Global Neighbourhoods

Why I'm shedding few tears for Detroit

A few people over on Twitter have wondered why I do not seem overly sympathetic to the plight of two-thirds of Detroit's car makers. Let me say at the outset, that I am extremely concerned for the millions of workers who theoretically could be laid off before this whole thing shakes out. I am also aware of the serious impact to the world's economic well-being. Already traumatized, the collapse of GM & Chrysler could be the most devastating body blow of a series of body blows.

Let me also say that I have relationships with people at GM and Ford they are good people. I believe them to be truthful overall. Although, I have to scratch my head because I visited GM & Ford earlier this year and met with more than 20 representatives of these companies. On after another sang me a song of a magnificent and imminent comeback. They showed me new designs and advanced applications of collaborative computing and virtual reality technologies that looked like they were reducing time to market of better, safer, more fuel efficient cars. In fact, one of them in jovial fashion, leaned over to me as we walked down a hallway and half-jokingly advised me, "if you have any spare cash laying around, this would be a great time to buy some of our stock."

Well it happened that this year I have not had any spare cash laying around. As a matter of fact, most people I know do not have any spare cash laying around and earlier this year, when Hank Paulson took a hefty chunk of our tax dollars and started to spread it around financial institutions in a haphazard and mysterious fashion, it inspired some of the most frugal thinking I and my fellow countrymen have expressed in about 75 or 80 years.

The bravado I heard in Detroit of February was gone. Now, Detroit's management and union leadership was in a panic. Suddenly, we were told, the end was near. If they could not get $15, billion--aw Hell, make that $35 billion, we are going to tank and millions of people in the world will be out of work.

All this tended to piss me and a lot of other people off, but that did not get me to oppose the package. When the head of the UAW termed a temporary pay reduction to $49 an hour "unacceptable," I wondered just who that was unacceptable and if he really did prefer the $0 an hour that the other side of his mouth said was coming. But that also did not stop me from opposing the bailout.

What got me to oppose it was that these guys, sitting before our Congress were the very guys who got us into this mess and they were proposing to be the guys we financed to get us out of it. They had no plan, displayed no vision and demonstrated the same lack of leadership that are at the nexus of the problem we are in.

Let's talk about that issue as well. My last American car was a 1974 Ford Mustang, a beautiful little car whose gear shift came off in my hand at about 42000 miles. My dealer's response was that I should buy a new car. He was right. I have been driving Japanese cars ever since. Most older Americans I know who drive foreign cars have some story of what an American manufacturer or dealer did at some point in the past 40 years to put them into other cars. We raised our children to believe that value and safety could be found more easily in cars made elsewhere. There is a mountain of data to back that up.

Not only did Detroit make the mess they are in, but they have had more than four decades to turn it around. They have an awful record in safety, value, environmental responsibility, credibility and more.

Still, I would have supported the bail out. What stopped me is that I saw and heard no evidence that the people glaring at Congress had any sense of their enormous contribution to the mess we are in and I had no sense that they would step aside and let newer, fresher thinkers replace them to drive our failing auto industry in a new direction.

A Jew's View of Christmas

         

     [Christmas lover Paula Israel with Brewster & very old friend. Photo by Shel]

Mumbai ... Detroit... Thailand... Foreclosures ... Greece. This is a very difficult season to feel jolly. This is the 5th year in which I have posted this piece. I post it earlier this year, in part to remind me of what this holiday season is all about. Hopefully, it may help you as well as me shake the malaise of this particular holiday season. If you remember this from a previous posting, please just mutter Bah Humbug once and move along.

"I grew up in the 1950s in New Bedford, Mass., a second-tier East Coast city. Christmas was the biggest day of the year. School was closed. Parents had rare paid days off. There was usually snow on the ground and the abundant churches would chime carols from bell towers all day long.

Even if you were a Jewish kid and you knew this day was not designed for you, you couldn’t help but share in the excitement. My parents, who were born in Europe at a time when it was unfortunate to be both European and Jewish, were unable to conceal their own ambivalence. Our small family would drive to Christian neighborhoods admiring decorations. We once ventured all the way to Boston--in those days a two-hour drive-- where we saw live reindeer fenced in on Boston Commons beside a large illuminated plastic nativity scene.

More than once, my mother cooked a turkey on Christmas day and family would come for the day—but we never, ever admitted that the celebration had any relationship to Christmas. There were no stockings hung by our chimney with care, no bulbous piles of loot, no sweet smell of pine trees in our living room.

