No, no, of course not. Go read Chris Floyd for a spectacularly jaundiced -- and by "spectacularly jaundiced" I mean "superbly written and correct in every respect" -- view of American official corruption -- and by "official corruption" I mean "business as usual for the elite" -- in Iraq. Peter Galbraith, Zalmay Khalilzad, Jay Garner, and Neil Bush join a cast of thousands!

I'm getting tired of waiting for my furnace guy. Any of you with old houses and single pipe steam systems know if this is true?

A representative of the company told me that old-house owners have reported great success with his company's product, J-B Weld on old cast-iron radiators.

You won't be surprised to learn of even more change you can't believe in.

Meet the newest addition to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. If you've been reading Mother Jones recently, then you already know quite a bit about Scott O'Malia. Like the fact that he once worked as a top in-house lobbyist for an energy company, Mirant, that manipulated California's market Enron-style. Or that, while on this company's payroll, he lobbied against a bill to expand the CFTC's authority to police derivatives. Or that the Senate Agriculture Committee, which reviewed his nomination, declined to ask him any specific questions about his pro-deregulation lobbying on not one but two occasions.

Because the banksters looted their pension funds, too. Quelle surprise. I'll just quote one or two "tells" from David Cho in Pravda to point out some features of the discourse. This is good:

Before the crisis, many public pension funds had experimented with risky trading techniques or committed more of their money to hedge funds and other nontraditional firms, which in turn invested some of it in complex mortgage securities. When these melted down, pension funds got burned.

Note lack of agency.

[A]lready, some funds are seeking to trim benefits to conserve money. Some governments have also proposed increasing the amount of public money paid each year into the funds. In practice, however, some political leaders have begun doing the opposite -- cutting annual contributions to pension funds -- as a way of balancing state and local budgets buffeted in the recession by falling tax revenue and rising costs.

And note the toxic leader meme. These are not "leaders" but officials. They are not leading us, but responsible to us (see, e.g.)

Of course, in the toxic and degraded atmosphere of Versailles:

"When, in countries that are called civilized, we see age going to the workhouse and youth to the gallows, something must be wrong in the system of government."
Thomas Paine, 1792 - The Rights of Man

I went to see the Thomas Paine exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery. If you are in DC, you should go see it. It is a tiny exhibit, only one room.

Although Paine has his portrait painted several times, few of the oil paintings survive, an interesting data point.

Go read it all (or here), it's chock full of great analysis and linky goodness. I'll excerpt what I see as the key analytical tools:

However, it's pioneering in outer suburbia and the stereotypical bedroom communities that is my focus here. If we have a design pattern that can be established in outer suburbia, can be reproduced in outer suburbia, and offers the opportunity for ecologically sustainable settlement in outer suburbia - then the massive amount of capital investment in outer suburbia over the past thirty years no longer acts to lock us into an unsustainable economy.

This is the sort of analysis Stirling would like, since the idea is to put otherwise dead capital to use in the peak oil environment. Or Atrios. SUPERTRAMS!

In short, the current design pattern for outer suburbia acts like a Berlin Wall between where we are and where we need to go, and the hope is to find a reproducible design pattern that acts to open the existing locked gates in that wall and to build new open gates in.

The design pattern I am focusing on here is the Suburban Town and Village pattern built around a Rapid Streetcar corridor.

More, more, more! I'm just picking great stuff at random, here:

Well, that's odd.

Long-secret security tapes showing the chaos immediately after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building are blank in the minutes before the blast and appear to have been edited, an attorney who obtained the recordings said Sunday.

"The real story is what's missing," said Jesse Trentadue, a Salt Lake City attorney who obtained the recordings through the federal Freedom of Information Act as part of an unofficial inquiry he is conducting into the April 19, 1995, bombing that killed 168 people and injured hundreds more.