Rossputin.com: Rational Thinking About Our World

According to a Canadian news story, the US American Medical Association along with the Center for Science in the Public Interest ("CSPI"), a nanny-state "science" organization used a public hearing today to call on the FDA to regulate salt. (Background information on the hearing itself is available HERE.)

http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2007/11/29/salt-regulations.html

According to a CSPI article, "The American Medical Association says that 150,000 lives could be saved in the U.S. annually if salt in processed foods and restaurant foods were cut in half."

And according to the Canadian article, "Kevin Willis, a bio-chemist with the Canadian Stroke Network, says about 30 Canadians die every day as a result of too much salt."

CSPI is the same group that is trying to ban non-diet soda for kids, to force restaurant chains to put "nutrition information" on their menus, and to get cities or states to ban trans-fats...and who knows what else?

In any case, does anyone really believe that lowering the salt content of food would save over 400 lives a day in the USA? It's just ridiculous. The last thing we need is letting these busy-bodies regulate salt. The proper response to these nanny-staters is to tell them to mind their own damn business and go eat boring salt-free food if they like but let us enjoy our lives while we can.

re "Fitz-Gerald challenges some donations to Polis" (Denver Post, 11/27/07)
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_7572240

Joan Fitz-Gerald’s complaints against Jared Polis’ campaign are both silly and typical. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have not been particularly pro-Iraq-war. They were simply against John Kerry lying about his record for political gain. Basically, Fitz-Gerald is arguing that lying is fine as long as the liar is against the Iraq War.

Furthermore, doesn’t Fitz-Gerald have anything better to do than to talk about legal donations to her competitor’s campaign? Does she actually have a positive position on an issue, particularly a position that doesn’t involve finding a way to redistribute taxpayer money to unions?

I doubt she does as I have not seen her to be anything other than a cold, manipulative political operator, owned by unions, and notoriously difficult to like and work with. If she wants to gain support, she’s going to have to make news headlines other than complaining that people she disagrees with contribute to a candidate who wants to beat her.

I mentioned the other day that a British teacher in Sudan was going to be put on trial for letting her students choose the name "Mohammed" for a teddy bear.

They had the trial. The teacher was found guilty and sentenced to 15 days in jail and subsequent deportation. She could have gotten 40 lashes.

There is no other way to put it. Islamic fundamentalism is barbaric. The countries who follow islamic law are barbaric. We need to continue to do everything we can to keep their mental disease from spreading, just as we would with any other violent cult.

Thanks to Greg Staff for sending this note...

It's interesting that "big oil" is so universally reviled by the left side of the aisle. Hillary has even said that "oil companies" do not need all that money and she's going to take their profits and lead us on to energy independence, to wit:

"The other day the oil companies reported the highest profits in the history of the world. I want to take those profits and I want to put them into a strategic energy fund that will begin to find alternative smart energy, alternatives and technologies that will begin to actually move us toward the direction of independence!"

Hilary Clinton - Source: Speech at Democratic National Committee winter meeting Feb 2, 2007

But what companies are conducting leading edge research to wean us away from crude oil? The oil companies, for a start:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5334375.html

But Hillary's "plan" would slam shut R&D by the major oil companies, and put it in the hands of the government, which of course knows best how to direct funds such that the greatest return is received. [dripping sarcasm].

Hillary's plan would also bring oil exploration by US oil companies to a screeching halt - can you spell "gasoline lines?"

The government-funded NREL (previously SERI) in Golden has probably spent close to $6 billion present-day dollars in its 30 years of existence. It has laudable goals and a great self-promotional website (http://www.nrel.gov/), but what has it actually produced?

Keep R&D - especially energy R&D - as much in private hands as possible to see the greatest achievements.

Greg Staff

The Denver Post reported last week (11/19/07) that Congressman Doug Lamborn got a $1 million earmark for Sturman Industries, a private company in Woodland Park, Colorado, whose chairwoman, Carol Sturman, contributed to Lamborn's 2008 primary campaign fund. (Click HERE to see FEC filing document.)

Even Doug Lamborn is probably not stupid enough to let a $250 contribution cause him to wrangle $1,000,000 out of taxpayers (apparently it was reduced to $800,000 in conference). But he should also have been smart enough to refuse that contribution because of the obvious appearance of a conflict.

I've looked at Sturman Industries' web page and it looks like they do some very interesting work in engine valves and controls. It's the sort of business that one might be very interested in investing in. But unless the government will own shares of the company, they shouldn't be simply giving them money. Sturman apparently already has work with the Department of Defense. They've worked with NASA. The have had partnerships with big companies including Caterpillar and various auto makers.

