I'm reading this world war 2 book. There was a time, not long ago, when armies marched into countries and set-up shop. A little over 60 years ago, Hitler was determined to build the finest army on Earth.
Now, in the US, we have the most powerful and skilled fighting force in the world. If any country ever actually tried to build an empire by violent conquest (I'm leaving however you interpret recent US actions out of the mix here), the US Military machine will wipe you off the face of the earth in days, or weeks at most. We have this incredible fighting force, full of brilliant tacticians and terrifying levels of firepower. And this fighting force is in the hands of the worst boss on the face of the Earth.
It is a testament to the discipline and professional attitude of our military that they have not staged a coup against the complete imbicile who has the chutzpah to send them to their undignified death. The reward our soldiers get for the service is reduced healthcare benefits from the VA system, as well as the knowledge that the legacy we leave behind will be a brutal civil war between ancient warring tribes who hate each other at least as much as they hated the US when we were illegally occupying their land.
Sometimes I look at the right wing Republican media outlets and books to get a sense of what makes this strange species go. And I realized that they still think of America as the savior of Europe, as the merciful God of countries among men who broke up what had become a deadly brawl between European powers that had been killing each with increasing brutality for centuries. They still have their G.I. Joe dolls. They think that those of us who have viewed America's numerous wars of dubious purpose (basically all of them since the day after VJ day) are not patriotic. America is a great power that can only do good. Basically, when get right down to it, the fundamentalist fervor and a proud decleration that reality has nothing to do with your world view reminds me of Nazis. Hitler was obviously one of the sickest human beings to have ever lived, but he was a brilliant and effective leader. Whereas the Republicans are just plain dumb. They have the fervor but none of the skills to actually govern in any manner whatsoever.
Maybe the Rebublicans are less like the Nazis and more like the 3 stooges, falling over each other, endlessly tripping over one's untied shoes and getting a spanking. How in the hell are the Republicans the "party of national security" anyway? They have fucked up every single war they've ever tried to wage, accomplishing nothing and leaving behind death and misery in their wake, all because of some repressed homosexual senator's need to live out their Steve McQueen perverted fantasies (I'm thinking of Charlie Wilson in Afghanistan). These hillbilly redneck morons who cry in their beer over the poor suffering Iraqis need to put their dicks back in the sheep they've been fucking since they were 12 and leave those of us who want to live after the next 3 years of endless catastrophe alone already.
14 March 2006
10 March 2006
Cellulose Ethanol
It's been a long time since I posted, since I'm sick of being a negative hater. Now, for something completely different. I've been doing a lot of research on cellulose derived ethanol. I've learned a lot.
Current Situation
There are lots of well-known problems with our current oil consumption. The 2 biggies in my mind are:
Why Ethanol?
In the past I have been guilty (as have many others) of seeking a utopian comprehensive solution to the above problems. But gasohol -- fuel that is part gasoline, part ethanol -- represents an incremental step in the right direction with a variety of dramatic impacts that can be achieved right now.
What's wrong with corn Ethanol?
Currently, there are approximately 5 million "flex-fuel" cars and trucks on the road today that run on E-85, which is 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline. The problem is that you can only get E-85 in the mid-west corn belt. While the program has good intentions, there is speculation that the only reason the vehicles are out there is that the manufacturers get a fuel economy credit. By producing the flex-fuel vehicles, they get a gas guzzler break and are allowed to manufacture more guzzlers without penalty. Further more, the corn-derived ethanol owes its existence to Federal Farm subsidies.
The output/input ratio for corn-derived ethanol is only about 1.2. When you factor in the incredible damage industrial agriculture practices do to the soil and the water (industrial fertilizer drains into the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, the soil loses all its value over time, etc), you have something that is not economically feasible for the long-haul.
Further more, how the heck do you deal with the vast majority of automobiles that can't run on biomass out of the box? Biodiesel is great -- if you're willing to brew it up at home and have a TDI or a Benz that will run on it.
Why Gasohol?
Friends, I bring you gasahol. It's a 90/10 blend of gasoline and ethanol. Many states already require gasohol during the winter months, when issues with ozone are minimized. "Gasohol has higher octane, or antiknock, properties than gasoline and burns more slowly, coolly, and completely, resulting in reduced emissions of some pollutants, but it also vaporizes more readily, potentially aggravating ozone pollution in warm weather." (http://www.bartleby.com/65/ga/gasohol).
