More On The Great Ethanol Hoax

Columnist Walter E. Williams is an Economics Professor at George Mason University. He has this to say about the Ethanol Hoax:

One of the many mandates of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 calls for oil companies to increase the amount of ethanol mixed with gasoline. President Bush said, during his 2006 State of the Union address, “America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.” Let’s look at some of the “wonders” of ethanol as a replacement for gasoline.

Ethanol contains water that distillation cannot remove. As such, it can cause major damage to automobile engines not specifically designed to burn ethanol. The water content of ethanol also risks pipeline corrosion and thus must be shipped by truck, rail car or barge. These shipping methods are far more expensive than pipelines.

Ethanol is 20 to 30 percent less efficient than gasoline, making it more expensive per highway mile. It takes 450 pounds of corn to produce the ethanol to fill one SUV tank. That’s enough corn to feed one person for a year. Plus, it takes more than one gallon of fossil fuel — oil and natural gas — to produce one gallon of ethanol. After all, corn must be grown, fertilized, harvested and trucked to ethanol producers — all of which are fuel-using activities. And, it takes 1,700 gallons of water to produce one gallon of ethanol. On top of all this, if our total annual corn output were put to ethanol production, it would reduce gasoline consumption by 10 or 12 percent.

Ethanol is so costly that it wouldn’t make it in a free market. That’s why Congress has enacted major ethanol subsidies, about $1.05 to $1.38 a gallon, which is no less than a tax on consumers. In fact, there’s a double tax — one in the form of ethanol subsidies and another in the form of handouts to corn farmers to the tune of $9.5 billion in 2005 alone.

Read more here.

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October 2006 on the Sourdough. Enjoy!

Decisions, Decisions

Dr. Walter Williams, the distinguished author, columnist and professor at George Mason University says, “The grain based ethanol hoax is a sterling example of a program economists refer to as narrow, well- defined benefits versus widely dispersed costs. It pays the ethanol lobby to organize and collect money to grease the palms of politicians willing to do their bidding because there is a large benefit to them – higher wages and profits. The millions of fuel consumers, who fund these benefits through higher fuel costs and food prices, as well as taxes, are relatively uninformed and have little clout.”

So, we tolerate $6.00 corn used to produce $2.00 ethanol, which is also subsidized by the government to the tune of $1.05 to $1.38 per gallon, because it would not survive on the free market. Thus, we allow the costs to each of us personally to increase even more, because those subsidies come directly from our tax dollars.

I woke up ths morning with the realization that while the price of everthing is going up steadily, my income remains the same. I lay there wondering how long it would be before my income and my expenses met. There is probably some financial term for the moment these two numbers coincide, but I am not aware of it. (#3 son says the term is, “broke.”)

Have you ever had that moment when you look around and realize that the world is going to Hell in an environmentally-friendly, bio-degradable, government-subsidized handbasket, and that nothing feasible for the correction seems to appear on the horizon?

No chance the envirowhackos are going to let us drill our own oil from proven reserves, refine it, or explore for new deposits in Wyoming, Alaska, California, or the Gulf of Mexico.

No way are the profit-farmers of the Breadbasket going to start growing FOOD again, as long as those lucrative subsidies keep rolling in.

And, no way Congress is not going to raise our taxes again.

Feed a Prius, starve a village

The possibility of the current situation being rectified grows slimmer by the day. But, there’s still time for us if we act now to open our oil fields and encourage exploration, development, and refining before the situation reaches the point where the food riots taking place around the world reach American streets. There’s still time for farmers to return some acreage to the production of food grains. The chance that any of this will happen in the foreseeable future? Virtually nil, the way it looks from here.

It’s not just the economic problems that come into play in these situations. The ethical ramifications must be considered. Profit for its own sake is not the evil that most redistributionists would have you think. But it does mean that whoever is making that profit is at least taking steps to make sure that growth is positive and provides jobs, income, and security rather than depriving people of these things. Ethics and economical considerations are entwined in numerous and convoluted ways. Nobody ever got a job from a poor man in an unprofitable line of work.

