Christopher Hitchens, the contrarian, and Jon Stewart get into a reasonable, fun argument on Iraq. Here's the video. (Check it soon, it may be gone or hard to find after two weeks or so.)
I'm not sure who I think "wins" but the discussion is invigorating. I could watch them go at it for hours so wish this clip wasn't limited to 8 minutes. Enjoyable none-the-less.
Here is a list of charities compiled by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit for Hurricane Katrina relief. I apologize for the belated nature of this post, please give what you can.
I’ve been listening all week to scores of pundits including Bill O’Reilly argue for caps on Oil Industry profits stating that they are profiting “unfairly” and have become increasingly infuriated at how general economic ignorance on the part of journalists is adversely affecting the understanding of basic economic principles within the public. Oil Industry executives are not Ken Lay Monopoly men using profits to light cigars with $100’s. Like all commodities providers, when demand increases, profit increases, and this profit is invested to provide even greater supply to create more profits. It’s happened since the Roman Empire and is happening yet again.
Since 1981, Shell researchers at the company's division of "unconventional resources" have been spending their own money trying to figure out how to get usable energy out of oil shale. Judging by the presentation the Rocky Mountain News heard this week, they think they've got it.
Shell's method, which it calls "in situ conversion," is simplicity itself in concept but exquisitely ingenious in execution. Terry O'Connor, a vice president for external and regulatory affairs at Shell Exploration and Production, explained how it's done (and they have done it, in several test projects):
Drill shafts into the oil-bearing rock. Drop heaters down the shaft. Cook the rock until the hydrocarbons boil off, the lightest and most desirable first. Collect them.
Please note, you don't have to go looking for oil fields when you're brewing your own.
On one small test plot about 20 feet by 35 feet, on land Shell owns, they started heating the rock in early 2004. "Product" - about one-third natural gas, two-thirds light crude - began to appear in September 2004. They turned the heaters off about a month ago, after harvesting about 1,500 barrels of oil.
While we were trying to do the math, O'Connor told us the answers. Upwards of a million barrels an acre, a billion barrels a square mile. And the oil shale formation in the Green River Basin, most of which is in Colorado, covers more than a thousand square miles - the largest fossil fuel deposits in the world.
Wow.
They don't need subsidies; the process should be commercially feasible with world oil prices at $30 a barrel. The energy balance is favorable; under a conservative life-cycle analysis, it should yield 3.5 units of energy for every 1 unit used in production. The process recovers about 10 times as much oil as mining the rock and crushing and cooking it at the surface, and it's a more desirable grade. Reclamation is easier because the only thing that comes to the surface is the oil you want.
And we've hardly gotten to the really ingenious part yet. While the rock is cooking, at about 650 or 750 degrees Fahrenheit, how do you keep the hydrocarbons from contaminating ground water? Why, you build an ice wall around the whole thing. As O'Connor said, it's counterintuitive.
But ice is impermeable to water. So around the perimeter of the productive site, you drill lots more shafts, only 8 to 12 feet apart, put in piping, and pump refrigerants through it. The water in the ground around the shafts freezes, and eventually forms a 20- to 30-foot ice barrier around the site.
Next you take the water out of the ground inside the ice wall, turn up the heat, and then sit back and harvest the oil until it stops coming in useful quantities. When production drops, it falls off rather quickly.
That's an advantage over ordinary wells, which very gradually get less productive as they age.
Then you pump the water back in. (Well, not necessarily the same water, which has moved on to other uses.) It's hot down there so the water flashes into steam, picking up loose chemicals in the process. Collect the steam, strip the gunk out of it, repeat until the water comes out clean. Then you can turn off the heaters and the chillers and move on to the next plot (even saving one or two of the sides of the ice wall, if you want to be thrifty about it).
Most of the best territory for this astonishing process is on land under the control of the Bureau of Land Management. Shell has applied for a research and development lease on 160 acres of BLM land, which could be approved by February. That project would be on a large enough scale so design of a commercial facility could begin.
The 2005 energy bill altered some provisions of the 1920 Minerals Leasing Act that were a deterrent to large-scale development, and also laid out a 30-month timetable for establishing federal regulations governing commercial leasing.