A 2004 article about the company talks about their "60,000 sq. ft. structure featuring vaulted wooden ceilings, Herman Miller furniture and situated across the valley from the magnificent Pike's Peak". If there is any example of a company that doesn't seem to be starving for cash and which should be able to raise money in the private sector if they needed cash for growth, this is the company.

What sort of fiscal conservative thinks it's OK to transfer money from taxpayers to private business? What sort of congressman thinks that doing so and taking a campaign contribution from that business won't be viewed with suspicion of the politician's integrity, intellect, or both? I guess the answer is "a congressman like Doug Lamborn".

This speaks for itself:

Reports: Sudan arrests UK teacher for teddy bear blasphemy
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/africa/11/26/sudan.bear/

As if in response to his own newspaper's insane article about "mankind shortening the universe's life", Telegraph reporter Christopher Booker offers us a bit of climate sanity. The first part of this article is a must-read, both for the technical and political points...all of which are equally applicable in the US as in Great Britain.

Christopher Booker: Planet-saving madness
Telegraph (UK), 11/27/07
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/25/nbook125.xml

A few days ago, I posted a note entitled "And we call these people our friends?" about a victim of a gang-rape being sentenced to 200 lashes in Saudi Arabia.

I like the idea of pointing out the horrible nature of such "friends" enough that I'm going to make it an occasional series, maybe one piece a week, pointing out the very bad behavior of people whom we give far too much support to, stupidly thinking that it's in our best interest...like supporting various other dictatorships in the past, some of which, like the Shah, didn't end up putting us in a winning long-term position.

Instead of giving money to places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, we should be threatening them in the short-term and long-term. In the short term, they must stop being barbarians. In the long term, if the even more barbaric within the country take over, we will pulverize them if they try to implement their fanaticism, directly or indirectly, one foot outside their own borders.

As if the original story of the gang-rape in Saudi Arabia weren't bad enough, the newer versions make it clear that the man whom the woman in question was with at the time was also gang-raped by the same group of assailants...as punishment for those two being out together.

There is no doubt that the "strategic" nature of our relationship with Saudi Arabia removes a lot of leverage over them. We don't give them enough foreign aid for eliminating it to matter. (Only a couple million dollars a year....though even that is ridiculous.) We could threaten to prevent them from buying US military hardware, but then they'll just buy from the British or the French, and maybe they'll also buy civil aircraft from Airbus just to spite Boeing. And, we don't exactly want them defenseless. So, we're in a very tough spot. But every country has their areas of sensitivity. And we should be pushing the Saudis, telling them that if this rape victim (or any other rape victim) gets punished, we will do something they don't like. The key is that we must really do it after we threaten it, or we'll be the country that cried wolf forever.

For today's entry, we have this lovely piece of work from Egypt, which is (tell me if I'm wrong) the second-largest recipient of US aid (after Israel):

Egypt Jails Christian Woman for Father's Conversion
http://www.christianpost.com/article/20071124/30207_Egypt_Jails_Christian_Woman_for_Father's_Conversion.htm

Basically, the story is this:

45 years ago, a woman's father converted briefly from Christianity to Islam when he left his Christian family. Shortly thereafter, he returned to his family and resumed living as a Christian. Under Egyptian law, when the man converted, it automatically converted all his children, even if they never knew he converted, and it's basically impossible to convert away from Islam in Egypt (though easy to convert to it.) When the woman, Shadia Nagui Ibrahim, got married in 1982, she listed "Christian" as her religion on her marriage certificate.

The government of Egypt has just sentenced her to three years in jail for fraud for doing so, despite it being exceptionally unlikely that she ever knew of her father's brief conversion to Islam and its impact on her. As far as she's known, she's been Christian her whole life. Indeed, could it be possible to charge someone with "fraud" or anything else if she believes that what she's saying is absolutely (and obviously) true?

As I mentioned, Egypt is a country that we have much more leverage over with our foreign aid of over $1 billion a year to them. We should tell Mubarek that our foreign aid will be cut by $1 million for every day Ms. Nagui Ibrahim spends in jail.

It's time to stop just accepting (and paying for) this bad behavior by Islamic barbarians and instead try to bring them out of the stone age before they bring the stone age to us.

If you'd like to read my review of one of the most repugnant movies of all time, here's my review of "Redacted" at HumanEvents.com:

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=23595

OK, it's probably not the most ridiculous science article ever, but it's in the top 10:

see "Mankind 'shortening the universe's life'" (UK Telegraph, 11/12/07)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/11/21/scicosmos121.xml&

As if the current global warming alarmism isn't silly enough in terms of the essentially egotistical arguments that humans are the cause of climactic change, now scientists are claiming that by doing research of space, astronomers may be hastening the universe's demise.

