Staying True To The Olympic Spirit

The Olympics opened with much fanfare this week. I didn't get to see the opening ceremonies, but all the buzz I hear from my friends was that it was both impressive and beautiful without getting too cheesy.

By the way, the official Olympics site at NBC forces you to install Microsoft's Silverlight browser plugin in order to watch videos of the Olympics. That is incredibly heavy handed and ridiculous and pure Microsoft. Hold the video hostage until you adopt their software. But that's a rant for a different day.

Meanwhile, I did manage to find one video here, that you can watch without giving in to Microsoft.

I understand that some commentators have even called it a "coming out" party for China taking its place on the world stage. I think that might be pushing it. But I do agree that for many people, possibly millions of people worldwide, the opening ceremonies will be their mew default image of China.

Problem is, the Chinese government still disregards human rights that the rest of the world demands and takes for granted. The beautiful glitz and flash of the opening ceremonies cannot erase the chilling images of Tiananmen Square Massacre.


We still routinely hear of individuals being jailed just for writing things that are critical of the government. We still hear of the oppression of religious practices. The much ballyhooed economic boom benefits the Party cronies more than the average citizen who still, as far as I know, is not allowed to own his own home or farm.

Yes. China is becoming impressively modern, beautiful, and powerful, but they are also brutal and have a lot to learn about how to treat human beings.

And so we have heard the usual hue and cry about boycotting the Olympics. The argument goes that sending athletes to participate in the Olympics sends a message to the Chinese that we don't care about human rights and even tacitly condone their brutal practices.

I believe this is incredibly short sighted and even borderline hypocritical.

First of all, why do we pick on amateur athletes to bear the burden of our protests? These young people have worked and trained all their life, harder than most of us ever will. They aren't a political group and indeed, they really aren't much of a group. Yes they are part of the "US Olympic Team" but there's not much meat to that group. They are mostly individuals competing in a sport they love. And whether they show up or not isn't going to affect the situation in China in any way.

There are far more substantive activities that could be boycotted if we want to use boycotts to try to force change in China. For example, when a US business opens a division in China and begins to do business with the Chinese, why aren't we screaming "How can we possibly do business with China who brutalizes it's citizens?" Why aren't we calling for companies to refuse to do business in China? Why aren't our diplomats raising protest when we hear of another group of Chinese bloggers being rounded up and sent to jail? Why isn't our ambassador to the UN making speeches at the UN about this?

If we really wanted to raise the issue, there are a bunch of more effective ways to make the Chinese uncomfortable about their human rights situation. But no, instead, we focus our desires for protest on a group of kids who just want to play their sports and ask them to sacrifice their life long dreams.

And besides, who said boycotts are effective? I completely agree that we need to bear witness to the practices we believe are inhuman. But I'm not sure boycotts are the right way to do it. And boycotting the Olympics is especially tragic because the Olympics have much better and more important uses.

The Olympics humanize all of us. The literally put us on an equal playing field. The worst thing we can do when trying to bring about favorable change in another country is to demonize them. It's an easy trap to fall into, but the worst thing you can do. The Olympics are one thing we can do to help prevent us from falling into the trap of demonizing people we think are doing bad things.

It would be too easy to fall into a trap and think that the Chinese are somehow "evil" people individually and that there's something different about them that makes them inherently prone to human rights abuse and other evils. If we don't interact with them in human terms in a one-on-one basis, they become an abstraction which can be demonized.

The whole point of the Olympics is for countries to set aside their differences and come together as human beings in good natured competition. My big gripe about the Olympics is that they are too nationalistic. Everyone marches around under their national flag. They play national anthems of the winning athletes. they count medals by country. If I were in charge I'd get rid of all that. I'd treat the athletes as individuals, not as members of a national team.

But even with its imperfections, the Olympics are a good way for us to remember that we're all human beings and they are a chance to build interpersonal relationships across national boundaries. Yes, the Olympics are highly staged. The Chinese in particular have been very heavy handed on the restrictions they put on athletes activities at the Olympics But it's a start. It's better than nothing. .

I saw a recent news story, in which it's been noted that Iranian athletes have been pulling out of events in which they compete directly with Israelis. The most recent case was in swimming, which is discusses in the news story "Iran swimmer avoids Israeli pool showdown in Beijing." The Iranians never give an explanation, but it has happened enough times over the years that the pattern is observable. I have a hard time believing that an amateur athlete would do that. Athletes don't train their entire life to literally pull out at the last second. They live to compete. So someone, someone in the Iranian government, forced them to withdraw to send a message. To try to make a political statement. And what is that statement? That the Israelis are beneath us.

Of course it backfires. Maybe it plays well to the folks within Iran. On the world stage, it makes the Iranians look childish. It makes them look like they are demonizing the Israelis, which by the way, at least seems consistent with their other actions and statements.

I am glad that the US has not done similarly foolish things by boycotting the Olympics. I'm glad that we're reaching out to the Chinese an all the other countries of the world. I'm glad that we're there trying to be good citizens of the world, trying to make some sort of human connection with other countries. And for the same reason, that's why I'm glad we're finding ways to be civilized and do business with them. Business relationships require interpersonal trust.

In the long run, it's only these these sorts of relationships that have any chance of having influence on China's much needed reforms.

Mr. Crandall's Speech To The Wings Club

On June 10, 2008 Robert Crandall gave a speech to the Wings Club, which advertises itself as "the premier global society of aviation professionals and the leading forum on aviation issues." The event was widely advertised and as I understand it, covered by major media outlets, including National Public Radio.

A video of the speech and the text of his speech can be found at The Wings Club web site.
It's an interesting read. What's even more interesting is how Mr. Crandall is billed. Note this screen shot of the The Wings Club home page.



Mr Crandall is advertised as the "Former Chairman, President, and CEO of American Airlines." This will become important later on. But note for now that every single major media outlet coverage of the Mr. Crandall's speech describes him this way.

Mr. Crandall is long know for his opposition to deregulation of the airlines industry. According to Wikipedia, Mr. Crandall was a vehement opponent of airline deregulation and actively opposed the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act. In his most recent speech Mr. Crandall is still opposed to deregulation and is now calling for re-regulation.

Read the speech for yourself. His remarks are full of hand-wringing about the financial state of the airline industry, citing how many airlines have come and gone since deregulation and how much money airline investors have lost. He calls for us to think of airlines not as companies, but as public utilities that need to be managed by the federal government. And he speaks very negatively about the United State's capabilities, "The United States used to be good at solving problems. These days, we don't seem up to the job."

I give Mr. Crandall credit for not blaming the airlines' problems on rising oil prices. He correctly notes, IMHO, that the airlines were suffering their current malaise well before the recent spike in oil prices.

Interestingly, he also is quick to argue against the nationalization of airlines.

