April 30th, 2008
Arianna Huffington describes Tim Russert as a “conventional wisdom zombie,” and apparently Timmy Russert has taken offense:
It seems that Arianna Huffington has run up against the impenetrable wall that is Tim Russert’s ego. Huffington, who is currently on tour for her new book Right Is Wrong: How The Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded The Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe, will be appearing on CNN, ABC, and CBS. She had been booked on Morning Joe and Countdown with Keith Olbermann as well, but those bookings were suddenly and inexplicably cancelled.
NBC confirmed that Huffington wouldn’t be booked on any NBC-affiliated show to promote her book, but refused to explain why. Huffington’s people say that this is Tim Russert’s doing, that Russert is out for revenge because Huffington called him a “conventional wisdom zombie” in her book and devoted seven pages to faulting Russert for allowing his Meet the Press guests to go unchallenged (not to mention HuffPo’s RussertWatch).
April 30th, 2008
Senator Kerry is right, those in the media need to start asking about issues that matter and have an impact on the American people, rather than obsessively focusing on mere distractions, er, the Reverend Wright. Here’s Senator Kerry on MSNBC:
April 29th, 2008
Have you ever seen watermelons like these before? No, never! Me neither! They are beautiful, and I can only imagine that they taste as sweet as they look. These are moon and stars watermelons, according to the NY Times.
The image is incredible, because I have never seen anything like it. And that’s just the problem:
[Gary Paul Nabhan] has spent most of the past four years compiling a list of endangered plants and animals that were once fairly commonplace in American kitchens but are now threatened, endangered or essentially extinct in the marketplace. He has set out to save them, which often involves urging people to eat them.
Mr. Nabhan’s list, 1,080 items and growing, forms the basis of his new book, an engaging journey through the nooks and crannies of American culinary history titled “Renewing America’s Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods” (Chelsea Green Publishing, $35).
The book tells the stories of 93 ingredients both obscure (Ny’pa, a type of salt grass) and beloved (the Black Sphinx date), along with recipes that range from the accessible (Centennial pecan pie) to the challenging (whole pit-roasted Plains pronghorn antelope).
I don’t know about eating a pronghorn antelope, but I would at least like to taste some moon and stars watermelons.
April 28th, 2008
High oil prices may be a permanent condition from here out; a fact that, as I previously mentioned, will come at a much higher cost than what most of us can imagine.
However, even with the current price of $120 dollars for a barrel of oil, we simply cannot get enough and, instead, continue marching straight towards the precipice that’s at the end of our “Long Emergency.”
As the NY Times reports, given oil prices, one would expect increased supply or diminished demand to bring things into balance, however:
[A]s prices flirt with $120 a barrel, many energy specialists are becoming worried that neither seems to be happening. Higher prices have done little to attract new production or to suppress global demand, and the resulting mismatch has sent oil prices spiraling upward.
“According to normal economic theory, and the history of oil, rising prices have two major effects,” said Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency, which advises industrialized countries. “They reduce demand and they induce oil supplies. Not this time.”
A key reason that supply is not rising to meet demand is that producers outside of the OPEC cartel — countries like Russia, Mexico and Norway — have been showing troubling signs of sluggishness.
That’s right, the key phrase that one needs to pay close attention to comes at the end: swing oil producers cannot meet demand, due to troubling signs of sluggishness.
The article continues:
At the same time, oil consumption keeps expanding at a faster clip than production. Demand is forecast to increase this year by 1.2 million barrels a day, to 87.2 million barrels a day. In the United States, the world’s most oil-thirsty nation, consumption has actually fallen a bit because of the economic slowdown.
But that drop is being offset by growth in other countries. World consumption is projected to rise 35 percent, to around 115 million barrels a day, in the next two decades. Most of the growth will come from China, India and oil-producing countries in the Middle East, where retail fuel prices are subsidized, encouraging wasteful consumption.
