Later On

From the Atlantic:

Lisa Margonelli is a writer on energy and environment. She spent four years and traveled 100,000 miles to write her book, Oil On the Brain: Petroleum’s Long Strange Trip to Your Tank.

Here’s her article:

Until this horrifying video of oil barreling out of the well drilled by the now drowned Deepwater Horizon rig surfaced a few days ago, few Americans had given the deepwater wells of the Gulf much thought — but all of us were getting more and more dependent upon them.

Between 1995 and 2004, deepwater production grew by 535 percent — an unimaginably high, Madoff-like rate in a country with tapped oil reserves and a driving habit that gobbles up a quarter of the world’s oil production. If we glimpsed these wells at all, they were in a Jules Verne-like dreamscape of triumphant technology presented in an oil company ad. Dangers? We didn’t think of them. These wells were not on the east and west coasts, where the politically-empowered environmentalists worry about their views. And they weren’t in the pristine white north, so dear to many of us who’ve never been there.

Deepwater wells were in the Gulf — the official sacrifice zone for U.S. energy policy — where a critical mass of our refineries, a tangle of marine terminals, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and many decades of oil exploitation have sullied waters and local politics as far back as anyone can remember. Until it appeared on YouTube, this was “magic” oil, miraculously plugging the gap in our unspoken energy policy of increasing imports while yakking ineffectually about energy independence. Magically, too, its seemingly sacrifice-free growth was projected to jump by 62 percent to 2.1 million barrels a day by 2016 — nearly 43 percent of the whole U.S.’s straggling domestic oil production in 2008.

Now, as BP eerily prepares to drop a “top hat” over this ever larger spill, it’s time to re-examine this magic oil, and the trick that brought it to us.

Deepwater drilling had an improbable, unbelievable, giddy rise from its birth in 1993. Every well was pushing the envelope, either of depth in the water or the depth of the drillbit beneath the crust. “Every well I did was the deepest ever,” an oil industry professional told me, yesterday. “I worked on 20 wells that set records. Every guy that did my job had worked on 20 wells that set records. We were sprinting, breaking records right and left. Everything they did had never been done before.” For 17 years the deepwater rigs were jamming on the edge of the envelope.

As the demand for deepwater oil grew, so did the demand for deepwater rigs, each differently designed than the last. “A year and half ago there were 35 drillships like the Deepwater Horizon,” an officer on a Transocean drillship told me, “and by 2016 there will be 65. There’s a very limited number of people with the experience to be officers on them. And that pool is getting diluted.The age of the captains on these ships is falling from the mid 40′s to the mid-30′s.” The International Association of Drilling Contractors recently bemoaned a coming shortage of professionals.

And they were drilling into trickier and trickier formations. By 2008, 25 to 30 percent of remaining reservoirs in the Gulf had pressure issues, which the industry and the MMS were trying to figure out how to manage.

Deepwater was, in other words, an increasingly risky business in risky conditions, with new equipment, people, and practices. If it sounds a bit like the conditions that led to the financial meltdown, perhaps it was, particularly when you factor in the behavior of the regulator. The MMS, the proxy for American citizens, had put its faith in magic rather than in regular inspections and regulation. Like those of us driving around madly on land, who preferred not to think about the risks of this oil, the MMS didn’t pay much attention to the details, and sometimes even violated the law to assist in oil extraction.

As industry sprinted, the MMS shuffled.  Since 1997, it appears to have issued only one notice on Deepsea BOP (Blow Out Preventer) inspections ( NTL No.2009-G07). Puzzlingly, this notice issued some clarifications on modifications to the BOP’s, which include an interesting sentence: “Failure of a choke line installed below a bottom ram could result in a blow out.”  (Perhaps that has something to do with some of the  info on the lack of schematic drawings for the BOP’s and the fact that they’d never been “emergency” tested since they had been placed on the seabed, according to Congressman Bart Stupak’s statement.) In any case, here was a regulator trying to stay on top of an industry that was moving the needle with every well, and it only issued one notice on the BOP in 13 years.

In addition to the famous scandal around sex and drugs, the  MMS had more insidious issues with industry. In 2001 it worked on Project Deep Sea Spill, which modeled an underwater spill much smaller than the Deepwater Horizon, but kept the information proprietary among the 12 cooperating oil companies for four years.

And so now, we are not only faced with an extraordinarily large, frightening, and nearly unthinkable oil spill, we are also facing the end of magical oil. Like the financial crisis, there are physical issues to deal with now, but in the future there will be a crisis of confidence in the oil industry and in government’s ability to regulate it. And at the same time, all of that new oil will not flow magically toward our shores, lubricating our lifestyle, allowing us to glide on without an explicit energy policy. We shouldn’t kid ourselves that this is merely a large oil spill. It is much more.

From an email:

Today marks the start of the 1st Annual Hemp History Week, which is taking place between now and May 23, 2010.  As a national grassroots education campaign, 185 events have been planned nationwide in 32 states with the goal of renewing strong support for hemp farming in the U.S.  In addition to events across the country, organizers also plan to collect tens of thousands of hand-signed postcards addressed to President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder asking them to end the ban on hemp farming and let farmers once again grow the versatile and profitable crop.

