Month: March 2007

The Electric Vehicle Association of Washington, DC and the National Electric Drag Racing Association are putting on an exhibition of electric vehicles and their capabilities called the Power of DC. The event has been held for the last six years at the Mason-Dixon Drag Way in Hagerstown, Maryland. This year, the seventh year of the event, we are adding an autocross event the day before the drag race. This will be an EV autocross event, (dubbed EVautoX). The EVautoX will take place at Hagerstown Community College June 2nd, admission is free. The electric vehicle drag race event will take place at the Mason Dixon Drag Way on June 3rd, spectator admission is $5.

Because of the added event of the EVautoX, the Power of DC organization is in need of sponsors. There is growing interest in plug-in vehicles and this is the closest sanctioned event of its kind to Washington, DC. Sponsors of significance will have their logo placed on the events official T-shirt.

The Power of DC is mainly an exhibition demonstrating the speed and power that can be achieved using electricity as a fuel. What better way to show the acceleration capabilities of electric vehicles than through a drag race. The drag race has helped to dispel the sometimes common perception that electric vehicles are slow off the line. This year the Power of DC will be showing electric vehicles maneuverability, range and look through the EVautoX, which tests electric vehicles in slalom like timed courses, range courses and in a beauty contest called the Show-n-Shine.

At the demonstrations we will have a super efficient, super aerodynamic, and super light weight EV called the AZTEC. This vehicle was the winner of the commuter category in the 1994 American Tour de Sol. The University of West Virginia will be bringing its electrically powered Formula race car, (called a Formula Lightning when electric). The Formula Lightning vehicle can reach speeds up to 145 miles an hour on a race track without any pollutants coming from the vehicle. There will be other vehicles there to see and to touch, such as a solar panel clad Destiny 2000, a convertible Cabriolet, a few home converted Ford Escorts, a Toyota built RAV4 EV, and a Solectria Force. All vehicles that are worth coming to the show to see touch and ask the owners questions about. There will also be vehicles built by high school students, such as the Miramar 944 Porsche, and Shawn Lawless’s famous Orange Juice dragster, as I said plenty of vehicles to see and touch. But there is more to the electric vehicle movement than just electric vehicles.

The electric vehicles movement is part of the larger alternative fuels movement. There will be demonstrations of solar panels, solar ovens, evacuated tube water heating and more. We still have room for exhibitors, so the door is open for organizations and companies to display their alternative fuel and energy products at the events.

Even though the Power of DC is a well attended event, this year our hope is to make it even bigger. We are asking that all schools, high schools, colleges, universities, and all organizations that are working on alternative fuels and electric drive trains, if they have products or vehicles to showcase to bring them to the event. We would really like to see a solar powered vehicle, one that was built to compete in competitions like the World Solar Challenge to be displayed at the event. We believe that advanced battery manufacturers and researchers would find a welcome home at these events. Organizations that are developing and selling electric motors for the hybrid and plug-in markets would be in line with the theme of the event. Automobile manufacturers exhibiting their hybrid technology would be a perfect fit. What ever you have that you feel the public should know about in terms of automotive advanced technology, alternative fuels and alternative energy contact us. I am sure we can make room for you in the event.

So, we need your assistance. First thing we would like you to do is spread the word about the Power of DC. Come and be there your self, bring family members, tell friends to make a weekend of it and come and have a good time. The second thing we need help on is finding sponsors. If you know of an organization or company that would be interested in beefing up its green credentials, here is their opportunity. The Power of DC is that event that has vast popular appeal, from the environmentalist to the automotive gear head, from the peace nick to the security hawk, the Power of DC brings all these groups together on common ground. Sponsoring our event upsets no one. Thirdly, bring your stuff. If you have an electric vehicle or an alternative fueled vehicle of any kind, bring it to the event. If you work in batteries, electric motors, controllers, capacitors or power electronics, bring it to the event and show it off. We welcome you. If you are in the solar panel, solar hot water heating business, if you sell high efficiency appliances, super insulation, bring it to the show. EV people tend to purchase those things also to the tune of 40%. For example, 40% of electric vehicle owners in California also have solar panels on their homes. It is precisely the market you are looking for. Car dealers, if you have hybrids of any kind, whether they be small cars to large trucks, this is the place to be. Show electric vehicles owners need to tow their vehicles long distances for shows. A hybrid truck is just the thing to bring to such an event. If you bring it, we will make room for it. In the end what we need is to bring your selves and your friends and family, bring sponsors, and bring your stuff. With that the Power of DC will become the catalyst to making the world better for our children and our children’s children, but we will be having so much fun doing it, too.

