Updates

Pretty self-explanatory

If you like beer and live within driving distance of Waterbury, CT, the third annual Brass City Brewfest is Saturday the 13th. Unfortunately, my attendance looks unlikely this year. :(

---

Phoenix found water on Mars, which is huge. It also found perchlorate, which is a bit of a surprise and opens up rocket fuel possibilities in the distant future.

---

China pulled off the Olympics without any athletes choking on air pollution. It's amazing what you can do when you shut down every factory, construction site and coal power plant within 20 miles for two weeks. Now, if only they'd keep them shut down.

---

This tree is still dead. In fact, I helped my neighbor take it down this weekend. Judging by the ring count, it looks like it lived 55 years. Now it's fuel to keep my house warm this winter.

The concerns I had last Fall about the drought carried through the Winter. We had a snow deficit, again. While the rest of the country got blizzard after blizzard, we got one serious storm and a couple small ones. I think we had a foot of snow for the whole winter. The rest was rain. With the ground still frozen, all that rain did was run off into the drains, rivers and reservoirs. Rivers that normally crest in April did so in February. Then Spring was on the dry side, sending my fears about a wicked hot Summer sky high. But rains opened up in late Spring/early Summer, helping to keep temperatures around average. Yay! 90 degree days were few and far between and we didn't see a single one in August.

\_/
DED

Offshore Drilling Is NOT a Quick Fix

Don't believe me? Even Cramer knows it.

"Right now there are no available rigs until 2012, particularly deepwater rigs. There just aren't any."

The reason for the backlog on drilling rigs is because there's been huge demand by Brazil, West Africa and Southeast Asia. Why is Brazil is so consumed with drilling for oil? After all, don't ethanol proponents point to them as being the shiny beacon of oil-free supplier of automotive fuel? Brazil isn't stupid. Oil's been over a $100/barrel for several months now. They're just looking to cash in.

A funny thing that seems to be overlooked is that we're still drilling in the Gulf of Mexico off of Texas and Louisiana. "Later this month, the U.S. government is offering for lease, as part of a regularly scheduled sale, 18 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico that are open for oil and natural gas drilling. The tracts could potentially yield as much as 400 million barrels of oil. The lease auction is just one example of how much oil exploration is currently occurring in the Gulf of Mexico. But the sale also reveals the limits of new drilling, as 400 million barrels is barely enough to meet the nation's oil needs for 19 days (Source)." And it's far from being a stagnant enterprise.

"Today, the Gulf of Mexico, which produces more than a quarter of the country's domestic crude oil, is actually in the midst of a resurgence. New technology is allowing companies to push farther into deeper water, and oil production there is up.

A bidding war for rights to millions of acres in the Gulf is quietly building. In 2007, the number of leases issued to oil companies there jumped by about 25 percent, and the average bid price for a single tract has soared this year by 50 percent to nearly $6 million, according to GOMExplorer, which gathers data on the Gulf's oil and gas industry."

Surely, a compromise is in the works, though it's not like this Congress has been idle.

"In 2006, for example, Congress opened up several million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for new leasing and drilling, of which a large portion had been previously off-limits. Because of the necessary planning work, many of these tracts won't come up for bidding until next year. (And even if these tracts receive bids, and an oil company chooses to develop them, it usually takes about seven to ten years for oil to start flowing, according the Energy Information Administration.)"

Source.

In fact, a bipartisan group of ten senators has offered a plan that allows drilling in the eastern portion of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean off of Georgia, Virginia and the Carolinas (source). In this proposal, state legislatures would have final say. Meanwhile, tourism dependent Florida has been buying up oil leases off its shores.

It might all be moot however. There's only an estimated 3.8 billion barrels predicted to be found along the eastern seaboard. California is suspected of having 10 billion. As of 2006, the US consumed an average 20.5 million barrels of oil per day. Put them together and that's roughly 2 years worth of oil. If combined with current domestic production, that could possibly make us energy independent for 4 years. Not exactly something to bank on.

As I mentioned earlier, a compromise is sure to happen and the Republicans will be there to cash in on it. They're having a field day with accusing Democrats of doing nothing while America suffers. And now that talk has arisen of a compromise, Republicans will make use of this election cycle to accuse Democrats of flip-flopping. Oh yes, it's already happened!

But first, a little background. My congressman is Chris Murphy. He won election in 2006, defeating Nancy Johnson, a long time moderate Republican, who went too negative with her campaign ads and was a bit too cozy with the more insidious members of her party. Anyway, Republicans want the seat back. Anyway, the Republican Party wants the seat back. They've drafted another moderate, and popular, state senator, David Cappiello. But they've transformed him from someone I respected into another mouthpiece for partisan politics.

"It has become clear that without a compromise on some increased, sensible offshore drilling, we will not be able to move forward on ideas that will make us truly energy independent," Murphy said. "We have to work together to negotiate a common-sense solution to help consumers, who can't afford the bickering."

He added expanded offshore drilling won't solve the energy crisis, but the issue shouldn't bar Congress from passing energy legislation.

State Sen. David Cappiello, R-Danbury, who is challenging Murphy for the 5th District congressional seat, issued his own press statement Thursday, calling out the congressman for flip flopping on the issue.

"Murphy's election-year conversion on offshore drilling is a day late, a dollar short, and totally disingenuous," Cappiello said. "His latest flip flop proves he cannot be trusted to address America's energy crisis unless he is dragged kicking and screaming to do so."

Democrats need to explain that compromise isn't flip-flopping and it's essential in getting things done. The "you're with us or against us" mentality of the last 8 years hasn't accomplished anything other than alienating allies and dividing the country. But they'll say anything to get elected now, won't they.

\_/
DED

The Politics of Offshore Drilling

This clip from The Daily Show sums it up.



\_/
DED

Behind the Surge

No doubt that you've heard that "the surge is working." And you'll be sure to hear it for the rest of this presidential campaign. Yes, violence is down, though it hasn't been eradicated by any stretch of the imagination. Daily attacks during the past two months have averaged about 25 to 30, down from about 160 to 170 a little more than a year ago. In Baghdad's West Rasheed area murders fell from 553 in January 2007 to 20 in January 2008. IED attacks fell from 178 in February 2007 to 5 in February 2008 (source). A glance at this chart shows that US troop deaths in Iraq have been trending downward. 510 Iraqis were killed in July, including civilians and security force members, a 75% drop from the 2,021 deaths recorded by the same method in July 2007 (source).

While the increase in troop levels may have played a role in bringing about a less violent Iraq, there's more going on here than meets the eye. If merely throwing more troops at a war zone were enough to achieve victory, then wouldn't the Vietnam War have been won?

Here's what I believe is responsible for the decrease in violence:

1. The Iraqi army has stepped up.


2. The Sunni's are accepting their new role in Iraq.


3. General Petraeus has focused on winning "hearts and minds" having realized that "we cannot kill our way out of this endeavor."


4. A treasure trove of al Qaeda documents were seized (read on).

Al Qaeda has been likened to a peer-to-peer network, a mutant supply chain, and a franchise. As such, somewhere along the way it ceased being one of these nimble forms (at least the branch in Iraq). It became a bureaucracy. Yes, the world's foremost terrorist organization is more like your local branch of the DMV. While this is no less a scary beast to face, it ceases being a swift slasher and is instead a lumbering thug.

Late last year, several hundred al Qaeda documents were captured in Iraq. They turned out to be personnel files. It seems that if you wanted to martyr yourself you had to fill out the requisite paperwork.

The personnel records are unusually formal, typed on letterhead that reads "Islamic State of Iraq," one of the aliases for al Qaeda in Iraq.

Foreign fighters were asked to provide basic biographical details, such as birth date, address, and telephone number, as well as questions aimed at double-checking who referred them to the organization. One Algerian fighter named Aydir describes three coordinators he met in Syria before he was smuggled into Iraq. The first was "tall and strong," the second was "tall and hunchbacked," and the other was "tan and weak."

Part of it is simply about logistics. "When you're moving people across international borders, you want to make sure you're keeping track of them," says Hoffman. "But it is also part of a hubris that this is more of an organization than it actually is and to impress the recruits in this martyrdom pipeline that they really are part of something bigger than they are."

There is also an aspect of quality control. One question asks recruits: "How did the coordinator treat you in Syria?" Most of the fighters replied, "Well." One even enthuses, "Very excellent." But a few complain of being locked up in an apartment in Syria. One Saudi who arrived in Syria with $1,000 writes, "Not good. Loua'aie took all the money and we are not happy and [he] give us back $200."

For Al Qaeda in Iraq, which relies on a loose network of operatives in Syria to help funnel fighters into Iraq, the forms allow leaders to monitor the reliability of their network. "You have the leadership who may be highly committed, but when you get to the handlers, it may be more criminal networks," says Lt. Col. Joseph Felter, who runs the Combating Terrorism Center. "They might be putting in some safeguards to try to identify those individuals who are less ideologically committed down the chain."

I don't know how many of these would-be martyrs were captured before they killed themselves. But if our military has the names of the recruiters, then capturing these guys severely cuts into the supply chain. Maybe that's why the number of women suicide bombers has increased.

I wish that these developments had occurred the first year we were in Iraq. We could've been spared 4,000 deaths, our military's readiness, and hundreds of billions of dollars. The Iraqi's could've been spared untold tens of thousands of deaths, the destruction of homes, towns, and their healthcare infrastructure. Then again, maybe we would've just invaded Iran that much sooner.

Withdrawal certainly won't happen now, even if the Iraqi's tell us to leave. The decrease in violence only strengthens his position. We all know that W intended to keep us in Iraq no matter what, in order to push the neocon fantasy of a American Oil Company Empire under the guise of a democratic Middle East. "Oh sweet Osama! You have provided us with the opportunity of a lifetime!"

Congress has abdicated its Constitutional authority so they're no help. The question is, are the American people tired of this vision of perpetual war for the sake of fattening up no bid contract corporations that lap at the trough of tax dollars or are they so addicted to oil that they'll believe every OPEC member had a hand in 9/11 and every square mile of this country needs to be drilled for the black gold that keeps their Escalade, Expedition, Yukon, Tahoe and Hummer singing along in materialistic bliss? I guess we'll find out in about 3 months.

\_/
DED