Via MSNBC:

Energy secretary says oil companies ‘have lost control of the market’

Gasoline prices have soared an average of 60 cents a gallon in less than a month because suppliers are unable to keep up with demand, a situation that could persist up to three more years, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said Sunday.

Bodman said on NBC’s "Meet the Press" that the shortfall was a sign of a stronger economy under President Bush, but he acknowledged that, at least for now, "the suppliers have lost control of the market."

No surprises there. When you sleep with evil it always steals the covers.

Commenting on Washington's dopey response to high gas prices..

In truth, these high gas prices are an obvious function of demand and supply, and, as such, they are one of the best things to happen in a long time. I hope they go much higher. Soon. If they don't, the government should force them higher with a big fat gas tax. Only higher oil prices will actually jump-start the new, greener technologies we all say we want (and our planet desperately needs). The government can help a little at the margins: lift ethanol tariffs from Brazil, drill in Alaska, insist on flex-fuel capacity in every American-made car. But for the rest, let the market show people that there are costs to things. This president has never let reality intrude on his conversations with the American public on energy, war, or much else for that matter; so maybe reality will have to speak for itself. Maybe the only way people will stop using SUVs is when they actually have to pay for their ecological destruction and energy inefficiency.

One simple conclusion: conservative government really is dead, isn't it? A conservative government would simply say: we have no control over global oil prices; consumers reap what they sow; companies should be left alone; and if your wallet is empty because of all that gas in your SUV, you've learned a useful lesson in self-government. If only Margaret Thatcher were around to punctuate that lecture with a swipe of her handbag.

No, not the 14th street PATH station. This one..

Don't panic but a black hole is far nearer than you may think.

Unitil now it would have taken a very long trip into outer space to see one but now scientists have created their very own black hole in a laboratory in New York.

But thankfully it was not the sort that could consume the Earth

It lasted for a tiny amount of time, a staggering 10 million billion billionths of a second.

The heat generated was 300 million times the temperature on the surface of the Sun.

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's anti-Israel conspiracy theories have inspired praise and support from the usual suspects..

David Duke says:

"It is quite satisfying to see a body in the premier American university essentially come out and validate every major point I have been making since even before the war even started."

I've started a petition drive for college and university teachers to defend John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt from baseless charges of anti-Semitism. I apologize for limiting the petition base this way, but others are welcome to create other petitions that anyone can sign. I feel it is time for teachers in higher education to stand up and be counted on this issue of the chilling of academic inquiry through character assassination. At a time when the use of congressional funding to universities to limit and shape curricula and research is openly advocated, all of us academics are on the line. And if scholars so eminent as Mearsheimer and Walt can be cavalierly smeared, then what would happen to others?

Robert Fisk, like Duke and Cole, basically praises Mearsheimer and Walt for validating every major point he's made since before the Iraq war started.

We've all heard the words before, but according to David T. at Harry's Place, the interesting part is the illustration accompanying Fisk's article:

What makes this one notable, however, is that the Independent has chosen to present Fisk's argument in an even more, erm, forthright manner than Fisk himself. What Fisk merely insinuates, the Independent makes crystal clear.

They've entitled their piece "A United States of Israel?", and illustrated it with a picture of the Stars and Stripes, in which the stars have been replaced by jewish stars of David.

It is reminiscent of the "Kosher Conspiracy?" illustration in the New Statesman - which featured a star of David impaling the Union Jack - a few years ago.

In both cases, the headline used a question mark: as if to imply that nobody should mistake this for racist propaganising, because the publications were only asking the question, you know...-

In the old days, that kind of thing used to be a violation of Godwin's Law. That was before the moronic convergence started Godwinning themselves.

..to the problems in Darfur. Great idea!

Private military companies have had a hard time convincing the international community that privatizing peacekeeping would be as good for Darfur, and for the rest of the world, as for their industry. In part that's because of the mixed reputation their work in Iraq has earned them and because the explosive growth of the industry has raised fears that security contractors working for the US government in Baghdad (and post-Katrina New Orleans) could become bona fide armies for hire. But the discomfort also has deeper roots, in the complicated history of private intervention in these kinds of conflicts. When Kofi Annan was UN undersecretary general for peacekeeping, he explored the option of hiring the South African private military company Executive Outcomes to aid in the Rwandan refugee crisis. He ultimately decided against the option, declaring that ''the world is not yet ready to privatize peace."

More fundamentally, many believe that the international community has a special responsibility to take on problems such as Darfur-and that outsourcing humanitarian interventions to the private sector is just another way of sidestepping the hard political debates that should take place in public.

But the abstract ideal of an engaged international community might seem a rarefied consideration in light of the realities on the ground.

"This came up a long time ago. People were saying that if we use private sector in the Congo, the international community will never get its act together," says industry spokesman Doug Brooks. ''But that was 3 million dead Congolese ago. The international community isn't going to wake up no matter how many people you kill. I think that it would be a good idea for the international community to get its act together. But we've got to find another way."

Because private contractors are far more cost-effective than the UN.

The industry also claims that it's far cheaper than its multilateral or military counterparts. ''We offer the ability to create a right-sized solution-which creates a cost savings right off the bat," says Taylor. By contrast, Brooks notes, ''NATO is insanely expensive; it's not a cost-effective organization. Neither is the [African Union]. Private companies would be much, much cheaper. When we compared their costs to most UN operations, we came up with 10 to 20 percent of what the UN would normally charge."

Airbus thinks that airline passengers haven't been abused enough lately. Their proposal to remedy the situation - people should stand up for the whole flight.

Fausta is not amused.

Dean Esmay recommends this Popular Mechanics article "Crunching the Numbers on Alternative fuels.

Just glancing at the graphic comparison chart (pdf), it's interesting to note that coal-generated electricity and compressed natural gas are already cheaper than oil.