Many states (like Washington) have legislation on the books to require gasohol year-round -- if issues like ozone depletion, and "will it run on every car" get sorted. I don't have an answer about the ozone claim, but I'm sure it is not an unsolvable problem. Now for the good news.
Enter switchgrass...
The input/output ratio for switchgrass-derived ethanol is 4:1. Switchgrass can be farmed sustainably. This article from 1991 explains the utopian promise of switchgrass in detail. It can be refined using bioorganisms to produce sugar and then ethanol. In other words, you could have fully organic fuel in your car, just like organic milk or vegetables! The life cycle of sawgrass to fuel and back involves a net carbon dioxide reduction, as well as the reduced emissions benefits of ethanol. Further more, you can take ruined, eroding farmland, and it's cheaper to replant it with sawgrass than the eventual cost of letting it sit. So if you're tired of Red states sucking down all your tax dollars for inefficient subsidies, here's a way they can create an economic powerhouse that creates jobs, weens us from foreign oil incrementally while creating the infrastructure for nationwide E85, and is good for the environment. (The government of Canada has estimated that if 35% of Canadian vehicles ran off of cellulose-derived gasohol, the net effect would be like removing 400,000 vehicles off the road annually.)
The Brasil Story
It's also worth pointing out that the Brazilian government mandated the use of ethanol to reduce dependency on foreign oil. The current process they use gets energy in:out ratios of 1:8, and Brasil's scientists think they can get it up to 1:10 soon.
Brasil's advantages:
They already grew a lot of sugar
The government, including the military, imposed this system on the population in a rather undemorcratic and non-market-driven factor. See the NYT article for more details.
Links to peep:
- Current Energy Situation
- Why Ethanol?
- Why Gasohol?
- Why Cellulose-derived Ethanol?
Current Situation
There are lots of well-known problems with our current oil consumption. The 2 biggies in my mind are:
- Greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) aka environmental impact of burning fossil fuels
- Dependence on unstable petro-regimes provides funding for terrorism
Why Ethanol?
In the past I have been guilty (as have many others) of seeking a utopian comprehensive solution to the above problems. But gasohol -- fuel that is part gasoline, part ethanol -- represents an incremental step in the right direction with a variety of dramatic impacts that can be achieved right now.
What's wrong with corn Ethanol?
Currently, there are approximately 5 million "flex-fuel" cars and trucks on the road today that run on E-85, which is 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline. The problem is that you can only get E-85 in the mid-west corn belt. While the program has good intentions, there is speculation that the only reason the vehicles are out there is that the manufacturers get a fuel economy credit. By producing the flex-fuel vehicles, they get a gas guzzler break and are allowed to manufacture more guzzlers without penalty. Further more, the corn-derived ethanol owes its existence to Federal Farm subsidies.
The output/input ratio for corn-derived ethanol is only about 1.2. When you factor in the incredible damage industrial agriculture practices do to the soil and the water (industrial fertilizer drains into the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, the soil loses all its value over time, etc), you have something that is not economically feasible for the long-haul.
Further more, how the heck do you deal with the vast majority of automobiles that can't run on biomass out of the box? Biodiesel is great -- if you're willing to brew it up at home and have a TDI or a Benz that will run on it.
Why Gasohol?
Friends, I bring you gasahol. It's a 90/10 blend of gasoline and ethanol. Many states already require gasohol during the winter months, when issues with ozone are minimized. "Gasohol has higher octane, or antiknock, properties than gasoline and burns more slowly, coolly, and completely, resulting in reduced emissions of some pollutants, but it also vaporizes more readily, potentially aggravating ozone pollution in warm weather." (http://www.bartleby.com/65/ga/gasohol).
Many states (like Washington) have legislation on the books to require gasohol year-round -- if issues like ozone depletion, and "will it run on every car" get sorted. I don't have an answer about the ozone claim, but I'm sure it is not an unsolvable problem. Now for the good news.
Enter switchgrass...
