Fire Hydrant of Freedom

The Hillbillary Clinton thread is threatened by overload. 

Lets start this thread for background intel on the players in their machine.  For example, John Podesta.

http://usuncut.com/politics/hillary-clinton-foreign-policy-record/

Rambling Rumination:  "Let's Roll!"
by Marc "Crafty Dog" Denny
(c) 2016
 
I:
We all know of the "well-regulated militia" of our Second Amendment.  It is very much worth noting that in the usage of when the Bill of Rights was written, "regulated" did NOT mean "regulations".  It meant "smoothly running".  Thus, an accurate watch could be said to be "well regulated".  
 
At the time of the writing of the Second Amendment, fresh from the memories of the standing army of the British, our Founding Fathers did not envision a standing army.  That is why we have the Third Amendment (no quartering of troops in our homes) and we have a Second Amendment.  The security of our country against all enemies, both foreign and domestic, resides with "We the people".  
 
In times of danger, those subject to being called up were expected to show up WITH THEIR GUNS to fight in defense of our country.  In my clear opinion, this means we were expected to have guns suitable for a foot soldier.  In those days it was a musket.  Today this includes the technology of our time: semi-automatic rifles which are often misnamed by those who would disarm us and those who have been deceived by them as "assault rifles".   To say otherwise would be as logical as excluding radio, TV, and the internet from the First Amendment.
 
(Though the appearance of each can be similar, the difference is this:  A semi-auto such as a civilian may own, requires one pull of the trigger for each shot.  An assault rifle of a soldier includes an automatic function whereby bullets come out as long as the trigger is held down.)

 This makes perfect sense.

 A militia that would have to have foot soldier arms distributed by the government before it would be ready to fight when the nation was under attack would not be "well-regulated"; it would run quite poorly; it would be a fustercluck.
 
 
ll:
 
Some argue that now that we have a standing army, we no longer need a militia, and that the Second Amendment is a atavistic echo of a time gone by.

Let us be perfectly clear.  "Enemies both foreign and domestic" includes our government should it ever seek to slip the bonds of our Constitution and take our freedoms.  Remember this well:  the American Revolution ignited at the battles of Lexington and Concord when the British came to confiscate our guns.  

It was thus then, and it is thus now.

Some argue that this is foolish.  "Look at the military power of our Government!" they say.  "Do you think you can fight that?"

The answer to this argument has two parts.

First, I challenge the assumption implicit in it that our military would turn upon us.

Second, thanks to our Second Amendment, we are no less well-armed than the Taliban or any of a number of other guerrilla movements which this same power has failed to defeat.
 
III:

This is not to say that there are not to be any sort of laws or regulations.

Our State governments are "the laboratory of democracy" where all this is to be sorted out.  

Open carry?  Concealed carry?  Minimum age?  Training required?  Criteria for extinguishing Second Amendment rights?

All these are things to be worked out by the States under their Tenth Amendment rights under what is known as "the police power".
 
lV:

Of course when it comes to interstate travel or foreign threat, there is a proper constitutional role for the Federal government.

For example as I type these words there is vigorous debate over whether people on the "No Fly" list should be allowed to purchase guns.

At first glance, this looks obvious-- "Of course not!"-- but the problem is this and it is a profound one:  The No-Fly List is a secret governmentally generated list with no Due Process concerning who is put on it and no Due Process for getting off it.

This is a formula for massive mischief!!!
 
In that flying is not a constitutionally protected right, the No Fly List passes muster as far as flying goes, but in sharp contrast our Second Amendment rights (and implicitly our Ninth Amendment right to self-defense) are fundamental constitutional rights and by definition losing these rights requires proper "Due Process" by Constitutional standards.  

This is not a line to be crossed in the passions of the moment-- passions often fomented by those who seek to disarm us!!!

 As can be readily imagined by anyone who has dealt with governmental bureaucracies (in my case it was as a lawyer in Washington DC), many of those on the list are put on by mistake.  In my readings of those who have done serious work looking into this, I am consistently running into the number  of 35% of those on the list not belonging there.    This means literally hundreds of thousands of innocent people are on the list!!! -- which if I have the number correct is the better part of one million names.

It may be due to a name similar to a suspect, or even a name spelled similarly to a suspect or some innocent behavior.

Senator Ted Kennedy was put on the list and so was Congressman John Lewis.  Of course they were promptly removed but so too was standout reporter Steve Hayes because he bought a one-way ticket to Turkey where he got on a cruise ship.  Despite his public recognition as a reporter, he spent many Kafkaesque months trying to get off it to no avail until anchor Brett Baier spoke to DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson ON THE AIR about his case.  

Obviously none of us has the political muscle of a US Senator or Congressman or an anchor who can shame the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security!  

The truth is simple and clear:  The No Fly List has no Due Process for our fundamental Second Amendment rights and until it does (For quite some time Republican Senator Cornier has had a bill which has been rejected by the Democrats) the No Fly List is an insufficient basis for extinguishing the Second Amendment rights of nearly one million Americans

An additional point:  Right now our executive branch is led by those who see the problem as "extremism"-- be it Muslim, Tea Party, Christian or otherwise.  

Indeed, as best as I can tell an unspoken reason for the determination to not identify the danger to our country as Islamic Fascism (or some other similar name) is to not "let go to waste" the opportunity to disarm as many as of possible political enemies of the the current administration , , , but perhaps I digress , , ,


V:

At the end of the day at Dog Brothers Gathering of the Pack one year after 911,  I spontaneously spoke of 911 and how the only thing that worked on that day was not the government or the police.
http://dogbrothers.com/saved-by-the-militia/

Two planes hit the World Trade Center.  One missed the White House and hit the Pentagon.  The last plane, Flight 93, presumably was headed for the Capitol building and it was "we the unorganized militia" on Flight 93 who answered Todd Beamer's call to action "Let's roll!" and took that plane down.