And as if reporters hadn't already demonstrated a reprehensible willingness to believe anything their told, as long as they don't understand it, the reporter in the above article actually calls the claims "damaging allegations", as if they have any chance of being true or any chance of being relevant.

It seems that scientists have far too much political agenda...in no small part because claiming that humans are destroying everything is a great way to get published and get grants. And reporters are far too willing to go along with that agenda, supporting people who won't be happy until we're all living in stone-age conditions again, free of the curse of capitalism and all the evils it brings like electricity, modern medicine, and the ability to travel more than 100 miles in less than a week, just to name three.

Reader Brian C posted the following comment to my recent article about dependence on oil:

"Since so many questions are being raised, I have one. Is there any truth to the discovery by US oil companies of vast oil reserves in international waters off the coast of Brazil and Venezuela? Supposedly they would start producing oil for the US in 5 years."

Here's my response to him...I think it's interesting enough to justify its own blog entry:

Brian,

You have the story mostly right. The oil discovery was off the coast of Brazil. It's estimated at 5-8 billion barrels of light crude (which is more valuable than heavy crude because it's cheaper to refine), representing something like 40% of the total of all previous oil finds in Brazil.

Where you had it wrong is the "US oil companies" part. The field is primarily owned by Brazil's state oil company, Petrobras, with two European minority partners (Galp Energia from Portugal and British Gas).

They'll probably start producing in 3-4 years, with full production coming online 5-10 years after that.

One part of your question which I want to address because it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of commodity markets is the idea of "producing oil for the US". Basically, nobody produces oil for any other particular recipient. They just produce it and sell it at the highest price they can. Obviously countries need to use petroleum products, so countries which produce a lot of oil are likely to use some of that production domestically. But even in that situation, if it were possible to sell their production for more than they could import somebody else's oil they would do that. So, when someone is producing oil, they're not selling it "for the US" or "not for the US". They're just selling it. Even if they didn't want it to go to the US, there's no real way to stop it because whomever they sell to could just turn around and sell it to the US. Indeed, even if they did want it to go to the US, whoever bought it here could turn around and sell it to another country if that were going to be a bigger profit than selling it here!

So, it doesn't matter whether they're going to produce "for the US". All that matters is whether they produce at all. Whatever they produce increases the total worldwide supply and therefore lowers the worldwide price, even if the US never gets a drop from that particular discovery.

Here are a couple things you could read about the news:
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/nov2007/db20071115_045316.htm?
http://www.petroleumworld.com/Ed07112101.htm

Thanks for reading and writing,
Ross

Mike, Joe, and Greg's comments on my recent note about "Changing my views on oil...a bit" are worthy of their own posting. I welcome comments or emails with your views as well.

First, Mike R:

First let’s all agree that our dependence on oil is indeed a ‘burning’ national security issue, (pun intended of course).

Second let’s all agree that the free market is going to solve or force us to solve this problem in the very near future. We are most likely headed for a very serious oil shock when the all but inevitable military strikes against Iran occur.

The broader issue of oil consumption is much deeper than most people even realize. We live on oil in every way except to consume it directly as food but it is absolutely necessary in getting our food to the table in every step from planting to grocery store shelf.

Nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, thermal, coal power(s) are not really at the heart of the issue of oil since none of them replace what we use to fuel our automobiles, trains, planes produce our fertilizers, plastics, lubricants etc. etc. etc…

The entire ethanol debate is too ridiculous to even be discussed by rational beings since it takes more oil going in to produce ethanol than it delivers at the precipitator spigot.

The unfortunate dilemma is that oil is still relatively cheap and we are completely disconnected from the fact that our dependence is precariously dependent on global political stability in the most unstable parts of the world and that our enemies control the resource.

This will remain the case until the ‘shock and awe’ hits home and oil is north of $150 a barrel sending both the U.S. and the rest of the western world into an economic tailspin replete with very real hardships in the form of vast shortages of everything from food to disposable diapers. Today’s Americans will suddenly know what it felt like to live in their grandparent’s time during the depression and the war or worse.

Here is the quintessential question in this problem; how do we impress on people the precariousness of this problem and force them to begin examining how impacting the problem is so that they start thinking differently and consuming differently before a crisis is upon us?

The answer to me is a big negative because I don’t think that that kind of consciousness can be raised or visualized by most people.

It goes a lot further than driving a Prius. It means changing everything we do from how we farm to how much we consume and why we consume it. It requires a kind of nationalism almost to the level of animosity toward the nations that hold the resource that we voluntarily enslave ourselves to, such that we think consciously when we make every choice and purchase, “fuck em”, I can do without that or with less of it if it means keeping my dollars from going to them.

The biggest boycott imaginable.

The Conundrum.

