I'm not a socialist, although my Political Compass score says I think like one. I'm not even anti-capitalist - in fact I am a capitalist by profession.

I drove to town today, so I got to listen to the radio (no reception at my house). I usually leave around 2PM so I can catch Fresh Air, and today Terry Gross was interviewing Bob Sullivan, author of a new book called Gotcha Capitalism (audio link). It's about all of the little extra "hidden fees found in many phone, cable, credit card and other bills."

These things have been driving me nuts for years, but I never quite caught the trend until I heard the program today.

Once upon a time, a Democratic President wanted to take us into war, and he was opposed by Republican Senators. Not only did those Republican Senators oppose the war, they did it at a time when the press, both parties, and much of the electorate was in favor of going to war. They did it even though one would be up for election the following year, and another wanted to run for President. Not only that, they didn't listen to political consultants and didn't apologize for or later try to obfuscate their positions. They didn't vote "Present". They didn't 'flip-flop'.

Given what we've come to know in this age as the behavior of the two parties,Senators and Presidential aspirants, it sounds like a fairy tale, I know.

It isn't.

[Voice over - delivered in a staccato semi-monotone by an omiscient narrator.]

NARRATOR: Two men, two colleges, two continents, autumn, 1760.

[split-screen]

NARRATOR: On the left: tall, thin-skinned, shy, Mr. Thomas Jefferson, student at William and Mary College, taking his first bite of the academic apple, in his own words eager to continue his study of the classics, learn something of mathematics, gain a more universal acquaintance.

On the right: Mr. James Watt, employee, in his workshop at the University of Glasgow. Trained as an instrument maker,  member of the Guild of Hammermen, a mechanic who can make anything, but a man ignorant of steam and steam engines, an ignorance soon to be remedied.

Two men with little to show as yet in the way of accomplishment. Two men unknowingly waiting for the cue to make their stage entrance in two very different revolutions. And for now, two men unaware that the cue will come from that same small influence waiting for them both in the wings behind the proscenium of -- the Diary Zone.

I live in Washington State because late in the 19th century, a doctor told Adelbert Lorenzo Kool he had only a few months to live. Mr. Kool was a paymaster for James. J. Hill's Great Northern Railroad. On receiving the bad news, Mr. Kool quit his job, left his family, and established himself as a trapper on a remote mountain lake in the North Cascades. 40 years later, in the 1930s, Mr. Kool died when his still set fire to his cabin. His favorite saying was "T'Hell with Jim Hill and the Great Northern Railroad".

Mr. Kool's misdiagnosis in the late 1800s ultimately created a disturbance in my life which led to a succession of changes in my personal environment. But this isn't about my life, or even about A. L. Kool - it's about the disturbance, succession and restoration of an ecosystem.

About the same time A. L. Kool was settling in a short distance from what today is known as Railroad Creek, another of Jim Hill's employees was exploring the Cascades for a railroad right-of-way on the other side of Railroad Creek, and that's the incident that set off the chain of events I want to write about.

This is an ecological ballet, as most ecosystem descriptions are. Instead of a young girl, a weird uncle, a decorative kitchen utensil with a sword, and armies of mice, its corps de ballet includes birds, trees, squirrels, grizzly bears, alien invaders (lots of aliens), and even Indians and their successors. It is set on a stage above 8000 feet extending from Yellowstone to Glacier National Park.

The final acts remain unfinished, subject to revision. It is rated R, since it contains some sex and violence. You may wish to provide your own adult language.

If you thought that the Clinton campaign's planted questions were bad, wait til you read the latest news item concerning the deceptive nature of Clinton's campaign ads.s

In 1891 Gifford Pinchot, later to be appointed America's first Chief Forester by Teddy Roosevelt, visited the Kaweah Colony, a utopian Socialist community situated in a grove of California's Giant Sequoia. As related by Stephen Pyne in Fire in America (p 302):

... Kaweah colonists informed [Pinchot] that they had saved the grove from burning up 29 times in the past 5 years. To this, Pinchot wryly inquired, "Who has saved them during the remaining three or four thousand years of their age?"

Had Pinchot really understood thoroughly the implications of his question, he would have known how to build a forest. More importantly, he would have known how not to build a forest, and the megafires that sweep the Western US (and other parts of the planet) every year would be more controllable and less destructive.

I have to take issue with the recent diary Firebombs in the Forest: Slashpiles Fueled Angora Fire Destruction by FUSEE. There are some conclusions in the diary which, while they may sound reasonable, simply aren't supported by experience or research.

The tendency in almost any wildfire where property destruction takes place is to place the blame on someone else - someone other than the property owner who suffered the loss. Most often, that someone else is the Forest Service.

In some cases, the Forest Service shares some of the blame, and the deteriorated conditions of western US forests is certainly a result of (among other causes) past Forest Service practice.

However a look at the science of structure ignition in wildfires makes FUSEE's claims seem unlikely.

