ETHANOL: LESS THAN MEETS THE GAS TANK

After the 1980s\' ethanol shortages, Brazil recognized that ethanol production alone would not lead to energy independence. Instead, it started promoting policies to boost domestic oil production. Indeed, increased production and new oil discoveries played the biggest role in liberating Brazil from dependence on foreign energy sources. According to the EIA:

• Brazil increased domestic crude oil production an average of more than 9 percent a year from 1980 to 2005, to 1.6 million barrels of oil per day.
• Most notably, in 2007, Brazil announced a huge oil discovery off its coast that could increase its 14.4 billion barrels of oil reserves by 5 billion to 8 billion barrels, or 40 percent.

By contrast, from 1980 to 2005, U.S. crude oil production fell an average of about 2 percent a year or 40 percent overall, from 8.6 million barrels of oil per day to 5.2 million.

Source: D. Sean Shurtleff, " Energy Independence in Brazil: Lessons for the United States," National Center for Policy Analysis, Brief Analysis No. 614, April 7, 2008.

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Oil Rises, Gasoline Surges to Record on U.S. Fuel-Supply Drop

New York - Crude oil rose more than $3 a barrel and gasoline surged to a record after an Energy Department report showed that U.S. supplies of the motor fuel fell a third week. Gasoline stockpiles dropped 4.53 million barrels to 224.7 million barrels last week, the report showed. It was the biggest decline since August. (Snip) Crude oil for May delivery rose $3.80, or 3.8 percent, to $104.78 a barrel at the 2:30 p.m. close of floor trading

[are we ready to drill yet?]

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Tanks for Nothing

Environmentalists are pressuring the Department of the Interior to list the polar bear as an endangered species. As the price of gas shows us, though, the real endangered species these days is the American motorist. And, if environmentalists succeed, that problem will only worsen.

[if listed] There would be virtually no chance to open up even a small portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), an area estimated to contain 10 billion barrels of oil. That’s enough to replace what we’ll import from Saudi Arabia over the next 15 years. [additionally] ...vast areas off Northwest Alaska estimated to contain 15 billion barrels of oil and 76 trillion cubic feet of natural gas would also be made off limits.

Unfortunately, new energy exploration isn’t the only activity that would run afoul of a polar-bear endangerment listing. Environmentalists want to use fears about global warming to limit our country’s energy use. Otherwise, they warn, the polar bear’s icy habitat could become a watery grave...

What the United States faces today isn’t an energy crisis. We’ve got plenty of sources of energy, enough oil, natural gas and coal to provide all our electricity for a century - and that's not counting nuclear power. Yet, even as the price of gasoline has soared, we haven’t built a new petroleum refinery since 1976. We haven’t opened a nuclear power plant in two decades.

The problem today is a crisis of confidence. We’re not willing to expand our domestic sources of energy, even though we know we can protect the environment while also drilling for oil or refining gasoline. Unless our government allows us to expand our energy supplies, we’d better get used to overpaying at the pump.

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Fact: Polar Bears are not going extinct because of the supposedly melting ice, according to a biologist Dr. Mitchell Taylor from the arctic government of Nunavut. “Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present,” Taylor wrote on May 1, 2006. See here:

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1146433819696&call_pageid=970599119419

MEDICARE AND ENTITLEMENTS

The Bush administration's Medicare reform proposals, like previous attempts at entitlement reform, have been proclaimed dead on arrival by Congress. The news comes amid details on the precarious financial situation of the trust funds that finance Medicare expenditures:

• The Medicare trustees warn that Medicare faces collective unfunded obligations of more than $74 trillion -- more than six times the current size of the American economy.
• The Government Accountability Office estimates that for each year that Medicare and Social Security entitlements go unreformed, their projected shortfall grows by an additional $2 trillion.
• The Medicare Part A trust fund is scheduled to be "exhausted" -- in plain English, flat broke -- in 2019.

The president's budget constituted a good first step toward Medicare reform, proposing to slow the growth of Medicare by nearly $178 billion over the next five years. In addition, medical liability reform would reduce providers' costs associated with legal claims, saving money for Medicare and the general public.

