It’s summertime in Iowa and that means the spring barn pooties are out, about, and getting into mischief.

  I lack the camera equipment needed to catch them in their natural playground under the lilac bushes so this morning I engineered a little feeding frenzy in order to grab some photos of the class of 2008.

   I’ve previously said a bit about my startup experience, how I think things will go for the Stranded Wind Initiative, and that those thoughts extend to others trying to cast "silver BBs" out of the swirl of innovation available today.

   One of the most interesting things is the range of people interested in this – everyone from the schizo guy that I met in the Iowa City homeless shelter who was into Moray valves to both current and retired executives from large companies know we need to do something, but they’re not sure exactly what ... yet.

  Some require management, others are management and require talent for their plans, and some are simply unique individual with no chance of working in a group no matter how valuable their ideas may be. You also meet the undesirables: the polished hucksters, the innovators who compulsively cause themselves and others drama, and the industry driven boondoggles calculated to draw the uneducated eye while not really changing anything. You should be whispering "The Hydrogen Economy" or "Clean Coal" to yourself while reading that last line ...

 The story’s about to get a lot more interesting, but a little more history is in order first.

   When I started the Planes, Trains, and Automobiles series I did it with the full intent to start exploring the various rail services in my area. Little did I know it would take a full thirteen days before a trip I could actually take a rail trip.

    Even more surprising to me was the route – Springfield, Massachusetts (SPG) to New York’s City’s Penn Station (NYP), hop the A train down to the 14th street station, and then a quick stroll over to 11th Avenue and 18th street ... to board a yacht for a cruise around the southern tip of Manhattan.

    I’ve been seeking visibility and power along many lines including the financial, but hooking up with a whole yacht load of investment bankers and hedge fund managers on the spur of the moment was a pleasant surprise.

   My personal journey of transformation over this last year began with the discovery and internalization of the things found on The Oil Drum, coupled with health troubles that have only recently been connected to Lyme disease.

 Along the path I’ve followed I’ve met others who were, intentionally or unintentionally, sliding out of this broad, self applied demographic of "middle class" and into the curious neverwhere inhabited by dispossessed Americans here at the beginning of the 21st century. Nerve and energy might just let me climb back out of it, but I believe this is going to be an all too common pattern for our nation.

 We, as a society, have only the crash of 1987 or the distant memories of the Great Depression as ways to express what is happening, but Dmitry Orlov draws frightening connections between the situation we face today and the condition of the U.S.S.R. in the late 1980s in his marvelous new book, Reinventing Collapse.

We’ve been out touring the waterfalls of Massachusetts and the sublime Chapel Falls, my previous favorite, has just been displaced by Race Brook Falls.

   Chapel Falls is easily accessible, literally a few steps off the road, but Race Brook requires about a mile and a half of hiking and then you need scrambling skills to fully access it. Let’s have a look around Massachusetts’ prettiest waterfall.

OK, fire up Google Earth and warm up your search skills, ‘cause I just heard that we’ve got troops on the ground in Georgia, there is fighting going on in South Ossetia, and we might very well get drug into it if we're not careful.

 Even if our guys aren’t there the Georgian troops attacking South Ossetia are definitely U.S. trained and Georgian president Saakashvili wouldn’t have done this without the approval of the Bush administration.

  Things like this are how situations get really out of hand really fast ... and in a curious twist our guys would be fighting Russian Cossacks.

 So I’ve been limping along health wise for the last year and by limp I mean "near death experience in February/March", losing everything, and having various neurological and digestive problems.

  I finally got diagnosed with Lyme on a Thursday and the very next Sunday I found a tick on me. Two weeks later the new infection knocked me flat, I went to a doctor, and after a few days of delightful high fever triggered by doxycycline killing the Lyme I felt ... dramatically better. I mean dramatically - back to work, focused all day long, and so forth.

  However, due to a corrupt coalition of doctors and insurance companies it would appear that unless I’m willing to self treat with veterinary antibiotics that I’m condemned to relapse ... read more about this astonishing need for an immediate antitrust investigation at the national level directed towards the Infectious Disease Specialists Association ...

  We hear a bit about carriers in the Navy and I recently covered them and their entourage, the carrier strike group.

   Much less well known but just as numerous and equally important to our global security efforts are the expeditionary strike groups, ten in all. Their makeup is reminiscent of the carrier strike group, but instead of being tasked with the delivery of an aerial "package" they deliver an integrated mix of marines, armor, landing craft, helicopters, and AV-8B Harrier attack planes.

  The United States has a navy but beyond the occasional mention of this aircraft carrier or that we don’t hear much about it. I recently got interested in this topic when I was researching our World War II production of ships, armor, and aircraft.

  We have an amazingly powerful force of surface combat ships, attack and ballistic missile submarines, amphibious assault, and transport/support vessels. The stars of the show are the carrier strike groups; aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and attack submarines.