"If consolidation were really the answer, it is conceivable that the system could be run by a single efficient operator. However, consumers clearly benefit from the existence of multiple airlines; the absence of alternatives does not encourage good customer service. Thus, our goal should be to harness competition and regulation to create a system responsive to both the imperative of efficiency and the desirability of decent service."

So Mr. Crandall wants a combination of competition and regulation. Which parts should be competitive and which parts should be regulated? To quote from his speech, he outlines what he believes are the three broad fundamental problems in the airline industry:

• "First and foremost, we have failed to confront the reality that unfettered competition just doesn't work very well in certain industries, as amply demonstrated by our airline experience and by the adverse outcomes associated with various state efforts to deregulate electricity rates. In my view, it is time to acknowledge that airlines look and are more like utilities than ordinary businesses.
• Second, our government has failed to develop a national transportation plan of any kind and has thus been indifferent to the continuing decline of our highways, our railroads and our airlines.
• And third, the government has failed to invest in the capabilities and resources which only it can provide, most notably by failing to implement the new air traffic control system that everyone agrees we desperately need."

Lets' look at these in reverse order.

He says that the government has failed to invest in the capabilities and resources which only it can provide, notably the air traffic control system that "everyone agrees we desperately need."

Fair enough. For better or worse, when the airline industry was in its infancy, the FAA was created and one of its responsibilities is to create, manage, and run the air traffic control system. That's the way it's been since the beginning and it's not likely to change in the foreseeable future. The air traffic control system effectively limits the capacity of the industry. It governs the flight routes, and how many planes can take off at any given time. Ultimately this creates a limit on the number of airplane seats there are for any given time period. Mr. Crandall doesn't specify what types of investment are needed in the air traffic control system. Does the air traffic control system have an availability problem? In other words, is the industry suffering because the air traffic control system goes down too often and prevents airlines from making their flights, effectively taking airplane seats out of the air? While there have been some highly publicized cases of such events in the past few years, I find it difficult to believe that all of the airline's financial woes can be blamed on that. Does the FAA have a safety problem? Has there been mistakes in the air traffic control system that have made air flight significantly more risky? Not that I've heard. The only other issue that I can think to lay at the feet of the FAA is _capacity_. And I do recall seeing news reports about lack of capacity at airports and lack of capacity in the routes. A quick internet search can yield lots of stories about lack of capacity in the air traffic control system and assessments of the air traffic control system like this one show big increases on air traffic capacity while keeping costs and safety risks constant. So absent any other indicators from Mr. Crandall, I have to assume his statement about failing to invest in the air traffic control system is about problems with capacity.

Now let's look at the second fundamental problem Mr. Crandall outlines. "failed to develop a national transportation plan of any kind and has thus been indifferent to the continuing decline of our highways, our railroads and our airlines." I give Mr. Crandall high marks for rhetorical flair. He dutifully lists highways, railroads, and airlines as things that have been neglected. Now let's play that Sesame Street game of "one of these things doesn't belong here." If you guessed airlines, you guess correctly. Why? Because the railroads, at least from a passenger service perspective, are already run by the Federal government. Highways, are run through a combination of federal programs and state programs. So their infrastructure is completely run by government. But airlines aren't. While it makes sense for the government to have a "plan" for infrastructure that it is responsible for. It doesn't make sense for the government to have a "plan" for an industry that it doesn't run. So by including it in the list, he implies that the decline of the airline industries are the responsibility of the government. As noted above, the government does run parts of the airline infrastructure. But it doesn't run the airline industry as a whole and therefore is not responsible for having a plan for the airline industry as a whole.

What does Mr. Crandall think a "national transportation plan" should include?

• "First, to strengthen our national economy by encouraging the creation of a cost effective, energy sensitive transportation network which will permit people to move easily from one place to another
• "second, to assure safe, courteous and on time service for consumers
• "and finally, to improve the financial performance and international competitiveness of America's airlines.

Gee. How can you be opposed to any of that? I especially love the "cost effective, energy sensitive" part. Could we get any more vague? Can we get any more motherhood and apple pie? The question is what the feds should be doing to achieve these noble and lofty goals.

And now to take his first "problem". He states that we need to be treating airlines as "utilities" not as businesses. OK. What's the difference? Well, as far as I can see the two big differences are that with utilities, the governing authority says who can and can't operate. It sets standards for service. It sets prices. It controls how much profit or not the utility is allowed to make.

And indeed, these are the main issues that Mr. Crandall wants to have addressed.

He calls for the government to reduce it's labor costs by giving it more negotiating power with labor unions. He says that "airplane seats" cannot be stockpiled and an airline has huge fixed capital costs. So strikes have a huge impact on airlines. He calls for the railway labor act to be amended to include airline labor. This would force the airline workers into binding arbitration rather so that organized labor would be "deprived of its ultimate weapon." We'll get back to this later, but for now I'd just point out that there are other industries that are in similar situations. Hotels for example. You can't stockpile hotel nights. So when their labor strikes, they are severely affected and they have huge capital costs that can't be quickly reduced in the event of a strike. So would Mr. Crandall support amending the railway labor act to include hotel workers into binding arbitration and taking away their right to strike?

Mr. Crandall also calls for the end of congestion at major airports. How. By outlawing it. He says,

"In the short term, the only solution is a regulatory mandate that limits the number of flights scheduled to what the runways, terminals and air traffic control facilities at a given airport can handle."

So every one has to give up an equal share of their traffic at congested airports. he does NOT call for the reduction of traffic at all airports. He just calls for the reduction of traffic at congested airports. For the sake of argument, I am going to make the claim that "congested" airports are synonymous with "major airports" that have a large number or flights, and in particular, I'm going to make a claim without supporting evidence that most, if not all airports that are major airports with congestion are also airports which are a major hub for one of the big airlines. This is an important claim because Mr. Crandall has a lot to say about hub and spoke systems which I'll get to in a minute.

Next he calls for stricter financial standards for start up airlines. The reason for this is that

"In the years since deregulation, nearly 200 airlines have come and gone. These inadequately financed carriers, whose principal goal has often seemed limited to either lasting long enough to reap the rewards of an initial public offering or satisfying the ego of yet another would be airline mogul, have consistently cut prices to attract passengers. Such short-term antics have destabilized the pricing structure required by a healthy industry, and have offered no lasting benefit to anyone."

Apparently Mr. Crandall doesn't consider price reductions for airline customers to be of any benefit to the public good. If you turn this around, the "stricter financial standards must therefore prevent start up carriers from offering prices that are lower in order to not jeopardize the health of the industry. So apparently the health of an airline is more important than the prices consumers pay. Who says? Sounds like the protectionist rhetoric of an industry insider to me. We'll have more to say about this later.

But Mr. Crandall's most radical recommendations are that he wants price controls for the airline industry.