It's a pretty good article, but I agree with Dean. They should have included the greenest form of electricity generation - nuclear:

They also state: "Only 2.3 percent of the nation's electricity comes from renewable resources...." Presumably, they've fallen for the old trick of believing that nuclear energy is non-renewable, when in fact it is highly renewable. It gives off far fewer pollutants than most forms of power generation too, including solar--and yes, that's including the radioactive waste.

If were intelligent, we'd be drawing 90% of our electricity from nuclear, with fuel provided by highly protected breeder reactors to the rest of the non-breeder reactors in the country (and world). It would make 100% electric vehicles much more practical and economical, and would help spur hydrogen fuel cell vehicle development too.

Sadly, most Americans remain deeply fearful of nuclear power

BASE jumping is insane, but these guys are the extreme.

Their NYC-in-the-dark jump even scared a cabbie.

[Link thanks to Judith]

The New York Times questions global warming hysteria - sort of:

Among its recommendations, the Yale book suggests something radical: drop the reluctance to accept adaptation as a strategy. Adaptation to climate extremes has long been derided by many environmentalists as defeatism. But, the book says, adaptation may help people focus on the reality of what is coming — and that may motivate them to cut emissions to limit chances of bigger changes to come.

Actions could range from developing drought-resistant crops to eliminating federal insurance and other subsidies that have long encouraged coastal development.

Could stressing adaptation work? The Yale group calls global warming "the perfect problem" — meaning that a confluence of characteristics make it hard, if not impossible, to solve. Its impact remains clouded with scientific uncertainty, its effects will be felt over generations, and it is being amplified by everything from microwaving a frozen dinner to bringing electricity to an Indian village.

"I wish I were more optimistic of our ability to get a broad slice of the public to understand this and be motivated to act," said David G. Hawkins, who directs the climate program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private group.

In an e-mail message, he wrote: "We are sensory organisms; we understand diesel soot because we can smell it and see it. Getting global warming is too much of an intellectual process. Perhaps pictures of drowning polar bears (which we are trying to find) will move people but even there, people will need to believe that those drownings are due to our failure to build cleaner power plants and cars."

I agree that we should adapt to changing circumstances, but not because the general public is not 'intellectual' enough to understand the big picture. We should adapt because the 'intellectuals' offer no proof that even the most extreme measures will reverse or even significantly slow the effects of global warming. Americans are pragmatists. If we don hairshirts and live like the Amish, as some enviornmentalists would like us to do, there is absolutely no proof that global warming trends will slow or reverse.

However, there is significant proof that taking extreme measures would destroy our economy. There's also proof that enviornmentalists have a long history of hysterical, baseless 'sky is falling' proclamations. So, I for one will welcome pelicans and palm trees to New Jersey because there's not very much that anyone can do about it. Adaptation is what life is all about.

While searching for some Italian tile to decorate my son's bathroom (something I must do before he graduates in three weeks) I found this site, and this recipe:

Sage Potato Chips

¼ cup (60 g) clarified butter
2 baking potatoes, peeled
24 fresh sage leaves

Preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C). Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper, and brush the paper with some of the butter. Using a mandoline or an electric slicer, slice the potatoes lengthwise very thin. Keep the slices in order, as if you were going to reconstruct the potatoes. Starting from the side of a potato, place 2 adjacent slices together with sage leaf sandwiched in between. As the pairs of potato slices are assembled place them close to each other but not overlapping on the baking sheet. Brush them lightly with butter. Place in the oven and bake 15 to 20 minutes, turning them once as the edges brown. Remove from the oven and allow them to cool on racks. Serve or store in an airtight container.

At a recent VRWC gathering, I got a chance to talk to Philip Klein, journalist and writer for TCS (who wrote this excellent article on Rudy Giuliani).

I mentioned that I was interested in blogging more about alternative energy. He suggested that I should go to the Auto Show at the Jacob Javits center. So I did.

Living in Jersey, it was easy to avoid the ad blitz for the Auto Show, but the minute I got into the city I was inundated by it. Nearly every ad space en route to the center was taken up by Auto show ads. Subaru hired a couple of guys to ride reclining billboard-bikes and billboard-Segways near the entrace to the Javits center. The focus of their ad campaign, and the focus of many of the displays at the Show was energy efficiency.

Of course, Toyota (makers of the Prius) focused mostly on their hybrids and their goal of 'moving forward'

They also showed this Concept Car, the Fine T.

DeLorean-style doors were very big this year.

Honda, Chevrolet, Ford, and others also showed 2005-6 hybrid cars but the majority of the models were traditional fuel-injection. Hybrids weren't the focus of the here-and-now, but they were the focus of the future.

Around 1999 I went to a Photo Expo at the Javits Center. Back then, traditional film was the focus of most of the here-and-now displays, but nearly every corporation acknowleged that digital was the future. The two exceptions were Kodak and Hasselblad. In 1999 they had the most impressive displays. In 2005, their displays were less impressive.

As far as innovation goes, the most bleeding-edge item at the 2006 Auto show wasn't a car. It was Phill.

Right now Phill is a home-refueling system for owners of natural-gas vehicles. That's innovative enough, but the long-term plan is to expand it to provide an 'Army of Davids' method of fueling hydrogen cars.

I thought it was the coolest thing. I was a fan base of one. Most people looked at it, scratched their heads and walked away.

Anyway, here's Phill. You can hook it up like a clothes dryer. Tell me this isn't cool.

Here are some more sportscar photos for my son (and anyone else who happens to stop by). If you're in the New York Area, the show will be on today and tomorrow.

Via Yahoo

The production milestone — coordinated to fall on a national holiday honoring 18th-century independence hero Tiradentes — marked an end to decades of dependence on foreign oil, and fuel bills that plunged Brazil into debt when oil prices soared in the 1970s.

Petrobras said the huge P-50 rig will boost national oil production to an average of 1.9 million barrels a day this year, more than average consumption of 1.85 million barrels a day.

"It's an important date for the country, and Petrobras has every right to be proud," said Luiz Broad, an oil analyst at the Agora Senior brokerage in Rio de Janeiro...