Shell has been deliberately low-key about their R&D, wanting to avoid the hype, and the disappointment, that surrounded the last oil-shale boom. But O'Connor said the results have been sufficiently encouraging they are gradually getting more open. Starting next week, they will be holding public hearings in northwest Colorado.
If you haven’t heard this yet, you should. I had to check the web just to make sure what I heard in the car really happened. Essentially Cindy Sheehan melted down under softball questioning on Talk of the Nation. As soon as the questioning moved away from being able to talk about how Bush is a kid killer she said she had to go and then pretended that her phone connection was breaking up when it clearly wasn't. The next guest pointed out that this is a commonly used tactic of hers when she is challenged.
This is the communications vehicle provided by anti-war organizations to her cause. I seriously doubt that she had less than “5 bars”.
Just saw the Brothers Grimm. I didn't think it would be good, but I thought it might be ok, what with Terry Gilliam directing and all. There were definitely some decent scenes and redeeming elements, but all in all, not very good. It was very similar to Sleepy Hollow, which I also didn't care for.
MIT's Technology Review is a recent discovery for me. I started picking through them at the girlfriend's house and have found a treasure trove of geeky info. First off, in the most recent edition, there is an article about the next "big thing" in media storage, in the form of holographic disks.
Here are some of the more interesting bits:
...The disc has more than 60 times the storage capacity of a standard DVD, while the drive writes about 10 times faster than a conventional DVD burner. That means the disc can store up to 128 hours of video content--almost twice enough for the full nine seasons of Seinfeld--and records it all in less than three hours. It's likely to be one of the first commercial systems to use "holographic storage," in which bits are encoded in a light-sensitive material as the three-dimensional interference pattern of lasers. Unlike CDs and DVDs, which store data bit by bit on their surfaces, holographic discs store data a page at a time in three dimensions, enabling huge leaps in capacity and access speed.In the June issue, copyright lawyers Lawrence Lessig and Richard Epstein (this link is a crapshoot, for no rhyme or reason as far as I could tell, but keep tryin') go toe to toe on issues surrounding software licensing, i.e., the open-source model vs. the propietary model. I find myself more sympathetic to Epstein's argument, which falls between the two, describing the distinct advantages to both models being in the marketplace.
...Meanwhile, CDs and DVDs have already transformed how people listen to music and watch movies. But each of these storage technologies has drawbacks. The density of magnetic materials in hard drives is fast approaching a fundamental physical limit. Flash memory is slow, and a DVD is barely large enough to hold a full-length movie....Storing data in three dimensions would overcome many of these limitations. Indeed, the theoretical promise of holographic storage has been talked about for 40 years. But advances in smaller and cheaper lasers, digital cameras, projector technologies, and optical recording materials have finally pushed the technology to the verge of the market. And the ability to cram exponentially more bits into infinitesimal spaces could open up a whole new realm of applications.
By storing and reading out millions of bits at a time, a holographic disc could hold a whole library of films. Movies, video games, and location-based services like interactive maps could be put on postage-stamp-size chips and carried around on cell phones. A person's entire medical history, including diagnostic images like x-rays, could fit on an ID card and be quickly transmitted to or retrieved from a database."
"My qualified defense of proprietary software rests on my general approach to property rights. It may seem odd that I see land law as a place to begin thinking about copyright law in the digital age, but in the law, continuity counts for more than novelty. While we always have to tend to the differences among different forms of property, we are likely to make fewer mistakes by proceeding carefully from established understandings.Fascinating stuff if you're into this kind of thing.Every legal system in history has blended two separate property regimes: the private and common. Both are important to software and copyright. Private property confers on individual owners exclusive rights to the possession, use, and disposition (sale, lease, mortgage, gift) of some given tangible resource. Virtually all civilizations start with a decentralized system in which the person who first takes an unowned thing is entitled to keep it against the rest of the world. Providing a plot of land or individual object with a single, determinate owner facilitates its effective use. The farmer who sows today knows that she can reap tomorrow, without fearing the incursions of others. The ability to sell, lease, or mortgage property allows for everything from a simple transfer of land from person A to person B to the formation of complex cooperative ventures among multiple parties. The GNU General Public License (GPL) that Lessig so admires offers a shining example of how this last, iterative process works.