VI:
 
As you can see from the article accompanying my impromptu talk, Title 10, Section 313 speaks to the "unorganized militia".

Here is my understanding-- whether the various state governments do their part in maintaining the apparatus required to have a "well-regulated milita" or not, the militia continues in "unorganized" form.  

THE FUNDAMENTAL CONSTITUTIONAL UNDERSTANDING THAT DEFENSE OF THE NATION IS IN OUR HANDS REMAINS.  IT IS NOT EXTINGUISED BY THE FAILURE OF THE STATES OR THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO DO THEIR PART.

 
VII:

Once again we see the wisdom of our Founding Fathers unchanged by time or technology.   Indeed it is precisely due to technology that our enemy is now able to bypass our military and our police.

Ben Franklin warned us "Those who give up their liberty in search of safety deserve neither."  

Still many people call for what amounts to an end of privacy of our personal communication (Fourth Amendment, Ninth Amendment)  even though  "encryption" and the "dark web" increasingly make such surveillance superfluous.  

No longer is there a need to plot, plan, and direct as was the case with the attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001.  Now there is only the need to inspire the "radicalized" to "go operational" in lone wolf actions with guns or, in their absence, bombs.

We see this again and again, be it the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston, the jihadi hit team in San Bernardino, or now in Orlando.  


VIII:

So, what are we the people to do in such moments?

First and foremost is to "man up".   Be Odysseus in Cyclops' cave.  He did not pray for Cyclops to eat him last-- he came up with a plan and acted!  While Cyclops slept, he speared him in his one eye and came up with a crafty plan to escape with the sheep and by so doing saved not only himself but his crew.

(If you don't get this literary reference, it is from Homer's "The Odyssey".  Read it-- and demand a refund from whomever claimed to have educated you!)

If you and others are being held as hostages in a bathroom until it is your turn to die as we saw in Orlando, DO SOMETHING.  Rip the seat off the toilet and have someone throw a garbage can as the killer comes in while the one with the toilet seat conks him over the head and everyone swarms him.  If you are to die, DIE FIGHTING.

Fighting will be a lot easier and more likely to be effective if you are armed (guns and knives both have their place) and properly trained in their use.  

Yesterday I received a call from a Green Beret in 5th Group Special Forces I had worked with some ten years ago.  We chatted at length and shared with me something he had written about all this.  

This man has been places and done things for us.  It is my honor to do my part in spreading his word forward.

=================================
BEGIN
Minimizing Active Shooters in Public Spaces

Two of the most notorious public active shooter examples, the Ft. Hood and Pulse Night Club shootings, illustrate the case of a lone gunman taking down numerous victims in very public places. Both involved semi-automatic firearms which required reloading, the AR-15 as the primary weapon in the Pulse shooting and the M9 Beretta in the Ft. Hood case.

In both instances, the moment shots were realized for what they were, had swarms of people overwhelmed the gunmen, it is arguable that not more than one magazine would have been fired, in the case of the AR-15, 30 rounds of ammunition; in the M9 Beretta, 15 rounds.

This is an argument to consider for it is almost certain that future acts of this kind of public terror will occur.

It is worth putting the theory into practice, wherein, in controlled environments, in training, the theory of swarming such gunmen can, at least, be put to test. Not to do so, without any other counteractions against such shooters in place, is irresponsible.

Now, it is highly understandable that from an instinctual life preservation basis, especially one’s own, it might well be argued that against such intrinsic value, the need to flee against someone with a gun may generally be what naturally occurs; however, these are not natural situations. The alternative, now twice registered, needs to be evaluated, e.g. mass casualties from numerous reloads in the aforementioned cases, where numerous people were, indeed, available to swarm the shooter.

What such action takes is a presence of mind, pre-loaded, which this letter suggests, wherein, before one ever goes into a mall, bar, or other crowded venue, where they know guns are not allowed, the idea of swarming an active shooter become commonplace thinking, as much commonplace as, say, it would be for anyone hearing someone scream FIRE in a crowded theater would cause everyone to immediately leave without thinking.

It is, to say the least, the last thing someone would naturally do - to run to shots that are being fired; yet, the argument remains – massive casualties occur in these situations when magazines are reloaded. There is an interval space wherein a swarm of unarmed individuals can overwhelm someone’s attempts to reload a weapon.


I would hope that increased concealed carry for responsible gun owners along with better staffing of armed security guards at public venues might now, gain traction; however, much stands in the way of such practices.

In the interim, maybe just increasing national consciousness and remembrance of what Todd Beamer inspired when he yelled, “Let’s Roll” on United Airlines Flight 93 during the attacks of 9/11 might be enough to minimize the next threat.

Let’s hope and pray we don’t have to go there; but, at the same time, let’s not allow wishful thinking to rule the ground of our being.

We cannot always be armed, everywhere. Such is the case going to watch your favorite sport in many venues. If an active shooter situation were to happen in such a place isn’t it high time we begin to ask – is it worth letting another active shooter the opportunity to reload?
END
==========================================
 
 In closing, I offer that "Let's Roll" be our American battle cry whenever the fickle flying finger of fate reaches out and touches us.  

If you think this missive worthy, please pass it forward.

The Adventure continues!
Marc "Crafty Dog" Denny
www.dogbrothers.com

Recently Nigeria has crossed my radar screen, so I begin this thread.  If you run across items of interest, please post them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/05/world/africa/boko-haram-food-crisis.html?emc=edit_th_20160305&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/02/25/infrastructure-country-breaking-down/

I could have swore we had a thread about this already, but I can't find it , , ,  

This piece makes the case for it:



By Zachary Karabell
Oct. 8, 2015 7:25 p.m. ET
7 COMMENTS

The 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal signed Monday is poised to become an election-year piñata as the Obama administration works to get it through Congress. Hillary Clinton, who supported the TPP when she was secretary of state, came out against it on Wednesday: “I don’t believe it’s going to meet the high bar I have set.” Sen. Bernie Sanders, her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, issued a caustic statement: “It is time for the rest of us to stop letting multinational corporations rig the system to pad their profits at our expense.”

