© Markwr | Dreamstime.com

MUDGE’s Musings

Politicians disagree. That’s not news — that’s politics.

Scientists disagree. That sometimes does not make the news. The flaming rhetoric gets the attention; the calm, carefully reasoned rebuttal is buried on page A22.

Or buried in a special interest magazine.

Found another such publication: Skeptical Inquirer.

Al Gore wants this country to totally migrate power generation from coal, like that sooty specimen above, to renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, in 10 years. A very Kennedy-esque proposal. Actually, Kennedy’s inspiration (or, at least, his speechwriters’) might have been Chicago visionary, and leading proponent of the Columbian Exposition of 1892-93, Daniel Burnham, who most famously said: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood…”

[Editor's note: the paragraph immediately above is a prime example of this nanocorner of the 'Sphere©'s specialty: Sequitur Service©.]

Gore’s proposal of course is the follow-on to his environmental hobby-horse, sound-bit as global warming.

Not so fast, Al…

Let’s Keep Our Cool about Global Warming

Given the recent debate in our pages over global warming and climate change, we invited Bjørn Lomborg, author of Cool It! The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, for his perspective. — Editor

When it comes to climate change, we need to cool our dialogue and consider the arguments for and against different policy options. In the heat of a loud and obnoxious debate, facts and reason lose out.

BJØRN LOMBORG | SKEPTICAL INQUIRER MAGAZINE | MARCH / APRIL 2008

Bjørn Lomborg, PhD, is an adjunct professor in the Copenhagen Business School and organizer of the Copenhagen Consensus, a conference of top economists who come together to prioritize the best solutions for the world’s greatest challenges. He is author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and, most recently, Cool It! The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming.

There is a kind of choreographed screaming about climate change from both sides of the debate. Discussion would be on much firmer ground if we could actually hear the arguments and the facts and then sensibly debate long-term solutions.

Man-made climate change is certainly a problem, but it is categorically not the end of the world. Take the rise in sea levels as one example of how the volume of the screaming is unmatched by the facts. In its 2007 report, the United Nations estimates that sea levels will rise about a foot over the remainder of the century.¹ While this is not a trivial amount, it is also important to realize that it is not unknown to mankind: since 1860, we have experienced a sea level rise of about a foot without major disruptions.² It is also important to realize that the new prediction is lower than previous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates and much lower than the expectations from the 1990s of more than two feet and the 1980s, when the Environmental Protection Agency projected more than six feet.³

We dealt with rising sea levels in the past century, and we will continue to do so in this century. It will be problematic, but it is incorrect to posit the rise as the end of civilization.

We will actually lose very little dry land to the rise in sea levels. It is estimated that almost all nations in the world will establish maximal coastal protection almost everywhere, simply because doing so is fairly cheap. For more than 180 of the world’s 192 nations, coastal protection will cost less than 0.1 percent GDP and approach 100 percent protection.⁴

As you can see, our Danish expert writes very cogently about the overblown threat of sea level increases. It gets better.

After doing some math and figuring that a $140/ton tax on carbon (a recent Gore proposal) is as absurd as it sounds, he comes up with a fascinating analogy: traffic deaths.

Traffic deaths are a growing problem in the world, as more and more people in the developing world acquire motorized vehicles. Dr. Lomborg tells us that there is a sure fire way to virtually eliminate deaths from such motorized mishaps (which after all kill 42,000 in the U.S. annually, and are on track to become the second leading cause of death globally, after heart disease!): set a mandatory global speed limit of five (5!) miles per hour.

That would all but eliminate traffic deaths, but of course is totally out of the question, everywhere, especially in the developing world, where the animal-cart speed of goods and people has been a limiter for thousands of years.

Same with eliminating the use of fossil fuels. Read on.

Let’s Keep Our Cool about Global Warming (Skeptical Inquirer March / April 200

So our sooty friend, and the 100-unit coal railroad trains that feed it, aren’t going away any time soon.

And New York, Rotterdam and Shanghai are not soon to be submerged beneath their oceans.

And, if Al Gore could truly stir men’s blood, he would be completing his second term in the Oval Office, instead of this country’s current and real catastrophe, George III.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

MUDGE’S Musings

Well, today was that Thursday that actually began at 10:00pm last night, flowing seamlessly from Wednesday, and save for about two hours between the end of one meeting at 2am and the preparation for the next at 5:15am, sleep for yr (justifiably) humble svt has been as scarce as home buyers.

So, we’re on a reduced blogging schedule, with just enough energy to faithfully observe the Prime Directive: Thou Shalt Blog Daily.

As we’ve opined in the past (recently, actually) one of our favorite bloggers regardless of topic is Sandy Szwarc.

The first time we found her was last October. Enjoy!

Blast from the Past!

A post we really, really loved to write, and read, and re-read…

From last fall, and always in season, originally posted October 8, 2007, and originally titled “mm165: Junkfood Science: Obesity Paradox No. 13 — Take heart.”

MUDGE’S Musings

Welcome to one of the newest members of the Left-Handed Complement blogroll, Junkfood Science.

Sandy Szwarc seems to have the credentials, and she has a point of view.

Points of view are not lacking in the blogosphere (although credentials may be!), but I was attracted to hers immediately.

Anyone glancing at the rendition of Yr (Justifiably) Humble Svt that graces the top of the sidebar of this nanocorner of the ‘Sphere© can probably tell that one might charitably describe MUDGE as horizontally challenged.

Fat.

Obese even.

A war fought over all but six decades. Oh, a battle won here or there, but the trend is lousy. And, the implicit message has always been: get skinny or die early.

Well, heredity and Snickers bars have long impaired my ability to do the former.

And over the past decade, the promised life-shortening chronic diseases have appeared as threatened: diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia, all controlled as well as can be expected through (to some extent diet, but mainly) the wonders of the pharmaceutical arts, which is pretty well indeed.

This past summer, a promising exercise program that played to the only exercise MUDGE can comfortably handle (other than blogging!), walking, turned into Achilles tendinosis, and the pounds lost so arduously over the past four years are packing on again, as the recreational and therapeutic walking halted while various medical professionals in MUDGE’s life attempt to figure out how to end the annoying ankle pain.

Then, the other day, thanks I believe to reddit.com, I encountered Sandy Szwarc.

For the first time in MUDGE’s time in the ‘Sphere was I tempted to write: “WTF!” But I won’t.

Take a look:

What is most amazing is how long it has been known that body fat doesn’t cause heart disease or premature death, yet how vehemently people hold onto this belief. “The notion that body fat is a toxic substance is now firmly a part of folk wisdom: many people perversely consider eating to be a suicidal act,” wrote Dr. William Bennett, M.D., former editor of The Harvard Medical School Health Letter and author of The Dieter’s Dilemma. “Indeed, the modern belief that body fat is a mortal threat to its owner is mainly due to the fact that, for many decades, the insurance companies had the sole evidence, and if it was wrong they would presumably have had to close their doors.” That can still be said today, although the obesity interests have since grown considerably larger.

But the evidence that fatness is not especially harmful has been shown from research that dates back to the 1950s — more than a half a century ago. While many remain incredulous, the soundest body of evidence has shown, and continues to show, that being fat is not a risk factor for heart disease or a cause of premature death, even controlling for the effects of smoking or cancer.

The people of the U.S. are simultaneously getting fatter, and living longer.

Well, knock me over with a feather (not too likely in practical terms; you probably would be more successful doing so with a 3,000-pound bale of feathers).

Quoted is Dr. William Bennett, former editor of the Harvard Medical School Health Letter:

“Detailed epidemiological studies, too, show no impressive connection between obesity and cardiovascular disease.