The input/output ratio for switchgrass-derived ethanol is 4:1. Switchgrass can be farmed sustainably. This article from 1991 explains the utopian promise of switchgrass in detail. It can be refined using bioorganisms to produce sugar and then ethanol. In other words, you could have fully organic fuel in your car, just like organic milk or vegetables! The life cycle of sawgrass to fuel and back involves a net carbon dioxide reduction, as well as the reduced emissions benefits of ethanol. Further more, you can take ruined, eroding farmland, and it's cheaper to replant it with sawgrass than the eventual cost of letting it sit. So if you're tired of Red states sucking down all your tax dollars for inefficient subsidies, here's a way they can create an economic powerhouse that creates jobs, weens us from foreign oil incrementally while creating the infrastructure for nationwide E85, and is good for the environment. (The government of Canada has estimated that if 35% of Canadian vehicles ran off of cellulose-derived gasohol, the net effect would be like removing 400,000 vehicles off the road annually.)
The Brasil Story
It's also worth pointing out that the Brazilian government mandated the use of ethanol to reduce dependency on foreign oil. The current process they use gets energy in:out ratios of 1:8, and Brasil's scientists think they can get it up to 1:10 soon.
Brasil's advantages:
They already grew a lot of sugar
The government, including the military, imposed this system on the population in a rather undemorcratic and non-market-driven factor. See the NYT article for more details.
Links to peep:
- Ethanol Distillation
- Iogen Corporation
- Ethanol resources on the Web: Journey to Forever
- RFA - Renewable Fuels Association
- Ethanol from Cellulose
- EERE: Biomass Program Home Page
- ORNL Review: Biological Ways of Producing Ethanol
- Oklahoma Researchers Test Switchgrass for Biofuel Production
- Switchgrass
- Switchgrass:a living solar battery for the praires
- NRDC: Reducing America's Energy Dependence
- BIO | Industrial & Environmental | Biofuels and Cellulosic Ethanol
22 February 2006
still finding fresh at red
Just got back from an epic trip riding Red Mountain in Rossland, BC, and snowmobiling in Revelstoke, BC. Check the vibe.
09 February 2006
Thomas Friedman, again
Response to article Thomas Friedman. He says it so well: Why is it OK to lower taxes to 'encourage spending' and why is it OK to subsidize oil companies? Cheney says we don't need to "inflict pain" but isn't our war in Iraq pretty painful? Isn't the billions of oil profits that go to Saudi Arabia that pays for terrorist activity "pain"? (Note: I copy and pasted most of the article below.)
Full disclosure: I bought a Toyota Tacoma pick up truck that gets 20 mpg on a good day. I can afford the gas. If it came in an ethanol variation I would jump on it. If bio-diesel was reliable at freezing temperatures, I'd jump on it. For me, it's not about the money -- I WANT TO PAY for something other than gas, but there's nothing out there that meets my needs. Something that can go down logging roads, haul kayaks, snowmobiles, etc., but that isn't a 20' land barge that gets 8 mpg... that's a Tacoma. But what incentive is there for Toyota to make an ethanol Tacoma? What incentive is there to make it a bio-diesel, or whatever? None. Because most Americans can still afford $2.50/gallon to get to work everyday and play on the weekends.
Why should the Federal government raise gas taxes by 2-3 dollars? Because you are paying that tax anyway by paying over 500 billion for our military every year. Where do you want your tax dollars going? To the military so we can make the world safe for oil? Notice how the Europeans and Japanese spend a tiny fraction of what we spend on defense. In fact, the US spends as much as THE REST OF THE WORLD COMBINED on defense. That's right. Our defense budget is as large as the defense budget of every other country on Earth. Of course you can look at it over time since the cold war, as a percentage of GDP, etc., but that's not the point is. The point is that the US has the largest, most powerful Military in the world. Therefore US taxpayers are paying to make the world safe for oil -- and dangerous for you and me. We spend billions of dollars to indirectly protect the very regimes whose citizens (and in some cases, governments) seek to destroy us.
So why not reduce our dependency on oil. Perform, as a SECURITY measure, a forcing function (hey, this president gets to do whatever he wants anyway, why not use his powers for good instead of evil) on oil. Raise gas taxes by 2, 3, or 4 dollars. Plow the profits into incremental improvements in our energy dependencies. The easiest thing would be biofuels, especially things like ethanol. Check out this report produced by UT-El Paso about their Chevy Silverado conversion project. I'd get my truck converted but there's nowhere to get E85 outside the cornbelt. With just a little nudge from a fat gas tax, we could get this country off of oil in no time.
