You sincerely believed that your previous post ... was introducing me to unfamiliar ideas.'' .d.
No. Remmeber. You said something to effect, where was the left pressure on Obama? Most of the post was intended to outline where, and how. And, I was annoyed that local political groups, are often dismissed as delusional.
As to Joe the Plummer post... Okay, mistake.
``Do you think I came fully formed from the head of Zeus!''
No. And I apologize. On the other hand, you rarely say much about it. Although, thinking back, your notes on surveillance and uses of information tech were certainly hints.
I tend to look at the world through my life and its experiences, which definitely has its limits.
``Right now, I'm still a bit pissed about the lecturing.''
Again, remember the point to the post was to give a concrete answer as to where pressure should come from on Obama. So I outlined it. The post was also directed at other skeptics.
Whether any serious pressure from the so-called left will show, as you say, we'll see. I also ahare your skepticism. As Ford said, nothing demanded, nothing owed. Maybe, I am trying to think positive here.
As others have pointed out, it's not looking good with some of the old Clinton crew, getting talked about, and getting appionted. Then I try and remind myself, hey, they are the only established `experienced' group left after eight years of rightwing mania.
Shifting over to the tech world...
While I was working around the physics, engineering, and bio-science crew, I was struck by how uniformly apolitical they were. Some part of those presumptions showed up in my post, again I apologize. I found the science crew very uncomfortable to be around. Lots of competition, lots of hierarchy, stress, very little comradarie. Other strange impressions were... The hard science types seemed to be overly cagy and secretive... reserved as it were. I liked the bio-science crew much better. I could at least get them to show me and explain what they were doing. Maybe it was just the difference between a small, under funded lab, and a big federal project complex of labs.
``I can think of three initiatives which have nothing to do with Pu-94. For example, the Helios solar energy project along with their efforts in cellulosic biomass and 'high performance buildings' (that is, buildings whose energy use profile is so significantly reduced --''
When I was on my quest to get out of wrenching in small, nasty businesses, I went through LBL's job listing and tried to figure out what projects they were running and whether or not I could muster any experience to fit. I couldn't really. Their technician grades required years of experience on all kinds systems I knew nothing about.
The mention of exotic battery techonogy interested me, but again I didn't know enough. (For those who don't know) Battery technology is used in wind and solar power systems to temporarily store the electric power, if need be, and then feed it out later. So batteries are a link in the power generating systems. The LBL projects were devoted to improving battery energy efficiency. The battery designs I looked at depended on exotic and toxic materials, well like Plutonium. Hence my joke about it. In general batteries seem to be a key `dirty' technology in supposedly `clean' energy systems. Even standard gel-cell batteries are so toxic, we export the lead cores to South Korea for recycling.
Anyway, I did come across the ancestors (1995) of some of the projects you mentioned above. They were working on desigining different sorts of materials with improved insulation qualities for use in construction, and trying to develop materials out the re-cycling bin and biomass.
What struck me about these LBL projects was the emphasis on joint funding and participation with major corporations. Back then PG&E was a public utility and seemed a much better sort of partnership. PG&E was involved in the building design and insulation systems. PG&E better? Man, was that illusion shattered a few years later.
The same sort of neoliberal concept, or privatization was making itself felt even in the small bio-science lab where I was working. The market connection in this case was the vast biosci-medi-agri-pharma complex. The link to biomass (at LBL) in this context was corn and other seed crop genetics.
I was horrified. I was working right square in the middle of an interlocking capital-government ripoff, via the stream of molecular biology patents just then getting public attention, etc.
Six month after the grant ran out and I had left, the whole research department was `jointly' funded by Novartis, a pharma giant. Wow! That venture died out a couple of years later. But I will bet a lot of the people there got political in one direction or another in a hurry.
CG