If we do in fact manage to reform our thinking in this way we will also, of course, at least in the short term, reduce our productivity and our consumption to such a degree that it will have negative economic consequences and negative quality of life consequences. This must be the result until an entirely new paradigm develops around new energy and new ways to restructure our country around that new energy paradigm.
A new source of energy that as yet, remains unknown.

This means new ways of distribution as well as production of that energy. It also means adaptive reuse that matches productivity with an eye toward making the most of what we make. Disposability is not an option until everything has been efficiently exploited from everything we produce.
The problem with the market in this case is that it is severely discounting the possibility of the catastrophic even as that probability of a catastrophic event is rising.

The put is too cheap, oil is too cheap. No one yet believes enough in the overnight catastrophic disruption of the flow of oil, just like no one seriously entertained the possibility of foreign terrorists using our civilian aircraft as cruise missiles. Sure some dark room, think outside the box folks had postulated it the way they postulated various nuclear war scenarios but it wasn’t a real and present.

People resist change unless it is forced on them or is clearly demonstrated to be to their benefit.

Since we do not have a ready replacement for oil that benefits anyone, especially in the short term, it would seem very likely indeed that the market will have to force that change and it will be ugly. Very ugly.
Our entire infrastructure is dependent on the free flow of relatively cheap oil. Without a replacement for oil that utilizes the old infrastructure, at least transitionally, it will be a long and painful process that will have a millennial impact on our culture and way of life.

I doubt very much that any sort of consciousness raising movement to create a new paradigm can come through any sort of charismatic call to arms on this issue. I doubt that draconian government action in the form of dramatic taxation on all things oil consuming would work or be tolerated.

I equally doubt that “benign” incentives in the form of tax relief or subsidy would be enough to make the change either.

I doubt that Mr. Kucinich’s aliens are arriving with a new energy panacea any time soon.

The market will solve this problem, but at the cost of the market collapsing when the “Black Swan” suddenly appears to fundamentally alter our thinking and awareness.

I just hope we can survive that day of realization.

------------------------

And now, Joe H:

When all else fails, I fall back to what I know: The market will solve this, if we allow the proper information flow. Government has chosen to distort information flow to the economy to arrive at its own heavily lobbied (read that Al Gore vs John Dingell) result. An example of this distortion was when the oil price spiked to the unimaginable price of $50-60/bbl Bush tapped the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lessen the economic hardship. Economic hardship comes because people didn't plan for, or properly place value on, energy efficiencies that are real. Hybrids are not really more energy efficient. That 1,500 pound battery cell is made up of exotic metals that had to be smelted somewhere in Canada, South Africa, China or Japan, and had a positively huge energy input to mine, mill and fabricate. There is a reason that platinum is $1,400 per ounce... because it takes digging it as much as 11,000 feet underground, and moving enormous amounts of tons (like 20 - 50 tons) for each and every ounce. That is not real energy independence.

A few examples of incremental progress toward energy independence could be that, if citizens had been allowed to feel the true impact of the price shock, they would have gone out with a infrared thermal imager (purchased at any hardware store for about $20) and taken a look at their house during the evening after sundown to see if they are losing heat from areas they might not have expected. They might buy a tankless water heater so they aren't holding a tank of hot water at the ready all day (and losing heat) while they are at work. And they just might decide that they don't need to go somewhere and burn an extra gallon or two...

Let the market work and get government the he-- out of the way!

---------------------

And last, but not least, Greg S.

After the first Iraqi war, I read a quote that, as I recall went something like this: "If Saddam Hussein had invaded Fiji, the United States would have sent a strong letter of consternation." If Fiji were oil-rich the story would of course be different.

Calling the Iraqi wars "oil wars" is of course correct, but they were not undertaken to enrich Exxon or Halliburton. The world's standard of living relies upon readily available energy supplies. Saddam's regime threatened the entire Middle East supply of oil to the world, and so he is gone; the US is generally OK with having despots in power, as long as they don't threaten the world's energy supplies. So Chavez and Ahjmedingbat can stick around as long as they don't get to carried away with their self-importance.

The West runs on oil, of course, and the West does not care where it sates its thirst. We lambaste Chavez, but his oil is still imported by the US and is in fact one of the largest percentages of foreign oil we import. Keep in mind, though, that the West and Japan are complicit in sending oil money to totalitarian regimes - this is not simply a USA problem. If Venezuela embargoed us, the rest of the World is treaty-bound to share the shortfall. (Brings up another point: If Venezuela did in fact embargo us, it would be meaningless. They would still export oil - but it would go through an extra trading step before it got here. It might even be off-loaded in Trinidad and then reloaded to another tanker, but we would still get it, although at a higher cost.)

