The "Chernobyl" of the oil industry

The dark shadows of the Chernobyl disaster looms in the background when we think about nuclear energy.  And, yes, the nuclear industry counters with their arguments about safety and security here in the US.

But, even a low probability for a disaster means that when that disaster happens, it is not a simple one.  The result: a great deal of opposition to building nuclear power plants.

The catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Louisiana, is a similar story then for offshore oil drilling.  When environmentalists worried about the potential downsides, well, even President Obama minimized those concerns; he said,

today we’re announcing the expansion of offshore oil and gas exploration, but in ways that balance the need to harness domestic energy resources and the need to protect America’s natural resources.  Under the leadership of Secretary Salazar, we’ll employ new technologies that reduce the impact of oil exploration.  We’ll protect areas that are vital to tourism, the environment, and our national security.  And we’ll be guided not by political ideology, but by scientific evidence.

That's why my administration will consider potential areas for development in the mid and south Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, while studying and protecting sensitive areas in the Arctic.  That’s why we’ll continue to support development of leased areas off the North Slope of Alaska, while protecting Alaska’s Bristol Bay.

How did the chief Republican legislator react to Obama's oil exploration proposal?  No, he did not oppose it, but chastised the president for not expanding the idea:

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) dismissed the president's plan as not going far enough in opening up U.S. waters for exploration. 

Obama's decision "continues to defy the will of the American people," Boehner said in a statement, pointing to the president's decision to open Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico waters, while leaving Pacific and many Alaskan waters largely closed to exploration. 

The irony of it all: Candidate Obama made it very clear that offshore drilling would not deliver any benefit.  In the video below, Candidate Obama actually says "let me make it clear ...."

I suppose after getting elected, President Obama saw things differently, as politicians often do after winning the election!

Photo of the day ... India's traffic

“Even an ambulance or a fire engine cannot come into the locality in case of an emergency,” said M. Sangeetha, a resident.
Report here

(un)sustainable agriculture

Influential food writers, advocates, and celebrity restaurant owners are repeating the mantra that "sustainable food" in the future must be organic, local, and slow. But guess what: Rural Africa already has such a system, and it doesn't work. Few smallholder farmers in Africa use any synthetic chemicals, so their food is de facto organic. High transportation costs force them to purchase and sell almost all of their food locally. And food preparation is painfully slow. The result is nothing to celebrate: average income levels of only $1 a day and a one-in-three chance of being malnourished.
If we are going to get serious about solving global hunger, we need to de-romanticize our view of preindustrial food and farming. And that means learning to appreciate the modern, science-intensive, and highly capitalized agricultural system we've developed in the West. Without it, our food would be more expensive and less safe. In other words, a lot like the hunger-plagued rest of the world.

One might think that such views will not be found in countries like India where not only do poor and undernourished live number in the millions, but also where millions of others have been lifted out of abject poverty and undernourishment.
Think again; more from the article:

Celebrity author and eco-activist Vandana Shiva claims the Green Revolution has brought nothing to India except "indebted and discontented farmers." A 2002 meeting in Rome of 500 prominent international NGOs, including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, even blamed the Green Revolution for the rise in world hunger. Let's set the record straight.
The development and introduction of high-yielding wheat and rice seeds into poor countries, led by American scientist Norman Borlaug and others in the 1960s and 70s, paid huge dividends. In Asia these new seeds lifted tens of millions of small farmers out of desperate poverty and finally ended the threat of periodic famine. India, for instance, doubled its wheat production between 1964 and 1970 and was able to terminate all dependence on international food aid by 1975. As for indebted and discontented farmers, India's rural poverty rate fell from 60 percent to just 27 percent today. Dismissing these great achievements as a "myth" (the official view of Food First, a California-based organization that campaigns globally against agricultural modernization) is just silly.

Headline of the day about Greece

'Nothing Justifies Kicking Greece out of the Euro Zone'
I am not making this up; that is the very headline at Der Spiegel!

Merkel has rejected a debate about ejecting Greece from the euro zone. "It is about a quick reaction in favor of the euro's stability as a whole. Everything else is a distraction."
In Monday's newspapers, German commentators are divided over whether the country's taxpayers should be forking out for the debts of other European nations and whether it may be time to contemplate kicking Greece out of the euro zone. 