As he puts it:

It must now be clear to all that one of the industry's fundamental problems is the way in which it prices its product. As you all know, airlines work with a very distorted supply-demand equation. The instant perishability of empty seats, the impossibility of quickly reducing fixed and semi-variable costs when demand falters, the public's view that all airline seats are interchangeable commodities, the plethora of competitors and the desire to protect the reach of networks all create a great temptation to sustain volume by selling seats too cheaply."

So the problem, in his view, is that airlines are selling seats too cheaply. So guess whether or not he wants airline seats to be more or less expensive? He wants them to cost more, of course. And he wants government regulation to create more expensive airline seats. This is what anyone else would call a government subsidy. And the subsidy comes directly out of the pockets of air travelers.

Mr. Crandall does a lot of panic mongering, implying that the drive to cost reduction has led to a myriad of safety and convenience issues. The conclusions he'd have you draw is that by forcing air travelers to pay more to subsidize the airline industry, they'd get more convenience and safety. But as the government air safety assessment linked to above clearly shows, there hasn't been a decrease in safety even during the recent years. As to inconvenience, I don't know. I'll say that every air traveler I have personal experience with has consistently chosen price over convenience. Maybe my friends are not typical.

Mr. Crandall paints himself as a moderate by eschewing complete government controls of prices and then offers this relatively moderate proposal which he calls the "sum of local fares" model.

"Suppose for a moment that in a world where every airline set its own prices, a regulatory agency required that any passenger traveling between two points via a connecting point pay the sum of the local fares on his or her itinerary."

"Ask yourself this: if the non-stop fare from Detroit to Los Angeles is $450, why should a passenger be able to travel via a connection for the same amount or, as is the case today, for even less?"

Why indeed. Especially if you buy into Mr. Crandall's assertion that

"As we have all known for many years, the cheapest way to carry a passenger from point a to point b is non stop, and the most efficient way to do it is by using the largest airplane compatible with demand."

I don't buy it. Sure. there are some costs that are linear in relation to the number of miles traveled. For example, the amount of jet fuel used is in direct proportion to the number of miles traveled. And if the only thing you look at is the costs that are directly related to the miles traveled then of course the direct routes are going to cost less than routes that require a going through a hub.

But surprise! There are in fact costs to airlines that are not directly related to miles travelled. In fact, the airline industries have done a lot of analysis of operating models and there is a large body of academic research that supports the idea that the hub and spoke model is the most cost efficient model for a transportation networks and that the savings in other costs more than offset the increased costs related to miles traveled. To get a feel for this start with the Wikipedia article on "Spoke-hub distribution paradigm." The benefits of the hub and spoke model include:

• For a network of n nodes, only n - 1 routes are necessary to connect all nodes; that is, the upper bound is n - 1, and the complexity is O(n). This compares favorably to the (n(n - 1))/2 routes, or O(n2), that would be required to connect each node to every other node in a point-to-point network.
• The small number of routes generally leads to more efficient use of transportation resources. For example, aircraft are more likely to fly at full capacity, and can often fly routes more than once a day.
• Complicated operations, such as package sorting and accounting, can be carried out at the hub, rather than at every node.
• Spokes are simple, and new ones can be created easily.
• Customers may find the network more intuitive. Scheduling is convenient for them since there are few routes, with frequent service.

The Wikipedia article also notes some drawbacks to hub and spoke, but they do not relate to efficiency.

So when Mr. Crandall says

"As we have all known for many years, the cheapest way to carry a passenger from point a to point b is non stop, and the most efficient way to do it is by using the largest airplane compatible with demand."

it is simply not true. The airline industry has known for decades that the most efficient way, when you factor in ALL of the relevant costs, of getting a passenger from A to B is NOT ALWAYS a direct flight and in fact more often than not it is actually cheaper, OVERALL, to send a passenger through a hub.

Mr. Crandall ran American Airlines for many years and was a key player in major airlines before that. He should know the benefits of the hub and spoke model. Scratch that. I'll go so far to say that Mr. Crandall MUST know the benefits of the hub and spoke model. It's inconceivable IMHO for a CEO of American Airlines to so completely misunderstand the economics of running a major airline.

At very least, he owes us a more complete explanation about why the benefits of the hub and spoke model don't apply to the airline industry when they apply to other forms of transportation and the principles of hub and spoke apply to other domains of study such as distributed computing.

So when he says "As we have all known for many years, the cheapest way to carry a passenger from point a to point b is non stop." I have to conclude that his is deliberately misleading his audience.

But why? Why would be make such an easily refuted claim in a public forum?

Why is Mr. Crandall so against the hub and spoke model? Why does he want to use government regulation to destroy the economic advantage of the hub and spoke model? If the hub and spoke model is more efficient and the airlines can offer airplane seats through a hub that are cheaper than direct flights (when you factor in all the costs) why should the government use its regulatory power to eliminate the advantages of this efficiency and force passengers to pay more?

So let's recap. When you factor in all the costs of running an airline, the hub and spoke model is more efficient than having direct flights. In fact, it's common today for a passenger to spend less on a route through a hub than a direct flight. It's to the airline's economic advantage to do so, even factoring in the inconvenience to the passenger for having to travel longer. So the hub and spoke model _helps_ airlines stay economically viable.

Why would Mr. Crandall be against it? Why would Mr. Crandall arguer for the government to artificially raise prices of passengers going through the hubs in order to eliminate the cost efficiencies of the hub and spoke model? Why would Mr. Crandall have an interest in making the direct routes more competitive to the hub and spoke routes? Why would Mr. Crandall advocate that passengers should pay more, while at the same time eliminating the efficiencies of the hub and spoke model in favor of less efficient direct routes?

In five minutes of internet searching, I could find at least one credible reason that Mr. Crandall would make these counter-intuitive recommendations. I found at least one credible reason why we should not trust Mr. Crandall's recommendations.

Mr. Crandall has a financial interest in destroying the hub and spoke model. In fact basically every single recommendation Mr. Crandall made has more to do with his financial self-interest than any interest in the welfare of the big airlines and the airline industry. In fact, Mr. Crandall has a financial interest in ensuring that the big airlines are less competitive.

In his speech, Mr. Crandall said, "As you all know, I am no longer active in airline management, and thus lack the sophisticated analytical tools I so enjoyed in years past." And remember the web site advertising Mr. Crandall as "Former Chairman, President, and CEO of American Airlines." This would imply that Mr. Crandall is no longer working in the airline industry.

That speech was delivered on June 10th, 2008. But as I write this article on July 10th, a month later. Mr. Crandall is in fact the Chairman and CEO of POGO airlines. Check it out for yourself on the web site's leadership page. And there is a press release currently on the POGO web dated February 28th 2008. The press release announces the appointment of two new people to POGO's Board Of Directors and at the end of the press release the press release clearly states that "POGO’s management team is led by Robert Crandall, the former president, CEO and chairman of American Airlines. I don't know about you, but I am unable to reconcile this statement with Mr. Crandall's statement that "As you all know, I am no longer active in airline management.

So Mr. Crandall is at the most charitable interpretation, misleading the audience when he says he is "no longer active in airline management." Given the gravity with which his opinion is taken in the industry I'll go so far as to say it's unethical of him to not disclose his obvious financial interests in the airline industry in his speech.

But wait, it gets worse.

POGO airlines is not just any startup airlines. They have a unique strategy.


From the "What is POGO?" page of the web site:

POGO is a development-stage company, not yet certified or offering service. We plan to become operational as a FAA-certified Part 135 operator by the first quarter of 2009.

Our idea is simple: to make on-demand, private air travel more affordable, easier to use, and more convenient.

Our plan is to use the low purchase price and operating costs of today’s Very Light Jets with intensive use of the planes to significantly lower the cost of private aviation. Our on-line booking system will permit customers to quickly arrange a flight that most closely fits their needs. And, by serving a vast network of underutilized small airports, POGO customers will be able to bypass congested hubs. In fact, our customers will be able to choose from over 400 airports in our initial service area."

Oh really? So by using the smaller, lighter airplanes and underutilized small airports, POGO's customers will be able to arrange a flight that more closely fits their needs. Is the web site implying that maybe customers are more likely to find a direct flight that bypasses the congested hubs? Cool! Customers will find it much more convenient to fly a POGO flight because its routes are more likely to be direct.

But what if, due to the hub and spoke model, the big airlines are able to actually offer flights between the small airports at a lower cost that POGO can due to it's reliance on direct routes? As the Wikipedia article shows, there are clear efficiency benefits to using the hub and spoke model. So what if the big airlines really can get a passenger from a to b cheaper than POGO can? Now the customer has a choice between the lower cost or more convenience. I don't have access to industry survey data, but I'd be willing to bet that, other things being equal, my friends would choose the lower price every time.

So what's a CEO to do? Here's an idea. Why not convince the government to force the big airlines at those congested hubs to peg their prices to the number of air miles traveled. That way there's NO WAY, enforced by government regulation, that big airlines can compete with POGO on price.

So it turns out the Mr. Crandall's "sum of the local fares" model has little to do with the health of the airline industry, little to do with global warming or the price of oil and all about making his new shiny airline more competitive at passenger expense.

And in fact, when you look at Mr. Crandall's speech in light of the knowledge that he was in fact the Chairman and CEO of an airline at the time he made his speech, every single recommendation he made makes much more sense in the light of his self interest in the success of his shiny new airline.

Let's go through some of Mr. Crandall's recommendations again.

As we've noted. The "sum of local fares" model of price controls he advocates will prevent the big airlines for getting passengers from a to be cheaper than his airlines can.

He calls for more investment in infrastructure, especially in the air traffic control system. Note that because his airline is not following the hub and spoke model, he'll have far more flights and routes. In fact they brag about using more and smaller planes. As Wikipedia notes, if he doesn't use the hub and spokemodel, the number of routes needed for his airline in crease with the square of the number of airports he serves. So you bet he's concerned with the capacity of the air traffic control system!

Mr. Crandall calls for the railway labor act to be amended to include airline labor so that airline labor can't strike and is forced into binding arbitration. Hmm, as CEO of POGO, do you think Mr. Crandall could foresee himself in labor negotiations in the future? Wouldn't it be nice if the government made the labor unions weaker for him?

Mr. Crandall calls for the government to use its power to eliminate the number of flights going into and out of "congested" airports. By the words of the POGO website, the congested airports are the hub airports. So if the government forcibly reduces the number of flights going into and out of hubs, and assuming the number or travelers remains more or less the same, won't that increase demand for POGOs routes, which bypass the hubs?

He argues against the nationalization of airlines, maybe because he's trying to start one himself.

I could go on, but that's enough for you to get the idea.

Maybe some of the recommendations make sense for the pubic and maybe they don't. But in my opinion, Mr. Crandall's speech to the Wings Club was unethical, misleading, and entirely self-serving and cannot be taken seriously as a honest policy analysis.

My Car Is A Vegetarian And Part Of The Problem

On July 4^th, The Guardian newspaper in the UK published an news article about an unpublished report commissioned by the World Bank that cites damming evidence that demand for biofuels has pushed world food prices up by as much as 75%. This notably contradicts claims by the United States government that biofuel demand has affected world food prices by only 3%. There is some speculation that the World Bank has so far chosen not to publish the report precisely because it would embarrass the Bush administration.

Biofuels were once seen as a major components of plans to reduce greenhouse gases but over the past couple of years there have been a myriad of unintended consequences relating to governments’ support ofr biofuels that are making biofuels look less and less attractive all the time.

The controversy over rising food prices are just the latest, though perhaps the most obvious negative consequence. The British government already requires that all fuels sold in the UK contain 2.5% biofeuls and the EU is considering a requirement of 10% biofuel. The Guardian reports that the World Bank report says:

"Without the increase in biofuels, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate," says the report. The basket of food prices examined in the study rose by 140% between 2002 and this February. The report estimates that higher energy and fertiliser prices accounted for an increase of only 15%, while biofuels have been responsible for a 75% jump over that period.”

The Guardian article goes on to say that:

“It argues that production of biofuels has distorted food markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going towards the production of biodiesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for biofuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.”

The United States is perhaps the biggest subsidizer of biofuels and is arguably the biggest distorter of food prices as a result. Biofuel subsidies have been one of the most popular topics of legislation over the past few years and there’s a myriad of bizarre ways in which the US government has given money to the biofuels industry.

In 2007, the Global Subsidies Initiative (GSI) of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD). Commissioned a report simply to document and understand all the different ways that the US government subsidizes biofuels. The report titled, “BIOFUELS - AT WHAT COST ?” is freely available and is a fascinating read. It’s truly amazing how creative legislators can get when they want to hand out money to an industry.

Table 4.1 of the report is shown below, as you can see, there are no less than 14 different ways in which the US government supports the biofuels industry.

The estimated subsidy for ethanol in 2008 alone is somewhere between $9.2 billion and $11 billion and the 2008 subsidy for biodiesel is between $1.5 billion and $1.8 billion. When all the subsidies for both types of fuel are added up from 2006 through the estimates for 2012, the total subsidies add up to somewhere between $66 billion and $91 billion. FYI. That’s a lot of money!

The biggest subsidy by far is the Volumetric Excise Tax Credit. I had no idea what this is until I read the report, which states that:

The volumetric excise tax credits for blending biofuels remain the single largest implemented subsidy to both ethanol and biodiesel. Rates have remained the same over the past year, with every gallon of ethanol (including imports) receiving a 51 cents per gallon blender’s credit. For biodiesel, rates have remained at 50 cents per gallon for biodiesel from waste cooking oils and $1.00 per gallon for biodiesel made from virgin agricultural feedstock. No caps or linkage to oil prices have been instituted; as a result, the subsidy cost has risen linearly with domestic consumption.

