I'm back in the Bay for a week. BadCAMP coming up, and business to conduct for our budding Cycling Empire. Also happy birthday Zacker. Good fun and a nice drive, so I'm content with all that.

Oft's the time I wonder about graphing my changes in mood and fortune, a little personalized stock ticker of the soul. Regular journal-writing is beyond me, and actually recounting the details of my daily life would be debilitatingly dreary. No one must know just how ho-hum my routine really is. Gotta preserve the mystery.

A numerical composite would be interesting, while (probably) allowing me to retain whatever shards of sex-appeal I can still muster. And what might such a life-market show? Finances flat but stable. Politics looking up and responsibility on the rise. Stress back down after peaking in August.

It's all well and dandy, and I'm especially happy that visible signs of over-stress -- e.g involuntary muscle-twitching -- are declining, but as things level out I worry muchly about the void, that it may just sit there gaping at me. Nature abhors a vacuum, and although I could really use a vaction, the kind of soul-emptying boredom that may be in the offing here seems dangerous.

The best answer seems like a long shot. Short-sellers are killing the Love index. The gut feeling: flat-lined.

This is starting to become a problem. Aphoristic wisdoms along the lines of "age is a state of mind" are cold comfort when contemplating a creeping case of cynicism. I really don't want to end up a jaded or pessimistic person. It's a shit way to live, but objectively that's the trend. Me no likey.

My good friend Frank writes:

Josh,

Thinking about the current financial crisis/bailout predicament, I noticed that you've begged off in your blog from weighing in. I thought it strange until I remembered something you'd said to me perhaps 200 times before:

"In my school-days, when I had lost one shaft,
I shot his fellow of the self-same flight
The self-same way with more advised watch,
To find the other forth, and by adventuring both
I oft found both: I urge this childhood proof,
Because what follows is pure innocence.
I owe you much, and, like a wilful youth,
That which I owe is lost; but if you please
To shoot another arrow that self way
Which you did shoot the first, I do not doubt,
As I will watch the aim, or to find both
Or bring your latter hazard back again
And thankfully rest debtor for the first."

If you remember, that didn't end very well. I was heavily invested in overseas contracts and you convinced me to leverage myself even further (deregulation had laid the way for exotic, organ-backed securities). Ships are but boards, sailors but men and when I lost all three ships, I had an instant liquidity crisis. If the judicial system hadn't been biased against predatory lenders (and had I not enlisted a knowledgeable corporate legal team) I would have lost everything.

Lucky thing, that.

Canadia to the rescue:

In demonstrating the technology in practice, Keith and his team used a custom-built tower to capture CO2 directly from the air while requiring less than 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity per tonne of carbon dioxide. The tower unit was able to capture the equivalent of approximately 20 tonnes per year of CO2 on a single square metre of scrubbing material -- which amounts to the average level of emissions produced by one person each year in North America.

While still in its early stages, the atmosphere-scrubbing technology has already been touted by environmentalists as an energy-efficient and cost-effective way to complement other approaches designed to help reduce transportation emissions, such as biofuels and electric engines.

Now, this should be pursued in addition to planting a lot of trees, but the truth is that over the past 300 years, we've dug massive amounts of shit out of the ground and set it on fire. Getting back into balance means taking a bunch of that shit out of the air and putting it somewhere else again. Trees don't cut it because when you cut them down they rot and the gas gets out again.

Basically the idea is you perfect this kind of rig along with some solar/wind power to keep it running -- just like highway lights on the remote parts of the highway -- and it becomes somebody's high-paying Union Job to service the thing, put the used-up scrubbers in a box car to be hauled off for burial, etc.

Maybe we can re-build the ruined mountain-tops of Appalachia.

As Atros says, Poll Porn.

This is only one pollster, and one that's been showing bigger margins for Obama in general -- which is why sober analysts use composite averages -- but it would appear that the Obama campaign is indeed beginning to pull ahead:

"It is difficult to find a modern competitive presidential race that has swung so dramatically, so quickly and so sharply this late in the campaign. In the last 20 days, Sen. Barack Obama has gone from seven points down to eight points up in Florida, while widening his leads to eight points in Ohio and 15 points in Pennsylvania," said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

...

"Sen. Obama clearly won the debate, voters say. Their opinion of Gov. Sarah Palin has gone south and the Wall Street meltdown has been a dagger to McCain's political heart. Roughly a third of voters, and almost as large a share of the key independent vote, say McCain did more harm than good in trying to resolve the financial crisis, and the share of voters who see the economy as the top issue has risen from roughly half to six in ten."

Concept album for a psychedelic Red Dawn fantasy rock band. Working track list:

Trip Narnia

Rockin' Out in Xibalba

Sleep With Your Third Eye Open

Rebel Unicorns

I can't claim any more than collaborative authorship. I'm just a conduit, one of many tiny condensing cells of consciousness, small sparks in geological time, looking to do battle with entropy. Maybe the b-side will feature dirty-beat and dub reggae remixes.

The Autumn is upon us. We are honest outlaws. We've got a shed full of wood and we're not afraid to use it. We recognize decay and even calamity as parts of every life-cycle, and we're not afraid of a little turbulence.

Most of all, we're winning.

It's a very two-steps forward one-step back kind of winning, but you have to recognize progress when it happens. Is it enough? Of course not. It's never enough, but it's something. We're winning feet and inches with miles to go, but that's a hell of a lot better than giving up ground, because in addition to (slowly) making progress, we're also getting stronger.

What do I mean, "we," white man? I mean the forces of hope for the 21st Century.

It's easy to see the apocalypse around every corner. Seductive even. The undercurrent of doom runs strong throughout our world, and it too is a real thing. Stock markets crash. Carbon dioxide accumulates. Our lives slip away in a fitful series of fluorescent flickers, gasping for traction. As the good word says, "it’s so easy to be sad."

But there's light out there. There's promise in the sun, in snowflakes on mars, in the premise of a Black President and Millennial Power. Every year there are more people like us, and not just because people like them are dying off, but because we're right about a lot of things. We're right and we're passionate and passion+truth is a powerful combination. We win converts every day.

I actually watched tonight's debate in full down at Humbrews. I would call it a draw overall, which favors Obama. Considering he needed to change the momentum and this was supposed to be his zone, that's good.

TV coverage is somewhat unhelpful to me. It's mostly fluff and drek. The debate itself was pretty interesting though. The format was good in terms of getting into the weeds. I liked that.

Other notes:

• McCain broached the idea of cutting Pentagon spending. That was the first surprising thing for me.
• Neither candidate said anything bold or interesting about the Wall St meltdown. The next time I hear someone do the Wall St/Main St contrast, I may go on a killing spree. Such a cliche.
• Obama does a lot of good things overall. He may not be a zinger kind of debater, but he speaks well. The Kissinger bit was strong. The "you were wrong" was also strong.
• McCain did a lot better in all the talking-over moments. He doesn't back down. Obama does. That scores points for McCain; it shows him pushing Obama around a bit.
• Both candidates show that media narratives trump facts: McCain brings up "Iran's Republican Guard" and Obama answers in the same words. Those were the boogymen in Iraq from back in the day, y'alls. Iran's crack paramilitary forces are the Revolutionary Guard.

Overall, it was surprising to me how narrow the terms of debate are here. Reagan is great. You can talk about the "freedom fighters in Iraq" without noting that, uhmmm, those are some of literally the same people who dropped the twin towers. Nobody calls any serious bullshit on the finance thing.

Serious writers block going on here it seems.

So, notes.

• Krugman. Essential reading. Again.
• I made it back to the gym for the first time in... forever. I've decided I should be exxxtra hot by the time I make the trip out to NYC for Alex and Laura's wedding. So, more lifting heavy objects, less drinking heady beer. For a while.
• I've really started to loathe my dirtstyle site design, and I desperately want to update to Drupal 6.0 and slap on a new theme (I like the feel of this). I'd like to keep my big juicy picture style, but the rest of the business is just depressing to look at at this point.

Overall it feels like I am confronting yet another crisis of identity, trying to figure out who I'm trying to be as a grown up, or perhaps if I want to take my last possible (or at least socially plausible) detour from that track.

I also learned from RadioLab that I need alternative activities to outlet my unhealthy levels of stress. Simply relaxing is probably not enough.

Seems like there should be a connection there. I don't have it yet, but I feel like its out there.

So, debate #1 is on Friday and the expectations game has begun. How will the Wall St. moneygrab play in? We'll see.

Also: attention students: Vote were it counts: http://www.countmore.org/

I have a lot of thoughts about this big bailout plan that's been unveiled. My interest is hopelessly nerdy and political, but what we're seeing right now is totally, like, crazy.

• First of all, $700B?!?!? For a sense of scale, that's more than the Iraq war has cost to date (though Iraq will cost much more over time in terms of support for wounded, replacing equipment, etc). It's also about $2,000 for every man, woman and child in the country.
• Secondly, the treasury secretary gets to do whatever the fuck he wants with it: "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." Bold.
• Gotta love capitalism.

The most interesting thing here to me is how this jives with what I recall from Polyani's The Great Transformation. What this appears to be is a move to protect people from the market, except that unlike in the past when those being protected were workers or families or the like, the entities being protected here are banks themselves.

Further, while there's clearly a huge amount of elites looking out for themselves here, the really striking thing is that the moral justification here is that if the whole shitpile were allowed to tumble, the impact on regular folks would be really bad. So you're going to see people making the argument shortly (if they're not already) that we're protecting the finance sector from the workings of the market in order to maintain the current standard of living for regular citizens.

Fucking crazy.

I've long enjoyed the static version of Get Your War On's sardonic humor, and this animated/voiced version made me laugh out loud, but it's pretty sick shit.

Incidentally, the most plausible rationale for Palin's insistence that victims of rape pay for their own forensic kits (rather than the police doing so, which is the humane norm) is that these kits contain emergency contraception, which Palin likely equates with abortion, which she also staunchly opposes as an option for victims of rape or incest.

McCain, also not so much into choice, btw. Loud and proud about his desire to overturn Roe v. Wade.