and be a fillip to tourism and the economies of Wales and south-west England, it said.

Next, Portugal!

Portugal gambles on ’sea snakes’ providing an energy boost

Portugal is poised to open what will be the world’s first commercial wavefarm, and while the coastline’s formidable surf will be a source of electricity, the engineers need a decent “weather window” to be able to get their machinery out to sea.

The Pelamis machines, named after the Latin for sea snake and developed by a Scottish company that leads the world in one of the newest renewable energy fields, are a series of red tubes, each about the size of a small commuter train, linked together, and pointed in the direction of the waves. The waves travel down the tubes, causing them to bob up and down, and a hydraulic system harnesses this movement to generate electricity.

The three “sea snakes” will soon be towed out to a spot some three miles from the coast of northern Portugal at Agucadoura, from where the electricity they produce will be pumped into the national grid.

Good for the Guardian. We love turbines, here. Like the East River turbines, the Portugese plans have suffered somewhat from, well, the environment applied:

… the hi-tech venture has not been without its problems. The latest date for inauguration of the wavefarm was to be Wednesday, but a combination of bad weather, bad luck and the pitfalls of developing any new technology has meant the machines are still on dry land, awaiting the next calm spell to be taken out to sea.

England’s plan has its own, truly interesting, quirk:

“It is imperative that a project of this national importance should be publicly-led and publicly-owned, but we do not rule out private enterprise partners,” said Jonathon Porritt, chair of the commission.

…

The SDC emphasised that the lower rate of interest available to government-led projects would provide the only realistic way of funding an “immense” compensatory package for the environment lost as well as providing electricity at a competitive price.

That ought to be interesting, indeed – fans of turbines, we are, here, no fans at all of PFI.

Two very impressive projects, proving Europe as quite the reliable path-finder for the rest of us. From the Guardian’s article on the wave farms:

EU current account Top generators

This year the EU set a target of increasing the share of electricity produced by renewables from 6.5% to 20% by 2020. European commission figures show that only 2% of Britain’s energy use came from renewables in 2004. Germany has 200 times as much installed solar power and 10 times as much wind power as Britain.

Wind power set records in 2006, the European Wind Energy Association reported, as 7,588 MW of capacity was installed, a 23% rise on 2005. Germany, the world’s wind-power leader, had 20,000MW of installed capacity; Spain was second. The UK has 40% of Europe’s wind resource but is only seventh in the world in installed capacity.

Marine power One of the world’s largest tidal projects was recently unveiled off Orkney. A wave hub off the coast of Cornwall this month gained planning approval and could generate electricity for 14,000 homes.

Solar In March the first commercial concentrating solar power plant in Europe was inaugurated in Seville. When completed in 2013 it will produce enough energy for 180,000 homes. According to industry estimates only 20,000 homes in the UK have solar panels.

Biomass The EU meets about 4% of its total energy needs with biomass. Its share the energy mix varies from 1.3% in the UK to 29.8% in Latvia.

Ultimately, I don’t see that Europe’s supplies of oil and gas are any more – or less – reliable than those of, say, the US, but it’s nice to see some intelligent responses to it. I’d like to see, in the US, some form of applied/experimental investment in similar enterprises around existing energy infrastructure. Wind and tidal energy, for example, is probably best-captured in areas where drilling and refineries (on land or off-shore) already exist. What better way for Big Oil to secure itself than to take advantge of such an expanding, and appreciating, market?

I’m not saying I think tens of billions in quarterly profits for Big Oil are my preference, but I don’t see anyone else stepping forth.

CSIRO climate change update

I’m from Sydney. High among my reasons for intending not to return is the heat (seriously). Which is something I discuss quite a bit, here.

From today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

Sydney could face an annual temperature rise of up to 4.3 degrees by 2070, and a tripling of the number of days a year when the thermometer soars above 35 degrees, if global greenhouse gas emissions are not cut steeply, a new report has found.