  Let’s have a look around the typical carrier strike group ...

Mike Pence the wingnut currently responsible for Indiana's 6th Congressional District is currently having a temper tantrum on the floor of the House over offshore drilling.

 Meanwhile, Barry Welsh, the Democratic challenger in 2008 has the district all to himself for a whole month, assuming Pence actually does what he said he'll do. (Republican, remember?)

 I think it would be right Kossack like of us to show up and assist in turning this district a nice, pretty shade of blue, don't you?

 As I recently reported I’m finally put back together well enough that I can go back to work and I am going at it with a will.

  I’ve been thinking about the genesis of the Stranded Wind Initiative, the work that has been done under its banner so far, and my history of startup involvement and management.

 Someone I work with has more than once mentioned "They’re venture capitalists ... and they’re absolutely ruthless." Reviewing the last twelve years of my personal experiences I know why this is the case ... and I think I’m ready to join the ranks of the ruthless.

    I’ve been working a bit on biomass stuff here in New England and I just got schooled in transportation costs. Trucks vs. Trains? It isn’t much of a battle when there are large weights or long distances involved.

    Let’s have a look at the math behind moving a mountain of wood pellets from the Midwest to New England ... and what this all means for our so called "way of life".

    The other day we were at the Cheshire County Fair in southwest New Hampshire and we stumbled across two local celebrities in need of bale money. Take a peek below the fold for more information on this chance to assist those in need ...

  I’ve been whacking away at my keyboard now for about nine months and I’m ready to begin the birthing process – my story has drawn numerous "write a book already!" comments from people and I’ve taken that to heart.

 My DailyKos diaries are 500 to maybe 2,000 words, often heavy on the photos but those are almost entirely my own work, and I’ve been mindfully linking to things that should be stable in anticipation of an edit process beginning. I’ve written a good bit on the Stranded Wind Initiative’s web site, too, but the nature of that is different and we’ll see how much of it qualifies as book material.

  Yesterday I sat down, focused, and divided 78 of my 120 diaries into four "chapters". I don’t know if they qualify as book chapters or not, they’re more just logically connected bits of work. This was a good deal harder than it should have been and it got the software developer in me thinking ...

   So this morning I find that I need to be cute and presentable in the southwest corner of New Hampshire in two short hours.

  Despite being pretty well set with rail transport and armed with a nice bike I think it would take me a day to get there using Amtrak ... if I managed to make it at all.

   Yesterday I began writing about Planes, Trains, and Automobiles and today I’m stuck at my desk, working on eliminating 4% of global CO2 emissions ... but looking at all those travel options on Amtrak gets my roaming gland going.

 The quest I am on began a year ago when I followed a link Jerome a Paris had to The Oil Drum. Peak oil?  I read a bit, then got out a notebook, a mechanical pencil, and I got an instance of the OpenOffice spreadsheet going, and pretty soon I was worried. I’m used to modeling large scale systems with diverse inputs and outputs; many of the things we take for granted now are simply going to go away in the very near future even if the mildest estimates are used.

 What sort of things? I’m glad you asked ...

Global oil production peaked in May of 2005 and while there is now a book cooking happening in terms of reported numbers such that there is a claim that December of 2007 equaled the previous amount, counting ethanol amongst all liquids seems more than a little ... funny, at least to me. If oil didn’t peak 5/2005 it will any day now and debating it is akin to pondering the weight of the ice that ended up on the deck of the Titanic after it became known that five compartments had been breeched; the direction the ship will tip as it slides beneath the waves is hardly relevant.

  Our world is changing dramatically on three different planes – economy, energy, and environment. I’ve been covering energy, specifically concerns regarding fossil fuel produced nitrogen fertilizers, and recently the impending bank mess has drawn my eye, but I’m content to turn away from it now that many people are beginning to call it for what it is.

  I haven’t said much about it yet, but how we get ourselves and our goods from one place to another has greatly occupied my mind these last few months ...

   I’ve been writing a bit over the last few months about the financial mess we’re about to fall into and an event I’ve been expecting for a while came to pass late last week – a foreign bank wrote down all of their U.S. CDOs to $0.10 on the dollar.

  This event, the long dreaded "mark to market" for CDOs, has implications for all bonds, both commercial and municipal, due to the exposure monoline bond insurers have. This matters for stocks as commercial bonds are often the offerings of publicly traded companies, it matters for the pensions that will have to fire sale all bonds that stop having a AAA rating if the monoline insurers implode, and it’s happening against the backdrop of the first of what promise to be somewhere between 900 and 2,200 bank failures that will result in an FDIC bailout to match the recent Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac bailout.

  Grab a bottle of scotch and your teddy bear, ‘cause you’re gonna need both before this is done.