On the Republican side of the presidential-nomination race, Donald Trump and Carly Fiorina separately denounced the pact as an assault on American business.

Labor leaders in turn excoriated the TPP for accelerating the loss of American jobs, while companies such as Ford Motors came out against it because of the perceived lack of protection against currency manipulation.
Opinion Journal Video
Editorial Board Member Joe Rago on how pharmaceutical innovation may be impacted by the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Photo credit: Getty Images.

The TPP is the definition of a Big Deal. The dozen countries involved, including Japan, Malaysia, Australia and Mexico, account for about 40% of global GDP. President Obama has made passage a priority, couching the pact in terms of who will write the rules of the new global economy, China or the U.S.

Yet much of the passion stirred by the deal is reminiscent of the wrangling over the North American Free Trade Agreement two decades ago—and feels about 20 years out of date. It isn’t simply that commerce has increased, regardless of tariffs and friction. Supply chains have evolved into an interlocking global lattice in which few countries are unaffected, and the ones left out tend to be the basket cases of the international system, from Afghanistan to North Korea.

The dispersion and complexity of supply chains has happened too rapidly for our statistical map of the world to catch up. Much of global trade today consists of companies shifting parts from factory to factory, country to country, to make a finished good. The result is that our centuries-old understanding of trade hardly captures its reality today.

Think of the iPhone. On the back of each handset, in print so tiny you may need a magnifying glass, it says “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.” That is Apple’s way of communicating a complicated reality that, in the land of trade statistics and common understanding, is reduced to a simple formula: A product is made where it has undergone its last “substantial transformation.” The product is then assigned to that place, and hence an iPhone is, in trade terms, “Made in China.”

But it isn’t, really. The phone is assembled from parts made in multiple countries, and as researchers have found, only a small portion of its value comes from China or goes to China. In trade land’s calculation of imports and exports, however, all of that is moot. The same is true for thousands of products large and small that have multiple parts, from the Boeing 787 Dreamliner to the engine in your car.

The way things are actually made in the world today is largely invisible. But the correlations between the world today and trade pacts are all too visible. Since the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade became the World Trade Organization in 1995, since Nafta and since dozens of smaller trade agreements in the period that followed, wages in the developed world have been flat and manufacturing jobs have evaporated at an alarming rate. Farmers, whose goods do indeed come from one country and one country only, have faced an uphill battle to maintain domestic prices protected only by tariffs. It is, therefore, easy enough to establish a simple logic that trade pacts cause wage stagnation and job losses.

But it’s much more complicated than that. Tracking the economic effect of the free flow of goods and ideas isn’t easy. (The TPP takes an antiquated approach to intellectual property that could impede the free flow of ideas by strengthening the enforcement of trademarks and copyrights.) A binary view of trade as countries making stuff and selling stuff overlooks not only the multiple-countries-of-origin problem, but also the vast trade in services that we struggle to measure and understand. Tourism and travel of foreign visitors to America, for instance, are counted as a U.S. export of services. And it is one of the major U.S. exports to the world today—at more than $150 billion, it accounts for nearly 9% of all U.S. exports.

Yet the trade debate primarily focuses on goods, because that is what most people think of when they think of trade, and because monthly Census Bureau trade figures by country report only goods. Over the past few decades, the U.S. has imported more and more goods, such as the iPhone, and exported more and more services, such as ideas and tourism. Millions of jobs directly relied on the old export of goods in traditional industries, but the new model of ideas and services employs fewer people directly and who-knows-how-many indirectly. We know how to count what has been lost; we have hardly begun to figure out what is being gained. That helps explain why so many associate more trade with fewer jobs.

The fight over the TPP is a 20th-century argument over who makes what and sells what across borders that are increasingly porous—and cannot contain the flow of ideas and commerce that will define the years ahead.

Mr. Karabell, the head of global strategy at Envestnet, is the author of “The Leading Indicators: A Short History of the Numbers That Rule Our World” (Simon & Schuster, 2014).

http://la.curbed.com/archives/2015/07/bay_boys_lunada_bay_surf_gang.php

From 4% to 16%?!?

http://www.dickmorris.com/here-comes-bernie-sanders-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports

http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/05/gov_bobby_jindal_issues_religi.html

In the 2016 Presidential thread CF has already been discussed a bit, but with her official candidacy and my having seen her this morning on FOX, I have decided to give her her own thread.

IMHO she will improve the Reps chances by being an effective pit bull against Hillary in a way that the men fear to.

She was asked about her qualifications for foreign affairs this morning and I was surprised at how effective her answer was.  She spoke well of the various national leaders with whom she has interacted (Putin, Netanyahu, many more) and when asked what she would do differently without hesitation she rattled off a list that looks surprisingly close to mine-- another famous lurker on our forum perhaps? 

1) Arm the Kurds directly;
2) Give King Abullah of Jordan the military supplies that he asks for;
3) Share military intel with Egypt; support Al-Sisi in his brave stance against "the cancerin Islam", support him when he attacks ISIS in Libya, etc.

CF may surprise in how well she performs and in how far she goes.   I would be VERY surprised though if she went all the way.

 

http://www.tpnn.com/2015/01/27/which-potential-gop-presidential-candidate-did-rush-limbaugh-say-has-the-blueprint-for-defeating-the-left/

http://www.mikehuckabee.com/index.cfm?p=featured-video&s=8KQ6

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/09/30/the_case_against_qatar_funding_extremists_salafi_syria_uae_jihad_muslim_brotherhood_taliban?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=*Editors%20Picks&utm_campaign=2014_EditorsPicks09%2F30RS  

I found this read quite interesting.

We need a bit more levity around here, hence a thread dedicated to Shotgun Joe:

http://www.ijreview.com/2014/03/122477-veep-biden-claims-led-fight-poland-joining-nato-didnt/

Life retains its ability to surprise:

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie just spoke out against the failed drug war in his inauguration speech! http://bit.ly/1f3Q1BE

http://www.artfido.com/blog/100-of-the-best-street-art-photos-for-2013/

CARSON: Heeding the warning signs of America’s dramatic decline
By Ben S. Carson
Tuesday, November 12, 2013

    People wait for a bus outside a shuttered art center in Detroit. Mayor Dave Bing is challenging the Census Bureau's count that put the city's population below the important threshold of 750,000, the level needed to qualify for some state and federal aid programs. (Associated Press)

What do the following five things have in common? The highest corporate-tax rate in the world; high personal and small-business taxes; the Affordable Care Act; an oppressive regulatory atmosphere with intimidation rather than help from the government; and overly aggressive environmental-protection policies.

These five things — along with the devaluing of the U.S. dollar by the constant printing of money backed up by nothing but reputation — are largely responsible for an extremely sluggish economy that has little hope of improvement without a drastic change in economic philosophy.

I was recently talking to a couple of very well-known entrepreneurs who had been extremely successful in creating vibrant businesses in the past.

Both said they would not even consider starting a new business in the current economic environment. I also asked some people who had started companies that are household names whether they think they could have succeeded in today’s environment. Their answer was a resounding no.

This economic environment is toxic for growth. Americans must face the reality that our massive federal debt will eventually drown our children if we don’t have the courage to act now and stop kicking the can down the road.

It may feel good to some to print money at will and borrow as long as someone will lend us money, but what does this say about our compassion for those who will follow us?

Having grown up in Detroit, I am particularly sad to see what has happened to a once-vibrant city that was the wealthiest in the nation. Many blame unions for strangling the goose that laid the golden egg, but unions serve their members and seldom have a big-picture perspective that takes into account the well-being of the larger society.

I believe a great deal of the fault resides with the upper management of the Big Three automobile companies, who tolerated the excesses of the unions. They must have been fully aware that in due time, the consequences of such actions would be devastating not only to the automobile companies, but to the city, the state and the nation.

Of course, by that time, they would have long ago escaped with their golden parachutes. Detroit is but a harbinger of the fate that will befall our beloved nation if we don’t heed the warnings so vividly placed before us.

Moreover, this toxic business environment is the perfect cultural medium for the growth of victimhood and the entitlement mentality. Political correctness dictates that one should never say such a thing for fear of being labeled heartless.  I not only reject outright such foolishness, but rather I feel very strongly that these measures that suppress economic development also suppress the hopes and dreams of many Americans.

I fear that the secular progressives have been winning lately by succeeding in convincing large portions of the population that they should be more concerned about the benefits they can collect than about the opportunities they lose when their God-given talents for achievement are replaced with dependence on government.

We need to understand the connection between dynamic economic growth and the general welfare of the people. For anyone who does not understand: Robust economic growth creates plenty of jobs and opportunities for everyone and decreases the need for government dependency.

Some on the side of big government will say, “There you go again talking about trickle-down economic theory,” as they attempt to denigrate the empirical data supporting the validity of supply-side economics. I don’t think it’s necessary to attach fancy nomenclature to a theory of common sense.

I am extremely encouraged by the resurgence of rationality I am seeing all around our country. I see people who understand that by adopting a reasonable corporate-tax rate, we can reverse the flow of economic activity out of our country.

By adopting reasonable individual and small-business tax rates, we can again encourage hard work and entrepreneurship. By taking this opportunity to look at some alternative methods of providing truly affordable health care to everyone in our nation and working together, we can all win. By having a government that minds its own constitutional business and stays out of ours, we will see a revival of the can-do attitude with explosive entrepreneurial successes.

By having an Environmental Protection Agency that works with our technological institutions, we can safely exploit the largest reserves of natural energy in the world and stop supporting those nations that desire our destruction.

We can do all this and more if we use our talents in a synergistic manner and forget about who gets the credit. Most importantly, we must remember that we have a responsibility to those who will follow us. Please, let us not fail them.

Ben S. Carson is professor emeritus of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/nov/12/carson-heeding-the-warning-signs-of-decline/#ixzz2kv0z90EC
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

Woof All:

This thread is for admitting where we thought we were wrong.

I'll kick things off.

Like many, I anticipated huge inflation due to the Fed printing scandalous amounts of money.   Though this may yet happen due to the inherent contradictions of the path upon which we are embarked, I have come to belief that Scott Grannis has been correct on this point-- that bank reserves are not the same thing as printing money.

TAC!
Marc

The importance of the US electrical grid and its increasing dilapidation is a theme that first crossed my radar screen in the year 2000 at Huber-Mills Powercosm conference.  Also, as technology evolves, the quality requirements of the electricity itself ("high nines"-- i.e. smoothing out farts in the flow of the current) evolve as well.

Despite the trillions spent on "shovel ready jobs investing in America's future", as best as I can tell little to none of it has made it to desperately needed upgrades to the US grid.  Furthermore, it appears that our grid may well have been infiltrated by the Chinese, to disrupt at will should ever they see fit to do so.

It is against that background I open this thread-- unfortunately with a piece from Pravda on the Hudson.  

Ideas to Bolster Power Grid Run Up Against the System’s Many Owners
Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

Turbines in central Kansas, where there are few major power lines.
By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: July 12, 2013


WASHINGTON — Bill Richardson often denigrated America’s power transmission network as a “third-world grid” when he was President Bill Clinton’s energy secretary, but the more current description of it is “balkanized,” with 500 separate owners. Marc L. Spitzer, a former member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said even that analogy was not harsh enough.


Bill Richardson, the former energy secretary, who called the American network a “third-world grid.”

“To call the U.S. grid balkanized would insult the Macedonians,” he said.

When President Obama presented his plans last month for executive action that would cut emissions of greenhouse gases, one item on his list was strengthening the power grid. It was on the lists of President George W. Bush and Mr. Clinton, too. But for the most part, experts say the grid is not being changed, at least not on a scale big enough to make much difference.

Their view is reflected in what they say is a largely hypothetical three-year effort by hundreds of engineers to redraw the grid for the eastern two-thirds of the United States. Engineers in the project, which is now drawing to a close, have proposed a basic redesign for beefing up the Eastern Interconnection, the part of the grid that stretches from Nova Scotia to New Orleans.

The redesign would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by replacing coal with wind energy and give the United States something it has never had, a grid designed for shipping bulk amounts of electricity across the continent. The planning, which cost $16 million, shows a substantial carbon emissions reduction.

But the project is covered with footnotes that assert that it does not represent the position of the participants.

“Our work goes into the general knowledge base of the kind of answers you would get when you ask certain policy questions,” said David Whiteley, the executive director of the Eastern Interconnection Planning Collaborative, which carried out the study. Christopher Russo, an energy consultant at Charles River Associates, which helped with the redesign, called it “a technical road map” of thousands of miles of high-capacity transmission lines, and calculations of electricity supply and load and the paths between them.

“We said, ‘Here’s what we could do,’ ” he said. “We haven’t said how we would pay for it.”

Still, drawing a sketch is a step forward. The grid is divided into regions that cover a state or a compact area (like New England) or slightly larger units, like PJM, which once stood for Pennsylvania-Jersey-Maryland but now extends through West Virginia, Ohio and the Chicago area. Almost all planning is done within those regions, as if they were islands. Federal officials say there is not even a regulatory mechanism for planning a line that does more than connect two regions.

“Given the history of this particular industry and its complexity, it is just not going to happen, at least not any time soon,” said James J. Hoecker, a former member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which has some jurisdiction over transmission lines. One problem, he said, is “resource nationalism,” in which individual states want to use local resources, whether they are coal or yet-to-be-built offshore wind, rather than importing from neighbors in a way that could be more economical.

For now, engineers in the grid redesign project have determined that conducting business as usual between 2010 and 2030 would require $18.5 billion in new transmission lines in the United States, while a system designed to integrate renewables like wind energy on a large scale would cost $115.2 billion. In some places, however, renewables could cut electricity costs by allowing the replacement of high-cost generators with lower-cost ones.

The technology, the engineering skill and even the money are all available, experts say, but the ability to reach agreement on such a grid is not. Dozens of experts said in interviews that there were simply too many players, both commercial and governmental, and too many conflicting interests.

Some of the players have a stake in cleaner or cheaper electricity, but others do not. “There are participants who have a vested interest in the high price of electricity, not the low price of electricity,” said Douglas Gotham, an industry analyst at Purdue University.

At the Illinois Citizens Utility Board, a state-chartered organization that represents consumer interests in regulatory proceedings, David Kolata, the executive director, said new lines could lower costs for customers. But, he said, “for every winner, you get just as many losers, perhaps even more losers.”

The hurdles are particularly acute with wind. Electricity can be made from natural gas almost anywhere, because a superb gas network, built under federal regulation over the last 60 years, will move the gas to wherever it is most convenient to burn it. Energy from coal can also be made almost anywhere. But to make electricity from wind, the generator has to be where the resource is, and for wind, that means places with few major power lines.

In Kansas, for example, sites are available where the wind is so strong that over the course of a year, a wind machine will produce half of its theoretical maximum capacity — an excellent output. But wind machines are more common in eastern locations where energy production is only one-third of the theoretical maximum.

“You could expect 40 or 50 percent more energy” with wind machines in western Kansas, said Michael Skelly, the president of Clean Line Energy Partners, a company that is trying to build, piecemeal, elements of the current plan. In an end run around the traditional regulatory process, Clean Line’s transmission lines would be a bit like private toll roads, financed outside the usual system, and available under contract. The company is planning four large projects but faces significant regulatory hurdles.

The existing grid also makes it difficult to predict the energy output from wind projects. At a single wind farm, energy production can range from zero to 100 percent. But with hundreds of wind farms networked together, production would almost never be zero. Utility planners could in fact derive a minimum likely capacity, an important statistic as more resources are poured into building wind farms.

However, wind energy works only if it is widely shared. Already, there are times in the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest when wind production exceeds demand in the regions to which it can be easily sent. Electricity is a supply chain with a time lag even shorter than the one for sushi. If the power cannot be sent somewhere instantly, it is useless.

For now, there is simply no momentum for a transmission system that would connect the best sites for renewable energy with the biggest areas of demand. “There’s no overall transmission planning for the entire interconnection,” said Vladimir S. Koritarov, deputy director of the Center for Energy, Environmental and Economic Systems Analysis at Argonne National Laboratory.

There is some hope for individual projects, although experts say they are the equivalent of building Interstate highways one route at a time.

“We’ve found a lot of different ways that transmission will fail to be built,” said David S. Hamilton, the director for clean energy of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign “This, at least, is one that has not yet failed.”

from Wikipedia:

Rafael Edward "Ted" Cruz (born December 22, 1970) is an American politician and the junior United States Senator for the state of Texas, in office since 2013. He is a member of the Republican Party.

Cruz was Solicitor General of Texas from 2003 to May 2008, appointed by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott. He was the first Hispanic Solicitor General in Texas,[2] the youngest Solicitor General in the United States, and had the longest tenure in Texas history. He was formerly a partner at the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, where he led the firm’s U.S. Supreme Court and national appellate litigation practice.[3]

He previously served as the director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission, an Associate Deputy Attorney General at the United States Department of Justice, and as Domestic Policy Advisor to U.S. President George W. Bush on the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign. In addition, Cruz was an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Texas School of Law in Austin, where he taught U.S. Supreme Court litigation, from 2004 to 2009.