The only available viable substitute is nuclear power - and/or we could tax gasoline like England, so that we are paying $5.00 more per gallon. Meanwhile, we can and should drill ANWR and areas that are currently off-limits in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere.

Eventually the solution will be market-based. Oil will become more expensive compared to other fossil sources - coal liquefaction, tar sands, oil shale - all of which have environmental consequences but are still cheaper and produce more net energy than wind, solar, or bio-anything.

We are going to have a fossil-fuel based economy well into the next century.

I wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving, and I hope we'll all take a moment to thank the men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan who are risking everything so we don't have to.

Steve Emerson's Investigative Project on Terrorism is a truly important organization. I encourage you to make a modest contribution to them if you agree with me. Here's an article which should act as a bit of intellectual vaccination against falsehoods about American "islamophobia"...

What Islamophobia?, IPT News, November 19, 2007
http://www.investigativeproject.org/article/549

The FBI released its 2006 hate crime statistics today, which, yet again, demonstrate that despite all the agitation by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to gin up cases of widespread "Islamophobia," the facts just do not fit CAIR's agenda.

According to the FBI, in 2006, there were 2,640 incidents of hate crimes against African-Americans, 967 incidents of anti-Jewish hate crimes, 890 anti-white hate crime incidents, 1,195 hate crime incidents based on sexual orientation, 576 anti-Hispanic hate crime incidents, and 181 hate crime incidents against Asians or Pacific Islanders. Anti-Muslim hate crime incidents numbered at only 156.

While crimes directed at any individual on the basis of race, religion or nationality are deplorable, the FBI's statistics give lie to CAIR's repeated claims that "Islamophobia" is the new anti-Semitism, that the current environment for American Muslims is somehow comparable to the civil rights struggles for African-Americans, and that American Muslims are being singled out for discrimination in a post-9/11 frenzy.

But despite the facts, CAIR's trumpeting of "Islamophobia," is unsurprising, and CAIR's Chairman Parvez Ahmed's has an op-ed out decrying "Islamophobic rhetoric" in the election season. But CAIR has no credibility on this issue, as this is the very same organization that included the arrest of terrorists such as top Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzook and the treatment of infamous Egyptian "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdul Rahman, at the hands of the U.S. justice system in its 1996 report on "hate crimes" titled, "The Price of Ignorance."

While some government agencies and members of the media continue to treat CAIR as the representative to the Muslim community, actual statistics, and CAIR's own cynical history of labeling hardened terrorists as the victims of "hate crimes" should serve as a reminder that government officials and journalists should keep CAIR at arm's length.

As a tangent to my article yesterday about my coming around to the view that we should work harder to reduce our dependence on oil, I refer you to this sickening article which John Mauldin brought to my attention:

http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-30671020071125

I don't want to sound like a liberal or a moralizer, but we should individually be ashamed if we don't each do what we can to try to make Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, and other dictatorships much poorer.

I was having a conversation with my friend Rich who is now driving a Toyota Prius. Rich is not an environmentalist or a liberal. In fact, he's an active Republican in Colorado and a very smart guy.

In the past, I have been very skeptical of arguments against "dependence on foreign oil" simply because oil is a fungible commodity and I don't believe we can substantially produce domestic production. In other words, if we don't want to buy oil from Venezuela, we can buy from other producers, or we can buy from third parties who may tell us they bought from Mexico, for example, but who might have actually bought from Venezuela. At the end of the day, the world's oil will slosh its way into wherever it is needed.

My problem with the "dependence on foreign oil" fear is really the word "foreign" because almost all oil is foreign and always will be. So for a long time, I stopped thinking about the issue for that reason.

But Rich makes an important point and one which I believe has merit: There is a national security issue here. I realize it's not a new point, but I'm coming to the view that we're at a time when it's important enough that I can't ignore the question any more.

As Rich said, every time we buy fuel we are directly or indirectly increasing the wealth of our true enemies and our might-as-well-be enemies. Every increase in marginal demand in America causes an upward pressure on the price of oil, and those higher prices go right to the bottom lines of the governments of Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia, among others.

This picture, which I saw on the BBC's web site, brought the concept home to me:

So, if I accept my own premise that worrying about the "foreign" part of "foreign oil" is pointless from the perspective of looking for non-foreign sources of oil (of which there are not enough to matter), then it occurs to me that the real issue is simply "dependence on oil". In other words, any dependence on oil must be primarily dependence on foreign oil.

Maybe part of my reticence to reach this conclusion is because it brings me uncomfortably close to people with whom I disagree on almost everything economic and political. Maybe part of the reason Rich reached the conclusion sooner than I did is because he is very active in Jewish and Israeli issues, so is even more aware of the danger that a smiling maniac like Iranian President Iminajihad poses and how much more clear and present that danger becomes as he is loaded up with petrodollars.

