26 December 2006,

Back to normal at the Washington Post front page:

Democrats Eye Fiscal Restraint

Party hopes to shrink federal deficit, preserve tax cuts for the middle class and raise money for war

Do you suppose that inside they inform the reader that under the Republicans the deficit has shrunk the last three years in a row because of increased tax receipts?  And what's this 'preserving' tax cuts for the middle class...I thought we had been told, repeatedly, that all of those tax 'breaks' had gone to the rich?  And raising money for the war...really?

Troop Push Personal for McCain

If more forces go to Iraq, Arizona senator's son could take his place in a line of family warriors.

How the Democrat leadership must hate McCain.  They love to bash the Republicans for not having their sons and daughters at risk in the war, but here's McCain, running for president and calling for more troops, even if it means that his son goes.  Bummer.

A Red Flag for Jet Lag

In Study, Simulated Flights Result in Deaths of Older Mice

Aren't scientists wonderful?  Hundreds of thousands of pilots to study for real human experience, yet they choose to study mice in simulated flights.  What would you like to bet that the researchers boondoggled some federal funding to do this?  And how about their conclusion?

Researchers aren't sure what conclusions to draw from the results.

I conclude that those scientists would be better off getting real jobs.

Richard Cohen writes this morning about the death penalty:

I apologize for the un-Christmasy nature of my topic, and I will understand if you choose to skip to another subject. But if you can spare me a moment, I'd like to tell you about Thompson. He is a cold-blooded killer, plain and simple. He is also out of his mind.

Thompson, 45, is delusional. He is also paranoid, schizophrenic and depressed. For these ailments, he receives daily doses of drugs and, twice a month, anti-psychotic injections. The state of Tennessee wants very much to put him to death for the horrendous 1985 murder of Brenda Blanton Lane, of which there is no doubt about his guilt. There is grave doubt, though, about the constitutionality, not to mention the decency, of executing an insane man. Thus the 12 pills Thompson takes every day. The idea, according to a recent account of his case in the Wall Street Journal, is to make him sane enough to be put to death.

I have to admit I find this idea bizarre, but it seems to me that we have deliberately confused the issue, first, for no good reason.  For instance, consider the constitutionality of "cruel and unusual", since this in itself clearly does not preclude the death penalty, it just should not be performed in a cruel or unusual manner.

I find the hocus-pocus to be cruel...the scheduling of a date, the preparing the prisoner, the special booth or chair, the doctors (you can't kill a man properly without a doctor present!). I don't understand why, instead, one non-special meal on an ordinary day doesn't happen to contain a powerful sedative, after which the guy remembers nothing...quite a lot like an ordinary person dying in their sleep, which is typically reported as having died "peacefully".  Dying in one's sleep is neither cruel nor unusual, certainly.

For the prisoner to get one last special meal of anything he wants is certainly unusual, not to mention cruel...a reminder that he's never going to get to enjoy a meal like this ever again.  How pleasant an experience that final meal must be.

As for his insanity, why make the man sane first and then execute him...so he can understand the reason why?  If the 'he' who is sane would not have committed the crime, then why should the sane 'he' pay the price?  You'd be executing the wrong man.   But if you cannot execute him for the crime, because he is innocent, then you cannot confine him for it, either. 

What constitutional provision says that the state is required to cure people of insanity rather than execute them as they are, if the jury decides that should be the penalty?  However, that does bring up a problem:

As we keep learning, the devil is not in the details, it's in our certainty. This almost always is true of death-penalty cases. They are built on certainty -- witnesses who were certain, technicians who were certain, cops who were certain, prosecutors who were certain and jurors who were certain beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet routinely we read about convictions being overturned by DNA evidence. All those witnesses, technicians, cops, prosecutors and jurors were wrong -- certain, but wrong. That, in effect, is the only certainty. Occasionally, we will be wrong.