It is too late for the city to avoid a warming of about 1 degree by 2030 as well as a 3 per cent reduction in annual rainfall because of polluting gases already in the atmosphere.

More droughts, fires, and severe weather events, and less rain and snow across the country are also on the horizon, according to the report, Climate Change in Australia, which contains the most detailed and up-to-date climate projections produced by the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology.

Its findings, released at the Greenhouse 2007 conference in Sydney this morning, include projections of up to 20 per cent more drought months over most of Australia by 2030.

By 2070 this could rise to 40 per cent more drought months in eastern Australia and 80 per cent more in south western Australia.

The report’s website is quite good.

So, score? This gets back into my obvious pessimism when it comes to agriculture in Australia: we shouldn’t be planning on that much rain. Same for electricity and water for Sydney. I just don’t see them as sustainable enterprises. Like climate change, generally, I sincerely hope I’m wrong – I just don’t believe that I am.

Getting back to Jason’s ongoing agency gripe:

It is based on conclusions of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released earlier this year, and climate research conducted on the Australian region since the last CSIRO projections were released in 2001.

Co-ordinator of the CSIRO’s climate change science program, Paul Holper, said improvements in computer modelling of climate meant the new projections were more accurate than the last ones, which warned national temperatures could rise as much as 6 degrees by 2070.

“Over the past five or six years we have learnt so much more about the atmosphere and the oceans, and our ability to use super computers to simulate climate has improved immensely,” he told ABC Radio.

“The science”, as it were, of this sort of work, is continually improving (that link is a .pdf). The two sides (of the after-science debate) disagree upon how much bias exists in this work. My colleague will tell you that these people are making money off the issue, and have a vested interest in, while improving the precision of their estimates, having those estimates agree with previous ones. I agree with this assessment, don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe it is sufficient to make us doubt the estimates themselves (certainly not, when compared to the greater, clearer and proved bias and dodgy work done by the ‘other’ side).

As I said, though, opinions differ.

What I do like about people like the CSIRO and BoM – besides their pedigree as scientists – is the absence, in their work, of policy implications. This report is about climate and rainfull: not coal, or electricity, or who owns the rivers.

Won’t somebody just default on Zimbabwe?

I can only think Zimbabwe, formerly the bread basket of its region, is deliberately pushing the accepted definitions of sovereignty.

Zimbabwe’s bakeries have shut and supermarkets have warned there will be no bread for the foreseeable future as the government admitted that wheat production has collapsed after the seizure of white-owned farms.

…

Last week, the government said it plans to import 100,000 tonnes of wheat but acknowledged that a shipment of 35,000 tonnes is held up in Mozambique because of a shortage of hard currency to pay for it. The agriculture minister, Rugare Gumbo, blamed the food shortages on black farmers who have taken over formerly white-owned land.

Nice – you mean those former soldiers with nothing but poverty and anger, whose support you won by pushing white farmers out of the economy and country, not even all that long ago? Rush Limbaugh would indeed be proud, the snivelling, hypocritical drug addict.

Who honestly thought that utterly non-trained people would assume entire farms and be able to reproduce harvests? Still less in the face of political tribalism that has not only superceded government, but gone almost completely (short of Lord of War caricatures of Charles Taylor) apeshit.

So: kicked out the skilled work-force (ooh, now where does that failure of intelligent planning ring a bell?); infrastructure disappearing from theft by hungry people; crops dying from failing infrastructure; food and electricity drying up because country’s out of currency; government planning on taking away 51% (minimum) of every foreign-owned company; government blaming black people, promising more and saying they’ll start a new currency.

The funny thing is, it isn’t even as though this is irrepairable – Russia managed. The trouble is this sort of shit just invites bankruptcy, penury, starvation and the arrival of the IMF to deliver far more foreign and white ownership than any post-Rhodesian-born Zimbabwean could imagine.

I’ll consider no age an enlightened one until tribalism (including religion) has no place in government.