Rich made it perfectly clear: “For me this is a national security issue, and that trumps everything else. If I could buy extra CO2 to emit to prove that this car is not about the “global warming” hype, I would.” (I made a suggestion about eating more Mexican food before driving, but that’s beyond the scope of this discussion.)

While I dislike bring readers more questions than answers, I must say that I am struggling with the answers for this one (and am most interested in reading your comments). If Rich is right that it is a national security issue, what are the proper policies for our country and proper behaviors for our citizens which don’t violate my strongly-held fundamental principles about limited government, the importance of liberty, the unacceptability of subsidies, and the fact that the free market is almost without fail the best provider of answers to all questions economic?

I ask these questions of you and of myself in part because most people who bring up the fundamental argument I’m discussing here go immediately to either killing the economy or to ethanol (and other alternative energy) subsidies.

Al Gore, flying around in his private jet or scheming in his well-heated mansion, and his various disciples, want to cut carbon emissions to levels what would be impossible without doing tremendous damage to the world economy. The anti-capitalist anti-American wing of the Democratic party (which includes most global warming activists), if they get their way, will be responsible for the first time in America’s history where parents like me truly should not expect their children to have a better quality of life than we have now.

And then there are the ethanol leeches: I remember the huge grin on Iowa Senator Charles Grassley’s face during the last State of the Union Address when President Bush called for more ethanol use and thinking to myself “Boy, this is gonna be expensive”. Indeed, as Senator John McCain mentioned in a meeting I attended just last week, McCain is doing badly in Iowa because he opposes farm subsidies “which amount to over $2,000 a year for every man, woman, and child in Iowa.”

What is someone who finds both of those camps repugnant to do?

My belief (and I repeat that I’m more interested in my readers’ views on this than I am on most things) comes down to a few key points:

• The president and members of Congress should go out of their way to encourage people to conserve energy and explain to them if they don’t already know just who the two villains in the above picture are and why they are smiling. Note that I did not say “force people to conserve”.

• Rather than giving farm subsidies which I believe are absolutely unconstitutional and unethical, give tax credits and thereby encourage people to find ways to do these things profitably. To the extent that the Treasury’s net revenue suffers due to tax credits (although this point need not be made since they would almost certainly be much less than current subsidy payments), “pay for” those credits by cutting other spending…including on entitlements, again making a big point of educating the nation on the subject.

• Make a similar huge educational and research push on nuclear energy. Some argue that nuclear energy is not economically viable without subsidies. I don’t believe it, and no matter what that is not a condition that remains permanent as technology and knowledge increase.

• And finally, I continue to believe that while it may be slightly slower than many would like, the market does indeed take care of such things. We’ve had a great example just this month as a slew of solar power companies reported earnings and gave guidance far ahead of analysts’ estimates. Many of these stocks are up over 30% just in a month as the market realizes that people are buying into the idea of producing at least some of their own energy…in part because the price of fuel and electricity has increased and in part, I hope, because they are beginning to realize what it took a conversation with Rich for me to realize.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ("IPCC") released on Saturday their most recent report on the perils of global warming. As has been the trend with prior reports, the level of hysteria is increasing.

I'll take on the subject in more detail over time, but there are just a couple of important points I'd like to ask you to keep in mind as you hear all this anti-capitalist anti-Western claptrap.

First: One of the main issues which alarmists bring up is sea level changes, and they love to talk about the Maldives, a chain of many low-lying islands in the Indian Ocean quite a few of which have resorts or hotels on them. (The islands are mostly very small and would otherwise be uninhabited.) The Maldives is a spectacular place; Kristen and I went there (among other places) on our honeymoon in 2003. Before getting back to the topic of the day, I offer you this travel note I wrote about the Maldives, including some nice photos:

http://www.rossputin.com/blog/index.php/a/2005/08/28/travel_photos_maldives_mostly_underwater

It's fascinating to me that every article I can find about the Maldives talks about the potential damage to them from rising sea levels rather than any actual damage even though many climate alarmists claim that global sea levels have already risen. Indeed, the most in-depth study I've been able to find argues that the sea levels at the Maldives have been dropping for 30 years:
New perspectives for the future of the Maldives
by Nils-Axel Morner, Michael Tooley, and Goran Possnert
Published in "Global and Planetary Change" in 2003
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/MornerEtAl2004.pdf

Dr. Morner also participated in making a documentary, which you can see here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3309910462407994295
To focus on the issue I'm discussing at the moment, I recommend you watch from 24:20 to about 33:30. (Of course, I recommend you watch all 44 minutes when you can.)

So, despite years or decades of claims that global warming would submerge islands like the Maldives, not only hasn't it happened, but the opposite has happened. Whether or not you believe that planet-wide sea levels have generally risen, it's clear that it is not happening at the poster boy location for the alarmists.