And I've got to make this very important point: I don't care about suburbia, or public transit, or any of that crap. America outside of New York City has been designed for use by single-occupant cars. It sucks but it's the way it is. We've got to fight one battle at a time. If you look at it dollar for dollar and life for life, the number one thing we can do to make America better is to stop sending money to the middle east, period. We get some bonus environmental action. But my goal is to be effective. Left wing environmentalists are often members of the liberal elite like myself, and we only know how to preach to the choir. But if you can convince Red State America that by converting their Ford Mega 6000 SUX 4mpg SUV to ethanol, they are saving American lives and making life much harder for terrorists; if you can convince them that 1/5th of every dollar they spend on gas goes straight to Saudi Arabia, where it promptly goes straight to Osama bin Laden and his friends -- THEN you're getting somewhere. Even better, if you can tell him (and I mean HIM intentionally) that by buying ethanol or whatever bio-fuel that you're buying America and you're supporting American farmers and all that baseball-apple pie shit, well, you've scored another point.
begin Friedman article:
"I think — the president and I believe very deeply that, obviously, the government has got a role to play here in terms of supporting research into new technologies and encouraging the development of new methods of generating energy. ... But we also are big believers in the market, and that we need to be careful about having government come in, for example, and tell people how to live their lives. ... This notion that we have to 'impose pain,' some kind of government mandate, I think we would resist. The marketplace does work out there."
What is he talking about? The global oil market is anything but free. It's controlled by the world's largest cartel — OPEC — which sets output, and thereby prices, according to the needs of some of the worst regimes in the world. By doing nothing, we are letting their needs determine the price and their treasuries reap all the profits.
Also, why does Mr. Cheney have no problem influencing the market by lowering taxes to get consumers to spend, but he rejects raising gasoline taxes to get consumers to save energy — a fundamental national interest.
Don't take it from me. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard, who recently retired as chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 3 about his New Year's resolutions: "Everyone hates taxes, but the government needs to fund its operations, and some taxes can actually do some good in the process. I will tell the American people that a higher tax on gasoline is better at encouraging conservation than are heavy-handed [mileage standards]. It would not only encourage people to buy more fuel-efficient cars, but it would encourage them to drive less."
Mr. Cheney, we are told, is a "tough guy." Really? Well, how tough is this: We have a small gasoline tax, but Europe and Japan tax their gasoline by $2 and $3 a gallon, or more. They use those taxes to build schools, highways and national health care for their citizens. But they spend very little on defense compared with us.
So who protects their oil supplies from the Middle East? U.S. taxpayers. We spend nearly $600 billion a year on defense, a large chunk in the Persian Gulf. But how do we pay for that without a gas tax? Income taxes and Social Security. Yes, we tax our incomes and raid our children's Social Security fund so Europeans and Japanese can comfortably import their oil from the gulf, impose big gas taxes on it at their pumps and then use that income for their own domestic needs. And because they have high gas taxes, they also beat Detroit at making more fuel-efficient cars. Now how tough is that?
Finally, if Mr. Cheney believes so much in markets, why did the 2005 energy act contain about $2 billion in tax breaks for oil companies? Why does his administration permit a 54-cents-a-gallon tax on imported ethanol — fuel made from sugar or corn — so Brazilian sugar exports won't compete with American sugar? Yes, we tax imported ethanol from Brazil, but we don't tax imported oil from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela or Russia.
"Everyone says we need a new Marshall Plan," said Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign policy expert and the author of "The Case for Goliath." "We have a Marshall Plan. It's our energy policy. It's a Marshall plan for terrorists and dictators."
How tough is it, Mr. Cheney, to will the ends — an end to America's oil addiction — but not will the means: a gasoline tax? It's not very tough, it's not very smart, and it's going to end badly for us.
