Hydrogen: Enough, Already.

Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer, wants us to quit chasing after the much-hyped “hydrogen economy.” I can’t say that I disagree.

From his article “The Hydrogen Hoax“:

What is needed is government action to break the vertical monopoly on the automobile fuel supply currently held by the petroleum cartel. This could most efficiently be done simply by mandating that all new cars—whether of foreign or domestic manufacture—sold in the United States be “flex-fueled.” Such cars, which can run on any mixture of alcohol or gasoline, are currently being produced in the United States for little more (typically an extra $100 to $200) than the same vehicles in non-flex-fueled form. But they only command about 3 percent of the market, because there are so few high-alcohol gas pumps to serve them. Conversely, the reason why there are few high-alcohol pumps is because there are not enough flex-fuel cars on the road to warrant them. If you own a fuel station with three pumps, you are not going to waste one distributing a type of fuel that only 3 percent of cars can use.

Yet within three years of a flex-fuel mandate, there would be at least 50 million cars on the road in the United States capable of using high-alcohol fuel, and at least an equal number overseas. This would be a sufficient market to create a widespread network of high-alcohol fuel pumps. Moreover, this dramatically increased demand for alcohol fuels would greatly exceed the supply capacity of American corn-ethanol producers, which means that we could drop our current tariffs against Latin American sugar-ethanol. A similar circumstance would pertain in Europe and Japan, enabling the elimination of their protectionist measures against Third World agricultural imports. This would solve the problem of trade barriers against farm products that scuttled the recent Doha round of international trade talks, thus benefiting rich and poor nations alike.

By simply exposing the oil cartel to competition from such alternative fuel sources, we could impose a powerful constraint on its ability to run up prices. Combined with an unrelenting tariff policy favoring alcohol over imported oil, we could destroy OPEC completely, and effectively redirect over $600 billion per year that is now going to the treasury of terrorism to the global agricultural and mining sectors. Instead of sending our money to the Islamists to spread fanatical ideology, we could give our business to the world’s farmers, coal miners, and other people who actually work for a living. Instead of selling off blocks of stock in Western media companies to Saudi princes, we could be selling tractors to Honduras. Instead of funding terrorism, we could be using our energy dollars to finance world development. That’s what a serious energy policy would look like.

(emphasis mine)

[The New Atlantis via The Lone Sysadmin]

10 Things We’ve Learned About Gitmo Torture

1. Americans were abusing prisoners at Guantanamo.
2. Donald Rumsfeld approved the “enhanced” techniques.
3. FBI agents thought the treatment was wrong but did nothing to stop it.
4. The Bush Administration’s “policy of cruelty” was a mistake.
5. Torture gets you bad information.
6. Torturing detainees makes us less safe.
7. Administration lawyers who approved the harsh tactics are now under fire.
8. Jim Haynes, Donald Rumsfeld’s top lawyer at the Department of Defense, was one of those who justified the harsh tactics.
9. Haynes and his fellow administration lawyers are increasingly being challenged by others.
10. Never lecture a West Point graduate about military honor while trying to justify your own actions.

[The American News Project via The Real News Network]

Congress votes to immunize lawbreaking telecoms, legalize warrantless eavesdropping

Remember when Ford pardoned Nixon? The Senate, including Barack Obama, just voted to cover up the commission of dozens of felonies by the Bush administration as well as expand the Executive’s legal ability to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant. This is in violation of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution. This is how one secures political office, and how one stays there.

The telecom companies needed this legislation to protect them as accomplices in these crimes, and they got it. It’s obvious who Congress answers to, and it sure isn’t their constituents.

An unconsitutional bill comes up for vote TOMORROW.

The FISA Amendments Act (FAA) is a bill that would radically expand the president’s spying powers and grant immunity to the companies that colluded in his illegal program. This is a video interview with Daniel Ellsberg (The Pentagon Papers) where he explains in practical terms what this legislation would mean for our country.

What Every American Needs to Know (and Do) About FISA Before Tuesday, July 8th from Tim Ferriss on Vimeo.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

It’s a couple of years old, but I finally had a chance to watch the documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?”. Nothing about the history of the GM EV1 surprised me, including GM’s destruction of the entire EV1 fleet.

The documentary includes mention of hydrogen fuel cells, which appears to be more of a stall technique by those invested in fossil fuels than the promising innovation that it’s often portrayed to be. It’s decades away and several times more expensive than gasoline or electricity.

Consumer demand is the only force that will result in plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles being manufactured in this country, and before you can demand it, you have to know that it is possible and already exists with today’s technology.

Here’s the trailer for the documentary:

why I’m voting Republican

Why are they rioting in Haiti?

“Free” trade, to the heavy hitters of the WTO, World Bank, and IMF, means they get increased access to the markets of poor countries while the poor countries lose access to their own. Poor countries are required to reduce their own government’s interference (subsidies) in their free market, while the rich countries are allowed to continue subsidizing their own.

In exchange for receiving loans to stimulate their economy, poor countries are required to lower their import tariffs which encourages “dumping” of subsidized commodities from rich countries into their markets, artificially lowering the price and driving local farmers and producers out of business. Haiti used to produce 80% of its own rice; it now imports around 80%.

Oxfam’s Make Trade Fair campaign explains what happens when rules rigged for the benefit of rich countries like the U.S. allow dumping to occur.

from an Oxfam press release from 2005:

Each year the US spends $1.3bn in subsidies to support a rice crop that costs $1.8bn to grow. These subsidies make possible the dumping of 4.7m tonnes of rice on world markets at 34% below the cost of production, hurting poor countries like Haiti, Ghana and Honduras. Developing countries should be allowed to use policies that allow them to develop fragile farming sectors, says the report.

Profits for Riceland Foods of Arkansas, USA – the world’s biggest rice mill – rose by $123m from 2002 to 2003 thanks largely to a 50% increase in exports, much of them to Haiti, which was forced in 1995 to cut its rice tariff from 35% to just 3% under pressure from the IMF.

Fear is more powerful than reason.

This isn’t a surprising revelation, but there’s a biological reason for it. From Newsweek [via Schneier]:

The evolutionary primacy of the brain’s fear circuitry makes it more powerful than the brain’s reasoning faculties. The amygdala sprouts a profusion of connections to higher brain regions — neurons that carry one-way traffic from amygdala to neocortex. Few connections run from the cortex to the amygdala, however. That allows the amygdala to override the products of the logical, thoughtful cortex, but not vice versa. So although it is sometimes possible to think yourself out of fear (“I know that dark shape in the alley is just a trash can”), it takes great effort and persistence. Instead, fear tends to overrule reason, as the amygdala hobbles our logic and reasoning circuits. That makes fear “far, far more powerful than reason,” says neurobiologist Michael Fanselow of the University of California, Los Angeles. “It evolved as a mechanism to protect us from life-threatening situations, and from an evolutionary standpoint there’s nothing more important than that.”

Politicians and all religions that claim the existence of “hell” have been capitalizing on this for centuries, and the more we trust the fear-inducing rhetoric they’re feeding us, the less chance reason will have to prevail.

Bishop Morlino: no emergency contraception for rape victims

I commented on this post on a Catholic blog [via Dane101]. Over the last week it had become a lively discussion until today when the priests took their ball and went home.

For my assertion that a rape-induced pregnancy should be a woman’s prerogative to abort, especially at a stage of development where a zygote is months away from the capacity to even feel pain, I was accused of “promoting death” as a “kill-all-the-babies-[relativist].” This wasn’t surprising, but I would have preferred that they stuck to attacking my argument instead of attacking me personally.

Once he started making it about me rather than my argument, I began asking Fr Renzo di Lorenzo: if God is required for moral behavior, then in the absence of God, would you rape, maim, and kill? Again and again he ignored it, preferring instead to speak in parables and insist that I don’t / won’t / can’t see. By the time the thread was closed he had created a caricature of me which was in equal measure entertaining and bizarre.

I am not afraid. Are you?

I believe that the most obvious way to fight terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. The erosion of our civil liberties in the name of an eternal War on Terror is reprehensible, cowardly, and un-American.

If the U.S. is not actually a nation of cowards, it is certainly being misrepresented as such by our government.

I just sent this to my Congressional representatives. You can too.

I am not afraid of terrorism, and I want you to stop being afraid on my behalf. Please start scaling back the official government war on terror. Please replace it with a smaller, more focused anti-terrorist police effort in keeping with the rule of law. Please stop overreacting. I understand that it will not be possible to stop all terrorist acts. I am not afraid.