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ACCESS DELAYED, ACCESS DENIED

In a new report, the Fraser Institute measured the delays to access caused by Health Canada when certifying new drugs as safe and effective, as well as the length of time it takes provincial governments to agree to reimburse those drugs under public drug plans.:

• Wait times for Health Canada approval and reimbursement take about two years (1 year each approval, reimbursment).
• Public [government] drug plans only fully cover about 39 percent of drugs that are approved by Health Canada as safe and effective; down from 44 percent in 2004.
• Private drug plans generally offer full coverage for 100 percent of all drugs approved by Health Canada -- as soon as they are approved.

Fraser recommends replacing Canada's government drug programs with subsidized access to private insurance.

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Mexican City Provides Illegals Sanctuary

A Mexican mayor has declared his city a “sanctuary” for the many illegal immigrants from Central American who pass through each day.

Jose Luis Gutierrez, mayor of Ecatepec — a suburb of Mexico City with as many as 3 million people — has not only ordered his police officers and city officials not to arrest or harass the migrants, he’s also told them not to cooperate with Mexican immigration agents.[snip]

Each year thousands of migrants from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and other countries south of the border arrive in Ecatepec to catch a train that will take them across Mexico to the U.S. border.

“For us, the bravest people of Ecatepec are the ones who take the risk of going to the north, with all the abuse and the hatred that goes on there,” Mayor Gutierrez said. “Those people are heroes for us.”

[our neighbors. what's that saying about fences and neighbors again?]

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CULTURE OF SUCCESS

... If more money isn't the answer, what does have an impact? In a word: culture. Everything we know about high performance in all fields of endeavor tells us that, while natural talent is a plus, there is no substitute for long hours of preparation and hard work.

Child psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley tested the effect of class on the differences in how parents interact with their young children. They were able to document dramatic differences in the intensity and nature of the verbal stimulation the kids were getting:

• Professional parents directed an average of 487 "utterances" per hour toward their children, as compared to 301 for working class parents and only 176 for welfare parents.
• Among professional parents, the ratio of encouraging to discouraging utterances was six to one; for working-class parents, the ratio slipped to two to one; and welfare parents made two discouraging utterances for every encouraging one.
• By the time the children in the study were around three years old, the ones from professional families had average vocabularies of 1,116 words; the working-class ones averaged 749; the welfare kids, 525.

Once kids reach school age, the growing influence of peer groups reinforces the early patterns established at home. College-educated professional parents make sure their kids are in college-bound peer groups, while working-class and underclass kids tend to gravitate toward others like them. Consequently, children on either side of the class divide grow up with very different attitudes about the importance of school achievement -- which leads to different expectations about themselves and the future

Source: Brink Lindsey, "Culture of Success," New Republic, March 12, 2008.

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Is There A War Against Fathers In America?

Dr. Baskerville is a professor at Patrick Henry College and author of the book, “Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fatherhood, Marriage and the Family"

Most people are unaware of it until they are sucked into it—usually through the family court system, divorce or some other method. Americans would be very shocked if they knew what was going on in this country under the name of divorce—“no fault divorce.” What we call divorce has become essentially a euphemism for government officials, courts primarily, and social service agencies to invade families—to separate children from parents who have done nothing wrong; to plunder the parents for everything they have in many cases and even to criminalize the parents and jail them without trail; to turn them into criminals in ways the parents are powerless to avoid.

The overwhelming victims of this are fathers...

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Radical Chic at the NYT: 'Heroic' Black Power Fists of '68 Olympics

New York Times reporter Katie Thomas embraced radical chic near the end of her front-page story Tuesday on the prospect for political protests at the 2008 Olympics, hosted by China.

Perhaps the best-known examples are the American sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith, who at the 1968 Games in Mexico City raised their clenched fists on the medal podium during the playing of the national anthem in a salute to black power. The action enraged the Olympic organizers, and Mr. Carlos and Mr. Smith were soon ushered out of the country. Now, 40 years later, their action is celebrated as heroic.

Raising a "Black Power" fist in defiance of the national anthem qualifies as heroic in the mind of the Times? Radical Pan-African activist Stokely Carmichael, who coined the phrase, said of his movement:

"When you talk of black power, you talk of building a movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created."

[who celebrates it? the piece doesn't say {conveniently}]

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California Hazmat Team Inspects Cargo Container Reading 'Anthrax a Gift From Osama'

Long Beach, Calif. — A cargo container spray-painted with the words ''Anthrax a gift from Osama'' on Wednesday caused the closure of an area near the Port of Long Beach as officials searched the item, the Press-Telegram reports. The Long Beach Fire Department, U.S. Coast Guard and Long Beach police were keeping people away from the area as hazardous materials crews wearing protective suits and oxygen masks opened the container

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New Math, Old Politics...

California

Last week the San Francisco Chronicle carried a remarkable question and answer session featuring Gov. Schwarzenegger. In response to the question, “Why have you allowed out of control spending to continue?” the governor replied: “Let me just tell you the reality of it. For instance, (state Sen. Tom) McClintock runs around and says spending has gone up under my administration. But what he forgets to tell us is that half the money we are spending is going to pay back the previous administration's debt.[snip]

The governor is apparently pioneering a new form of mathematics in making this claim. Davis’s last general fund budget spent $78.3 billion. In August, Gov. Schwarzenegger signed a general fund budget of $103 billion, an increase of $24.7 billion since he took office.

Perhaps it is this new branch of mathematics that led the governor to assure the public last August that his latest budget was not only balanced, but contained the biggest reserve in state history.

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MUSLIM SUCCESS STORY

... During the past two years Albania's government has enacted a number of exciting and eye-opening reforms, says Steve Forbes, editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine.

On the economic front, Prime Minister Sali Berisha proudly points to Albania's now having the smallest government per capita in Europe:

• It has enacted a 10 percent flat tax on both personal incomes and business profits.
• Social security levies have been lowered by 31 percent.
• Tariffs with European countries have been eliminated; government personnel have been cut by almost 30 percent.
[and?]
• Total revenues have surged from 22 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to 27 percent.

Since the fall of communism, Albania has been a stalwart U.S. ally, even supplying troops to help us in Iraq. Its economic and anticorruption successes are models for other Muslim nations, says Forbes.

[wow. Q: exactly how many times must we see proof of smaller government and less taxation unleashing individuals to do for themselves work elsewhere else before we get it?]

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Should colleges OK concealed guns for students?

The next time a psychopath walks onto a college campus and starts blazing away, the most logical way to prevent mayhem is for someone in class to have a gun. Someone like himself, says Nathaniel Sheetz. The Lancaster County resident and graduate student at Penn State University is among those leading a growing uprising on college campuses that challenges the liberal notion that students there are best protected by being forbidden to have any way to defend themselves...

['gun free zones' are magnets for madmen]

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Myths of '68

This 40th anniversary of the turbulent year 1968 is already starting to spawn nostalgic accounts of that year. The events of 1968 have continuing implications for our times but not the implications drawn by those with romantic myths about 1968 and about themselves.

The first of the shocks of 1968 was the sudden eruption of violent attacks by Communist guerillas in the cities of South Vietnam, known as the "Tet offensive," after a local holiday. The conclusion that might have been drawn was that politicians and military commanders should not make rosy predictions. The conclusion that was in fact drawn was that the Vietnam war was unwinnable.[snip]

In reality, the Tet offensive was one in which the Communist guerilla movement was not only defeated in battle but was virtually annihilated as a major military force. From there on, the job of attacking South Vietnam was a job for the North Vietnam army.

Politically, however, the Tet offensive was an enormous victory for the Communists — not in Vietnam, but in the United States. The American media, led by Walter Cronkite, pictured the Tet offensive as a defeat for the United States and a sign that the Vietnam war was unwinnable.[snip]

Think about it: More than 50,000 Americans gave their lives to win victories on the battlefields of Vietnam that were thrown away back in the United States by the media, by politicians and by rioters in the streets and on campuses.

Years later, Communist leaders in Vietnam admitted that they had not defeated the United States militarily in Vietnam but politically in the United States.

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Northrop: battlefield rayguns to demo this year

US weaponry goliath Northrop Grumman says it has achieved the ''first major building block'' necessary for manufacture of a 100 kilowatt solid-state laser - that is, a viable battlefield raygun. The company said yesterday that its Joint High-Powered Solid State Laser (JHPSSL) programme has ''exceeded all target requirements of its second major demonstration milestone''. This was the trial of a ''laser chain'' with 15 kilowatt power. Northrop intends to combine eight such units to
produce a single laser beam of more than 100 kilowatts...

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News Hound

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