Oil: While Congress Slept

Thanks to new technology the Bakken Formation in North Dakota could boost America’s Oil reserves by an incredible 10 times, giving western economies the trump card against OPEC’s short squeeze on oil supply and making Iranian and Venezuelan threats of disrupted supply irrelevant...In the next 30 days the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) will release a new report giving...assessment of the Bakken Oil Formation that covers North Dakota and portions of South Dakota and Montana. With new horizontal drilling technology it is believed that from 175 to 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil...The USGS did an initial study back in 1999 that estimated 400 billion recoverable barrels...but with prices bottoming out at $10 a barrel back then the report was dismissed because of the higher cost of horizontal drilling techniques that would be needed, estimated at $20-$40 a barrel. [1/7-1/4 of the cost per barrel in 2008! ED]...Massive Oil Deposit Could Increase US Reserves by 10X, NextEnergyNews.com

The proven reserves in the US, according to the US Geological Service, are currently 21 billion barrels. Apparently, Democrats and many Republicans in Congress think that's just fine and dandy. It's sort of like a stuffy, stodgy old club where the grandees sit around whining such original thoughts as What do we need all that dirty stuff for? Let's get those funny looking people overseas provide it for us. We've got the money! We can always send the volunteer Army if the price gets too high. That's worked so well in keeping the price down in the Middle East. And hey, what are volunteers in the Army but people who couldn't find anything else to do? And if the hoi-polloi doesn't like it, let them run their cars on corn oil! You're right. It doesn't sound like the Petroleum Club in Houston. It sounds like an upper class all-male club in the 19th century. The only differences? The stodgy members are from both sexes; it's illegal to smoke cigars. The rest, especially the bully pulpit for the pompous blowhard elites, has not changed.

Let's see. We've got 200-500 billion barrels of recoverable oil in North Dakota that Congress hasn't noticed. That's a range of between 39 and 80 years supply at current rates of consumption. What else?

An oil discovery by Chevron Corp. has bolstered prospects that petroleum companies will be able to tap giant reserves that lie far beneath the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico...Oil analysts and company executives said...test results from a well 175 miles off the coast of Louisiana indicate that the oil industry will be able to recover well more than 3 billion barrels, and perhaps as much as 15 billion barrels, of oil from a geological area known as the lower tertiary trend, making it the biggest addition to U.S. petroleum reserves in decades. The upper end of the estimate could boost U.S. reserves by 50 percent. US Oil Reserves Get a Big Boost, Steven Mulson,Washington Post

Okay, taking a middle figure, say 10 billion barrels of oil, that's another 2 years of supply at current consumption. What else?

A 1993 United States Geological Survey (USGS) study indicated at least 4.3 billion (95% probability) and possibly as much as 11.8 billion...with a mean value of 7.7 billion barrels (1.7 km³). In addition, in the entire assessment area, which covers not only land under Federal jurisdiction, but also Native lands and adjacent State waters within three miles (5 km), technically recoverable oil is estimated to be at least 5.7 billion (95%) and as much as 16.0 billion (5%) barrels (0.7 to 1.9 km³), with a mean value of 10.4 billion barrels (1.2 km³). Economically recoverable oil within the Federal lands assuming a market price of $40/barrel (constant 1996 dollars - the highest price included in the USGS study) is estimated to be between 3.4 billion (95%) and 10.4 billion (5%) barrels (0.5 to 1.7 km³), with a mean value of 6.8 billion barrels (1.1 km³).

Long story short, about a year and a half of domestic supply. Congress slept through this one too, renewing the ban on oil from this source each year since 1993. Note that the "economically recoverable" price for the lowest figure was $40 a barrel, less than 1/3 of the current price.

Okay, we're up to between 43 and 84 years of recoverable reserves. More? Yep.

The offshore areas of the United States are estimated to contain significant quantities of resources in yet-to-be-discovered fields. MMS estimates of oil and gas resources in undiscovered fields on the OCS (2006, mean estimates) total 86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of gas. These volumes represent about 60 percent of the oil and 40 percent of the natural gas resources estimated to be contained in remaining undiscovered fields in the United States....Offshore Minerals Management, 12/12/2007

That's a 400% increase in reserves, or another 16-18 years of supply at current consumption. Gazooks, we're talking 59-100 years of supply, in our own back yard, that belongs to us!

Yes, you've asked the right question. What the hell is going on in the halls of Congress? You're paying $4.68 for regular and some snotnosed "representative" of the people is saying you can't have America's own stuff? Who do these people represent?

Not you. Not the oil companies.

And, not thoughts from some other significant representatives of the oil business, to wit:

THE OIL RESERVE FALLACY
Proven reserves are not a measure of future supply

“We are looking at more than four and a half trillion barrels of potentially recoverable oil. That number translates into 140 years of oil at current rates of consumption, or to put it anther way, the world has only consumed about 18 percent of its conventional oil potential...That fact alone should discredit the argument that peak oil is imminent and put our minds at ease concerning future petrol supplies...
The Impact of Upstream Technological Advances on Future Oil Supply" - Mr. Abdallah S. Jum'ah, President & Chief Executive Officer, Saudi Aramco, address to OPEC, Vienna, Austria, Sept. 13, 2006.

"The world has only consumed about 18 percent of its conventional oil potential"!!!

Even the Arabs know our Senators and Representatives are asleep at the wheel. When are you going to wake them up, voters?

Luther

Oil and Idiotarians

Yeah, I know, I've railed about this before. But one of many keys to socialist progress in strengthening government controls and weakening individual freedom is demonizing the wrong target while offering the government as solution and protector.

Take the current ongoing oil nonsense. Obviously, long-range, we need to develop a variety of new energy sources, renewable and otherwise. But one way to blow off the current, speculative bubble in oil is to first threaten to increase production, and then, dramatically, to do it. The obvious choice for the US is to remove restrictions on offshore and Alaskan drilling.

But now the Democrats have reared back and struck in force with an argument that's as fatuous as it is ballsy. Well, they say (as usual), it's the damned oil companies that are at fault. Why do we need to let them drill offshore and in the Alaska National Wildlife refuge? They already lease millions of acres of land for drilling but haven't done a damn thing. They're sitting on their existing leases to let the price of oil go up and then drill to collect ill-gotten windfall profits.

What's wrong with this picture? First of all, just because you "lease" x-million acres doesn't mean there's a gusher under every single acre. You lease acreage in promising drilling areas and hope for the best. Over time, only a modest fraction of these acres will ever yield oil, so you have to lease rights on an awful lot of acres to hedge your bets.

And the first thing you need to do is EXPLORE the acreage. With modern scientific instrumentation, you can just plunk a few devices down and get a pretty good idea as to where you might want to drill a few test wells before getting really serious.

But wait--what the American public doesn't know is that the current legal situation ALSO PROHIBITS EXPLORATION. This is perfect for the Democrats. They can stand at the podium and denounce the oil companies 'til kingdom come. But the argument is bogus. The oil companies continue to sit not because they're waiting for Godot. They sit there because they can't even EXPLORE much of the acreage they've leased. Amazing. They are getting denounced because they're not doing something they're not allowed to do.

It's amazing to me that many Americans have bought these bogus arguments for decades. It is, in fact, Democrat policy to cave into the enviro-freaks to buy their votes while screwing most of their constituents in the gas tank. Blaming the oil companies and the Saudis is but a pleasant diversion, but it's been astoundingly effective. Up to this point.

Because folks are starting to notice, as per this great piece in today's TheStreet.com. by Eric Bolling. (Video is here, too.) For example, Bolling lays waste to another conventional Democrat's phony argument:

A Congressman followed my segment and suggested that drilling wouldn't help for 10 years or more. I know this is absolutely untrue, so I called Transocean (RIG - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr), the biggest driller in the world. An officer of the company told me that depending on the location of the drilling, oil could be realized in as little as a year.

Ultra-deepwater fields might produce in 3-5 years. For the most remote locations, without any prior infrastructure support, that barrel may require a 4-6 year window. I suggested 8 years and he said that he could not envision a situation where it would require more than 6 years to bring a barrel out of the ocean floor.

I'd add that they've been dishing this "it'll take 10 years" crap since the 1970s. And I'd point out if we'd done some more damn drilling in the 1970s and 1980s, 10 years would already have been up and we'd be pumping oil with more on the way. What a bogus argument, stating something won't help "now" when it would have helped "now" if they'd permitted it to happen decades ago. Jeez.

I'm going to have a lot more to say on this. Like you, I'm experiencing pain at the pump, although my budget seems able to take it for now. But hey, I'd rather be sending my $$ direction to Exxon instead of the terrorists who want to kill me, wouldn't you? And if we'd been sending our money to Exxon instead of listening to gasbagging Congressional Democrats, prices would still be reasonable, albeit higher than yesterday. And there'd be a lot more Americans at work on our own shores, pumping our own oil with our own money going into our own banks and not to those who'd like to take us back to those pre-oil days in the 7th Century. And their friends, the Congressional Democrats.

Senate Cafeteria: Preview of Socialized Medicine?