If you continue on in the video, you learn that Dr. Morner and colleagues believe that the sea level has dropped about a foot and a half in the past 30 years in large part because of rapid evaporation....which can be caused by warmer temperatures.

And that brings me to my next point of the day: When the gullible UN chief Ban Ki-moon recently visited Antarctica, he said that it represented a message that we need to take immediate action because he saw some melting glaciers.

The problem with using that one data point as a reason to implement (economy-destroying) policies is that he missed a completely different story elsewhere in Antarctica where the ice has been thickening and increasing for years. The explanation is that a warming climate causes more evaporation which then causes more snow over Antarctica where it remains because the climate is not warming nearly enough to allow melting there. And even the uppermost predictions of temperature increase would not put the heart of Antarctica at risk of melting.

Like most organic things the earth encounters, the planet's own feedback cycles find a way to deal with it. If the climate were to warm, the planet's response would automatically cause the impact to be far less than the alarmists want us to believe.

So, despite increasing global temperatures in recent years the Maldives are not going under and Antarctic ice is thickening. Yet you'll never hear any of those things from the UN and other organizations whose primary mission is to attack capitalism and the West.

Furthermore, given the long-term cyclical nature of climate (and its primary change causes, such as the sun), it's as likely that we'll be cooling 25 years from now as warming. People on both sides of the debate must refrain from talking about very short-term data as representative of a macro trend, but here's a more medium-term story which offers yet another example of why I believe Al Gore will end up looking like as bad a choice for the Nobel Prize as Jimmy Carter or Yasser Arafat do today:
http://my.telegraph.co.uk/reasonmclucus/november_2007/al_gore_wrong_again.htm

And this story about NASA finding a change in Arctic Ocean circulation is even more important, and therefore more conspicuous for its absence in mainstream media:
NASA Sees Arctic Ocean Circulation Do an About-Face , JPL, 11/13/07
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2007-131

The attack on free markets and free people in the cloak of defending us against the chimera of "global warming" will not soon stop. Scaring the public is particularly easy to do with pseudo-science because so few people have the time, the intellect, or the resources to do their own homework on the subject. It's up to those of us who recognize this movement for what it is, namely a huge money-and-power-grab, to give it that name, to educate our friends and readers and ask them to help intellectually vaccinate as many people as they can against this UN-Gore virus.

This article, A Grim Milestone Ignored by Patrick Poole is an important reminder of what's going on in the world:

http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=453D47F2-EA57-43CD-8DF8-403A77F960BB

Thanks to Linda for sending this along:

http://rodhampsalm.com/

Here's an interesting article about new NASA research which seems to point to ocean salinity rather than "global warming" as the primary driver of Arctic weather patterns. I wonder why I have to keep finding this stuff in English and Canadian newspapers instead of American media....

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/15/ocean_currents_melt_planet/

Thanks to Don Boudreaux for bringing this great clip to my attention. It's an excerpt from an interview of Milton Friedman by the reliably-leftist and pseudo-intellectual Phil Donahue in 1979, and it's well worth your 2 1/2 minutes.

(Click on the picture!)

Rudy's first television ad of the presidential campaign, "Tested", begins running today (11/14/07) in New Hampshire. You can click HERE to watch (or right-click to download) a .wmv file of the ad, or you can watch it on YouTube:

As I fill out a federal government form (for what purpose I will respectfully decline to disclose), I come across the following quandary:

It asks for hair color and eye color.

For eye color, the choices are:

Brown, Blue, Green, Hazel, Gray, Black, Pink, Maroon, and Other.

So, here are a few things that makes me wonder:

1) How many people choose "black" because they got punched in the face or were in a car accident and have a "black eye" at the time of filling out the form? (And if you dare answer this question, don't forget that the average person's IQ is...you guessed it...100. I don't know if you've ever met a person with a 100 IQ, but I can tell you it leaves you wondering how humanity has done what we've done if that's the mean.)

2) As a follow up to #1, do more people choose "black" eyes for that reason than because they actually have black irises or aniridia (a medical condition in which the iris doesn't develop properly)?

3) Given that aniridia probably occurs in fewer than 1 out of ever 100,000 Americans (since it seems to be about 1/80,000 worldwide with quite a few cases in India and is strongly related to a family history of genetic issues), and with the types of albinism that could cause red or violet eyes also being very rare (fewer than half of people with some form of albinism), wouldn't the "Other" category have been sufficient for the probably-less-than-half dozen people a year who might accurately check any of the "Black", "Pink", or "Maroon" boxes?

And as for the hair color question, the choices are "Black, Brown, Blonde, Gray, White, Red, Sandy, and Bald (No Hair).

