I haven’t written a whole lot about McCain this election season, largely because I’m trying to stay above the stupid shrill meaningless differences between the candidates that seems to dominate the news. But on some things, it’s worth jumping in.

Now, McCain has slowly been slipping into panderville trying to appeal to the religious right, and this latest bit is just horrible. Here’s the quote:

I think that we’ve proven that both parents are important in the success of a family so, no I don’t believe in gay adoption.

I’m guessing that what McCain is talking about here is child well-being in different family structures. I.e. some studies have shown that kids from married happy households tend to be better off.

Here’s the one most people talk about (PDF Link).

The take away of this study is this: married biological parents with low levels of conflict tend to make for well adjusted kids.

Okay, that’s great. So by McCain’s sweeping logic, we shouldn’t allow for adoption of any sort, because oh yeah, by definition adoption means at least one of the biological parents is no longer involved. But this logic clearly hits single adoptive parents of any sort, gay or straight.

So what he should really be referencing is the impact on child development of gay/straight single parent households and the same for couples.

As far as I can tell, no such study currently exists. So he’s really just talking out of his ass.

If you’re going to pander to the right, just be honest and say that you don’t support Gay adoption because it makes the baby Jesus cry.

And BTW: other studies have actually shown children of single fathers did as well or better than children with two biological parents. Whoops.

I’ve been listening to conservative talk radio here in the valley for the last week, if for no other reason than my own morbid curiosity. But I have to admit, it’s really fascinating. It’s amazing how well republican talking points are spread, and how well they make ridiculous right wing positions sound like common sense.

This week they’ve jumped right on Bush’s bandwagon: blaming Democrats for high oil prices because they won’t allow drilling.

While is patently ridiculous, you have to admire the brass balls on these guys. It’s hasn’t been our disastrous economic, energy, or foreign policy positions that raised the price at the pump, it’s those pesky democrats and tree huggers. Never mind the fact that for the first 6 years of my presidency I had a rubber-stamp congress who did anything I told them to do. Somehow those democrats hate cheap gas, and it’s all their fault.

There’s no discussion of the fact that part of the drilling moratorium was actually passed by his father when he was president. Every concern about why we shouldn’t drill is blown off as inconsequential in the face of $4/gal gas.

This station at least is riding a hard line message which is “more oil in the market = lower prices”. It’s just basic economics! Everyone knows that all prices are set by supply and demand!

It goes without saying that there is no actual discussion of how oil economics actually works. When they state that there’s BILLIONS! of barrels of oil out there to be had, there’s no discussion of how much that is relative to world supply (which would be important to know in a pure supply and demand discussion). Just for giggles I thought I would look up how much oil ANWR has and how much it would affect prices. Off to wikipedia!

From the Energy Information Administration:

“The opening of the ANWR 1002 Area to oil and natural gas development is projected to increase domestic crude oil production starting in 2018. In the mean ANWR oil resource case, additional oil production resulting from the opening of ANWR reaches 780,000 barrels per day in 2027 and then declines to 710,000 barrels per day in 2030. In the low and high ANWR oil resource cases, additional oil production resulting from the opening of ANWR peaks in 2028 at 510,000 and 1.45 million barrels per day, respectively. Between 2018 and 2030, cumulative additional oil production is 2.6 billion barrels for the mean oil resource case, while the low and high resource cases project a cumulative additional oil production of 1.9 and 4.3 billion barrels, respectively.”

And

“Additional oil production resulting from the opening of ANWR would be only a small portion of total world oil production, and would likely be offset in part by somewhat lower production outside the United States. The opening of ANWR is projected to have its largest oil price reduction impacts as follows: a reduction in low-sulfur, light crude oil prices of $0.41 per barrel (2006 dollars) in 2026 for the low oil resource case, $0.75 per barrel in 2025 for the mean oil resource case, and $1.44 per barrel in 2027 for the high oil resource case, relative to the reference case.”

