evought, you are too nice and too smart for this to get heated. And if I seemed angry it wasn't at you. I get heated all by myself.

You've given me some things to think about and a reason to read a little more background, for which I am grateful. And I agree about Blackstone and Paine, but it's amazing how misused those fundamental authors can be. I see their writing cherry-picked over like a bowl of M&Ms, with people looking for partisan justification. And I do it too. The spirit of the Enlightenment was inspired, but as with most things, the devil was in the details. My favorite parts of the debates are when the delegates start throwing Montesquieu quotes at each other like a liberal Catholic priest and a evangelical preacher having an argument using only Biblical quotes. When you knew the real argument was about stuff that was a lot more mundane, like money, power, and how to come up with a document that would reverse some of the more democratic impulses of the Articles of Confederacy. Because at the end of the day, it seems to me like the point of the exercise was to keep the aristocracy in place (or at least a kind of oligarchy) while coating it with enough democratic language so that need be, they could convince farmers to put down their implements, leave their families and fight and die for a government over which they had little say. Like firebrand Jeremiah Cornelius likes to say, the Constitution was a counter-revolutionary document. I see it the same way.

It doesn't make the Constitution any less wonderful in my eyes, it only makes it more human. Some wealthy white men wanted to cement their place at the head of the table and they wanted to brandish the words of the Enlightenment to make it so. Fortunately for the surviving Enlightenment thinkers, there was no Internet so they didn't really get a chance to see the results in their full glory. Though a few seem to have had a few difficult moments when during the time visiting the colonies they would get a glimpse of black men and women in chains being sold as chattel. The amazing and quite special part - for me- is that ordinary Americans continue to agree to be bound by this document. It shows much more how great is the desire of this people to live in a peaceful and organized civil society than it does the magic power of the Founding Fathers. They're desire to stay whole as a people. To me, it's proof of the notion of a "living document", because it's been twisted and turned to adapt to times so drastically that if it wasn't living, it surely would have crumbled to dust long ago. The Constitution itself should have been, like Jefferson suggested, redone before the end of the 18th century. And probably half a dozen times since then. It endures not because of it's innate qualities, but rather because of the innate qualities of the people who agree to be bound by it (as opposed to the ones who take an oath to it. Most of them don't seem to give a damn.). Even when (or maybe especially when) things are at their worst, they turn to a mythical notion -an ideal - of the document in order to try to find their way back. Not back to a notion of the Founders, but back to living their lives peacefully without getting torn to bits. The Constitution is used to argue imposition and discrimination as often as it's used to argue liberty and equal protection. Same document in both cases. It not only lives, it seems to be chameleon in nature.

As someone who most people would call a "liberal" (though I'm not really so much that), I have a pretty high opinion of the American people. Even the ones who got here since this morning. When I say, honestly, that I love my country, I think of them more than I think of our institutions or founding documents. Traveling elsewhere has only made that love stronger.

Say, evought, you ever come to Chicago, I'll sport you to the beverage of your choice. I'm glad to have had this encounter and glad it lasted long enough to be friendly. It doesn't happen often enough with me, so I hope some of your civility rubs off. And it's not just this concoction my wife made tonight of over-ripe plums pureed with bourbon and honey. I swear. Now I will retire to my back porch where I will practice my chromatic harmonica until it's time to walk the dog.

"Honey, is there any more of this plum stuff?"

This contact is for carrying people in to LEO, not satellites or cargo. Your argument doesn't work for human rated launchers.

First, it is difficult and expensive to human rate a launch vehicle so not very many companies are going to do it without a reasonable chance of getting business.

It is also probably not a place you want a company cutting corners to low ball a contract bid. The first priority is keeping the cargo alive, not saving a few dollars by going with launch-by-night Rockets-R-US.

Oh, I'm familiar with Eurostat, but your links weren't working (and still aren't). Apparently, not so resilient. Maybe the EU's fossil fuel plants are still in the process of "spinning up".

I still don't get the reference to Der Spiegel, though. Was that a mistake or a red herring?

And I wasn't saying your statistics were right wing, just that your narrative is one that is favored by right wing. The same people who have perpetrated this disastrous "austerity" on Europeans, only to see economies tumble, recessions loom large and jobs lost, while the 1% tucks into the meal of a lifetime.

And last of all, I'm still interested in how you believe solar panels caused a rise in emissions. Maybe they gave certain fossil energy executives and institutional shareholders gas?

Anyone still reading this, I would encourage you to try this little experiment. Google "Germany solar police a failure" and look at the links. Whether or not you read the stories, I suggest you take a look at the advertisements on the page and/or read a little bit about the organization behind the web page. As usual with these things, there's a story behind the story.

As popular as it is to make this gripe this country was founded on democratic process.

No. You could say that our Constitution was designed as a counter-revolutionary reaction to the Articles of Confederation, designed to keep any important decisions out of the hands of ordinary citizens. It's "democratic" in the sense of people being able to vote, but everything from the electoral college to the Senate to the Supreme Court were designed as safeguards against the will of the people.

There were democratic movements in various eras in the US, the most recent being in the decades after WWII when women and blacks both had the right to vote, but everything today is pointing away from "the Will of the People". From our legal system which every year creates millions of adults who cannot vote to the new spate of voter suppression efforts in Red states throughout the country to the recent movement by conservatives to repeal the 17th Amendment, which allows for the direct election of the Senate. Even the recent Citizens United opinion was designed to reduce electoral participation. When it's clear that a handful of the richest donors control the electoral process from school boards all the way up to the Presidency, why bother voting?

Nosirree. We were not founded as a democracy. We've been something other than democratic from the day the Constitution was ratified, not by popular election, but by a group of wealthy white slave-owning men. "Democracy" is a fairy tale we tell school children in the hope that they'll someday enlist in the military and be willing to go die in some foreign hellhole to protect the assets of the wealthy.

That's exactly what they are doing, making sure you get the functionality you pay for. I buy my stuff from reputable dealers, in 25yrs I've had exactly one Nvidia card and one ATI card blow up, every other video problem I've ever had has been software related. Both cards were cheerfully replaced under warranty.

AFAIK from personal experience the practice of downgrading faulty chips to a lower spec has been around since the days of maths co-processors, probably longer. And no they don't exhaustively test every chip, the grading is done via random sampling at the batch level because, like science, "statistical analysis works".

Soo, their CO2 output in increasing, their energy prices are highest in Europe, and a broad coalition, which includes the chancellor, is now pushing to have the program cancelled. ... SUCCESS!

And how exactly is solar energy responsible for the increase in CO2 output? Please explain.

Is it because of a basic flaw in the fossil fuel model? That unless you have the plants burning constantly, it requires more energy to stop and start them? Is that flaw the fault of solar energy? By that reasoning, we can never stop burning fossil fuels.

Soo, the fact that this solar program has exposed a fundamental flaw in this 18th century fossil fuel energy technology, it means that solar energy is the real villain...FAILURE!

FUD is easy, my friend. Solutions are harder. Pretending that we can just keep going along as we have been going along since the early days of the Industrial Revolution is not an option for anyone who doesn't own (or is owned by) and energy company.

What then? Is the 4th Amendment similarly racist because black men get frisked more often?

The difference is that the 4th was not put in place entirely to protect slaveowners, but the 2nd was.

Your ascribation of a dark motive to the whole proceeding--- whether or not it may have existed or been a factor--- is simply false.

It's false "whether or not it existed"? If the motive existed, then how could it be false?

The term itself is a legal term of art going back centuries before 1789. So how do you explain this racist conspiracy to invent something which was merely affirmed in our law in the first place and which quite arguably existed in our common law regardless?

I'm curious, if the absolute right to keep and bear arms was part of our laws from the beginning, why was a personal right to have guns not a popular notion until the 1980s? Are you saying for over 200 years people didn't understand the Bill of Rights until Edwin Meese explained it to us?

Regarding Maier's "Ratification", it's a wonderful book. I remember the reason I got it in the first place. I was reading Rackove's review and saw this:

Inadvertently or not, Maier’s account of what was actually said explains why latter-day originalists like Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who treat the final text of the ratified document as sacrosanct, reveal so little serious or sustained interest in the actual debates that adopted the Constitution—indeed, why “originalists” now prefer to play language games about what the Constitution must have meant to ordinary readers rather than reconstruct how it was actually framed and debated.

You could say the same about latter day self-described fans of the ratification debates like Mark Levin. Like a TV preacher mishandling scripture to support his non-Christian agenda, you can cherry pick those debates to make it seem like the founders unanimously believed all sorts of things, including the right of every citizen to have their own weapons of mass destruction. I have a feeling that this debate will be taking more dramatic turns in the not too distant future. The Second Amendment of the next few decades will probably resemble the Second Amendment of the past 30 years about as little as the more recent Second Amendment resembled that of the nation's first 200 years.

None of those links are working right now, but I'm familiar with the assertion, which you will hear on Fox News, Washington Times, and other right-wing sites.

They show,

1) The German program did not meet it's initial highly-optimistic estimates, but was still plenty successful, and got more successful over the past five years even in the face of huge energy industry opposition (including that coming from the conservative government), PLUS the freeze on nuclear after Fukushima.

2) The "damage" you describe only shows the estimates fell short, not that the program was a failure. In fact, in the face of the freeze on nuclear in the wake of Fukushima, you could say that Energiewende is performing remarkably well.

P.S. Der Spiegel is "right wing press" now? Really?

Were your links to Der Spiegel? None of the URLs are to Der Spiegel, so I'm not sure why you're referencing them.

The arguments you're making sound suspiciously familiar to anyone who has been following the political debate over Obamacare in the US. The more popular the program gets, and the more its success is evident, the more panicked and shrill the opposition.

Whether or not Energiewende is ultimately the program that gets them there or not, the movement to more renewable resources for energy is inexorable. Fission is not going to be the ultimate answer, and it's increasingly clear that fossil fuels time has come and gone. They'll both still be with us for a while, but there is evidence that the days of control of everyone's energy being in the hands of a very few is coming to an end. I wouldn't be surprised if in my lifetime residential consumers no longer need to be connected to a grid at all. Imagine the shift in political power that would bring and the amazing level of freedom that would give ordinary citizens.