Free for all in Ukraine's parliament

I wonder if Dick Cheney is thinking that this is how he ought to have punched a few senators, instead of merely swearing :)

Watching this reminded me of a few other similar "democratic" acts in elected bodies that made the news, and here they are:
Taiwan:

In one of the states in India:

Czech:

Enough? ha ha ha .... politics is always way more fascinating than sitcoms :)

First Iceland. Then Greece. Next Portugal? And Euro dies?

That listing of countries might be a wonderful vacation schedule.  But, that seems to be the path of the European contagion ...
First, this news update: Greece's bond rating now means that one can expect only 30 cents on the dollar.  I bet there are quite a few Greeks who are now lamenting the gazillions spent on hosting the Olympics in 2004.  How much did they spend?  Ahem:

the overall cost (state and private funding) was estimated to reach 8.954 billion euro, not including the cost of projects that were completed or the construction of which were accelerated due to the Games, but which had been planned for construction regardless of the Games. Those projects included the Attiki Road highway, Athens' new Eleftherios Venizelos international airport, the tram, and the suburban railway. Of that 8.954 billion euro total, an estimated 7.202 billion was footed by the State, with the remaining 1.752 billion euro coming from the Athens 2004 Organizing Committee (ATHOC) and financed by the committee's revenues from ticket sales, television broadcast rights, Olympic-logo product sales, and sponsorships.

If we count all those investments "regardless" of the Games, well, let us round it up to 10 billion euros.  That was six years ago.  So, factor in inflation as well.  All it means is this: if Greece hadn't wasted away that precious euros, it would not be facing this disastrous scenario of not enough cash to pay the piper, eh! 
Of course, Greece's debts are way more than 10 billion euros.  But, my point is that having debt is one thing, but not being able to make payments is another.

It is not the Olympics aspect that Krugman writes about though.  He has far more profound things to say:

Greece seems to be spiraling over the edge into default; I just don’t know how it steps back from that edge now. Might it also leave the euro? That would be a total mess, inviting the mother of all bank runs

These developments could even make the Goldman Sachs folks respectable and responsible :)  Talk about timing!

Anyway, Hitchens' bottom line is pretty much simple: I told you so!  Apparently he did write that the Euro was not bound to last:

In the summer of 2005, Foreign Policy magazine asked its contributors to name one taken-for-granted thing that they thought was overrated or would not last. After a brief interval of reflection, I chose the euro.

A better prediction that Fukuyama's "the end of history" ...
Anyway, Hitchens writes:

How tragic it is that the euro system has already, in effect, become a two-tier one and that the bottom tier is occupied by the very countries—Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Ireland—that benefited most from their accession to the European Union. The shady way in which Greece behaved in concealing its debts, and the drunken-sailor manner in which other smaller states managed their budgets, has, of course, offended the Germans. It is openly said in Germany now that it would be better to bring back the deutsche mark than to be bailing out quasi-indigent and thriftless banana republics.

Well, this is the same stuff that Krugman refers to the "cohesion crisis"
So, will Greece exit the Euro?  Not so fast, cautions this report:

The most drastic solution - abandoning the euro as a prelude to devaluation - would not change the requirement to cut the twin deficits since short-term export competitiveness is not the key issue and opportunities to boost exports (including tourism) are quite limited, especially as the European economy remains weak.  Those who see euro exit as attractive should also recall the instability generated by historic episodes of devaluation.

Hmmm .... we will be in this for a long time ... hold on to your wallet, home, kids, ....