To my way of thinking, this means that the standards for "reasonable doubt" have been set too low.  Being sure, being pretty sure, being mostly sure, being sure beyond a "reasonable" doubt are all variations on a theme, seems to me, because some doubt is always acknowledged.  This is not the same as "certainty", no matter what you call it.  'Certainty' means no possibility of doubt, Richard has just let his definition of 'certainty' become sloppy, which he acknowledges by saying that occasionally he is wrong.  In order for the death penalty ever to be awarded as punishment--it is called a penalty, after all--then there should be NO DOUBT, whatsoever.  To my mind that means having credible and unimpeachable witnesses, at a minimum. 

This year saw the fewest executions in a decade and growing public support for the alternative sentence of life without the possibility of parole. The cynic in me suspects that this is a result of historically low crime rates, not a sudden appreciation of how difficult it is to kill people properly, legally and, of course, justly.

My problem with Richard is not his coyly asserted cynicism but the fact that he is occasionally intellectually dishonest when he's preaching his own sermon.  Included in this column is this statement:

If I were not forced to choose a person as my person of the year, I might choose a concept: certainty. It is the one concept we cannot afford. Certainty is where we all get into trouble. We were so certain that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that it was reason enough to go to war.

Richard was for the war before he was against it, you may remember, albeit a bit earlier than most.  His intellectual dishonesty here is that he presents the certainty of WMD as if it were the only reason given for going to war against Iraq.

That would be a little bit like saying the American Revolutionary War was fought only because King George was quartering his troops in American homes without the owners' permission.

But the Declaration of Independence contains a laundry-list of complaints, of reasons, and so does the Joint Declaration of Congress authorizing the Iraq War.

It's intellectually dishonest for the currently anti-war among us to deliberately refrain from mentioning those other things, and that's not cynicism on either his part, or mine.

It's another concept we should choose to disavow: spin.

Speaking of the death penalty, how about this one?

The appeals court has approved Saddam's execution within the next 30 days and says it can be carried out at any time during that period...in other words, that's a maximum number.

"From tomorrow, any day could be the day of implementation."

I'm going to make two predictions for you.

(1) The Sunni insurgents are going to go berserk between now and his execution.  (2) Afterwards, the steam is going to go out of the insurgency. 

Bonus: if the Sunnis settle down and whole-heartedly join in the government of Iraq, the Shiite death squads will lose all pretense of justification.  Will they be able to continue, if so?

It would be nice if the government could just go on the air now and say the execution has already been carried out.  Unfortunately, people will have to see it to believe it.

Wes Pruden, I'm sorry to say, is smack-dab on target!

   The interviewer cites a ninth-grade text in Saudi schools that explains why photography is evil. If there's a broken heart for every light on Broadway, there seems to be an evil spirit in hell for every virgin in paradise, and photographers aren't entitled even to one virgin: "Whoever takes a photograph will be most severely tormented on Judgment Day. For every picture taken, a spirit will be sent to torment him in hell."
    One of the Saudi intellectuals recalled how his fifth-grade son came home to tell him that he would not listen to his father any longer. "The teacher said that if your father and mother listen to songs, do not obey them."
    A colleague nodded agreement. "The same thing happened to me. But there was something else. Once I got a message from school that my son must wear Islamic clothing. I went to school and asked, 'What is this Islamic clothing you want him to wear?' They began to describe Afghan clothing. It was a private school, so I went to talk to the principal, and discovered they had abandoned the curricula and were indoctrinating them with Taliban ideology. Imagine what goes on in government schools."

    We in the West can hardly imagine, which is why so many Americans of the hard-left persuasion, drunk on their contempt for George W. Bush, prefer to imagine that the only religious extremists to fear are churchgoing Republicans.  Not all the fools live in Arabia.

That was the paragraph of the year.

Tulin Galoglu acts like he's just discovered the Straits of Hormuz:

When I interviewed Donald C. Winter, the secretary of the Navy, I asked him to explain the importance of trade over the Straits of Hormuz, just off the south coast of Iran. "Hormuz is a major point that goes in and out of the north Arabian Gulf," he said. Indeed, it is a critical point; 40 percent of the world's oil passes through it every day.