Christmas was a source of huge confusion for me as a boy and teenager. Perhaps it still is.

As a Jewish kid, we had Hanukkah. But the Festival of Lights, as it is called, seemed pale in the shadow of all that Christmas glitter of tinsel and bright blinking bulbs. Christmas was everywhere in the windows of homes and stores, on lawns in parks and even on rooftops. Yes, it was in the schools and no one even thought of objecting at that time. I still wouldn't.

While he was still alive, my grandfather, a white-haired kindly old man gave me Hanukkah “gelt,” in the form of a silver dollar. A dollar was big-time money back then, but how could my grandfather ever compete with the other white-haired guy, the one in the red suit with the elves, the flying sleigh and all his well-disguised doubles in department stores?

I liked getting a gift each of the eight days of Hanukkah, even if over-half was only socks and clothing that I would have gotten anyway. But while my Christian friends had only a single day, theirs seemed to be the Perfecta Jackpot, dwarfing our quantity of days with their quality.

In January. when we went back to Betsy B. Winslow School, I’d hear glee-filled reports of how these Christian kids had awakened Dec. 25 to entire living rooms filled with Schwinn bikes, Lionel Trains, American Flyer Wagons and Junior Builder Erector Sets. The only price they had to pay was to leave out some faith-based milk and cookies the night before.

Christmas loot was bad enough, but then there were the miracles. Theirs was the birth of God’s son on a night when animals talked. Ours was that a temple light burned for a long time. Big deal. Our most popular Hanukkah song was, “Dreydle, Dreydle, Dreydle,” which has the same melodic merit as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Not quite on par with “Silent Night,” “First Noel” or even, for that matter, “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Our Holiday food featured potato latkas, still a personal, cholesterol-soaked favorite, but we had no Mormon Tabernacle Choir, no TV special with Perry Como crooning “Ave Maria.“ We never dashed through the snow, laughing even part of the way.

But Hanukkah had one special part for a Jewish kid in that era-- latent machismo. The holiday story was about how Judah Maccabee had led a successful guerrilla war against the previously undefeated Roman Legions, making himself the central figure in the whole Hanukkah tale. Maccabee had kicked some serious Roman butt back when the Romans were the undefeated champs. It made me proud. He was our Rocky, our Joltin' Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson. He wasn't no wimp as Jewish kids were often considered to be in the 50s.

I started remembering all this yesterday, while driving through the sad city of East Palo Alto (EPA). A few years back, EPA had the highest murder rate in the country--outdoing Detroit, New York City and Oakland. [They say it’s a lot better now that they’ve brought in a Home Depot, Ikea and Sun Microsystems campus]. But as I sat at a traffic light watching a packaged goods deal between a dude in a long coat and a kid on a bike, I saw a sign that reminded me about what I envied most about Christmas. It hung in huge, slightly lopsided, letters across University Avenue.

It said: “Peace on Earth.”

Tomorrow will be my 64th Christmas. It was a great many Christmases ago when I first heard the words, and fewer Christmas ago when I came to understand the bigness of the concept and the power of the thought. Peace on Earth is much, much bigger than Maccabee kicking Roman butt.

Not too many years ago, I met Paula who is now my wife. She loved Christmas like the kids in the old TV programs sponsored by Hallmark cards. She loved the planning, and decorating; the gifting and wrapping and opening and putting ribbons on her head; she loved the cooking and filling the house with unlikely assortments of people who somehow enjoyed each other. Her zeal put me at odds with my own deep and ambiguous feelings about the holiday. I’ve never been able to explain them to her in any way that makes sense and perhaps that’s what I’m trying to do in this particular blog.

There are now two things special about Christmas for me. The first is the big thought, dream or illusion of peace on earth and goodwill between its many inhabitants--Christians Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists and even Republicans. I don’t pray, but I do hope. If you do pray for these issues, I hope they come through and I will be grateful to you.

The second is smaller and more personal. It’s about Paula and how she catches the season’s joy as if it were something contagious. Whatever the germ, I’ve caught it as I find myself looking forward to the planning, and decorating; the gifting, wrapping and opening--albeit without ribbons on my head. Christmas Day, our home will be filled with unlikely assortments of people and I already know it will work out just fine.

Happy holidays, whichever you choose to observe, and may the New Year bring all of us closer to peace on Earth."

[Originally published December 24, 2003.

Even if you were a Jewish kid and you knew this day was not designed for you, you couldn’t help but share in the excitement. My parents, who were born in Europe at a time when it was unfortunate to be both European and Jewish, were unable to conceal their own ambivalence. Our small family would drive to Christian neighborhoods admiring decorations. We once ventured all the way to Boston--in those days a two-hour drive-- where we saw live reindeer fenced in on Boston Commons beside a large illuminated plastic nativity scene.

More than once, my mother cooked a turkey on Christmas day and family would come for the day—but we never, ever admitted that the celebration had any relationship to Christmas. There were no stockings hung by our chimney with care, no bulbous piles of loot, no sweet smell of pine trees in our living room.

Christmas was a source of huge confusion for me as a boy and teenager. Perhaps it still is.

As a Jewish kid, we had Hanukkah. But the Festival of Lights, as it is called, seemed pale in the shadow of all that Christmas glitter of tinsel and bright blinking bulbs. Christmas was everywhere in the windows of homes and stores, on lawns in parks and even on rooftops. Yes, it was in the schools and no one even thought of objecting at that time. I still wouldn't.

While he was still alive, my grandfather, a white-haired kindly old man gave me Hanukkah “gelt,” in the form of a silver dollar. A dollar was big-time money back then, but how could my grandfather ever compete with the other white-haired guy, the one in the red suit with the elves, the flying sleigh and all his well-disguised doubles in department stores?

I liked getting a gift each of the eight days of Hanukkah, even if over-half was only socks and clothing that I would have gotten anyway. But while my Christian friends had only a single day, theirs seemed to be the Perfecta Jackpot, dwarfing our quantity of days with their quality.

In January. when we went back to Betsy B. Winslow School, I’d hear glee-filled reports of how these Christian kids had awakened Dec. 25 to entire living rooms filled with Schwinn bikes, Lionel Trains, American Flyer Wagons and Junior Builder Erector Sets. The only price they had to pay was to leave out some faith-based milk and cookies the night before.

Christmas loot was bad enough, but then there were the miracles. Theirs was the birth of God’s son on a night when animals talked. Ours was that a temple light burned for a long time. Big deal. Our most popular Hanukkah song was, “Dreydle, Dreydle, Dreydle,” which has the same melodic merit as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Not quite on par with “Silent Night,” “First Noel” or even, for that matter, “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Our Holiday food featured potato latkas, still a personal, cholesterol-soaked favorite, but we had no Mormon Tabernacle Choir, no TV special with Perry Como crooning “Ave Maria.“ We never dashed through the snow, laughing even part of the way.

But Hanukkah had one special part for a Jewish kid in that era-- latent machismo. The holiday story was about how Judah Maccabee had led a successful guerrilla war against the previously undefeated Roman Legions, making himself the central figure in the whole Hanukkah tale. Maccabee had kicked some serious Roman butt back when the Romans were the undefeated champs. It made me proud. He was our Rocky, our Joltin' Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson. He wasn't no wimp as Jewish kids were often considered to be in the 50s.

I started remembering all this yesterday, while driving through the sad city of East Palo Alto (EPA). A few years back, EPA had the highest murder rate in the country--outdoing Detroit, New York City and Oakland. [They say it’s a lot better now that they’ve brought in a Home Depot, Ikea and Sun Microsystems campus]. But as I sat at a traffic light watching a packaged goods deal between a dude in a long coat and a kid on a bike, I saw a sign that reminded me about what I envied most about Christmas. It hung in huge, slightly lopsided, letters across University Avenue.

It said: “Peace on Earth.”

Tomorrow will be my 64th Christmas. It was a great many Christmases ago when I first heard the words, and fewer Christmas ago when I came to understand the bigness of the concept and the power of the thought. Peace on Earth is much, much bigger than Maccabee kicking Roman butt.

Not too many years ago, I met Paula who is now my wife. She loved Christmas like the kids in the old TV programs sponsored by Hallmark cards. She loved the planning, and decorating; the gifting and wrapping and opening and putting ribbons on her head; she loved the cooking and filling the house with unlikely assortments of people who somehow enjoyed each other. Her zeal put me at odds with my own deep and ambiguous feelings about the holiday. I’ve never been able to explain them to her in any way that makes sense and perhaps that’s what I’m trying to do in this particular blog.

There are now two things special about Christmas for me. The first is the big thought, dream or illusion of peace on earth and goodwill between its many inhabitants--Christians Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists and even Republicans. I don’t pray, but I do hope. If you do pray for these issues, I hope they come through and I will be grateful to you.

The second is smaller and more personal. It’s about Paula and how she catches the season’s joy as if it were something contagious. Whatever the germ, I’ve caught it as I find myself looking forward to the planning, and decorating; the gifting, wrapping and opening--albeit without ribbons on my head. Christmas Day, our home will be filled with unlikely assortments of people and I already know it will work out just fine.

Happy holidays, whichever you choose to observe, and may the New Year bring all of us closer to peace on Earth."

[Originally published December 24, 2003.

My 2000th post

This is the 2000th time I have posted on this blog since it began as "TheRedCouch" in December 2004. That was the first of a good number of names for the book that eventually came out as Naked Conversations. It was called red Couch after a piece of furniture in my co-author, Robert Scoble's house.

Global Neigbourhoods is th third name for this blog, which has received 8622 comments, according to Typepad. WebPage Grader says that sometime in the past few days I received my 50,000 inbound links. I am not sure of the exact number, but I'm pretty certain that I've posted over a million words here, more than 13 times as many as we wrote in Naked Conversations.

What a terrific journey it has been. What a wonderful journey I know it will continue to be. Thanks to so many people in so many places for so many interesting conversations. I have learned so much from so many people. Social media has brought me to 14 countries so far. This would never have happened without this blog and China is kind of the cherry on the Sundae.

I can't wait to see what happens next.

Our Election: Toward a Common Ground

As people who follow me on Twitter already know, I have long been an ardent supporter of Barack Obama. It is with joy and trepidation that I realize the very high likelihood that in less than three weeks, he will become the resident-elect of the United States.The joy is because of the hope I have for what he can achieve. The trepidation is because--like so many times in the past--the person elected does not do what the people who voted him in hope he will do.

Four years ago, slightly over half this country voted for George Bush. They sincerely believed he would do better for us than he did. Their disappointment in what has happened to this country and the world during his tenure is probably no less than mine. I had great faith in Bill Clinton, the first time I voted for him, and some faith in him the second time around. But he did not conduct his personal life in a way that most American's had hoped he would. His sex life became a public issue and distracted from more important matters.

My point is this. Having your guy beat the other guy is not like a sporting event. This is not about one side winning and the other side losing. It is about a process that is supposed to have friction in it. It is also about a process that works best when there is compromise involved. It is about a process where we are supposed to argue our cases with all our hearts and learn that there are other credible viewpoints being held by people of equal wisdom and integrity. In our passions we all get angry at times and in politics I find myself blowing my own top early and more often than I do in other areas.

Electing a president is not about winning. It's about setting a course for the common good. It's about picking the perceived leader of the Western world. It's about finding a healthy level of governance. It's about finding peaceful solutions with other countries, many of whom have leaders who regard us with hostility or downright hatred.

The media has come to treat political races as sports matches, perhaps boxing or live professional wrestling. That's why negative ads have been effective in recent elections. I see the paucity of media interest in complex issues as a major reason why these ads have worked--until this time and this election, which most people realize is just too important to decided by slur and innuendo.

It is about finding common ground and respecting the views of others, no matter how boneheaded we regard those views--and they view ours.

I hope I'm right about Barack Obama. If I am, our domestic situation will improve and our relationships with a great many countries of the world will improve and our realization how we all have come to interdepend on each other.

Democracy. Is ours broken?

I spent a couple of years, a very long time ago, in state government. When I left, I wondered if it had been ego or naivete that made me feel I have actually made a difference. I've been thinking about this for a few days after my old friend, who grew up with me, blew into town for lunch on Friday. Paul is now retired, after serving without passion for 25 years as a government lawyer in Washington, DC. He's glad to be done with it and gladder for the pension that allows him to spend most of his time getting serious with his passion with photography,

Paul lived in government for a long time. It s the dominating culture of where he lived most of his life. He knew the people whose passion was like mine when I went into government, who believed that they really could change a system; that they really could serve people and make the lives of citizens better. As years went by, and those that stayed, got promoted, they started acting and thinking like the elders they had replaced. Government got bigger and less effective and they grew more apathetic and their purpose was the inevitable pension rather than helping people in a democratic system.

That's one thread of four that I'm braiding in my mind. The second is the very cynical voices I am hearing from American voters on Twitter, where I talk politics far more often than I do here. I've often chatted with LizWebPage , who is usually optimistic and even more frequently funny in her 140-character missives. But when it comes to this imminent presidential campaign, Liz has a dark and frightened view of how it will come out. I asked others if they felt the way she did and the majority--particularly among voters under age 35 seemed to share the feeling that this voting stuff was just a game engineered by Carl Rove and equally dark manipulators.

At lunch, I told this to Paul, who nodded his agreement. The system, he said, was hopelessly corrupted, and he no longer saw a way to fix it.

The first place that I visited that was governed by what I considered to be less than a Democracy was Singapore, in 2004. I went, expecting to encounter an oppressed people under the powerful thumbs of an uncaring government. I wonder, once again, if it was ego or naivete that set my expectation. I met some incredibly capable people in government, who displayed great passion about education, technology and well-being of Singaporeans. I met quite a few citizens who seemed overall happy about their lives under the existing (unopposed) president and his regime. They had their complaints, but they were no greater and perhaps less than those I hear from Americans on Twitter. And they spoke freely about them, with polite requests that I do not cite them in my writing. My dialog with several has continued for four years.

One recently observed that people anywhere will fight back if you repress them beyond a certain point, but it hasn't happened  in Singapore because the basic human priorities are met -- safety,
shelter, food.

As an American, the word "Katrina" rolls through my brain. Sometimes our democracy doesn't even try to meet those same requirements. It is one of many examples where our democracy, which is elected to serve the needs of its people failed to provide basic servers to people who had fallen into harm's way.

I go to China in six weeks. I started writing about the world's largest country only six months ago, when I cited a UN report that said China had lifted 300 million people out of poverty in a generation. I was surprised by the hostility and factual inaccuracy of some of the people who commented about China, it's policies and the government that has evolved in the 32 years since Mao's death.

I too had misconceptions about the relationship between China's government and its people. I have spent a fair amount of time reading what I can and speaking to Chinese people, particularly those who Chinese involved in social media. "You think of our government, ' one of my new friends told me, "like the Bourne identity--listened, watching able to eliminate anyone, anywhere. It's not that way. It's more like your government, more like your Keystone Cops. Officials running all over the place, in all directions, barely getting anything done."

There are many actions of the Chinese, or Singaporean governments that I don't like. Then again, I'm aware of the facts in more cases of my own government's actions that I consider pretty untenable. But what is clear to me is that both of these governments, who do not allow two-party votes for their highest offices, have agreements with their citizens. These agreements ensure that life will be stable and it will improve. That freedoms will come at a pace which ensure social stability, and that sitting here in California, I have limited access to the big picture in either country. So I bring them in to this conversation, not to judge them, but to challenge my own basic premise.

That premise has been part of my own conventional wisdom all my life: that America's way of governing s best because it allows the most freedom and that most people in the world would like to have our way of life and government.

I think in emerging countries, stability, health, education, housing are inalienable human right, just as they are supposed to be here. But I think a case is emerging that our particular system may not be the best at all times and in all places.

And I think that before we judge our global neighbors, Americans need to spend a great deal of time and energy in getting or own house in order first. Which brings me to the 5th and final thread in the rope that connects this--social media. In social media we have the opportunity to restore the voice of our citizen. We have the ability to talk directly with those who govern us, and are supposed to serve us. We have the ability to bypass the admen and Carl Roves who use traditional communications to deceive us, to by lies that hurt us.

We have just begun to use conversational technology in this light. Until very recently, politicians used social media to get message out and campaign contributions in. But new ways of conversing are happening, such as the Contact TV-Twitter project I wrote about earlier this week. That project itself is relatively minute when one looks at the challenges we face to restore American faith in the American system, but as Malcolm Gladwell, told us in his Tipping Point subtitle, little things can make a big difference.

Or, the other thought is, that at this late date in my life, I still have the ego and naivete to believe people like us can make a difference.

Grand daughter on Aisle 3

I was at Molly Stone in Belmont, Ca trying to find the ^&*$#** Mandarin oranges my wife fancies so much when my iPhone buzz in my pocket. I happen to know that this place is a dead spot for AT&T so I ignored it. The phone rang less than 60 seconds again and I saw it was my wife, so I went outside to find out what else my wife wanted me to pick up.

But that wasn't it at all. She was calling to tell me that our daughter Melanie in Dallas, had given birth to Isla (pronounced AYla) a few hours ago. Isla is 8 pounds, a few ounces and 19 inches long I was told. More important, all her toes and fingers are where they are supposed to be. For once in my life, I was pretty speechless. We spoke for another minute or two, then I returned to Aisle 3 and my quest for Mandarin oranges.

Slowly, I realized that my eyes were misting up. And then I was bawling like Isla must have done a few hours earlier. I stood there wondering if I could shoplift a Kleenex when some guy came up to me, concerned, asking what was wrong. I told him I had just learned I had a new granddaughter. He stared for second, then, beaming, stuck out his hand.

"Congratulations, grandpa,"  he said. I think I said thanks. Then he turned to someone passing by and told him I just learned about a grandchild. Then one person was telling another and people were patting me on the back and I was wiping my eyes and saying thank you.

I know that I just had one of those memories that will stay with me. I even remembered the Mandarin oranges. 

Life is beautiful. Birth is a miracle. And yes, you can call me grandpa. At least today.

Will you still love me when I'm 64?

I was 23 years old when Paul McCartney sang that question for the Beatles Yellow Submarine. Now I discover, to my great ambivalence that I will be precisely that the day after tomorrow. I was going to write something truly profound this Thursday, as I did when I turned 60, but I was afraid that by then I would forget what it was I wanted to say.

In fact, I already have. There isn't profundity floating around anywhere, in here. So instead, as I'm increasingly prone to do, I offer you a few scattered and random thoughts:

• This distance between 23 and 64 is a lot shorter than you think.
• Some of the most memorable experiences are simpler than you may think. For example, my first espresso in Italy. A smiling girl on a subway with who I never spoke, the first time I smelled jasmine.
• Babies. When you are young other people's babies are pretty much boring. When they are your grand children, it's entirely different.
• Letters about Medical and Social Security arrive every year after you turn 50. This year they are suddenly of great interest to me.
• I stay young by seriously considering a great many new ideas.
• I exercise like there is no tomorrow. One of these days, there won't be.
• The hardest human virtue for me remains forgiveness. I've been working on that one for a very long time. Oh yeah. I'm also not particularly good at shutting up.
• Pay attention to little details. Very often, that's where you'll find the most revealing secrets.
• Of all the things you can possibly run out of, time is the one you cannot replace.

May each of you live long and prosper. Hopefully, I will continue to do the same. Now where did I put my spectacles?

Quote for Today

They are not really quotes for the day and sooner or later, I'll come up with a better name for them. I post quotes when I see them, often ones I come accross in social media. Today's comes from someone who never blogged, but it somehow seems appropriate to the SM Community these days.

'An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.'

                                           --Mahatma Gandhi

Oil Price plunge 2nd day in a row. Are Happy days here again?

Oil prices dropped for the second straight day. The stock market is rising except oil stocks which are falling. Somewhere a Chevy showroom is dusting off a Tahoe in the hopes they'll finally be able to sell the incredible hulk. Are happy days here again.

Probably not.

According to the NY Times: Chip Johnson, the president and chief executive officer of Carrizo Oil and Gas,
a Houston-based company, said he was “confused” by “such wild swings.”
But he added: “I can’t see oil getting cheap again ever. It’s just too
hard to find, and too many people want to use it.”

Right now, in San Carlos, CA it is 96 F outside, by my count, the 12th day of 2008 tht has topped 90. Last I heard, our Forest fires were less than 300, down from 1300 about a week ago.

These dots connect, or so it seems to me. There are two compelling reasons to get away from fossil fuels as fast as possible. The first is the compelling case that it is getting warmer, most years and will continue to do so. The second is the sheer economics of the situation. Even if fossil fuel was clean-burning we simply cannot use it as much to heat our homes and power our transporation. Actually, there's a third reason: Most of the countries that have the stuff don't like us very much.

Gotta go fill up my Acura. Heard a rumor premium is down to $4.75 at the Olympus station.

Doc Searls is going Home!

Through Scripting News, I've learned that Doc Searls is sucking ice, rather than getting his water through an IV and that better still, the incredible pain he has been enduring has subsided and--best of all--Doc is scheduled to get out of the hospital on Sunday.

Be well, Doc. The world is a better place with you in it.