Outsourcing: The Onion explains why

Hey, they included "cricket" in the list :)

Raising Arizona--from its police state avatar

So, what does Arizona's law on illegal immigrants mean?
William Finnegan at the New Yorker writes:

Arizona will become an American-style police state. Racial profiling will be the law. Whites will be all right, just as they were in the Jim Crow South. God help everyone else. The nativist right seems to be calling the tune in Arizona politics today. Senator John McCain, facing a primary challenge from an anti-immigrant talk-radio host, abandoned long-held moderate positions on immigration policy and supported the new law. The governor, Jan Brewer, also being challenged from the right this year, did the same thing and signed the bill. The Arizona state legislature has tried to lead the nation backwards on racial issues before. In the nineteen-eighties, Arizona refused to recognize the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as an official holiday. This week the legislature’s lower chamber passed a bill that will require President Obama to produce his birth certificate if he wants to be on the ballot in Arizona in 2012. According to the Associated Press, “Supporters say the bill would help settle a controversy over whether Obama was born in the United States.”

If only Congress had acted on immigration issues all these years.  Obama said it best: it is a result of “our failure to act responsibly at the federal level.”
I do wonder what might have happened if Janet Napolitano had continued on as Arizona's governor, and not become the Homeland Security Secretary.  She would have vetoed the bill, I am sure; this was her comment:

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is taking aim at the new controversial law passed in her home state of Arizona dealing with illegal immigration, telling ABC News it is "not a good law in any number of reasons."
"That one is a misguided law. It's not a good law, good enforcement law," said Napolitano, who served as governor of Arizona before being joining President Obama's administration last year. "But beyond that, what it illustrates is that other states now will feel compelled to do things."

The challenge ahead for India

The story unfolds by itself through these two photos from The Hindu:

The "modern" seeking to compete in the global market from Hyderabad, in Andhra Pradesh, while for the "traditional" millions "hunger is routine, malnutrition rife, employment insecure, social security non-existent, health care expensive, and livelihoods under threat."

Life in villages definitely seems better now compared to my childhood years ... but, there is simply a long, long way to go ...

Larry Summers unites the left and the right :)

In graduate school, a professor once remarked that on some issues, if you go far enough, the left and the right will agree.  Yet again, he was proven right--in this case with Larry Summers.  Both the leftist Nation and the libertarian Reason have labeled Summers a liar, and for the same stuff he said.
The context is this PBS interview with Summers

According to the Nation: " Larry Summers is a clumsy public liar."  There, as simple as that!  Well, there is more than that:

Summers's claims about what caused the banking crisis were, likewise, aggressively misleading to plain deceitful. "Regulators didn't have the specific mandate for the consumer." Wrong. The Federal Reserve and other agencies had plenty of legal authority to protect consumers. They chose not to use it. Their dereliction actually occurred on Summers's watch, when he himself was Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton.
"Regulators didn't have authority in a comprehensive way to monitor the derivatives market." This is a flaming lie. The principal regulatory agency--the Commodity Futures Regulatory Commission--was actually preparing to impose stricter oversight on derivatives in the late 1990s when Larry Summers stopped it. Summers and Republican allies intervened in 2000 with legislation that castrated that agency and prohibited it from acting further. Derivatives exploded thereafter.
When Summers was finally asked about his own responsibility for encouraging the dangerous financial instruments, he responded with a mouthful of double talk. "You know, the situation's changed hugely.... So people were actually focused on a very different set of issues." Summers even tried to make it sound like he personally had wanted to tighten the oversight, but was blocked by "Congressional opposition."
Liar, liar, pants on fire.

Ok, that is from the left.  Next up, from the libertarian perspective, here is Reason:

More serious than Summers' well established habit of citing a fake consensus of experts to support his claims is that these comments embarrass an administration that is trying to promote the fiction that it is seriously interested in ending bailouts for gigantic banks. It might make intuitive sense that regulators would rather deal with a few big, identical institutions than with many diverse ones, but that's not the story the Democrats are using to sell their financial reform plan. So between Thursday and yesterday, somebody must have found a woodshed big enough to take Summers out to. Here's what he had to say on one of the Sunday talk shows:

"We must end too big to fail," he said on Face the Nation. "There is no one associated with the White House who believes "too big to fail" is acceptable, or that it's acceptable for financial institutions to rely on a bailout."

Glad that's squared away.

You can understand why I like these: After all, I identify myself as a libertarian Democrat :)

In "solidarity", D'oh!

More on the South Park episode (and nothing to do with my work; D'oh!!!)

Students evaluating faculty

First, the quote for the day:

"Students are the inventory," Mr. Crumbley says. "The real stakeholders in higher education are employers, society, the people who hire our graduates. But what we do is ask the inventory if a professor is good or bad. At General Motors," he says, "you don't ask the cars which factory workers are good at their jobs. You check the cars for defects, you ask the drivers, and that's how you know how the workers are doing."

To some extent, this metaphor is rather crude.  But, there is a great deal of merit in the argument that Professor Crumbley offers.

I pay a lot of attention to student feedback.  It is not only from those evaluation forms, but throughout the year from their explicit comments, and from their behaviors. 
But, at the same time, I don't view what I do as some kind of a factory job with students being the output.  Neither do I see students as customers.  In fact, I often point out to students that in a public university like ours, taxpayers pay for about 40% of the operational expenses, and almost all the capital expenses ... which then all the more reinforces Crumbley's point that society is our customer ... but then I hate this customer metaphor ....

More on South Park, the prophet, and Islamism

Continuing with previous posts (here, and here), this one is from Ross Douthat's column in the NY Times (BTW, this is the first time I am linking to a piece by Douthat; I am not sure if he has earned his place as a columnist yet; he was a great blogger though)

Across 14 on-air years, there’s no icon “South Park” hasn’t trampled, no vein of shock-comedy (sexual, scatalogical, blasphemous) it hasn’t mined. In a less jaded era, its creators would have been the rightful heirs of Oscar Wilde or Lenny Bruce — taking frequent risks to fillet the culture’s sacred cows.
In ours, though, even Parker’s and Stone’s wildest outrages often just blur into the scenery. In a country where the latest hit movie, “Kick-Ass,” features an 11-year-old girl spitting obscenities and gutting bad guys while dressed in pedophile-bait outfits, there isn’t much room for real transgression. Our culture has few taboos that can’t be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place.
Except where Islam is concerned. There, the standards are established under threat of violence, and accepted out of a mix of self-preservation and self-loathing.

I catch up on South Park only every once in a while.  of the episodes I have watched, including the Superbest Friends, well, I have watched better ones.  The two that stand out in my mind are the one about the smug factor in the SF Bay Area, and the Scientology piece with Tom Cruise in the closet .... those two were hilarious :)

Wall Street, White House, and Congress: a horrible alliance

Two different columns, in two different publications, in two different countries, but the bottom line is the same: the nexus between Wall Street's big banks and the political establishment in DC is not healthy for democracy.

First, here is Robert Reich, writing in the Financial Times.  (The guy is on a roll--only a few days ago he had a column in the WSJ!!!)

Tight connections between Washington and Wall Street are nothing new, of course, especially when it comes to Goldman. Hank Paulson ran the bank before becoming George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary. Robert Rubin followed the same trajectory under Bill Clinton, then returned to Wall Street to head Citigroup’s executive committee. Dick Gephardt, the former Democratic House leader, lobbies for Goldman. Some 250 former members of Congress are now lobbying on behalf of the financial industry. President Barack Obama himself received nearly $15m from Wall Street during his 2008 campaign, of which almost $1m came from Goldman employees and their families.
Politicians cannot continue to have it both ways. The close nexus between Washington and Wall Street is eroding trust in government.

And then, Frank Rich in the NY Times:

The truth is that both parties are too often in hock to the financial sector, and both parties bear responsibility for the meltdown. In response to a question from Jake Tapper of ABC News last weekend, Bill Clinton was right to say that he and two of his Treasury secretaries, Rubin and Lawrence Summers, “were wrong” to leave derivatives unregulated.

Bet Against The American Dream from Planet Money on Vimeo.

Meanwhile, Sarkozy's France goes nuts

The woman in the photograph was fined.  This was in France.  What was the fine for?
Driving under the influence of drugs?
Prostitution?
Nah .... even worse, according to Sarkozy's government: for the veil!!!

Anne, an assumed name, a 31-year old French woman who has been fined for wearing a niqab while driving, speaks during a news conference in Nantes, western France, April 23, 2010. Anne told French media that police handed her a 22-euro ($29.6) fine, saying her veil posed a "safety risk" to her driving.

South Park, Muhammad, and free speech

Dan Savage: