House of the rising Moonglum

I don’t know how I missed this before, but it looks like Bush signed into effect a bill that spends $286 billion for federal highway improvements. The usual critics claim that it is completely full of pork, which while very tasty in stew is generally poor for government health. At least when you are fighting a war. And cutting taxes.

Bush’s claim is that it will “give jobs to 100,000s of Americans”. It might not be very democratic of me, but handing out piles of money to create jobs where most of the money is going directly to the purchase of new manufacturing equipment, even if it is mostly going to my home state, seems like a poor, and nonsustainable, use of funds. Of course Obama came down in favor of this bill, but that’s becasue every single state in the union got money directly from it. It is hard to be the one to say “no thanks” no a nice “democratic” gift like that.

Oh and did I mention that the total package was $30 billion over what Bush said he would veto? *sigh*

Am I the only one who finds this a little odd?

I can’t decide wether I think the fake fig leaves are the oddest part.

In this era of dumbing down common news articles, I just read an article that astonished me in both the complexity of the arguments it was dealing with and the detail with which it delved into in order to present the material. So I was shocked when I read a legal analysis of pornography vs. prostitution. It actually lays out the details of both sides of the argument, talking about the reasons why pornography is legal and prostitution isn’t. It then goes on to describe the legal similarities between the two, but the legal backing for the different treatment. At each stage it gives examples from other areas of law clarifying why the law stands at it does on each point. I think the thing I like most about this article is that it looks at something that has complicated arguments behind it and rather than brushing them under the table with sound bites actually describes the issues and allows the reader to come to their own conclusions. Too bad there isn’t more reporting like this on foreign affairs in CNN.

Since we seem to be on the theme of elections, I thought it might be a good time to point out a short clip of the presidential speechwriter talking about his secret for connecting with you and I.

So, I just finished this book by Dan Brown. I would just like to mention that he may be a crappy writer, but many can he write. This book is a rocket ship. And by that I mean that it goes at just about a million miles an hour. He writes in what seem to be two page chapters, each one with a cliff hanger ending. The thing that makes this book particularly interesting is that is appears to be a spy novel, but is really about esoteric campaign finance laws. But it makes them DAMN EXCITING! The other interesting thing is that he leaves enough stuff for you to figure out that you think you have everything figured out just in time for you to get blind sided by the real mystery that you don’t even know is a mystery to begin with. So on to the spoilers!
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I haven’t done an Iraqi update for a while, however two things of note have happened this week. First, the Iraqi Constitution was delayed by a week. This actually seems fine to me. There are lots of pros and cons to getting it done more or less quickly. The main thing is that it has to be something that the vast majority of the people believe in. The other exciting thing that happened was that Zarqawi has gone through the third stage of his metamorphosis. He started as being anti US, then he was Pro Sunni (anti US and Shia) now he seems to have become completely anti Iraq in general. Since we seem to be able to hope that proper planning and execution on the part of our leaders will win the war, perhaps we can hope that the horrible missteps of our enemies will win it for us.

*SPOILERS* for Noir and Gasaraki. Smaller for Noir than Gasaraki, but definitely there for both.
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Just finished The Horse And His Boy (as opposed to a boy and his dog) and I really really liked it. One of the things I was really excited to find out was how they were going to have another book, since the fist book ends with them actually getting old and living happily ever after. (Which was actually quite spooky when you think about it.) But having an almost completely unrelated story set in exactly the same time. Awesome. I also really liked the flavor that was in this book. He did a really good job of building a feeling of a foreign land by making it more like our own world than Narnia. The “norm” becomes talking animals and the abnormal is regular humans.

The one thing I don’t like is that the boy really was from the north. It would have been more powerful IMO if he were actually from the south and has simply become friends with the prince. They could have banded together on some jaunt or something. As it was the whole book smacked of racism and sexism, but the fact that the arab female was the most likable and complex character in the book made it much easier to wade through the fact that the entire war was men going around and picking unwilling brides for themselves.

The other thing I liked was how much this book opened up the world. Narnia is just one small country. I also loved the machinations of the King of Calormen in thinking about invading Narnia. He was smart enough to rule over that large a kingdom. He set up a plot with such good plausible deniability that even though it was heard by “spies” they were unable to leverage that against him. Nice.

Definitely my favorite book so far. They do seem to get better as they go along.

I recently finished Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. Unfortunately since all my friends seemed to have more time on their hands than me, they all read it first and as such have posted all the interesting thoughts already. Because of that I am not going to worry about SPOILERS.
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The problem of our dwindling oil supplies is something that has bothered me for a while. Seems to be my new itch now that I appear to mostly be over diamonds. It has cropped up in a number of random places recently, so I decided to make a post about it. The biggest problem with the oil supply going away is that it is difficult to get good information about what the real problem is, how bad it is, and what is being done to deal with it. There are plenty of sites on the internet, but you do have to be careful, because most of them are nut jobs who are predicting the end of the world. The latest item I saw predicted that 11/12ths of the world population would die off when the oil disappears. I don’t think that will happen, the world’s population was already over 1 billion about the time that we started becoming dependent on oil, but we are facing a serious problem. So first let’s frame the problem.

Peak Oil. This is a phrase that is used in the oil industry and by the internet prophets of destruction. What it means is actually quite simple. During the life of an oil field, the output of that field follows a bell curve. There is a startup time when it is not producing as much, a peak when it is producing as much as it will ever be able to, and then a decline as the remaining oil is harder and harder to get out. Due to annual fluctuation it is difficult to determine when we have actually hit that peak, but it has been shown in many oil field the world over time and time again. Now combine all those curves, and the world wide oil reserve will supposedly follow the same pattern. It is generally assumed that the peak will happen between 2010 and 2020. Some have even guessed that we have already reached the peak. Global oil output has dropped each of the past five years, however this has happened in the past and new discoveries make determining when we hit the peak difficult on a wold wide scale as for an individual field.

So if we hit the peak, what’s the big problem? Well, the problem is more people. Population grows exponentially and so does our energy consumption. China it continues its modernization will need much much more fuel. The US currently uses 25% of the world’s oil output, but China has four times the population. If they are going to meet our standard of living, they are going to need all the oil produced in the world. And that need, as well as ours and the rest of the world’s, is going to continue to increase exponentially. The problem is that the downslope of the curve will be much harder than the upslope.

People have been predicting the end of oil for a long time now, but as our population grows and our dependency on oil increases rather than decreases, the crash could be particularly hard. In my opinion, a real crash won’t happen simply because oil accounts for 40% of our energy consumption in the US, but not all of it. I believe that we will slowly make up for it as oil becomes more expensive. We won’t see the end of oil, we will see the end of cheap oil. At some point, other energy sources will become more cost effective and those will take over. In my mind the real problem will be a shortage of petrochemical byproducts.

Oil byproducts produce a lot of things that make life possible for the billions of people living on this planet right now. Oil is food. To quote from that harper’s article:

“The common assumption these days is that we muster our weapons to secure oil, not food. There’s a little joke in this. Ever since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1. And this understates the problem, because at the same time that there is more oil in our food there is less oil in our oil. A couple of generations ago we spent a lot less energy drilling, pumping, and distributing than we do now. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only ten, a calculation that no doubt fails to include the fuel burned by the Hummers and Blackhawks we use to maintain access to the oil in Iraq.”

Crop rotation is nice for re-nitrating to a degree, but the fact remains that we require oil to eat. As oil becomes more expensive, we will turn to other forms of energy transport. Probably nuclear, we should be able to build much more efficient and safer nuclear plants now, and at some point even fusion becomes cost effective. But these will only help so much, alternate transportation and energy are good, nuclear shipping, nationwide electric trains, electric cars (I don’t see fuel cells taking off, that is a highly inefficient energy transport, costs too much in energy to make the hydrogen) but we need the oil for our food.

So it’s not that I’m concerned about not being able to drive my Hummer through Chicago’s potholes, it’s that I’m concerned about running out of food. Made that scene in Gasaraki where the US cuts off all grain exports make a bit more sense. So, what is our government doing about this? Well at least they seem to know about it now, but shifting to alternate energy supplies doesn’t solve the problem of food.

The biggest problem is that we need to conserve what petrochemical resources we have now, but there is little chance to that happening until we have passed the peak a bit and the people who feel like driving their Hummers can’t afford to any more. There are methods of producing sustainable post oil communities, Cuba is one example, however it is unclear how well those methods would work here. Would Americans be willing to think about the greater good when making every day decisions without being forced into it? There will be a decline in standard of living, but it doesn’t have to be a collapse as the prophets of doom suggest. It just needs a little planning, or evolution. Since we aren’t going to get the planning, hopefully enlightened self interest will enable our country to avoid the tragedy of the commons. Local sustainable farms are beginning to show up, even near and in cities. Hopefully as petro based fertilizers and thus processed food becomes more and more expensive, more of these farms will pop up and we will transfer safely to a non petro based society. But we do need to do something, because the end of cheap oil is on the way one way or the other. The only questions are when and what the effects will be.