Any system of private ownership requires state enforcement, first, to protect private property from forced occupation, misappropriation, and invasion, and second, to enforce voluntary deals. But any theory of property rights that includes a key role for the state should also emphatically reject the use of centralized state power to determine who shall own what resource or why. Governments, for instance, should not pick technologies.
In all legal systems, however, a system of private property rests on an infrastructure of common property. The air we breathe, the roads we travel, and the language we speak cannot easily be reduced to private possession. They remain part of the commons because their separation impedes respiration, transportation, and communication. At the edges, we recognize useful exceptions. Although everyone may use the word "monopoly" to describe a market with a single seller, only Hasbro may market a board game with hotels and a jovial top-hatted mascot under that trade name. The private creation of a trade name pulls that name out of the linguistic commons for the limited purpose of identification."
I saw this once before, laughed my ass off and then promptly forgot about it, so I felt compelled to post it this time. It consists of a series of frames from a bootleg "Revenge of the Sith" DVD and contains the "direct English translation of the Chinese interpretation of what the script was saying," and it's hilarious.
For instance: "Let the force be with you," becomes, "ratio tile, the wish power are together with you." While not terribly funny, it at least offers a comparison. This is just plain funny.
"Giving first aid the already disheveled hair projection"
or
"I was just made by the Presbyterian church."
A few weeks ago the left’s favorite economist wrote “The French Choice”, a NYTimes editorial arguing that despite a yawning gap in fiscal measures of standard of living; the French just have different and arguably better societal priorities. Since no leftist economy has ever managed to exceed the US standard of living (except for when we briefly had our own leftist economy under Carter) this un-provable argument has always been the refuge of last resort for the intellectually dishonest; first in the context of communism and now in the context of France. Next to a lobotomy such twisted reasoning is the only way to quiet the cognitive dissonance of educated leftists actively pushing the very same policies which are now pulling their dream state under. “It’s not worse…it’s just different!”.
Actually it is.
The only empirical measure for Krugman’s claim that the only difference between the French and American economies is “priorities, not performance” is the utterly dishonest comparison of productivity per hour. Per hour worked, France’s economic output is slightly higher than the US but to argue that this in any way reflects the productive value of an economy is disgraceful – especially for an Economist with a PhD from MIT. It would be the same to argue that some lucky rookie baseball player who has a hit his first time at bat is as good or better than Barry Bonds who fails to get a hit over 60% of the time. Through policies such as the 35 hour work week and regulations which make it nearly impossible to fire anyone, only the very fittest population in the French work force is employed. Productivity per hour is the only measure which hides the vast number of unproductive members of French society. When the entire population is taken into consideration, a picture less favorable to Krugman’s argument comes into view:
While Krugman admits the obvious: “that the typical French family, without question, has lower disposable income. This translates into lower personal consumption: a smaller car, a smaller house, less eating out.” He attempts to put a happy face on the situation by arguing that having a minimum 7 weeks paid leave for the employed (it’s family fun all year round for everyone else!) is more than an adequate trade off for a lower standard of living. A generation ago, one could make such an argument and not get laughed at but the truth is that the current generation is swiftly becoming poorer. Fewer and fewer Parisians can even afford to leave their homes for the traditional August vacation. Instead they must sit on trucked in sand overlooking that glorified open sewer, the Seine.
And for as good as French schools may be, the future is bleak for their graduates. This quarter the US economy grew 35 times faster than the French economy.
Krugman is right to be concerned about France’s inevitable slide into poverty. It will be harder and harder for his lot to convince the US to take their medicine when the corpse of their last patient is rotting nearby.