That’s right kids, a whopping reduction of 75 CENTS on a BARREL of oil, not a gallon of gas, in 2025. With prices at $137 right now, that 75 cents should really help us save at the pump in 17 years. Also take note that there would be no increase in production for 10 years. 10. Years. Yep.

It’s important to note that total US reserves (21 billion barrels) represent only 1.8% of total world reserves. Saudi Arabia alone has more than 10 times the amount of reserves that we do. Increased drilling is not going to lower prices. At least not in the US.

It’s also important to note that any increased production in the US can easily be offset by reduced production overseas which will keep prices stable.

“But Joe,” you say, “those numbers don’t include oil shale, which the US has a shit ton of.” This is very true. Back to the interwebs! Turns out that the US may command roughly 1.7 trillion barrels of shale oil! Whee!! awesome. That will totally solve the problem!

Except it won’t. The cost of producing shale oil, before taxes and markup is between $70-95 a barrel.. To give you an idea of how big an issue that is, it currently costs around $7 a barrel for regular oil drilling in the US.

While shale oil may provide another huge source of hydrocarbon energy, it’s not going to lower prices at the pump without massive technology leaps driving down production costs. That will not be happening this summer, or the next one, or the next one. Maybe when your kids are your age though.

If supply problems really are the cause of high prices, US production is not going to fix it, because we just don’t have enough to make a dent. If you could get OPEC to produce more, you may have a solution, but Bush has been unsuccessful in persuading his buddies in Saudi Arabia to do so. Why? Because they don’t think it’s a supply problem!

So the question is, who stands to gain from bullshitting the american people about gas prices? Well, for one, the oil companies. They do in fact want to increase domestic production so they can capitalize on high oil prices, not because they want to drive prices down. After all, why should middle easterners enjoy all those insane profits? Lets get while the getting is good!

Who else benefits? Well, as I stated before, the republican party gets to hang high oil prices around the necks of democrats who oppose drilling, when it has nothing to do with the problem. A great topic for an election year. Also, they know if they can push a democratic candidate into actually explaining the reasons for opposing drilling, they can then paint them as an ivory tower intellectual who doesn’t understand the pain of the working class.

And of course YOU! It’s not a demand problem, it’s a supply problem. You should be able to drive that 7MPG hummer coast to coast and not feel bad about it. You really do need that 3.2 ton vehicle to drive yourself back and forth from your McMansion.

Of course, the republicans aren’t suggesting that we rethink how we design cities to encourage more foot traffic and biking. No suggestions of tax breaks for people who carpool to work. No spending bills for establishing excellent and cheap public transportation in every major city. It’s not a demand problem, it’s a supply problem.

While I do think that regulation is going to be a big big help in short term prices, it remains a fact that the US consumes something like 3 times the amount of energy it produces. It buys this energy on the world market, and will always be competing with other large industrial societies for scarce resources. Coal, Oil, Oil Shale, Oil Sands, all of our current hydrocarbon sources will eventually run out, and prices will go up.

We need long term sustainable sources of energy and we need them yesterday. We need to throw serious minds and dollars at hydrogen and solar in a big big way. The universe has a lot of hydrogen, and a lot of nuclear energy coming from stars. Harnessing these two sources would provide energy for a long long time.

How does a law offering telecom immunity seem like a good deal to democrats? Unbelievable. I’m really starting to dislike Pelosi. What possible leverage could the republicans and Bush have to push this through? Hopefully there are enough democrats who will not toe the party line and will fight this passing.

President bush has asked that we allow drilling in ANWR, and off the coasts of Florida and California, for the sake of lowering the price of Oil. He’s making an argument that what is driving high oil prices is short supply. This argument is one that is refuted by OPEC, and many economists, but it’s undoubtedly part of the equation.

I still think speculation is what’s driving insane prices, through loose regulation on trading of oil futures (more here).

