Posts Made By: Paul Kammueller

Combination of b), d) and e):

Giving a drug addict more drugs doesn't cure the addiction. History has demonstrated decisively that the only thing more oil accomplishes is that it makes us want and use even more oil. Supply creates its own demand which in turn breeds greater and greater dependency which translates into national vulnerability. If we have 10 barrels we'll spend 12. If we have 100 barrels we'll spend 150.

It'll take too long for it to make any difference. Nothing's stopping them from drilling now anyway. 86% of the reserves are in the non-protected areas.

Burning fossil fuels essentially runs backwards the energy conversion that created the atmosphere that humans are adapted to breathe today. In so doing we are changing the atmosphere, from one that we know supports humans, to a progressively more primordial one that is an unknown condition. Logically, if you burn all the available fossil fuels that exist, eventually you will completely 'rewind' the atmosphere back to the primordial state of being mostly CO2. Obviously we could not survive that, though fortunately it would take quite a while to reach that point -- but I'm not keen on discovering exactly what the limit of survivability is anywhere between now and then. Until it can be decisively proven that a different atmosphere has no ill effects, climatic or otherwise, the only prudent and logical thing to do is limit the change to the extent humanly possible and try to maintain the atmosphere that humans are adapted to.

So the short answer is, because there is no upside, nothing but downside. We need a REAL answer.

The worst thing you can do with any public gaffe is to try to 'explain' it. Never works. Ever.

We've just been watching these for our family TV entertainment too. My 10-year-old daughter is totally into the Twilight Zone. And the original 'Star Trek' series. She was quite thrilled to see William Shatner in the Twilight Zone episode "Nightmare at 20,000 feet", as cheesy as the monster costume was.

1) Claudia Black as Aeryn in 'Farscape' (tough as nails!)
2) Diana Ewing as Droxine in Star Trek 'The Cloud Minders' (a bit on the skinny side yes but it was a great outfit)

The SP500 is now similarly at a long-term oversold extremis. Also the VIX crossed over 30 today, and somewhere between 30 & 40 seems to be usually where it 'peaks out' under periods of stress lately.

Looks like anybody can pick their favorite poll. One poll shows Obama with a solid lead in Ohio. Another shows McCain with almost the exact same solid lead. Pffft. Whatever.

I think it's more fun to watch the election futures quotes. The ones I've seen so far imply that traders think Obama has around a 63-65% chance of becoming President at this point.

I'm only cautiously optimistic though. Those futures don't take into account the selective neglect that goes on at election night. There's the voting 'irregularities'. The poorer urban precincts are given fewer resources on election night so people have to wait in line longer. What they discovered in Ohio in 2004 is that if you make people wait in line for hours and hours to vote, they eventually give up and go to their jobs or home or whatever. Add to that the caging and fake-felon lists. And now there's election 'minders' present to 'challenge' voters. Then there's all the monkey business with dubious rerouting of server-hosting of Ohio's vote-counting to GOP-dominated servers on election night. And precincts where Bush won big with impossible vote counts, in some carrying a 120-124% share of the voters that signed in. In decisive swing states, the vote has essentially become a social engineering, data management and filtering operation.

These things will be occurring much more aggressively in 2008 I expect. The pertinent question to ask is how big of a lead does Obama lead in order to actually 'win' the 'official' counted election? I think if he's leading kind of close, say 53% to 46% or something there's no chance he'll win. None. To overcome all the tinkering at this point I think it has to be a pretty decisive landslide in the polls for a Dem to get to the bare majority needed in the electoral vote.

Looks like the poll was engineered to get the desired results.

One of the leading questions was about offshore drilling -- and the question was phrased in such a flowery way as to make people think it would solve all our energy woes tomorrow. No mention of any possible alternative course. Efficiency, conservation, alternative energies were all off the table. Why?

The phrasing of the Iraq question was engineered as well, without allowing for a range of alternative possibilities -- one of the choices was withdraw 'immediately' -- you throw the word into 'immediately' into any proposal and most people will say no. If you had asked the same question but said something like 'establish a timetable' vs. 'stay in Iraq indefinitely'... you'd get a different answer.

Similarly if you'd ask to compare 'promote alternative energy technologies, greater efficiency and conservation' vs. 'increase fossil fuel production and risk more dramatic climate change', you would have gotten pretty different proportion of answers again... maybe not a full-blown switch for some states but you'd definitely get movement in the %ages yes/no etc... and have set a different mood for the survey. Phrasing is everything, at least as much as the choice of lead-up questions itself. Language and context often affects how people on (or near) the fence think. That's why we have rhetoric.

Also keep in mind many of these polls only poll people on land-line telephones. That weeds out a lot of younger voters who are increasingly reliant on cell phones and don't even both with a land line anymore.

(Sigh) another typical e-rumor. Some of the few more 'respectable' websites carrying the story have presented a retraction at this point since Ma'ariv spokesman is apparently flatly refuting any of this. Basically it's a rumor that no one will (or can) corroborate.

But the wingnut blog mills don't dwell on facts, they prefer to make up their own. Of course, in the meantime they also need to find a motive for why Obama himself would 'leak' a story that essentially was just ammunition for his opponents to generate chatter with in the first place? Seems to be going out of your way just to get ridiculed.

The area will give you how much 'area' of light is being blocked by the secondary. But as the secondary grows, diffraction becomes a factor -- basically as the diameter of the obstruction increases, a larger percentage of light is diverted into the 1st and 2nd diffraction rings instead of being focused inside the airy disc -- this is aside from area blockage, a contrast-affecting factor which increases with secondary diameter. Typically the area-coverage impact of the secondary obstruction is itself not an issue unless the secondary gets especially large.

Do you guys get all your political wisdom from spam?