Three groups are responsible for the looming disaster: The eco-freaks and their demands that no further utilization of resources be allowed; the houses of Congress, who have bent over and grabbed their ankles for the eco-freak faction and who put things into motion with their vote to provide large subsidies to farmers for providing crops for ethanol; and the farmers, the third group, who seem to have forgotten that the food crops they are sequestering for ethanol used to feed the world.

There is a fourth group–one who has put up with the run-up to this situation without a quiver: US. We must not mind paying these charlatans to hose us and work us over. We jump on the green bandwagon like the dutiful dupes we are, and go along, sorting our trash, riding our bikes, paying our taxes and tolerating the high prices, while the eco-freaks and the government smirk and poke us, their little piggybanks, with an ever bigger stick.

It takes about 470 pounds of corn to make enough ethanol to fill the tank of a Prius. It takes roughly the same amount to feed a person for a year. Decisions, decisions…

The Sun Takes A Break

Take a look at this beautiful site. Look at the picture of the Sun, and see how “quiet” it is. Scientist believe this has a lot to do with the sudden cooling of earth’s weather. All I know is that it was sixty degrees and bare ground yesterday, and today, we have about 10 inches of snow here in Wasilla, while Anchorage is shoveling out from under a couple of feet.

Just one of the interesting little asides on the SpaceWeather site. Enjoy!

The Bridge From Nowhere To Nowhere

I watched a show last night on one of the science/technology channels about building a sixty-mile long bridge across the Bering Strait. Besides the fact that such an undertaking is absolutely unthinkable, the premise appeared to be (the last thing they happen to mention in these “informational” programs) to bring Siberian oil to the United States in order to make the U.S. less dependent on the Middle East. Inside this bridge would be a high-speed train to carry the sparse population of Siberia to the equally sparse population of Alaska, and vice versa. Sort of as an aside, they mention the oil and gas piplines that would also be carried by the bridge.

Hello???

Apparently, a couple of facts seemed to have escaped the producers of the program:

1) There is a place in Alaska where a much more reasonably sized and engineered bridge could be a real possibility: The Diomedes. Big Diomede Island belongs to Russia. Nine miles to the east, Little Diomede belongs to Alaska. Doesn’t a nine-mile bridge sound just a little bit smarter than a sixty-mile wet dream?

2)The wind. The program thought it was touching all the bases in its interesting look at the technology and innovation required for a north-country bridge over a long span, but missed one of the most important factors that could easily scuttle a project that size. There is nothing but wind between the Bering Strait and the North Pole, not even a barbed-wire fence. The computer-generated images of the bridge the designers had in mind was like a sail, with solid (although curved and somewhat aerodynamic) sides. The wind in the Bering never stops blowing and never blows below 50.

3) These guys obviously forgot about the huge reserves of oil in Alaska. For some reason, just the idea of actually tapping into these reserves completely escaped these far-thinking geniuses, while the idea of building a sixty-mile-long bridge carrying millions of barrels of Siberian crude oil across a stretch of the most treacherous water in the world makes total sense. Instead of plumping up our own economy, we busily plump up that of Russia. Brilliant!

It’s a better idea to keep the Strait pristine, forget the bridge, and do what we should have been doing all along (which does NOT include importing our oil from Siberia) and drill our own vast reserves. Not just in Alaska in ANWR, the Kenai Sound, or Prudhoe Bay, but all the outer Continental Shelf, including the coast of California and the Gulf of Mexico.

And, of course, the fact that we have to pay so much for gas at the pumps these days, (thanks to the EW’s and their benighted desire to save us from ourselves by refusing to let us drill, refine, build, explore, or otherwise develop and send to market our own petroleum deposits) leads directly to their disastrous demand that we make our fuel from food crops. If this isn’t the most deranged, destructive, and downright STUPID idea to come up the pike, I don’t know what is. A point-blank, both-barrels 12-guage blast to both feet.

Thanks (once again) to Algore’s cadre of interfering, insufferably arrogant greenie True Believers, we are in a giant,worldwide mess.

