Blogging in entropic Obamastan. Literature links. Music links. Two songs. Oh, and my team sucks.

Weapons procurement gone wild? There is a US Government agency with a budget of $3 billion investigating the idea of a Flying Submarine.

Now I was invited to join Best of the Blogs in part because of my knowledge of military affairs. However, I do not think I really need to explain to the average person why this is a waste of money and a bad idea. Even Joe the Plumber could figure it out.

This is my favorite week of the year. It’s all about family and friends and giving and sharing and thanking and being thankful. We have 14 family and friends coming for Thanksgiving. All Democrats, except for my brother who will be odd man out when the Obama celebration kicks in.

Thanks for all your support and participation this year. It’s been quite a ride, with a happy ending. This one came along yesterday, and I thought, if you had a moment before the rush of the week, that you might appreciate and enjoy it as I did.

Happy Thanksgiving.

I just remembered. There is all this talk all over the Blogoshpere over whether Obama should keep Robert Gates on as Secretary of Defense. Wasn’t he part of a coup? At the time, Cheney was on an official trip to Japan. Suddenly Rumsfeld was out. Rummy and Darth Vader at the time were making all kinds of noises about the need to attack Iran.

My surmise is that the Washington establishment saw the train wreck that Iraq and Afghanistan had turned out to be, and viewed the optimistic theorizing of the Neocons that an Air Attack of three days would be all that was necessary to force regime change in Iran with dismay. And I think that they did not dare move against Rumsfeld if the sly and mysterious VP was at his “undisclosed secure location” in the US.

We all remembered that “cake walk” talk about Iraq.

So while Cheney was in a Tokyo Sushi shop, Rumsfeld gets the axe and Gates is put in. He put a serious brake on moves to instigate a war with Iran. Cheney did make some later efforts, but the wind was really taken out of the Neocon sails.

So that means that even if Gates is a Republican, he is an intelligent man. I do not see why Barack Obama’s reaching out to intelligent people despite ideological background should be a mistake.

After our initial invasion of Iraq, the first question asked of prospective members of the Iraq Occupation Authority was “Did you vote for George Bush?” We ended up with a bunch of Bible College grads, and we saw how well that worked out.

I see nothing wrong with utilizing competence, no matter what ideological background.

Curiosities include contemplation on blogroll policies, football teams wearing stupid colors at home, Ed’s flame war in his comments with Billy Joel (true!), the town I grew up in gets praise(?) from Business Week, another Go-Betweens song.

In case you haven’t seen this, and with thanks to one of my internet scouts, Howard Bailen, this one is hard to believe. Then again, it’s not. (Scroll down the link for all three maps.)

I must admit that I would be willing to kick the crap out of Obama if he actually appointed John Brennan to be CIA Director. The rumor is all over but it seems like a very odd choice to me. Of course that could just be wishful thinking.

I would think he would have trouble getting a warmonger Cheneyite confirmed. Even Sullivan is on rant about it.

I am justly chastised for my mwhahahappiness. Boatload of links, political, musical, literature. Dead Can Dance.

Here is some timely backup to bolster some of Max’s case and to add to his list of concerns. While there is no good news in Max’s post, at least this National Inteligence Report should catch Obama’s attention as it was intended to do. Let’s hope so. This one should be required reading. It says that America is in the rapid process of losing its economic, political and military dominance.

To add further to Max’s list of worries, one I have been following for ten years after reading the fascinating book, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, is the depletion of wild fish and the myriad compounding problems with fish-farming. Here is a recent article, with good links, that documents the imminent calamity. For example, did you know that it takes 3 kilograms of wild fish to produce 1 kilogram of farm-raised fish?! One-third of all wild fish taken out of the natural fish food chain goes to making fish meal to feed farm fish, and would you believe, cattle and pigs. And 25 percent of the caught wild fish is tossed back, dead, of course, as garbage.

And a question to Max, how is Japan, where the consumption of fish, of quality fish, is greater than the US handling this problem?

The broader problem is food. It takes 10 calories of fuel to produce one calorie of food. The alternatives of local and grow your own movement, such as these innovative efforts in England, and the efforts of folks like Jerry A mentioned in his comment below, are good for the “haves”, but what about the near total population of “have-nots”? Not a pretty picture, not sustainable solutions.

There has been a lot of back and forth over President Elect Barack Obama’s choices for this position or that. Or whether we should support him or criticize him at an early date.

I have pledged my unqualified support, and I will tell you why. Barack Obama is the only possible hope for America to survive in any form resembling a civilization. I think many people elected Barack Obama in the hope of restoring a fading lifestyle.

Well that is impossible. What we are looking at is whether or not the nation can survive at all. Despite the comments of some, there is no more usable oil. Any new fields found are small, we will use them up too quickly. And they cost too much to reach, the energy cost to get the oil is nearly equal to the usable energy we withdraw. You cannot run society on that.

The Bushies knew this, and they invaded Iraq to dominate Middle Eastern oil and put off this problem for a generation. It would have made the rest of the world crash earlier by the way, but they did not care. To my thinking, this deception is the greatest crime of the Bushies. And they failed to get the oil.

Americans still do not understand the magnitude of the dilemma. Without oil, food production will collapse, and what food is produced, it will become impossible to deliver to the cities. The cities will have to depopulate, people will be searching for food. The only work available will be manual farm labor. Now think of all those overweight bond traders. How well will they work out on the farm? Many will die. In fact most will. But eventually things will settle out to a supportable population.

If you live in the US southwest, forget it. The entire region will see a mass die off. There are way too many people for the water available. And thanks to climate change, water supplies are decreasing. The reality we all have been ignoring the fact that the region is natural desert. When the White man first came to the Los Angeles basin, it supported a natural human population of about 3,000 Indians. Now it is 10 million. Think of that. L.A. has depleted water source after water source in a march eastward, now they have their eye on the Great Lakes. Well they can forget that.

By my calculations, Atlanta will run out of drinking water for it’s population in about three years. Atlanta has created an urban heat island that is drying out the Southeast. Atlanta has 5 million people. Imagine if they suddenly realized that they are in trouble and all tried to go somewhere at once. They would be cloud of locusts, depleting every gas station and grocery store on their route. And they will run out. The effective travel distance for an American family in this circumstance will be a tankfull of gasoline, no more. Then you walk, because in such a situation there will be no more gas deliveries.

This is the situation we are facing, and soon. On Japanese television news, we have commentators saying the world’s oil supply will run out in 37 years. But that means we can run society as it is for a much shorter time. But Japan has electric trains that we can run on nuclear power, Japan is building fishing boats that are hybrid diesel electric. And a fishing boat will always have wind, and you can generate electricity with wind.

Too many Americans believe that a magical technical fix will preserve the present US society. No. No matter how many hybrid cars or electric cars we build, there is not enough time to replace every vehicle in the US. It would take ten years to replace every vehicle. But that would be with factories turning them out full blast, at the moment they are still a novelty. Think 3 to 5 years to retool factories. And that is too long.

We are out of time. The only solution is a massive electric train system. Yet there is not really enough time to save all of America. We are going to have to change. People in the US Southwest will have to learn to live like Australians. No swimming pools, lawns, or car washing. Bathing may even become restricted. Electricity may be rationed so air conditioning might be out.

There are some nifty inventions in Japan that reduce heat. What I see on TV I pass on to the US embassy. WE just MIGHT be able to reduce the Atlanta heat island and save the US Southeast from turning to desert. But we only have a year or two. Once the forests there burn, it is over, it will become desert.

Some Americans do understand the seriousness of the problem. The Pentagon does. Why has the US Army invented a heat ray weapon for crowd control? It will be used in Chicago, not Karachi. In Karachi we would use machine guns for crowd control. Why has the US Army taken an active duty Brigade, 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, and assigned it to the US for domestic duty in urban crowd control? They know what is coming.

So I am not going to yell and scream about Barack Obama putting Hillary in his cabinet, even though she lost my respect in the campaign, and I not going to yell about Democrats forgiving Joe Lieberman.

Barack Obama is our last and only hope, and he has an incredibly tough job ahead of him. I will give him all my support. And you know what, from what I have seen, he is making some incredibly smart choices. We just might make it as a planet, and as the Human race.