For more information on this exciting EVent visit our website at
http://www.powerofdc.com

To Register, fill out our convenient Registration Form at http://www.powerofdc.com/lets_race.html

A downloadable file of the EVent flyer is available at http://www.powerofdc.com/powerofdc_flyer.pdf

For sponsorship opportunity contact Chip Gribben the organizer of the Power of DC
futurev@radix.net
240-687-1678

For EVautoX information contact Mike Harvey
info@harveyev.com

And if you don’t know who to contact, contact me and we will figure it out.
Joe Lado
joelado@yahoo.com

Can we can any more disrespect?

“The government should quit mandating that various documents be printed in any one of 700 languages depending on who randomly shows up” to vote, said Gingrich, who is considering seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. He made the comments in a speech to the National Federation of Republican Women.

“The American people believe English should be the official language of the government. … We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto,” Gingrich said to cheers from the crowd of more than 100.

I happen to live in the ghetto. Well…it’s a rapidly gentrifying ghetto, but still inner city, dirt poor, strongly immigrant and heavily black. It gets a little tiresome having people suggest that we shouldn’t be able to read our ballots. We can’t vote until we learn the ‘language of prosperity’? I’d like Newt to come down here and tell that to a gathering of 100 people from my neighborhood. He’d get run out of town on a rail and with a white hood fastened to his thick neck.

There’s a funny thing about being in the majority. You get to vote in a much more progressively friendly way. For example, according to Progressive Punch, the five most progressive members of the Senate are all Senators that were just elected in 2006. And coming in tied for first is none other than Bob Casey Jr. It’s true. I’ve been watching every vote he casts, even on irrelevant stuff, and he has only voted against the mainstream Democratic position once that I’ve noticed. Here’s a look at the scores for our new Senators:

1T 98.55 Cardin, Benjamin L. D MD
1T 98.55 Casey, Robert P., Jr. D PA
3T 97.10 Brown, Sherrod D OH
3T 97.10 Klobuchar, Amy D MN
3T 97.10 Whitehouse, Sheldon D RI

16 91.30 Webb, Jim D VA
26 88.41 McCaskill, Claire D MO

29 86.96 Tester, Jon D MT

These numbers will flip around quite a bit as we get a larger sample of votes and they will wind up spread out among the entire caucus. But one lesson is already clear. If we aren’t constantly forced to make votes that can be used against us, even some of our socially conservative Senators won’t irritate us. For example, there are no ratings for the new senators on family planning because there haven’t been any votes on family planning.

Just for informational purposes, these are our worst senators on family planning (starting with the worst): Ben Nelson, Ken Salazar, Robert Byrd, Mark Pryor, John Kerry.

And here our five worst senators on issues of war and peace (starting with the worst): John Kerry, Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Bill Nelson, and Mary Landrieu.

There’s a little surprise in there, dontcha think?

Bill Kristol:

Many Republicans may be tempted to give up in exasperation on a Bush administration that often seems incapable of defending itself. This would of course be bad for the country, leaving the nation at the mercy of the Democratic Congress for the next year and a half. But it would also be a political mistake. Even though Giuliani and McCain and Romney and Thompson have a fair amount of distance from the Bush administration, there is almost no precedent for a party’s retaining the presidency if the outgoing administration ends its term in a shambles. So if Republicans–even not-particularly-Bush-friendly Republicans–want to save the country from a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress in 2009, with all that implies for foreign policy and the Supreme Court, they need to fight to save the Bush administration. It would be helpful if Bush would fight too.