Hemp History Week volunteers across the country have researched the history of hemp farming and manufacturing in their regions before the crop was essentially banned by its misclassification as a drug.  Among this re-discovered history are the diaries of USDA Chief Botanist Lyster Dewey who bred hemp cultivars extensively in the Washington, DC area during the early part of the 20th Century, primarily at Arlington Farms on which the Pentagon was built.  The diaries and personal photos of the USDA’s top expert on fiber production for more than 45 years reveal a treasure trove of information on hemp farming research by the U.S. Government from the 1890′s to the 1940′s.  This and other research will be presented at scheduled public events this week, along with presentations by local politicians such as David Norris, Mayor of Charlottesville, VA; prominent business leaders such as David Bronner, President of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps; and others who support hemp farming in the United States.  Events are planned in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, North Carolina, Vermont, Virginia, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas and Washington, D.C. among other states. 

A complete listing of Hemp History Week events is available at: HempHistoryWeek.com/events

Hemp History Week supporters include Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, who submitted an official statement in support of Hemp History Week to Congress earlier this month. "Hemp was an important crop for George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and thousands of American farmers until it was outlawed completely in 1970 by the Controlled Substances Act. I know many farmers in my district could benefit greatly from the renewed freedom to rotate industrial hemp into their growing seasons. Hemp History Week will help other elected officials learn about America’s rich hemp heritage along with the tremendous benefits of growing hemp in America once again," explains Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas.

In addition to volunteer-run events nationwide, natural product retail outlets are also participating in Hemp History Week by sampling best-selling hemp products in their stores including: Nature’s Path’s Hemp Plus™ Granola Cereal, Sunny Hemp™ Granola Bars and Hemp Plus™ Waffles; Living Harvest Foods Tempt™ hemp milk and frozen desserts; Nutiva’s organic shelled hemp seed; Manitoba Harvest Hemp Pro™ 70 and Hemp Pro™ 50 protein powders and Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps. Participating stores include Mom’s Organic Market in the Washington, D.C. region as well as Westerly Natural Market in New York City, Earthfare in North Carolina, Henry’s Farmers Markets, Rainbow Grocery and Jimbo’s Naturally in California, New Seasons Market in Portland, Oregon, in addition to local co-ops throughout the country.

Sustainable hemp seed, fiber and oil are already used in nutritious food, textiles, body care and even auto-parts. Companies like Ford Motors, Patagonia, and The Body Shop, in addition to Hemp Industries Association members are using imported hemp in their products today.

For the last four growing seasons, farmers in North Dakota have received licenses from the North Dakota Department of Agriculture to grow industrial hemp. Despite the state’s authorization to grow hemp, these farmers risk raids by federal agents and forfeiture of their farms if they try to grow the crop, due to the [pig-headed – LG] failure of the Drug Enforcement Administration to distinguish non-drug industrial hemp from drug types of Cannabis.

Grown commercially in Canada since 1998, hemp has become one of the most profitable crops per acre for farmers north of the U.S. border. Due to its many benefits – a reusable resource in every aspect and offering a long list of health and nutritional benefits – hemp is one of the fastest growing industries in natural foods. Hemp seed and oil is a rich source of the Omega-3 & 6 essential fatty acids in an optimum ratio, including the Super Omegas Stearidonic Acid (SDA) and Gamma Linolenic Acid (GLA). Hemp’s protein is second only to soybeans in completeness, containing all 10 essential amino acids, with no enzyme inhibitors, thus making it more easily digestible. Hemp seed is also a good source of vitamins and minerals such as vitamin E and iron, as well as dietary fiber. Simply put, hemp seed is a gluten-free superfood.

Hemp History Week – May 17-23, 2010 is an unprecedented industry-wide project initiated by The Hemp Industries Association and Vote Hemp, involving hundreds of hemp manufacturers and retailers. The Hemp Industries Association (HIA) is a non-profit trade group representing hemp companies, researchers, farmers and supporters. Vote Hemp is a national, single-issue, non-profit advocacy group founded in 2000 by members of the hemp industry to remove barriers to industrial hemp farming in the U.S. through education, legislation and advocacy. While 16 states have passed pro-hemp farming legislation to date, Hemp History Week organizers want to influence significant policy changes on the federal level as well.

For further information and a list of sponsors, go to: HempHistoryWeek.com

About Vote Hemp

Vote Hemp is a national, single-issue, nonprofit organization dedicated to the acceptance of and free market for industrial hemp, low-THC oilseed and fiber varieties of Cannabis, and to changes in current law to allow U.S. farmers to grow the crop.

Web Site: http://www.VoteHemp.com

About the Hemp Industries Association

The Hemp Industries Association (HIA) represents the interests of the hemp industry and encourages the research and development of new products made from industrial hemp, oilseed and fiber varieties of Cannabis.

Web Site: http://www.HempIndustries.org

Our drug laws are incredibly stupid. Here’s hoping the country can come to its senses.

John Cook at Skeptical Scientist:

In the past, research has predicted that global warming could lead to the extinction of more than one-fifth of animal and plant species. This research has largely been based on theoretical models. However, now observations can confirm whether reality matches theory. The paper Erosion of Lizard Diversity by Climate Change and Altered Thermal Niches (Sinervo 2010) compares global observations of lizard populations from 1975 to present day. The result? Rapidly warming temperatures are causing lizard species to go extinct before our eyes.

How does climate change affect lizard populations? While lizards bask in the morning sun to warm up, they retreat to the shade when temperatures get too hot to avoid heat stress. As it gets hotter, they have less time to forage for food. Warmer springs are particularly devastating as this is when lizards reproduce and need extra food.

Sinervo 2010 first analysed observations of lizard populations in Mexico. Since 1975 when observations began, 12% of local populations have gone extinct. Looking at weather station data, they found a correlation between the change in maximum temperature and local extinctions. The number of hours that lizards were forced to retreat to shade were significantly higher at extinction sites.

There are two ways species can compensate for climate change: adapt or migrate. Temperatures are changing too rapidly for most species to evolve in order to adapt to warmer temperatures. That leaves migration. What is being observed is species are relocating to cooler regions in response to warming temperatures. Lizard populations from lower elevations are expanding up to cooler, higher habitats. This appears to be exacerbating extinction of species already living in higher elevations.

Another important result they found is if we manage to reduce CO2 emissions over the next few decades, this will reduce the number of species extinctions in 2080 but have little effect on the extinctions by 2050. A slow down in global warming will lag atmospheric CO2 levels by decades. This lead the authors to conclude that lizards have already crossed a threshold for extinctions.

Another reason for oil company profitability, besides that they don’t clean up their messes, is that taxpayers underwrite a good portion of their expenses. Sima J. Gandhi is a Senior Policy Analyst with the economic policy team at Climate Progress and she writes of how the country could save $45 billion over the next 10 years:

President Obama’s 2011 budget proposes to eliminate nine different tax expenditures that primarily benefit oil and gas companies. Cutting these special tax deductions, preferences, and credits would save the government about $45 billion over the next 10 years.  CAP’s Sima Gandhi has the story in this repost:

CAP has previously argued for eliminating tax expenditures for multibillion-dollar oil companies such as BP, ExxonMobil, and Chevron that would be profitable even without government subsidies. Here are the tax expenditures that the Obama administration has targeted for elimination.

1. Intangible drilling costs. Firms engaged in the exploration and development of oil or gas properties may expense (deduct in the year paid or incurred) certain types of drilling expenditures from their taxes. These costs include wages, fuel, repairs, hauling, and supplies related to and necessary for drilling and preparing wells for the production of oil and gas. Other companies incurring similar types of costs must recover this cost over the life of the investment. The administration expects that eliminating this subsidy will produce budget savings of about $7.839 billion over 10 years.

2. Deduction for tertiary injectants. Tertiary, or enhanced oil recovery, methods increase the amount of oil that a company can extract from a well by an additional 5 percent to 15 percent according to some research. This tax expenditure subsidizes the costs of tertiary injectants—the fluids, gases, and other chemicals that are pumped into oil and gas reservoirs as part of this process. The subsidy essentially gives companies government money for acting in ways that will enhance their profits. It allows companies to expense the costs of tertiary injectants, even though such costs should be recovered over time. Companies can alternatively choose to deduct these costs as an intangible drilling cost.The administration expects that eliminating this subsidy will produce budget savings of about $67 million over 10 years.

3. Percentage depletion allowance. Percentage depletion allows an independent oil company to deduct from its taxes about 15 percent from the revenue generated from a well, even if that amount exceeds the well’s total value. This means that oil companies take a deduction as long as a well is producing oil, without regard to how much, or whether, the well is still declining in value. Companies in other industries are only allowed to deduct an amount that represents the decline in their investment’s value that year. The administration expects that eliminating this subsidy to produce budget savings of about $10 billion over 10 years.

4. Passive investments. The government generally only allows investors to deduct a limited amount of losses from “passive activities” such as renting land in order to prevent tax shelters. Yet oil and gas properties are exempt from this rule. This gives oil and gas companies a competitive edge over other types of energy companies. The administration expects that eliminating this subsidy will produce budget savings of about $180 million over 10 years.

5. Domestic manufacturing tax deduction. Companies that manufacture, produce, or extract oil and gas or any primary derivative receive a manufacturing subsidy provided that the product was made in the United States. But since removing oil does not affect the production of oil, the subsidy does not significantly affect business decisions and eliminating the subsidy would not affect consumer prices. The subsidy is essentially a throwaway for oil companies. The tax expenditure is provided through a deduction for 9 percent of income, subject to a limit of 50 percent of the wages paid that are allocable to domestic production during the taxable year. The administration expects that eliminating this subsidy will produce budget savings of about $17.3 billion over 10 years.

6. Geological and geophysical expenditures. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 created this tax subsidy, which allows companies to deduct the costs associated with searching for oil, recovering the costs over a two-year period. The administration expects that scaling back the amortization period to seven years would produce budget savings of about $1.1 billion over 10 years.

7. Foreign tax credit. This credit is intended to prevent the double taxation of income that is taxed abroad but also subject to tax in the United States. Yet companies, particularly oil companies, have managed to exploit this subsidy even when they don’t pay income taxes abroad. In total, adjusting the rule would prevent companies from avoiding about $8.5 billion in taxes over a 10-year period.

8. Enhanced oil recovery credit. Companies receive a 15 percent income tax credit for the costs of recovering domestic oil when they use “enhanced oil recovery” methods to extract oil that is too viscous to be extracted by conventional primary and secondary water-flooding techniques. The EOR credit is nonrefundable and is allowed if the average wellhead price of crude oil (using West Texas Intermediate as the reference) in the year before the credit is claimed is below the statutorily established threshold price of $28 (as adjusted for inflation since 1990) in the year the credit is claimed. Oil prices in fiscal year 2006 were too high for companies to receive this subsidy, but the subsidy remains in existence. Its elimination is not expected to produce budget savings.

9. Marginal well production. This provision provides a subsidy for oil and gas produced from certain types of oil and gas wells. These wells include those that produce heavy oil and those with an average production within a statutorily specified range. Oil prices were too high for companies to receive this subsidy in fiscal year 2006, but the subsidy remains in existence. Its elimination is not expected to produce budget savings.

The total government savings from eliminating these subsidies is projected to be $45 billion over 10 years.

Interesting article in the NY Times by Patricia Cohen:

Poverty, greed, anger, jealousy, pride, revenge. These are the usual suspects when it comes to discussing the causes of crime. In recent years, however, economists have started to investigate a different explanation for criminal activity: physical attributes.

A small band of economists has been studying how height, weight and beauty affect the likelihood of committing — or being convicted of — a crime. Looking at records from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, they have found evidence that shorter men are 20 to 30 percent more likely to end up in prison than their taller counterparts, and that obesity and physical attractiveness are linked to crime.

“The profession has developed a large interest in biology,” what some refer to as anthropometric economics or history, said Gregory N. Price, an economist at Morehouse College and one of the authors of a paper on height and crime.

There is already a sizable stack of research that examines the connections between physical characteristics and the labor market. Economists have found, for example, that every inch of additional height is associated with a nearly 2 percent increase in earnings; that employees rated beautiful tended to earn 5 percent more an hour than an average-looking person, while those rated as plain earned 9 percent less; that obesity can cause a drop in white women’s earnings.

To make a point about income tax, Gregory Mankiw, an economist at Harvard and the former chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, has facetiously proposed taxing taller people more, since someone 6 feet tall can be expected to earn $5,525 more a year than someone who is 5-foot-5, after accounting for gender, weight and age.

Linking physical traits to criminality may sound like a throwback to the biological determinism advocated by 19th-century social Darwinists who believed that there was a genetic predisposition for wrongdoing. Practitioners are quick to distance themselves from such ideas.

Mr. Price, for example, argues that crime can be viewed, at least partly, as an “alternative labor market.” If individuals with certain physical attributes are disadvantaged in the labor force, they may find crime more attractive, he said.

H. Naci Mocan, an economist at Louisiana State University and an author of a paper on crime and attractiveness, explained that theories about the relationship between weight, height or beauty and the labor force emerged because “economists looking at standard determinants — like education, experience, productivity, human capital — found that they could only explain some of the variation in wages.”

“This is very new,” Mr. Mocan said of the research into crime. “It opens up our horizons a little more.”

A link between a physical attribute and salary, or crime, does not necessarily mean cause and effect…

Continue reading.

Interesting article in Game Studies:

Abstract

For collectible card games (CCGs), game designers often limit the availability of cards that have a particularly powerful gameplay effect. The conventional wisdom is that the more powerful a card is, the more rare it should be. The long-term implications of such an approach can have negative consequences on a game’s suitability for casual play. Digital Addiction (a company that produced online, collectible card games in the 1990s) developed a different game design philosophy for balancing collectible card games. The approach called for the most obviously and generally useful cards to be the most common and to equate rarity to specialization rather than raw power.

Keywords: Game design, collectible card games, CCG, game balance, Sanctum, Magic: The Gathering

Introduction

This paper explores the complex game balancing issues inherent to collectible card games. It begins with an overview of the Magic: The Gathering card game and follows with comparative case studies of Sanctum and Trading Card Baseball, both of which were online collectible “card” games. Sanctum’s game designers, after experiencing early balancing problems, developed a game design philosophy that attempts to address the issue every collectible card game faces: the fact that game play advantage can be purchased. When Sanctum’s game designers later created Trading Card Baseball, they attempted to address this issue holistically by taking advantage of baseball’s statistical nature.

Continue reading.

Oil is immensely profitable mainly because the oil industry manages to externalize most of the costs (pollution, global warming, etc.)—and they are eager to follow that pattern in the Gulf spill, hoping that they can get taxpayers to pay for the damage. From the Center for American Progress in an email:

The consequences of oil company malfeasance and our nation’s broader addiction to fossil fuels became starkly apparent with the disastrous explosion and resulting spill at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The cost of the Gulf Coast disaster could be as high as $14 billion, and many fear that the American taxpayers will ultimately pick up the tab. However, if the right policies are enacted, Big Oil could be made to pay the costs for its own disasters, and taxpayers would be spared another bailout. By increasing the cap on oil industry liability for disasters and ending wasteful taxpayer subsidies of the oil industry, oil companies like BP and ExxonMobil will finally have to pay their fair share for the "costs of the health, safety, and environmental damages they cause." The only thing that stands in the way are industry-friendly members of Congress who put the profits of Big Oil above the welfare of average Americans.

