I'm just speculating...

You may have noticed a lot of chatter this week about the Damned Oil Speculator, a cruel beast whose malicious drive for Profit has no heart for the Plight of the Innocent SUV-Driving Suburbanite. There were commentaries. There were complaints. And, in the end, there were Congressional Hearings, with much associated Preening.

What there didn't seem to be was a lot of Common Sense. I'm no financier, but here's my limited understanding of how the market works: oil is a commodity. That means it can be bought and sold based on anticipation of its future price. This is good because it allows entities that buy a lot of fuel over time to anticipate, and to some degree control, their fuel expenses. And it allows energy companies to anticipate, and to some degree control, income. And it runs, naturally, on speculation -- anticipation by people of whether the price over time is going to go up or down. Which has to do with supply, and with demand, in the same way that all markets do. And since for every seller there is a buyer, this should be a self-policing process: for every person who thinks that prices will go up, another thinks that prices will go down. Speculation.

What seems to me to have happened is that the market has caught up with itself. It's not that oil costs twice as much because it's half as available today as it was six months ago, it's that the market consciousness has begun to acknowledge that oil is, incredibly, not an infinite resource dependent only on the the willingness of OPEC to create it from thin air. In other words, I think we've had $4 gasoline for years, and just haven't realized it. And now we do. Which is not all bad.

Like I said, I don't really know a thing about this stuff, so I've felt a little leery about jumping into a long discussion about it. But then I ran into this article in today's NYT, which says basically the same thing, and more.

JEK
Weekend economist

MPG Illusion

After watching this 4 minute video, you'll never look at MPG math the same way.

Turns out we should use GPM instead of MPG. Confused? You wont be after these fine folks from Duke are through with you.



POHS

Pork Invaders

The McCain website is really an endless source of great amusement. They seem to have taken down their prominent link for golf gear, but they have replaced it with an online video game. It fairly screams: "We are totally hip to these modern days, these 1980s!"

JEK
Prefers the current millennium, all things considered

RxCreative Goes Live

Many of you have no doubt said to yourselves: those guys at Nation Indivisible are so...creative. And so science-y and medical! Why don't they have a corporate arm, in which they cater to the creative needs of doctorate-holders, and the doctorate needs of creative-types. We've been asking ourselves that very same question, actually, and today we go live with the answer: RxCreative.com. Tell everyone you know -- particularly if they work for Shonda Rimes.

JEK
At the forefront of...something.

Shuffling the world

My cousin Liz just sent this to me, and I gotta say, even as person without a huge amount of rhythm, that I thought it was pretty great. Great footage, great adventure, great example of corporate sponsorship doing something interesting (he's sponsored by Stride gum).


Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

JEK
Often wishes he was more the dancer

Email from the Afterlife

We've talked a little bit about the coming apocalypse on Nation Indivisible, in a thread I would not have anticipated when this project started. But I don't think we've addressed the Rapture...something that the writers on this blog, at least, are unlikely to experience. But it's nice to know that there are some good evangelicals out there who have thought to provide a way for them to continue to nag us after they've gone off to Heaven, leaving us behind. Their scheme depends on email remaining up even when all the Christians are gone, but knowing what I do about Silicon Valley this seems like a safe bet.

JEK
Lapsed Unitarian, but somehow manages to be moral all the same

Floods

I'm only just realizing the gravity of the floods in Iowa and Illinois, the post below notwithstanding. I guess I have a tendency assume that, barring the only way out of the city being a 40 mile drive across Lake Pondchartrain, floods are an annoyance that should teach decadent people to be a little less entitled about their SUVs. Which is to my real discredit. But I'm reading more about them now, and it's pretty sobering. Not just the people who are losing their homes, but the effect on crops at pretty much exactly the wrong time in the growing season and the demand cycle. It doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility that people will starve in Asia and Africa because of the rain in Iowa.

Right now, though, the effect is local. I think it's great that the Obama campaign site has made flood relief their primary issue on their home page...I think it's great for Iowans, for the campaign, and for the candidate. But when I followed the link to the Red Cross site, I found that what is less great is the design of the site for directing you to the donation page (it's buried within an unlikely sub-page.) So if you're inclined to donate something, and prove the efficacy of American unity, you can do it easily by clicking here instead.

JEK
Geographic empathy is a work in progress

What A President Should Do When Floods Occur

Mac vs. PC vs. Cindy

A while back I posted the NYT story about how Clinton is a PC, and Obama is a Mac. This, to me, was true, and a strong endorsement of the Obama candidacy.

Now check this out, culled from HuffPo:



JEK
PC turned Mac via DMW, who may or may not be a Republican turned liberal independent via JEK, depending on the source

Russert

I don't think I've ever watched an episode of Meet the Press.

I've been only vaguely aware of who was hosting any given presidential debate.

But all the same I've always had a soft spot for Tim Russert, based on what little I've known or heard or assumed over the years. That he was a tough, unsparing interviewer; that he didn't take no, or an unrelated talking point, for an answer; that he was revered by the people I knew in journalism, people I figured would know.