The wheels on the bus go ’round and ’round…

That is, they go ’round and ’round until they fall off. At what point do the Republicans want to get off the bus? That’s the question. If they don’t impeach Bush and his quail-hunting sidekick soon, they are going to wind up having to defend them to the bitter end. And, trust me, things are not going to get any better for the Bush administration. Why? Well, first of all, look at their track record. But, secondly, there is some truth to this:

Surely President Bush must realize that the Democratic Congress is not merely struggling with him over policy, or jousting for political advantage. The Democrats in Congress are trying to destroy his presidency. They are trying to cripple his ability to govern for the rest of his term. And they are not far from succeeding.

I’d switch around a couple of words and change the emphasis in places, but Kristol has it basically right. He simply fails to note that the President has destroyed his presidency and his ability to govern, and the Democrats are merely trying to clean up a really sordid mess. But I’d agree that we are not far from succeeding. Success will come if and when the Republicans’ will to self-preservation kicks in. Exhorting the President to fight back can only carry them so far. He can’t fight back because he’s a crook and a liar. His administration is filled with underqualified evangelicals, party hacks, and sleezy businessmen.

We’d have to legalize drugs to find enough cell rooms for them all.

When Congress gets back from their vacation, Henry Waxman, Pat Leahy, and John Conyers are going to start nailing the coffin shut. The Republicans would be well advised to prepare themselves for a slew of indictments, scandals, invocations of the 5th amendment, and possible impeachment hearings. And if it does come to impeachment hearings, they better get out in front of them and make sure there are convictions. No one want to go on the record as saying what this administration has done is okay…not if they want to see a sniff of power anywhere after the 2008 elections.

David Broder is continuing his heralded style of wank-o-rific pontification in tomorrow’s Washington Post. If you were wondering whom the School of Higher Broderism is going to endorse in the 2008 primary elections, you now have your answer: John McCain and Hillary Clinton. How exciting. How inevitable.

When the Clintons arrived in Washington DC in their turnip truck, it was David Broder and Sally Quinn that decided they had no class. But, I guess over time Broder came to appreciate Hillary’s many charms. She’s been accepted into the Club. Maybe she earned it by winning over the Manhattan elites and securing herself a well carpetbagged Senate seat. Who knows?

But that Obama kid? He’s still on the outs.

Before I even delve into the particulars here, I have something to share with all the Deaniacs. This is a warning…you aren’t going to like this. This is how he summarizes your movement.

Do you recall the Howard Dean boom of 2003? It existed mostly in the minds of political reporters looking for something to write about — and it collapsed once voters became engaged.

Yeah. All those meet-ups and all that internet activity and all that energy ‘existed mostly in the minds of political reporters (other than David Broder, presumably).’

Wanker.

Broder is predicting the same fate for Obama (and, hey, he could be right). Obama might actually be no more than the figment of non-Broderist political commentators.

On the Democratic side, which commands greater interest because the Democrats dominate in almost every poll on 2008 prospects [ed note: uh, no], the question of the day (for Broderists) is “What’s happening to Barack Obama?”

What indeed? Ready for a cheap shot?

Obama had the bad luck to be the last of the seven speakers, and the program was well behind schedule by then. He began his remarks with the comment “I’ve got a vote at noon, so I’m going to have to cut this short” — suggesting that this audience was hardly his priority.

Yeah, poor judgment on Obama’s part to explain to his audience that voting is a higher priority to him than missing votes. Typical sniping from the all-wise Brahmin. But look at him slobber all over the ever serious senator from Delaware.

By contrast, the previous speaker, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, played the crowd like a virtuoso, lowering his voice to a confidential whisper to brief them on his views on Iraq — you could have heard a pin drop — then bringing the audience of beefy construction workers to their feet with a shouted pledge that, “When I’m president, we will spend what it takes to give our veterans the health care they deserve.”

I’m glad Biden gave a well-received speech, but that is ridiculous. And so is this.

Obama never varied from a conversational monotone and, unlike Biden, expressed no gratitude to labor for past support and barely mentioned the issues of minimum-wage legislation, prevailing wage guarantees and bills to strengthen union bargaining rights that had made up the bulk of the speeches of other candidates.

The judgment of the California delegate I met walking out was: “He left me kind of flat.”

