About a month and a half ago, the U.S. financial industry (and thus the financial industry of most of the planet Earth) looked to be on the brink of collapse. In spite of massive public opposition to a bailout to the financial industry, most of the news media was pretty clear that having the banking industry go into free fall would be a bad thing. Eventually enough votes were passed and a bailout passed.

So in the last calendar year, motorcycles have killed more Marines than al Qaeda in Iraq. Brookings and Icasualties both have the number of Iraqi civilian and security force casualties as the lowest since folks have been keeping count. Sadrists are being assassinated at a decent clip, and the only real place where there's remaining Iraqi resistance is Mosul, and that probably has a lot to do with the fact that the citizenry of that city is not a big fan of either the Kurdish Regional Government of the Shi'ah Arab government of Baghdad.

Another Sadrist was assassinated. Given that this occurred pretty much right next to an Iraqi Army checkpoint, I'm thinking that maybe the JAM is onto something when they blame our trusty allies in the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council. And this is only one in a pretty steady series of assassinations, government harassment, voter intimidation, etc. directed towards the Sadr movement. Now then, Muqtada al Sadr is not a good guy, and the JAM has done awful, awful things.

But this business is just rancid.

So a few months ago, I rather cantankerously noted that Obama's winning smile would cause America's creditors to forgive our debt and that his good looks and charisma would cause Ayub al-Masri and Osama bin Laden to turn themselves in. So this post is going to be a little bit of crow eating.

I think that Obama's election, charm, and the like *will* wind up being really, really helpful for getting us out of the current financial mess even before 20 January 2009.

So for the last couple of years, the federal government has been running a budget deficit. It was, however, never as bad in terms of proportion of the GDP as in 1990-1. Because in 1989-90, the federal government had had to cover the collapse of a large chunk of the financial sector during a recession. Fortunately, in 2007, that wasn't the case.

Whoops.

So we're back to 1990 levels of federal budget deficit. Now then, this is bad, but the 1990's showed that a deficit this bad can be turned into a surplus in less than a decade.

I think that there is one thing we can all agree on. With a very few exceptions, for the last forty or so years, America's domestic terrorists have the world's lamest when it comes to acts of death and mayhem. Most groups--and I am thinking in particular about the Weather Underground and the Order--have been little more than a bad joke, their ranks composed mostly of FBI informers. With the exception of Timothy McVeigh, most of the lone nut terrorists have also been pretty darned unimpressive.

So I was home in TX, and in a strip mall I saw a rather unusual bumper sticker. What was unusual about this bumper sticker was not the sticker itself--it was a McCain 2008 sticker--but that it was on a Toyota Prius. As everyone knows, a Prius usually comes with a pre-installed Obama sticker.

Not only was it unusual, but it signified something deeper.

At the moment, Nouri al-Maliki's policy, if one can be discerned, seems to be "double cross everyone." It was the Sadrists in parliament who provided him with the votes he needed to become PM in the first place--early in 2008, he repaid them by sending the tanks into Basra and, with the help of American artillery and air support, gutted the armed power of the JAM.

People have called technocrat-turned-martyr-of-the-left Al Gore many things, but few (if any) would call him stupid. So when he says that in a mere ten years the government can wave its magic government wand and an end of fossil fuels into place, the only possible conclusion is that he is lying. Given his failure to mention the only possible replacement of fossil fuel that provides as much energy (viz., nuclear), that he is lying becomes an absolute certainty.

It's pretty certain now that the planet Earth has reached or is close to its Hubbert Peak, the point at which the amount of oil produced begins to flatten out and then decline. Now then, when it comes to stationary energy, this is not terribly catastrophic--there are several different options, viz. solar (which, granted, is pretty crappy for actually getting much usable energy), wind, and nuclear. But one thing that makes modern civilization go is the energy used to transport stuff. And that energy can really only be gotten by burning hydrocarbons.