But I’m willing to consider throwing Bush a bone here. I’m perfectly willing to allow both coastal drilling and drilling in ANWR on the following conditions that apply to all oil from these sites:

1. Cannot be exported to any other nation either by the producer or any reseller. (We export to Canada and Mexico)
2. Current exports cannot be increased.
3. Must be sold at cost (i.e. cannot be traded on the futures market, and cannot be marked up for profit), I might be willing to allow markup if all profits are donated to universities explicitly for developing alternative fuel sources.
4. All drilling operations are audited and inspected to insure no inflation of costs to drill the oil.

In addition within 5 years:

1. We import no foreign oil whatsoever.
2. All oil produced from US sources may only be sold in the US and all surplus must be held in reserve, not sold on the world market.
3. All oil produced from US sources must be priced only by US demand, not by world market pricing.

Effectively what I’m saying is that if we want to remove dependence on foreign oil and drive down fuel prices, we must remove ourselves from the world oil market. If we’re going to drill additional sources in the US, this is the only acceptable reason to do so.

Of course, this would cause incredible losses for multinational oil companies. And we all know that’s not going to happen.

Kelli and I were watching Family Guy last night on TBS HD, and saw these beyond-annoying ads. We were both flabbergasted. Who would have thought that TV advertisers would try to recreate the pop-up for TV.

TBS, seriously, cut it out. I can watch Family Guy on DVD.

If you haven’t yet, take 10 minutes and view “From Russia with Hate“, an interesting report about the growing neo-nazi/skinhead movement in Russia.

While I’m sure there are a large range of emotions at play here, those who were interviewed consistently pointed to economic issues for their hate, rather than genetic inferiority, which separates these skinheads or from Hitlers own views. Of course, the interviews could have been edited to emphasize this particular view. I personally find it difficult to believe that any Russian would have tattoos of Hitler if they only embraced their nationalistic views.

It’s mentioned that one of the reasons for the violence is foreigners encroaching on their jobs. They claim that someone will come in and do a job for $1/hr that normally a Russian would be paid $10/hr to do. They claim the government won’t do anything about this, so they have to take matters into their own hands.

Now, maybe this is just an excuse, or maybe there’re some specific regional issues at work here, but Russian Unemployment is actually pretty low. 6% as of Sept 2007. Also, average real wages have been increasing year over year as labor costs have gone up due to shortages.

So if there’s a shortage of labor, why can’t these guys find jobs at living wages? It may be that they are indeed losing jobs to people who will work for less money, and somehow as a result are dropping off of whatever methodology is being used to gather the statistics. It’s mentioned that Russia has a highly mobile labor force, which might just be code for, “we can’t find these people anymore” But if they were really being replaced for less money, labor costs should be going down, not up. Both foreign investment and GDP are also up, so somebody is making money here.

But either way, this really strikes me as classic class warfare kind of stuff.

If that worker is earning $1/hr there’s a good chance they’re being exploited, living in abject poverty, and sending money back home to improve the quality of life for their families in countries where they can’t earn $1/hr. None of the foreigners in that video were driving a Benz, or living in luxury.

But instead of teaming up with those low wage earners to demand fair wages from employers, i.e. unionizing, or demanding labor laws that restrict exploitation of foreign labor (you have to hire them at the same pay rate, with the same benefits, pay the same taxes, etc.) They instead choose a solution (chase off foreigners) that is least likely to actually solve the problem they claim to have.

Although I would say that young Russian males have very little to bargain with. Education took a big hit in the 90s, and a lot of their better professors left after earning no money. It seems like most of the labor force lacks specialized knowledge that would give them an advantage over foreign labor pressure.

So is this just a problem being driven by regional unemployment? or just an excuse to be an angry young man?

Today I saw a link to an interview done with bush in Ireland. Noted was the interviewer’s willingness to ask Bush difficult questions. I don’t personally think she was that rough on him, and he roughly just stayed on his talking points and shouted her down when she tried to call him on it. But he mentioned as contrast to the horrible things we’re doing in the world, that we’re also very generous. An example he gave was PEPFAR, his law to help prevent and treat the AIDS epidemic.