...It's quite a change from the 1970s, when Brazil imported 85 percent of the oil it consumed, deepening a foreign debt that raised inflation to four digits and pushed the country to the brink of bankruptcy.

"We have the fastest-growing oil industry in the world," Petrobras Chief Executive Sergio Gabrielli said Thursday.

Brazil still depends on natural gas imported from Bolivia, on its own nuclear power and on hydroelectric dams to produce electricity, and on an abundance of ethanol, an alternative fuel made from Brazilian sugar cane.

In related news, Saudi Arabia, the only oil-producing nation that (supposedly) has significant spare output capacity has announced that they have no control over the price of oil.

Markets, of course, thrive upon movement. Influenced by Saudi Arabia, OPEC has done its best to give some stability to the supply, and thus the price, of oil. Despite this, what is happening in markets at present is beyond the ability of any oil-producing country to control...

When First World companies find themselves losing money because they are becoming uncompetitive, governments will no doubt do something. Reducing energy taxes can only be a temporary palliative. Therefore the solution lies not in lower taxes but in lower consumption as a result of conservation as well as more sensible use of a finite resource. This will have the added effect of easing pressure on the environment.

Here are some possible reasons for this announcement:

1. They're lying to drive up the price of oil.
   [unlikely, since soaring oil prices tend to encourage the search for alternatives, as it has in Brazil]

2. They're our friends and they want to give us some helpful advice, despite the financial cost to themselves.
   [yes, this is the comic relief choice]

3. They've been lying to us about their capacity and they're starting to run low.

We still have no alternatives to the US-Saudi friendship. Maybe that's not such a hot idea.

Via Yahoo:

DUBLIN (Reuters) - Ice cream makers Ben & Jerry's have apologized for causing offence by calling a new flavor "Black & Tan" — the nickname of a notoriously violent British militia that operated during Ireland's war of independence.

The ice cream, available only in the United States, is based on an ale and stout drink of the same name.

"Any reference on our part to the British Army unit was absolutely unintentional and no ill-will was ever intended," said a Ben & Jerry's spokesman...

...The Black and Tans, so-called because of their two-tone uniforms, were recruited in the early 1920s to bolster the ranks of the police force in Ireland as anti-British sentiment grew.

They quickly gained a reputation for brutality and mention of the militia still arouses strong feelings in Ireland.

"Ben & Jerry's was built on the philosophies of peace and love," [the spokesman] added.

Prominent Democrats Al 'digital brownshirts' Gore and James 'I root for hurricanes' Wolcott have a message for us.

The end is near.

In Vanity Fair, writer Mark Hertsgaard alleges that Frederick Seitz, the former president of the National Academy of Sciences and the former president of the prestigious Rockefeller University, was a shill for, of all things, the tobacco industry. A press release by the National Environmental Trust proclaims "Scientist Who Spearheaded Attacks on Global Warming Also Directed $45M Tobacco Industry Effort to Hide Health Impacts of Smoking." Seitz, a giant in American science, says this is all "ridiculous, completely wrong." Now 94, Seitz explained to TCSDaily.com that R.J. Reynolds had given Rockefeller University $5 million a year for basic research. Seitz says he directed the money toward non-tobacco-related efforts in the study of prions (the virus-like proteins that cause mad cow disease), tuberculosis and other diseases. Prion researcher Stanley Prusiner thanked both R.J. Reynolds and Seitz in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

But Gore & Co. aren't troubled by such details because the smears are all for a good cause. That's why Gore saw nothing wrong in bullying dissident climate change scientists when he was a senator or waging a mean-spirited campaign to discredit the work of his old mentor, Harvard oceanographer Roger Revelle, because Revelle thought alarmism was unwarranted.

Hence the irony of the title "An Inconvenient Truth." It is the green scare that has no patience for inconvenient truths. For example, Gore blames the disappearing snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro on global warming, but a 2003 study in Nature identified the clear-cutting of surrounding moisture-rich forests as the culprit. In the famously fact-checked New Yorker, Editor David Remnick pens a love letter to Gore in which he laments that Earth will "likely be an uninhabitable planet" if we don't heed Gore's jeremiads. Oh … come … on!

This is just a small taste of the millenarian battiness running through the green scare. Sure, a one- or two-degree-per-century rise in average global temperatures may have unpleasant consequences — with some pleasant ones as well — but in what study did the New Yorker's fact-checkers verify that Earth will become uninhabitable? Moreover, the greens' proposed solutions to global warming are even more otherworldly. Reducing global carbon dioxide emissions to 60% of 1990 levels before 2050, while China, India and (hopefully) Africa modernize, is inconceivable, ill-conceived and also immoral because it would consign generations to poverty.

But none of that seems to matter to the greens. To them, the only thing we have to fear is the lack of fear itself.

[link thanks to Dean]

..we are too...

Saudi Arabia announced Tuesday that they would transfer $92 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority. Their declaration of support for the PA comes after Russia said it would transfer $10 million, Iran $50 million, and Qatar an additional $50 million for a total of over $200 million.

After meeting with Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, PA Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar said that the Saudis had agreed to give $92 million in aid to the Palestinians. He added that at the meeting the two had also discussed the collapsing Palestinian economy and ways of ending the new Hamas-led government's current international isolation, Israel Radio reported...

...While cutting off any direct US aid to the Palestinian government, the Bush administration intends to contribute about $600 million in the next few years to Palestinian humanitarian projects.

Our government just doesn't understand bribery. When you bribe people, they should to do what you tell them to do.

Our gov. doesn't understand extortion either. When you pay money to an extortionist, he's supposed to be tougher than you are. This is like the school principal being shaken down by psycho AV nerds. What are we thinking?

[Link thanks to Roger Simon]

artwork thanks to my daughter

Via the Washington Post: Environmentalists are starting to speak out in favor of nuclear power:

Going Nuclear
A Green Makes the Case

By Patrick Moore

In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That's the conviction that inspired Greenpeace's first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too...

