We have all experienced the mind numbing futility of trying to get a "conservative" to change his opinion by looking at the facts.  Here, finally, is experimental evidence that there is something about the way a "conservative" is constituted that makes them less likely to be influenced by reality.  A simple experiment really, but it says a lot about our current state of affairs.

Glenn Greenwald has a nice piece up on this, thought I'd add my two cents.  You see boys and girls, the reason that the pundit class and official Washington can't allow themselves to let go of the idea that Iraq could have worked if it had only been done right is that the real lesson of this clusterfuck shakes their entire world view down to its very foundation.

OK. You are among the 50% of the population who realized that invading Iraq was a stupid thing to do before we did it. You watched in amazement as your views were marginalized in the media and in Washington as the phony case for war was made 24/7 in the most shameless manner imaginable. You've watched as the completely predictable nightmare unfolded. You saw Karl Rove and his reptiles use the bloody shirt to win back the Senate in 02 and after the shooting started he managed to heave his boy across the finnish line in the bloodiest Republican re-election campaign since 1972.

Once the Supreme Court decided that money was the same thing as speech and the spiraling costs of media driven campaigns made the quest for greater and greater sums of cash necessary to run competitive campaigns, it became necessary for politicians of both parties to pursue policies that made them attractive to large corporate donors. Through the 80's and 90's turning your back on this source of campaign funds amounted to unilateral disarmament.

I've heard David Brooks do his disingenuous "third way"stchick. I've heard the new Smokin' Joe Lunatic version of it. I've been nauseated by Ken Salazars milktoast incantations.

Unfortunately, there is a superficial appeal to this rhetoric on the part of the bulk of the population who don't follow politics closely and we need to be able to expose it neatly and pragmatically.

I heard some retired General or such on NPR on the drive home giving the Pentagon spin on why "Haditha isn't Mai Lai" He claims that we learned from Vietnam. Hardly.

If we had learned from Vietnam, there would have been mass resignations at the command level at the hint of invading Iraq.

With a few brave exceptions, there weren't.

From the very beginning, hell from before the beginning, it was clear that although comparisons to Vietnam were being roundly rejected by the planners and pundits, one dynamic would be identical.

So now we learn (surprise) that the 06 election are going to "be about security".  Well, I can't speak for the democrats, but I'd like to raise a voice for sanity.  So let us take a few moments to compare a sane security strategy to the Bush/Cheney security strategy.

I've got family and relatives in the ranching country down there. Where its burning right now. I know you all have your hands full. But I'd like to ask a favor of you. You live on the land. You depend on the weather. I want you to look into your souls and admit that the climate is fucked up. You of all people know this better than most. You, the survivors of the Dust Bowl. You know what bad is. This is bad.

Rocky Mountain News: Energy & mining: "The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden plans to lay off as many as 100 scientists and researchers, or 11 percent of its total staff, beginning early next month as it faces drastic cuts in its budget.

An entire generation of bitter dead enders have spent the last thirty years stewing over why we lost the war in Vietnam. Nixon's political disgrace prevented us from having the sort of rational post-mortem on the experience that may have prevented repetition of the same mistakes.

SW's Energy Gap: "The recent revelations that the Bush administration has likely been using the high tech capabilities of the NSA for the past five years to run an information gathering operation on their political enemies in the guise of the war on terror should surprise no one.The very definition in the common usage of the term 'Nixonian' is an inability to distinguish one's political security from national security.  To oppose the war in Iraq is not to oppose the U.S. Military or 'The United States'.  It is to oppose the policy of the current political leadership.  

I was just listening to Chris Mathews and Dana Milbank cracking wise and admiring Bush's new Iraq PR offensive.  It's brilliant don't ya know?  Dana thinks Howard Dean is the perfect dupe.  After all, Bush is talking about "Victory" and stupid Howard went and said the word "Defeat" and we all know that the American public is so dense, they will automatically support the guy who sez "Victory", and not the guy who sez "Defeat".  I mean Duh!  We're Americans dammit and one thing we don't abide is a loser.

SW's Energy Gap: "The budget that has come out of the House is so larded down with pork in the form of earmarks that what is left-over for the biofuels program at The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden Colorado is just enough money to cut severance checks to the ninety some scientists and engineers working on the program and close up shop.Considering the fact that we have reached the peak in global petroleum production, the major oil companies are busy raping consumers while Congress is handing out multi-billion dollar tax breaks to the very same assholes, this would seem to be a bad move."

Saudi Arabia's Longtime Ambassador to the U.S. Is Resigning - New York Times: "Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who in 22 years as the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States operated as an insider's insider and wielded enormous influence in Washington over successive administrations, is resigning for 'private reasons,' Saudi Arabia announced Wednesday."

Make no mistake.  This is intimately connected to the impending decline of Saudi Arabia's oil production capacity.  Once the illusion that they are going to be able to maintain or even increase their production begins to crumble, their political fortunes will rapidly deteriorate.  The deference that they are granted in the corridors of power in the west is due entirely to their status as a swing producer.  When it becomes clear that this status is no longer based in reality, the knives will come out.  Bandar is getting while the getting is good.

The researchers at The National Renewable Energy Research Laboratory deserve our support.  As you know, the first budget submitted by the Bush administration attempted to cut their budget in half.  Under this administration, top DOE leadership has remained openly hostile to their mission.

SW's Energy Gap: "Most of the smart money is betting that demand will outstrip supply in the global petroleum market before we reach the peak in production.  By now, everyone knows that the unanticipated thirst of China and to a lesser extent India, along with the failure of high prices to substantially curb U.S. demand is taxing the current system.  Although there is the lunatic fringe (like the USGS) that thinks we have another thirty years of increasing production capacity waiting to be tapped, most rational folks see us reaching a peak of production somewhere in this decade or early in the next.  The pessimistic among us see signs that this peak is right around the corner.  

Life is a wonderful thing.  To be celebrated.  But to me, all of this culture of life nonsense isn't so much a celebration of life as it is an absolute terror over the prospect of death.  A reflection of our complete inability as a culture to deal with the concept of death.  For something that is so natural so completely inevitable something that is common to every single one of us, we structure our lives in such a way so that we can pretend up until the last possible moment that it simply doesn't exist.  We hide it.  We stick it away in nursing homes and hospices.

Here is a new piece from Mat Simmons who is one of the few analysts who has gotten this thing right over the past ten years or so.  Follow the link.  It's worth reading the whole thing.

WorldOil.com - Online Magazine Article: Special Focus - Feb-2005: "If any spare wellhead capacity still exists, it is for crude that is both heavy and sour. The refineries that are equipped to refine this type of crude are currently operating at 100% capacity. Compounding this problem is the fact that the world's light sweet crude supply is also in decline. Almost 90% of new oil projects produce oil that is either sour, heavy, or both.