That’s right, at present, it looks like we’re headed towards cliff: “sluggish” oil production and increased global demand. Remember, we’re talking about the world’s most precious commodity, which makes this a situation ripe for conflicts, er, wars on a global scale.
Peak oil?
Some regions are simply running out of reserves. Norway’s production has slumped by 25 percent since its peak in 2001. In Britain, oil production has plummeted 43 percent in eight years. The North Sea is now considered a dying oil basin. Alaska’s giant field at Prudhoe Bay has declined 65 percent since its peak 20 years ago.
[…]
[T]he case that has attracted the most attention is Mexico, the second-biggest exporter to the United States, which seems increasingly helpless to stem the collapse of its largest oil field, Cantarell. Last week, the country’s state-owned oil company, Pemex, said that production had fallen 300,000 barrels a day so far this year to 2.9 million barrels a day, a stunning drop from its peak production of 3.4 million in 2004.
[…]
Further clouding the picture, Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, signaled last week that it might have trouble increasing its production.
As one would expect to read in such an objective and balanced article, solutions that are just over the horizon receive their proper due. The over the horizon solutions usually involve throwing more dollars at tech innovations, so that we can drill for more oil. However, as the article concludes, throwing more dollars at this may not be enough:
The International Energy Agency estimates that current investments will be insufficient to replace declining oil production, let alone increase overall output. The energy agency said it would take $5.4 trillion by 2030 to increase global output, a level of investment that is unlikely to be met. It said a crisis “involving an abrupt run-up in prices” could not be ruled out before 2015.
There you go, kiddies. A preview of upcoming events in The Long Emergency.
April 27th, 2008
Elizabeth Edwards laments about how the traditional, er, mainstream, media continues to fail the American public by merely providing us “Cliffs Notes of the news,” where “the outlines are accurate enough but we cannot really see the whole picture.”
Mrs. Edwards writes:
[T]he news media cut candidates like Joe Biden out of the process even before they got started. … Few people even had the chance to find out about Joe Biden’s health care plan before he was literally forced from the race by the news blackout that depressed his poll numbers, which in turn depressed his fund-raising.
And it’s not as if people didn’t want this information. In focus groups that I attended or followed after debates, Joe Biden would regularly be the object of praise and interest: “I want to know more about Senator Biden,” participants would say.
Who is responsible for the veil of silence over Senator Biden? Or Senator Dodd? Or Gov. Tom Vilsack? Or Senator Sam Brownback on the Republican side?
The decision was probably made by the same people who decided that Fred Thompson was a serious candidate. Articles purporting to be news spent thousands upon thousands of words contemplating whether he would enter the race, to the point that before he even entered, he was running second in the national polls for the Republican nomination. Second place! And he had not done or said anything that would allow anyone to conclude he was a serious candidate. A major weekly news magazine put Mr. Thompson on its cover, asking — honestly! — whether the absence of a serious campaign and commitment to raising money or getting his policies out was itself a strategy.
[…]
Watching the campaign unfold, I saw how the press gravitated toward a narrative template for the campaign, searching out characters as if for a novel: on one side, a self-described 9/11 hero with a colorful personal life, a former senator who had played a president in the movies, a genuine war hero with a stunning wife and an intriguing temperament, and a handsome governor with a beautiful family and a high school sweetheart as his bride. And on the other side, a senator who had been first lady, a young African-American senator with an Ivy League diploma, a Hispanic governor with a self-deprecating sense of humor and even a former senator from the South standing loyally beside his ill wife. Issues that could make a difference in the lives of Americans didn’t fit into the narrative template and, therefore, took a back seat to these superficialities.
[…]
All of this leaves voters uncertain about what approach makes the most sense for them. Worse still, it gives us permission to ignore issues and concentrate on things that don’t matter.
[…]
If voters want a vibrant, vigorous press, apparently we will have to demand it. … Do your job, so we can — as voters — do ours.