The Senate is downright ashamed of its cafeteria. The cafeteria is in the Dirksen Senate office building. I had to learn this through Google, even though, as I mentioned, I’ve been covering politics in D.C. for nine years and live and work only a few blocks away. The number of times I’ve lunched with sources, friends, and acquaintances who work in the Senate is far too numerous to count. Not once — even when I was already in the Senate office buildings — had anyone ever invited me to lunch in the Senate cafeteria....If You Like Creamed Raspberries in Plastic, Mark Hemingway, National Review, 6/18/2008

Well, sensible scions of the people, led by Dianne Feinstein, of all people, they've decided to privatize the cafeteria, figuring that an outfit like Aramark or Mariott can sort out the difference between food fit for a substandard nursing home and a showplace of the United State government.

However, the same crew, led by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Dianne Feinstein do want to create a national health care system. One ought to think about that carefully. If for more than half a century they were willing to describe as a "cafeteria" a place where only tourists, you know, "the people," would go, and most likely would never return to, what is their national health care system going to be like? You can guess.

In Italy, one of the first pieces of advice you'll get from a local friendly is "never use the state doctors." We had the names of several private doctors. This is because the state medical system in Italy is regarded in about the same way US Senators regard their own dining room.

One may also draw a simple conclusion about the way the United States Senate thinks of the beneficiaries of its subsidy programs. QED

Luther

Dodd-Shelby: Another "Save the People" Con Game

The principal author of the Dodd-Shelby housing-bailout bill is Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat who chairs the Senate Banking Committee, which has jurisdiction over the mortgage market. Last week, Portfolio magazine revealed that Dodd was one of two U.S. senators who benefited from a program under which Countrywide Financial gave loans at favorable terms to the influential and the powerful. The other senator was Kent Conrad, a Democrat from North Dakota....Countrywide Corruption, National Review, the editors, 6/18/2008

Oh, wonder of wonders, a "reformer" turns out to be a confidence man with designs on the money.

But as powerful as Conrad is, the allegations against Dodd are more disturbing because he wields so much power over Countrywide’s fortunes and because he has used that power to benefit Countrywide. According to Portfolio’s calculations, the preferential loan rates Dodd received on two mortgages could end up saving him $75,000...The troubling nature of this arrangement becomes clear when one looks at the fine print of the Dodd-Shelby housing bill....mortgage lenders — of which Countrywide is the largest in the U.S. — would agree to renegotiate their most troubled home loans in exchange for a federal guarantee on those loans. If the borrowers who took out those troubled loans end up defaulting, the government would cover any losses the mortgage lenders incur....(Countrywide Corruption, continued...)

And guess who get to pay Chris Dodd and his constituents for their careless financial arrangements? Yep, you do! See, that's the way it works with the Left. If somebody makes a mistake, they were victimized. Therefore, someone else's mistake goes on your bill. If someone, say a mortgage broker, contributed to that mistake by unethical conduct, then -- hey! make a speech and then send the bill to the taxpayer (you).

Or, as the editors of National Review put it, "if the Senate passes the Dodd-Shelby housing bailout before such an investigation can run its course — especially if that investigation finds that members of Congress were improperly influenced — it will have allowed Countrywide to take the money and run."

Luther

Democrats: Murthless?

At Camp Pendleton yesterday, military judge Col. Steven Folsom dismissed all charges against Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, the highest-ranking officer accused in the Haditha massacre-of-justice. The ruling makes him the seventh of eight accused in the Haditha skirmish to have charges dismissed....Murtha Lied; Marines Were Tried, Ben Johnson, Frontpagemag.com, 5/18/2008

Democrats, in their ongoing lemming rush to electoral oblivion, probably won't get the joke in the headline above. Old line Democrats like Senator Joe Lieberman, however, may pray for Murthlessness every day a story like this comes out.

Murtha, an old friend of Speaker Pelosi's, is a disgrace to the office he holds and to the constituents he represents.

Luther

Marxist Juris-"prudence" Continued

We've already seen the lefti-wing Supremes gang up to trash the Constitution with yesterday's asinine and life-threatening 5-4 ruling that foreign terrorists who plan to rain death on the US get "constitutional rights" too. Just like the 3K + US citizens who died on 9/11 did, I guess. Already, American-bashing clowns in Congress and the media are predictably "hailing" this despicable and clearly unconstitutional ruling. Gives considerable credence to our ongoing theory that Gramscian leftists have steadily infiltrated all our cultural institutions as well as the media and the courts the better to eviscerate the American way of life. (You'll recall that a similar 5-4 margin that put George W. Bush in the White House continues to be trashed by 'Rats as "judicial interference," of course. Guess the validity of a 5-4 ruling depends on who's making it.)

In case you've ever wondered about the loyalties of similar "patriots" who sit in judges' chairs around the country, get a load of this USA TODAY photo. It tells you everything you ever wanted to know about yet another a bleeding-heart leftist judge, who presides not too far from where I grew up in what's left of Ohio:



What's the story behind the story? As USA TODAY tells us in the first graf, this Idiotarian, Lorain County Common Please "Judge" James Burgess, is mounting yet another inside attack on the death penalty:

ELYRIA, Ohio (AP) — A judge in Ohio says the state's method of putting prisoners to death is unconstitutional because two of three drugs used in the lethal injection process can cause pain.

Funny, you never hear these clowns worrying about the "pain" of the people murdered by these felons and predators. In the end, it's just another way of undermining our system of justice, pleasing our Euro-socialist betters, and increasing burden for the taxpayers (for maintaining three squares a day and hotel space for convicted murderers), all of which is the point for judicial dictators like Burgess. Any doubts? If you haven't already looked closely, check out the pair of portraits that hang in this Marxist's phony's office. Kind of a Freudian slip, wouldn't ya say?

Meanwhile, last dude out of Ohio, please turn out the lights. No wonder my old home state is going down the tubes.

The McClellan Hit Job

Leave it to the Democrats and/or their leftist pals in business and media to do their best to malign Republicans in the Presidential election run-up. Their latest effort is to use the blunt instrument of a tell-all book by a failed presidential press secretary to clobber the lame duck president on his way out and smear an entire Republican administration in the process. The hope here is to tar Republican candidate John McCain with the alleged taint, all the better to boost the chances of the sainted Barack Hussein Obama in this fall's presidential sweepstakes.

The Washington Post's review of Scott McClellan's "Culture of Deception" today, penned by longtime book critic and die-hard liberal Jonathan Yardley, gives the book a softball assessment, endorsing McClellan's low-key damnation of the "most unpopular president in American history" as yet another compelling chapter the media-manufactured "truth" we've been bludgeoned with over the last 8 years or so. (Actually, what ever happened to Warren G. Harding, Herbert Hoover, Chester A. Arthur, and John Quincy Adams who were easily as "despised" as Bush? Or how about Lincoln early-on in the Civil War?) Once having written a phony narrative, the left-wing media never gives up on the story.

Too bad the conservative blogosphere is out there shredding McClellan's feeble attempt at justification for his wretched handling of White House communications. In point of fact, the appointment of McClellan, a now-former Texas cronie of the President's, was a poor bit of HR R&D by Mr. Bush, a belly-flop for which he paid dearly while McClellan was muffing press curve balls. For which he is paying again as McClellan tries to restore his tarnished reputation with the media's favorite weapon, the "tell-all" attack book on a Republican.

Like many Republicans who'd like to be liked by the media before they die, McClellan is, with his weakly documented book, trying to attack the Republican administration of which he was a part in order to get some kind of moneymaking gig with the media like many Democrats before him. Won't work, Scott. The left will never trust you. But they'll be happy to use you for a couple months as a tool to discredit the Republicans before dumping you like they did with Cindy Sheehan.

But wait, there's more. As you might suspect, George Soros money is behind the publisher of this latest hit job. Soros has been burnishing his rep by providing economic patter to the media over the spring, making Republican-damaging gloomy assessments on the economy even as he profits from it via manipulating his billion dollar portfolios. He maintains his sanitized profile as an investment sage while using his profits to undermine the economy, the government, and most of all, Republicans. Helping underwrite McClellan's book effectively makes McClellan Soros' unwitting stooge. But, as he often proved in front of the media, you can never accuse Scott of being the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Now we learn that McClellan's Soros-supported editors "shaped" McClellan's original proposal in a way designed to rewrite the story to cause maximum damaging PR to the Bushies, according to an astute piece in The American Thinker:

An examination of published reports reveals that Scott McClellan's kiss-and-smell betrayal of George W. Bush is a far cry from the book McClellan started out to write and was shaped into an offensive tome by a publisher with close ties to George Soros.

And McClellan was further incentivized to push potentially damaging material, true or not, by being given a very small advance for such a book. Thus, the book would have to be written to fly off the shelves for McClellan to pocket a meaningful profit for his time. And there's no better way to do that these days than by "shaping" your manuscript to indulge the left's fetish with Bush Derangement Syndrome. The American Thinker's William Tate elaborates further, discussing comments made by McClellan's actual editor:

A book's editor and its author work extremely closely--with the author sweating over every word, every detail, and the editor helping shape the pacing and overall tone of the manuscript. Kaufman told the AP that as McClellan wrote the book the "tone began to be directed toward issues and events that some people would rather he not be straightforward and candid about." (Emphasis added.)

The lesson in all this? Don't bother buying "tell-all" books by either Republicans or Democrats with an axe to grind. They either started out as a pack of self-justifying lies or were transformed into same by unscrupulous editors or publishers with dollar signs in their eyes and dreams of another Nixon-like presidential scalp dangling from their belts. What the hell can you believe anymore?

Liberal Left: Constantly Petrified with Terror

I was just cruising through some financial new sites and came up with this headline at CNN/Money:

Hurricanes Could Mean $6 Gas

(No link since these main heads change throughout the day.)

The linked story, which you get on the jump, has the following head and subhead:

An ill wind for gas prices

Traders say that even though you're already paying for the hurricane season, the price could spike to $6 a gallon if catastrophe strikes.

COULD.

IF

Ever notice how many MSM "stories" indulge in this crap? All it is is hype, conjectural stories penned by lazy journalists involving sound bites from their favorite alarmists about this and that. Especially if it involves the latest "global warming" terrorism.

Try this quote from the story we've just cited:

Peter Beutel, oil analyst at Cameron Hanover Beutel, said if a Katrina-like hurricane were to hit in July, gas prices could go as high as $5 or even $6.

Now we don't know Mr. Beutel, and we don't blame him for his opinion since the pump was obviously primed. What was the likely question he was asked? Maybe something like, "Mr. Beutel, what would happen to gas prices if another Katrina hits?" That's how you get an answer like the above. It's a rational answer, but the question is bogus, alarmist, and meant to elicit the desired frightening response.

What if the reporter had asked "Mr. Beutel, assuming we have a benign hurricane season like last year, which didn't live up to all the Weather Channel hype, how low could gas prices go? And Mr. Beutel might have responded, "Well, if per barrel prices roughly continue their downward trajectory from last week, we could see per barrel prices decline to $90-100 per barrel and gas prices at the pump could dip close to $3.00 a gallon after Labor Day."

But obviously, that type of question is one that's never asked. The focus is always on fear.

This is an interesting characteristic of leftists, whether in journalism and government. They appear to have a vested interest in emphasizing the negative and keeping the populace in some kind of fear over something. Usually something that "requires" more government or higher taxes to "fix." Keep an eye out for these bogus stories. Not only do they emphasize the kind of hyped fear that allegedly keeps readers showing up. They also relentlessly steer the electorate to demand the government do "more" to protect them. Which ultimately means that the government will have to take "more" from our collective wallets to redistribute to the usual suspects.

It's a longstanding game we can ill afford. Be aware of what's being done. And remember: Things COULD get a lot worse. But they also COULD get a lot better.

It's OK to Break the Law. We're Catholics...

This from the Houston Chronicle, via PoliPundit:

SAN ANTONIO — A group of faith-driven activists is trying to organize a network to help illegal immigrants who fear new local immigration-related laws and massive raids.

The advocates — all Catholic — hope to provide places to stay, food and health care for immigrants. They have a few families who have volunteered to host immigrants, but ultimately want to open a shelter.

This article, in turn, was taken from the AP, staunchly anti-American in all things. Reading the carefully sanitized lede above, you'd think we're dealing with a bunch of heroes trying to right the wrongs perpetrated by our evil government. How do we know this? Well, the good guys are Catholics, that's how. Game, set, and match. Problem is, the actions above are part and parcel of the socialist "New Sanctuary Movement," which in turn is based on an earlier "Sanctuary Movement." And both, in turn, are based on Marxist-inspired "Liberation Theology" which was championed in the 1960s and early 1970s, but later turned back by Rome which recognized a Marxist front group when it saw one.

Fellow travelers of the "New Sanctuary Movement" include the Islamofascist front group CAIR, who have obvious reasons for thwarting the goal of secure US borders. Others include the Interfaith Worker Justice "movement" which is funded by the Marxist Tides Foundation and some additional usual suspects.

The Catholic Church explicitly denounced Liberation Theology and its Marxist ties as outlined in a complex document put out by Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1984. Nothing has really changed since then. The current socalled "New Sanctuary Movement" is simply Marxism in sheep's clothing, making useful idiots out of left-leaning Catholics and clergy who are prodded to employ the ancient tradition of "sanctuary" in their churches to thwart the will of the American people and undermine our traditions and laws, both of which encourage LEGAL immigration. "Catholics" they are not. They are Marxists first and foremost, although some are too dumb to know the difference.

Congressional Idiotarians = Higher Oil Prices

Yesterday, we had the laughable spectacle of Congress calling the oil companies on the carpet to explain how those companies were screwing the American consumer with "windfall profits." Leave it to the Democrats, particularly that other Socialist Senator from Vermont, Patrick Leahy (Idiotarian-VT), to launch an instant Grand Inquisition on TV after rounding up the usual suspects.

But, as the oil execs ably explained between bouts of Senatorial grandstanding, the problem here is that "national oil companies" (read Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and their ilk) own not only the oil under the ground but the companies that produce it. American oil "giants" don't really own very much oil at all. And the huge resources of oil, gas, and coal that America has--which, if developed, could clearly blunt the current oil mania--are inaccessible, not because of the corporate oil giants, but because the production of fossil fuels in this country has been effectively terminated due to the predations of eco-freaks and their congressional enablers.

PowerLine has some great sound bits on this. Elaborating on the observation above, an Exxon Mobil exec observed that:

Exxon Mobil is the largest U.S. oil and gas company, but we account for only 2 percent of global energy production, only 3 percent of global oil production, only 6 percent of global refining capacity, and only 1 percent of global petroleum reserves. With respect to petroleum reserves, we rank 14th. Government-owned national oil companies dominate the top spots. For an American company to succeed in this competitive landscape and go head to head with huge government-backed national oil companies, it needs financial strength and scale to execute massive complex energy projects requiring enormous long-term investments.

To simply maintain our current operations and make needed capital investments, Exxon Mobil spends nearly $1 billion each day.

So much for "windfall profits."

In case the obtuse Dems in the audience didn't "get it," a Shell exec elaborated further:

...in the United States, access to our own oil and gas resources has been limited for the last 30 years, prohibiting companies such as Shell from exploring and developing resources for the benefit of the American people.

Senator Sessions, I agree, it is not a free market.

According to the Department of the Interior, 62 percent of all on-shore federal lands are off limits to oil and gas developments, with restrictions applying to 92 percent of all federal lands. We have an outer continental shelf moratorium on the Atlantic Ocean, an outer continental shelf moratorium on the Pacific Ocean, an outer continental shelf moratorium on the eastern Gulf of Mexico, congressional bans on on-shore oil and gas activities in specific areas of the Rockies and Alaska, and even a congressional ban on doing an analysis of the resource potential for oil and gas in the Atlantic, Pacific and eastern Gulf of Mexico.

The Argonne National Laboratory did a report in 2004 that identified 40 specific federal policy areas that halt, limit, delay or restrict natural gas projects.

That was the windup. Here's the pitch:

The cumulative effect of these policies has been to discourage U.S. investment and send U.S. companies outside the United States to produce new supplies.

As a result, U.S. production has declined so much that nearly 60 percent of daily consumption comes from foreign sources.

The problem of access can be solved in this country by the same government that has prohibited it. Congress could have chosen to lift some or all of the current restrictions on exportation and production of oil and gas. Congress could provide national policy to reverse the persistent decline of domestically secure natural resource development.

(Bold text highlighted by Wonker.)

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) worked with the Shell exec to pinch in on further truths:

HATCH: ...we're talking about Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. It's fair to say that they're not considered part of America's $22 billion of proven reserves.

HOFMEISTER: Not at all.

HATCH: No, but experts agree that there's between 800 billion to almost 2 trillion barrels of oil that could be recoverable there, and that's good oil, isn't it?

HOFMEISTER: That's correct.

HATCH: It could be recovered at somewhere between $30 and $40 a barrel?

HOFMEISTER: I think those costs are probably a bit dated now, based upon what we've seen in the inflation...

HATCH: Well, somewhere in that area.

HOFMEISTER: I don't know what the exact cost would be, but, you know, if there is more supply, I think inflation in the oil industry would be cracked. And we are facing severe inflation because of the limited amount of supply against the demand.

HATCH: I guess what I'm saying, though, is that if we started to develop the oil shale in those three states we could do it within this framework of over $100 a barrel and make a profit.

HOFMEISTER: I believe we could.

HATCH: And we could help our country alleviate its oil pressures.

HOFMEISTER: Yes.

HATCH: But they're stopping us from doing that right here, as we sit here. We just had a hearing last week where Democrats had stopped the ability to do that, in at least Colorado.

HOFMEISTER: Well, as I said in my opening statement, I think the public policy constraints on the supply side in this country are a disservice to the American consumer.

Yeah, they are. (Bold text above courtesy of Wonker.)

The Dems are actually thrilled that oil is currently being goosed upward by speculators at the rate of 2-5 bucks a day which, in pretty short order, is going to cause mass-layoffs when the ripple effect is felt across the housing weakened economy, which is actually attempting to recover. Why? Because it's all about blaming the Republicans. Problem is, they just might succeed, which shows you how thoroughly these leftists have captured the media machine.

In point of fact, since Nixon first attempted to impose some rationality on the oil situation back in the 1970s, the Democrats and their eco-freak allies have thwarted each and every attempt to achieve, if not energy independence, then energy parity with the rest of the oil producing nations. We can't extract oil because it might displace a couple of polar bears. We can't extract oil shale because it might spoil somebody's view. We can't burn coal because it's dirty. We can't use nukes because we'll all be killed. We can't build more hydro because that messes with fish.

You get the picture. The Dems conduct show trials and villainize Republicans and oil companies for causing the disaster for which the Democrats themselves are exclusively responsible. Just shows you how effective Party Discipline--enforced with a little bravado, chutzpah, and outright lying--can be in completely obliterating the truth.

Yesterday's hearings didn't turn out quite as the Dems had expected. Truth sneaked out anyway. But you'll never hear that if all you do is read the local paper or listen to the MSM's Nightly Snooze.

No Crisis for Boys in School

Hey, great news! Read our headline! Problem solved!

Actually, it's not our headline. It's a condensed version of the headline for an A-1 above-the-fold story that ran in the Washington Post yesterday. The actual headline reads:

No Crisis for Boys in School, Study Says

Now being the natural born skeptic that he is, Wonker immediately smelled a rat. Who did the "study?" Why, none other than the American Association of University Women, that's who. And since you read this in the Washington Post, well, it must be true.

To make a long story short, the "study" claims that there is no crisis facing our school system due to the fact that boys are significantly underperforming girls. In typical leftist fashion, the "study" alleges that there is no problem and the study proves it. And furthermore, if there WERE a problem (note the hedge), it would be racially and/or economically oriented, and wouldn't be affecting nice white boys.

This is the typical Marxist whitewash that flies in the face of numerous other studies conclusively illustrating that, after several decades of gender-feminized education, boys are underperforming girls in school by a significant margin. Further, fewer boys are going to college. Worse, fewer still are actually graduating.

This is what you get when you forcefully apply class-struggle doctrine to practically anything without giving the consequences much thought. In this case, "privileged" boys were "deprivileged" in order to "privilege" girls. The effect is easily predictable. Let me elaborate.

Back when Wonk was enjoying his short, happy career as an English professor (without benefit of rank or tenure), girls indeed were called on less often and taken less seriously by a great many instructors. This was clearly wrong and held many of them back, proving an impediment to higher achievement. Obviously there was a social interaction that had to be fixed.

But in typical leftist fashion, rather than fix the problem by leveling the playing field, it was transformed into class struggle, pitting the proletariat--in this case women--vs. the capitalists or the bourgeoisie (take your pick) as represented by male instructors and students. The leftist solution to this issue was standard-issue Marx: reverse polarity and elevate the women while putting down the men.

It's been pretty effective, too, as the majority of studies of this issue have proved over the years. Leftists aren't really interested in solving the problem. They're basically fascists at heart. Rather than create equal opportunity to solve a once-legitimate issue, they simply wish to change places with the alleged oppressors and become the oppressors themselves. Anyone who questions their motives gets denounced publicly and often.

The bogus AAUW "study" trumpeted in the Post is an attempt to belittle and dismiss a major threat to the current status quo of female leftist educational hegemony. Which, in the educational establishment at least, has swapped alleged male dominance with its very real opposite. The problem for AAUW, like all leftist organizations, is maintaining this dominance once the truth has come out. They can obviously depend on the usual media shills, like the Washington Post, to help them out. Once the left has seized yet another cultural and social beach head, it has no intent of letting go.

BTW, AAUW, we're not the only ones who noticed this collusional sham science. PowerLine comments on it here.

The Problem with Conservatives

Victor Davis Hanson has taken a look at the Republican Party--currently behaving like a mass-cloning of the Three Stooges--and has succinctly distilled this miserable mess:

They forgot who they were and can’t explain what they might be.

That pretty much sums it up. From fiscally-responsible adults, they've transformed into spendthrift, adolescent children. From supporting their president, they've turned instead toward the Dem's favored "Bush did it" mantra as an excuse for everything. From supporting the Afghani-Iraqi phases of the Global War on Terror, they're jumping on the defeatist-withdrawal wagon, apparently hoping to cement a new "defeat" like the one we allegedly had in Vietnam. (In actuality, we were never "defeated" there. Congress simply terminated the money. Anyone for for an instant replay?)

You get the drift. When Republicans, particularly Conservative Republicans (there are other kinds) start acting like Democrats, they come off as second-best Democrats and lose elections.

If a Republican politician's behavior and actions cause voters to conclude that he or she is actually an amateur Democrat, they'll invariably choose the real Democrat over the imposter. Every time.

It's amazing that it took the Republican bozos on the Hill only about 10 years to completely squander the Reagan Revolution and the brilliant, Gingrich-led Conservative takeover of the House. But when you see the Democrats passionately committed to that final cattle-drive toward outright Euro-style Socialism while the so-called Conservative Republicans just sit there wringing their hands and doing the same stupid things that got them into the current pickle in the first place, you're forced to realize that the Stupid Party is living up to its name. Which very shortly will consign them to back-bench status for another 50+ years.

Hansen has some good ideas for countering this slow, political suicide in his article, which everyone who cares about this issue had ought to read. The current batch of Republicrats, though, will probably skip it.

Universities: Pink Collar Ghettos?

Interesting exchange in the female blogosphere, where two docs effectively debate what's been happening to men in an increasingly feminized society.

Dr. Melissa seems to have started it:

What the world needs more of is manly men. I've blogged about this before, but it's worth repeating. A girlfriend of mine told me that her three best girlfriends all have husbands that stay home while their wives work and the men sit around complaining about their wives.

Gee, what a concept. Seems some professional women like Dr. Melissa are getting tired of what kind of men the gender feminazis have succeeded in creating: an awful lot of passive wussies. Like the alleged Chinese proverb more or less says, don't wish too hard for something. You just might get it.

She continues:

Societally, it seems like men don't value or seem to be valued for manliness. A strong, hard-working, driven guy has been replaced with a soft, unmotivated, aimless man who can't make a declarative sentence or find the will to do what needs to be done. Basically, too many men have become pansies. Gay men need to butch up, too.

Somewhere between the hypermasculinity of Islamofascism and the gang culture on one hand and the effete softness of the bitchy out-of-work, tears in his beer dude on the other, there's a balance. To me, the honor, strength and drive shown by men who've been through military training serves as a good model of manly behavior.

Butch up. There you go. I'd have expressed this somewhat differently. But in this fashionably anti-het age in which we live, you get the point.

Dr. Helen, (spousal unit of Instapundit) on the other hand, gives the un-fairer sex a little more credit for creative thinking:

Have men become "pansies" (your words, not mine) using this strategy? I don't think so. They have become strategic. This is different than aimless. Aimless suggests no purpose. Men may look aimless but underneath it all they actually have a purpose--to protect themselves from a society that considers men responsible for the welfare of women and children but offers them little or nothing in return. Who can blame them?

Well, yeah. But "The Other Side" (blogger Kim du Toit) agrees with 'em both. Sort of:

I agree with both of them, a little—although I think Helen gives men too much credit for being devious and scheming—kinda like women...

You want to know why CEOs earn so much these days? It’s because of all the “teaming” and diversified responsibility which takes place in their corporations—to the point where only the “C” class can actually make decisions.

It’s the corporate version of kids’ soccer matches where nobody keeps score, lest the losers get their feelings hurt.

Here’s where the fun begins, by the way. I don’t think that men are as subtle or as perceptive as Dr. Helen thinks they are. They can recognize a game in which the odds have been stacked against them, of course—but I don’t think they work the system as she thinks they do.

What they do is refuse to play.

What’s the point of being ambitious or hard-working, when your efforts will be subsumed in a “task force” or “team” project, and others get the credit for your work? What’s the point of being a man, when all you get from it is scorn from women and from men who behave like women?

Interesting thought, which leads the Kimster to this conclusion:

And if some harpy tells them to “butch up”, they say, “Bite me”.

When women finally do get everything they wanted, I wonder whether they’ll enjoy living in the world they’ve created.

Good question. Which is what got Dr. Helen to the Pink Collar stuff we advertised in our headline. The university system is where today's men start to run into the wimpy, PC crap, since that's where spineless men and feminazis tentatively co-exist, with the feminazis holding the upper hand, so to speak. Real guys are immensely turned off by this environment, yet they're forced to endure it to get the necessary credentials, dealing with loads of anti-U.S., anti-capitalist, anti-Western spleen en route. Small wonder why guys hate school from K-8 thru post-graduate. It's insulting, demeaning, and stupid to put up with the idiotic sideshows while attempting to pursue education and fathom a career path. Plus, it's entirely too girly.

Dr. Helen describes one male's path around this nonsense to bolster her argument:

For example, I recently talked with my accountant, a man who is getting an advanced degree online. He didn't want to go to a PC university and sit through a bunch of professors putting down his gender or having him do ridiculous amounts of tedious and inefficient paperwork that he found boring. Instead, he is taking classes that he enjoys on his schedule. The male nurse at my doctor's office is getting his degree online because he doesn't want to deal with the "crap" that a regular university expects students to listen to on an ongoing basis. He stated that he simply reads the material and takes the tests and doesn't have to deal with the PC milieu that would leave him annoyed and disgruntled. Both of these men have successful careers and while I don't know what they make, I bet it is plenty enough to pay for whatever lifestyle they want to enjoy.

She concludes this round by stating:

It's no wonder universities are turning into pink collar ghettos. Men are finding other avenues that are fulfilling and fit in with their lifestyle. With the rise of technology and alternative ways to make a living and live one's lifestyle, I have no doubt that most men will find what works for them.

This is actually a pretty civil, provocative little debate. Kim and the Doctors essentially agree on the point. Real, actual men have had it up to here with liberal, PC, male-bashing nonsense, whether in the corporate or university environment. It's axiomatic to them that this is all crap. But our panelists are not quite in agreement as to how or in what manner the men are really dealing with it. Have they bought in? Are they subversive? Have they figured out how to get their own way without tipping their collective hand?

Being an actual real man with the wreckage of an intellectual career well behind me, I can help. Men DO know what they're doing. Teddy Roosevelt said it best: Speak softly and carry a big stick.

Maybe better still, to paraphrase the English meaning behind a famous (and bogus) legal Latin cliche: Never let the bitches wear you down.

Or, best of all, op. cit. above in the contemporary idiom: Bite me.

And have a nice day.

More on the Eco-Freaks and How They're Bankrupting Us

If you haven't read Luther's excellent post on Dr. Zubrin below, do it now.

I'd especially commend his conclusion, which gets to the real root of the larger problem:

Ethanol from corn or sugar is not new, does not work well, and can only be supported with subsidies and state intervention in markets. That support causes a major problem in food markets, now noticed in screaming headlines across the world. Even Greens are starting to advocate nuclear powerplants. We've known for thirty years that there's enough shale oil and gas in Wyoming to fuel America for centuries. Congress refuses to do anything except mandate bad solutions like ethanol. It is time perhaps for Congress to start representing the people, instead of a single special interest that shells out bucks for campaign money...

Frankly, I'd like to know when the average American is going to wake up and stick a pitchfork into the increasingly insane Eco-Freak movement in this country. It's THEY, not Bush, the Chi-coms, or even the Democrats who are bankrupting this country and destroying its economy. (Although the Dems do their level best to help.)

We're talking energy here. And we're talking the near-complete triumph of illogic in this situation. Let's see. Oil is too expensive, so let's make ethanol from corn to replace oil. And to make it cheaper, let's subsidize it with taxpayer money. Meanwhile, let's denounce oil company "windfall" profits while preventing them from using those profits to drill for oil on both U.S. continental shelves as well as in Alaska where such exploration might force a few dozen elk to take a 10 minute detour.

And let's not burn coal, since we have plenty of it, because it creates pollution and acid rain. Let's just sell it to the Chinese so THEY can create pollution and acid rain (without the need for any coal scrubbers) while we freeze but feel virtuous. Meanwhile, we can buy more expensive oil from the Saudis so they can fund more radical madrassas to train more radical students so they can kill even more of us so we eventually won't have to use so much energy.

And let's shut down all the wind-turbines, since they kill birds and bats. And above all, let's at least not put any of those where Ted Kennedy can see them. Let's put them all in West Virginia where all those gun-toting cretins live. And then we can shut them down, since they kill birds and bats.

And let's not build nukes, because they provide clean, green energy. Because nukes cause mushroom clouds that are harmful to children and other living things. And speaking of living things, let's not wear furs to take up the warmth slack because that's a violation of animal rights.

And while we're at it, let's not build solar farms in the desert. It creates visual pollution. And besides, solar farms don't produce oil, which we need to fuel our Hummers and SUVs and private jets as we travel the world telling people not to buy Hummers, SUVs, and private jets and to use one sheet of toilet paper per necessary room session to save our trees and save our planet.

And when the entire economy collapses, let's just blame Bush.

You think we're kidding? Just try to put the energy logic of the Eco-Freaks to work, and an ambiguous, random chain of phony, indefensible nonsense like the above is what results. It's the same far-left game, really. Listen to us, because we're better, smarter, and more virtuous than you. But when you try to parse out the message, all you come up with is the snake oil they're selling. And don't get us started on carbon credits, the latest example of popular delusions and the madness of crowds.

He's Ba-a-a-ack!

What, again? For the umpty-umpth time, Wonk is attempting yet another blog comeback after disappearing yet again. Add to deaths in the family a surprise additional wrinkle. The demise of a long-estranged relative who ended up expiring intestate. A poor idea in tax-happy Ohio.

Wonk is back in DC again, and America's lawyerly class has been enriched again. We all are definitely in the wrong profession.

Meanwhile, I'm catching up on Luther's brilliance which really has been quite non-stop, hasn't it?

Stick to Mars, Dr. Zubrin

With his alarmist call for American oil independence (“Breaking OPEC’s Grip”), Robert Zubrin joins a long tradition of pundits who have used national security as an excuse to abandon consumer markets in order to forward their Big Government schemes. Add the Mideast “oil cartel” to Japan and China as declared threats to our manufacturing base requiring protection...Whatever the merits of his argument, Zubrin sadly uses the same rhetorical device to sell flex-fuel mandates as Gore & co. make for Kyoto: if you disagree, you are a proponent of petroterrorism, or in the latter case, a polar-bear killer...Flex Fuel Folly, Henry Payne, Planet Gore National Review Online, 2/22/08

The trouble with a smart guy like Dr. Zubrin is that, with his origins in big science, funded primarily by Big Government, he has a limited understanding of such things as market. The primary principle in analyzing a market is supply and demand. In a given market, if you divert a commodity's supply, as with a government subsidy of ethanol production from corn, it will directly impact supply of corn for other purposes, such as food.

NASA, to which Zubrin presented his Mars Direct program some years back, had a fling with "market" back in the planning stages of the space shuttle, one which the author's father, a very successful marketer, was invited to participate in. The idea was that payloads would pay for the shuttle's operations. The author's father later said he wished he had never taken the offer, for a simple reason. A government agency has no conception of business operations. In the business world you can't call on the Commerce Committee to introduce new funding authorization if your project isn't making money. The shuttle's costs were never properly analyzed. In the end, there was no way the payloads could pay for operations if the shuttle was to be a competitive launching system.

Zubrin seems to have about the same idea regarding the energy problems of the early 21st century.

He says that all Congress has to do is “pass a law requiring that all new cars sold in the U.S. be flex-fueled” (that is, alcohol-fuel compatible) and — voila! — alcohol fuels will become competitive....(Flex-Fuel Folly, cont'd)

This kind of magic thinking has surrounded legislation for a long time, so Dr. Zubrin can't be fairly accused of original ignorance. He's only going into an old frontier where thousands have gone before.

Heavily dependent on OPEC oil, Brazil embarked on a national plan of oil independence during the last oil price panic in the 1970s. Dubbed “Proalcool,” the central government nationalized its largest energy company to goose ethanol production, massively subsidized sugar ethanol, mandated the production of ethanol cars, and mandated at least a 25 percent mix of ethanol in gasoline. In effect, government took over its domestic energy sector in the name of national security....there were unintended consequences. Inflation soared thanks to government spending and an agricultural economy now skewed towards fuel — not food — production. Brazil suffered widespread environmental degradation with the rush to convert cropland to fuel, and ultimately — with the collapse of oil prices a mere decade later — the program failed because ethanol is fundamentally an uncompetitive fuel source relative to oil....(Flex-Fuel Folly, cont'd)

The problem with many scientists is that they only see individual processes, not the whole ecology as it were. The whole direction of science since the 18th century until the stirrings of chaos and complexity theory in the 1960s was precisely opposite the strategy of studying overall views and consequences. This is great if you're trying to derive a fundamental law, such as the behavior of a gas under pressure. But that method's dependency on a closed system is fatal in large-scale analysis.

A practical understanding of broader consequences, called "seeing the big picture" by business people, is informed by market decisions too complex to analyze individually, as one might a container of pressurized helium. A business has to take the measure of consequences by broad statistical analysis in market studies. The methods aren't very different from those used to study individual processes, but are held in contempt by representatives of and advocates for state intervention in the economy. Payne emphasizes this strongly but I doubt Dr. Zubrin will pay attention until food rioters are at his local supermarket.

U.S. prosperity is due in part to free markets determining our most efficient fuel sources. Indeed, as oil topped $50 a barrel, Canadian oil sands have become viable, making that country our leading oil exporter (hardly Zubrin’s caricature of a terrorist oil country holding us hostage)...Left alone, free markets might ultimately determine that coal-to-oil is the best alternative to gas, or hydrogen, or even ethanol. . . . But Zubrin would rather strangle the U.S. economy with subsidies and decrees for an ethanol technology that has not yet proven itself worthy in the marketplace....(Flex-Fuel Folly, cont'd)

Dr. Zubrin's conceptions for interplanetary, human-crewed travel are brilliant, but as an economist, he offers very little except politically easy answers for a very complex problem that affects the entire industrial world. In sum, we have reached the stage where the quantity of petroleum is not sufficient to meet demand. Price, the most powerful indicator in a market, is shouting a message: either find a way to increase the energy output of existing supplies, or develop something new.

Ethanol from corn or sugar is not new, does not work well, and can only be supported with subsidies and state intervention in markets. That support causes a major problem in food markets, now noticed in screaming headlines across the world. Even Greens are starting to advocate nuclear powerplants. We've known for thirty years that there's enough shale oil and gas in Wyoming to fuel America for centuries. Congress refuses to do anything except mandate bad solutions like ethanol. It is time perhaps for Congress to start representing the people, instead of a single special interest that shells out bucks for campaign money, and for Dr. Zubrin to figure out a way to privately finance Mars Direct.

Luther

Dartmouth Professor Sues Students?

An irate Ivy League lecturer says she is suing her freshman students because they were mean to her in class...."Class Action", Emma Haberman, Cynthia Fagen, NY Post, 4/30/2008 -- no link

Heh-heh-heh....

Few of the professor's students deny disliking her; they just say it had nothing to do with race, gender, or any other federally-protected characteristic. Rather, the lecturer embodied that special brand of neurotic pedagogical tyranny that includes making rules against questions, refusing to interact with students, and cancelation of class for a week after the class applauded a student who contradicted Venkatesan’s opinions about post-modernism...Putting the Class in Action, Ivygateblog.com, 4/30/2008

It had to come to this sooner or later, eh? We already know from Wonker's history, which is a paradigm of what it's like to work in academia if you're not on the Left, how professors treat each other -- ad hominem attacks, lawsuits, denial of tenure assaults, usually regarding preposterous and unprovable claims about racism, sexism or homophobia. The list of lawsuits and other mean stuff surrounding those disputes is campus legend. It only follows that, sooner or later, professors would start treating their students the same way. Still, as Ivygate's writers note:

Spontaneous applause during a class on literary criticism? Obviously, there is something very wrong with this picture, so outrageously shocking as to shake Venkatesan to her very core: In a class at an Ivy League university, students were paying attention. Worse: They were engaged, and they cared....Putting the Class in Action, Ivygateblog.com, 4/30/2008, cont'd.

An obvious extension to this -- trial lawyers, take note! -- is to sue parents for allowing their children to have wrong opinions.

Luther

Gore Conveniently Silent on BioFuels & Food Crisis

With prices for rice, wheat, and corn soaring, food-related unrest has broken out in...Haiti, Indonesia, and Afghanistan...There is even talk that governments could fall if they cannot bring food costs down...One factor being blamed for the price hikes is the use of government subsidies to promote the use of corn for ethanol production. An estimated 30% of America’s corn crop now goes to fuel, not food...“I don’t think anybody knows precisely how much ethanol contributes to the run-up in food prices, but the contribution is clearly substantial,” a professor of applied economics and law at the University of Minnesota, C. Ford Runge, said. A study by...the International Food Policy Research Institute, indicated that between a quarter and a third of the recent hike in commodities prices is attributable to biofuels...Ethanol was initially promoted as a vehicle for America to cut back on foreign oil. In recent years, biofuels have also been touted as a way to fight climate change, but the food crisis does not augur well for ethanol’s prospects...“It takes around 400 pounds of corn to make 25 gallons of ethanol...roughly enough to keep an adult person alive for a year.” Mr. Senauer said climate change advocates, such as Vice President Gore, need to distance themselves from ethanol to avoid tarnishing the effort against global warming. “Crop-based biofuels are not part of the solution. They, in fact, add to the problem. Whether Al Gore has caught up with that, somebody ought to ask him,” ...Mr. Gore was not available for an interview yesterday on the food crisis....Food Crisis Eclipsing Climate Change, Josh Gerstein, The New York Sun, 4/25/2008

Yup. Mr. Gore was unavailable for what is increasingly the most inconvenient truth at all, that Green fads don't solve problems. An ecology, local or global, can't be examined in terms of any given fix without taking into account the consequences. If the DDT ban catastrophe is any indication, very few leading ecological thinkers seem able to conceive of problems and solutions in an ecological fashion.

Luther

Luther

Green Stupidity: Ethanol and the Food Crisis

---Price of corn in February 2006: $2.06
---Current price in 2008: $5.93

Oh, those Greens in their miraculous cures for all that ails the planet. Notice the nearly tripling of the price of corn in the last year and a half. You know why corn meal in Haiti and even in California is being rationed? You guessed Global Warming? WRONG!!!!!!!!! It's ethanol, that great fix for reducing bad gases in the air, also known as the great farmers boondoggle of the decade (a great favorite of Bill & Hillary Clinton, whose understanding of green may be somewhat different than when it's capitalized). Ethanol is produced from corn. Vast amounts of US cornfield acreage is being harvested to produce this fuel additive but -- oh-oh....

Factories that convert corn into the gasoline additive ethanol are releasing carbon monoxide, methanol and some carcinogens at levels "many times greater" than they promised, the government says....Ethanol Pollution Surprise, AP, cited on CBSNEWS.COM, 5/3/2002

Okay, okay, they must have cleaned that up already, but wait!

Switching from gasoline to ethanol — touted as a green alternative at the pump — may create dirtier air, causing slightly more smog-related deaths, a new study says..."It's not green in terms of air pollution," said study author Mark Jacobson, a Stanford University civil and environmental engineering professor. "If you want to use ethanol, fine, but don't do it based on health grounds. It's no better than gasoline, apparently slightly worse."...Scientist: Ethanol Would Cause More Pollution Than Gasoline, Foxnews.com, 4/18/2007

Doesn't sound good, does it? And it's not a new story.

With a corn-to-ethanol conversion rate of 2.7 gallons per bushel (a rate that many state-of-the-art facilities are already surpassing), the U.S. ethanol sector will need 2.6 billion bushels per year by 2010—1.2 billion bushels more than it consumed in 2005. That’s a lot of corn, and how the market adapts to this increased demand is likely to be one of the major developments of the early 21st century in U.S. agriculture. The most recent USDA Baseline Projections suggest that much of the additional corn needed for ethanol production will be diverted from exports....Ethanol Reshapes the Corn Market, Allen Baker & Steven Zahnizer, Amberwaves.com, April 2006

We knew in advance. So, what gives? Somebody must get something out of this. Whoever could that be?

Soaring land values, increasing debt and a reliance on government subsidies for ethanol production have prompted economists to warn that what some describe as a golden age of agriculture could come to a sudden end...Amid Strong Farm Economy, Worry About Increased Debt, KansasCity.Com, 4/20/2008

There you go, you starving Haitians, no corn meal for you today. To keep American farmers subsidized, the Congress has legislated that the government pay them to produce corn for ethanol, which causes farmland use for food crops to be sharply restricted, which causes prices to rise, which causes rationing. You have to be pretty f...ing green not to see that!

Oh, you Greens. Not content with the thirty million dead because of the finally lifted, thirty-year DDT ban, now you want to starve people who won't drive a Prius fueled by corn ethanol. What will you think of next?

Luther

Citigroup Fire Sale: More Bad News for New York

Citigroup Inc. said today it lost $5.1 billion during the first quarter as poor bets on mortgages and leveraged loans lopped billions of dollars from its investment portfolio...Write-downs related to mortgages and turmoil in the credit markets reached about $12 billion...The most recent quarterly shortfall at the nation's biggest bank by assets is not as massive as the nearly $10 billion loss it suffered in the fourth quarter of last year...Citigroup Posts $5.1 billion Loss, Washington Times, 4/18/08

As bad as this is, both for Citigroup's stockholders and employees and for New York, it's a good example of how private business handles a recession. It sells off assets that aren't helping the bottom line. It cuts costs. Its objective is to change its balance sheet from a disaster to a report indicating a future for the company. Once that's achieved, investors (not to mention depositors large and small) will begin putting money into Citigroup's financial products again. It's brutal, but it's real. They should send an emissary to Albany to meet with the Legislature's leaders and with Governor Paterson.

Luther

Governor Paterson's First Month

"What I want you to understand is that this is not a new governor responding to an economic crisis. This is a new governor trying to create fiscal reality.” [Governor Paterson of NY, April 7] The governor’s words give some hope that he is serious about fixing New York’s budget problems, slowly easing the tax burden, and staunching the losses from a fleeing middle class...But New Yorkers need action, not words—and certainly not the nearly $122 billion state budget that Paterson is expected to sign barely a week after his speech. While he has pared almost $2 billion from earlier budget proposals, state spending will still rise by close to 5 percent this year. To balance the budget, Paterson and the legislature did what past governors and legislatures have done: find creative ways to levy nearly $1.5 billion in new taxes and fees on New York residents and businesses....Words Not Deeds, Nicole Salinas, City Journal, 4/14/2008

For those seriously considering moving out of state to join the hundreds of thousands of tax refugees from New York City and New York State, Governor Paterson's speech was almost as startling as hearing Bill Clinton chime in with New Gingrich in 1995 about welfare reform. It was a direct assault on the assumptions that guide New York's waltz into bankruptcy. Perhaps Governor Paterson forgot something, however.

Even though Paterson is the head of a state government, an unelected Governor has no mandate to do anything but follow the legislature's lead. This bodes ill for New York State's future, because the legislature in Albany, and not just the Democrats as George Pataki's last term demonstrated, is leading the state on a spending and taxation binge that, as Mayor Bloomberg noted yesterday, is more likely to drive wealth out of state than balance a burgeoning budget. What's worse is that in New York State's major cities, including the biggest one, political discourse is entirely one-sided. In New York City, a Republican office-seeker is rarer than a snail darter in Tennesee. The local party has had to adopt Democrats, such as Mike Bloomberg, to offer serious candidates. A state lurching on the edge of bankruptcy, without serious political discussion, is more like a tottering socialist country in South America than an American state. The primary option for protecting one's self, one's family, and one's company is taxpayer and employer flight.

As Galinas and many other writers have made abundantly clear, as have we on this blog, the heart of New York State's economy is an industry that could move in toto to Jersey City in eighteen months. Modern markets or, for that matter, modern stores, don't depend on brick and mortar headquarters in a given city or state. That's why New York City has thrown billions of tax rebates to the wolves of banking and Wall Street. That same industry, financial services, is also stumbling into a major recession with the current credit crunch. Tax collection in New York State from financial services businesses, as Governor Paterson pointed out, is down 75% from last year. Bonuses will shrink, further suppressing tax revenues. Tens of thousands are likely to be laid off.

Unless the Governor can start making a governing alliance out of members of his own and what's left of the other party, and now, New York State is going to slide backwards toward 1975, a generation's work of reconstruction gone to waste.

Luther

The Market or The Fed? We'd Better Decide

Bank holding companies including Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. have the thinnest safety cushion against losses in seven years...Credit ratings on $704 billion of bonds have been cut this year following the collapse of the U.S. housing market. Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., said last week that the downgrades may compromise bank capital ratios enough that some of the largest institutions will no longer be considered well capitalized....Falling below a regulatory benchmark that is intended to maintain a minimum level of capital to protect depositors against losses would subject banks to more scrutiny from regulators than they have ever experienced....Citigroup, Wells-Fargo May Fuel Recession by Curtailing Lending, Bloomberg.com, 4/8/08

It's that big, folks. As noted below in remarks about Senator McCain's thoughts on the subprime mortgage mess and the consequences of a panic, markets respond swiftly and efficiently. Government intervention causes increasingly dangerous problems. Why is this important?

As Fed Chair Bernanke's ill-advised bailout of Bear Sterns demonstrated, the only way for the government to rescue a badly managed institution is to print money, to paper over a financial collapse. When you do that, as time-honored a practice in Argentina as in recent years in the US, you devalue the currency. How? When value doesn't change, but the dollars that represent it increase, the dollars become worth less. That TIAA-CREF account you have that's valued at $700,000 -- check again after one of these bailouts. It may be worth ten percent less, even though the numbers stay the same. The Bear Sterns story isn't over either. Class actions suits by shareholders in both Morgan Chase and Bear Sterns are highly likely. Why? When the government intervenes to force a deal, as the takeover of BS by Morgan Chase, it sets a price which may not be indicative of real value. The Fed allowed a valuation of Bear Sterns at $2 a share, down 95% from the previous week's listing on the exchange. A little welcome flexibility got that up to $10 a share, which may put off the legal threat, but don't count stockholders out yet. Lawyers feed off this kind of thing.

The market, in Citibank's case, reinforced by regulation on capital reserves, has sent a clear message to borrowers: if prospective borrowers don't have strong collateral, long-term stability, and a substantial down payment, don't issue any paper to them. They are not creditworthy in today's market. It's an honest assessment. The Fed can't help this. That was $704 billion in questionable paper, a big chunk of which is in the hands of Citibank and Wells Fargo. Questionable paper, for all intents and purposes, may as well be toilet paper for all the value it has as an asset. If things get worse, this questionable stuff will become an expensive writedown. Then, policy trends by lending officers will become official bank policy.

These things happen. Take a smaller example. Let's say that, feeling flush after a big raise, you borrowed $82,500 to buy yourself a new Escalade. Then, eight months into the sixty-month payback schedule for the auto loan, you discovered that you couldn't afford the payments. Hey! you complain; I can't help it. Well, the people's whose jobs depend on your paying back that $82,500 loan don't have many options here. You've taken $82,500 out of their capital, which you've agreed to pay back at -- these days -- very modest interest. Now you won't meet the payments schedule. What choice do people have whose livelihoods depend upon you making responsible use of their depositors' money?

You guessed right. They send repo man. They sell the Escalade and get back maybe fifty cents on the dollar. It's not a great system for the bank, but at least they got half the money back and can loan it to somebody else. That you might have to drive an old Plymouth for a while isn't their problem. If you'd paid attention to something real in budgeting, you might have bought a Voyager instead of an Escalade. The problem here is that if they let everybody off the hook who didn't pay back auto loans, there would be no money to loan to buy cars, no employment for loan officers who issue auto loans, and layoffs at General Motors.

But wait! Here come de spitzer! (see below). The spitzer says that this loan payback business is immoral, and that you, the poor citizen, were victimized by the Satanic car salesman, who convinced you against your will to buy a car that you couldn't afford. The spitzer says "let the taxpayer buy this man's car." Or house, or factory...you see where this is going.

Once you start down the road of what's called moral risk there's no stopping. The more forgiveness there is of bad credit, the more dollars will be dumped into the economy to paper over the bad debt. The more dollars there are in circulation without an increase in value (such as paying back loans) the less those dollars will be worth. Inflation, back to the 1970s! Everything costs more and what you thought was your retirement (or house or vacation) fund is worth a lot less. Let's be honest here. This kind of "forgiveness" is nothing but government theft, transferring taxpayer money to settle accounts for people who refuse to do it on their own dollar.

Back to the real world: a lot of buyers and mortgage brokers suffered irrational exuberance in the last five years. Prices and the instruments for financing them became mindboggling. Houses that were on the market in Brooklyn for $50,000 in 1996 were, for a time, valued at $900,000 in 2006. No equity loans? What's the difference between that and rent? And what's the incentive to stay for the "buyer"? Whacko thinking! Deranged financing? Tulip market redux!

We know why this happened. It was exciting. Everybody would own something. And nobody in the banks or among buyers wanted anyone to be disappointed. This was America, where nobody ever loses. Fantasy can't be sustained in any real world. Sooner or later, the market has to be adjusted to actual conditions. Hope is not enough. A lot of people can't afford these amazing prices and the saner bank officers will have to start looking at the real basis for financing credit. A good place to start: the introductory rate on a mortgage, dear lender, and dear lendee, is not a basis for budgeting next year's monthly payment. It's a sale price for the first year. The lesson always comes and it is always harsh. Contracting the mortgage market by raising standards is how this lesson is taught.

The alternative of the kind of intervention the Fed engaged in with Bear Sterns, though, is a debased currency and the risk of explosive inflation. Want to go back to the 1970s? Want your retirements accounts to decline in value by 10% or more a year? That's what Citibank and Wells Fargo, by responding to real conditions in a real market, are trying to avoid. Unfortunately, the spitzers and the Fed, during an election year especially, don't want us to remember what happens when you pour good money into a pool of bad debt.

In sum, in this election year, we're faced with spitzer promises that could sink us in stagflation for a decade, or a few years of rocky roads as credit markets recover and credit standards are constructed along more rational lines.

Luther

Global Warming Curve Upside Down? UN Not Sure

Average global temperatures in 2008 are forecast to be lower than in previous years, thanks to the cooling effect of the ocean current in the Pacific, U.N. meteorologists say....The World Meteorological Organisation's secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, said it was likely that La Nina, an abnormal cooling of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, would continue into the summer..a small number of scientists doubt whether this means global warming has peaked and the Earth has proved more resilient to greenhouse gases than predicted, but Jarraud insists this is not the case and notes that 1998 temperatures would still be well above average for the century...."When you look at climate change you should not look at any particular year," he told the BBC. "You should look at trends over a pretty long period and the trend of temperature globally is still very much indicative of warming..."La Nina is part of what we call 'variability'...."
UN Forecasters: Global Temperatures to Decrease, FoxNews.Com, 4/4/2008

Oh, that dog of variability, that cursed beast of contingency! For ten years, the trend of global temperatures has been slightly down, not up. That's not a very long time, but it almost exactly corresponds to the rising hype regarding global warming.

The problem, as Michael Crichton has described it (see State of Fear), is the use of calculated models as a substitute for evidence, what was once derisively described in the early PC days as spreadsheet knowledge. The problem with models is easy to describe. If you miss a key variable, what in the real world is described as a contingency, you will calculate utterly false results.

A classic example of this was a model developed by the Club of Rome in 1970. It calculated the demise of the human species by the 1980s. We were all going to devolve into starvelings in a universal war of attrition over diminishing resources, especially diminishing food resources. Evidently, the Club of Rome had never heard of Norman Borlaug. Food production more than doubled by the time we were all supposed to starve to death. That was one key variable. Population growth, especially in the northern hemisphere and South America, sharply declined. That was another key variable missed. Put the two together and all that remained of the Club of Rome's model by 1985 was an artifact of an era, something one might put in an exhibit at the Woodstock Museum that Senator Clinton would like the government to subsidize.

Before computer modeling came to attain the status of experimental evidence, such speculations were usually reserved to a certain class of science fiction. Antiquarians will point to some of the more spectacularly errant ideas realized in these novels and short stories, a staple of the paper pulps in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. One that arose, as computers were developed in the 1940s, was that the day would come when a few individuals with supercomputers would control the world. The writers who followed this lede had no way of knowing that more computing power than was available to the entire world in 1947 could be found in a $299 sale item at Wal-Mart in 2008. This kind of science fiction is almost always wrong, because the future is far too difficult to predict, especially in a free market economy.

It was easy to debunk this kind of fiction when the stories were bound in covers that looked like softcore pornography. (Old issues are now art collectibles on eBay.) But, after the startling realism of 2001, A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968, director), the silly symphony approach to science fiction movies, even so-called serious ones like Metropolis, gave way to an increasingly popular perception that science fiction might have a thing or two to say about things to come, as it were. That perception is very big today, but needs closer examination. Take Bladerunner.

As 2001, A Space Odyssey became after 1968, Bladerunner after 1982 became an iconic film, an artifact not only of its maker's imagination (and that of Philip Dick), but of a burgeoning political paradigm. Human beings were hurtling into a future where the environment would be poisoned by the very technology that allowed us to advance; only the rich would have havens of safety; only the rich would ever see sunlight. Beautifully designed, presented with convincing noir realism, the film's setting and background became how many people saw an impending, doomed world.

Bladerunner was released twenty-six years ago. The closest environments today to that depicted in the movie are found in China and in the wreck of the Soviet Union, not in the West. Environmental cleanups in the the Americas and Europe are so dramatic that New York, where one could feel the soot falling out of the sky in 1968, now seems like the windswept port city that it has always been. Even the air over Los Angeles, a city thicker with cars now than ever, has been transformed. An area in New Jersey west of the city where the waterways and swamps were green with toxins in 1970 is now a protected wildlife preserve. The weirs that held industrial waste are gone, the waste with them. There are more trees in the Appalachians now than there were in the 1700s. And, far from the populations reduced to serfdom as in the movie, we have more problems with overconsumption in 2008 than with workers slaving in fiery mills. Those mills are gone. The new ones are startlingly clean, the workers well paid. The Bradbury Hotels of New York have been either torn down, or have been renovated as condominiums. The hulks of tenements torched for insurance in the Bronx in the 1970s have been rebuilt or replaced. The vision of the movie, utterly convincing, of a dystopian world of the future, while it may have encouraged us to do better, was as wrong in its forecast of the future as was 2001, A Space Odyssey.

But, both are fiction. Fiction, onscreen or on the page, is an art form. Its plausibility isn't based on how true it is, but on how well it's done. Writers and filmmakers who propose futures are almost always wrong; they're creating art. And it's too complicated to imagine all of the possible variables of the next fifty to one thousand years. But, surely,the immensely powerful software and processors of today's computers, networked by the millions, can outdo a single man or filmmaking team. That must have been the temptation that drew scientists away from their initial scorn for computer calculation as a substitute for fieldwork and paperwork.

Take the weather. For five decades, the US Meteorological Service has requested more and more powerful computation assets. They've generally gotten them. Weather, a natural system, is a big problem. Ask any citizen of New Orleans. Trouble is, we've known for almost four decades that there are limits on computation of weather patterns. 48 hours is the most we can forecast. After that, you might as well flip coins. (Compare any local weather forecaster with actual results for a week.) A lobbyist pitching for more computational power for the USMS would be lying if he or she claimed that more computers would allow deeper projections into the future. It won't. Lorenz proved that in the early 1960s. Weather is a chaotic system, relatively stable, but never the same. What more computer power will do, however, and this is why the money is worth spending, is to allow richer detailing of those forty-eight hours. There, the difference between 1960 and 2008 is astonishing.

But the weather, like all other global patterns, is still a chaotic system, not a neat problem for a spreadsheet or more complicated software. As such, even with the vast computational power of the US Metereorological Service in 2005, New Orleans citizens didn't know that a) the storm would head into Lake Ponchartrain and defeat the levee system, and b) that the political leaders in the city would completely fail to meet the test the storm presented.

The same applies to any chaotic system. Such systems fall into similar patterns as they repeat processes, but they never do exactly the same thing twice. It's the difference between a hurricane striking harmlessly on a vacant part of east Texas or fatally in a direct hit on Galveston. Based on science that's now over four decades old, it's easy to aver the following: presuming to project a hundred years into the future on a global system like temperature patterns is as arrogantly presumptive as the Club of Rome predicting that we'd all starve to death in 1985.

The trouble is that computation in the abstract, working without the messy interference of contingency, such as physical evidence, is in its own way a kind of fiction factory where, instead of a year to develop and shoot a feature film, a new fiction can be produced with each variable introduced to the software. As Crichton has pointed out with considerable force, politics can introduce its own variables to so-called objective calculation. We can (and do) deny that certain physical evidence is relevant, because the evidence is politically unacceptable. And we're still left with the fact that a computational model is just that, a model, not the real thing. Taking exactly the same model, and introducing a random element (the way real events can be), we might find it just as easy to forecast an ice age. Oh,but wait: that was done before. Those who read history, or who were there, will remember the reputations put on the line in the 1970s to predict global cooling.

Luther

Kay Hymowitz's Wail About Immature Men

Young men especially need a culture that can help them define worthy aspirations. Adults don’t emerge. They’re made....,Child-Man in the Promised Land, Kay Hymowitz, City Journal, Spring 2008

When first reading this, it seemed that the author was describing young men in a blaxploitation movie set in Harlem in 1973. Directionless, overgrown teenagers, abandoned by society, seeking out pleasures, licit and illicit, utterly uninterested in the larger consequences of sexual relationships, high on one thing or another -- this was the foundation of a new hooliganism, sometimes called the Quiet Riot.

But, wait, this long and windy complaint is a general description of single young men in 2008. It's no longer Them (dark, foreboding, handsome, good at basketball); it's all single young men. While young women have become the New Woman, young men have become idle, video game freaks who just want some trim before breakfast.

Single women in their twenties and early thirties are joining an international New Girl Order, hyperachieving in both school and an increasingly female-friendly workplace, while packing leisure hours with shopping, traveling, and dining with friends...(Child-Man in the Promised Land, cont'd)
Of course, Hymowitz fails to point out that it's illegal for there to be a New Boy Order, you know, where guys work together toward helping one another, where they're regarded as a disadvantaged class in school and therefore given vastly more assistance than so-called "advantaged" students. When was the last time you heard about a public education campaign to assist the huge number of male students at the tipping point of dropping out of school? When was the last college campaign you heard about to help male students over the hump of required courses in areas where many may have problems?

And on the job, the writer's own experience suggests that the virtues of the New Girl (aggressive, assertive, hard-charging, and in control) are denied to the New Boy. The motivation to succeed has been undercut by a new privileged class and the order's enforcers in upper management.

Fact is, the game now is not a transformation of the old game, where boys were somewhat advantaged (except for little matters like required military service). The new game simply inverts the old. At least in the old days the girls had marriage and motherhood to look forward to. Funny thing -- some of these brilliant columnists should read a serious anthropologist like Robin Fox -- men unmotivated by the prospect of being a part of family and society tend to turn into video game freaks, drunks, and losers. It is also worth noting that, for thirty years, the propaganda from all points of the compass has been that men are dangerous, destructive, over-aggressive tyrants. After a while, the target of constant propaganda may begin to believe the lies and start saying "yeah, that's what I'm really like."

There is also some doubt in this writer's mind about the superiority of a New Girl culture of shopping, travel and dining. When that culture is upheld by the necessity to wage war for resources, this writer knows who pays. It ain't the New Girl driving the Escalade.

Luther

Senator Clinton: Lying A Career Style?

The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes...Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career...Why?...“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”...Watergate-Era Judiciary Chief of Staff: Hillary Clinton Fired For Lies, Unethical Behavior, Dan Calabrese, North Star Writers Group, 3/31/2008

Oh, Hill and Bill, those naked days of youth are coming back to haunt you. Change the rules midstream? Hillary will do it. Violate the Constitution? Hillary can find a way. Show contempt for Congress? Hillary can. The Empress's new suit is nakedly lawless. Even the Democrats are saying so now.

Luther