I didn't really have much of an opinion about Rick Santorum, aside from thinking his stance in the gay-marriage debate was, like the President's, wrong and reeked of political posturing. Now I really don't like him. I read this quote on BuzzMachine the other day:
(From an NPR piece on Santorum's book, "It Takes a Family")
This whole idea of personal autonomy — I don’t think that most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. And they have this idea that people should be left alone to do what they want to do, that government should keep taxes down, keep regulation down, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, that we shouldn’t be involved in cultural issues, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world. And I think that most conservatives understand that we can’t go it alone, that there is no such society that I’m aware of where we’ve had radical individualism and it has succeeded as a culture.
Uhhh, right. What Americans really want is to be told what to do by a sanctimonious prig. The "conservatism" he's talking about bears no resemblance to the conservative notions I've heard espoused by Republicans in every election since I've been alive. So what gives? Is he saying what other Republican congressmen think and believe but never say, or is he alone in this?
Ronald Reagan famously said, "Government is the problem, not the solution." Now, I've been slow to see the wisdom of this statement in and of itself, because somewhere along the line I decided that history would remember Reagan was a hack and a fool. As I've gotten older, my view of him and his basic conservative philosophy has tempered to the point that I'm now finding myself agreeing with him (on some of the big stuff anyway). Reading this tripe from Santorum, the third most powerful Republican congressman, makes me wonder how much the recent up-and-comers from the GOP took Reagan's conception of conservatism to heart, or whether they were just paying it lip service to bide time for the big power grab.
How long will it take for the more libertarian/Reagan-style Republicans to reject Ricky and his power-trip and what will it look like? I will be disappointed if it doesn't come to pass, but of course if it's to happen, Republican's are going to have to break Reagan's 11th Commandment, "Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican." Here's hoping...
I find this endlessly amusing. Having written a couple things for printed publication (college newspaper and small local magazines), I've experienced the thrill of seeing my name on a bunch of pieces of paper enough times to be somewhat jaded about it. However there's something much more thrilling, for me anyway, to know that I've been helpful to someone whose ideas and writing I respect. I got the chance to thank Jeff for providing some worthwhile information by giving a little back.
It harkens to something Kevin Kelley wrote for this months Wired:
... I run a blog about cool tools. I write it for my own delight and for the benefit of friends. The Web extends my passion to a far wider group for no extra cost or effort. In this way, my site is part of a vast and growing gift economy, a visible underground of valuable creations - text, music, film, software, tools, and services - all given away for free. This gift economy fuels an abundance of choices. It spurs the grateful to reciprocate. It permits easy modification and reuse, and thus promotes consumers into producers.
Factcheck.org has a ridiculiously throrough timline of the Wilson/Plame/Rove business which features links to original source material where it's possible. This is for someone who really cares about this crap. I don't, so if you go to the touble of looking at all this stuff, tell us lazy folk what you got out of it.
ALSO: If you haven't thought to yet, check out Andrew Sullivan's blog. Dan Savage is filling in for Andrew while he's on vacation, and I for one think he's doing a fine job. If he had a blog instead of a sex-advice column, I'd read him more often. Plus he really doesn't like Rick Santorum (the biggest damn-fool Senator alive), so much so that he started a campaign to coin a meaning for the word "santorum" [warning, it's not for the faint of heart, but very appropriate - here's the backstory].
I’ve sort of wanted to blog about this for some time but, as Joe noticed, things are so slow news-wise that it seems like as good a political topic as any.
Every few weeks since November 2000 a story like this makes its way into mainstream media coverage parroting completely unsupported allegations of “voter disenfranchisement” while virtually ignoring stories such as this involving the attempted murder convictions of democratic officials seeking to kill a witness to voter fraud.
"In the state of Ohio, where they had fewer voting booths and long lines in minority neighborhoods and no lines and many voting booths in white neighborhoods, that the balance is not what it should have been." –Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi
In fact, while Nancy Pelosi wails on about our inevitable return to Jim Crow, many stories such as the following get little or no national coverage.
1.) Paid democratic operatives who also happen to be Children of Democratic house members (not state) convicted of slashing the tires of Republican vehicles.
2.) Democratic Mayor of Milwaukee demanded release of far more ballots in 2004 than there are eligible voters and, predictably, there are 7000 more votes cast than the total eligible voting population of Milwaukee. (>100% turnout = Fraud; Milwaukee is heavily Democratic; Kerry only won Wisconsin by 11,000 votes)
3.)Yesterday Wisconsin Republicans released evidence that 9 individuals from Milwaukee voted several times in different cites.
And thats just Wisconsin who's news I still closely follow.
While I’m sure that we’ll continue to see news stories repeating vague charges of Ohio conspiracy well into 2008, like Florida, it’s clear that the lack of media coverage Democratic voter fraud has received continues to embolden activists to push ever farther beyond what is legal. Yes I tirelessly beat the drum of media bias for just about everything, but this is an example where it is having a tangible effect on the democratic process.
I haven't done much in the way of blogging lately, both because I've been settling into my new apartment and because there doesn't seem to be all that much going on in the realm of politics, at least nothing that I care all that strongly about....(I guess I would have liked to see a bigger push for the subidization of renewable energy research in the energy bill, along with more pressure on auto companies to increase fuel efficiency, but other than that, nothing really grabbing my attention). Oh, and people are starving in Africa again, which is bad.
I start school in a week and I still need to decide if I should do law school or not, which is somewhat dependent on my deciding what I want to do with my life. I was gonna try to eventually work at State or USAID, for which my MPA would probably be sufficient, but I'm feeling good about being in Indiana, and I think I'd grow frustrated by being an administrator. Now I'm leaning toward the dirty business of politics, where lawyers abound, and so i think the law degree might be more useful. Any of you wise people have any advice?
I'm off to a job interview with KAPLAN, the testing people. I will wow them with my new tie.
Windsofchange.net has a very helpful, and to the layperson thorough, monthly roundup of news from the world of energy science and policy.
Check it out.
This article explains why I still feel like a kid even though I'm 24. Mom and Dad, thanks for all the stuff!
I can't find adequate words to describe how cool this is, but here goes. There is open source software for video editing, 3D animation, and color correction available for free, which, if it were produced by a big name for profit, would run you in the thousands of dollars. And from what I can tell, it's really damn powerful. Unfortunately, that usually translates into user-unfriendly. But give it a shot if you're feeling the flow, just scroll down to the post titled "The Poor Person's Production Suite."
In a similar vein to my last post; the tools are out there, free of charge, to create high quality video content and make it available to mass audiences. If there exists the kind of talent needed to write the code to create and develop this production quality software [and make 'em available for nothing out of the sheer love of doing it], then there exists the kind of talent needed to take full advantage of said software and flood the marketplace with creative, high-quality video content. I am so f'n sick of seeing tripe like "Hell's Kitchen" or "Survivor - Whatever" hit my TV, that I would be happy to spend my entertainment-time surfing around on my computer for something worth my while, if I knew I could find it.
Bring it on.
Popcast, a service I read about this last week from HDforIndies, is a pretty interesting development in the video/television world. Essentially, it's on-demand programming over your computer that uses BitTorrent to share video files among viewers.
This is the kind of video distribution tool that I imagine will start making waves soon (which will likely drive up the cost of this particular service, and with any luck hack cable prices at the knees). But for now, if you're interested and have a fast connection to the internet, you can take advantage of it for free.
If any of you PC users happen to try it out (the Mac version is promised soon), let me know if it cuts the mustard. In theory it sounds great, but in practice it may take some time to develop into anything worthwhile.
It seems that I must eat my words about Bush's nominee. Roberts seems to be a nice, smart, level headed, relatively a-political hoosier. Of course, he's something of an unknown quanitity, and I would still bet money that Roe V. Wade will be overturned, but he's a much softer pick than I antipicated. I guess there are several possible explanations for this: 1. Bush is more of a moderate than I thought. 2. Bush has good reason to believe that, once on the bench, Roberts will turn into a Scalia clone. 3. Bush feels the mantle of lame duckness approaching, and wants to husband his political capital for other purposes...overturning Roe, while popular with the base, would still have some damaging fallout for moderates.
Here's a related thought. I wonder if there aren't strategic minds in the GOP that would lament a change on Roe? Abortion has been a very useful issue for the GOP from a strategic standpoint...if it becomes illegal again, the GOP could lose that tool.