But, this was supposed to be about Hillary Clinton and John McCain. I don’t know if you have noticed, but both of these candidates have been struggling in the polls recently. In fact, John McCain isn’t even the front runner anymore. Rudy Guiliani is clubbing him in the polls. But none of that matters to Broder.

On the Republican side, the unsettled picture allows for one “new star” after another — first Mitt Romney, then Rudy Giuliani, now Fred Thompson — to emerge as a threat to Arizona Sen. John McCain, who keeps piling up endorsements from across the GOP spectrum and deepening an organization that already looks formidable.

What the hell, it’s a Republican nomination, so what does FOX’s most recent poll say?

Uh, it says:

Rudy Guiliani 36%
John McCain 20%

Better get some more endorsements, John.

Meanwhile, look at how fabulous Hillary is.

But Obama’s problem, for now, is not Joe Biden, who is searching for his own footing in the race. His problem is Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who has a far more solid campaign structure — and the lead in the polls. Her speech to the unionists, like her appearance at the health-care forum, was a demonstration of her deep familiarity with the issues — and her personal and political bonds with many in the audience.

In her high-energy performance, Clinton went even deeper into the details of pending labor legislation than did Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, who has 26 more years of experience in Congress, and she had them on their feet as often as Biden did.

It’s just spring training, but it’s pretty clear who has the best pitching staff.

So, to recap…Obama had to cut short his speech to go vote. It was not so great a speech. People felt it was flat. Something is wrong with Obama. He may be just the figment of our imaginations. Joe Biden is man of the people. John McCain is going to win once the people get engaged in the process. Hillary Clinton has the best pitching staff in major league baseball.

Thank you, Broder.

Originally posted at the Independent Bloggers’ Alliance

From Thursday night’s Daily Show, in which Jon Stewart interviewed Dr. Philip Zimbardo, who recently wrote a book entitled the Lucifer Effect. I recognize him from those Discovering Psychology videos, which I have been showing to my psych classes for years.  (Demetrius still maintains that he looks uncannily like The Master from Doctor Who.)

Philip Zimbardo: It’s great to be here–nothing I’ve done in my whole career is going to earn me more “pizazz units” than being on your program. As my students say, “It’s totally awesome, man!”

Jon Stewart: Students at Stanford talk that way?

Philip Zimbardo: Students everywhere talk that way.

Jon Stewart: I’m going to start talking that way! Your book, it’s called the Lucifer Effect. Now,  I was a psychology major–

Zimbardo: What did you get in Introductory Psych?

Stewart: Introductory Psych 101, I got “Yes, your essay was long enough.” (Laughter.) But the two famous experiments are the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram shocking experiment, that we’re all taught that people are much more evil than they would appear to be on the outside. Tell us about the Stanford experiment.

Zimbardo: No, people are not more evil than they would appear to be on the outside. The Stanford Prison Experiment that I detail at great length in the Lucifer Effect really describes the gradual transformation of a group of good boys, 24 college students who volunteered to be in the experiment. Only the normal, healthy ones, randomly assigned by a flip of the coin to be guards or prisoners. What we see is how quickly the good boys–and that’s important, they start off good–become brutal guards, and the normal kids become pathological prisoners–

Stewart: Now when you say “the slow descent from good to evil, it took a week, did it not?

Zimbardo: No, it actually took 36 hours. (Laughter) We were counting in minutes. (More laughter.) No, at 36 hours, the first prisoner had an emotional breakdown, and each day after that, another one followed suit. So the study was supposed to go two weeks; I had to end it in 6 days because it was out of control. These good guards were totally into the role of being sadistic, controlling, and dominant. The prisoners rebelled and they got their asses kicked, and the guards just dominated them, and we ended the study because it was out of control.

Stewart: Are those people now running the country? (Laughter and applause.)

Zimbardo: Some of them got jobs at Enron. (Laughter.)

Stewart: It boils down to this–I get the sense that we’re in the trouble we’re in because of this idea that there is good and there is evil.

Zimbardo: Right.

Stewart: And it doesn’t mix, and we are locked in some sort of Hobbit-like battle between the two, but what you’re suggesting is, it’s pretty much of a flux.