Full disclosure: I bought a Toyota Tacoma pick up truck that gets 20 mpg on a good day. I can afford the gas. If it came in an ethanol variation I would jump on it. If bio-diesel was reliable at freezing temperatures, I'd jump on it. For me, it's not about the money -- I WANT TO PAY for something other than gas, but there's nothing out there that meets my needs. Something that can go down logging roads, haul kayaks, snowmobiles, etc., but that isn't a 20' land barge that gets 8 mpg... that's a Tacoma. But what incentive is there for Toyota to make an ethanol Tacoma? What incentive is there to make it a bio-diesel, or whatever? None. Because most Americans can still afford $2.50/gallon to get to work everyday and play on the weekends.
Why should the Federal government raise gas taxes by 2-3 dollars? Because you are paying that tax anyway by paying over 500 billion for our military every year. Where do you want your tax dollars going? To the military so we can make the world safe for oil? Notice how the Europeans and Japanese spend a tiny fraction of what we spend on defense. In fact, the US spends as much as THE REST OF THE WORLD COMBINED on defense. That's right. Our defense budget is as large as the defense budget of every other country on Earth. Of course you can look at it over time since the cold war, as a percentage of GDP, etc., but that's not the point is. The point is that the US has the largest, most powerful Military in the world. Therefore US taxpayers are paying to make the world safe for oil -- and dangerous for you and me. We spend billions of dollars to indirectly protect the very regimes whose citizens (and in some cases, governments) seek to destroy us.
So why not reduce our dependency on oil. Perform, as a SECURITY measure, a forcing function (hey, this president gets to do whatever he wants anyway, why not use his powers for good instead of evil) on oil. Raise gas taxes by 2, 3, or 4 dollars. Plow the profits into incremental improvements in our energy dependencies. The easiest thing would be biofuels, especially things like ethanol. Check out this report produced by UT-El Paso about their Chevy Silverado conversion project. I'd get my truck converted but there's nowhere to get E85 outside the cornbelt. With just a little nudge from a fat gas tax, we could get this country off of oil in no time.
And I've got to make this very important point: I don't care about suburbia, or public transit, or any of that crap. America outside of New York City has been designed for use by single-occupant cars. It sucks but it's the way it is. We've got to fight one battle at a time. If you look at it dollar for dollar and life for life, the number one thing we can do to make America better is to stop sending money to the middle east, period. We get some bonus environmental action. But my goal is to be effective. Left wing environmentalists are often members of the liberal elite like myself, and we only know how to preach to the choir. But if you can convince Red State America that by converting their Ford Mega 6000 SUX 4mpg SUV to ethanol, they are saving American lives and making life much harder for terrorists; if you can convince them that 1/5th of every dollar they spend on gas goes straight to Saudi Arabia, where it promptly goes straight to Osama bin Laden and his friends -- THEN you're getting somewhere. Even better, if you can tell him (and I mean HIM intentionally) that by buying ethanol or whatever bio-fuel that you're buying America and you're supporting American farmers and all that baseball-apple pie shit, well, you've scored another point.
begin Friedman article:
"I think — the president and I believe very deeply that, obviously, the government has got a role to play here in terms of supporting research into new technologies and encouraging the development of new methods of generating energy. ... But we also are big believers in the market, and that we need to be careful about having government come in, for example, and tell people how to live their lives. ... This notion that we have to 'impose pain,' some kind of government mandate, I think we would resist. The marketplace does work out there."
What is he talking about? The global oil market is anything but free. It's controlled by the world's largest cartel — OPEC — which sets output, and thereby prices, according to the needs of some of the worst regimes in the world. By doing nothing, we are letting their needs determine the price and their treasuries reap all the profits.
Also, why does Mr. Cheney have no problem influencing the market by lowering taxes to get consumers to spend, but he rejects raising gasoline taxes to get consumers to save energy — a fundamental national interest.
Don't take it from me. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard, who recently retired as chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 3 about his New Year's resolutions: "Everyone hates taxes, but the government needs to fund its operations, and some taxes can actually do some good in the process. I will tell the American people that a higher tax on gasoline is better at encouraging conservation than are heavy-handed [mileage standards]. It would not only encourage people to buy more fuel-efficient cars, but it would encourage them to drive less."
Mr. Cheney, we are told, is a "tough guy." Really? Well, how tough is this: We have a small gasoline tax, but Europe and Japan tax their gasoline by $2 and $3 a gallon, or more. They use those taxes to build schools, highways and national health care for their citizens. But they spend very little on defense compared with us.
So who protects their oil supplies from the Middle East? U.S. taxpayers. We spend nearly $600 billion a year on defense, a large chunk in the Persian Gulf. But how do we pay for that without a gas tax? Income taxes and Social Security. Yes, we tax our incomes and raid our children's Social Security fund so Europeans and Japanese can comfortably import their oil from the gulf, impose big gas taxes on it at their pumps and then use that income for their own domestic needs. And because they have high gas taxes, they also beat Detroit at making more fuel-efficient cars. Now how tough is that?
Finally, if Mr. Cheney believes so much in markets, why did the 2005 energy act contain about $2 billion in tax breaks for oil companies? Why does his administration permit a 54-cents-a-gallon tax on imported ethanol — fuel made from sugar or corn — so Brazilian sugar exports won't compete with American sugar? Yes, we tax imported ethanol from Brazil, but we don't tax imported oil from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela or Russia.
"Everyone says we need a new Marshall Plan," said Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign policy expert and the author of "The Case for Goliath." "We have a Marshall Plan. It's our energy policy. It's a Marshall plan for terrorists and dictators."
How tough is it, Mr. Cheney, to will the ends — an end to America's oil addiction — but not will the means: a gasoline tax? It's not very tough, it's not very smart, and it's going to end badly for us.
04 February 2006
The 2 Biggest Threats to America (aside from King Bush II)
1. Spiraling health care costs
2. Oil, period.
Current expenses of the US:
War on Iraq: $1 trillion
Future Combat Sytems: $1 trillion
Imagine if we spent $1 trillion on fixing health care and $1 trillion on reducing oil consumption by 75%....
For all 3 of you who read this, you know one of my obsessions is my loathing for Future Combat Systems, a massive pork barrel project that has yet to produce anything other than a black hole for US taxpayer dollars to be sucked into. As I noted previously, FCS provide billions for such a diverse range of Congressional districts that no one wants to shut it down. The 25% or so members of Congress who are riding the gravy train are undoubtedly employing the mutual back scratching technique, and with so many people involved, it's gained a momentum all its own, despite repeated warnings from GAO that the program is more likely to fail than not, given the failure of the program directors to follow best practices. Bottom line: over the course of the next 10 years we're flushing about $1 trillion in change down the toilet on Donny Rumsfelds toy train yard fantasy. Give his track record of total and complete abject failure, it's amazing he still has a job. The fact that we're still spending money on his pipe dream fantasies is distressing to say the least.
2. Oil. We all know about this. Buying oil from the middle east allows dictatorships and corrupt regimes to stay in power from Iran to Saudi Arabia. We're going to spend another $1 trillion on our failed efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to get our own oil supply. In the meantime we're pumping less oil in Iraq now than we were pre-war. Pathetic.
Now, supposing we did something totally different:
1. Spend $1 trillion dollars on nationalized health care instead of fighting in Iraq
2. Spend $1 trillion dollars to reduce oil consumption by 75% instead of building Rummy's toy train collection
What would you do?
1. DARPA invented TCP/IP, the protocol that makes the Internet go round, over 30 years ago. It's held up pretty well over time. Government is capable of producing excellent results when it wants to. I'm confident that given a trillion dollars, some smart fellows could come up with a "health care internet" that created a unified simple medical record data interchange format. It's got to be possible to create a universal interchange data format. If you want Medicaid money or whatever, you'd have to use it, essentially creating a forcing function for a country wide standard for data interchange. For everything from medical records to billing information. You could reduce the 33% of money spent on health care that goes to filing insurance claims and use that money to insure everyone. Imagine the benefit to American business. Imagine the growth and pork available to Congressional districts everywhere. Everyone ones.
2. Oil. I don't want to get into one of those "ethanol costs more energy than you get" arguments. I don't know the answers. But I know if you threw $1 trillion at it, you could come up with a cost effective way so calories in is smaller than calories out. Whether it's some kind of bio-fuel or something more pie in the sky like hydro cells, get us off oil, now. Then, if we want to blow up Iran, we can do that. If we want to tell the Saudis that they can pay for their own goddamn army and go fuck themselves in the meantime, we can. I am so sick and tired of the world kow-towing to these repressive dictatorships, and the assholes like Donald Rumsfeld that think they will ever be democratic societies. These are ancient cultures that only believe in honor and revenge. They have no concept of respect or fealty (Afghanistan, anyone?). I don't give a rat's ass about them. As far as I'm concerned, the middle east can go fuck itself in its entirety, and the sooner they go back to killing each other instead of us, the better. The sooner we stop buying oil from them, the sooner we can leave them alone to rot in hell. This includes Israel too. As soon as we stop caring about what happens in the Middle East, the less we need a "bulwark" against the Islamic states. Israel is a bad-ass country and they can fend for themselves. We need to let them free to do what they need to do and stop thinking of them as a potential landing strip for an invasion we don't have the backbone to ever launch.
Controversy baby... I'm going redneck out here in Washington State!
2. Oil, period.
Current expenses of the US:
War on Iraq: $1 trillion
Future Combat Sytems: $1 trillion
Imagine if we spent $1 trillion on fixing health care and $1 trillion on reducing oil consumption by 75%....
For all 3 of you who read this, you know one of my obsessions is my loathing for Future Combat Systems, a massive pork barrel project that has yet to produce anything other than a black hole for US taxpayer dollars to be sucked into. As I noted previously, FCS provide billions for such a diverse range of Congressional districts that no one wants to shut it down. The 25% or so members of Congress who are riding the gravy train are undoubtedly employing the mutual back scratching technique, and with so many people involved, it's gained a momentum all its own, despite repeated warnings from GAO that the program is more likely to fail than not, given the failure of the program directors to follow best practices. Bottom line: over the course of the next 10 years we're flushing about $1 trillion in change down the toilet on Donny Rumsfelds toy train yard fantasy. Give his track record of total and complete abject failure, it's amazing he still has a job. The fact that we're still spending money on his pipe dream fantasies is distressing to say the least.
2. Oil. We all know about this. Buying oil from the middle east allows dictatorships and corrupt regimes to stay in power from Iran to Saudi Arabia. We're going to spend another $1 trillion on our failed efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to get our own oil supply. In the meantime we're pumping less oil in Iraq now than we were pre-war. Pathetic.
Now, supposing we did something totally different:
1. Spend $1 trillion dollars on nationalized health care instead of fighting in Iraq
2. Spend $1 trillion dollars to reduce oil consumption by 75% instead of building Rummy's toy train collection
What would you do?
1. DARPA invented TCP/IP, the protocol that makes the Internet go round, over 30 years ago. It's held up pretty well over time. Government is capable of producing excellent results when it wants to. I'm confident that given a trillion dollars, some smart fellows could come up with a "health care internet" that created a unified simple medical record data interchange format. It's got to be possible to create a universal interchange data format. If you want Medicaid money or whatever, you'd have to use it, essentially creating a forcing function for a country wide standard for data interchange. For everything from medical records to billing information. You could reduce the 33% of money spent on health care that goes to filing insurance claims and use that money to insure everyone. Imagine the benefit to American business. Imagine the growth and pork available to Congressional districts everywhere. Everyone ones.
2. Oil. I don't want to get into one of those "ethanol costs more energy than you get" arguments. I don't know the answers. But I know if you threw $1 trillion at it, you could come up with a cost effective way so calories in is smaller than calories out. Whether it's some kind of bio-fuel or something more pie in the sky like hydro cells, get us off oil, now. Then, if we want to blow up Iran, we can do that. If we want to tell the Saudis that they can pay for their own goddamn army and go fuck themselves in the meantime, we can. I am so sick and tired of the world kow-towing to these repressive dictatorships, and the assholes like Donald Rumsfeld that think they will ever be democratic societies. These are ancient cultures that only believe in honor and revenge. They have no concept of respect or fealty (Afghanistan, anyone?). I don't give a rat's ass about them. As far as I'm concerned, the middle east can go fuck itself in its entirety, and the sooner they go back to killing each other instead of us, the better. The sooner we stop buying oil from them, the sooner we can leave them alone to rot in hell. This includes Israel too. As soon as we stop caring about what happens in the Middle East, the less we need a "bulwark" against the Islamic states. Israel is a bad-ass country and they can fend for themselves. We need to let them free to do what they need to do and stop thinking of them as a potential landing strip for an invasion we don't have the backbone to ever launch.
Controversy baby... I'm going redneck out here in Washington State!
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