Furthermore, the tax law for most subsidies of this sort is taxable. But not biofuel subsidies. Quoting from the report:

“In our October 2006 report, we noted the existence of a further tax loophole that enabled the excise tax credits to be excluded from taxable income (most tax credits are added to taxable income, reducing their cost to the Treasury). Sources within both the Joint Committee on Taxation of the U.S. Congress (JCT) and the U.S. Department of Treasury (Treasury) have confirmed that there have been no technical corrections in how the excise tax credits are treated by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). As a result, the credits are still excludible from taxable income. The incremental benefit of this exemption was $ 1.2 billion for ethanol in 2006 on top of a direct revenue loss of $ 2.8 billion; and $ 105 million for biodiesel, on top of $ 250 million direct revenue loss. The incremental subsidy from this tax loophole, supposedly a policy accident, has become the third largest subsidy to ethanol and the second largest to biodiesel.”

These subsidies have lead to a practice called “splash and dash” among biodiesel producers. I found a good explanation of this practice in The Christian Science Monitor in a 2007 article which describes the practice like this:

Created under the 2004 American Jobs Act, the "blenders tax credit" was supposed to boost US production of biodiesel by encouraging US diesel marketers to blend regular petroleum diesel with fuel made from soybeans or other agricultural products. It succeeded, perhaps too well.

Attracted by the $1-per-gallon subsidy, US diesel-fuel marketers mixed away, setting off a nationwide boom in biodiesel refinery building. But no one anticipated splash-and-dash.

The maneuver begins with a shipload of biodiesel from, say, Malaysia, which pulls into a US port like Houston, says John Baize, an industry consultant in Falls Church, Va. Unlike domestic diesel-biodiesel blends, which typically contain from 1 to 10 percent of biodiesel, the Malaysian fuel starts off as 100 percent biodiesel, typically made from palm oil.

Then, the vessel receives from a dockside diesel supplier a "splash" of US petroleum diesel. It doesn't take much to turn it into a diesel-biodiesel blend that is eligible for US subsidies.

If the ship holds roughly 9 million gallons, it takes only about 9,000 gallons of traditional diesel (0.1 percent of the total) to make the entire load eligible for the blenders tax credit.

The US importer of the load applies to the Internal Revenue Service for the credit – a dollar for each of the 9 million biodiesel gallons, Mr. Baize calculates. The next day the tanker can set sail – dash – for Europe. There, the US importer resells the biodiesel, taking advantage of European fuel-tax credits that, in effect, keep biodiesel prices above US prices.

So for each tanker that does this, the taxpayers pay $9 million to the company and the fuel is not even sold to US consumers.

The other unintended consequence of biofuel subsidies is more like a lack of a consequence. The IISD report also crunches some numbers to calculate the efficiency of these subsidies in terms of reducing greenhouse gases and displacing carbon fuels and concludes:

“our basic conclusion remains the same: even using the most favorable assumptions regarding displacement values for biofuels, the cost per unit displaced was far higher than other options existing in the economy.”

So let’s recap where we are with biofuels and the U.S. subsidies that support them:

• The cost to US Taxpayers from 2006 -2012 is somewhere in the ballpark of $66 billion and $91 billion.
• US Consumers often don’t benefit from the subsidies due to “splash and dash practices”.
• a “policy mistake” exempts the biofuel subsidies from taxation
• there is at least one credible study that shows with some degree of certainty that the U.S. subsidies of biofuels is less efficient at displacing carbon fuels usage than other alternatives.
• the massive subsidies of the biofuels industry is arguably contributing to the massive rise in food prices.

The IISD report sums it up bureaucratically:

“Given the inefficiencies that have been identified, combined with the rising environmental costs of biofuel production around the world, there is no reason that this one particular approach aimed at addressing energy security and climate change concerns should be given a free rein.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favor of exploring as many energy alternatives as possible and in an era of $4 per gallon gas (and rising), a lot of the energy alternatives are becoming economically viable in their own right. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to explore energy alternatives. Massive government subsidies are becoming more and more obviously the wrong way to go about it.

The next time I see one of those smarmy bumper stickers like the “My car is a vegetarian too” sticker, I’m not going to be nearly as impressed as I used to be. In fact, I’m gonna start thinking of them more as a “part of the problem” than “part of the solution.”

Survey Shows U.S. Religious Tolerance

The New York Times has an article titled, "Survey Shows U.S. Religious Tolerance" which reports on the results of a survey from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The study shows a large degree of religious tolerance in the U.S. across all sects and segments of society.

From the NYT article:

For example, 70 percent of Americans affiliated with a religion or denomination said they agreed that “many religions can lead to eternal life,” including majorities among Protestants and Catholics. Among evangelical Christians, 57 percent agreed with the statement, and among Catholics, 79 percent did.

Among minority faiths, more than 80 percent of Jews, Hindus and Buddhists agreed with the statement, and more than half of Muslims did.

The findings seem to undercut the conventional wisdom that the more religiously committed people are, the more intolerant they are, scholars who reviewed the survey said.

Now if only other countries were as equally tolerant.

Congressman Calls For Nationalization of Oil Refineries

US House Representative Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) is a member of the the House Appropriations Committee and has been known as one of the leading opponents of allowing oil drilling off the coasts of the US.

During a press briefing yesterday, he was quoted by several news sources including MSNBC as saying,

"We (the government) should own the refineries. Then we can control how much gets out into the market."

Yeah. Right. That'll help a lot.

Of course if you don't actually let the oil companies drill, what is there to refine?

Also, note that he didn't say that the government would actually increase the amoint of oil refined if they nationalized the refineries. He said that the government would control it. Not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination.

A Chill On The Internet

I recently learned of a blog posting from someone in Germany named Florian Sander who was commenting on a recent survey in Germany. Unfortunately the original survey report is in German.

But the blog post is in English and the author makes a point that I've long believed:

The problem with surveillance is not primarily that some bored officer might learn about some embarrassing private detail (although this is a problem as well). The fundamental problem with surveillance is that it changes people. People under surveillance behave differently than people who are not monitored - differently than free people.

I've long kept my eye open for scientifically credible studies that back up this point, but have never run into one.

The author however has posted information about a law tht was recently put into effect in Germany. From the author's blog:

Unfortunately, this fundamental problem has just been proven in Germany. Since the beginning of this year, communication providers are required to record who communicated with whom and when (but not the content of the communication). This data is stored for six months and available to law enforcement in cases related to certain forms of crime.

The author goes on to reference a survey done recently be a research firm in German, which discovered:

• 73% know about the data retention
• 11% said that they had already abstained from using phone, cell phone or e-mail in certain occasions
• 6% believe to receive less communication since the beginning of the data retention
• 52% said they probably would not use telecommunication for contacts like drug counselors, psychotherapists or marriage counselors because of data retention

In addition to the German law, more and more countries are invading their citizens privacy on a massive scale. Sweden is in the process of giving law enforcement officials the right to monitor all forms of electronic communication that cross Swedish borders with no court oversight whatsoever.