Zimbardo: Oh, absolutely. Essentially what The Lucifer Effect is, is a celebration of the human mind. The human mind is this exquisite organ, which has the infinite capacity for any of us to be kind or cruel, selfish or destructive, villians or heros, and because of that capacity, it really is the situation that moves us in a path to be perpetrators of evil–most of us do not, but are innocent bystanders. And the good thing that comes out of my research is, some of us get moved to be heros. And so the question is, why do good people turn evil, and how can we get ordinary people to be more heroic?

Stewart: Well, here’s an interesting thing. We had a kid on the show named Ishmael Beah, from Sierra Leone. As a teenager, they gave him a mixture of gunpowder and cocaine, gave him a gun and told him, “These people killed your family” and turned him into a killer. And then he, himself, worked out of that and has become somewhat heroic. So each person has that same capacity. But, in the so called “death cult”, is that how they get people to be this way. Is there a certain kind of technique to turn people into that?

Zimbardo: Yes, but that’s extreme. In Rwanda, it was enough to have the local government announce on the radio that starting today, the Tutsi are our enemy. And they went around giving each Hutu family a macheti and a club, and they say “We want to destroy the enemies, because they are a threat to our national security“–you’ve heard that song before. And in three months, Hutus killed 800,000 of their neighbors. And the “weapon of mass destruction” was what? It was a machete and a club.

Stewart: Is there an innoculation?

Zimbardo: Yeah, of course. None of these things happen–in the Stanford Prison study, I draw the parallels of Abu Ghraib, which are identical. I mean, the things that happened in our study all happened at night shift. The worst things that happened at Abu Ghraib were on night shift where there was no supervision and no oversight. You want to eliminate evil in institutions, you have to have strong oversight. You have to have leadership that says, “This is what we will do, this is what you can’t do. We will do no harm, and if you do harm, here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to get in trouble, you’re going to lose your job.

Usually in situations like that, the leadership backs off–they let you do whatever you want. In Abu Ghraib, those abuses went on for three months–who was watching the store?

Stewart: So you’re saying they should have stopped Abu Ghraib after 36 hours.

Zimbardo: And the same thing with the war we’re in–maybe 48 hours.

Stewart: Absolutely. It’s unbelievabley fascinating, even for someone who did very poorly in psychology. The Lucifer Effect, it’s on the bookshelves now–Philip Zimbardo.

The bride must have been glowing:

A 110-year old Saudi man has taken a second wife because his first 85-year-old wife no longer satisfies his needs, the daily Arab News said on Friday.

The report did not explain why the man considered his current wife to be unfulfilling, but it did point out that his new spouse is only 30 years old.

Under Islamic law, men are allowed to have as many as four wives, as long as they can support them and provide for them equally.

It’s a strange world.

The Republicans have two familiar things to cry about this weekend. The first is the media’s coverage of Chocolate Jesus. The second is the fact that Speaker Pelosi is ignoring the State Department’s advice and leading a congressional delegation to Syria. (She’s also going to speak before the Knesset). Here’s some whining from the White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, filling in for an unfortunately ailing Tony Snow:

…the speaker “should take a step back and think about the message that it sends.”

“This is a county that is a state sponsor of terror, one that is trying to disrupt the Senora government in Lebanon and one that is allowing foreign fighters to flow into Iraq from its borders,” Perino said.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad “probably really wants people to come, and have a photo opportunity, and have tea with him, and have discussions about where they’re coming from. But we just think it’s a really bad idea,” Perino said.

Well…let’s see.

The White House thinks it is a really bad idea.

I gotta let that sink in for a little bit.

The White House thinks it is a really bad idea.

Okay. I know that the right wing has a thing about sipping tea in a foreign country. They teased Ambassador Joseph Wilson relentlessly for writing:

I spent the next eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people: current government officials, former government officials, people associated with the country’s uranium business. It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place.

But I just don’t think they’ve got their talking points worked out very well. Are the American people supposed to share their bizarre aversion to tea? And, if so, is this supposed to hurt the popularity of the Speaker?

Here are some facts. We have an embassy in Damascus. This isn’t Cuba we’re talking about here…or Iran. It’s freaking Syria. It’s a nice country to visit, or so noz tells me. The government’s run by strange cultist Muslims with an affinity for fascism…but other than that, they’re not so awful. They’re certainly not appreciably different from the Saudis, although they do have a much harder time making friends (it’s the oil and gas thing).

The Syrians have a weird kind of alliance with Iran. It’s not really based on anything concrete. After all, the Iranians don’t tolerate the Syrian leadership’s Alawite sect of Shi’a Islam in their country. I think their alliance is partly a legacy of the Cold War and partly because the Iranians were the only ones willing to keep up the fight against Israel after the Egyptians, Jordanians, and Saudis caved. I don’t know. Maybe the ancient rift in the Syrian/Iraq branches of the Ba’ath Party had something to do with it, too. Who cares?

The bottom line is that Syria can be peeled away from Iran quite easily. They don’t enjoy being a pariah. They don’t want bad relations with the United States. Prior to the war in Iraq they were happy to torture anyone one we needed tortured. I mean, that’s a true act of friendship right there. All they want is the Golan Heights back. You want Syria to stop doing things we don’t like? Help them get their land back and stop invading their neighbors and giving them huge refugee problems.

The Syrian regime is pretty awful as far as governments go. But, they aren’t a danger to us. They’re not really a danger to Israel either. Not by themselves. The worst thing they do is provide a refuge for some of the more militant Palestinian guerrillas. And they’ve helped Hezbollah as part of their overall domination of Lebanon post civil war. The totality of their behavior is annoying to Israel and probably to about 98% of their own citizens. I’ve noted that John Bolton doesn’t care for them either.

Nonetheless, I hope Speaker Pelosi and Reps. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, Henry Waxman and Tom Lantos of California, Louise Slaughter of New York and Nick Rahall of West Virginia, and Ohio Republican David Hobson all have a great time in both Jerusalem and Damascus. I hope they learn something useful. I think that would be a really good idea.

this diary is dedicated to all who suffer because of war

we love and support our troops, just as we love and support the Iraqi people – without exception, or precondition, or judgment

we have no sympathy for the devil

we acknowledge the power to act that is in us

cross-posted at MyLeftWing, BooMan Tribune, and my blog.

image and poem below the fold

Insurgents lie dead with a live hand grenade besides them in Ramadi during an operation to clear insurgents on Wednesday, March 28, 2007, in Ramadi, Iraq, 115 kilometers (70 miles) west of Baghdad. Iraqi soldiers shot the men, one of them holding a grenade, as the men tried to attack a house. They died during a US-Iraqi house-to-house sweep through what American commanders said was one of this city’s last insurgent strongholds. The operation ended with rooftop gunfights, airstrikes and dead guerrillas on the streets.
(AP Photo/Todd Pitman)

from [American Journal]
by Robert Hayden

here among them     the americans     this baffling

multi people     extremes and variegations     their

noise     restlessness     their almost frightening

energy     how best describe these aliens in my

reports to The Counselors

disguise myself in order to study them unobserved

adapting their varied pigmentations     white black

red brown yellow     the imprecise and strangering

distinctions by which they live     by which they

justify their cruelties to one another

charming savages     enlightened primitives     brash

new comers lately sprung up in our galaxy     how

describe them     do they indeed know what or who

they are     do not seem to     yet no other beings

in the universe make more extravagant claims

for their importance and identity

. . .

confess i am curiously drawn     unmentionable     to

the americans     doubt i could exist among them for

long however     psychic demands far too severe

much violence     much that repels     i am attracted

none the less     their variousness their ingenuity

their elan vital     and that some thing     essence

quiddity     i cannot penetrate or name

the complete poem

– – –

FAIR USE NOTICE: This essay contains images and excerpts the use of which have not been pre-authorized. This material is made available for the purpose of analysis and critique, as well as to advance the understanding of political, media, and cultural issues.

The ‘fair use’ of such material is provided for under U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with U.S. Code Title 17, Section 107, material in this essay (along with attributions to original sources) is viewable for educational and intellectual purposes. Anyone interested in using any copyrighted material from this essay for any reason that goes beyond ‘fair use’ must first obtain permission from the copyright owner.

a personal note: My posting has been sporadic lately, as my wife recovers from her recent surgery. She’s doing well, and I hope to return to this series more regularly very soon.