|
break out |
main
attacking iran is dumb
casmii
clark
folly
the usual suspects
unusual suspects
under our bombs, over the sea
the human cost
moratorium time
juan cole
as'ad abuKhalil
missing links
reidar visser
salam pax,
raed,
& baghdad burning
dahr jamail
rahul mahajan
today in iraq
the occupation project
roohullah rahimi
mukhtar ainashe
lebanon updates
"labels are not more than open boxes"
one big wobblosphere
IWW News
Retail Worker
eric lee
eugene plawiuk
f n brill
j m branum
k marx the spot
kevin carson
mark dilley
rob findlay
thomas l knapp
ilk
anarchoblogs
art of the possible
andrew o baoill
andrew levin
arthur silber
chris dillow
cosma shalizi
course correction
daniel davies
dave pollard
dennis perrin
doug henwood
dru oja jay - dominion
hugo zoom
jeff vail
john caruso
jonathan schwarz
karmalised
kevin harris
libertarian labyrinth
mark ames
max sawicky [defunkt :(]
michael perelman
mitchell freedman
naomi klein
nell lancaster
norman solomon
the open mind
our tomorrow
press action
richard stallman
sam smith
stop me before i vote again
ufo breakfast
sedition
seth edenbaum
stay free!
upaya
vermont commons
who is ioz
znet blogs
fire your boss
thwarted efforts
econ
dean baker
nouriel roubini
calculated risk
cepr blog
econospeak
general glut
globalize this!
robert waldmann
walden bello
strikes and drives
glabour
jordan barab
labor blog
rafael gely [law]
NEWMAN!!
thomas palley
work less
working family party
--
Borders Union
Congress Hotel Strike
Houston Janitors
Starbucks Union
TC Metro
Scottish Socialist SF Vanguard
ken macleod
'i am no marxist!'
bionic octopus
lenin's tomb
stan goff
progressives
cursor
american amnesia
bitch, phd
cernig
crooked timber
david corn
doug ireland
fables of the reconstruction
fester
jordan klein
ken silverstein
prometheus 6
rootless cosmopolitan
robert dreyfuss
sadly, no!
scott horton
seeing the forest
steve perry
religious 'left'
gutless pacifist
abbas kadhim [shia]
helena cobban
martin kelly [quaker]
ray mcgovern
rev. allen h. brill
rootsblog [hoodoo]
shiapundit
skip schiel
veiled4allah
liberal
christopher allbritton
order of the shrill
pacific views
paul krugman
sideshow
spencer ackerman
suburban guerrilla
war and piece
unfogged
unfair, unbalanced
argmax
arms control wonk
bruce schneier
capital spectator
craig murray
defending ethics
drugwar rant
eric umansky
gary brecher
grok law
housing crash
housing crash...
lawrence lessig
mark crispin miller
make
memory hole
murketing
robert fisk
sanders research associates
scott atran
steve aftergood
war is boring
heathens & heretics
gristmill
real climate
tim lambert
satellite dish hats
rigorous intuition
long emergencies
clusterfuck nation chronicle
energy bulletin
the oil drum
r-squared energy
miscreants
alicublog
the curmudgeon
fafnir
adam felber
filthy critic, the
ironic times
jay pinkerton
jon swift
neal pollack
opinions you should have
rude pundit
the lowest deep
libertarian
antiwar blog
the agitator
balkinization
entitled to an opinion
freedom democrats
jim bovard
jim henley
john smith
julian sanchez
kerry howley
liberty & power
nebojsa malic
vaguely right
wally conger
wendy mcelroy
conservosaurus rex
charles reese
joe stromberg
justin raimondo
old man 1787 [rip]
karen kwiatkowski
conservative
arnold kling
brian carnell
daniel drezner
john cole
james joyner
kesher talk
klayman & verney
tacitus
unreasonable searches and seizures
checkpoint usa
papers, please!
homeless
claire bushey
thehomelessguy
run for the hills
counter-terror
flibbertigibbets
george monbiot
robert fisk
africa
alex de waal [harvard]
arab street [egypt]
crumbley [on egypt]
drima [sudan]
from the rock [libya]
slum tv [kenya]
americas
blogalization [brazil]
blog from bolivia
eparillon [trinidad]
justin delacour
narcosphere [drugs]
randy paul [latin america]
patrick barr [peru]
asia
amarji [syria]
central asian journal
committee to protect bloggers [iran]
fons tuinstra [china]
iranian girl [iran, retired]
ishtartalking [iraq]
lady sun [iran]
pedram [iran, emmigrant]
ali abtahi [iran]
the argus [on central asia]
sofia javed [in uzbekistan]
the south asian
steve levine
third world view [bangladesh]
eastern europe
a natural anthem [moldova]
iraq resources
IVAW
campaign for casualty assessments
Bodycount, Iraqi Civillians
Bodycount, Occupying Forces
GlobalSecurity: US Casualties
Comparative US Def. Spending
Oil For Food Facts
Watch, Bush on Film
Watch, Iraq Debt
Watch, Iraq Occupation
Watch, Iraq Revenue
Watch, US Bombing
Watch, Arms and The Man
Iraq Warcrimes Tribunal
the yellow peril
China Study Group
frog in a well
image thief...
lawyers, guns and money
those who dare...
katrina
Reconstruction Watch
ACORN
American Red Cross
American Second Harvest
Food Not Bombs
Habitat for Humanity
Hurricane Housing
Music Rising
a gumdrop house on lollipop lane!
after downing street
sign a letter
the british memos
timeline
tsunami
tsunami relief blog
doctors without borders
global fund
ecology
ask blogs
blogpulse
blogstreet
blogshares
[*]
feedster
google blogsearch
technorati
[*]
ttlb ecosystem
weblogs.com
who links me
|
|
Current or Currently Old Issues:
my imagination is turning into my father:
The more I delve into the intertubes' enormous DIY community, the more I feel like I'm living in the world described in Player Piano, and understand the bare necessity of owning a garage and a woodshop, nevermind a kiln and a specialmatic. Bumbling suburban apes the world over are building absurd, rudementary contraptions that just barely work, and like any other monkey I can't help but want to imitate them.
update: I haven't found a DIY plan for a specialmatic, on the one hand, but here's a how-to for building your very own numerical control machining tool.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-19 00:44:46 CST |
link
| comment (5)
|
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-18 23:15:07 CST |
link
|
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-18 10:26:04 CST |
link
|
spare me the humanity:
Jad Mouawad, NYT, August 13th, providing a clear eyed view of the interests at stake:
American policy makers hoped that diverting oil around Russia would keep the country from reasserting control over Central Asia and its enormous oil and gas wealth and would provide a safer alternative to Moscows control over export routes that it had inherited from Soviet days.
Princeton professor Gary Bass, the NYT, two days later, clouding my eyes up with tears:
In 1995, after three and a half years of killing, an American-led NATO bombing campaign helped stop Karadzics atrocities and turned the Bosnian Serb leader into a fugitive. But do the humanitarian interventions typified by Americas interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo have a future?
Now, you can take your pick - whether you believe Clinton and Putin were intent on preventing genocide, like they claim, or whether their intentions reflected some more stately interest - but the objective reader might note a similar interest in "diverting oil around Russia" in the Balkans.
Bass looks to the history of humanitarian intervention, and unsurprisingly finds it everywhere. He decides to land upon the British role in the Battle of Navarino as a "spectacular" instance of a nation intervening against its own interests for humanitarian purposes:
When Greek nationalists rose up against Ottoman rule in 1821, much of the British public rallied to their cause, galvanized by press reports of Ottoman atrocities. This was supremely inconvenient for the British government, which had a clear imperial interest in supporting the Ottoman Empire as a bulwark against Russian expansion. But the London Greek Committee lobbied the government, sent money and weapons to the Greeks and dispatched men, including Lord Byron, then probably the most famous poet in Europe, to Greece to fight. Byron died of fever there. (Imagine Bono fighting in Darfur today.) Finally, in 1827, the British Navy, alongside French and Russian ships, sank much of the Ottoman Navy in Greece helping to secure the creation of todays independent Greece.
An intriguing example! I note that the British Navy had been ordered to avoid hostilities - Britain only agreed to go in, after five years of successful stalling, on a bid to restrain the new Russian Tzar's unilateralist tendencies - and that sinking the Ottoman Navy, and thus winning Greece its independence, was rather an accident. The Admiral, as a reward for this humanitarian gesture of either disobeying orders or defending his fleet, was summarily relieved of his command and recalled to London for a solid dressing down, while the Foreign Office went about patching things up with the Ottomans and installing some Bavarian Prince into the otherwise empty throne of the Greek republic, and so, terminating the independence all those 19th century British Bonos had died fighting for.
Bass continues:
Humanitarian intervention, in other words, is not the property of the United States or the generation of liberal hawks who championed Balkan interventions in the 1990s. For better or worse, it is best understood as an idea thats common to the big democracies on both sides of the Atlantic.
And, he might have added, common to other notable products of Western civilization. If only Neville Chamberlain had established a stricter system of international intellectual property rights, so much mid-century calamity could have been avoided.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-17 02:17:02 CST |
link
|
mental bulimia:
A conservative acquaintance suggested to me this morning that Bush's actions regarding Georgia may some day lead us to see that "bush is a modern day churchill". The thought was fairly unfathomable, figuring the proposed truce pushed onto Georgia's village idiot by our village idiot seems to give Russia exactly what it wanted, de facto if not entirely de jure. The first hit I got on google news for "bush churchill", in the hopes of discovering what must be the extraordinarily idiotic logic behind such fantasies, was the Wall Street Journal:
President Bush finally condemned Russia's actions on Monday after a weekend of Olympics tourism in Beijing while Georgia burned. Meanwhile, the State Department dispatched a mid-level official to Tbilisi, and unnamed Administration officials carped to the press that Washington had warned Georgia not to provoke Moscow. That's hardly a show of solidarity with a Eurasian democracy that has supported the U.S. in Iraq with 2,000 troops.
Compared to this August U.S. lethargy, the French look like Winston Churchill.
Well, either way you puke it up it's still pretty stupid. The conservative's mental equivalent of chronic acid reflux is that anytime a serious crisis is encountered World War II will be painfully regurgitated. All French President Sarkozy did was host the bridge game, and now the WSJ is comparing him to some archaic thug, to whom, if we're to be serious, was a good deal more like Putin - note the efficient imperial savings to be had by occupying secessionist territories that want to be annexed - than any of these other jokers, pulling off some goofy stunts at the terminal end of a once mighty empire.
On the bright side, if the simple minded foaming at the mouth for the past week for a "new Cold War" is any indication, none of these people will be running the world for much longer.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-16 15:46:54 CST |
link
|
a serious crisis, my friends:
This statement today:
MCCAIN: My friends, we have reached a crisis, the first
probably serious crisis internationally since the end of
the Cold War. This is an act of aggression.
Made me curious enough to spend 10 minutes on a search engine.
July 25th, 2008, less than a month ago:
MCCAIN: "Eighteen months ago, America faced a crisis as profound as
any in our history. Iraq was in flames, torn apart by
violence that was escaping our control."
January 22nd, 2006:
"This is the most serious crisis we have faced, outside of the entire war on terror, since the end of the Cold War," said one, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. "A nuclear capability in Iran is unacceptable."
January 11th, 2002:
MCCAIN: As the president has said, there are significant challenges that remain in the region, from getting control of the country of Afghanistan to this very serious crisis that exists between Pakistan and India. So there's challenges in the region, but overall the success so far has been very impressive.
October 10th, 2000:
MCCAIN: I think we're seeing, perhaps, our worst fears being realized there in that part of the world. I believe that unless something turns around rather quickly, we could see further escalation and open welfare, whether it be in Ramallah, the West Bank, Gaza or Lebanon, Syria. I support the administration's efforts strongly to bring this -- to defuse this crisis that's looming that could be the greatest since the '73 war, '67 war. And it's very, very serious. It has very serious consequences and it is clearly in the United States national security interest to see this situation defused.
I do not think it's appropriate for me or any other politician right now to criticize the administration while this very serious crisis is going on.
A feather hasn't flown off the back of a chickenfoot without being declared a serious crisis by Launchpad McCain.
THE NATIONAL INTEREST: polls (including Time and Rasmussen surveys released this week) have consistently demonstrated McCain’s advantage over Obama on terrorism and national-security issues. If a serious crisis unfolds, voters may regard McCain as the more experienced and tougher candidate, prepared to deal with foreign chaos.
I don't think I'd hire him to run the company risk assessments.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-15 22:05:46 CST |
link
| comment (1)
|
abolishing the cia:
Jimmy Carter one asked why his daily brief from the CIA just told him what he'd already read in the morning paper. The statistical outlier Reagan was of course too busy writing the news himself to have any use for some petty civil servant telling him what he'd been up to. The last three Presidents of the United States all famously watched the progress of their wars on CNN or, latterly, FOX. But times change, and technology advances. The POTUS of the future will just read wikipedia.
As you can see, the market has provided centralized intelligence products that the consumer routinely prefers over more bureaucratic alternatives, demonstrating once again the inefficiency and waste of government and the superior innovation of the private sector. It is inevitable that the CIA will be phased out of existence, like so many other archaic federal redundancies before it.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-11 23:37:59 CST |
link
| comment (5)
|
I rung her before we sailed away, we're bound for South Ossetia:
I understand a border territory caught between the spheres of influence of two major world powers is experiencing some hostilities. The Bush administration's behavior, I'm sure, is awful and shocking in some way. Rather than follow the story, however, I've decided to save some time and watch it in movie form. The only hard part is figuring out which tinpot leader gets to be allegorically represented by this sublime Ernest Borgnine performance.
update: An old Human Rights Watch report, back when it was still watching Helsinki, on the 1991 Georgia-South Ossetian conflict is rather more informative than anything I'm seeing anywhere else.
Excepting, now that I get around to looking, Cobban and co., of course.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-09 22:08:56 CST |
link
| comment (2)
|
It turns out John Edwards is less the fag and more the manslut. I don't see the shame in either: it's not like he served his wife with the divorce papers while she was recuperating in the hospital from a tragic accident, or some dick move like that. But whatever it is, it's good news for John McCain!
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-09 19:20:40 CST |
link
|
fred l. smith jr. doesn't make a lot of sense to me:
Fred Smith, the welfare queen founder of the tax-payer subsidized sinkhole for Exxon's windfall profits called the "Competitive Enterprise Institute", jumps down the otherwise unremarkable throat of a jibber-jab on carbon policy sponsored by Reason magazine:
Our ability to do anything about CO2 increases for the next half-century is now obviously nonexistent. And the tensions we could create by pushing the world into some form of energy rationing, I think, are underestimated. Recall that in World War II, one of the incidents that pushed the war party into power in Japan was an energy boycott on that Asian nation. We are going to do that again with China. It doesnt make a lot of sense to me.
Obviously, it's not obvious, nor is energy coupled to greenhouse emissions, so there's no energy rationing implied, obviously, to some sort of rationing of said emissions by some sort of implied price mechanism, let alone some sort of energy boycott against China nobody seems to have suggested - for this reason, anyway, though they have for every other. Obviously, if the PRC is predicting a 10% loss of output in their 300 billion dollar ag sector, nevermind the annual 7% glacier loss reducing the supply of hydroelectric power and fresh water and irrigation resources, they've got their asses pretty far into the fire already. But China isn't the problem, even after years of record growth, with fewer past emissions to account for, the carbon footprint of the average Chinese citizen is less than a fifth of that of an American. An energy boycott against us would seem more likely.
We must do something. Perhaps. But why must that something be the expansion of state power over our lives?
That, from a classic example of a barnacle that feeds off the bounties that got us into this mess, is classic. Fred Smith pays himself his very comfortable salary with tax incentivized donations from large fossil energy firms, which, to quote Dick Cheney, "government involvement makes ... a unique commodity ... both the overwhelming control of oil resources by national oil companies and governments as well as in the consuming nations where oil products are heavily taxed and regulated", nevermind subsidized and supported as a way of life from the federal level to the local. From naval protection to production tax credits to the occasional trillion dollar occupation, to the state supported highway system at the expense of cheaper, more efficient mass transit that in turn was "deregulated" to shift liability to the public for private profit, to regulatory disincentives for end-use efficiency, to the zoning laws that restrict population density and spawn long commutes over sprawling heat islands, the simple amount of poor design of essential public goods that have benefitted Fred Smith's donor base since the invention of the automobile - and at the expense of alternatives we're now turning back to - is simply incalculable. And he wants to talk about costs.
Fred Smith isn't afraid of a carbon tax increasing state power over our lives, he's afraid of state power ceasing its support of his.
So I take it back. Fred Smith Jr. makes perfect sense, afterall. Inviting him to this debate is like asking the pig at the trough to address portion sizes in the kitchen.
On the up side, I still find Ronald Bailey's argument for a carbon tax over cap-and-trade fairly convincing, and have to admit to some concern that the proposed carbon markets will be a massive swindle. This comment from Northwestern economics prof Lynne Kiesling may be apropos:
Kiesling: In this case of Chicago Climate Exchange, the biggest participants are Ford Motor and American Electric Power—the largest coal-fired generation owners in the country. So for them, it’s a strategic action. They’re hoping to forestall regulation but also it’s a P.R. and reputation capital building exercise.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-09 15:48:50 CST |
link
| comment (1)
|
don't confuse us with the facts:
The New York Times reports about how awesome shit is down in Brazil, by way of idly kicking around Bolivia and Venezuela:
Brazil, South Americas largest economy, is finally poised to realize its long-anticipated potential as a global player, economists say, as the country rides its biggest economic expansion in three decades.
That growth is being felt in nearly all parts of the economy, creating a new class of super rich even as people like Ms. Sousa lift themselves into an expanding middle class.
Despite investor fears about the leftist bent of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva when he was elected to lead Brazil in 2002, he has demonstrated a light touch when it comes to economic stewardship, avoiding the populist impulses of leaders in Venezuela and Bolivia.
Instead, he has fueled Brazils growth through a deft combination of respect for financial markets and targeted social programs, which are lifting millions out of poverty, said David Fleischer, a political analyst and emeritus professor at the University of Brasilia.
That's why Brazil's average GDP growth over the past 6 years has been dramatically greater than its impulsive populist neighbors, by avoiding populist impulses!:
Venezuela: 4.43%
Bolivia: 3.45%
Brazil: 2.73%
Oh. Oh dear. Why, that doesn't map onto our primitive neoliberal model of the world at all, does it?
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-09 09:54:00 CST |
link
|
misallocated predicates:
I see James Galbraith has a new book out, titled after this old column, "The Predator State: Insert Obligatory Subtitle". I guess this would dovetail nicely with the three books I've already got open, but the obligatory subtitle gives pause: "How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too".
For one, two of said three books are From Mutual Aid to Welfare State and Slavery By Another Name, covering overlapping periods around the turn of the century, suggest on the large scale of 20th century history there's not been much abandonment going on. Conservatives haven't much claim to having ever embraced free markets - the embrace of particular pieces of parchment notwithstanding their apparently never having read them.
From Mutual Aid covers the period in which fraternal societies with awesome names (the: Ancient Order of Foresters; Independent Order of Odd Fellows; Canonical Association of Strangers) were able to provide health insurance and sundry benefits to their broad memberships, undercutting private insurance and driving down prices for medical care, to only find themselves regulated out of the market in 1913 by the combined interests of organized medical professionals and private insurance companies, with the largest fraternal societies joining to lock out smaller competitors in order to save their own necks. The same forces combine again to defeat the first major effort to legislate mandates for health insurance - universal healthcare, that is - in 1919. The basic gist being that cost-raising doctors' associations and private insurers managed to protect their own interests and cut out smaller, innovative health insurance providers by writing and lobbying for regulatory statutes that defacto protected them from - the author argues - otherwise healthy competition. Later, the remaining benefit societies would be driven out of the market altogether by welfare state coverage for their low income members. Having already signed themselves off to oblivion, oblivion was thus entered. As Gabriel Kolko laid out so well many years ago, this kind of predatory formulation of regulatory regimes is a familiar story: raise the bar to market entry, socialize the costs of entry into new markets, call it progress. With respect to health insurance it's easy to conclude - in comparison to our neighbors' nationalized regimes or some imagined system (one for the record: "this hospital has passed from one corporate owner to another, like a drunken sorority chick pulling a train") of modern mutual aid - that we ended up with the worst of possible alternatives.
Slavery by Another Name's relevance probably goes without saying, but obviously: if your justice system recaptures emancipated slaves on trumped up charges, and farms their labor out to private interests for fun, profit, and political repression from the end of Reconstruction straight through the Gilded, Progressive, and New Deal eras to the Civil Rights movement, it may well be that you have one of these predatory states operating in your vicinity. If you should find yourself in such unsavory circumstances, the best solution may be to emmigrate, but not to here! So there you are then, back in chains. God bless America.
Since at least the beginning of the last century and perhaps their invention, "free markets" - defined just about however your particular ideology cares to define them - are rather a moot point. In this brief review of the literature it's easy to conclude that nobody who believed in them - liberal or conservative - ever successfully defended a "free market" from its greatest enemy: the given market actor with the greatest political leverage. The term is at best an archaic oxymoron, at worst a slander against those fine occasions when some combination of human institutions succeed in some strange way to produce - let us arbitrarily describe as - exchanges of mutually beneficial net value. On the other hand, the phrase offers an irresistible freeride on a century's worth of propaganda efforts.
Which, if I'm not mistaken, is why "Why Liberals Should Too" may be malallocated rhetoric. Unless Galbraith actually wants to abolish markets altogether. That'd be very ungalbraithian of him, to say the least. Whatever it is, call it "free" and you unfail. "Free planning", perhaps?
If you stack some more current texts onto the pile - a poorly written but nevertheless rewarding Free Lunch,
or a Conservative Nanny State - one sees a certain continuity between past and present practice. It's fashionable in some circles to complain of a new Gilded Age and yearn for
a new Progressive Era, but here we have the worst of both worlds, entrenching politically-connected interests and fossilizing a hypothetically dynamic society. The obvious Galbraithianism would be
to yearn for a return to the Golden Era of our post-war mixed economy, when a confluence of interests and pressures combined to form a certain variety of lubricant for the gears of arbitration between
old and new actors - chewing up third world corpses in the beak of a mighty industrial octopus on one end and pumping out a bewildering social revolution from the other.
But to answer the question, while I do rather like this "predator state" neologism I'm not sure if there's any good reason to keep reading along with this script. Not, anyway, with a row of fascinating looking books on the history of forest management sitting in front of me.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-08 17:04:46 CST |
link
| comment (4)
|
a slam dunk:
Tony Fratto, deputy White House press secretary, says that Ron Suskind is "making wild allegations that no one can verify".
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-05 09:01:53 CST |
link
| comment (1)
|
We could cheaply power entire cities if we could simply capture the methane emissions from the conservative movements' efficiently produced and highly coordinated collective brain farts, estimated by some experts to be in the gigatons of gaseous stupidity a year.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-04 13:34:48 CST |
link
| comment (3)
|
drilling nonsense:
What exactly is politically shortsighted about taking away your opponent's shiny new cudgel and giving him nothing in return? Lifting the offshore ban is just free money if you take the cudgel and use it to jack up the lease rate schedule - or, heaven forfend, using it to get some minimal energy re-regulations (call it "deregulation" if you want, for joy) passed to combat global warming - there are some good ideas here along those lines - nevermind cutting the absurd oil production subsidies. Have they even normalized the tax incentive for wind yet? We'd be building more wind power faster, I suspect, if we just agreed to do nothing at all instead of passing temporary willy-nilly tax breaks that get applied one year and then abandoned the next.
Little to nothing other than the leasing of some ocean surface would occur for years after the lifting of the ban, for the simple lack of the equipment to do anything. That's exactly what Democrats argue: so, uh, why not lift the ban? It's just free money, ain't it? The fed gets $2 an acre, oil execs get to boost their reserve numbers and pocket those options for oil they'll never have to drill.
If the environmental costs of greenhouse gas emissions are not priced in by some mechanism by the time they're actually drilling offshore, making the drilling even more cost prohibitive than it already is, then we're pretty much toast anyway. The fact that there's only some 18 billion barrels that will have no effect on gas prices, that there's 70 million acres of dirt-cheap leases already going undeveloped, and that the first environmental disaster off the coast of, say, Virginia or, uh, Lousiana, would presumably lead to state-level moratoriums on the drilling anyway, makes the political confrontation little more than staged theatre. That is to say, every argument Democrats offer to defend the ban is just as serviceable as an argument that the ban is otherwise meaningless symbology, but as a stick that beats them conveniently about the head as they studiously avoid any action that might actually damage the industry's interests.
update: oh my:
The proposed bill, from [Obama's] point of view, offers some attractions. It would strip oil companies of $30 billion in tax breaks, renew tax breaks for solar and wind power, and give consumers a tax credit to buy electric or fuel cell cars.
It's been a while since I felt like I was being directly pandered to, and with such rapid turnaround. Still, though, I'm concerned that people haven't read Gar Lipow's book, among the other fine sources of negawatt evangelism. It's always about handing out buckets of cash to this or that energy source, not reducing our use of the stuff.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-02 10:04:39 CST |
link
| comment (1)
|
it's not exactly chocolate cake:
oil shale is very impressive [pdf]:
Oil shale is said to be rich when it contains 30 gallons of petroleum per ton. An equal weight of granola contains three times more energy. The vast, immense, and unrivaled deposits of shale buried in Utah and Colorado have the energy density of a baked potato. If someone told you there were a trillion tons of tater tots buried 1,000 feet-deep, would you rush to dig them up?
Very funny, but ok. Shell has that in-situ experimental station in Colorado that conservatives are ape about (more oil than saudi arabia!). How's it work? They have to heat the rock to 700 degrees for 3 years. The rock has to be dry while they heat it, so they need to freeze a wall of rock around the deposit, to keep moisture out, and then dry the rock, then you can start baking your flourless cake:
To produce 100,000 barrels a day would require raising the temperature of 700,000,000,000 pounds of shale by 700 degrees F. How much power would be needed? A gigabunch—in rough numbers, about $500,000,000 per year. The least expensive source for electricity is a coal-fired power plant. How much coal, how many power plants? To produce 100,000 barrels per day, the RAND Corporation recently estimated that Shell will need to construct the largest power plant in Colorado history, large enough to serve a city of 500,000.
I don't think it will work.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-08-01 15:07:35 CST |
link
|
I'd like to thank the reputable radio broadcast business press that reported repeatedly throughout the day that Americans drove 40 billion fewer miles this year through May, without making any attempt to put that number in the context of anything at all, other than that this somehow explains a 10% some drop in oil prices, or so NPR's experts told me. Total American mileage per year? About 3 trillion. A, uh, 1.3% drop in gas demand, if I'm not mistaken, all things being equal. Of course, that wouldn't have much to do with total oil demand, since gasoline is just one component of a barrel's product, and the US market is, so we're told, a quarter of the global market demand, so let's call it a .3% reduction in global demand for fossil transport fuel. A back of the envelope calculation suggests a roughly equal probability of the one explaining the other as my running over an NPR Marketplace expert while I'm looking such basic data up on the internet while behind the wheel. Those highways are dangerous.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-07-28 23:36:41 CST |
link
| comment (2)
|
rtfm:
When I sat down last week and started reading F.A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom (1944) - the intellectual godfather, I'm told, of what was once called "the conservative movement" - I wasn't expecting to discover a fullblown pinko Islamocommunist in classical liberal fur, ready to devour our very souls:
It will be well to contrast at the outset the two kinds of security: the limited one, which can be achieved for all, and which is therefore no privilege
but a legitimate object of desire; and absolute security, which in a free society cannot be achieved for all and which ought not to be given as a privilege
- except in a few special instances such as that of the judges, where complete independence is of paramount importance. These two kinds of security are, first,
security against severe physical privation, the certainty of a given mimimum of sustenance for all; and, second, the security of a given standard of life...
There is no reason why in a society which has reached the general level of wealth which ours has attained the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom. There are difficult questions about the precise standard which should thus be assured; there is particularly the important question whether those who thus rely on the community should indefinitely enjoy all the same liberties as the rest. An incautious handling of these questions might well cause serious and perhaps even dangerous political problems; but there is no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and
clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody. Indeed, for a considerable part of the population of England
this sort of security has long been achieved.
Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individual in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance - where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks - the case for the state's helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong.
--"Security and Freedom", p 147-148. (emph. added)
Earlier in the book he was advocating for regulations to account for environmental externalities - which is rather less libertarian than all the demon horned domestic terrorist envirowackos today who just want to internalize prices on greenhouse gas pollution with a tax, or, go figure, markets:
Any attempt to control prices or quantities of particular commodities deprives competition of its power of bringing about an effective coordination of indvidual efforts, because price changes then cease to register all the relevant changes in circumstances and no longer provide a reliable guide for the individual's actions.
This is not necessarily true, however, of measures merely restricting the allowed methods of production, so long as these restrictions affect all potential producers equally and are not used as an indirect way of controlling prices and quantities. Though all such controls of the methods of production impose extra cost (i.e. make it necessary to use more resources to produce a given output), they may be well worth while. To prohibit the use of certain poisonous substances or to require special precautions in their use, to limit working hours or to require certain sanitary arrangements, is fully compatible with the preservation of competition. The only question here is whether in the particular instance the advantages gained are greater than the social costs which they impose. Nor is the preservation of competition incompatible with an extensive system of social services - so long as the organization of these services is not designed in such a way as to make competition ineffective over wide fields.
...
It is by no means sufficient that the law should recognize the principle of private property and freedom of contract; much depends on the precise definition of the right of property as applied to different things. The systematic study of the forms of legal institutions which will make the competitive system work efficiently has been sadly neglected; and strong arguments can be advanced that serious shortcomings here, particularly with regard to the law of corporations and of patents, not only have made competition work much less effectively than it might have done but have even led to the destruction of competition in many spheres.
There are, finally, undoubted fields where no legal arrangements can create the main condition on which the usefulness of the system of competition and private property depends: namely, that the owner
benefits from all the useful services rendered by his property and suffers for all the damages caused to others by its use. ... there is a divergence between the items which enter into private calculation
and those which affect social welfare; and whenever this divergence becomes important, some method other than competition may have to be found to supply the services in question.
Thus niether the provision of signposts on the roads nor, in most circumstances, that of the roads themselves can be paid for by every individual user. Nor can certain harmful effects of deforestation, or some methods of farming, or of the smoke and noise of factories be confined to the owner of the property in question or to those who are willing to submit to the damage for an agreed
compensation. In such instances we must find some substitute for the regulation by the price mechanism.
--"Individualism and Collectivism", p 86-87.
What a radical, huh? Fred Hayek might as well be Al Gore in one of his more populist campaign seasons.
The central argument is, of course, that central economic planning ("socialism") is poor economics and a worse threat to individual freedom. There's probably not much point in summarizing the argument, considering how few would argue the point, but for a quick gloss: Economies of scale do not create a deterministic end-state of a market dominated by a few industrial monopolies that need to be controlled by the state for some common good, as so many state socialists, nevermind their capitalist counterparts, envisioned. It is impossible to define a "common good" at such a level of granularity by which an economy can operate efficiently, as any state planning board will be forced to pick winners and losers in order to allocate assets to fulfill their goals - better some arbitrary functional mechanism ruin your livelihood than your betters. Under such a system of domination of daily life as necessitated by narrow control over all economic activity, only the crudest, lowest common denominator of what passes for leadership will be able to unify a mob large enough to pass the next budget, and so, welcome to the future.
Hayek in a nutshell, then: centralized economic planning boards are bad, but centralized social insurance schemes and state action to price in market externalities are good, or at least strongly arguable. I suspect the Reader's Digest version most people must have read, like the vulgarized versions of Adam Smith that are apparently circulated in economics classes and journalism schools, glossed over the second and third point.
If you're not impressed by Hayek's argument for national insurance schemes putting the power of taxation to one of its few arguably good uses, you probably won't be impressed by the rest of it. Concise, thought-out arguments in this book seem to occur at about the rate of once every three chapters, with just-so assertions and repetition filling the space between. It's more like the scatological thought droppings on somebody's blog on their way to writing a book.
But then, that's about how it looked when Hayek's book was written multiple times half a century earlier - and perhaps it's easier to complain now that it would have been at mid-century - by various anarchists, or as Bertrand Russell noted in Roads to Freedom (1919), in 300BC by Chuang Tzu:
But when Sages appeared, tripping up people over charity and fettering them with duty to their neighbor, doubt found its way into the word. And then, with their gushing over music and fussing over ceremony, the empire became divided against itself.
So long as human endeavors in political economy persist in repeating past mistakes, one would assume the same corrections will be re-issued for about as long.
update: And then, "The Prospects of International Order", in which he advocates for a federated world government in which "the supernational authority must be very powerful". What a nut. Didn't he read Hayek?
"The great opportunity we shall have at the end of this war is that the great victorious powers, by themselves first submitting to a system of rules which they have the power to enforce, may at the same time acquire the moral right to impose them on others"
And he's a comedian, too.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-07-20 15:37:11 CST |
link
| comment (3)
|
we're all gonna die:
Holy shit! Iran is going to use the selling and buying of goods as "bargaining chips" in Afghanistan! Why will no one stop this cruel extermination of Afghan independence from traffic lights that work!? Food and motorcycles are already being bought and sold! What's next? Economic activity beyond the city limits of Kabul? Before long they'll be at our very borders trying to entice our children with chelow kabab. Doom I tell you, doom!
In less existentially threatening news:
U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab told a Washington press conference today that countries such as China, Brazil and India need to make "meaningful market-opening commitments."
Then we can use them as bargaining chips against Iran! Take that, mullahs.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-07-17 10:19:16 CST |
link
|
a shorter month in democratic political punditry - or - on the way to having it six ways to tuesday:
Last week: McCain surrogate called Americans whiners, zomg yowling snagglefart! NOT TRUE!!
This week: The New Yorker printed a cartoon about some stupid crap that will fester and bubble up in regurgitated fashion from here unto eternity. An unfunny cartoon! In the New Yorker!! Zomg mewling snivelshits! NOT AMUSING!!
Certain section of my google reader will need some heavy pruning, methinks.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-07-15 18:19:11 CST |
link
| comment (3)
|
would you like flies with that:
Maurice Dufour makes a powerful argument that the skyrocketing price of Haiti's staple processed food - mud pie - could make them rich, by the magic of comparative advantage:
While it may seem that Haitians have reached rock bottom, they may, in fact, be sitting on a gold mine. Through the alchemy of comparative advantage, their sludge-filled biscuits could become their most valuable commodity, propel the country into the ranks of rich nations, and even provide a lasting solution to world hunger. After all, the logic of shifting more resources into the production of these biscuits is as "impeccable" as Lawrence Summers' argument for moving dirty industries from rich to poor countries.
Clever marketers could label the exported cookies "organic" and "low-cal." Publicity campaigns could make favourable comparisons with Twinkies in terms of nutritive value without violating any truth-in-advertising regulations. Bakeries could diversify their offerings: mud pastries, mud quiches, mud rolls, mud scones, and so on. Franchising could be hugely lucrative. Soon, door-to-door deliveries of no-dough donuts could displace Dunkin' Donuts' delicacies. To steal market share from the famous franchise, marketers could mimic the name of the chain: how about “"Muck-in-Donuts"? Sales experts from McDonald’s could be brought in to coach vendors on the correct way of saying, "Would you like flies with that?"
It’s a win-win situation, really.
Read the rest.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-07-14 13:54:37 CST |
link
|
the table is a delusion, but time, time is forever:
I was really impressed today as I drove home from Minnesota, and every news station on the radio from Fargo to Chicago talked about some Iraqis 'demanding' a timetable for withdrawal. Finally they're coverin the news. Wisconsin Public Radio's IDEA network had on some hack from the American Enterprise Institute, Rachel Maddow chatted it up with Russ Feingold in between apologia for Obama's flutter-tumble on FISA, Ed Schultz discussed it in his every increasingly El Rushbo-like jowl-hanging blubber ridden radio voice, NPR covered it six ways til sunday, and all the talk radio squibs babbled about it, one way or another. After 11 hours on the road with nothing but news talk not one party to this micro-universe of the national discourse cared to mention that the vast majority of Iraqis have consistently wanted us to withdraw on a timetable since at least the Spring of 2004.
My brain seg faulted trying to count the number of times I heard mention of "democracy" or "sovereignty".
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-07-09 00:31:58 CST |
link
|
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-30 16:33:29 CST |
link
|
math is hard:
On the one hand, says Beltway Establishment, we must drill every last drop of crude and process every metric ton of shale oil, forever, damn the consequences. On the other the government is supposed to intervene in the free market and chase the speculators out of the temple, promising that if we do so the price of oil will crash back down to 50 dollars a barrel. Meanwhile, the producers who are supposed to invest in the increasingly expensive exploration and extraction operations will apparently do more and better for $50 what they haven't done for $140.
If this makes sense to you, then you have the depth of experience and commitment to free markets necessary to be the Chief Executive of the United States of America.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-27 12:31:54 CST |
link
|
normative postulate:
A good idea that is traced back to its source will be found to have been conjured by someone with reprehensible or offensive views about something else.
Corollary A: This utterly discredits the idea.
Corollary B: There are no good ideas with a personal history.
Lemma: If a good idea should tragically happen to you, bury it someplace safe, destroy all records of your connection to the idea, then take a cash-only vacation as a consolation prize before euthanizing yourself. Try not to get so wasted that you spill the beans to some reprehensible or offensive stranger that might later take the credit, thus destroying all that's good in the world.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-26 23:34:17 CST |
link
|
Launchpad McCain's Lexington - A future of dependence on powerful, nuclear armed industrial giants we're not going to be able to just invade when the moment strikes us, willy-nilly:
"In a world of hostile and unstable suppliers of oil, this nation will achieve strategic independence by 2025", said McCain, promising to double our nuclear power capacity by, uh, 2030. Except our nuclear power capacity is already dependent on foreign uranium imports. The entire industry has the same problem as oil: it's a finite extractable resource that will be exhausted faster the larger the industry becomes. Uranium prices have doubled since 2003 and we run about a 5 billion dollar annual trade deficit importing the stuff - 42 million pounds a year at over $100 a pound. This is only going to go up in the long run.
For extra points, McQuack "invokes nuclear power initiatives in China, Russia and India" as a selling point for his "Lexington" plan, which has at it's heart the goal of declaring American energy dependence. He did say he was no good at economics. As those developing economies rapidly expand their own nuclear production they're going to be causing uranium prices to increase just like their growing demand has driven a nearly 500% increase in the price of oil in the past decade. What's he think is going to happen to the price of nuclear fuel? By the time his first 45 plants are miraculously completed in 2030 we'll shortly find ourselves just as dependent on foreign energy as ever.
Promises of $2 billion a year for coal carbon sequesterization would be a good idea in so far as it'd represent a 400% reduction in coal subsidies, but - like Barrack Obama - there's no talk of the generous federal incentives already in place for fossil energy.
That along with the massive public financing and investor guarantees that will be required to double nuclear production in 20 years basically amounts to handing the public treasury to the nuclear, gas, and coal giants. McQuacks Big Plan for renewable alternatives that, you know, become exhausted on a time scale of billions of years rather than a hundred, is to... normalize the tax code.
Leaving these decisions up to an unregulated, speculation fueled market would be a holiday compared to putting this crank in charge.
Much the same could be said of the plan McCain quite obviously cribbed: Obama's. Barrack promises to increase the public subsidies for biofuels and... coal. While Obama reasonably intends to actually fund his infrastructure upgrades ("Digital Smart Grid" for Obama, "SmartMeter" for McCain), aside stricter demands for cap and trade I'm not sure it's altogether much of an improvement.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-26 15:13:32 CST |
link
|
The Third World - Right Outside Your Front Door:
Mentally retarded infants should worker harder, and pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Nearly every hospital screens infants for the genetic disease phenylketonuria, but only two states require screening for toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection passed from mother to child at birth. Both diseases cause mental retardation. Toxoplasmosis affects 10 times as many newborns as phenylketonuria does, but toxoplasmosis is mostly limited to inner cities and poor Southern areas.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-26 14:16:32 CST |
link
|
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-26 14:03:26 CST |
link
|
cancer is a gateway to death:
Thanks to modern pharmaceutical technologies and corporate research and development efforts, funded by massive patent rents extorted from the sick and dying, a radical new miracle oncology drug could slam the door on cancer mortality. What? Oh, nevermind:
The first experiment documenting pot's potent anti-cancer effects took place in 1974 at the Medical College of Virginia at the behest federal bureaucrats. The results of that study, reported in an Aug. 18, 1974, Washington Post newspaper feature, were that marijuana's primary psychoactive component, THC, "slowed the growth of lung cancers, breast cancers and a virus-induced leukemia in laboratory mice, and prolonged their lives by as much as 36 percent."
Despite these favorable preliminary findings (eventually published the following year in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute), U.S. government officials refused to authorize any follow-up research until conducting a similar -- though secret -- preclinical trial in the mid-1990s. That study, conducted by the U.S. National Toxicology Program to the tune of $2 million, concluded that mice and rats administered high doses of THC over long periods had greater protection against malignant tumors than untreated controls.
However, rather than publicize their findings, the U.S. government shelved the results, which only became public after a draft copy of its findings were leaked to the medical journal AIDS Treatment News, which in turn forwarded the story to the national media.
via somebody who reads the huffpo so I don't have to.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-25 12:18:07 CST |
link
|
can't quite put it into words:
this really just boggles my mind:
JAMES GLASSMAN, Undersecretary of State: I think Al Hurra is meeting its goals. What Al Hurra was conceived to do was to bring to the Arab-speaking world -- in this case 22 countries -- a free press, to show them what a free press is like.
Yes, that's why it's forbidden under the Smith-Mundt Act from broadcasting in the US. It's just a nutty foreign version of PBS.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-25 08:02:17 CST |
link
|
[List Headings]
[Older Entries]
|