In India, the government is pressuring Blackberry to give it the keys to it's encryption mechanism so that the Indain government can monitor all traffic on the blackberry network in India.

It goes on and on. No one seems to care about how these laws are going to be affecting society as a whole.

Bill would let pharmacies sell medical records

"Bill would let pharmacies sell medical records"

The California legistlature has a bill before it, authored Democratic Party State Senator Ron Calderon, which would let pharmacies sell their patient records to Drug Marketing companies so that they can market their drugs directly to people.

It's difficult to think of a more blatant violation of privacy rights. The whole point of patient privacy is that the only the patient, physician and pharmacist have the right to know what medications are prescribed. In many cases, even the patient's family don't know the medications that the patient is taking, for a host of good reasons.

Imagine if a marketing company had possession of this information and started calling the patient's house, or sending mail to the patients house. It's easy to see how easily the patients privacy could be violated.

And even if you weren't worried about that. People often feel very sensitive about their medications and they don't want to receive marketing messages about their medications. I can easily see how getting bombarded with marketng messages about their meds could cause some patients to stop taking them.

What's amazing to me is the double speak being used to defend this proposed legislation. A spokesman for the State Senator Calderon said, "The point is to tell people to take the drug as prescribed and to refill it."

Yeah, Right. Not that I can't imagine a company engaging in public service like that. But there's a fundamental marketing concept called "adjacent markets" which is to say you start with one market and send marketing messages for similar products or services to that market. For example, suppose a patient is taking a prescription acid reducer medicine. Why not market over the counter medicines to that patient as well. And on the assumption that stomach acid is highly correlated with stress, why not market stress relief programs to that person. The point is, even if the do as intended, which is to remind people to take their medicines and prescribed, who can believe they won't do additional marketing to them?

The other tactic Senator Calderon is using to try to sell this legislation is that it has an "opt out" provision. At the time that patient picks up the prescription, he or she would be gien a form to sign in order to opt out of sharing their information. That's so wrong.

As we've seen with those gazillions of HIPAA notices, people HATE having to sign those forms every time they pick up a prescription. Most people have no idea what they are signing when they sign those forms. So adding a second one would be just as bad and make an already complicated process even thatmuch more complicated.

It's incredibly hard to understand how Senator Calderon can square his responsibility to his constituents with this bill. Nothing says special interest group like this bill.

And what makes me doubly mad is that the legislators are starting to adopt the terminology of privacy protection and twisting it around to serve their privacy invading purposes.

Pictures Only A Scientist Could Love and Prospecting

I've been spending a ridiculous amount of time at the Phoenix Mars Mission site. The engineering involved in this mission is just staggering and for it to have been so relatively error free up to this point is almost unthinkable, especially considering how much software is involved.

But all that planning and building and testing and travelling the hundreds of thousands of miles to give us pictures like this:


It's dead, Jim. Can't we at least get a faux-face print in the sand or suspiciously stacked rocks? I don't need little green men. But please, let's get a little bit of mystery.

I know. I know. They are going to dig for signs of water and potential building blocks of life to see if maybe once there might could have been primitive life on the planet. And yes that will be very cool to find out. For the record. Here's my prediction. The planet is dead. Always has been. Always will be. I predict they will find not even the faintest hint of a possibility of life there.

When I was at Balticon I sat in on an presentation on the current state of AI in computers and an overview of the different approaches to AI systems. Along the way the presenter talked about some decision that were made about how much AI to put into the phoenix mission and how much autonomy to give the lander. The trade offs are that if you give the lander more autonomy it can react to threats more immediately because it takes multiple minutes for it to phone home information and wait for instructions. On the other hand, no one quite trusts AI systems to make the right decisions. In the end, the scientists and engineers opted out of giving the lander. The idea being that buy putting it under direct control of the earthbound crew they would likely be able to get some data out of it no matter how badly things went wrong. The speaker at this panel said that they'd rather have a sure chance at getting 10% of the data they were hoping for than run the risk of getting nothing because something went horribly wrong.

In my amateur study of risk management for my job in IBM, I've had the chance to read up on prospect theory, which is the study of the idea that human beings do not respond to all risks the same way and in particular that people do not want to put at risk what they already have or think they can have, but they will have higher risk tolerances when they think they can minimize losses. It seems to me that the decision to not give the Phoenix lander autonomy is consistent with this principle, which in some way, is more interesting than any of the pictures I've seen so far.

19 Year Old College Freshman Wins Mayoral Race

The Associated Press is reporting a story titled "U. of Okla. freshman, 19, elected mayor of Muskogee"

There's a couple of things that impress me about this story. First of all, Muskogee is a town of 38,000 people. It's a small town, sure, but big enough to have to run a serious campaign in order to win.

The next thing that impresses me, and amuses me, is this quote from Mayor-elect John Tyler Hammons:

"The public placing their trust in me is the greatest, humbling and most awesome experience I've ever had in my life," said Hammons, who is from Muskogee but attends the university in Norman.

I gotta like a politician that uses "most awsome" in a speech. That kinda says it all.

But the thing that impressed me the most was Mr. Hammons platform, from the AP Article:

The mayor leads the nine-member city council and serves as a voting member. Hammons said a key to his platform that resonated with voters was openness of government and keeping citizens better informed of city operations.

"I think that's been a detriment to the trust of the citizens of Muskogee," he said. "Once we have that trust, we can solve any other problem."

Truer words were never spoken.

How Do You Say "Fido" in Spanish?

So there's been much buzz of late that Raul Castro has "allowed" Cubans to buy and own personal computers.

I'll refrain from stating the obvious. It's a sick and twisted society when one man can dictate what things the citizens are and aren't allowed to do/buy/be.

The interesting part about the story to me is that Raul still hasn't seen fit to allow the citizens of Cuba to hook their computers to the internet.

This reminds me of the pre-internet days of personal computers. For years, I ran a node on the FidoNet BBS systems. This was a message passing network, kind of like Internet news groups but the machines in the FidoNet dialed up each other and exchange messages. It was slow, but it worked.

I wonder how long it will take Cubans to discover the joys of FidoNet and I wonder how long it will be before ol' Raul will realize he's let the genie out of the bottle.

Protecting Britney's Data

Greetings,

I just posted the latest entry to my blog. This week I discuss, "Protecting Britney's Data."

Here's a teaser for ya:

The UCLA Medical Center is in the news for a privacy breach. Again. The victim? Britney Spears. Again. The full story is published in the L.A. Times under the headline “UCLA workers snooped in Spears' medical records”

In 2005 when she had her first child at UCLA, employees were caught snooping her medical records even though they didn’t have a need to know. In January 31^st of this year, Ms. Spears was checked into the psychiatric unit for treatment. And again, employees could not resist using the hospital’s medical records system to snoop on her medical record files. All in all, UCLA Medical Center is taking steps to fire 13 employees of the hospital, and suspend 6 others. Six doctors are facing disciplinary actions.

There’s nothing new about a privacy breach at a hospital these days, unfortunately. But this story is interesting because it can be spun as a case of not learning from past incidents. But I wonder if that’s true......

As always, I welcome your feedback either here or at the Visible IT blog.

Recycling CO2 Emissions

Imagine sicking in the CO2 emissions from auto exhuast or a coal fired plant and converting it back into Gasoline? That's just the sort of blue sky thinking being pursued at the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. And, by the way, they use sunlight to do it.

Makes my brain hurt just thinking about it.

So far it's only been demonstrated in laboratory environments and large scale commercialization is still a decade or so away. But the possibilities are intriguing. For one thing, if such a process were in place, you could literally buy yourself carbon offsets by buying tyour share of time on a CO2 recylcling process!

Pay As You Go

As a general rule, I have been opposed to all of the recent Democratic Party proposals in Congress regarding the War in Iraq. I think they've largely been bone-headed proposals intended to debate _yesterday's_ issue of whether or not to invade Iraq instead of debating _today's_ issue, which is what should we be doing to help Iraq restore their government and rebuild their nation. We are in nation building phase now whether the Democratic Party would like it to be or not.

But today Rep. David Obey, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and Reps John Murtha and Jim McGovern, all Democrats, offered a tax plan that add surcharges to our tax bill in order to pay for the latest $150 billion funding request.

I don't know the details of the plan. I might find the details odious. If the tax plan said that the $150 billion would be paid for by people whose first name is Calvin, i might object.

But as a general principle, I am 100% for paying for wars as we go along. I actually agree with Rep. Obey when he argued on the House floor today that it's unfair to burden future generations with the cost of this war.

I just wish that the Democratic Party would apply this principle to other areas of government as well. And I am apalled that the Republicans, the party that once upon a time argued that it is the party of fiscal responsibility, didn't pick up on the Democratic gambit and say, "Yeah, you're right. It's the right thing to do. Let's work together to come up with a plan to pay for this $150 billion."

What do we get from the Republicans instead? Well, for one thing we get Rep. Roy Blunt, Repubican Whip saying "If the new majority has proven one thing this session, it's that no piece of legislation is immune from being converted into a vehicle to raise taxes."

Rep. Nancy Pelosi has also stated her opposition to the proposal.

Argh.

Full story at:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071003/ap_on_go_co/us_iraq_tax

Edwards, Sacrificing SUVs, and $400 Haircuts

From ABC News 13, "Western North Carolina's News Leader," a web article titled, "Edwards: Americans should sacrifice their SUVs"

I quote the news story in its entirety:

Edwards: Americans should sacrifice their SUVs
August 29, 2007 07:46 EDT

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. (AP) -- Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards told a labor group he would ask Americans to make a big sacrifice: their sport utility vehicles.

The former North Carolina senator told a forum by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, yesterday he thinks Americans are willing to sacrifice.

Edwards says Americans should be asked to drive more fuel efficient vehicles. He says he would ask them to give up SUVs.

Edwards got a standing ovation when he said weapons and equipment used by America's military needs to be made in the United States. He says tanks and ammunition for M16 rifles are being made in other countries.

He says jobs that provide equipment for America's defense need to be made in the United States.

Fist of all, I'd like to point out what an awful reporting job this is. And I note that it has neither a by-line or any sort of attribution to a news service. Judging from the URL it's a wire story but it's unclear if the station pulled this story off the wires or wrote the original and is putting it out in the news service. Note the incorrect use of "by" instead of "of" in the second paragraph. Note that the last sentence/paragraph doesn't even make sense. I think what the writer was intending to say was that equipment that provides for America's defense needs to be made in the Unites States with American labor. But what really irks me about this news story is that there isn't a single direct quote from John Edwards in the whole thing. How hard would it be to get a transcript of his speech and call out a quote or two to prove to us what he actually said?

But let's take the article at face value for a minute. Let's assume that the anonymous author accurate captured what John Edwards said in his speech.

First of all, the article twice says that Edwards would ask Americans to sacrifice/give up their SUVs. Why? Well the article doesn't directly say. Indirectly, the article implies that the reason he wants Americans to sacrifice their SUVs is for fuel efficiency reasons because there is a sentence in there in which Edwards reportedly thinks Americans should drive more fuel efficient vehicles.

OK, fine. Let's assume that we can put this gobbledey-gook of an article together and infer that John Edwards wants us to sacrifice SUVs for the sake of fuel efficiency. But fuel efficiency is not an end in itself. Why do we care about fuel efficiency? Is Edwards jumping on the Al Gore carbon neutral living band wagon? Is he jumping on the energy-independence-as-a-national-security-issue band wagon? We're left to wonder.

Why is he targeting SUVs? Why do we have to sacrifice our SUVs instead of, oh i dunno, 22' recreational vehicles? Why do we have to sacrifice SUVs instead of our V8 Cadiallac STS? Why do we have to sacrifice our SUVs instead of those land-yaht-sized convertibles? I bet I could name 20 common vehicles on the road that are just as bad or worse than SUVs. So why does Edwards single out SUVs? Does he think that if we eliminate SUVs all of our fuel efficiency woes will be solved? I doubt it, but you never know with John Edwards.

More likely, Edwards' reference to SUVs was a rhetorical flourish, a synecdoche to represent all fuel inefficient cars. In that case, I'd have to ask, why use SUVs in this case? Why didn't he say that he would ask Americans to give up their Caddies? Or their 22' RVs? Perhaps he perceives SUV drivers are already hated by a segment of the population he's trying to appeal to and he's trying to fan the flames of that hatred to win the approval of that segment of the population.

The other thing that bothers me is the phrase "Americans are willing to sacrifice". What does he think Americans are willing to sacrifice. Does he think non-SUV drivers are willing to require that SUV drivers give up their SUV for another car that meets with everyone else's approval? Does he mean that _all_ Americans are willing to pay higher car prices for more fuel-efficient cars? Does he mean that _all_ Americans are willing to give up car safety as a trade-off for having lighter, more fuel efficient cares? Based on the story Edwards could mean that Americans are willing to either sacrifice their neighbor's car, sacrifice their money, or sacrifice their family's safety. There are probably other things "sacrifice" could be interpreted to mean. The point here is that Edwards does not specify or clarify what he thinks the sacrifice would be/need to be. Again without direct quotes from Edwards, we don't know if this ambiguity is due to the content of Edwards' speech or the poor reporting skills of the author.

