Every politician sells themselves as the candidate of change.  It’s the word to say, the word to be, it always has been and probably always will.  It’s classic BS politics – it’s ambiguous, noncommittal, very open to end-user interpretation.

I’m not going to try to convince you Obama is the first major party presidential candidate of our generation who will actually bring real change to our country.  I don’t need to convince you.  You already believe it.

Why?  Why do we believe in Obama?  We don’t even need him to claim to be the candidate of change.  We already know he is. Why?  How?

One word: NITGOBC:  Not In The Good Ol’ Boys Club.

Obama isn’t from old money. Obama is a first-generation American. Obama comes from a broken home. Obama hasn’t followed a path in life laid down by his father, family, or trust fund – he’s built a path of his own. And, thank God, Obama isn’t one more dried up old, rich, white male.

NITGOBC isn’t something you can fake.  It isn’t something you need to explain.  It’s something that’s built by decades of growth from challenge.  And it is those same challenges that have built Obama into the leader he is today that we now see and feel acting on us, our generation, and our country – building her into the America she will be tomorrow.  That’s why we believe in Obama.

America, this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past. Our time to bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face. Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love.

Vote Obama, President of the US of A. Change we DO believe in.

• It’ll save California about 82 billion compared to the “no-build” alternative: building 3,000 new lane-miles of freeway plus five new airport runways.
• It’s projected to turn a profit of almost 1 billion annually.
• The rest of the world is building HSR as fast as they can to stay economically competitive in the 21st century.
• It’ll save 16 billion lbs of CO2 from being expelled into the atmosphere annually – HSR is the most energy efficient major mode of medium & long distance transportation known to man.
• It will reduce our dependence on foreign oil by about 22 million barrels a year.
• 2hrs 30 minutes @ 220mph from downtown SF to downtown LA for $55 would be just awesome – mainly for business, but also for pleasure.
• The line will generate about 160k construction-related jobs right here right now, in California, providing a badly needed stimulus as our economy tanks.
• With proper land-use controls, we can use HSR to help funnel our growth into (more) human-scaled pedestrian-oriented sustainable development patterns.
• The Central Valley will experience an economic boom – suddenly being able to realistically commute daily to two of the largest job centers in the world.
• All of California can expect congestion relief by eliminating 30-40% of intra-California air passengers and taking 3.5-7.9% of the cars off I-5 and I-15.
• HSR is proven, off-the-shelf technology that has become the dominant medium-distance mode of transportation in varied environments around the world – including those with similar density, vehicle use, and income patterns to California – the most recent example being Spain.

No. These are all good reasons to support HSR in California – but this is not why California needs HSR. So why does California need High Speed Rail?

America needs an example. The potential of California HSR to stimulate powerful change on local, regional and national levels across the country outweighs all the direct benefits it will deliver to Californians.

We Americans (including Californians) lack the concept of functioning transit in our collective consciousness. Assuming you’re going farther than you can walk or bike, functioning transit is:

• The fastest way to get there.
• The most convenient way to get there.
• The most reliable way to get there.
• The cheapest way to get there.
• The most environmentally friendly way to get there.

How can functioning transit be the best at all these indicators?  Because it scales.  The addition of “one more rider” to a transit system lowers your cost per rider, increases demand for more frequent service to more destinations, decease your emissions per capita, and increases your farebox revenue.  One more rider makes the system better.

If we rewind 50-70 years, all those indicators that now shine for transit previously shined for private automobile use and air travel in the United States.  In those days before vehicle and air travel demand became congestion-limited, one more car on the road or one more passenger on the plane didn’t make it worse for everyone else.  There was plenty of capacity.  Rather, one more user of the system encouraged the system to grow to reach more destinations, with more direct routes and at higher speeds, thus increasing the quality of the system for everyone. Our parents and grandparents took advantage of this positive feedback system by pumping massive investment into our roads and airports, and we can largely thank that investment for our global economic dominance today.

Those days are over. They fell tumbling over their peak in the 1970’s, and for the last 30 years America has been holding on to the now-dead dream of the “open road”.  For the 79% of us who live in urban America the “open road” has become the dirty, dangerous, slow freeway.  While this has had the obvious effect of degrading our communities, our environment, and our heath – it has (IMHO, perhaps more importantly) had the “slow burn” effect of draining time, money and energy from the American worker.

In the congestion-limited domain, one more driver or one more air passenger makes the system worse.

Our competition “gets” this.  HSR systems are going up around the world at a nearly exponential rate as costs drop and speeds increase.  Americans don’t tend to travel outside their home country as much as most, and it often takes new ideas a little longer to penetrate our shell.  Well, this is California’s opportunity to deliver one big shining wake-the-F-up to ourselves and the rest of the country.  Petrol-powered transportation at 80mph in your own private 2,000 lb box of steel is a 20th century idea who’s day in the sun has come to a close.

Vote YES on Prop 1A. Keep America and California economically competitive in the 21st Century.

Which brings me to the big question I’d like to pose – and if anyone out there has an answer for it, or even part of an answer, I’m all ears.  I understand some people have a problem with gay people.  Some people have a problem with gay sex.  Some people have a problem with gay marriage.  Awesome, we don’t agree, I strongly believe you are inflicting unnecessary and unwarranted pain and alienation on good people – but I’m not going to try to change you.

My question is, how on earth is it a good idea to throw our government into this conflict?  Why would anyone want the state bureaucracy telling them who they can and can’t marry?  How is it in our best interest to have our government regulating who we fall in love with, who we sleep with, who we choose to spend the rest of our lives with?

Talk about big government.  Telling us who we can and can’t marry?  It doesn’t get much bigger than that.

Vote NO on 8. Keep government out of our love lives, our bedrooms, and our hearts.

Shortly thereafter, a man ran outside, yelling ‘They’re married! They’re married!’, to which the several thousand people waiting about erupted in cheers and applause.

Kinda tragic, but apparently all the excitement was too much for one guy, who collapsed right in front of the steps of city hall. They did CPR on him for several minutes before rolling him away, still trying to bring him back.

The crowd was mostly just people down out of work for the day, stopping by to witness history in the making. God I love this city.

So for those of us who tend to believe this world’s too big for one person to make a difference…

Dear Gavin,

I don’t know what pushed you, on that calm and dreary Thursday morning four short years ago, to invite Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin into your office for a small and quiet marriage. Some say you did it for political gain. Some say you did it because you’re still in the closet. And some say you did it because – imagine this – you did it because you care.

Guess what… the ‘why’, well, the ‘why’ just doesn’t matter here. It’s the result that matters. You have, through personal choice, thought and action, first positioned yourself to be able to work significant change in this world, and then had the balls to follow through. Gavin, you stood on the shoulders of decades of work by thousands to get this done. But the indisputable fact is that, because of you, millions of gay Californians wake up tomorrow no longer pushed to the side, no longer denied an undeniably human portion of life. May our children grow up in a world where gay hate is learned in the history books, and gay marriage is learned through the neighborhood, at the playground, in the community.

Gavin, I didn’t vote for you in 2004. Nor in 2008. And I probably won’t vote for you in 2010. But I have to say – thank you Gavin. Where others would only give words, you gave action. And today, today your actions have forever changed the lives of millions.

Yours,

Michael J.

Hey, so it may have been the slowest election ever, in the history of California. Apparently less than 1 in 4 people were able to spare 30 minutes to vote. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t have a spare 15 hours to spend at the polls!

Heh, going back to school was such an awesome idea. It’s an interesting combo of who works the polls: retired people (the average age was probably about a billion) and students. Except not grad students – high school students. Am I just on the slow track or something? I think I may have been the only 20-something in San Mateo County to be working the polls. There were definitely a few 30-somethings though… along with a similar number of 80-somethings.

Breakfast: (and lunch)

I didn’t get a picture of it, but my roommates brought me awesome homemade quiche and fresh strawberries for dinner! You rock roomies!

So over the course of the day, I signed my name off several dozen times. Initials a few more dozen times. Everything arrives sealed with serial numbers. Every seal’s serial number must be matched against a master list. Every action you take that could potentially give you access to the (virtual or physical) ballot box, you must do with a partner. You both sign off on everything. At the end of the day, we counted everything up, made sure every one of our 560 ballots were accounted for, and sealed all of them back up with more tamper-evident serial-numbered seals. Pretty comprehensive security. But it was kinda overload. 15 hours of trying to make sure you, your fellow election ‘judges’, and every voter crosses every ‘t’ and dots every ‘i’… I think we got nearly all of them.

I got assigned to my neighborhood polling place, which is at the church just over my backyard fence. Here’s our set up:

¡Yo voté! Y Ud… ¿Ud. votó? ¿Votará próxima vez?

The greatest challenge we, the current generation of the American people, will face over our lifetimes is not Iraq. It is not the economy. It is not terrorism. It is not global warming! (that will hit the third world much harder) It is… oil.

Over the last 20 years, the concept of Global Peak Oil has evolved from a bunch of hippie BS to the real deal. The question is no longer if, it’s when.

• Famous Princeton Prof: 2010
• Shell: 2015
• Saudi Aramco: 2022
• Exxon: 2032+
• Reality: May 2005??

My uniformed and amorphous intuition based on what people who study these things for a living are saying, and considering their (sometimes alternative) motivations, is that total global crude production will keep bouncing around within a couple percent of its current plateau for another 5-7 years, before heading cleanly southward between 2013 and 2015. At which point, there will be a ridiculous amount of press, concern, name calling, recession, and we will be paying $10-15 for gallon for gasoline. Maybe we’ll start another war or two to try to blame someone.

So, over the next 20 years the entire global community will learn to deal with much more costly oil. The question is, who will come out of top? Will this alter the global balance of power? Well, the societies that will be least affected will be those whose economies don’t already depend on oil for the majority of daily life. Meaning, this will have minimal affect on the third world. Those currently in the process of industrializing will find themselves changing their building patterns and industrial organization to use other sources of energy (yum, dirt that burns!), thus adapting to the changing market conditions.

Who’s going to feel it the hardest? Those societies that have already invested trillions and trillions of dollars into a built environment that depends on cheap oil to function effectively. Of those societies, one stands out as significantly more vulnerable than the others. A product of our own global economic dominance over the last 60 years, the US of A has a problem. Our economy is approximately twice as dependent on cheap oil as Canada or Australia, and more than three times that of your average western European fruity nation.

If the US of A is to remain on top of the world economy in 2030, we need to be addressing our ingrained oil dependence now. By 2014, it will be too late.

Of the three major candidates running for MVP of The World, only one has managed to not make the problem worse. But even he has given this, the most important long-term issue facing our society today, only lip service.

We don’t need more fuzzy talk about ideas, concerns, feel-good legislation dictating fuel economy standards, or what could be done. We need forceful leadership pulling money away from the sinkhole that is our sprawling, unsustainable, and dare I say – unAmerican – exurban land use patterns and pushing it directly into our core cities. Specifically, this means – stop this sh*t. Pay for this sh*t. If we, the American people, continue to lead the world through the 21st century, it will be because we successfully refocused our powerful investment on our core cities – and we did so before it was too late.

All right, basic intuitive Econ 0.000001, applied to a dumb ass idea, here we go: You lower the cost to market of a commodity (like say a barrel of oil), demand will rise to meet a new equilibrium with the new cost to market. Meaning: if you get rid of taxes on oil thus lowering it’s price, people will buy more oil, thus rising the price back up. It won’t go all the way back up, but it will likely go somewhere around halfway.

But oil’s not like, say, beer. The difference is that for oil, since it’s finite, each barrel costs a tiny bit more to bring it to market than the last. Now, just like every other commodity with this structure, if you lower the price, thus increasing consumption, then because we’re consuming more, the result is that the price now rises faster than it otherwise would have. And after some number of years, we find ourselves paying more than we otherwise would have. This ain’t rocket science people… this is what our kids all should be learning in junior high.

Now, the most insulting part about this is that both Hilary and McCain understand this perfectly well. But they’re running on the assumption that enough of the American public is not an “elite liberal economist from new england” and therefore doesn’t get this “complex” stuff. Well, F-YOU! We’re not fricking bricks here, it’s damn insulting that you think the average American falls for this kind of BS.

Nobody really blinked an eye when McCain proposed this idea. It’s no secret what the business-minded side of the Republican party thinks about the social-conservative side. But Hilary? What? Why are you trying to treat me like I’m a little kid who can’t stop myself from grabbing a marshmallow? How bout some fricking respect?

If you support Hilary, you should be embarrassed by this shit. ‘Nuff said.