A final note: the shoddy Newsbusters blog has been caught in the past simply fabricating news regarding the Chronicle's coverage. Our paper has demanded corrections for their fiction, but to no avail.

We contacted Bill Riggs, regional press secretary of the Republican National Committee tonight on his emailing of this erroneous report suggesting a ''hidden'' Chronicle audiotape to political reporters. His response: he didn't confirm it, or write the headline. He just sent it out.

He got taken. And so did the rest.

Link

As for "Newsbusters," look up Bozell and read about some of his fine works, such as this...

like electricity - 51% comes from coal - stop this clean and present danger!!!

Gee Jude - one day the coal won't be there. So why not move to Solar and Wind now?

Dude, you're new here, so I'll cut you some slack.

But you just posted this 10 minutes earlier. Do not keep re-post the same story over and over again. Once is enough.

"He wants to destroy our most important energy resource:"

i keep getting these robocalls from the gop. 1st obama was a friend of terrorists, then he wanted to raise my taxes, then later the financial melt-down was caused by the democrat congress elected in '06.

from this i conclude that many of mccain's votes will come from the less than dull normal.

i've engaged in political discussions here like many others, but an internet robocall ???

give us a break.

i don't know about your negative ratings,(which says something about the chickens here) but all i can say about Obama is: voting for Obama is like the chickens voting for Col. Sanders. This guy, Obama, is a marxist if there ever was one. He is a charlatan. I would like clean coal energy too, but it has a price. nonetheless, Obama is not what we want. he is promising the world, and i mean the world. Which can never happen. It isn't possible. Unless your really Jesus. but it's not possible after the $700 billion bailout.
He is promising the world to everyone, and will deliver absolutely nothing. it's all false promises. but what do i know? more bailouts are to come, and we are pretty much tapped out in terms of money, so to expect us all to give a little bit (Supertramp) more is going to crash this economy. We are maxed out on our money, and we haven't room to give much more. if any.

I am disgusted with Bush 2 as much as anyone. but Obama is not the marxist answer that we need. when it comes to national security, McCain is hands down better qualified, but Obama is going to be the next American Hugo Chavez.

tonight we will see if we are chickens or not. The middle east hopes so, russia hopes so. lord knows they have funneled plenty of money to the Obama campaign.

Bullets are hard to find in league city, texas. Academy along I45 south towards Galveston.

Essentially true, I think. The capital costs are huge, and the value of a 90% complete project is usually far less than 90%. For a transportation project, one holdout landowner can scuttle the whole project, so you ultimately need the power of eminent domain to ensure that the project can be guaranteed success. If government is smart, they would use these powers as little as possible, of course.

The costs to maintain the current road network are going to grow ever higher as the years go by, and I wonder if many rural and secondary roads will revert to gravel as these are cheaper to maintain.

And two separate, incompatible cell phone networks, as opposed to Europe's system in which all phones work in any country.

i believe the us moved to L* in '82 then to a slightly smaller l in '92 and then to the biggest L ever in 2000.

*L = looting of the treasury

Many large organic networks are resilient. The human body is a network of hundreds of billions of individual living cells which can sustain the system for many decades. Trees can live for centuries.

So, yes, large-scale complex network resilience is possible. But resilience does not necessarily mean immortality or immunity from collapse.

In the early days of software programming they soon became aware of the pitfalls of monolithic programs. That is highly integrated software systems. The high level of integration was efficient, but not resilient, problems quickly engulfed such systems. Object Orientated design and programming resulted to correct the mistakes of earlier design methods.

I tend to view Globalisation as a monolithic system. So, through the lens of my own experience, I see the solution as being more object oriented like. That is each object has minimal integration with the rest of the system and any contact is through rigidly controlled interfaces. A family, a community, a village, a farm, etc. could be seen as objects.

I suppose the key is that failures at the interfaces are automatically handled without causing the object to fail itself. So say a family, farm or community were suddenly left without money, power or food for example, then they would be able to deal with it without failing themselves.

A nation could be an object, a failure in the US shouldn't cause a failure in China. So in answer to your question, I believe large networks can be resilient, and in the case of national economies, they cannot be made so without totally changing how they work.

Can large networks be built to be resilient?

The internet certainly seems to be. It was a design goal to be able to route traffic through whatever infrastructure survived a nuclear war. You can send TCP/IP over a barbed wire fence, and get to the destination subnet if it's physically possible.

Can large networks be built to be resilient? I would think so, but I'm not sure.

Sure they can, but such a design is not as profitable. (And what's the cost of failure? How much do you have to refund if you fail)

It is accurate to say the USA is broke, but the USA has no chance of turning this mess around without growing the economy-there is no point pinching pennies when you are already too deep in the hole to save your way out. You could be right about nothing at all being done-everybody has big plans until the day they are elected.

But then I see Barack time after time demonstrate his absolute cluelessness on economic matters, and I find that very scary. It's still all about preparing for a golden future, whether through building roads or building railways. Not an honest word, and no inch in transparent assessment, of the true state of the US economy.

Let me ask though - let's say that he were lurking here and on your blog, and let's say that he found all of these arguments convincing. Could he really voice opinions such as this without completely blowing his chances of winning? The only ones who can say such things are the so-called fringe candidates who everyone knows have no chance of winning.

Or put it another way - let's say you were a politician running for office and your opponent tried to tell the voters that a golden future was impossible. Your own natural inclination would be to ridicule your opponent, and use such statements to your own advantage.

Ultimately the leaders we elect are a reflection upon the people in the country. The vast majority of people still want that golden future. I think the best we can hope for are highly intelligent leaders who at least have the potential of grasping that there is a problem, and lead us in directions that will be somewhat less crappy.

There is no money left in America to do any of this. There is not even money to maintain existing infrastructure. On state, county and town level budgets are slashed in way perhaps never seen before.

I agree that our economic problems are very serious. But this comment ignores history. Railroads were built across the US using almost entirely human and animal labor. In historical terms the current US is extremely wealthy, so wealthy that most people are employed doing non-productive tasks and the average person spends 4 hours a day watching TV. If 300 million people stopped watching TV and did something productive instead, tremendous amounts of infrastructure could be created with minimal money required. After the Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps harnessed the available energy of the unemployed in this manner. Plenty of beautiful stonework from the 1930's still endures today (not quite the Inca Trail or the Great Wall of China, but human-created infrastructure can be very durable and useful for generations {in Italy I walked over a bridge built by the Roman Empire that still connected the two banks of the river in a mountain village for daily use, many centuries after the builders were dust} If the builders of that ancient infrastructure had convinced themselves that these tasks were impossible it would have been a self-fulfilling prophecy and therefore true).

When we are talking about electricity, a larger network could be made more resilient. A small network has such a large reliance upon single power generation point sources, that if one goes down, the amount of load to be shed is a pretty high fraction of the total network. Of course we still need some local storage, and smart grid technology, i.e. so the grid can respond to an unexpected outage, by shedding load appropriately, rather than catastrophically. If we are indeed running out of fossil fuels, and must increasingly rely upon variable renewable sources, then both a smart grid, and long distance transmission are necessary to make that work.

As in most things - Probably a "Hybrid." I notice that Walmart is carrying a lot of locally grown produce, for ex.

I'm not much interested in "which is a better business model?" - because BAU is not sustainable.

I also think Wal-Mart and its ilk have been enormously destructive. They are the reason for "food deserts." Nobody wants to supply small stores any more, because it's easier and more profitable to supply the suburban big boxes. And the places cut off from the distribution system are generally the places peak oilers consider most sustainable (the very rural or very urban).

The idea of using those batteries in an electric car for anything besides moving the car is a serious flaw, IMHO. Hooking the car to the grid should be for charging the batteries, not for removing energy from the car. What happens if the user decides to drive the car after the batteries have been drained in some situation where there has been a big drain on those batteries? And, to feed energy back to the grid, an inverter must be available, which is not usually included in an electric car.

I do think that it would be a good idea to charge the electric cars whenever they are parked. In a typical commute or shopping situation, the vehicle is parked for most of the day. The batteries could be charged during the day by solar PV or thermal, when there's lots of energy available, instead of charging the batteries during the night. Wind may be variable such that the extra energy for charging might not be available at any one time of the day, but, as long as there was enough wind energy, the cars could be charged when ever it was there.

Am I missing something here?

E. Swanson