Speaking of ambiguity, my biggest problem with this whole article is in the ambiguity of the word "ask." Does he mean that he's going to go house to house of every SUV-owning family in the United States, knock on the door, and politely suggest to the family that they trade in their SUV for a Prius? I'm sure Toyota would love that. But somehow I doubt that. His he going to include a section in his state of the union address to guilt trip people who own gas guzzlers? Maybe, but I doubt it. John Edwards is campaigning for the Democratic nomination for the President of the United States. So many people would assume that Edwards is making a policy speech. By that I mean, he is communicating to the American people how he would use his authority over the various departments in the Executive Branch and his influence on the legislative process to enact legislation and regulations that would force the country to do something about fuel efficiency. But Edwards doesn't have the guts to actually tells us what his policy actions would be. In fact, by using the term "ask" he completely avoids having to take any meaningful action at all. He _could_ have said that he will urge congress to pass legislation to outlaw SUVs. He could have said he would said that he would require the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to raise the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards. There's a thousand specific recommendations he could have made to address fuel efficiency issues. But he didn't say _anything_ specific. By using the word "ask" and "sacrifice" in his speech he doesn't commit himself to doing anything more than issuing a press release saying he wished Americans would buy more fuel efficient cars.

The reason all those muckraking news stories about Edwards' vanity and all those wanton stories about his opulent lifestyle stick to him like glue is that, as snarky as they are, they are actually _more_ substantive than anything else Edwards says/does on the campaign trail. If Edwards went on record with a specific, significant policy statement like, "Within my first year as President, I'll require the NHTSA to raise CAFE standards by 20% with a 4 year deadline for the industry to meet those new standards" I betcha we would immediately stop hearing about $400 haircuts, because he'd finally give us all something to talk about, something meaningful to debate.

Democrats' April Fools Joke

Dick Morris had an interesting article published on the web site, The Hill, on July 18th about the latest bill sent through the house regarding the War In Iraq. The vote on the bill was on July 12th and passed largely along party lines with a vote of 223 to 201. Supposedly, according to the Pelosi's talking points, the bill called for a withdrawal from Iraq.

But Morris, who served as chief of staff for Bill Clinton's administration, actually read the text of the Bill, which he quotes in his article which I'll also include:

The purpose of the bill was to “require the secretary of defense to commence the reduction of the number of United States armed forces in Iraq to a limited presence by April 1, 2008”

It also said:

“president shall, at a minimum, address whether it is necessary for the armed forces to carry out the following missions:

“(A) Protecting United States diplomatic facilities and United States citizens, including members of the armed forces who are engaged in carrying out other missions.

“(B) Serving in roles consistent with customary diplomatic positions.

“(C) Engaging in actions to disrupt and eliminate al Qaeda and its affiliated organizations in Iraq.

“(D) Training and equipping members of the Iraqi Security Forces.”

Instead of unconditionally calling for a withdrawal from Iraq, the bill actually _requires_ the President to keep troops in Iraq if the President deems any of the above items necessary.

So the question becomes, what's different between this bill and what's going on now? Does anyone seriously believe the president would not view any of these items to be necessary? Are there _any_ military activities in Iraq that don't fall into one of these 4 categories? So even if tis bill sailed through the House and Senate unchanged, it would not require the President to bring a single person home by April 1, 2008.

As far as I can see, the only real substantive thing the bill does is require the president to "address" whether these things are necessary. I think that's fair. If the president is going to put the lives of troops at risk, he is morally obligated, IMHO, to state to the world why and defend his justification. I'm not sure this legislation is the right way to do force him to do that. But I am supportive of the idea of discussing why we need to keep troops in Iraq.

But for Pelosi and the Democratic candidates to claim that this bill calls for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq gives the country the impression that the Democrats are calling for an unconditional withdrawal of troops in a specific, near term time frame, which clearly it's not. And the Democrats have been deliberately misleading about this bill and ought to be ashamed of themselves for playing these games. If they really want to get out of Iraq, they could have drafted a bill to say so, but they didn't.

I can't help but wonder if the deadline in the bill, April 1, 2008, was deliberately chosen for it's significance. If the bill was somehow passed and somehow the president signed it, then on April 1 2008 when not a single troop had been brough home, the Democrats could say to the public. "April Fools Day!"

Al Gore Finds Himself

So Al Gore has finally found himself. He's the new Jerry Lewis, rounding up hoards of B-List entertainers for an annual telethon to raise money, or at least raise consciousness about a Very Important Issue which we should all pay more attention to. Like Lewis' Labor Day Telethon for he Muscular Dystrophy Association, the glitz of the Live Earth didn't quite hide the fact that it's well, a little bit dull.

I think it's inevitable that an event that was hyped so much would be followed with a media storm of critical press and I along with them can't help but be a little snarky about the whole thing. The event was Big, way Big. Bigness commands attention. So what was communicated, what was said. Was consciousness raised at all?

The nominal purpose of Live Earth was to get all those booty shakin' hipsters to participate in the Call To Action. It's filled with very tame things:

• I will change four light bulbs to CFLs at my home.
• I will ride public transit or carpool one or more times per week.
• I will shop for the most energy efficient electronics and appliances.
• I will forward a Live Earth email message to 5 friends.'
• I will shut off my equipment and lights whenever I'm not using them.
• Add my name to the Live Earth pledge.

The first five items strike me as not doing partcularly much to save the planet or reduce carbon emissions. But I'll grant that they are consciousness raising items. They are items that any Joe Schmoe can do and feel good about. So, ok. I'll buy into the theory that if you get people to adopt these simple things it will start getting them to think in a greener more environmentally conscious way which will cause them to act in mor eprofound ways when the opportunity comes up. So, fair enough. Although I am amused that these lightweight items are made even lighter weight by the fact that you can choose which ones, if any, you want to do. So you can just sign up for the "I will shut off my equipment and lights whenever I'm not using them." That's the one that I'd sign up for because it has the added bonus that it will make my parents happy because that's what they always told me as i was growing up.

What about that last bullet in the call to action? It's the "Add my name to the Live Earth pledge." which is listed below:

I pledge:

1. To demand that my country join an international treaty within the next 2 years that cuts global warming pollution by 90% in developed countries and by more than half worldwide in time for the next generation to inherit a healthy earth;
2. To take personal action to help solve the climate crisis by reducing my own CO2 pollution as much as I can and offsetting the rest to become "carbon neutral;"
3. To fight for a moratorium on the construction of any new generating facility that burns coal without the capacity to safely trap and store the CO2;
4. To work for a dramatic increase in the energy efficiency of my home, workplace, school, place of worship, and means of transportation;
5. To fight for laws and policies that expand the use of renewable energy sources and reduce dependence on oil and coal;
6. To plant new trees and to join with others in preserving and protecting forests; and,
7. To buy from businesses and support leaders who share my commitment to solving the climate crisis and building a sustainable, just, and prosperous world for the 21st century.