I’m currently reading “Confessions of an Economic Hitman” which has made me extremely skeptical of foreign aid. So I thought I would try and find out where that money is going. Publicintegrity.org has some interesting numbers and a dissection of the program. Of course they had to file a freedom of information act request to get the numbers, and one set of the numbers was so badly kept as to be useless. Pretty much exactly what you’d expect.

The big number I was looking for was how much of the money was going to US based companies. Because after all, if we’re going to help poor brown people, let’s at least further subsidize rich white people while we’re at it right?

Here’s the interesting facts: 1. About half of the treatment money is going for antiretroviral drugs, which at the beginning were required to be highly expensive name-brand drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration and provided largely by major American pharmaceutical companies. More recently, some two dozen generic formulations have been approved for PEPFAR use by the FDA. 2. Congress mandated that one-third of the prevention money (about 20 percent of the total appropriated) be earmarked to go to abstinence and fidelity programs. A 2006 Government Accountability Office report concluded that this spending requirement was hurting other programs in the field, such as prevention of mother-to-child transmission. 3. The discussion of condoms is routinely discouraged as a primary prevention approach among youth and cannot even be mentioned to those under age 15 in school programs, even if they are already involved in sexual conduct. Condoms can be addressed in out-of-school settings among youth who engage in high-risk behavior. 4. In general, at least two-thirds of all foreign aid funds never leaves the United States, according to a Congressional Research Service report. The money buys U.S. products, pays for U.S salaries, overhead, benefits packages, travel, American-made vehicles, office expenses, computers and other equipment. USAID awards 87 percent of its consultant dollars to U.S.-based firms.

So, US taxpayers are paying US drug companies artificially high prices (while generics have been approved, there’s only sparse evidence they’re being used) for drugs, and paying christian organizations to spread christian values about sex. Good times.

You can see from the public integrity page how the results are going. Seems that when you de-emphasize condom use, and emphasize abstinence only programs, infection rates go up. go figure.

But either way, you’d be within your rights to question the generosity of largely giving aid dollars to american companies for programs that have a shaky record of effectiveness. To be sure, ARV drug treatment for africans is pretty awesome, and I think that part of the program is a great success, how much PEPFAR is still paying for those drugs might not be, but it sounds like it’s getting there.

However I can’t find solid numbers anywhere for prevention. All I’m looking for are infection rates of the member countries for the years that PEPFAR has been working. Lots of people including the Government Accountability Office aren’t happy with the results, but I can’t find them. The Office of Global AIDs Coordinator’s own report [PDF link] is mysteriously silent about prevention rates, and only reports on prevention of mother to child infections.

But it also shamelessly proclaims they’re using the best evidence based prevention program in the world, despite better success rates from many other countries outlined in the publicintegrity.org study above, and condemnation from multiple groups that condom advocacy has long been proven to work better.

Apparently PEPFAR is undergoing some changes in the current legislative sections that should make the program more effective. I guess we’ll see.

Sidenote: I also thought it was funny that Bush was using people who’s hands were cut off by Saddam as an example of how bad he was. As far as I know, our buddies Saudi Arabia will cut off your hand for simple theft. And the bar for beheading is pretty low too. Yet we’re not storming their borders to stop the injustice are we?

Mario Kart Wii. We’ve all been waiting for it. Does it deliver? eh…

Okay first things first. The wheel. The wheel is fun. It makes it feel like you’re really interacting with the game. This is good times. Unfortunately, it also takes a lot of the precision out of handling, and if you’re like me, you’ll often find yourself sliding the opposite of the way you mean to, and directly into a wall. Not good times. Dumped it after about 10 races.

New stuff: The Bam is the bane of my existence. I hate it. Bikes are cool, wheelies are good times.