AVOIDING RESPONSIBILITY: The oil industry has a history of skirting responsibility for its economic and environmental disasters. During the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989, almost 11 million gallons of oil poured into Alaska’s Prince William Sound. After the spill, a court set punitive damages at $5 billion. Exxon litigated against the decision for nearly 20 years until 2005, when the Supreme Court reduced the company’s damages to only $500 million. Exxon paid about $300 million after taking its tax deduction for punitive damages. The company’s profits that same year totaled $36.1 billion. Unfortunately, Exxon’s case is not unique, as other oil companies have also done everything they can to keep from paying for their disasters. Transocean, a contractor involved in the Deepwater Horizon incident, has already petitioned a court to limit its liability to $27 million dollars, citing a law passed in 1851. An investigation by ProPublica finds that the average penalty paid for violations by offshore drillers over the past 12 years was only $45,000. Meanwhile, daily profit for the first quarter of 2010 was a whopping $62 million. When breaking the law involves so little risk, companies have little incentive to follow it in the first place. Additionally, oil companies take advantage of the current tax code to shirk their tax responsibilities. ExxonMobil, for example, "uses 122 foreign subsidiaries, including 32 countries that are officially labeled tax havens to dodge U.S. taxes," including in the Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Read the rest of this entry »

Alex Seitz-Wald at ThinkProgress:

As BP believes it has finally made progress plugging the massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, it has managed to prevent much of the oil already released from washing onshore by using huge quantities of oil dispersants. BP rounded up a “third of the world’s available supply of dispersants” and has been deploying them aggressively. But Greenwire reports that the chemical BP is using is more toxic and perhaps even less effective than other available dispersants:

So far, BP has told federal agencies that it has applied more than 400,000 gallons of a dispersant sold under the trade name Corexit and manufactured by Nalco Co., a company that was once part of Exxon Mobil Corp. and whose current leadership includes executives at both BP and Exxon. And another 805,000 gallons of Corexit are on order, the company said, with the possibility that hundreds of thousands of more gallons may be needed if the well continues spewing oil for weeks or months.

But according to EPA data, Corexit ranks far above dispersants made by competitors in toxicity and far below them in effectiveness in handling southern Louisiana crude.

Of 18 dispersants whose use EPA has approved, 12 were found to be more effective on southern Louisiana crude than Corexit, EPA data show. Two of the 12 were found to be 100 percent effective on Gulf of Mexico crude, while the two Corexit products rated 56 percent and 63 percent effective, respectively. The toxicity of the 12 was shown to be either comparable to the Corexit line or, in some cases, 10 or 20 times less, according to EPA.

BP “shares close ties” with Nalco. A BP board member who served as an executive at the company for 43 years also sits on Nalco’s board, and critics suggest there may be a conflict of interest in BP’s choice of Corexit. “It’s a chemical that the oil industry makes to sell to itself, basically,” said Defenders of Wildlife’s Richard Charter. While use of dispersants helps keep oil off beaches and out of wetlands, “[s]cientists warn that the dispersed oil, as well as the dispersants themselves, might cause long-term harm to marine life.” Even Nalco admits the chemicals pose “moderate” environmental hazard, but Pro Publica noted that dispersant ingredients are kept secret under trade laws, so it’s difficult to know the potential fallout from using them. A Corexit product was used to cleanup the Exxon Valdez spill, and workers suffered health problems“including blood in their urine and assorted kidney and liver disorder.”

UPDATE: Climate Progress’ Joe Romm notes that as toxic as Corexit is, dispersed oil is more toxic.

A superb lather from the D.R. Harris shave stick, thanks in part to the Rooney Style 3,1 Super. Then a very smooth shave thanks to the nearly new Swedish Gillette blade and the Slant Bar. A splash of New York on my amazingly smooth face, and I’m ready to go.

Very interesting post at TruthOut by Stephen Maher:

Many of Israel’s critics blame an "Israel lobby" for the near-total complicity of the US in Israeli annexation, colonization and cleansing programs in the occupied West Bank. This complicity continues to the present, despite the "row" that erupted after the Israeli government humiliated US Vice President Joe Biden by announcing the construction of 1,600 settlement units in occupied East Jerusalem while he was visiting the country. Indeed, despite the apparent outrage expressed by top White House officials, the administration has made clear that its criticism of Israel will remain purely symbolic. However, as we shall see, the lobby thesis does little to explain US foreign policy in the Middle East.

Years after Noam Chomsky, Stephen Zunes, Walter Russell Mead and many others published their critiques of the Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer "Israel lobby" thesis, many of the sharpest critics of Israel continue to attribute US foreign policy in the Middle East to the influence of the lobby. Given the prevalence of the Israel lobby argument, and the latest diplomatic confrontation between the US and Israel, it is important to revisit the flaws in the thesis, and properly attribute US behavior to the large concentrations of domestic political and economic power that truly drive US policy.

US foreign policy in the Middle East is similar to that which is carried out elsewhere in the world, in regions free of "the lobby’s" proclaimed corrupting effects. The inflated level of support that the US lends Israel is a rational response to the particular strategic importance of the Middle East, the chief energy-producing region of the world. By building Israel into what Noam Chomsky refers to as an "offshore US military base," it is able to protect its dominance over much of the world’s remaining energy resources, a major lever of global power. As we shall see, those blaming the lobby for US policy once again misunderstand US’s strategic interests in the Middle East, and Israel’s central role in advancing them.

Read the rest of this entry »

Brad Johnson at ThinkProgress:

This morning, Fox News anchor Brit Hume scoffed at the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, wondering, “Where is the oil?” Hume followed the lead of Rush Limbaugh and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R), who have been aggressively downplaying the disaster and bristling at comparisons to the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill. During the Fox News Sunday roundtable, Hume dismissed the expert analysis that many times more oil have spilled already than the Exxon Valdez disaster, a point raised by fellow panelist Juan Williams:

WILLIAMS: First of all, don’t you think, this spill now is going to be in excess of what happened with Exxon Valdez.

HUME: Let’s see if that happens. There’s a good question today if you are standing on the Gulf, and that is: Where is the oil?

WILLIAMS: “Where is the oil?”

HUME: It’s not on — except for little of chunks of it, you’re not even seeing it on the shore yet.

Watch it:

Independent experts, using both surface and subsea estimates, believe the vast sea of oil gushing from multiple leaks on the seabed surpassed the Exxon Valdez weeks ago. “Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots.” “The millions of gallons of crude, and the introduction of chemicals to disperse it, have thrown this underwater ecosystem into chaos, and scientists have no answer to the question of how this unintended and uncontrolled experiment in marine biology and chemistry will ultimately play out. ”

The slick on the surface of the Gulf is now about 4,922 square miles, larger than Los Angeles County, Delaware, or Rhode Island. On the surface, oil contamination has reached the barrier islands of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.

After Hume repeated the “natural seepage” talking point to falsely imply the oil industry’s catastrophic record of spills is unimportant, he then mirrored Rush Limbaugh’s argument that “The ocean will take care of this on its own“:

WILLIAMS: But I think it will damage the environment in the gulf and damage tourism and damage fishing. I don’t think there’s any question this is in excess of anything we’ve previously asked the ocean to absorb.

HUME: We’ll see if it is. We’ll see if it is. The ocean absorbs a lot, Juan, an awful lot. The ocean absorbs a lot.

WILLIAMS: I think Rush Limbaugh went down this road, “The ocean can handle it.” I think we have to take some responsibility for the environment and be responsible to people who live in the area, vacation in that area, fish in that area. It’s just wrong to think, “You know what? Dump it on the ocean and let the ocean handle it.”

HUME: Who said that? Who is saying that? No one’s making that argument.

Nearly two weeks ago, Gulf Coast marine scientists told ThinkProgress they “shudder to think” of the devastation this underwater apocalypse could entail, because “oil is bad for everything” that lives in the ocean.

Kevin Drum:

Last week I was talking to a friend whose son is currently stationed in Afghanistan. He was pretty scathing about how the war is being prosecuted. We’re supposed to be engaged in a counterinsurgency campaign there, he told me, which means getting soldiers out from their camps and into the towns and cities. They should be patrolling continuously, making their presence felt, and engaging with local leaders. But his son reported that none of that was happening.

That’s only one unit, of course, and enlisted men are rarely privy to the bigger picture.  Maybe there’s a reason this particular unit is twiddling its thumbs for the moment. Unfortunately, there’s reason to suspect that the problem runs deeper and wider than that. And even more disturbingly, there’s pretty good reason to think that even if the Army steps up its game, it won’t do any good. Gen. Stanley McChrystal is currently planning a make-or-break offensive in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, but a source there who’s a firm believer in counterinsurgency doctrine has recently become profoundly disillusioned. In "A Counterproductive Counterinsurgency," a memo currently wending its way through official channels in Afghanistan, he says:

The idea of “counterinsurgency” appears to be a viable way for success on paper. Military units, along with NGO’s [non-governmental organizations], the Department of State, GIRoA [the Afghanistan government], and other government agencies work together to emplace the clear, hold, build strategy in key areas of the battlefield. Like communism, however, counterinsurgency methods are not proving to be effective in practice.

The history of foreign powers mounting successful counterinsurgencies is bleak. Too little force and you can’t protect the local population. Too much force and you risk enough civilian damage to push them into the hands of the insurgents. It is, in T.E. Lawrence’s famous phrase, like eating soup with a knife, and most practitioners can point to only one significant success in the modern era: the Malayan Emergency of the late 40s and 50s. Plus, of course, Gen. David Petraeus’s famous victory in Iraq in 2007. But even that should give pause for thought. For starters, it’s not clear yet that counterinsurgency has actually worked in Iraq: the government is less stable now than ever and violence is again on the rise. Beyond that, though, the success in Iraq was due not just to Petraeus’s surge, but to what I call the Four Esses. The Surge was one of them, but it wouldn’t have worked without the other three: the Sunni Awakening that turned tribal leaders against al-Qaeda in Iraq; the sectarian cleansing that displaced millions of Iraqis and purged mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad; and Muqtada al-Sadr, who declared a cease fire long before Petraeus arrived and, against all odds, stuck to it.

None of those things is present in Afghanistan, and so far the evidence suggests that without them we have little chance of replicating even the contingent success we had in Iraq. This is something that the Pentagon seems to be belatedly recognizing as it tries to downsize future operations. Counterinsurgency, says Andrew Exum, a fellow with the Center for a New American Security, "is a good way to get out of a situation gone bad," but it’s not the best way to use combat forces. Afghanistan, unfortunately, is starting to look like the graveyard of empires once again.

Paul Krugman:

Thinking about BP and the Gulf: in this old interview, Milton Friedman says that there’s no need for product safety regulation, because corporations know that if they do harm they’ll be sued.

Interviewer: So tort law takes care of a lot of this ..

Friedman: Absolutely, absolutely.

Meanwhile, in the real world:

In the wake of last month’s catastrophic Gulf Coast oil spill, Sen. Lisa Murkowski blocked a bill that would have raised the maximum liability for oil companies after a spill from a paltry $75 million to $10 billion. The Republican lawmaker said the bill, introduced by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), would have unfairly hurt smaller oil companies by raising the costs of oil production. The legislation is “not where we need to be right now” she said.

And don’t say that we just need better politicians. If libertarianism requires incorruptible politicians to work, it’s not serious.

Very interesting column in the Washington Post by William Galston and Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution:

We commend The Post for initiating a forum on polarization, which is indeed the dominant political phenomenon of our time. Consider that for the first time in modern history, in both the House and the Senate, the most conservative Democrat is slightly more liberal than the most liberal Republican. This is more than an interesting scholarly finding; it has consequences for the legislative process. The most conservative Senate Democrat (Ben Nelson) ended up supporting health reform; the most liberal Republican (Olympia Snowe) ended up opposing it. For decades, the operational core of bipartisanship in Congress was the overlap between the parties. Through a long process triggered by the politics of the 1960s, that core has disappeared.

Polarization is not confined to elected officials and political elites. While the American people are not as divided as the parties are, they are more divided than they were a generation ago. As Emory University’s Alan Abramowitz notes in his new book, "The Disappearing Center," the percentage of the electorate that places itself at or near the ideological midpoint of American politics has shrunk from 41 to 28 percent since the mid-1980s, while the left and right extremes have expanded.

In addition, because people increasingly prefer to live near others who share their cultural and political preferences, they are voting with their feet and sorting themselves geographically. Many more states and counties are dominated by one-party supermajorities than in the past. Contrary to widespread belief, reducing the gerrymandering of congressional districts would make only a small dent in the problem. And unfortunately, homogeneous groups tend to reinforce and purify the views that bring them together: Sorting not only reflects polarization but also intensifies it.

What The Post’s editorial missed, however, is that these developments have not produced two mirror-image political parties. We have, instead, asymmetrical polarization. Put simply: More than 70 percent of Republicans in the electorate identify themselves as conservative or very conservative, while only 40 percent of rank-and-file Democrats call themselves liberal or very liberal. It is far easier for congressional Republicans to forge and maintain a united front than it is for Democrats. George W. Bush pushed through his signature tax cuts and Iraq war authorization with substantial Democratic support, while unwavering Republican opposition nearly torpedoed Barack Obama’s health-reform legislation. When Democrats are in the majority, their greater ideological diversity combined with the unified opposition of Republicans induces the party to negotiate within its ranks, producing policies that not long ago would have attracted the support of a dozen Senate Republicans.

Consider the episode that The Post cited as Exhibit A for polarization:

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Every now and then I get an issue of New Scientist in which almost every article is fascinating. The most recent is one such issue. I particularly recommend these brief articles:

• Welcome to the family, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis — Is there any reason not to allow the squat, rugged, cold-loving apes into the fold with Homo sapiens?
• Newton’s tree joins list of odd items to fly to space – A fragment of the apple tree that inspired Newton will fly to the International Space Station and back
• Republicans won’t be nudged into cutting home energy — Feedback on energy consumption only seems to have positive effects with liberals – conservatives tend to ignore it
• Stray grey whale navigates the North-West Passage — The whale was hunted to extinction outside the Pacific over 200 years ago – now a 13-metre-long specimen has been spotted in the Mediterranean
• Crumbling labs could clip NASA’s wings – The agency aims to develop new technologies for space flight, but years of neglect have left many of its labs in rough shape, says a new report
• Cancer’s sweet tooth becomes a target — Killing cancer cells by blocking their tendency to guzzle sugar could be a gentler way to fight the disease
• Neanderthals not the only apes humans bred with — A growing body of evidence suggests that our ancestors got it on with extinct hominid species, including Neanderthals and other Homo species [what will racists say? – LG]
• Quantum space monster leaps from a gravity well — Gravity could create a powerful runaway effect in quantum fluctuations in apparently empty space – this might influence the evolution of stars
• Maiden voyage for first true space sail — Next week Japan hopes to demonstrate the first sail to harness the sun for propulsion through space
• Bahamas islands were giant labs for lizard experiment — One of the most ambitious ecological field experiments ever conducted has resolved a long-standing question about the evolution of lizards
• Weed resistance could mean herbicide is futile — More weeds are evolving resistance to glyphosate – aka Roundup – but the problem could have been forestalled by a better understanding of evolution
• Pyramids are the best shape for packing — Tetrahedra – objects with four triangular faces – are the most efficient shape for randomly filling a container
• Bonding hormone helps men recognise emotions — A nasal spray of the hormone vasopressin improves men’s ability to recognise angry and happy faces, but not neutral ones [sounds like just the ticket for those with Asperger's syndrome – LG]
• Hand-washing wipes emotional baggage from decisions — Long a metaphor for the desire to distance oneself from immoral acts, hand-washing does more than just wipe your conscience clean [is this the Spike Lee, working on a doctorate? – LG]
• Infrared cameras could stop road tunnel fires – A new automated system could save lives by spotting overheating components in vehicles before they get into the tunnel
• Rocket-assisted pills pack a punch to the gut — Tiny rocket motors could one day be used to fire drugs into the human gut [can you imagine the consent form for this study? I imagine the investigators spent some time saying, "Those possibilities are very remote. Don't dwell on that." – LG]
• Oil industry failed to heed blowout warnings – The warnings were there a decade ago. Yet little has been done to address the risk of systems failure in deep-sea drilling operations [no surprise: a business will do nothing that will cut into profits unless it is forced to – LG]
• Scramjet with stamina ready for hypersonic test – An aero engine design tipped to make space flight affordable will soon try to set a new record by flying for several minutes at Mach 5 [5 minutes at Mach 5 is over 300 miles – LG]
• Flab rats: Unfit animals are bad for experiments – Biomedical research needs to wake up to the fact that most laboratory rats and mice are not fit for the job, argues Mark Mattso
• Did exploding stars shatter life’s mirror? – The building blocks of life all twist the same way. Is that a quirk of Earthly biology, or have cosmic forces been at work?
• Omega-3: Fishy claims for fish oil – Claims that the famous fatty acids can fix innumerable health problems – and cut murder rates into the bargain – take some swallowing
• Special report: Living in denial – From climate change to vaccines, evolution to flu, denialists are on the march. Why do so many people refuse to accept the evidence?
• Living in denial: When a sceptic isn’t a sceptic – There are clear lines between scepticism and denial, but telling them apart can be tricky in the real world, says Michael Shermer
• Living in denial: Why sensible people reject the truth – Denialism satisfies deep emotional needs. That makes it easy to encourage and hard to counter, says Debora MacKenzie
• Living in denial: How corporations manufacture doubt – If the truth is inconvenient, put up a smokescreen instead. It works wonders for big business, argues Richard Littlemore
• Living in denial: Unleashing a lie – It’s easy to send a lie flying around the world, and almost impossible to shoot it down, says Jim Giles
• Living in denial: Questioning science isn’t blasphemy – Michael Fitzpatrick argues that calling an opponent a denier is illiberal, intolerant and ineffective
• Living in denial: The truth is our only weapon – We must let denialists be heard, and respond with patience, vigilance and tireless rebuttal, says Michael Shermer
• The ant way to success – Adventures Among Ants by Mark Moffett examines the idea of ants as superorganisms and looks at how much their colonies resemble human societies

Spencer Ackerman in the Washington Independent:

The leak I got yesterday from Kandahar expressing skepticism that counterinsurgency can bring the nine-year war in Afghanistan to a successful conclusion has inspired another one. This time, a former CIA counterterrorism operative who has served on the ground in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq agreed to pass along a memo he has briefed to top military leaders since the fall debate over Afghanistan strategy. It’s crossed desks at the White House, the Pentagon, U.S. Central Command and even Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s command in Afghanistan.

While I can’t go into the sourcing of this memo, it’s penned by someone who began embracing population-centric counterinsurgency to mitigate the deterioration of the Iraq war as far back as 2005 — something that not a lot of CIA operatives bought into, then or today. Despite that pedigree, the CIA operative contends that attempts to protect the population from the insurgency and facilitate the delivery of Afghan government services are fatally undermined by the persistent corruption and ineffectiveness of the Afghan government and its institutions.

His counterproposal, similar to a controversial approach advocated by an Army Special Forces major named Jim Gant, is to use Afghanistan’s various tribes as a proxy for both political legitimacy against the Taliban and a more effective and relevant structure for the provision of governance and economic development. He’s taken to calling it “Tribe-Centric Unconventional Warfare/Foreign Internal Defense.”

“Press reports indicate the Taliban are already making nighttime inroads back into Marjah, and the ‘government in a box‘ promised by Gen. McChrystal in February isn’t materializing,” the ex-CIA operative said. “That our strategy doesn’t work in a remote hamlet is indicative of what we can expect in Kandahar and elsewhere. Accordingly, Taliban confidence is increasing as they perceive having three key requirements of insurgents — unlimited manpower, unlimited time, and a safe haven in Pakistan.”

I won’t reprint the memo in full, because it contains several passages that would reveal this operative’s identity. Instead, I’m going to excerpt the major sections that explain the argument, with some minor edits for clarity. Here goes:

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From the Washington Post. Click for full size:

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship at Salon:

Even as headlines and broadcast news are dominated by BP’s fire-ravaged, sunken offshore rig and the ruptured well gushing a reported 210,000 gallons of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico, there’s another important story involving Big Oil and pollution — one that shatters not only the environment but the essential First Amendment right of journalists to tell truth and shame the devil. 

(Have you read, by the way, that after the surviving, dazed and frightened workers were evacuated from that burning platform, they were met by lawyers from the drilling giant Transocean with forms to sign stating they had not been injured and had no first-hand knowledge of what had happened?! So much for the corporate soul.)

But our story is about another petrochemical giant — Chevron — and a major threat to independent journalism. In New York last Thursday, Federal Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ordered documentary producer and director Joe Berlinger to turn over to Chevron more than 600 hours of raw footage used to create a film titled Crude: The Real Price of Oil.

Released last year, it’s the story of how 30,000 Ecuadorians rose up to challenge the pollution of their bodies, livestock, rivers and wells from Texaco’s drilling for oil there, a rainforest disaster that has been described as the Amazon’s Chernobyl. When Chevron acquired Texaco in 2001 and attempted to dismiss claims that it was now responsible, the indigenous people and their lawyers fought back in court.

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Justin Gillis for the NY Times:

Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.

“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”

The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.

Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. “If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a couple of months,” she said Saturday. “That is alarming.”

The plumes were discovered by scientists from several universities working aboard the research vessel Pelican, which sailed from Cocodrie, La., on May 3 and has gathered extensive samples and information about the disaster in the gulf.

Scientists studying video of the gushing oil well have tentatively calculated that it could be flowing at a rate of 25,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day. The latter figure would be 3.4 million gallons a day. But the government, working from satellite images of the ocean surface, has calculated a flow rate of only 5,000 barrels a day.

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

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