By the way, I recently updated the sidebar for the blog. I got re-organized stuff, got rid of sites I never use and added a bunch that I use everyday. Check 'em out (the one's on top seem the most broadly applicable) and I hope you can find some use for them. By the way, if you find anything out there that seems worthy of having up here for a while, but not inbedded in a post, shoot me an email and I'll put it under "More Insightless-ness."
P.S. I find this extremely ironic. I just spell checked this thing and it wanted to change the word "blog". This is a site hosted by Blogger.com. Come on fellas, that should be a no-brainer.
The Christian Science Monitor has a very good article on Islamic radicals and their preachings. It's paints a scary picture: But tempers it with this:
Young, independent, and streetwise, they are preaching in urban slang outside the confines of Britain's mosques. They are helping teens and 20-somethings beat drugs and alcohol. And they are inspiring a new pool of impressionable young Muslims to consider killing their fellow Britons.
These radical bands constitute a small fraction of London's 1 million Muslims. But their freewheeling ideology - hardened in the jihadi echo chambers of cliques like Abu Osama's - is creating a new subculture within Britain's Islamic community. So far, the growing influence of these informal, maverick groups has gone largely undetected - and unchecked.
Also, see this section that describes the behind the scenes action from the reporters. As they observed the street sermon and spoke with those in the crowd, they found the comments chilling. "In the Middle East, you often hear a lot of bravado about jihad from young Muslims," John says. "But these men were older. The Iraqi talked about his children. Another wondered if his father's work visa contractually obligated him to protect Britain. There was a specificity about their discussion about striking at Britain or Iraq that was particularly worrying."
Meanwhile Jeff Jarvis has a solution (inspired by a Tom Friedman editorial in the NYT). Let's shine the spotlight those who spew ideas that attempt to inspire hate and murder or make excuses for such things, and show them for what they are. Here's Friedman's take:
Sunlight is more important than you think. Those who spread hate do not like to be exposed, noted Yigal Carmon, the founder of Memri, which monitors the Arab-Muslim media. The hate spreaders assume that they are talking only to their own, in their own language, and can get away with murder. When their words are spotlighted, they often feel pressure to retract, defend or explain them.Jarvis has a variation on this idea; use bloggers to take on this task:"Whenever they are exposed, they react the next day," Mr. Carmon said. "No one wants to be exposed in the West as a preacher of hate."
We also need to spotlight the "excuse makers," the former State Department spokesman James Rubin said. After every major terrorist incident, the excuse makers come out to tell us why imperialism, Zionism, colonialism or Iraq explains why the terrorists acted. These excuse makers are just one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be exposed. When you live in an open society like London, where anyone with a grievance can publish an article, run for office or start a political movement, the notion that blowing up a busload of innocent civilians in response to Iraq is somehow "understandable" is outrageous. "It erases the distinction between legitimate dissent and terrorism," Mr. Rubin said, "and an open society needs to maintain a clear wall between them."
There is no political justification for 9/11, 7/7 or 7/21. As the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen put it: "These terrorists are what they do." And what they do is murder.
A fine idea. But I don't think the State Department is who should do this.I couldn't agree more.Bloggers should. News organizations should follow. And I'd be delighted to see religious leaders join in.
This seems like a fine project for Global Voices or such a group.
Why not create the Digg of terrorism: We all get to nominate examples in each of Friedman's categories and we all get to vote them up to the home page.
We all link to the worst of the worst to turn the spotlight on it.
Those who can volunteer to translate the offending material.
We convince news organizations to get RSS feeds of terrorism Diggs and report on those who are inciting and supporting the terrorists.
We pepper those associated with these inciters and excusers -- their governments, their religious leaders, their media outlets -- with protests:
The whole world is watching.The point is not to stop the speech. The point is to expose the speakers. And why rely on a government body, especially the U.S. State Department, to do this. Rely instead on the civilized citizens of the world.
Why, it even comes with cute slogans suitable for T-shirts: Digg out terrorism! Digg terrorism a grave! Digg dirt!