The occasion for Szwarc’s article is another new, very underreported study, published in the current issue of the American Journal of Medicine, led by cardiologist Dr. Seth Uretsky, M.D., at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in New York, showing the same counterintuitive findings: fat people survive cardiac episodes better than thin ones!

Take a look at the full story:

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Junkfood Science: Obesity Paradox #13 — Take heart

Is it really possible that I’m supposed to be losing this lifetime battle against obesity?

And if so, why have I been lied to– er, misled all of these years?

Bears researching further I’m thinking, and Sandy Szwarc’s Junkfood Science blog will now become a regular read.

Because, funny thing: Except for this pesky ankle, I feel pretty good.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

© Ron Chapple Studios | Dreamstime.com

Web Conferencing Week

So, if this were really a weekly feature, we’d be on number 052 or something, and this is only number 14. Thus, why not two in a row?

The poor sap fallen asleep over his laptop in front of his desktop PC in the illustration doesn’t resemble yr (justifiably) humble svt in the slightest, but it’s what I’ll look like in a few hours.

No, I won’t suddenly get 35 years younger, grow back a lot of very dark hair and become vaguely Asian.

But, I’m working very late tonight, and very early in the morning. Sigh.

As I’ve often noted in this space, I support the enterprise web conferencing application from an end-user perspective. A vendor once described me most flatteringly as the manager of the end user experience for my technology.

So, in addition to working with the other, more technical, members of the team (server administrators and system architects); developing curriculum and reference materials; teaching nearly 4,000 fellow employees in the past six years to use web conferences  by attending my training web conferences; besides all that, I’m the guy who gets the call when users have critical conferences that require my professional expertise.

Got the call a few weeks ago: we’re doing an important meeting three times, because the sun never sets on our global enterprise: once for the Asia-Pacific region, once for Europe and once for the Western Hemisphere. 8amCEST, 1pmCEST, 6pmCEST. We’ve had trouble with the web conferencing tool in the past, please help.

I endeavor to honor requests like this. But, of course, I’m sitting in the U.S. Central time zone.

8amCEST (Central European Summer Time) in, yes, central Europe, the origin of the meetings, translates to 1amCDT (U.S. Central Daylight Time).

1pmCEST is 6amCDT.

6pmCEST will be the only reasonably convenient (to this U.S. based employee) session, 11amCDT.

Tonight, or rather, early tomorrow morning, is the night.

So, and this is after a typical workday that began at 7:20am this morning in our Northern Illinois office, shortly I’ll set up my laptop, verify a good VPN connection to the network, test the server and then wait it out until 1am, a little more than three hours away as I write this. Got my cell phone (loud) alarm set for 12:45am just in case the above photo is destiny.

Then, after the first session, I’ll head to bed for my beauty sleep (never worked before, but there’s always hope), dreaming peacefully for the long, quiet hours until the alarm goes off at its usual 5:10am (maybe three hours if I’m fortunate).

Hopping out of bed, I’ll have time to shower and dress and be ready for the 6am session; thence to the office for the odd team meeting and the 11am session. And in the U.S. afternoon, I’ll be assisting another group with their four-hour session, this time in person, in a large conference space.

And can I take the next day off, in compensation? No such good fortune, as I have a commitment to assist yet another team with their critical meeting, again, in person.

What is ironic about all this is I am a champion night owl. Lots of nights, admittedly weekend nights, where the opportunity, if not the reality, exists for sleeping in, I’ll still be reasonably wide awake at midnight, 1am, and later. Tonight though, I HAVE to be awake at 1am. Not nearly any fun at all!

I am not complaining about all this, because I really love my job (in these parlous times EVERYBODY who has a job MUST love it!); no, really I do.

But, where else can I vent, except to you, faithful reader.

So, thanks for providing me the opportunity to pull aside the curtain, when most people pay no attention. After all, I haven’t had to support a conference in the middle of the night since last October. A couple of times a year is no big deal.

Yawn.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times

Web Conferencing Week

Telepresence is the most exciting luxury class concept since the Learjet.

Telepresence is the advanced version of videoconferencing first exposed in this nanocorner of the ‘Sphere© last 01-August-2007 in WcW004, and then updated in WcW010 24-October-2007.

It’s videoconferences gone ultra high definition, and it just made its way out of the trade press ghetto, into the mainstream in today’s New York Times.

As Travel Costs Rise, More Meetings Go Virtual

By STEVE LOHR | Published: July 22, 2008

Jill Smart, an Accenture executive, was skeptical the first time she stepped into her firm’s new videoconferencing room in Chicago for a meeting with a group of colleagues in London. But the videoconferencing technology, known as telepresence, delivered an experience so lifelike, Ms. Smart recalled, that “10 minutes into it, you forget you are not in the room with them.”

Accenture, a technology consulting firm, has installed 13 of the videoconferencing rooms at its offices around the world and plans to have an additional 22 operating before the end of the year.

Accenture figures its consultants used virtual meetings to avoid 240 international trips and 120 domestic flights in May alone, for an annual saving of millions of dollars and countless hours of wearying travel for its workers.

As travel costs rise and airlines cut service, companies large and small are rethinking the face-to-face meeting — and business travel as well. At the same time, the technology has matured to the point where it is often practical, affordable and more productive to move digital bits instead of bodies.

These telepresence studios are not cheap (as much as $350,000 at each end!) compared to the standard issue videoconference suite; just as that first Learjet wasn’t as cheap as a first class airline ticket, until the green eyeshade folks got a look at the productivity gains and the outright savings.

My niche of the corporate IT world is web conferencing: a telephone conference enhanced with a live on-line display of presentation materials and shared PC desktops. There is no doubt that allowing participants to attend meetings from their desks, as opposed to driving or flying or even walking down the corridor is a time, productivity and money saver. It’s hard not to see how $millions can be saved, even at low resolution, or, for thousands of our meetings a month, without live video at all.

And in this age of high fuel prices, which make travel of any kind even more expensive, and air travel (unless you rate that Learjet!) confiscatory AND unpleasant, instead of merely costly and inconvenient, such virtual meetings, especially for excruciatingly high paid executive suite denizens, are an idea whose time is finally ripe.

Corporate training and education is a field many companies are moving online, in part to trim travel costs. Darryl Draper, the national manager of customer service training for Subaru of America, used to travel four days a week, nine months of the year, presenting educational programs at dealers nationwide. Today, Ms. Draper rarely travels and nearly all of her training is done online.

Previously, Ms. Draper estimated, in six months she would reach about 220 people at a cost of $300 a person. She said she now reaches 2,500 people every six months at a cost of 75 cents a person.

The basic web conferencing technology supported by the team I work with has shown a steady ascending slope of growth, reflecting its benefits, for the nearly six years I have been working with it.

As Travel Costs Rise, More Meetings Go Virtual - NYTimes.com

As I’ve written previously, our on-line technology often accompanies high level videoconferences, since videoconferences, at least in the low definition world I inhabit, are better at managerial faces than typefaces. So we show the slides on a separate screen via web conference, adjacent to the screen that shows a table full of people looking at a screen that shows a table full of people.

The few illustrations I’ve seen of those telepresence suites show people so clearly, but never show presentations or documents, although the Times story mentions image magnification. So I’m thinking that there’s still room for my technology even in the new, exalted world of sharper than high definition conferencing.

My employer spends its capital carefully, and thus far I’m not aware of any such installation here at the Heart of Corporate America. But, in the age of $140++/bbl oil, and a product that, if used regularly, can pay for itself in a year or less, such an investment can’t help but be attractive, even to the manhole cover spenders.

But, now that it’s been exposed in mass media, I’m thinking that sooner than not, I’ll be called in to coordinate a web conference to accompany a session where the video is so sharp we’ll be able to see our European colleague’s glittering blue eyes.

“Get me makeup!”

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

From Daniel Kurtzman, About.com

MUDGE’s Musings

Frank Rich of the NYTimes eviscerated John McCain over both his supposed area of expertise, military affairs, as well as Sen. McCain’s admitted area of weakness, matters economic. It wasn’t pretty.

It’s the Economic Stupidity, Stupid

Op-Ed Columnist | By FRANK RICH | Published: July 20, 2008

THE best thing to happen to John McCain was for the three network anchors to leave him in the dust this week while they chase Barack Obama on his global Lollapalooza tour. Were voters forced to actually focus on Mr. McCain’s response to our spiraling economic crisis at home, the prospect of his ascension to the Oval Office could set off a panic that would make the IndyMac Bank bust in Pasadena look as merry as the Rose Bowl.

“In a time of war,” Mr. McCain said last week, “the commander in chief doesn’t get a learning curve.” Fair enough, but he imparted this wisdom in a speech that was almost a year behind Mr. Obama in recognizing Afghanistan as the central front in the war against Al Qaeda. Given that it took the deadliest Taliban suicide bombing in Kabul since 9/11 to get Mr. McCain’s attention, you have to wonder if even General Custer’s learning curve was faster than his.

Mr. McCain still doesn’t understand that we can’t send troops to Afghanistan unless they’re shifted from Iraq. But simple math, to put it charitably, has never been his forte. When it comes to the central front of American anxiety — the economy — his learning curve has flat-lined.

Rich follows similar economic criticism of McCain from Paul Krugman 12 days previously, before Phil Gramm elevated himself from has-been to economic advisor to get thee gone in just a few hours time.

Mr. McCain’s fiscal ineptitude has received so little scrutiny in some press quarters that his chief economic adviser, the former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, got a free pass until the moment he self-immolated on video by whining about “a nation of whiners.” The McCain-Gramm bond, dating back 15 years, is more scandalous than Mr. Obama’s connection with his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Mr. McCain has been so dependent on Mr. Gramm for economic policy that he sent him to newspaper editorial board meetings, no doubt to correct the candidate’s numbers much as Joe Lieberman cleans up after his confusions of Sunni and Shia.

[By the way, the photo at the top of the column will hereby become Left-Handed Complement's official John McCain portrait.]

Carly Fiorina has picked up the economic cudgel from temporarily banished ex-Sen. Gramm. She comes with a wonderful track record: booted out of Hewlett-Packard after five years of big talk and miserable results.

Then Rich wanders into a long-time hobby-horse of this nanocorner of the ‘Sphere©, Michael Bloomberg, positing him a potential vice president on the McCain ticket.

Mr. McCain reminds us every day how principled he is. That presumably means he’d risk a revolt by his party’s dwindling agents of intolerance and do everything in his power to persuade Mr. Bloomberg to join his ticket in the spirit of patriotic sacrifice. The politics could be advantageous too. A Bloomberg surprise could impress independents and keep the television audience tuned in to a G.O.P. convention that will unfold in the shadow of Mr. Obama’s address to 75,000 screaming fans in Denver.

Op-Ed Columnist - It’s the Economic Stupidity, Stupid - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

All this vice presidential speculation this year provides the usual column-inch filler during the summertime doldrums for the political junkies out here, but it’s also particularly of interest, in a year of unusually vulnerable presidential candidates. (Hey, if Hillary can point it out, so can I. I’m going to hate myself in the morning, though.)

But, hey, Frank Rich! I want Michael Bloomberg for the good guys.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

© Simone Van Den Berg | Dreamstime.com

MUDGE’s Musings

Summertime. People are vacationing. The weather, here in the Northern Hemisphere, at least (reportedly quite chilly in Oz, sorry guys!) is excessively hot and humid. The beach beckons.

News is sparse, but the need to sell the advertisers’ wares means that the 24-hour news cycle keeps on spinning.

Thus a story in the New England Journal of Medicine received undue prominence this week: a report on a clinical study of a comparison of two popular diet programs, the Atkins diet (once a tool of yr (justifiably) humble svt) vs. the Mediterranean diet (a favored tool of an official brother of y[j]hs). So it was all over the headlines for a day or so, midweek, filling those column inches and 30-second sound bites during the summer doldrums and of more than a little personal interest.

This was a 2-year study, and the weight loss reported was depressingly small. What was going on?

I turned, as often I do when trying to dig beneath the headlines on medical issues, to Left-Handed Complement’s favorite authority on such medical studies, especially as regards weight loss, Sandy Szwarc, writing in her amazingly wise blog, Junkfood Science. Here are some previous occasions when she cut through the jargon and the statistical distortions for us.

Sure enough, yesterday’s Junkfood Science post provided a thorough analysis, detailed but not excessively technical, of the study. Were you aware, for example, that it was partially funded by the Atkins people?

Round eleventy-seven in the diet wars

Junkfood Science | Sandy Szwarc | July 19, 2008

Here we go again in the battle of the diets. Another weight loss study was published this week. This one, partly funded by Atkins Research Foundation, pitted a low-fat diet against a Mediterranean diet against an Atkins-like diet. The news has either declared Atkins the winner, or that they all worked, or that they all failed.

This study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, actually confirmed everything already known about weight loss diets. The quickest post would be to simply refer you here, here and here and say “step and repeat.” But new readers might not like that.

So, at the risk of boring regular readers with a rehash of diet study fallacies, here’s a quick rundown.

Overview

This trial was conducted in 2005-2007 in Dimona, Israel. It was registered as a phase 1 trial (ClinicalTrials.gov registration #NCT00160108), explained here. Given its size and duration, though, it appears more a combined phase 1 and 2, designed to evaluate the safety and note the effects of the dietary interventions on weight loss.

The objectives of this 2-year randomized trial were to evaluate not just the safety and weight loss effectiveness of the three diet plans, but also to test the effectiveness of a workplace weight loss program.

For most people, diets just don’t work on any long-term basis. Weight lost by reducing calories, carbohydrates, fats, whatever, eventually comes back. And this two-year study, despite some chartmanship that Szwarc clarifies for us, proves this disappointing law of nature yet again.

Since the first low-calorie diet book was published nearly a century ago, diet doctors have come up with every imaginable gimmick for reducing calories, manipulating macronutrients in every conceivable way. If anything was truly effective, after nearly a century, there would be no diet industry and everyone would be slim. Any contrivance to cut calories works to enable most everyone to lose some weight… but only temporarily… and only to a point. Then, those homeostatic metabolic adjustments work to return body weights to their genetically-determined setpoint range, in both naturally obese and nonobese bodies. These biological adjustments are so powerful, as much as a four-fold increase in metabolic efficiency, that to keep weight off below one’s natural range, or to try to lose more, requires increasing severe caloric restrictions, not optimal for nutritional health or wellbeing.

Diets. Just. Don’t. Work.

Junkfood Science: Round eleventy-seven in the diet wars

One of her most intriguing points is that there was no attention given in the analysis of the data to any medical outcomes: was heart disease risk lessened? Did any pre-diabetic conditions fail to become diabetes as a result of the diets?

This was dieting for the sake of dieting (okay, to lose some weight), but the clinicians were apparently disinterested in whether the weight loss experienced by the study participants had any positive therapeutic value.

Looking better (at least for a few months) in their Speedos at the beach (this was an Israeli study after all) doesn’t seem sufficient, does it?

5-1/2 years ago, I bravely embarked on the Atkins program, with some excellent early results. Of the ultimately nearly 50 pounds lost, in the past year about 15-20 have returned, but I’m “guilty with an excuse.” My level of exercise was slashed due to the pesky Achilles tendinosis issue that, nearly a year along, still bedevils and restricts activity. And of course, as the weight started coming back, the rigidity about the virtual carb-free daily choices disappeared; four years of denial needed to rebound, and did. Sigh.

Am I better off 30-35 pounds down? Yes. Have I any confidence in my ability to get that pesky 15-20 back off, not to speak of the further 40 or 50 beyond that my BMI says I need to lose. None whatsoever.

Diets. Just. Don’t. Work.

But, as always, I appreciate Sandy Szwarc’s careful reading and literate daylighting of what most of us take at face value, because we are all too willing to let the MSM do our chewing and digesting for us, with the expected results.

Mainstream media is the medical reporting equivalent of a Hostess Twinkie, absolutely empty calories.

Sandy Szwarc’s Junkfood Science is the high fibre, whole grain, naturally sweetened, real deal.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

© Robert Paul Van Beets | Dreamstime.com

MUDGE’S Musings

If biofuels make any sense at all, and the jury is still out on that one outside the White House, and the state of Iowa, ethanol made from sugar cane rather than from corn has already been shown to be far the better choice.

First, a review. We have discussed this topic many times:

A prime source of sugar cane, that, if developed, would become the third largest source of ethanol after the U.S. and Brazil, is a mere 90 miles from our shores, in Cuba.

One of the last vestiges of the long since over 50-year Cold War is the United States’ odd non-relationship with the nation of Cuba.

One more good reason to lift the embargo on Cuba

Let’s seize the potential of the nation’s sugar-based ethanol — before China beats us to it.

By Joe Conason

July 18, 2008 | Listening to the mouthpieces of the oil industry on talk radio and cable television — as well as in the Bush White House — one gets the impression that we must start drilling in America’s coastal waters immediately. If only we unleash the oilmen to explore and exploit, then the price of gasoline will start to fall, the scheming petroleum cartel will collapse, and the United States will be independent once again. And if we don’t unleash the oilmen, then the Chinese communists will siphon off all the oil from the coast of Cuba before we can even launch a rowboat into the Caribbean.

None of that is true, of course. Producing oil from new offshore wells requires decades, and even when those resources come online they will have little impact on world prices, according to the government’s own studies. Fouling our shores with clots of tar will bring us no closer to freedom from foreign oil in the near, medium or long term.

And that tale about the Chinese drilling off Cuba is a hoax designed to gull the public into supporting the repeal of laws that restrict offshore drilling. But the phony Cuban oil story raises a pertinent question. If we really want to free ourselves from the death grip of the oil-exporting countries, maybe we should lift the embargo on trade and investment in Cuba.

Tiny Cuba’s potential as a military threat was always solely embodied in its client status of the Soviet Union; once that entity dissolved, only political pandering to the rabid exile community in South Florida has sustained the embargo that has left Cuba with its oddly photogenic collection of vintage 1950s American automobiles, and little else of economic substance.

But sugar cane has always been at Cuba’s agricultural heart. And Brazil has shown the world (outside the U.S. where its own sugar lobby has successfully blocked importing cost effective Brazilian sugar and sugar based ethanol) that sugar is a much more efficient source for the manufacture of ethanol than is corn.

One more good reason to lift the embargo on Cuba | Salon

Further, while some of our own links above make it clear that using corn to create fuel may be distorting food prices and causing global starvation, sugar from  cane is far less important (qualitatively) to the food supply; its empty nutritional calories might as well be repurposed toward internal combustion engines.

As Joe Conason makes his case in Salon, sugar ethanol is one more good reason to normalize the Cuba-U.S. relationship. And the Miami exiles could console themselves by taking advantage, as could the rest of this country, with less costly, less politically dangerous, fuel for their commutes.

And what cigar smokers remain in this non-public smoking era would finally be able again to directly and legally import those other greatly desirable Cuban agricultural assets, their H. Upmanns and Cohibas.

Seems like a win <cough> win to me.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE