… this time as an environmental responsibility. The mind boggles.

The day is not here yet, but soon will be, when connecting homes to central power grids will be unnecessary. By “soon” I mean within 20 years. Here’s why.

“New Solar Photovoltaic Cell Efficiency Record: 42.8%.” Once solar-cell efficiency reaches 50 percent, quite a large amount of electricity can be generated from much smaller areas than at present, making rooftop solar cells powerful enough to supply electricity for the whole home. Fifty percent is the efficiency rate set by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at which solar-cell sets become portable enough to be militarily useful for tactical units.

So I think that the day will soon come when solar-cell technology will reach that 50 percent mark and manufacture of such cells will be cheap enough so that roofs of houses may be covered in them. Central grids won’t go away, not soon, anyway, because solar roofs will still be more expensive than shingles, but excess electricity from solar-powered homes will be sold to the grid to help provide juice to conventionally-powered homes. Furthermore, businesses use more electricity than homes and even at 50 percent efficiency, solar cells probably won’t be able to power businesses in full.

The question is begged, however: what about nighttime or very cloudy days? How will homes be powered then? Aha:

A new type of a room-size battery, however, may be poised to store energy for the nation’s vast electric grid almost as easily as a reservoir stockpiles water, transforming the way power is delivered to homes and businesses. Compared with other utility-scale batteries plagued by limited life spans or unwieldy bulk, the sodium-sulfur battery is compact, long-lasting and efficient. …

American Electric Power (AEP), one of the largest U.S. utilities, has been using a 1.2 megawatt NaS battery in Charleston, W.Va., the past year and plans to install one twice the size elsewhere in the state next year. Dozens of utilities are considering the battery, says Dan Mears, a consultant for NGK Insulators, the Japanese company that makes the devices.

“If you’ve got these batteries distributed in the neighborhood, you have, in a sense, lots of little power plants,” [analyst Stow] Walker says. “The difference between these and diesel generators is these batteries don’t need fuel” and don’t pollute.

There is no reason that such battery piles couldn’t be built into homes themselves, making a home entirely self sufficient for electrical power. But economies of scale would almost certainly mean that homeowners would find it cheaper to tie into a neighborhood battery pile, which would store the combined excess power from home during the day and provide it back at night or other low-solar times. In fact, it’s not hard to envision homeowners associations starting electrical co-ops for that purpose. Battery piles, of course, can store electricity not only from solar cells, but from any other generating means. In some parts of the country that could be a boon to wind generation and can even reduce the amount of coal that coal-fired plants use by storing power from peak-generation times.

A final thought: is 50 percent solar cell efficiency high enough to make pure-electric autos self charging? What about hybrids, which use the gasoline engine to recharge their batteries; could they use highly efficient solar cells instead, thus decreasing their use of gasoline? I don’t know, but I’m sure some smart people are working on the answers.

HT: Glenn.

This image looks eastward from “Wind Turbine Hill” on the Israeli side of the border into Syria. The shadows of the wind turbines are to the lower right. The hill rises about 150 meters above the border, which is located about 100 meters beyond the treeline. The turbines were set on the hill to take advantage of the generally constant winds blowing from the west, over the hill into Syria. When the winds reverse, the air gets hot and fills with sand; not unlike Assad, my friend Udi says. Here, eagles come to ride the air currents-one lone eagle can be seen as a black dot against the sky in the upper right.

Perhaps the most interesting sight is the contrast between the difference in color of the land between the two countries-Israel is green and Syria in brown despite the irrigation pond seen to the left and in the center. The one thing that unites all Israeli’s the mitzvah, commandment, to steward the Land and make it prosper.

It is interesting to note the value of walls and fences. Here, like the new separation fence around Jerusalem, the Golan forms a solid and natural barrier. Moreover, the degree of security around this boundary is not symmetrical. While the Israelis have bomb shelters on their side of the Golan and give it a safe distance; the Syrians do not and live quite openly up to the border. It is clear from which direction the threat of violence comes.

This is a video of the cruise ship Voyager weathering a cyclone in the Mediterranean Sea in 2005. This’ll ruin your shuffleboard game!

I’ve observed a few times since 2003 that the mantra is false that “the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer.” The poor are getting richer, too. In fact, according to UC Berkeley Professor J. Bradford DeLong, “Since 1975 the world has not only become a richer place, but the world’s poor have seen their incomes grow faster than the world’s rich. …”

Why, then, does the left side of the political aisle, and some on the far right, continue to rail against globalization? Globalization, for all its drawbacks (as V. D, hanson said, it brought Islamist terrorism to our shores), has been the best thing that ever happened to the poor. Yale University’s ironically-named David Dollar has showed that for the first time in the whole history of civilization, the percentage of extreme poor people worldwide is declining, and has been since 1980, the year globalization as we speak of it now began.

Prof. DeLong has also pointed out that most of the improvement has taken place among the 2.5 billion people who live in only two countries, India and China, which have both freed their economies substantially from statist suffocation since 1975.

And the good news is getting better.

As Surjit Bhalla, an economist affiliated with the Institute for International Economics, recently wrote: “World poverty fell from 44% of the global population in 1980 to 13% in 2000, its fastest decline in history. Global income inequality has dropped over this period and is at its lowest level since 1910.”

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr., recently observed that thre global economy is the strongest he’s ever seen. In terms of global productivity and the raising of standards of living, it surely is the best it has ever been in history. Paulson warned, though, that “We haven’t had a global financial shock since 1998″ and that a global financial downturn is inevitable. I won’t argue otherwise; what goes up must come down in economics as well as gravity. But to return to the world poverty levels of a generation ago would require a truly massive collapse, and that simply is not on the horizon.

A June 28, 2007, article in the Jerusalem Post:

President George W. Bush held up Israel as a model for defining success in Iraq, saying Thursday that the goal of the US mission in the war-ravaged Arab nation is not eliminating attacks but enabling a democracy that can function despite continuing violence.

The truth of this statement, however, goes far beyond the situation in Iraq or “enabling democracy” (as if democratic societies are similar to an addiction). If Israel is a role model for the Middle East, it lies within its pluralistic culture, which is strangely similar in texture to the so-called “melting pot” of early 20th century North America. Just as the US has been characterized as a nation of immigrants, so too is Israel.

Starting with the first waves of immigrants at the end of the 19th century, Jews have arrived here from all over the world. The successive waves of immigrants to the shores of the US brought great social changes as newcomers and established immigrants developed means to assimilate and accommodate cultural, religious, and political differences. The process continues and the dynamic revolutionary process of US society is still the “city on the hill” for most of the people of the world.

A similar process is taking place in Israel. Wave after wave of Jews from all over the world continue to arrive. Like the stories of the Lower East Side of New York, where newly arrived Jews would seek out and find people from their old villages or neighborhoods, each wave of immigrants from Outside-The-Land gravitate to places in Israel where their landsmen are located. There, they find their language, their food, their customs, and their form of religious expression.

This process, however, is not static. Contrary to the political philosophy of David Greene, aka Ben Gurion, you cannot simply put people from all over the world into a bottle, shake them up, and come up with a homogeneous beverage. To beat the analogy to death, oil and vinegar do make a salad dressing but the oil just gets spread around into finer and finer beads—never does it mix. The Pioneers were socialists and, although Zionistic, were fiercely anti religious. On the other hand, those that followed, especially after WWII, were more religious and clung more and more to their “medieval mythologies and mumbo jumbo” as my grandmother called Judaism.

Israelis are fiercely divided today, in their own terms, by their stand on the Religious—Secular spectrum. On the one side are the Haredi, or Ultra-Orthodox and on the other are the Chiluni, or Ultra-Secular. On the sidelines are expected range of observance levels from keeping kosher and Shabbat to those go to Shabbat services but are not so thorough in their religious praxis. In short, there is a healthy and wide ranging religious market in Israel. Be that as it may, 90% of Israelis fast on Yom Kippur and an equal number observe the traditional Passover meal.

But theological differences are not the defining dimension of difference in modern Israeli society, especially what could be used to examine Bush’s belief in Israel’s role model status in this part of the world. In his book, The Ethnic Myth, sociologist Stephen Steinberg analyzes the spurious relationship between culture and religion to explain the social success, or failure, of US ethnic group mobility. The critical factor of rapid upward mobility and success of different groups in the US is largely determined by where they were in the “old country”—did they start from the middle class or not? The rapid success of new Americans from Southeast Asia, especially in the 1980’s emerging computer technology fields was not because Asian culture was better adapted to math, but because the up and coming success stories were the children of immigrant parents who and been doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs, and scholars in the Southeast Asia before they were run out of town.

They may have arrived on US soil with nothing in their pockets, but their education and economic class values are highly transportable.

Steinberg could have been writing about Israeli society. The so-called early pioneers, children of the Jewish middle class from Russia and Lithuania, arrived at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries two steps ahead of the Tsarist police. They set up their early collectives on ideological lines and hired Arab labor to do the majority of their work. They were supported by Western European Jewish elites who recruited Central European youth to work in the farm cooperatives.

Pre WWII brought other Europeans and some from the Middle East, but it was after WWII that the doors opened and immigration began from all over the world with survivors from the Shoah, oppressed Jews from Arab nations, religious Zionists from the Anglo speaking world, the surviving Yeshivas from middle Europe, Chasidim from Eastern Europe, the highly secular from Western Europe, and even the remnants of ancient communities of Southwest India. However, by far, it was the two waves of the post war death camp survivors and the Jews from Iraq, Yemen, and Iran that made up the largest change in Israeli society. For both groups, their motto was “never again” and for essentially the same reason—two thousand years of exile in other cultures leading a pariah class existence was too much. Never again.

Herein lies the essence of Israel’s melting pot. The different strains of religious and political practices that divide Israeli society are grounded in the social economies of the countries from which Israelis come. My family, for example, lived in North America for four generations and after repeated sojourns around the world I have to admit that I am essentially a crass American, albeit an Orthodox Jewish American; but, an American in culture, value, and outlook nevertheless. What about my neighbors from Iraq or Yemen where their families lived for over 30 generations? The Jewish community of Iraq was continuous from the destruction of the First Temple some 2500 years ago and was the center of Jewish culture and scholarship from 400 to 1000 CE. Yet, culturally my neighbors are as Asian as I am North American. The theological differences masks the underlying range of socio-economic differences in the country of origin—Western urban university society versus the Central European working class—salon versus Chasidic court.

But, there is one further factor that needs examination. Holding cultural differences aside, the socio-economic class of ones family in the old country strongly explains not only status differences within Israeli groups but the similarities across groups as well. Ironically, Ben Gurion, the socialist yeshiva boy, wanted to melt social differences between people to forge the new Israeli. However, it would seem that he forgot about effects of modes of production on cultural values—and these are quite persistent. It is not simply that those from Western European and Anglo countries are educated, of the middle and upper professional classes, worldly in their values. It is they are largely from capitalist and industrial nations. Regardless of political hue, they come from market societies. This is not the case with those from parts of the world like Iraq, Yemen, Ethiopia, Sudan, Morocco, Tunis, or Syria. The culture of the market gives way to the bazaar. There, the values and process of the agrarian mode of production are dominant. Honor, authority, and raw factional power dominate. Moreover, the practices of Judaism also differ from those as found in the largely Arabic melody structures of prayers, reading the Torah, marriage, meals, and popular music.

Socially, Israel is divided into three sections with the Western European and Anglo culture located across the center of the culture from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. To the south and the north, however, it is the other social groups that are concentrated. Up in the north, in the Galilee, the prevailing culture can only characterized as Israeli Arab made up of Muslim, Christian, Druze, Bedouin, and Jewish groups. For these Israelis, the quality of their life compared to what their parents knew in the Old World, or what their few remaining relatives know who still live in the Old World, are galaxies apart. The Old World remains in how they look at work, national service, authority, and factional respect. The Old World remains in where they chose to live (separate quarters, villages, towns, and cities), how they eat, and how they conduct business. But, the new world is breaking through in how they educate their sons and daughters and how they look at the modern world.

This is the way Israel stands as both example and threat to the nations and cultures that surround it. It is an emerging culture that is stable, democratic, and largely secular society where diverse ethnic factions with theological and economic differences can live in peace—where inter-clan battles are fought with ballots and Parliamentary maneuvers; where houses of worship are used for rituals and sacred knowledge and not repositories of weapons or theology of hate.

One of my neighbors, a fellow graduate of Yeshiva University, said that when the Jews scattered around the world, they brought home Bollywood weddings, capitalism, and US religious tolerance. If that’s a model for Iraq and Iraq society, then all in all, that’s not too shabby.

Captain’s Quarters provides a snippet of a debate between Sen. Dick Durbin and Sen. Norm Coleman on the so-called “fairness doctrine,” which was once law and empowered the federal government to regulate media broadcasts regarding political coverage to ensure (it was claimed) “dalance” and “fairness.” There are member os the Congress of both parties who want the “fairness doctrine” reestablished in law. So over to Dick Durbin:

Since the people who are seeking the licenses are using America’s airwaves, does the government, speaking for the people of this country, have any interest at that point to step in and make sure there is a despair balanced approach to the -a fair and balanced approach to the information given to the American people?

Get that? “… does the government, speaking for the people of this country… .”

Senator, here’s a clue. You do not speak for the people of this country. Nor do your 99 colleagues, nor do the 435 members of the House.

The people of America speak for themselves. That’s why the states required the guarantees that the government would stay away from speech regulation to be amended to the Constitution before they would ratify it. Hence the First Amendment.

Why does Durbin think he speaks for the people? Because of Den Beste’s Law: “The job of bureaucrats is to regulate, and left themselves they will regulate everything they can.” But not everyone is infected with regulatory disease. Sen. Coleman responded,

We’re at a time where we’ve got 20,000, you know, opportunities for stations and satellite, where you have cable, you have blogs, you have a whole range of information. I think it would be — I — I can’t even conceive — I can’t even conceive that the market could not provide opportunities for differing positions because it does. And in the end — in the end, consumers also have a right based on the market to make choices.

Now, Norm’s close but still doesn’t the cigar. The “market” has nothing to do with this. Consumers making choices, right or wrong, have nothing to do with this. This is not a mercantile issue. This is about a fundamental human right that strikes to very heart of democracy: the unhindered right of the people to speak, publish, post or broadcast without government constraint about matters relating to their government. If the First Amendment is intended to protect anything, it’s intended to protect political speech. But as Radley Balko wrote, “This is all thinly-disguised posturing for what’s really bothering the senators: They don’t like that people are allowed to criticize them on public airwaves.” Yep.

So Durbin and allies want to regulate the people’s speech because they incredibly believe that they speak for us and therefore must protect us from our own speech.

(Linked at OTB’s Traffic Jam.)

.. and haven’t at least thought about doing this, then I don’t believe you.

Reminds me of the four-panel Far Side cartoon in which the pilot announces to the pax that there is turbulence ahead, then wrenches the yoke violently to the right. After a good laugh the copilot announces, “Uh, oh, looks like more turbulence!”

… to immortalize the Hero of Glasgow:

Twas doon by the inch o’ Abbots
Oor Johnny walked one day
When he saw a sicht that
troubled him
Far more than he could say…
Now that’s no richt wur
Johnny cried
And sallied tae the fray
A left hook and a heid butt
Required tae save the day.
Now listen up Bin Laden
Yir sort’s nae wanted here
For imported English radicals
Us Scoatsman huv nae fear.

“Heh,” as someone famous sometimes says.