Honestly I can’t for the life of my understand why they made some changes though. 1. No multiplayer grand prix. What the f’ing hell? What made grand prix tolerable was that you could have a buddy run interference against the cheating AI so that you could unlock stuff. Now, to unlock new characters or carts, you have to do it alone. This can be incredibly obnoxious as even if you hit every shortcut and run a perfect race in first place the whole time, chances of you eating 4 red shells in a row at the last corner is very high. Again, not good times. Nothing makes me curse like Mario Kart, as Kelli will attest.

While I know that some people love playing random people on the internet, and Mario Kart is okay for that, I hate doing that, mostly because of shitcockery.

What I want to do is play online with my friends, and enjoy all the same love of playing in the same room with them. But it’s a huge pain in the ass to do this.

Anyone used to Xbox live knows how this should work. But no. What we get is 12 character friend strings. I add yours. You would then think your wii would just ask you to accept me as a friend or not. Nope. I have to give you my 12 digit string, then we connect up. uggh.

To see if you’re online, I have to manually connect to WFC. I can’t remain connected to WFC while playing single player, waiting for friends to show up online. So you can’t see if I’m playing Mario Kart right this second. I have to be connected to WFC just sitting there waiting for you to connect to WFC. Lame.

Once we are both connected, we can bust into a VS mode or battle, which is good, except there’s no microphone for us to talk to each other. ugh. Oh yeah, and you have like 4 seconds to choose your character and kart or the Wii will choose one for you, including the choice of manual or automatic slides. Ugh. Super lame.

The really weird, strangely limited multiplayer, and insane rubberband singleplayer make the game hard to love at times. There are still good times to be had though.

Over-all I’d give this guy a 3 star review with hopes that Nintendo will allow a downloadable update to change some of the crappy decisions they’ve made.

I’ve been listening to a lot of NPR over the last year, and I’ve been noticing a shift more and more to the right of politics.

The first thing I noticed was that a lot of stories on politics were being delivered as essentially straight press releases from the whitehouse, with almost no critical review. This seemed out of character for NPR.

And now it seems like every day I’m hearing single expert commentary from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. That just struck me as odd.

So off to teh Google.

Turns out I’m right. NPR has been sourcing far more rightwing “experts” than centrist or left wing.

And in case you’re doubting that the right wing has been winning the war of ideas for a while now, check out the linked study from FAIR, which counts think tank citations for the last 10 years pulling from the Nexis news database. In 2004 there were 15,285 right wing citations, and 4,984 left wing.

I’ve largely been getting my news from the BBC these days, and relying on factcheck.org for reasonable critical reporting, and I’ll be adding fair.org as well.

The state of news in this country is just terrible.

Check out the story about how the pentagon has been providing generals to news programs to provide favorable coverage of the Iraq war. Ahh coordinated propaganda machines. You may ask yourself why you haven’t seen this reported on the news. Here’s some coverage by Salon.

I’m actually sort of surprised that someone already hasn’t done this.

After reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, it’s easy to start thinking of things in Whuffie. I was going through my blog and flickr stats, noting how few hits I get on a daily basis, and thinking my online Whuffie is low.

Then it struck me. There really should be an online whuffie counter that pulls from all the various APIs out there. Your score would be a combination of a crapload of things, but just to get the list started:

1. Flickr views on your photos. Massive wuffie for getting into explore. Number of friends also.
2. Blog views - pulled from the blogger or livejournal or wordpress or moveable type APIs.
3. Pagerank or incoming links to your online assets as tracked through google blog search or technorati or whatever.
4. Number of twitter followers.
5. Number of diggs on your submitted articles or upvotes on reddit, karma on slashdot or whatever the hell they’re using these days.
6. Whatever makes you popular on facebook or myspace these days. I have no effing clue.

all this stuff is muxed together to give you a left and right handed Whuffie score that you can then proudly display where ever you think it matters. Users could then dump wuffie onto each other whenever they felt like it, say if your online wuffie was as lousy as mine.