So, what I'm wondering here:

4) Would enough people who have colored their hair blue or magenta select "Other" if that were given as a choice that the government decided not to put "Other" on the form? And if that is the case, then what about the same sort of people who put in oddly-colored contact lenses? Do you really want to give the brown-eyed "goth" the chance to check "Other" for eye color because she's wearing orange contact lenses?

5) Where do you draw the lines between brown, blonde, and sandy? And what's the penalty if you pick blonde (because you want to have more fun, presumably), but the government agent thinks your hair is just a little too dark and you should have chosen "sandy"?

Well, I don't know if you or anybody else has any answers to these burning questions of the day, but I hope you at least enjoyed reading them....

This article by Stuart M. Saft in the 11/10/07 edition of the Wall Street Journal is important information. I am putting it up here in part because I think I lot of people don't read the WSJ on the weekend. I urge you to read it and to contact your Congressman and Senators about the issue:

The Anti-Mortgage Lending Act
By STUART M. SAFT, WSJ, November 10, 2007; Page A10

The Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act was approved by the House Financial Services Committee last week and has been sent to the floor for a vote. This piece of legislation is intended to overhaul mortgage lending and legislate our way out of the subprime mortgage crisis. Unfortunately, like most actions taken in the immediate aftermath of a high-profile event, the bill should not become law. It is fraught with peril to the housing and credit markets, and it will not help low-income housing purchasers.

Take, for example, the "federal duty of care" that the bill imposes on mortgage lenders. Explaining what this duty amounts to will, without a doubt, require hundreds of pages of complex regulations that few lenders and their employees will understand -- but nevertheless be in jeopardy for failing to obey.

Lenders must for example determine what loan products are "appropriate" to the consumer's existing circumstances. Does that mean that the lender has to investigate whether the borrower is telling the truth? What if the borrower fails to understand the questions the lender is asking? The lender must also "diligently" present the borrower with options. How will that be decided? At trial? What jury will find for the lender against the borrower?

The bill also creates a federal cause of action for the lenders' failure to comply with the law. This is just what the federal courts need -- mortgage foreclosure lawsuits added to their dockets.

Lenders must make "a reasonable and good faith determination based on verified and documented information" that the consumer had a reasonable ability to repay the loan. Who will be able to say what is reasonable or taken in good faith? Would you like to make a loan if years later you can be called before a federal agency or a jury and cross-examined as to whether your actions were reasonable? Could some aggressive prosecutor one day attempt to make his or her career by going after a lender criminally?

The law wipes out a portion of the Uniform Commercial Code by negating the concept of a holder in due course. This feat is accomplished by permitting a borrower to sue the assignees of his loan -- including securitizers -- for rescission, that is, cancellation of the debt, and for repayment of the consumers' costs, if the loan violates, for example, the statute's minimum standards for reasonable ability to repay.

Thousands of loans are packaged and sold as part of Mortgage Backed Security pools. How long will housing mortgages continue to be part of these pools after Congress creates a due diligence standard that no securitizer will want to or be able to meet?

The pièce de résistance is that all of the bill's new standards and mandates will serve borrowers as a possible defense to foreclosure. And so we enter the brave new world, where no mortgage can be foreclosed without a trial. But not for very long, as how many lenders will offer new mortgages with this threat in the background?

If this bill becomes law, lenders who do foreclose will have to take over the property subject to leases entered into prior to the foreclosure -- even if the lease was entered into without the lender's consent, at a significantly below-market rent, and for an indefinite term. In other words, this would permit financially troubled borrowers to stave off foreclosure by entering into uneconomic or long-term leases, which would preclude lenders from foreclosing because they could not sell the property at auction.

The bill will also make it more difficult for lenders to comply with the Community Reinvestment Act, which requires all lending institutions to make credit available in low-income neighborhoods. The Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act is at war with this obligation -- as it will make it more difficult, and legally perilous, for lending institutions to make loans to people who might not be able to afford them. These are of course the very people supposed to be served by the CRA.

Although the Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act may have been written with intentions that are good, its consequences are not. As the members of Congress consider this bill they might think about where the money comes from that is lent to home buyers. Tens of millions of Americans' savings and pensions are tied up in the millions of mortgage loans. If Congress makes it more difficult or even impossible for lenders to foreclose on defaulting loans, it is those people whose savings and pensions have provided the financing that will be hurt.

Capital, like water, seeks its own level. If the people who buy the securitized loans, and the institutions who invest in pools of mortgage loans, are no longer secure in being able to get their money back or the interest paid, they will find other investments, and countries, where they can.

This is hardly what the troubled housing and credit markets need.

Mr. Saft is a partner at the law firm of Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP.