A Friday Round-Up for a Thin Week

Little time to blog this week, so I'll just do a round-up of things I wanted to talk about but didn't have time to. I have a lot to say on the News Corp phone hacking scandal, but that deserves its own post.  On thing that has just happened is that the former head of News International and current CEO of Dow Jones has resigned.

Speaking of News Corp, a blog in that tree-hugging, anti-business rag The Wall Street Journal tells us that oil production can't keep with demand.  Some interesting points from James Herron's Oil Production: Running to Stand Still:

In June, Saudi Arabia responded to rising oil demand, against the protests of fellow OPEC members, by pumping an extra 700,000 barrels a day of oil...So what effect did this major effort have on the crucial balance between oil supply and demand? Very little.

Oil supply from countries outside OPEC for 2011 was revised down by 0.2 million barrels a day because of “prolonged production outages” in a number of important oil producing regions, the IEA said.

More oil is increasingly being consumed at source. The Saudis pumped an extra 0.7 million barrels a day in June, but half of this was consumed domestically.

The Crowell & Moring law firm said birth defects in W. Va are the fault of inbreeding, not mountain-top mining.  Nice strategy, blame a stereotype, not the effects of your client's operations: massive exposure of coal seams (which can include sulfur and heavy metals) to oxygen and water, creating acid mine drainage, as well as radical alteration of surface and groundwater flow.

In their festering Randian-Calvinists minds, the Teabaggers believe themselves to be disciples of fictitious Founding Fathers who were all evangelical protestants who never would think of taxation and fees as a way to pay for the operation of the Federal government.  One of many things they ignore is that the first government under the Constitution solved a massive debt problem by RAISING REVENUE.  When Western Pennsylvania farmers rebelled against an excise tax on corn whiskey, President Washington even raised troops to enforce collection.  The birth of the Coast Guard in the form of the revenue marine came about as a result of revenue collection as well. Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton obtained approval from Congress to build the first ten cutters for the purpose of collecting tariffs and stopping smuggling.

Conor Freidersdorf in The Atlantic watched the Palin documentary in empty Orange County theater.The turnout  shows how overrated she is by the pundits.

It's pretty pleasant here in SE PA, but our fifth heat wave is expected next week.  The drought and heat continue in the south and Plains, leading the Governor of Oklahoma to call for prayer.  Blame it on God eh, not our abuse of the planet eh? When you look at the comments in the linked article notice all the Texas-Okie denialsts claiming it's always hot there.  That begs the question, why pray for it to end then?  But don't worry Southern farmers, that evil federal government will bail you out from the effects of extreme weather.  Too bad most of you vote for people who deny climate change and believe the federal budget should be balanced immediately by only cutting spending.

Strange, surreal and Sunday...Jan 16

They're biting in the Schuylkill River. Big ones, in the thousands of pounds.

Ya know, I blame these bird deaths on the guy who kept serving them. On the other hand, it seems you can't trust human pilots with any beverage. And then there's this, what's up with you pilots lately?

Even mermaids aren't safe these days.

Sarah Palin, Larry the Cable Guy and an Elvis impersonator walk into a bar...if that were only a joke.

Damn you wobbly Earth, now I have to live my life not be able to have the stars tell me if I'll find happiness or word from a long-lost friend today.

Late breaking update: with a warmer climate, why would any think we need hairy elephants?

DADT, WikiLeaks, and Palin - "Meh"

There's a number of subjects in the so-called news that are generating a lot of noise and show, but leave me with a feeling of, "yeah, so" to varying degrees.

First the repeal of  "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". This is truly a big deal for gay service members or those who want to serve, so I'm not trying to discount the importance of it.  And it is making the wingnuts heads explode, which is always fun to watch.  Now I think it would've caused a lot of trouble when I was in back in the '80s, but since people overall today are more accepting of it, my response to predictions of doom is "meh", won't happen. Although again, reading wingnuttery at this level of insanity is always good for a chuckle. You know, if it cuts down on the backwards ass hicks who join, that will be a positive result.

Now on to Wikileaks. Julian Assange is either an evil villain or a brave, persecuted hero, depending on your programmed political beliefs, and the cable leaks are either a viscous crime that will cost lives or the greatest unmaking of government corruption since Watergate. Cool your jets people, its neither. Think of it this way, I have a ton of data on various volcanoes and geological terrane boundaries going back over a decade. Some has been selected and interpreted and the results published in peer-reviewed journals. We can say that's like a well done news story. Now imagine I took the rest of the data, did little or nothing to filter the bad points or sort the data in any meaningful way, and just dumped it on the internet. That's Wikileaks (well sorta, to complete the analogy I would have had to have hacked the data from someone else). The data dump I described is about as close to a research paper. as WikiLeaks is to journalism. Most of what's been released is in the category of "tell me something I didn't already know". Wake me when they actually scoop something.

Finally there's frickin' Palin. Of all the topics I ranting on here, her story is the only one that has absolutely no meat to it. Her story is nothing more than thrice chewed gristle being passed as fillet-mignon. No matter how many worthless analysis pieces crowding out legitimate news are published, no matter how many reality shows she does, no matter how much undeserved praise she gets from ignorant conservatives and hand-wringing from spineless liberals, she is nothing. Every week it seems they publish another poll saying showing something like 60% of Americans wouldn't even think of considering her for president, yet these farces keep pushing this narrative. Enough, I don't care, she's not even worth attacking.

Palin, Payments and Profits

Sarah Palin's speech at CSU Stanislaus in June was controversial not just for the speaker, but because the cash-strapped school shelled out $75,000 in speakers fees and tried to keep the financial details away from scrutiny.
This past week all the gory details were released. Overall the CSU Stanislaus Foundation states ~$257K was spent on the speaker's fees, accommodations and security. Spent by who? Was it out of the foundation's pocket or the University's? The Foundation took in around $473K which after expenses nets $207,000. According to the university, $80,00 of the net proceeds are to go to "student scholarships", but no firm details are provided. This contradicts information provided by the CSUS President and reported here that claims all 207K went to scholarships. What's the deal with that? Furthermore, despite a lot of statements that the foundation is private, their incorporation indicates that they are an auxiliary arm of the University.

But lets' forget Palin for the time being, the speaker doesn't matter. What matters is the way money is brought into universities, how the spoils are divided and how much accountability there is.
OK, first of all, despite some claims, public money may have been used (the details are still vague). If so, the University should get  it back from the foundation, but when? How much of the proceeds actually go to students and how much to administrative overhead? Finally, what is the point of enabling more students to attend when the content of their education will be gutted?
Foundations, alumni groups, athletics and the universities themselves are supposed to be non-profit. But this just means they don't pay dividends or divvy up a surplus. But when you have evergrowing overhead expenses for salaries and benefits for excessive (and expensive) administrators, and you cut money from the educational/research mission to pay those expenses, you are acting like a for-profit entity. Add in the fact that much fundraising (including athletics) exists now to support the fundraisers, and we have an unsustainable situation developing in higher education. Colleges and universities may end up as nothing more than overpriced sports-entertainment-resort complexes with the occasional dumbed down high-school level class to attend.