..I am not alone among seasoned environmental activists in changing my mind on this subject. British atmospheric scientist James Lovelock, father of the Gaia theory, believes that nuclear energy is the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change. Stewart Brand, founder of the "Whole Earth Catalog," says the environmental movement must embrace nuclear energy to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. On occasion, such opinions have been met with excommunication from the anti-nuclear priesthood: The late British Bishop Hugh Montefiore, founder and director of Friends of the Earth, was forced to resign from the group's board after he wrote a pro-nuclear article in a church newsletter.

There are signs of a new willingness to listen, though, even among the staunchest anti-nuclear campaigners. When I attended the Kyoto climate meeting in Montreal last December, I spoke to a packed house on the question of a sustainable energy future. I argued that the only way to reduce fossil fuel emissions from electrical production is through an aggressive program of renewable energy sources (hydroelectric, geothermal heat pumps, wind, etc.) plus nuclear. The Greenpeace spokesperson was first at the mike for the question period, and I expected a tongue-lashing. Instead, he began by saying he agreed with much of what I said — not the nuclear bit, of course, but there was a clear feeling that all options must be explored...

..the 103 nuclear plants operating in the United States effectively avoid the release of 700 million tons of CO2emissions annually — the equivalent of the exhaust from more than 100 million automobiles. Imagine if the ratio of coal to nuclear were reversed so that only 20 percent of our electricity was generated from coal and 60 percent from nuclear. This would go a long way toward cleaning the air and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Every responsible environmentalist should support a move in that direction.

There's no doubt that it would help the economy, it would reduce our dependence on foreign oil and it would make the air a lot easier to breathe. And, the issue is producing sane words from enviornmentalists. A complete win-win situation.

[link thanks to Michelle Cottle, who is guest-blogging at the Daily Dish]

On Sunday, the New York Times ran this full-page pro-Hamas ad (pdf), paid for by former Rep. Paul Findley's "Council for the National Interest Foundation"

Who is Paul Findley? He's a Republican former Congressman who tilts at the windmills of our our "Israel-centric" foreign policy in publications like the Huffington Post, the white-supremacist Vanguard News Network and the progressive Common Dreams.

He was also published in the Saudi Arab news, where he blamed 9/11 on the US government's policy of helping Israel "humiliate and destroy Palestinian society" He said:

Few express this conclusion publicly, but many believe it is the truth. I believe the catastrophe could have been prevented if any US president during the past 35 years had had the courage and wisdom to suspend all US aid until Israel withdrew from the Arab land seized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

The US lobby for Israel is powerful and intimidating, but any determined president even President Bush this very day could prevail and win overwhelming public support for the suspension of aid by laying these facts before the American people.

The CNI ad, published in the New York Times, was more of the same. In the header, Findley's group asks:

"Why has the United States been willing to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state?"

It's like this Monty Python routine, without the full frontal nudity:

Luigi: (looking round office casually)You've ... you've got a nice army base here, colonel.
Colonel: Yes.
Luigi: We wouldn't want anything to happen to it.
Colonel: What?
Dino: No, what my brother means is it would be a shame if... (he knocks something off mantel)
Colonel: Oh.
Dino: Oh sorry, colonel.
Colonel: Well don't worry about that. But please do sit down.
Luigi: No, we prefer to stand, thank you, colonel.
Colonel: All right. All right. But what do you want?
Dino: What do we want, ha ha ha.
Luigi: Ha ha ha, very good, colonel.
Dino: The colonel's a joker, Luigi.
Luigi: Explain it to the colonel, Dino.
Dino: How many tanks you got, colonel?
Colonel: About five hundred altogether.
Luigi: Five hundred! Hey!
Dino: You ought to be careful, colonel.
Colonel: We are careful, extremely careful.
Dino: 'Cos things break, don't they?
Colonel: Break?
Luigi: Well everything breaks, don't it colonel. (he breaks something on desk) Oh dear.
Dino: Oh see my brother's clumsy colonel, and when he gets unhappy he breaks things. Like say, he don't feel the army's playing fair by him, he may start breaking things, colonel.
Colonel: What is all this about?
Luigi: How many men you got here, colonel?
Colonel: Oh, er ... seven thousand infantry, six hundred artillery, and er, two divisions of paratroops.
Luigi: Paratroops, Dino.
Dino: Be a shame if someone was to set fire to them.
Colonel: Set fire to them?
Luigi: Fires happen, colonel.
Dino: Things burn.
Colonel: Look, what is all this about?
Dino: My brother and I have got a little proposition for you colonel.
Luigi: Could save you a lot of bother.
Dino: I mean you're doing all right here aren't you, colonel.
Luigi: Well suppose some of your tanks was to get broken and troops started getting lost, er, fights started breaking out during general inspection, like.
Dino: It wouldn't be good for business would it, colonel?
Colonel: Are you threatening me?
Dino: Oh, no, no, no.
Luigi: Whatever made you think that, colonel?
Dino: The colonel doesn't think we're nice people, Luigi.
Luigi: We're your buddies, colonel.
Dino: We want to look after you.
Colonel: Look after me?
Luigi: We can guarantee you that not a single armoured division will get done over for fifteen bob a week.

Speaking in Hamas' interests, Findley is asking for a little more than fifteen bob. The CNI money quote is:

Does anyone doubt that the massive financial pressures being organized by the United States and Israel against the new government of Palestine will lead to anything but more violence?

Groups like Hamas have always relied on extorted funds from the West and Israel; of course they want the aid to continue. Hate mongers like Paul Findley are all too willing to help them.

Why do they hate us? Why do they blow us up?

Because that's where the money is.

Via Fortune - 'Ethanol is interesting but risky.'

f you go on the Web you'll see dozens of projects being promoted. It's not an easy business. You need to attract equity before you can get financing, but smart-money people are looking for proven managements with track records, and in this business, there just aren't any. There's also fear of overbuilding — investors got burned in the independent-power-generation bubble of 2000-2001.

And with ethanol, the barriers to entry are scarily low. Ethanol plants not only are much cheaper to build than oil refineries (they cost about $1.5 million per 1 million gallon capacity), but also farmers LOVE having them in their back yard. (Today nobody wants an oil refinery in their backyard — there's only one project underway, and that's in Arizona, far from the supply or the demand, in the middle of nowhere — the first new refinery in 30 years!)

What all this means is that supply of ethanol is no problem — the big question is demand. Ethanol demand right now is influenced by different mandates in different states. Minnesota, at one extreme, has a mandate for E85 fuel, which is 85 percent ethanol. California and many northeastern states have ethanol requirements — often E10 fuel, which is 10 percent ethanol and 90 percent gasoline. But many sunbelt states require none. Just to get all gasoline to the E10 level would require between four and five times the ethanol production capacity we now have in place. The energy bill mandates production by 2012 of 7.5 billion gallons a year — but the business could expand much more quickly if there's a voluntary shift to ethanol.

John Atkinson has posted the latest Energy Markets and Policies at Winds of Change.

There's lots going on,including IPOs.

Two ethanol producers have filed with the SEC for IPOs.

Not coincidentally:

Californians may be voting this November on a state proposition requiring that all new cars sold in California be flex-fuel ready. Kammen said that once this happens, California is poised to move toward the situation in Brazil, where many cars burn pure ethanol and ethanol made from sugar cane supplies half the fuel needs for cars and trucks.

Knowledgeable venture capitalists already are putting money behind ethanol and cellulosic technology, as witnessed by recent investments by Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates and strong interest by Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla.

"The investment by Gates is an example of the excitement and seriousness the venture capital community sees in cellulosic technology, which they see as now ready to go prime time," he said. "Our assessment in the paper is that it is a very strong winner and that the effort needed to go the last 10 percent of the way to get cellulosic on board is actually very small."

The Chinese IPO boom appears to be building on strong momentum. Reuters reports that 42 percent of Chinese companies are planning stock issues and over 50 have received approval and plan to go public in 2006. This is good news for clean energy. While investors have devoured shares of Chinese solar gear maker Suntech Power Holdings (NYSE: STP), clean technology IPOs out of China have been sparse.

For the first time, the 2006 report tracks the burgeoning biofuels market (ethanol and biodiesel), which Clean Edge reports hit $15.7 billion globally in 2005 and is projected to grow to $52.5 billion by 2015. Up more than 15 percent from 2004, biofuels exceeded wind or solar in 2005 global revenues. Clean Edge projects that markets for solar photovoltaics (modules, system components, and installations) will grow from $11.2 billion in 2005 to $51.1 billion by 2015; wind power installations will expand from $11.8 billion last year to $48.5 billion in 2015; and fuel cells and distributed hydrogen will grow from $1.2 billion in 2005 to $15.1 billion by 2015.

The free report, entitled "Clean Energy Trends 2006," examines factors that are influencing clean-energy market growth and tracks five key trends:

* Clean Energy Becomes a U. S. Security Issue

* Innovation Stretches Silicon for Solar

* Renewables Cross a Tipping Point

* Flex Fuels Gain Power and Speed

* China and India Loom Large

At Dean's World, Dave Price discusses why Comedy Central wimped out over the portrayal of Mohammed on South Park:

Something I’m surprised no one has seriously asked: Why do some Muslims threaten violence when Islam is criticized or mocked? I don’t think it’s overly cynical to immediately assume simple piety is not the answer to that question. Nor will I accept that Muslims are inherently that much more violent.

In the liberal West, perhaps the most important aspect of the state is its monopoly on the use of force, and in modern times that monopoly is mostly unchallenged. This is true in large part because the vast majority of people feel the state does a reasonable job of representing their interests in its applications of force. In Muslim countries, this is often not the case, because many governments are undemocratic and repressive. There are generally two loci of power in such countries: the state, and the one competitor the state cannot crush out of hand: the mosque (in some countries, the mosque is actually the only place people can gather without violating laws against public assembly). Since these states’ use of force is generally selfish and even wanton, that monopoly is often challenged, and with the only other locus of power being the mosque, the natural result is a subset of violent, rabble-rousing clerics, such as those that sparked the original protest with a tour in the Mideast designed to incite anger over the original cartoons.

There’s an infamous event in Christian history in which Galileo was forced to recant, under the threat of violence from clerics, his heliocentric model of the universe....

.. why did the Church initially resist Galileo’s ideas, despite the empirical proof? Because, of course, they saw those ideas as a threat to their power.

Similarly, anything that mocks Islam or contravenes its rules is not just a challenge to radical clerics’ authority, but also an opportunity to rally the faithful to a religious cause and thus increase their power. And thus in this cause they’re seeking to apply force to modify our society’s behavior, which is properly the sole domain of our democratically controlled states, subject to restriction by principles like free speech.

It took a coordinated effort between extremist imams and extremist governments to get the boycotts going and the angry mobs out into the streets.

The same holds true here - in the local, peaceful rally in NYC against the cartoons, I noticed that the crowd precisely followed the orders of the rally's leaders. The leaders shouted orders and the crowd of hundreds respectfully and quickly obeyed. There was very little that was spontaneous. It's not Muslims in general who are afraid of losing power, it's the extremist leaders. Once these obedient followers begin to question their authority, once they stop listening, the whole system falls apart.

That's why published criticism should focus, not on Islam or Mohammed, but on these leaders. The political leaders are kleptocrats and fascists. The religious leaders can't debate to save their lives. They also probably have a multitude of skeletons in their closets. We need to focus on them, deligitimize them, in any way we can.

Radio announcer and full time racist/Anti-Semite Hal Turner has often received complaints from anti-fascist groups like the Anti-Defamation League and The Southern Poverty Law Center.

I first found out that this white supremacist was living a few miles away, in North Bergen, when he was interviewed by the police during the Judge Joan Lefkow murder investigation. According to Wiki:

Two years earlier, on his worldwide shortwave show, Turner stated that a decision made by Lefkow, which included an order to a racist "church" to burn its "Bibles", made her "worthy of being killed". After the judge's family was slaughtered, Turner posted a photo on his website of Judge Lefkow with the Headline "GOTCHA!".

"If they are not going to obey the law, people like me aren't going to play by the law and I am going to start shooting them down."

According to the Jersey Journal:

Vazquez, wearing his medal-decorated uniform, had marched for about an hour in front of Turner's condominium complex on Paterson Plank Road, holding a sign that read "Hal Turner - shoot me!! Racists and bigots like you are cowards." He said an hour or two was the most he could manage, due to shrapnel injuries in his leg suffered at Khe San in 1967.

Vazquez said that Turner came out to the sidewalk at about 3 p.m. and confronted him, telling him that he could either "leave on your own, or leave in an ambulance."

Vazquez said that Turner then stepped on his right foot and pushed him into the street, and that he hurt his back and left wrist as he tried to break his own fall.

Turner, however, said that Vazquez, while calling him "a racist and a bigot," shoved him first. Turner said he used "reasonable, non-lethal force" until Vazquez was no longer a threat.

A photo of Turner:

Does Turner look like he would be threatened by the disabled veteran?

"When I came out, he accosted me," Turner said. "He was looking for trouble."

..he was misquoted in Tuesday's Jersey Journal, and that he had said "they should shoot them" and not "I am going to start shooting them."

Vazquez said that Turner was a coward. Turner made a great effort to prove that Vazquez was right.

Off to the Jersey shore on business..

[okay, the 'business' is just an excuse to go rollerblading]

Be back soon with a post about a genuine New Jersey hero, but if I'm back too late, this is the story..

Jaime Vazquez deserves a medal - if they can fit one more on his uniform.

Thanks to Ron Coleman at Dean's World

Well, on Passover everything comes to a halt. It begins with the destruction of the chametz, leavened foodstuffs, our daily bread. What could be more symbolic of the mundane, ordinary and routine than a piece of bread? We scour our homes and clear every morsel. The "normal" is simply unacceptable for eight days each year. Then we turn off our cell phones, close our places of business and sit down to a Seder with all the time in the world to discuss the Exodus experience. And, while many of us cringe at the seeming never-ending questions our kids can annoyingly ask the rest of the year, on this night they're encouraged to ask the four questions, along with any others they might have.

As for the rest of Passover, the simple commandment prohibiting us from eating leavened foods automatically creates a huge paradigm shift for a whole eight days whereby our regular routines go out the window. We are free of fast food restaurants. Free from the mundane obligations and vicissitudes of life. Passover is freedom indeed, from the spirit-stunting routines of modern life.

The fact is that each and every week we've simply got to take a day off just to catch our breath. That day is Shabbat. But in order to "clean house" and truly free our inner selves from the overwhelming clutter of life lived in the fast lane, we need the extra-strength, paradigm shifting power of Passover.

I was about to make a tuna sandwich, but found that what I thought was a can of tuna was a can of crabmeat. So I had this with baked pita chips instead.

1 can (or 8 oz) crabmeat
1 scallion, chopped
1 carrot, 1 red/green pepper, or handful of lettuce, [whatever is in the fridge] finely chopped
2 or 3 tbs. mayonnaise
1 tbs. catsup
1 tsp. curry powder or ground garam masala
juice of 1/2 lemon
freshly ground pepper & salt to taste

Mix all of the ingredients together and stir.

Video link thanks to Bruce, who says;

According to some of my pilot friends here in California, there is a spot in southern Mexico that Boeing favors for testing plane landings because of the steady 40 knot 90 degree crosswinds.

Here's the video. Sorry about the music.

Yee hah!

You've got to read about Michael Totten and Sean Lafreniere's race to Iraq.

The whole thing is quotable, but I'll restrict it to this clip:

The food we were eating was terrible. There was no time to stop in proper restaurants. We had soft drinks, potato chips, and other crap from convenience stores. We tried to pop into a little food stall at night. Then we saw what was being cooked on a stove in bubbling cauldrons and walked right back out the door.

"I can't deal with that right now," I said.

"It looks like Orc food," Sean said.

An old man stood by the side of the road selling bananas in troglodyte country where some people lived in caves tunneled into the ground and the cliffs.

"Want some bananas?" I said.

"Yes!" Sean said.

I pulled off the road. "Quick, get those bananas," I said.

Sean rolled down the window and handed the old man a dollar. The old man gave us bananas. Real food at last.

more here...

By the late 1990's, England's crime rate rose to the point where it was worse than France, Germany or the United States. According to the American Spectator:

American and British criminologists have long been puzzled and angered by the fact that Britain seems to have learnt nothing from the experience of New York in successfully reducing crime.

The big drop in virtually all types of crime in New York has generally been attributed to the zero-tolerance policy associated with Mayor Guiliani. Now Britain, far from adopting zero-tolerance, looks like it's adopting a policy of not prosecuting many serious crimes at all. This is the subject of an official Home Office directive to all British police forces. British police have now been told that instead of arresting a range of serious criminals, they can be let off with a caution.

The Home Office says offenses that may now be dealt with by a caution include burglary of a shop or office, threatening to kill, actual bodily harm, and possession of Class A drugs such as heroin or cocaine if police decide a caution would be the best approach....

Guess who always wins.

There have been doubts expressed that a right to self-defense still exists in British law. Following one homicidal home burglary Dr. Ian Stephen, an Honorary Lecturer (Forensic Psychology) at Glasgow Caledonian University, told householders:

"If you attack the burglar, or react in an 'over-the-top' manner... you will inevitably end up on the receiving end of a prison sentence that will far outstrip that imposed on the intruder in your own home.... [W]hen individuals are confronted by intruders there are some actions they should follow. Direct contact should be avoided whenever possible. If unavoidable, the victim should adopt a state of active passivity..."

...London and British crime rates have been increasing for years. Recently total crime rates for London have been estimated at about seven times those of New York for a slightly smaller population and some authorities suggest these figures have been minimized. England and Wales are now accounted by some estimates as the most dangerous places for crime in the developed world.

New York and London have populations of 8 million and 7 million respectively and comparable police budgets, though New York has about 40 percent more police actually on the beat. British papers retail many incidents of British police, rather than preventing crime, being kept busy "celebrating diversity" and prosecuting politically incorrect remarks and behavior (large amounts of money and court time have been spent by the Crown Prosecution Service on cases of children who have made politically incorrect remarks in school playground fights, for instance)...

Some judges are questioning the wisdom of this policy:

Judge Finestein said he thought prosecuting the youngster was "crazy" and urged the Crown Prosecution Service to reverse its decision. He said: "Have we really got to the stage where we are prosecuting 10-year-old boys because of political correctness? I was repeatedly called fat at school. Does this amount to a criminal offence?

He told the court: "This is how stupid the system is getting. There are major crimes out there and the police don't bother to prosecute. If you get your car stolen it doesn't matter, but you get two kids falling out because of racist comments - this is nonsense."

The changes made to the British legal system seem to be motivated by political correctness and an anti-prison bias:

"This is part of the wider problem that the Home Office has an anti-prison bias. But while they regard prison as uncivilized, they don't seem to care whether the alternatives work or not."

Their efforts to make Britian more civilized are making it a very uncivilized place. Any ten year-old can tell them this is a bad idea.

[cross-posted on Dean's World, where commenter Ken Hall says:

"Self-defense is a natural right, one that no human law may abrogate"

That's very true, but it doesn't stop them from trying..]

Monster rabbits are on the loose in Britain!

Via Yahoo:

It is a massive thing. It is a monster. The first time I saw it, I said: 'What the hell is that?'" the Northumberland Gazette newspaper quoted local resident Jeff Smith, 63, as saying on its website (www.northumberlandtoday.co.uk).

He claims to have seen the black and brown rabbit — with one ear bigger than the other — about two months ago, and at least three fellow allotment holders say they have seen it as well.

"I have seen it and it is bigger than a normal rabbit. It's eating all our crops and we grow the best stuff here," said retired miner George Brown, 76, quoted by the domestic Press Association news agency.

Smith could not be reached for comment Friday, but his mother told AFP that the hare-raising story is true — and no less an authority than the British Rabbit Council said it was credible.

[This and other attack bunny links thanks to Ace]

Richard Landes writes about his recent visit to France

Nous sommes tétanisés,” said my French friend. [We are paralyzed.]

The French are beginning to wake up, beginning to lift up their Ostrich head from the sand. As opposed to the frequent dismissals I ran across in the past – when it wasn’t accusations of racism – I now met an increasing number of people willing to say, “we don’t disagree” (the French really don’t like to say “you’re right”). But, as my friend put it, we don’t know what to do. “We’re paralyzed.”..

..One might even say, some of the Gaulois were finding some clarity on who were the good guys. At the first café we went to, late Saturday night, the waiters, who began the evening making snide remarks about us behind our backs (including the way I wore by beret), upon realizing that were Americans who spoke French, grew quite warm. It turned out that at least two of them wanted to move to America.
“What about anti-Americanism?” I ask the waiter who was marrying an American girl and hoping to go to the States to start a restaurant.
“Oh, that was bad back at the time of the Iraq war, but no longer,” he said, with a reassuring confidence...

Landes' essay is long, but well worth reading. He concludes:

Attacking the most powerful is not courageous, especially when the most powerful is a friend and ally and will not strike back. Attacking enemies who will punish you violently for any affront, that is civic courage. When will the Europeans realize that?

A motorist drove a car through a crowd of protesting students, slightly injuring seven. The demonstrators overturned the car and tried to kick its windows out. Police in riot gear and helmets worked to disperse the crowd.

Some businesses are targets of the demonstrators while others appear to be safe. Via No Pasaran:

The two McDonalds near the Place d'Italie were boarded up yesterday, Gulf of Mexico hurricane style, to provide some modest protection against the hoards of rampaging youths who have a tendency to blame the youth labor law on American imposed unbridled capitalism. Other businesses don't have to worry so much. Take Quick Burger. They're promoting their new Cauet Burger, named after a popular French radio and TV personality and professed anti-Semite (he compared Auchwitz to a vacation colony on his radio show back in the 90s). Nothing like a little anti-Semitism to boost sagging sales and keep the casseurs away.

It's fun to gloat over the problems of the French, since they have such wonderfully "appealing" politicians and they are so generous in their evaluations of les américains (and, yes, I have been guilty of this gloating in the past). But as with Dick Nixon, I'm tired of kicking them around. In the end, I suspect many of us would like to have our dream France back.... Jean Gabin, Arletty, the Resistance. But I am afraid we may not. It may be over, if it ever was there.

[I went shopping at our local Mitsuwa supermarket, a place that's so Japanese you could swear you were in Tokyo. The produce is wonderful there, but pricey. I would have had to get a mortgage to pay for the sushi-grade seafood there, so this is a veggie dish)

1 buttercup squash (note: the name on the squash was unreadable, but I think it was a buttercup squash)
1 carrot, chopped
about 5 cups vegetable broth

Pour the broth into saucepan. Slice the squash in half, then cut it into slices. Turn the slices on their side and chop the skin off - then cube it and put the cubes in the broth. Add the carrot and bring the soup to a boil.

1 large onion, chopped 1 tbs. olive oil
1/2 cup ground peanuts (or walnuts)
1/2 cup basil leaves, washed, chopped
1/2 lb. shelled & deveined shrimp or cubed chicken (optional)

In a pan, fry the onion in oil till yellow. Add the ground nuts and fry over medium heat, stirring till browned. Add the basil and shrimp (or chicken) and stir till cooked.

3 one-inch chunks of Golden Curry Roux - or 1 tbs. yellow curry powder
fresh-ground pepper to taste
1 cup coconut milk

When the squash and carrots begin to soften, mix in the ground nut mixture. Add the Golden curry mix or powder, and stir over medium heat for awhile till mixed together. If the soup is too thick, add some water till it's right. Cover and simmer for about 15 minutes.

With a cup or a ladle, pour the hot soup into a blender or Cuisinart. Blend for a short time, till it's no longer chunky. Return to the pot, add the coconut milk, and bring to a boil. Stir till blended.

We had this with a couscous salad but it would also be good with brown rice, pita bread or, if you can get it, roti canai.

Will human time travel be possible in this century?

With a brilliant idea and equations based on Einstein’s relativity theories, Ronald Mallett from the University of Connecticut has devised an experiment to observe a time traveling neutron in a circulating light beam. While his team still needs funding for the project, Mallett calculates that the possibility of time travel using this method could be verified within a decade.

Black holes, wormholes, and cosmic strings – each of these phenomena has been proposed as a method for time travel, but none seem feasible, for (at least) one major reason. Although theoretically they could distort space-time, they all require an unthinkably gigantic amount of mass.

Mallett, a U Conn Physics Professor for 30 years, considered an alternative to these time travel methods based on Einstein’s famous relativity equation: E=mc2.

“Einstein showed that mass and energy are the same thing,” said Mallett, who published his first research on time travel in 2000 in Physics Letters. “The time machine we’ve designed uses light in the form of circulating lasers to warp or loop time instead of using massive objects.”

To determine if time loops exist, Mallett is designing a desktop-sized device that will test his time-warping theory. By arranging mirrors, Mallett can make a circulating light beam which should warp surrounding space. Because some subatomic particles have extremely short lifetimes, Mallett hopes that he will observe these particles to exist for a longer time than expected when placed in the vicinity of the circulating light beam. A longer lifetime means that the particles must have flowed through a time loop into the future.

[link thanks to Alcibiades at Kesher Talk]

"International law aspires to be - and many would argue is - law. For it to be respected and observed as law, however, it and the system of which it is a part need to be more than a piety. Think of a national legal system that just regularly presided over - by which I mean countenanced and did not intervene to prevent - large-scale massacres of whole sections of its population. Would the fact that it was, in some sense, a set of laws, and backed by a putative authority, demonstrate its adequacy as a legal system? Of course not. The dismal record of the international system in preventing genocide and large-scale atrocity does not speak in its favour, and those friendly to the idea of an effective and properly legitimate regime of international law have no reason to be tactful about the existing defects."

- Norm Geras, from his post Presiding over genocide

Via Yahoo:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia must do a better job at ferreting out major individual donors who continue to fund terrorism abroad, including in Iraq, a top U.S. Treasury official said on Tuesday.

Stuart Levey, the Treasury's undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said Saudi Arabia had made significant strides in counterterrorism efforts in recent years and that the kingdom was "doing an excellent job" fighting operatives of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network at home.

But he told a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee that concerns remained, including the existence of so-called "deep-pocket donors" and the abuse of charities to fund militants.

"Is money leaving Saudi Arabia to fund terrorism abroad? Yes," said Levey, who has traveled to Saudi Arabia twice in the last two months. "Undoubtedly, some of that money is going to Iraq. And it's going to Southeast Asia and it's going to any other place where there are terrorists."

He said Saudi Arabia had taken steps to curb terrorism financing, but had failed to set up a special charity commission to regulate the sector, as it had pledged. He said rules implemented as a stop-gap measure in the interim "haven't been uniformly implemented."...

.."What needs to happen is they need to do financial investigations in a serious way in order to locate those deep-pocket donors that are still funding terrorism abroad. And that's something which is a concern that hasn't happened as robustly as it needs to happen," Levey said.

Banking Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, asked whether there was a gap between Saudi government rhetoric and the implementation of policy.

Levey replied: "I've got to say that there's a lag. ... And we'll see if there's a gap."

..or perhaps he's just another American mind warped by Jack Bauer...

In this post, Dean asked

I'll be gone most of today and will not immediately respond, but, I issue an open challenge/question:

What part of this analysis am I wrong about?

1) It is entirely clear that the practice of female circumcision is barbaric and should be fought at every opportunity. BUT, we need to stop infantalizing women when we do so. This to me is no minor objection.

A general discussion about female circumcision was prompted by this article:

Dr. Muhammad Wahdan: In 2001, the Center for Population Research at Al-Azahar University conducted research about the chastity of Egyptian girls and the unity of the Egyptian family. They took a representative sample of Egyptian society. The determined several factors for the chastity of Egyptian girls...

Dr. Muhammad Wahdan: If a girl says she doesn't want [female circumcision] she's free. No problem.
Interviewer: Is this what happens in reality?
Dr. Muhammad Wahdan: I have no relation to reality. I am talking about how things should be.
Interviewer: You are a religious sheik, from Al-Azahar University. You cannot say you have no relation to reality.
Dr. Muhammad Wahdan: Reality is a mistake, we must rectify it.

When it comes to Muslim/Arab involvement in the male/female circumcision controversy, the jury appears to be out. The online Dear Abby of the Muslim world, Mufti Ebrahim Desai of Ask The Imam, favors circumcision of men and women.

Q: What is the Islamic ruling on female circumcision? Please explain in detail.

A: It is Mustahabb (commendable) for females to circumcise. It is narrated in an authentic Hadith quoted from Abu Dawood Shareef that during the Prophet (Sallallaahu Álayhi Wasallam)'s time there was a woman in Madinah who used to perform circumcision for women (Fathul Bari vol. 16 p. 353)

and Allah Ta'ala Knows Best

Mufti Ebrahim Desai

Q: Is it the woman right that I have circumcision or is it not possible for her to insist me to do that?

I am a new convert and i am going marry soon, so may question to you: Is it the woman right that I have circumcision or is it not possible for her to insist me to do that? Because maybe it is not without any risk to do that in the age of 30. Thank u for your answer

A: Circumcision is not the right of a woman to insist. Rather, it is