Last June, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, threatened to interrupt the world's oil supply if the United Nations Security Council proceeds with a policy of sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. "The United States and its allies would be unable to secure oil shipments passing out of the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz to world markets," he said. ... The nuclear issue evidently is an important part of the decision-making process, but Iran's threat to hold the world economy hostage by blocking the free flow of trade through the Straits of Hormuz should not be underestimated.

While the Iraq issue remains paramount among Mr. Bush's problems, there is another important reason why he would be reluctant to engage in a military confrontation with Iran. Assume that Iran decides to pull its 2.7 million barrels of oil a day from the world markets. The result would be an immediate increase in oil prices -- most analysts suggest somewhere around $100 per barrel. In addition, if Iran carries out its threat to stop trade through the Straits of Hormuz, it would at a minimum double the price of oil per barrel.

    Although the Bush administration and the U.N. Security Council are engaging in a lot of tough talk about Iran, any military option is the most unlikely. The stakes are so high that attacking Iran could easily create an oil crisis in the world economy, which would lead to a world economic crisis. The only way out is to maintain a strong position and steady nerves -- and to think carefully and explore fiercely any option that does not involve "preventatively" attacking Iran's nuclear sites.

Written like a pulling guard blocking for the run of halfback Ahmadinejad.  It ignores the other side of the coin.

For instance, the cost to Iran of pulling their 2.7 million barrels off of the market, especially losing out on $200/bbl prices.

For instance, the fact that the 2.7 million bbls does not constitute 40% of the world's oil supply passing through the straits of Hormuz, therefore there are going to be one heck of a lot of very unhappy non-Iranian Arabs also missing out on that huge pot full of money, and all because of Ahmadinejad.

For instance, the Israelis may become convinced that Ah-mad is about to touch off the one bomb he has said will be sufficient to do the trick, thereafter decide that living in a world without oil is better than dying in a world with plenty of oil, no matter how "the world" feels about it.  They might feel that living is more important to them than any world economic crisis. 

Now, what if you thought about all of these things and the likelihood that Ah-mad was actually going to do what he said he is, touch off that one bomb, precipitating an event even worse than $200 oil, a second Holocaust, at what point might you conclude that preemption, although bad, was the lesser of two evils?

The problem is that you can never know about something that has been prevented, not for sure.  If Clinton, for instance, had accepted custody of Osama before 9/11, causing the event not to occur, nobody would have known that it would have happened if Clinton did not take custody. 

We know now that he refused to accept custody (on what I consider to be fairly rational legal grounds, Clinton has a good argument on his side) and that 9/11 happened, for which we blame Osama, but that's all after the fact.  Hindsight.  Monday morning quarterbacking.

Osama became Osama-the-Horrible after 9/11; before that he was one of Kerry's legal nuisance problems.

George Bush worried--and said quite plainly--that he didn't want to wait until afterwards where Saddam was concerned, we'd already done that once with Osama with dire results.

Bush's critics complain that Saddam hadn't really done anything much to us.  Bush supporters say that's right!  That's the whole point in a nutshell.  But you can't point to something that didn't happen and use it as an example.

Israel might just decide not to wait until they have become the example we need to "justify" removing Iran's nuclear capacity, it won't matter what Bush decides afterwards.

Daloglu has illustrated the picture of what might happen if Bush decides on a preemptive strike.  It doesn't look good.

But he hasn't illustrated the picture of what might happen if he does not.  It looks much worse...especially if you live in Israel.

Oh, I forgot another "for instance"--the most important one.

For instance, what if Ahmadinejad decides that in order to cleanse the world of the Greater and Lesser Satans, he BOTH nukes Israel AND closes the Straits of Hormuz, simply in the spirit of doing the most damage he possibly can to the Western World.  Remember: he says this is his duty and his destiny.

NOW how does the potential damage of a preemptive strike compare with that?

Besides, if the following report is true then what has Ahmadinejad to lose?