Cruz was the Republican nominee for the Senate seat which was vacated by fellow Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison.[4] On July 31, 2012, he defeated Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst in the Republican primary runoff, 57%–to-43%.[5] Cruz defeated the Democrat, former state Representative Paul Sadler, in the general election held on November 6, 2012; he prevailed with 56%-to–41% over Sadler.[5] Cruz is endorsed by the Tea Party Movement and the Republican Liberty Caucus.[6]

On November 14, 2012, Cruz was appointed vice-chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.[7]

Contents [hide]
1 Early life and education
2 Legal career
3 U.S. Senate
3.1 2012 election
3.2 Committee assignments
4 Personal life
5 Electoral history
5.1 2012 Republican primary
5.2 2012 Republican primary runoff
5.3 2012 General Election
6 See also
7 References
8 External links
 

[edit] Early life and educationCruz was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where his parents, Eleanor Darragh and Rafael Cruz, were working in the oil business.[8][9] His father was a Cuban immigrant to the United States during the Cuban Revolution.[10] His mother was born and reared in Delaware, in a family of Irish and Italian descent.[9][11] Cruz's family returned to the U.S. when he was four years old.[10]

Cruz attended high school at Faith West Academy in Katy, Texas,[12] and then graduated from Second Baptist High School in Houston.

Cruz graduated cum laude from Princeton University in 1992.[13] While at Princeton, he competed for the American Whig-Cliosophic Society's Debate Panel and won the top speaker award at both the 1992 U.S. National Debating Championship and the 1992 North American Debating Championship.[14] In 1992, he was named U.S. National Speaker of the Year and Team of the Year (with his debate partner, David Panton).[15] Cruz was also a semi-finalist at the 1995 World Universities Debating Championship.[16]

Cruz's senior thesis on the separation of powers, titled "Clipping the Wings of Angels," draws its inspiration from a passage attributed to James Madison: "If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." Cruz argued that the drafters of the Constitution intended to protect the rights of their constituents, and the last two items in the Bill of Rights offered an explicit stop against an all-powerful state. Cruz wrote: "They simply do so from different directions. The Tenth stops new powers, and the Ninth fortifies all other rights, or non-powers." [17][18]

Cruz then attended the Harvard Law School, graduating magna cum laude in 1995.[19][20] While at Harvard Law, Cruz was a primary editor of the Harvard Law Review, and executive editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and a founding editor of the Harvard Latino Law Review.[13] As a student at Harvard Law, Professor Alan Dershowitz said, “Cruz was off-the-charts brilliant.”[21]

[edit] Legal careerCruz served as a law clerk to William Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States, and J. Michael Luttig of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.[22][2] Cruz was the first Hispanic ever to clerk for a Chief Justice of the United States.[23]

Cruz served as an associate deputy attorney general in the U.S. Justice Department and as the director of policy planning at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission under President George W. Bush.[21]

In 2003, Cruz was appointed Solicitor General of Texas by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott.[2]

Cruz has authored more than 80 United States Supreme Court briefs and presented 43 oral arguments, including nine before the United States Supreme Court.[2][21][24] In the landmark case of District of Columbia v. Heller, Cruz drafted the amicus brief signed by attorneys general of 31 states, which said that the D.C. handgun ban should be struck down as infringing upon the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.[24][25] Cruz also presented oral argument for the amici states in the companion case to Heller before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.[24][26] Cruz did legal work during the Florida recount during the Presidential campaign of Bush/Cheney 2000.[27]

In addition to his victory in Heller, Cruz has successfully defended the Ten Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds,[21][24] the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools[21] and the majority of the 2003 Texas redistricting plan.[28]

Cruz also successfully defended, in Medellin v. Texas, the State of Texas against an attempt by the International Court of Justice to re-open the criminal convictions of 51 murderers on death row throughout the United States.[2][21][24]

Cruz has been named by American Lawyer magazine as one of the 50 Best Litigators under 45 in America,[29][30] by The National Law Journal as one of the 50 Most Influential Minority Lawyers in America,[31][32] and by Texas Lawyer as one of the 25 Greatest Texas Lawyers of the Past Quarter Century.[33][34]

[edit] U.S. Senate[edit] 2012 electionMain article: United States Senate election in Texas, 2012
 
Cruz speaking to the Values Voters Summit in October 2011.Cruz's election has been described by the Washington Post as “the biggest upset of 2012 . . . a true grassroots victory against very long odds.”[35] On January 19, 2011, following an announcement that U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison would not seek reelection, Cruz announced via blogger conference call his candidacy for the position.[4] Cruz faced opposition from sitting Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst in the Republican senatorial primary. Cruz was endorsed by the Club for Growth, a fiscally conservative political action committee;[36] Erick Erickson, editor of prominent conservative blog RedState;[37] the FreedomWorks for America super PAC;[38] nationally syndicated radio host Mark Levin;[39] former Attorney General Edwin Meese;[40] Tea Party Express;[41] Young Conservatives of Texas;[42] and U.S. Senators Tom Coburn,[43] Jim DeMint,[44] Mike Lee,[45] Rand Paul,[46] and Pat Toomey.[47] He was also endorsed by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and former Texas Congressman Ron Paul,[48] George P. Bush[27] and former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania Rick Santorum.[49]

Cruz won the runoff for the Republican nomination with a 14-point margin over Dewhurst.[50] In the November 6 general election, Cruz faced the Democratic nominee Paul Sadler, an attorney and a former state representative from Henderson in east Texas. In the general election, Cruz prevailed with 4,469,843 ballots (56.4%) to Sadler's 3,194,927 (40.6%). Two minor candidates held the remaining 3% of the ballots cast.[5] Cruz won 35% of the Hispanic vote in the general election.[51]

[edit] Committee assignmentsCommittee on Armed Services
Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities
Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support
Subcommittee on Seapower
Committee on the Judiciary
Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights (Ranking Member)
Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism
Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security
Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation
Subcommittee on Aviation Operations, Safety, and Security
Subcommittee on Science and Space (Ranking Member)
Committee on Rules and Administration
Special Committee on Aging
[edit] Personal lifeCruz was born and spent the first four years of his life in Calgary before his parents returned to Houston. His father was jailed and tortured by the Fulgencio Batista regime and fought for Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolution[52] but "didn't know Castro was a Communist" and later became a staunch critic of Castro when "the rebel leader took control and began seizing private property and suppressing dissent."[53] Rafael Cruz moved to Austin in 1957 to study at the University of Texas. He spoke no English and had $100 sewn into his underwear.[24][54] The elder Cruz worked his way through school as a dishwasher making 50 cents an hour.[21] Cruz's father today is a pastor in North Dallas and became a U.S. citizen in 2005.[17] Cruz’s mother, who was from Delaware, was the first person in her family to attend college. She earned a degree in mathematics from Rice University in Houston in the 1950s, working summers at Foley’s and Shell.[17] Cruz has said, "I'm Cuban, Irish, and Italian, and yet somehow I ended up Southern Baptist."[55]

Cruz and his wife, Heidi Cruz, have two daughters, Caroline Camille and Catherine Christiane. Cruz met his wife while working on the George W. Bush presidential campaign of 2000. Cruz's wife is currently head of the Southwest Region in the Investment Management Division of Goldman, Sachs & Co. and previously worked in the White House for Condoleezza Rice and in New York as an investment banker.[56]

Woof All:

What to do when the excrement hits the fan?  

CD
==============================================
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/us/in-a-shift-police-advise-taking-an-active-role-to-counter-mass-attacks.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130407

GM, BD, et al please feel free to engage here on this very interesting point.

I'll help kick things off by wondering where the Palestinians would be if they had chosen the NV route with Irsrael , , ,

Perhaps due to a couple of brief moments in my life, or perhaps due to something I cannot name, I have an afinity for owls.  Hence this thread:

NYT

I’m driving in the last of the dusk, bare trees on both sides of the road. A bird form slants silently across the highway, just above the arc of the headlights. Impossible to say what color it is, but it is an owl. It is all I ever see of owls up around my farm, that swift, peripheral, ghosting drift across an opening in the trees. Every time I see one I remember the great gray owl that I saw years ago above a hilly dirt road just before dawn in southern Montana. It was as though a cumulonimbus cloud had been compressed into bird shape and given stern yellow eyes.


I see a lot of wildlife in the course of my day. There are the crows that wait in the maple tree until the barn cat has finished eating on the deck. They look far less sagacious when they have a bit of cat food in their beaks. Every time I go out to the chicken yard, I scare up a red-tailed hawk. It sits on a hickory branch above the hens, which are safe beneath a net. Its fierce serenity looks more like petulance as it flies off, having put in another day watching what it cannot have. In the dark, I walk out into the pasture with Ceilidh, the Border terrier, and we can sense the deer, which have gone gray with winter.

But I would like to see more owls. Maybe they are out there keeping an eye out — the great horned and screech, saw-whet and short-eared and the barn owl. One summer dusk I’d like to go out and have the owls make themselves as visible as the bats that drop out of my eaves.

And I would like a holiday when all the hidden creatures around the farm would make themselves apparent just for an hour or two. They step out from their camouflage, from their hidden bowers, from their holes and burrows and nests and recesses. The owls would surely be among them. VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Peer Power, from Potholes to Patents
Beyond big business and big government, decentralized groups are coming together to solve problems.
By STEVEN JOHNSON

If you listened only to the chatter of this campaign season, you might assume that all our core political values revolve around the two institutions of the market and the state, big capital and big government. If you're on the right, you want the market to do its magic and have the state get out of the way. If you're on the left, you want the market to be held in check by the regulators and safety nets of the state.

But seeing the world through these easy oppositions blinds us to the growing prominence of a group of new organizations: fluid, collaborative networks working outside both the marketplace and the state to improve the world in inventive ways. Inspired in many cases by the decentralization of the Internet, the movement uses the peer network as its organizing principle, with no single individual or group "in charge."

Fix this pothole! Ordinary citizens can report neighborhood problems on SeeClickFix.

In all these efforts you can see the emergence of a new political philosophy. It takes seriously Hayek's insight about the power of decentralized systems to outperform top-heavy bureaucracies, but it also believes that innovation and progress can come from forms of collaboration beyond the market. I like to call the members of this movement "the peer progressives."

Not surprisingly, some of the most prominent examples of peer-network success have emerged online, in the global encyclopedia of Wikipedia or the arts-funding site Kickstarter. But they are also flourishing in localities around the world.

Consider the maps released earlier this month by the New Haven, Conn., organization SeeClickFix. Zooming in on a city neighborhood, you will see clusters of color hovering over certain blocks. Those bands indicate urban problems that ordinary citizens have reported using the SeeClickFix app: gaping potholes, abandoned cars, graffiti. So far, city governments have used the data to address more than 125,000 cases in neighborhoods across the U.S.

Other organizations, such as neighbor.ly, are taking the problem-solving one step further, creating a Kickstarter-style platform where neighbors can propose and crowdfund new projects in their communities: bike racks, community gardens, playground swings.

Peer networks don't have to involve digital technology. Twenty years ago, the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre pioneered a radical new technique called "participatory budgeting." Each year, the city's 16 regions conduct general assemblies in which neighbors debate priorities for the budget: school construction, sewer repair, bridge building. The assemblies create a ranked list of projects, and the government disperses funds accordingly. The money comes from the state, but the decision of what to fund comes from the street.

Participatory budgets transformed Porto Alegre almost immediately. Within seven years, the number of citizens with access to the sewer system doubled. The number of new paved roads jumped to 12 miles a year from 2½ miles. The idea has spread world-wide: Roughly 10% of municipal budgets in Spain are now allocated based on civic participation, and districts of Chicago and Brooklyn have recently adopted the approach.

Another seminal project is the Peer-to-Patent system, designed by the New York University professor Beth Noveck to solve the bottleneck of patent review. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office receives roughly a half-million applications a year, many involving arcane pharmaceutical or technological advances. Someone inside the government must review and make an informed judgment on each one. Because the search for "prior art"—earlier instances of the invention that would negate the patent claim—is complex, the backlog of applications had grown to 1.2 million in 2009.

Prof. Noveck's system allows unpaid outside experts and informed amateurs to contribute to the prior-art discovery phase, through both tracking down and explaining earlier inventions. Based on its success so far in reducing the backlog (now down to 600,000 applications, thanks to a number of factors) and expanding the range of discovery, the U.S. patent office last week launched a full-scale version, "Patent Exchange," that allows citizens to participate in every patent under review. Pilots of Peer-to-Patent have also been launched in the U.K., Japan and Australia.

For two centuries, we have lived in a mass society defined by passive consumption, vast corporate hierarchies and the centralized control of state power. Those organizations didn't seem artificial to us because we couldn't imagine alternatives. But now we can. Peer networks are a practical, functioning reality that already underlies the dominant communications platform of our age. They can do things as ambitious as writing a global encyclopedia or as simple as fixing a pothole.

—Mr. Johnson is the author of "Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age," published this month by Riverhead Books, a member of the Penguin Group.

I often find Thomas Friedman fatuous, but this piece seems to me quite interesting.
=================================

In China We (Don’t) Trust
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: September 11, 2012 40 Comments
 


One of the standard lines about China’s economy is that the Chinese are good at copying, but they could never invent a Hula-Hoop. It’s not in their DNA, we are told, and their rote education system reinforces that tendency. I’m wondering about that: How is it that a people who invented papermaking, gunpowder, fireworks and the magnetic compass suddenly only became capable of assembling iPods? I’m wondering if what’s missing in China today is not a culture of innovation but something more basic: trust.

When there is trust in society, sustainable innovation happens because people feel safe and enabled to take risks and make the long-term commitments needed to innovate. When there is trust, people are willing to share their ideas and collaborate on each other’s inventions without fear of having their creations stolen. The biggest thing preventing modern China from becoming an innovation society, which is imperative if it hopes to keep raising incomes, is that it remains a very low-trust society.

I’ve been struck at how many Chinese businesspeople and investors have volunteered that point to me this week. China is caught in a gap between its old social structure of villages and families, which created its own form of trust, and a new system based on the rule of law and an independent judiciary. The Communist Party destroyed the first but has yet to build the second because it would mean ceding the party’s arbitrary powers. So China has a huge trust deficit.

To see what happens when you introduce just a little more trust in this society, spend a day, as I just did, participating in the “AliFest” — the annual gathering of thousands of Chinese entrepreneurs who are linked together in the giant Chinese e-commerce Web site Alibaba.com. Founded in 1999, Alibaba says its sales this year could top eBay and Amazon.com combined. This happened, in part, because it has built trusted, credible markets of buyers and sellers inside China, connecting consumers, inventors and manufacturers who would have found it hard to do transactions before.

Alibaba has three major businesses: Taobao.com and Tmall.com, which together constitute a giant online marketplace where anyone in the world can go to buy or sell anything — from Procter & Gamble selling toothpaste to Chinese companies offering their engineering prowess. The Tao companies this year are expected to move some $150 billion in merchandise between buyers and sellers, mostly in China.

The second is Alibaba.com, where, if you want to make rubber sandals that play “The Star Spangled Banner,” you click on Alibaba and it will link you with dozens of Chinese shoemakers that will compete for your business.

And, lastly, there is Alipay, a Chinese version of PayPal that can enable, for example, a small Chinese manufacturer in the hinterland to sell its goods to a Chinese consumer in Shanghai. The buyer puts his money in escrow with Alibaba and it is released to the seller only when the buyer says he got the goods he ordered. Presto: trust. What has been the impact? There are more than 500 million Chinese Taobao users and 600 million Alipay accounts.

While here in Hangzhou, I visited the workshop of Robert Luo, the president of Classic-Maxim, a firm he started to make kitschy wall art for hotels, using foreign designs. Luo used to drum up sales by flying to trade shows, but, in 2006, he got a huge American order through the Alibaba platform, enabling him to greatly expand his business. He has since shifted from doing outsourced artwork for others to hiring Chinese and foreign artists to produce his own original designs. “We design so much now” — outdoor art, solar art — and “we’ve applied for so many U.S. patents,” he said.

There are two trends to watch from all this: One, argued Ming Zeng, Alibaba’s chief strategist, is that Alibaba — which now serves more than 100 million consumers daily, through 6.5 million retail shops connected to 20 million manufacturers — is, in effect, creating “a virtual combination industrial park and online marketplace,” where anyone in China or abroad can come to invent, collaborate or buy and sell goods or services.

Alibaba, Zeng predicted, will eventually connect in some way with Facebook, Amazon, eBay, Apple, Baidu, LinkedIn and others to create a giant trusted virtual “global commercial grid,” where individuals and companies will offer their talents and buy and sell products, designs and inventions.

Eventually, Zeng argued, “every individual will have to find a way to succeed” on this global grid. “National boundaries will offer you no protection.”

The other trend is that the Chinese will be big players on this grid. The creation of global trusted business frameworks like Alibaba is starting to enable a new generation of Chinese innovators — who are low cost, but high skilled — to extend their reach. We’ve seen cheap labor out of China; now we’re going to see more cheap genius.

Which is why Phillip Brown and Hugh Lauder, in a recent essay on Eurozine.com, argued that a big shift of the global labor market is under way, in which “many of the things we thought could only be done in the West can now be done anywhere in the world, not only more cheaply but sometimes better.”