I wouldn’t write a screed like this without mentioning at least one solution to the problem, so here it is: If we can just open up the drilling where the oil is, get independent without a sixty-mile-long bridge from nowhere to nowhere, and start putting the corn crops back in the “food” column, maybe we can get things back to normal.

But,then, I just had a think: Suppose, just suppose, that the food problems suddenly go away by the end of the year if Hillary or Barack Hussein Obama get elected… (hmmm… I need to go to my thinking place.)

Odds And Ends

Thanks are due to Sigmund, Carl and Alfred again. Once again, I laughed right out loud!

A Frenchman, an Englishman, and a New Yorker were captured by cannibals. The chief comes to them and says, “the bad news is that now that we`ve caught you, we`re going to kill you. We will put you in a pot and cook you, eat you, and then use your skins to build a canoe. The good news is that you get to choose how you die.”

The Frenchman says, “I take ze sword.” the chief gives him a sword, he says, “Vive la France!” and runs himself through.

The Englishman says, “a pistol for me, please.” the chief gives him a pistol, he points it at his head, says, “God save the queen!” and blows his brains out.

The New Yorker says, “gimme a fork.” the chief is puzzled, but he shrugs and gives him a fork. The new Yorker takes the fork and starts jabbing himself all over– the stomach, the sides, the chest, everywhere. There`s blood gushing out all over, it`s horrible.

The chief is appalled, and asks, “my God almighty, what are you doing?”

The New Yorker says, “so much for your canoe, dummy!”

—o&o—

Earth Day. Well, la dee dah. I plan to take my accumulated cardboard boxes and paper egg cartons out to the burn barrel. It’s a beautiful day, but we must need more CO2 around here, because it’s not warming up very fast. There is still snow in the shade, and the nights are regularly down into the twenties, sometimes even the teens. A week ago, we had an overnight low of 9. In April.

There are some interesting things coming out about Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” schlockumentary. Apparently, in addition to all the bad science he collected, proofs are coming out that the famous “stranded polar bears” picture was a plagiarized image of playing polar bears (definitely not stranded), and that the famous shot of the tidewater glaciers (ice shelves) melting, collapsing, and falling into the sea was none other than the famous (computer-generated) shot from the opening credits of the goofy, overcooked, overlong movie, “The Day After Tomorrow.”

I get disturbed when I see the price of gasoline continuing to rise, and the idiots in Congress running around like a Chinese firedrill wailing about “green” solutions, raising taxes, punishing the taxpayers and continuing to forbid any further exploration and development of known reserves. This is because the environmental whackos have demanded it. Evidently, the EW’s (catchy acronym, that) have the Senatorial nuts in a lockbox, because nothing sensible has come out of Washington in the last 16 months.

I’m all for alternative forms of energy, PROVIDED they can be proven to be 1) As practical as petroleum 2) As cheaply produced as petroleum 3) As efficient as petroleum, and 4) as versatile and widely applicable as petroleum.
So, let’s drill where the oil is and at the same time, work on developing PRACTICAL, cheap, efficient, and versatile alternatives. We should be able to come up with something before the oil “runs out.”(as if)

—o&o—

Here is some good information about “climate change” from our friends at The American Thinker. Pull quote:

The “science” of global warming is nothing more than a cover for their irrational emotional needs. It’s religion for people who are too cool to go to church. All that yearning, the need for something bigger, transcendent: Hey the planet’s heating up and I’ve been placed here to save it!

Enjoy!

Playing God

PLAYING GOD

Contraception of all kinds
Artificial insemination
In-Vitro fertilization
Prenatal sex selection
Sex-change surgeries
Cloning

PLAYING SATAN

Legal abortion through all nine months of pregnancy
Partial-birth abortion
Homicide bombings
Chemical and biological weapons
Euthanasia
“Assisted Suicide”

It isn’t hard to see that when these things are listed in such a fashion, they show us up for what we really are. Everything you see on those lists are legal. (Well, with the possible exceptions of cloning, and the suicidal/murderous activities of bombing in whatever manner, that is.) We are a people who have become obsessed with the ability to be “like God,” which was the promise of the serpent to Adam and Eve in the Garden. Humans have some kind of an inborn desire to be able to create and destroy life in any manner we choose, at any point in that life we so desire. In the Bible, the first murder was committed by Cain, upon his brother, Abel, out of jealousy.

It’s also easy to see that the closer we can come to doing what God can do, the closer we come, in our minds’ eyes, to “being like God.” Cloning, abortion, and all the ways in which we manipulate the possibility of existence seems to get us breathing hard and fast. We snort and paw like old firehorses when we hear the terms, and want to do all that we can to give ourselves the ability to create life as easily as we now destroy it. Of course, what we now destroy is not considered “Life,” or even “human,” but is reduced to “fetus,” or “the product of conception,” or “embryo;” strictly normal medical terms, but not “normal” in the course of a conversation. Who refers to their own unborn child as “my fetus?” Who do we know who refers to that “fetus” as the “product of conception” when talking about baby clothes or birthdays? Only someone who doesn’t want to accept the fact that that word means “little one,” or that it refers to a human baby. Only someone who wants to do that child harm, to take away its right to exist.

Then, to keep ourselves from thinking the black thoughts that perhaps, just perhaps, we might be committing/abetting murder, we euphemize and equivocate, changing terms to suit our callused consciences, so that we can look the other way as another inconvenient life is sucked into the vacuum machine, while we strive mightily in the next building to force the union of egg and sperm on our terms. We want the life we want, the way we want it, when we want it.

I don’t pretend to understand the motivations that people have for supporting or performing these acts. All I know is that the more we know, the more we seem to forget. We have forgotten, for example, that the first right mentioned in the Declaration of Independence is Life. Without it, the rest of the guaranteed rights have no meaning. Without life, what good are liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

We have forgotten how we used to cherish all life. How interesting it is that we are so determined to deny this first right to anybody except those whom we deem fit. We forget that for many years, we protected that life with laws that made aborting a gestating child a capital offense of murder. We protected it with social pressures that caused unwed mothers to go away to “visit an aunt in upstate New York” rather than kill their babies. We protected it when adoption was a loving option, and child-hungry couples did not have to go to Romania or Korea to find a child to adopt.

But protecting life now to most of us has become a narrow business of protecting our own hides. As individuals and as groups, we complain that we are in an “unjust” war. We have chosen to forget–thanks to the mainstream media–that we were attacked on September 11, 2001, and that there has never been such an enormous loss of civilian life in one act of violence in the United States before or since.

And in the forgetting of those facts, we set ourselves up to protect our narrow little lives from the evil we perceive in the dogged persistence of our President to keep his word, to carry out what he promised; to take the fight to the enemy; and to bring the perpetrators to justice (or, in his words, to “…bring justice to the perpetrators…”). In a bizarre transferrence, we now make him out to be the villain, as evil as the perpetrators of that heinous act.

We want so badly to be left alone in our little safe world that we forget that America is the only country on earth with the moral authority and the strength to make the worlds of others just as safe. It sounds as if we resent the fact that we have liberated nearly a billion people in the history of our nation. It sounds as if we are jealous of the freedoms we restore to oppressed and tyrranized people we go to free, as if we not only don’t have the right to restore those rights to others, we really don’t have the right to enjoy them ourselves.

Don’t tell me George W. Bush is sending your kid to die. Your child volunteered for service in a military that he or she knew could be called up at any moment. He wasn’t drafted. He signed up and chose the military life. Nobody wants to see their children die. It’s unnatural for a mother to bury her children. Perhaps this is why the prevailing attitude today is to preserve the right to kill that child before it gets big enough to go away and fight and die for someone else’s right to exist in freedom.

Liberals make absolutely no sense when it comes to “life.” They are rabid about supporting abortion “rights.” “Right” to abortion? Excuse me…but, when did you (as in “liberals”) get the right to say that an unborn child had no right to exist? If you will show me where the Constitution specifically supports your right to make that decision, I’ll write a retraction of this article immediately. You can’t have it both ways.

It always boils down to abortion, whether people want to admit it or not. When Roe v. Wade was put into effect over thirty years ago, the “slippery slope” that the pro-life people warned us about began. An attitude of abortion, one that perceives the unborn as disposable, one that perceives life as cheap enough to be discarded for any reason, has pulled us into the morass of moral decay. When life is cheap, so is every other right, because without life, none of the other rights have meaning. Many of us voted for the legalization of abortion in the seventies, even though now, in retrospect, we view that vote with horror as we realize what we helped to bring about.

But all the promises were there: “Oh, this is only to save the life of the mother!” “Only in cases of rape or incest!” and the list continued to grow, until it eventually became legal to slaughter an unborn baby in the womb for the entire nine months of the pregnancy, simply because it existed. And now, there even are those who think even that isn’t enough…that the window of opportunity should be extended to cover babies up to thirty days of age (presumably to determine if the child is “perfect” enough or not).

Having the power to “create” life tends to make us all a little prideful, as if we now have the handle on being “like God.” Now, we boast, we can do it all! We can not only “create” life, but we can erase our “mistakes,” so we are even better than God, who lets all manner of deformed and crippled life be born.

Playing “God” should be left to the real expert.

Just looking at PLAYING GOD/PLAYING SATAN, I realized that playing God seems to have at its core the desire to muddle up God’s rules regarding sex. If we aren’t deliberately contracepting, we’re killing our babies. If we aren’t happy with the sex we are, we have surgery to “correct God’s mistakes.” Cloning is probably the only thing listed there that isn’t overtly about SEX, and even it boils down to the desire to do what God does. I dunno…seems to me things were much simpler years ago when we didn’t know how to do all these things. People were almost invariably married when their children were born, they took what they got in terms of the baby’s sex, and they had large families. Life was simpler. Why do we always want to complicate things so badly? And why do we always think we are not only smarter than God, but better at what HE does?

You can hardly swing a cat today without hitting an article about the Pope’s visit and the Mass he celebrated in Washington DC.

It’s interesting to note how many complaints came from people who are still aligned with the “Spirit of Vatican II” proponents. They are still complaining because there is no support for women priests (This topic has been dealt with and dropped, and it’s even against the rules for priests to mention it any more), altar girls (and even boys, at Papal Masses), and the varied and various other little accretions that have been added to the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass since Vatican II.

I often ask myself–but have yet to do the research–just exactly what GOOD did Vatican II really do for the Church? The only consequences I have seen have all turned out to be, if not actually destructive or detrimental, at least undignified, silly, and/or totally uncalled for. I know I should get busy and do my research if I am seriously interested, and I have no excuse for not doing so.

But for people like me who love the Church they fell in love with years ago, it is a breath of fresh air to see and hear a Pope who is so determined to undo as much of the destruction in the liturgy as possible. I pray his health holds up and he is able to accomplish his work before he leaves us to take The Lord up on an Offer he can’t refuse.

Pettifogging Busybodies

Some safety crusaders may be satisfied just to be morally one-up by making lofty statements. Politicians who are safety crusaders will be satisfied if that gets you to vote for them, which is their real bottom line

Thomas Sowell is probably one of THE wisest minds in the country. Once more, he has put it into words for us. In this article, Dr. Sowell has shown the environmental whackos in Washington to be nothing more than pettifogging busybodies.

Just when you thought the Washington elite chapter of envirowhackos couldn’t get any goofier, they come up with a whole new scam to screw up our lives, complicate everything beyond comprehension, and generally make awful nuisances of themselves.

Toilets that only use 1.6 gallons of water (apparently nobody has shown them how the water cycle in nature works), front-loading washers as opposed to top loaders (which presumably use more water than the front loaders, thereby causing further predation on our precious water (see hydrologic cycle again), the disastrous CFL (“curly”) light bulbs and their sick, pitiful “light,” and the various and sundry other ways they (the same people who demand that we conservatives/Christians stay out of their bedrooms) manage to snoop, intrude, meddle, insinuate, complicate and further turn what might have been a fairly happy life into a ratrace of regulations, fines, and frustrations, even moreso now than previously, simply because it’s an election year.

Tedious And Dangerous

In place of a regular post today, I’m simply going to leave you with this. I realize that it appears that everything that can be said regarding the utter lack of fitness of the Gentleman from Illinois for the office of President has already been said. I don’t believe that is the case, however.

I believe he has just begun to tell us the truth about himself, his beliefs, and what he hopes to accomplish. Because of this, I am passing on the insights of Dr. Sanity, who does yeoman’s work in keeping us aware of the truth about the people we have sent to Washington. In everyday terms, Dr. Sanity shows us the real faces of those who seek high office or who presume to form policy for Americans. I believe it is extremely important.

Language Arts

The American English Language is being dissolved into a mush of politically-correct euphemisms and sexually-charged advertising jingles, laced with the pitiful noises of “ebonics” and the other cultural breadcrumbs that coat the consumerist lifestyle of today’s American colorlessly politically-correct world.

Instead of teaching vocabulary-building exercises in English class (nowadays, it’s called “Language Arts”), students are taught to write what they “feel” and not to worry about grammar, punctuation, or spelling.

Is it any wonder that we have newspapers who hire people who can’t tell “its” from “it’s”, who use “there,” “they’re,” and “their” interchangeably? And, who ever taught a “journalist” (nobody is just a “reporter” today) that it was correct to say, “President Bush on Tuesday called for…” Somehow, they have gotten the idea that they MUST begin every paragraph with the name of some prominent individual, instead of saying something much less clumsy, like: “On Tuesday, President Bush called for…” or, if you must: “President Bush called for … on Tuesday…”

I taught myself to read when I was four. Since then, I’ve had an incredible love for the language we speak. A book was (and still is) a delicious walk through someone else’s deep affection for words. Reading the printed page is so pleasurable that I still feel a certain restlessness when I have no suitable pages before me. I keep books whose “sounds” stir my heart, and I reread them over and over again.

But today’s students of public schools are deprived children, deprived of a language that should help them express themselves clearly. They mumble in hesitant, mushmouthed pidgin because they simply don’t have the right words to say what needs to be said. No one has taught them to love the language, on the (poorly-conceived) pretext that certain language “might offend” someone else who didn’t speak it.

So the whole culture suffers from the politically-correct worries of school officials. Privately-schooled or homeschooled students, on the other hand, still receive the kind of education in English and grammar that leads to a real love for the proper use and deployment of words. Immigrants used to be required to learn enough English to pass their citizenship tests. Now, the tests are given in their native language because the powers that prescribe these things don’t wish to “offend.”

The language of a culture reflects the culture of the people. Today’s young people are virtually inarticulate simply because no one has taken the time to teach them the language. No one has cared enough about language to make it mean something. To today’s “educators,” language should never offend, but it offends in its pitiful range of expression and lack of illustration. Today’s young people live DOWN to the “expectations” of the language they use, which is a patois of misused words, like “disrespected,” and made-up descriptives used simply because of the paucity of their vocabularies. What’s “offensive” about all of this is the disrespect shown the language of our birth and heritage. Things are indeed at the bottom when teachers send home notes with phrases like, “Johnny wet his panse in class today.” (This note was actually received by me from my 5-year-old’s kindergarten “teacher.”)

It’s not a wonder why American culture seems to be slumping into a pale imitation of the vibrancy of days gone by. The language it uses can no longer express clearly enough or strongly enough to inspire Americans to stand proudly. American English is the language of a country that is mighty, rich, and free. Of course, this is offensive to those who wish to keep all citizens weak, confused, and helpless, and the same as everyone else.

If it were possible to restore a culture with just the use of words, I would propose that we begin immediately to really teach the true language of America to everyone, to demand it of students before they can receive their diplomas, and to use strictly-judged writing tests to vet reporters and journalists. It’s time to stop letting those people who worry about “offensive” language dictate how Americans speak and express themselves. Before we finish the slide into irrelevancy, we need to speak up, clearly and concisely, with words that are not preceded by, “I’m, like… then, he’s, like…, an’ we’re like, ‘Whoa!’” and no citizen is hyphenated for fear of offending them.