July 23, 2008

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Peter Wehner of Contentions was surprised by Obama’s continued refusal to acknowledge the value of the surge.

In an interview yesterday with Senator Obama, ABC’s Terry Moran listed just a few of the by now seemingly endless data points demonstrating that the so-called surge, which Obama opposed at the time it was announced, is a success. Moran then asked this (excellent) question: Knowing what you know now, would you support the surge?”

Obama’s answer was, “No.”

This must surely rank as among the most misinformed, ideological, and reckless statements by a presidential candidate in modern times. The McCain campaign should do everything they can to make Obama pay a high price for it. That one word answer, “No,” should be advertised in bright neon lights. It should become Exhibit A that Obama not only doesn’t have the “judgment to lead;” he has now supplied us with evidence that few people possess judgment as flawed as his. …

Jennifer Rubin agrees. Are they preaching to the choir?

… How will all this play? It depends if the American people, after learning of the surge’s great success and the brilliance of our commander there, find it troubling that the candidate with no national security experience would throw it all away and disregard knowledgeable advice. It is peculiar in the extreme to have a nominee who when presented with potential victory says ” I wouldn’t have tried to win.” One can imagine that a victory he would not himself have pursued himself (and is apparently sorry we did) is one he has little interest in securing. Hence, his light regard for the advice of Petraeus.

The McCain camp must be celebrating. They have finally gotten lucky.

Jonah Goldberg thinks the surge is yesterday’s news. That elections are about the future.

… Politically, the surge is a bit like the Supreme Court’s recent decision affirming the constitutional right to own a gun. Obama’s position on gun rights, a miasma of murky equivocation, would hurt him if gun control were a big issue this year. It isn’t, thanks to the high court’s ruling. That’s a huge boon.

The surge has done likewise with the war. If it were going worse, McCain’s Churchillian rhetoric would match reality better. But with sectarian violence nearly gone, al Qaeda in Iraq almost totally routed and even Sadrist militias seemingly neutralized, the stakes of withdrawal seem low enough for Americans to feel comfortable voting for Obama. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s support for an American troop drawdown pushes the perceived stakes even lower.

Recall that Bill Clinton, with his dovish record and roster of “character issues,” would never have been elected if the Soviet Union hadn’t collapsed in 1991. With the Cold War over, the successful Reagan surge (and Bush pere’s cleanup efforts) made rolling the dice on Clinton tolerable. The McCain surge (and Bush fils’ success at averting another 9/11) produces the same effect for Obama.

A silver lining for McCain is that Obama’s arrogance and sense of indebtedness to his party’s antiwar base have elicited a series of credibility-damaging zigzags on Iraq. Obama would do better to promise peace with honor as soon as possible, then quickly move on to economy talk. The subsequent bleating from the bug-out lefties would be useful testament to Obama’s rumored centrism. …

David Warren comments on the tour.

Seriousness is a perception, and I am struck by the tone of American media, even from the conservative side, as they review the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. (John McCain is also running, but they’re not covering that.) The welter of his empty rhetorical gestures and contradictions are analyzed with a gravity to suggest deep thought had gone into his “evolving” electoral manifesto.

Running for the Democrat nomination, Obama posed as the reliable progressive, free of all Clintonian baggage — as a kind of “Hillary Clinton you can believe in.” He would get out of Iraq, cut a deal with Iran, bomb Pakistan, trash America’s free trade agreements, deliver socialist medicine, cool global warming, and “heal” everything that ails you. Shades of John F. Kennedy: at least in his supporters’ imagination.

Running now against a Republican, and with the progressive vote safely in the bag, he will stay the course in Iraq, confront Iran, show diplomacy in Pakistan, defend free trade, spend cautiously, ignore global warming, and “heal” everything that ails you. Shades of Ronald Reagan.

The most laughable part of the campaign is the new, first-ever, “I am the world” tour, currently in progress. Obama, realizing he has no credentials in this field, but is even more a rock star abroad than at home, seeks photo ops looking presidential in front of backdrops such as the Brandenburg Gate. Of course, he cannot get all the backdrops he wants, since his demand for them as a mere candidate for office is unprecedented, and leaves foreign leaders embarrassed that he asked. …

David Harsanyi too. He thinks Barack could learn a lot there.

The Barack Obama “Change Is Coming” World Tour touches down in Europe this week after a triumphant jaunt through the Middle East.

The trip is significant in more than one respect. After all, there is genuine (if incremental) “change” budding in European politics — most of it an attempt to turn back the kinds of stifling economic controls and regulations that the presumptive Democratic nominee seems to support here at home.

Obama will visit Germany, France and England this week. It just happens that those Western European nations have turned to right-of-center coalitions to remedy corrosive welfare systems, never-ending entitlements, unchecked union power and overregulation of industry.

In England mere months ago, the left-of-center Labor Party lost more than 400 seats in local elections, including finishing off the reign of London Mayor Ken “The Red” Livingstone.

In France, Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy swept into power in 2007, promising to cut back welfare rolls and revitalize the floundering French economy. In Germany, Angela Merkel vowed free-market reforms to undo theoretical social “safety nets” that have led to “terrifyingly high unemployment.”

Then, Silvio Berlusconi unexpectedly won Italy’s election this year, in part on the pledge to unknot the tangle of economic regulations hampering that nation.

Those are the top four economic powers in Europe. That’s officially a trend. …

Popular Mechanics has a great article on MIT engineers with simple ideas to improve living conditions in underdeveloped parts of our world.

The Peruvian village of Compone lies 11,000 ft. above sea level in El Valle Sagrado de los Incas, the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Flat but ringed by mountains, the tallest capped year-round in snow and ice, the valley is graced with a mild climate and mineral-rich soil that for centuries has produced what the Incas called sara—corn.

<!–

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/design/MIT_s_Guru_of_Low_Tech_Engineering_Saves_World_on_2_a_day’;
// –>The farmers of Compone feed corn to their livestock, grind it into meal, boil it for breakfast, lunch and dinner and stockpile it as insurance against future unknowns. They burn the corncobs, stripped of kernels, in the earthen stoves they use for cooking and to heat their homes.

It’s the stoves that worry Amy Smith. One morning, the 45-year-old inventor stands on the front lawn of the town’s community center, beside a 55-gal. drum packed with corncobs that is billowing smoke, a box of matches in her hand and dressed for comfort in faded jeans, avocado T-shirt and a baseball cap pulled over a thick curtain of dirty-blond hair. Smith is ringed by three dozen campesinos who make no move to dodge the lung-burning, eye-stinging cloud. If she just waited a few minutes, the embers would burst into flame on their own and the smoke would dissipate in the intense heat. Instead, she drops a match into the barrel, then jerks her hand back. Nothing happens.

Smith is trying to turn the cobs into charcoal. For an award-winning engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this would seem to be a humble goal. Wood charcoal has been in use for thousands of years. However, for many of the world’s poor, it can be a life-saving technology. Compone’s farmers are among the 800 million people worldwide who use raw biomass—agricultural waste, dung, straw—for fuel. Globally, smoke from indoor fires makes respiratory infections the leading cause of death for children under the age of 5, claiming more than a million young lives a year. Charcoal burns much more cleanly. “I don’t know how quickly we can change cooking habits here,” Smith says, “but I’d like to see people breathing less smoke inside their homes.”

A well-liked instructor at MIT and member of the Popular Mechanics editorial advisory board, Smith is a rising star in a field known as appropriate technology, which focuses on practical, usually small-scale designs to solve problems in the developing world. She has brought four undergrads to Compone, along with Jesse Austin-Breneman, an MIT graduate who works for a community organization in Peru, and one of her engineering collaborators, 53-year-old Gwyndaf Jones. To get here, the team has lugged bags of tools and low-tech gadgets, water-testing equipment and a heavy wooden crate bearing a pedal-powered grain mill more than 3500 miles in taxis, airplanes and buses. …

WSJ Op-ed favoring nuclear power proposes a rebranding.

… The construction of reactors in the rest of the world is essentially a government enterprise. Private investment and even public approval are not always necessary. In the U.S., however, the capital will have to be raised from Wall Street. But not many investors are willing to put up $5 billion to $10 billion for a project that could become engulfed by 10 to 15 years of regulatory delay — as occurred during the 1980s. The Seabrook plant in New Hampshire went through 14 years of that before opening in 1990. The Long Island Lighting Company’s Shoreham plant began in 1973, but was shut down by protests in 1989 without generating a watt of electricity, and the company went bankrupt as a result.

If we are now going to choose nuclear power as a way to resolve both our concerns about global warming and our looming energy shortfalls, we are first going to have to engage in a national debate about whether or not we accept the technology. To begin this discussion, I suggest redefining what we call nuclear power as “terrestrial energy.”

Every fuel used in human history — firewood, coal, oil, wind and water — has been derived from the sun. But terrestrial energy is different.

Terrestrial energy is the heat at the earth’s core that raises its temperature to 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than the surface of the sun. Remarkably, this heat derives largely from a single source — the radioactive breakdown of uranium and thorium. The energy released in the breakdown of these two elements is enough to melt iron, stoke volcanoes and float the earth’s continents like giant barges on its molten core.

Geothermal plants are a way of tapping this heat. They are generally located near fumaroles and geysers, where groundwater meets hot spots in the earth’s crust. If we dig down far enough, however, we will encounter more than enough heat to boil water. Engineers are now talking about drilling down 10 miles (the deepest oil wells are only five miles) to tap this energy.

Here’s a better idea: Bring the source of this heat — the uranium — to the surface, put it in a carefully controlled environment, and accelerate its breakdown a bit to raise temperatures to around 700 degrees Fahrenheit, and use it to boil water. That’s what we do in a nuclear reactor. …

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July 23, 2008

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