So I was sorry and shocked to see that he had died today, suddenly and unexpectedly. And moved to see Tom Brokaw crying as he reported it. And stunned to see the outpouring of the press in the hours following the first announcement. This event reminds me of the humanity of "the press". Not just because one of its big faces has just proven its mortality, but because seeing the completely over-the-top, head-of-state funeral quality of the coverage reminds me that the people in the news business, like the people in any business, know each other, know each other's spouses and kids, like and kid and goad and care about and mourn each other. And because they happen to have a very large microphone held to them, and because this is a huge event for them personally, this becomes a national news story. But really what it seems like, to me, is as though a family is in mourning, and they happen to have a bunch of cameras on them.

JEK
Admirer of those who make a lot of their lives, and are loved for it

Kelly Escapes the Locked Closet

Hurrah! R. Kelly has been acquitted!

This is great for two reasons. One is that prosecuting someone for a high-level felony on the basis of a video tape provided by someone complicit in the supposed crime, when both of the other parties, notably including the supposed victim, deny that the supposed crime ever happened, just seems like a bad idea. Particularly when heavy-handed enforcement of statutory rape seems to be one of the most frequent to occur along lines of race.

But the most important reason, by far, is that we will now not have to wait 15-20 years for the next installment of what is probably the best example of post-modernism in hip-hop that will ever exist. I'm speaking, of course, about the stunning genius that is the hip-hopera "Trapped in the Closet".

One measure of its greatness: the Weird Al parody is so well-powered by the premise that it is itself a work of greatness. That you can take the derivative of a thing and still have it be this good implies a mighty area underneath the curve:



JEK
Likes to think he knows a good thing when he sees it

War, Inc.

Check out this movie. It's a satire of private companies profiting from war.

I'm surprised I haven't heard of it before, since it's been out since May 23 and has a star filled cast. Apparently there's no ad money for it and, well, I guess this is just the kind of grassroots word of mouth it needs.



Review from The Huffington Post.

Movie Web Site.

pohs

State of the Union

Speaking of youtube videos, this one cracked me up. I like Condoleezza's nod. It's like taking an x-ray of Bush's speech.


pohs

VP picks... Similar or Different?

When it comes to picking a running mate, there's two schools of thought; pick someone different or pick someone similar. In other words, pick someone who is strong in whatever the candidate is weakest or someone who reinforces the candidate's strengths.

Of course, a good VP pick will do both, and more. Such as, win at least one state that you'd otherwise lose, match up favorably in VP debates, have no skeletons in the closet... Oh yeah, and somewhere down on the list is whether or not they'd make a good president.

I'm of the school of thought that you should pick someone similar. It helps give your campaign one consistant message. Having a clear story line, or narrative seems to be the most important thing in modern presidential elections. Marketing execs figured out a while ago that humans naturally tend toward narrative. It would be wonderful if every American could look at a list of Obama and McCain's positions and decide with whom they sided and vote accordingly, but people don't like to process data. It takes time and energy, and it's hard to remember. Instead we like to make stories.

So, in this election we have the story lines of McCain as the experienced vetran with the strength to navigate the dangerous war and Obama as an inspriational force, transcending old politics to heal a wounded nation and navigate a damaging war. It would be wise for both candidates to pick running mates that don't go against these story lines.

Obama should not pick Jim Webb, Sam Nunn or Hillary Clinton. He should pick Bill Richardson or Colin Powell.

McCain, I'd like to see pick Pat Buchanan.

pohs
the article on Bill Richardson is particularly convincing.

YouTube Moments

The link to the MoveOn site, which really is pretty amazing, is here.

JEK
Procrastinating for the future of our country

Free Obama Bumper Sticker

Get a free Obama Bumper Sticker from MoveOn.org. The first one is absolutely free. I gave a $20 donation and I'm getting 10 bumper stickers. Don't know what I'm going to do with them, but I'm so excited. I almost gave $25 and got 100 bumper stickers, but I really didn't know what I was going to do with 100 bumper stickers.

Tell all your friends who live in battleground states!

https://pol.moveon.org/obamastickers/

POHS

It's not a loss, it's a win.

So, since the big victory, the press has been full of news about the election. And it seems to me that almost all of that coverage has been about how Clinton lost. How her advisors failed her, her organization failed her, her Iowa strategy failed her, her fundraisers failed her, her husband failed her.

These post-mortems are satisfying, in their way.

But they seem to be missing one essential reason, every one of them, every time:

What if one reason that Hillary lost was that Obama was a better candidate?

After all these months, all these displays of great campaigning by how did we get back to the Clinton as Presumptive Nominee, upset through her own fault? This line of argument passively dismisses Obama's legitimacy as the strongest candidate, and I hope they fight this line of reasoning hard if it continues past the weekend.

JEK
Schadenfreude will only take him so far

Contrasts

If you scroll back a piece, you'll see a message and a comment thread about the MoveOn contest for movies about Barack Obama.

Now see it done McCain style (courtesy of TPM, who first pointed this out):



TPM also has this story today demonstrating quite clearly the target demographic of the Republican camp.

Fore!

JEK
Can't, just can't, get behind golf

Alternative entertainment

Well.

All's well that ends, is all I have to say.

It'll be a few days before the general election starts up in earnest. In the meantime, this should help to pass the time:

Beatbox Fame Game
Uploaded by loranger

And to crib from our original post, here's a nice reminder of January...and hopefully, November:




JEK
Has faith in talent, political and otherwise.