It's amazing, really, how the Right hates centralized political power but loves the idea of centralized corporate control over the very energy that powers our lives.

Because I recall explaining it to you already, just a few weeks ago

Yes, your fable about the German renewable energy program is the narrative coming out of the energy industry and the right-wing press. However, it's pretty much phony, or at best, misleading. Whenever you find that story told, you will invariably also find adverts for fossil fuel companies. You find statements like this one:

In other words - when wind blows, if you're running a nuclear or coal plant, you cannot sell any of your produced electricity until your wind/solar competitors sold everything they produced. At the same time, you are not allowed to shut the plant down, because you need to sit on the grid as spinning reserve for when wind blows too hard or stops blowing to pick up the slack.

Which is basically like saying, "Hey, there's an inherent flaw in our method of producing energy, so if you come up with something better, it's your fault if there are problems". Seriously, think for a minute about that Luckyo quote and what it means. There's so much nonsense coming out of the energy industry right now that it's not even funny. And it's a worldwide, coordinated effort to spread FUD (and things like the "Sun Tax" and "Solar Surcharge" and other alternative energy tariffs).

However, the Brattle Group's recent study tells a different story about Germany's experiment:

http://cleantechnica.com/2014/...

Here's the Brattle Group's actual study:

http://www.brattle.com/system/...

In fact, the program is so successful that Angela Merkel is now pushing reductions and eventual phasing out of the subsidies.

the whole thing may either turn around or at least shift toward day-time electricity being cheaper simply because of basic economy principles, not because of some malicious intent.

We should stop pretending that there is anything like a "Law of Supply and Demand" when it comes to energy.

And if you want proof of "malicious intent"...

http://thinkprogress.org/clima...

http://www.tulsaworld.com/news...

http://www.deseretnews.com/art...

The Koch Brothers (and others) are pushing these "solar tariff", sun tax and surcharge laws all across the country. The rationale in their advertisements has varied from place to place, but generally it's "Solar energy is costing us money so people who use solar energy should pay double, one way or the other, because screw you, that's why". And yes, it even applies to solar which is not on the grid. So if you want to set up some solar panels to augment your daytime energy use and maybe a battery for night time, be prepared to pay this new tariff because of the Koch Brothers and their representatives at Americans For Prosperity

They're determined to send a message: "If you think you can leave us and go back to your mother, think again sweetie, or maybe you'll run into another door."

For the most part, they already have.

US Solar subsidies in decline:
http://www.pv-magazine.com/new...

Australian subsidies in decline:
http://www.theaustralian.com.a...

China cuts solar subsidies:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

And yet it hasn't stopped solar deployments. Because even without subsidies, they're now cost competitive. Utility companies can't use the canard of government subsidized energy any longer. Yet they've invested - as the Economist notes - half a trillion in fossil fuel plants worldwide. I'm proposing a solution that at least prevents a utility meltdown during the transition period.

As the Economist notes, due to German and other European solar government incentives, European utilities face an existential threat to their investment future and business model. Utility giants the world over have seen this and decided to fight back against Net Metering and other means whereby homeowners can feed back into the electric grid excess energy production from rooftop solar. Barclays, the British multinational banking giant, agrees that rooftop solar and net metering represent a threat to centralized electric production utilities.

The problem utilities face is that solar tends to maximize output at mid-afternoon, exactly the same time spot prices have traditionally been at maximum. So their solution is to lobby government the world over to reverse net metering laws and end solar subsidies.

OK, time for me to get on a soapbox. I think this is shortsighted. The real problem here is that government and electric utilities have agreed on a price structure and investment plan to build out gas powered and coal powered plants that now appear to be unsustainable due to disruptive shifts in the market from technical innovation in the renewable field. As is noted in TFA, solar is - or will soon be - already cost competitive even without government subsidy.

Market fundamentalists would argue, 'let the utilities die. Their investors bought into a dying technology, the market will decide their fate.' Except that they have an endless stream of money to buy lobbyists and legislators to warp law in their favor. Further, they have a good argument that intermittent renewables will only meet partial demand. You still need baseline generation capacity from central utilities. So the problem - from their perspective - is excess production by renewables.

Except: when has excess energy production ever been a problem?

The real problem is twofold: We want to move off of fossil fuels due to global climate change and they want to maximize their vast infrastructure investments. A real policy solution would meet both needs.

Rooftop solar should be maximized. During periods of excess, gas powered plants should funnel their energy to local raw materials ore processing facilities and manufacturing. This has the benefit of distributing labor where it's needed near mining sites, rather than shipping raw materials where labor is cheapest for exploitation as well. And it keeps utilities running for the next thirty years to generate a viable expected ROI. And government policymakers could then plan a rational transition period away from fossil fuels without the economic dislocation of utility giants imploding worldwide.

Thoughts?

Some guy posting pictures and commenting on an event

Nice pictures though. And a direct report from someone who attended rather than filtered news.

Works for me.

FYI: I should have included this link to the print article about those audio recordings as well.

http://www.propublica.org/arti...