Iran is experiencing a staggering decline in revenue from its oil exports and, if the trend continues, income could virtually disappear by 2015, according to an analysis released yesterday by the National Academy of Sciences.
    Iran's economic woes could make the country unstable and vulnerable with its oil industry crippled, Roger Stern, an economic geographer at Johns Hopkins University, said in the report and in an interview.
    Iran earns about $50 billion a year in oil exports. The decline is estimated at 10 percent to 12 percent annually. In less than five years, exports could be halved and then disappear by 2015, Mr. Stern predicted.

  He said oil production is declining, and both gas and oil are being sold domestically at highly subsidized rates. At the same time, Iran is neglecting to reinvest in its oil production. ...
    Iran produces about 3.7 million barrels a day, about 300,000 barrels below the quota set for Iran by the oil cartel, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
    The shortfall represents a loss of about $5.5 billion a year, Mr. Stern said. In 2004, Iran's oil profits were 65 percent of the government's revenues.
    "If we look at that shortfall, and failure to rectify leaks in their refineries, that adds up to a loss of about $10 billion to $11 billion a year," he said. "That is a picture of an industry in collapse."

With that prospect facing you, together with the prospect of saving the Muslim world, spiritually, and bringing world peace as a result, what would YOU do if you were Ahmadinejad?

See, Westerns might not believe that he's really looking at such a prospect, but that's not important if he truly does.  What the West thinks is immaterial to him, in the plainest sense of the word. 

And he's not alone!  Read this by Arnaud de Borchgrave:

In much of the world, friends and foes alike challenge America's pre-eminence. Pakistan's "Frontier Post," reflecting the euphoria of Muslim fundamentalism, asked: "Which country will 'supplant' America? Such an entity must possess a huge population, abundant resources, a universal ideology, and the political will to succeed. The most obvious candidate is the Muslim world under the Caliphate."

 "WatchingAmericadotcom" conveys a bleak picture of how the rest of the world views the 79 recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group (ISG). Whichever way you slice 'em and dice 'em, the report's 104 pages spell failure. Some of its harshest critics in America say they're a recipe for surrender. Abroad, they're seen as a tacit recognition of defeat.

You talk about getting no respect...but it was obvious just from listening to and looking at the names of the few people who supported the ISG that we were dealing with Lenin's useful idiots here.

    From Buenos Aires to Berlin and from Brussels to Beijing, ISG was a devastating indictment of a multibillion-dollar boondoggle. In Tehran and Pyongyang, the two remaining capitals in the "axis of evil," and in Damascus, axis of lesser evil, cliches bristled about paper tigers and giants-with-feet-of-clay. That is precisely why President Bush is not about to accept ISG's findings. Mr. Bush sees himself as a lone Winston Churchill figure from the 1930s railing against his somnolent colleagues as they appeased Adolf Hitler. And like Churchill at the end of World War II, he was not elected to preside over the dissolution of the American empire.

I don't know if Bush sees himself as the lone Churchill figure, but I certainly do.  Churchill was alone, but he was also correct.

Israel also has plenty of reasons for alarm in the ISG report. When Baker-Hamilton talk about a Palestinian settlement that includes the "right of return" for millions of Palestinians, this can only mean, in Israeli eyes, the destruction of the purely Jewish state, on par with the bats in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's belfry when he says the Holocaust never happened and therefore Israel should be wiped off the map.

    ...    The major problem with "bombs away" over Iran's nuclear installations is that Mr. Ahmadinejad may be asking Allah for just that. It would coalesce worldwide Muslim opinion behind the latest "victim of Zionist American imperialism." It would also produce the kind of regional mayhem Mr. Ahmadinejad sees as a precondition for the return to Earth of the 12th Imam, the Mahdi. He's the 5-year-old boy who vanished 1,100 years ago who will lead the world back to prosperity under the banner of Islam. (Bolding mine.)

And there you have it in a nutshell...only he isn't a nut, he's a true believer.

For you Bush-obsessed, Bush wasn't the president 1,100 years ago.