Our local school district has just taken delivery of one of the first (if not the first) plug-in hybrid electric school buses (PHEB) in the nation.

You can read about it here or here, see pictures here (it's yellow and looks like a school bus), or find out some details over the fold.

In today's Midday Open Thread, Miss Laura provided a link the this article in The Nation. The takeaway quote from article is:

It would be easy to blame the entertainment industry for the invisibility of working people fighting to better their lives. Ask writers in show business and they'll say, "Nobody cares about seeing those people on a screen" and "If audiences wanted to see that, the studios would make it" ...

To me, that seems like a "Hollywood" version of what work and working people are about, and it leaves me wondering what the article's authors are thinking (and what they're watching).

While not watching the Super Bowl tonight, I ran across a global warming ad on TV, sponsored by Environmental Defense (formerly the Environmental Defense Fund) and the Ad Council, who produces a lot of public service ads.

The ad closes with a link to http://www.fightglobalwarming.com, which after a brief look, appears to me to be a responsible, somewhat non-technical, consumer-oriented web site. My first impression is that both the ad and the web site are very well done.

More below ---

This is a story about how Wal-Mart conspires with small city government to impose itself on a small community and threaten the community's thriving small businesses.

It's also a story about how a small group of citizens can throw a monkey-wrench in Wal-Mart's plans and win, at least in the first round - the final outcome is yet to be determined.

I couldn't tell you if anyone has diaried this, because I've been without electricity for 60 hours (I did search and didn't find anything). Thursday night/Friday morning a severe windstorm passed through Washington State knocking out power to about 1 million people. Our power came back on about 2PM on Sunday.

Since a lot of people were interested in the preparedness diaries a year or so ago, I thought I'd do a follow-up on an actual (minor for us, thankfully) disaster. So on the flip side is a chronological description of life here the past few days.

The biggest problem in cold weather areas is heat - 60 hours without heat and our pipes would have frozen (it was down into single digits by Friday night). Fortunately we rely on wood for most of our heat, and that never goes out. I don't know of another good solution for people without wood stoves or fireplaces (and don't count on them to work in an emergency if you haven't tried them out beforehand - chimneys get plugged by vines or bird's nests and chimney fires are a concern with dirty chimneys) - some of my neighbors will have frozen pipes.

Unrest in the Forest could refer to the seemingly eternal triangle formed by environmentalists, timber companies and US Forest Service (USFS) in the Western US. It could also be part of the opening line of a song by Rush. But in this case, it refers to my bad attitude.

I've spent a lot of time over the last 6 months trying to learn about forests and especially forest fires. I didn't exactly start from zero (but close to it), but I've learned a lot, especially from some very good university and government web sites, and directly from fire ecologists, fire management people at the Federal and state level, and fire fighters, who I've spent a lot of time talking to and (mostly) listening to.

I've wanted to relate the things I've learned to political policy in a diary for the last few weeks, but before I did that, I wanted to round out my research a little by seeing what players in the political arena - especially environmental groups - had to say.

Therein lies the cause of my unrest.

I happened to be channel surfing past an LA station (on satellite) the other night, and saw a commercial for Phil Angelides.

I thought it was one of the worst political commercials I've ever seen. I don't live in CA and don't claim to know much about CA politics, but I thought the ad really sucked.

One major issue in the Western US, and probably increasingly in places like FL, TX, and maybe even the Midwest and Appalachia, is forest fire or wildfire. In past years within a 50 mile radius of my home, hundreds of thousands of acres of forest have burned. 12 years ago the Tyee Fire here set a record for forest fires at 120,000 acres. Since then, fires in NM and CO have surpassed that, and large areas of Yellowstone burned.

For people living in many rural areas - sometimes referred to as the "Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI)" - fire can be a recurring threat. So it seems odd to write a diary that views fire as an integral and necessary part of the ecosystem. As a Democrat and environmentally minded, it's even odder to commend any part of Bush's Healthy Forests Restoration Act (HFRA). But this diary does both.

Where I live, my conception of "traffic" is one other car on the road, "heavy traffic" is two cars, and more is probably a funeral procession. But both Sunday and today I drove from North Central Washington State to Portland, OR and back (round trip each day, about 700 miles total each day), and while it's mostly my opinion, and both subjective and anecdotal, I thought there was a lot less traffic than normal in most of the areas I drove through.

I'm just wondering what other people are seeing in their parts of the country.

My wife and I consumed about $2000 worth of energy this week and in the end, all we got out of it was a wienie roast (but a damn fine wienie roast!). However, what we actually spent on the $2000 worth of energy we consumed was 8 cents.

It turns out the US Government and private individuals own huge amounts of free-for-the-taking energy, and in fact taking it would be the environmentally sound thing to do. Beyond that, it takes virtually no new technology to utilize this energy.

Unlike other free energy schemes, this one requires no tinfoil hats. Read on ...