The problem with wind energy is that it drives prices down! From Bloomberg news:

After years of getting government incentives to install windmills, operators in Europe may have become their own worst enemy, reducing the total price paid for electricity in Germany, Europe’s biggest power market, by as much as 5 billion euros some years, according to a study this week by Poeyry, a Helsinki-based industry consultant.

Jerome a Paris has an excellent discussion of the article over at The Oil Drum. He also links from there to an excellent (and entirely wonky) discussion of the proper pricing of wind power. It is a great article – one key takeaway is that wind power actually brings electricity prices down! Understanding that assertion requires a discussion of marginal costs, initial investments, demand curves, spot pricing, intermittency, externalities, and Spitzenlast (see above), but it’s totally worth it.

Another key point is that “market” pricing actually tilts the playing field toward fuel-based generation of electricity, because of its lower capital and debt-servicing requirements:

selecting market mechanisms to set electricity prices (rather than regulating them) is, again, not technology neutral: here as well, deregulated markets are structurally more favorable to fossil fuel-based generation sources than publicly regulated price environments.

So while I definitely wanted to highlight the issues around wind power (and point you to some excellent, informed commentary), I mostly just wanted an excuse to show that graph! SPITZENLAST!

“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.”

That’s from General Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, quoted in the New York Times. He’s referring specifically to soldiers at military checkpoints who engage in “escalation of force” against people, usually in vehicles, who behave in ways the soldiers perceive to be threatening.

The whole situation is extremely complicated, but it bears repeating: Afghanistan never attacked the United States. The people of Afghanistan never posed a threat to the United States. The alleged perpetrators of the attacks of September 11, 2001 were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Lebanon (all nominal “allies” of the United States). The United States had no basis under international law for its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan: such behavior constitutes a war of aggression.

Sixty years ago, the United States government helped to articulate the gravity of a war of aggression: it is “not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Nine years into this unprovoked war, the US general in charge admits “we have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.” Though he was talking about checkpoints, his comments could easily apply to the enterprise as a whole.

What will be our reward here in the United States for such international cruelty?

“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just” (Thomas Jefferson, 1783).

…from 1961! Voiced by the actor RONALD REAGAN!

“One of the traditional methods of imposing Statism or Socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it. Now, the American people, if you put it to them about Socialized Medicine and gave them a chance to choose, would unhesitatingly vote against it. We had an example of this: under the Truman Administration, it was proposed that we have a compulsory health insurance program for all people in the United States. And, of course, the American people unhesitatingly rejected this.”

This recording was distributed in 1961 as an LP, and was apparently funded by the American Medical Association. You can read all about it on Wikipedia!

President Obama is now out on tour daring the Republicans to try to repeal the new health care reform law. Here’s what he said yesterday:

“If they want to have that fight, we can have it. Because I don’t believe the American people are going to put the insurance industry back in the driver’s seat.”

Yeah, not after we worked so hard to shove the insurance industry aside, right? I mean, before the law passed, if you wanted to buy insurance, you paid whatever the Insurance industry demanded.

Whereas now, you will be obligated by law to give your money to a private insurance company, at whatever price they name, or else pay a tax penalty.

Yessirree Bob, we certainly wouldn’t want to let the insurance industry back in the driver’s seat! We showed them who’s boss!

…Now, to be fair: eliminating lifetime payout caps, limiting annual payout caps, and requiring the companies to accept customers regardless of pre-existing conditions are all good reforms. But there are currently no provisions for limiting the costs of insurance premiums! And, if you earn more than 400% of the Federal poverty limit, you receive NO FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE from the government (this year, the magic 400% number is about $43,000).

So, the government is mandating that you buy insurance, but they’re not setting limits on what the companies can charge for it.

I seem to remember one of the Presidential candidates opposing this idea… saying something about how it wouldn’t work, and it wasn’t fair… Now let me see, who was it again…?

Never mind, I can’t remember that far back!

Since 1997, every night before I go to sleep, I turn around three times and chant “on-gay iger-tay”. In more than thirteen years, I have not been attacked by a tiger. My method is perfect!

Everything I know about logic, reasoning, and causality, I learned from Peter Wehner, former deputy assistant to President Bush, in this op-ed:

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when virtually everyone assumed we’d be hit again, Bush put the United States on a war footing. He mobilized the entire federal government, including the military, Homeland Security, the Treasury, the FBI, our intelligence agencies and more.

We have not been attacked since.

Update 3/26/10:

I should add that I have also learned a great deal about logic and causality from former Bush administration speechwriter Marc Thiessen, from his fabulous new book Courting Disaster:

“In the decade before the C.I.A. began interrogating captured terrorists, Al Qaeda launched repeated attacks against America. In the eight years since the C.I.A. began interrogating captured terrorists, Al Qaeda has not succeeded in launching one single attack on the homeland or American interests abroad.”

Q.E.D., baby!

(BTW, the Thiessen quote comes from this excellent takedown by Jane Mayer in the current New Yorker magazine.)

Matt Taibbi breaks it down (once again). Make the time to read this and you’ll get a much better grasp on the insane shit that’s gone down over the past year of “recovery”. This “bailout” has been like having the guy who mugged you sending you his dry cleaning bills for getting your blood on his shirt AND THEN charging you interest for the bill ($1billion).

It seems to me that the calling this a “Recession” is a misnomer and misdirection. It kind of implies that this is some sort of natural dip to the economic flow. What we are really witnessing is the largest and most egregious transfer of wealth from the American tax-payers to a few large players on Wall St.

As Warren Buffet said in 2006, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

J. Edgar Hoover, that is! Via BoingBoing, I came across The Kisseloff Collection, which is author Jeff Kisseloff’s collection of photos and stories stretching back through the 1920’s. Some of the photos are gorgeous, some are disturbing, and some are just weird:

Jeff writes about working with Alger Hiss in the early 1970’s, and in the process going through more than 40,000 pages of FBI files. He recalls many of the nasty, anti-Semitic writings he found in Hoover’s personal collection, and fires off this bon mot about the FBI director:

he had his agents compile lists of left-wingers to be picked up and placed in detention camps in the event of a national emergency. If he compiled lists of right-wingers it was only for dinner invitations.

Zing!

Today, I noticed an ad for California Prop 16, with the catchline “Preserve Your Right To Vote.” Thinking that this sounded like a lot of spin, I decided to look it up.

According to Ballotpedia, this is basically an initiative funded by PG&E to make it more difficult for municipalities to start their own utilities.  It would amend the California state constitution to require that any Community Choice Aggregator be approved by a 2/3 vote.

Now, I already thought that California’s system for amending the constitution by a simple majority is ridiculous, but this really takes the cake.  (Perhaps even the lemon olive oil cake.  See below.)

Let me get this straight — you’re using a simple 50% vote to require that, in the future, individual communities need a 2/3 majority to do something?  That seems really backward.

But what really gets me is that PG&E, a monopoly public utility, is planning on spending $25-35 million dollars to singlehandedly fund the campaign for this initiative — that’s money that we’re paying them!

“The knowledge that we are slaves being bought by the hour rather than the lifetime has also been lost. We have been wage slaves for so long that we have forgotten there is any other way to live. We have forgotten that once we had land and tools and could live independently, providing for ourselves, without being forced to sell our labor power for wages.”

I’ve linked to him before… and now I’ll do it again. Highly worth reading.

Andrew Sullivan calls out Dick Cheney’s admission this weekend, “I was a big supporter of waterboarding,” and correctly notes that the former Vice President has thereby admitted to being guilty of a war crime. War Crimes must be investigated and prosecuted under U. S. law and international treaty, and the principle of Universal Jurisdiction applies (meaning, Cheney could be indicted and arrested by agents of a foreign government and held to account).

Of course, the Attorney General of the United States doesn’t seem to understand his solemn obligation:

[Attorney General Eric Holder] added that he had seen documents making clear that Cheney’s office was the driving force behind the Bush Administration’s most controversial counterterrorism policies, especially those sanctioning brutal interrogations. He said of Cheney, “I think he’s worried about what history’s judgment will be of the role that he played in making decisions about everything from black sites to enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Thanks, Eric Holder. Let’s all just sit on our hands and wait for history to render a judgment. It’s not like it’s your JOB to go around enforcing the laws of the United States!

(The Holder quote comes from this excellent article by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, which I also referenced in a prior post.)