Ahmadinejad started on his road to power during the Carter administration, when the American Embassy was captured in Iran and we did nothing about it.  He has since that time repeatedly attacked and killed Americans in several locations.  When it comes to fighting America, Ahmadinejad has known only victory.  Why should he expect anything different in the future?

Especially if he, like many others abroad, sees the ISG report as a tacit recognition of defeat in Iraq.

Yes, I know, there's a supremely ironic humor contained in the fact that those Americans who thought the ISG Report was a good thing are also those who are the most concerned with America's reputation abroad.

Speaking of economic impact, how about this Commentary by H. Sterling Burnett:

While coal is the lowest-cost source of reliable power, it is also a secure energy source. The U.S. contains more than a quarter of the world's recoverable reserves, equaling a 250-year supply at current consumption. As a result, coal-fired power plants generate 52 percent of U.S. electricity. Coal power's low cost, reliability and security are why more than 150 new coal-fired power plants are being built or proposed across the U.S.
    Fortunately for air quality, modern coal-fired power plants emit 90 percent less air pollution than previous generations and less carbon dioxide (CO2) per kilowatt produced.

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University estimated the economic benefits of coal and the potential impact of replacing it with energy sources such as natural gas and a 10 percent mix of renewables. By 2015, they estimated coal would produce more than $1 trillion annually in gross domestic product (GDP), $360 billion in additional household income and nearly 7 million jobs.

By comparison, cutting coal-fired electric power generation by 33 percent would reduce GDP by $166 billion, household income by $64 billion and would cut 1.2 million jobs. Larger cuts would result in greater economic losses.

Also, that money coal provides in gross domestic product does NOT do two things: 1) fund Islamic terrorists, or 2) add to the trade deficit.

You'd think that would make the decision a no-brainer.  Instead, the no-brainers are following Algore's Pie-eyed Piper route of scientific inanity.

As for global warming, yes, it's happening.  It has been happening, with interruptions now and then, for thousands and thousands of years.  It's a good thing for humanity and for Americans in particular, because there are no longer mile-thick sheets of ice covering the Ohio Valley.  Get used to it.

These excerpts from a rather good article on the oil exploration business, you should read all of it.  These parts caught my fancy:

In short, the depth of our knowledge of petroleum geography is even shallower than our grip on the topography of the bottom of the oceans, for which our maps are still mainly fanciful artists' renderings.   Only exploration wells can provide more precise indications of what lies beneath the Earth.

I liked this, because, as some of you know, I worked for 11 years in the oil exploration business.  Most of that time I worked as a seismologist.  Seismic works, basically, by shooting some energy into the earth and hoping that it bounces off of something down below and reflects back.  It's a lot more complicated than that, of course, but that's essentially the story.  You shoot energy in, you get some of it back, and then you try to figure out what it means.

In an area of nice smooth layers of rock of different densities, the reflections bounce back nicely and you can draw a picture of what the subsurface might look like, as a result.

We were exploring the El Monte valley area in the Los Angeles Basin.  Unfortunately for me, the first several thousand feet of surface geology are a jumbled up mess of poorly-sorted and haphazardly stratified rocks which were not deposited in neat layers by water in an ocean environment.  The resulting seismic records were complete confusion.  I had virtually nothing to contribute to the project but my imagination.  My boss on the project was a great guy, a wonderful man we all loved and admired, and VERY persuasive, so between us we managed to "see" certain seismic reflections we liked better than others.  (Yes, folks, that's the way the world works.)

Eventually a well was drilled, so now at last we were going to know what was happening.  Yeah, sure.  We drilled all the way to basement (through the stratigraphic section into the underlying granites and metamorphic rocks, collected some really nice light oil from the rubble layer on top of the basement, but never could figure out from the well logs, including an erratic dipmeter log, which way was up.  (Mero knows a lot more about what happened here than I do, maybe one of these days he'll tell us.  I wouldn't mind hearing the complete story, myself.)

In the end, we drilled a straight hole and thought we could tell from information gathered from it which way the beds were dipping, re-drilled a slant hole from the same location, up-dip, got some light crude from a test, and still didn't know what was what.  It was simply too expensive to drill another hole, the SF brass wouldn't allocate the money, so we walked away, hugely disappointed.

What I'm trying to illustrate is that even drilling a hole doesn't always produce precise indications of what is going on.  Even when you find some oil it doesn't necessarily lead to a discovery and production.

But exploration through wells is much less widespread than people think, and historically has been centered in North America. By the 1930s, wildcatters were digging everywhere in oil towns like Kilgore, Texas, where derricks went up even in the churchyard. All told, about 1 million exploration wells have been drilled in the United States, as against only 2,000 in the Persian Gulf, 300 of them in Saudi Arabia.

Even today, more than 70 percent of exploration activity is concentrated in the United States and Canada, which together hold only about 3 percent of the world's oil reserves. Conversely, only 3 percent of exploration wells drilled between 1992 and 2002 were in the Middle East, which holds more than 70 percent of the world's oil. Furthermore, the analysis of core logs from exploration wells may lead experts to opposite conclusions. In the early 2000s, Shell and its partner on an exploration project in India, Cairn Energy, disagreed over whether the core logs indicated oil. Shell turned over the area to Cairn, which has since made finds of 380 million to 700 million barrels of oil.

I wouldn't like to be the geologist who was eventually responsible for making that decision.  It probably wasn't a geologist, though, but some pencil-pusher in higher management, the equivalent of our SF brass who cut off our funding because they decided there was no oil there.

So oil exploration is still dependent on human judgment. At the same time, oil recovery from known fields may offer some startling surprises. Given its complex nature, a reservoir will always entrap a part of its oil, even after very long and intensive drilling. This means fields that no longer produce oil, and are considered to be exhausted, still contain more or less ample supplies of hydrocarbons that simply cannot be recovered with current technology or in a cost-effective way.

I don't know how much the technology has changed, and there are many factors involved, but it used to be that only about half of the oil contained in the field could actually be produced, maybe a bit more.  Oil isn't found in liquid pools underneath the surface, a common misconception. 

Today the average recovery rate for oil is about 35 percent of the estimated "oil in place," which means that only 35 barrels out of 100 may be brought to the surface.

Oops, I got ahead of myself while reading and writing at the same time, and see that he corrected my guesstimate downwards.  I thought we were doing better than that by now.

Simply put, new exploration methods have increased existing reserves over time, even without any new discoveries. The oil literature is full of examples. A most astonishing one is the Kern River field in California, discovered in 1899. In 1942 its "remaining" reserves were estimated at 54 million barrels. Yet from 1942 to 1986 it produced 736 million barrels, and still had another 970 million "remaining."

This is why King Hubbert's famous "peak oil" concept has worked out about as well as the predictions made by Malthus about the food supply running out many years ago.  Malthus didn't adequately allow for technology, either.

The most recent estimate of probable recoverable oil resources made by the International Energy Agency, based on previous work by the U.S. Geological Survey, suggests a figure of about 2.6 trillion barrels, about 1.1 trillion of which are considered to be proven reserves. ... Today the world consumes about 30 billion barrels of oil per year, with a projected growth of less than 2 percent annually; this means that if the IEA projections are correct, there is enough oil to last for most of this century.

... The figures above do not take into account the additional estimated 1 trillion barrels of technically recoverable, so-called unconventional oil like ultraheavy oil, bituminous schist and tar sands.

Note also that he doesn't even mention coal.  When you think about energy you cannot consider merely oil, or petroleum, but hydrocarbons in general.

Oh, yeah...and just imagine what would happen if that 35% recovery rate of oil in fields already discovered and being produced was somehow increased to 70% by means of some technological break-through?  This is oil you already know is there, you don’t have to go looking for it, or even spend a bunch of money drilling a lot of new wells, you just have to figure out the key to unlocking the treasure house.

Maybe those smart Chinese will do it, after they’ve finished unlocking the secrets to fetal stem-cell research being blocked in America by the evil Bush.