B1042-3 No-Drill Obama

    Consider this: Obama kills oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico (and elsewhere) for pretend safety reasons, but mostly for ideological reasons.  The ideology drives a policy of non-use of petroleum products because, at some intuitive level of understanding, America sucked dry of oil becomes just another impoverished third-world nation.  Some would guess that making the United States a third-world nation is Obama’s ultimate goal.  I’m not so sure.  But other nations (Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, China, and others) will sweep into the Gulf to explore, extract and burn oil products.  So, the net-net on this policy changes only the location of the carbon dioxide producer.  The USA stops burning oil and somebody else picks up the slack elsewhere.  How does that, pray tell, help with “safety,” “global warming,” or “climate change?”  Oh, you say this has nothing to do with “safety,” “global warming,” or “climate change?”  Hmmm...that’s what I thought.

B1042-2 NIMBY

The walk-away escape that is available to the well-connected is not available to ordinary folk:  Five-Dollar-A-Gallon gasoline means absolutely nothing to billionaire environmental idealists.  It means the difference between eating and not eating for the less privileged, however.  To make the relative pain more meaningful for Upper East Side Manhattanites, perhaps they could be charged $1,000 per gallon for gas, in the same way that some Nordic countries impose traffic fines based on the net worth of the violator.  You have the big bucks; you pay much more.  And incidentally, $5 per gallon gas for the average schlub is equal to $1,000 per gallon gas for privileged.  Work the numbers.  Don’t own a car?  Well, that $25 cross-town cab fare for Mister Everyman works out to a cool $5,000 ride for Mister Big Bucks.  Get your wallet out.  It’s about time you started paying for your idealism.  Everyone else is.

B1042-1 Moron Science: Kepler Ten-Bee

    The recent discovery of a rocky planet (designated Kepler 10b) outside our solar system has excited some astrophysicists.  It’s always been their contention that a universe filled to the gizzards with stars must include some with orbiting planets.  Billions and billions of stars, they say, means millions and millions of planets.  Fair enough.  But understand that I’ve just made a logical inference here: it would stand to reason that billions and billions of stars must produce many millions of planets.  The evidence found, however, is otherwise: Stars are found in the billions.  But we have discovered just a handful of planets beyond our own, none of which is particularly suited to the forms of life as we know it.  The ratio: billions of stars to, what, five or six planets?

    Then, of course, those millions and millions of planets - that haven’t been discovered to exist yet - must include a finite number of ‘Goldilocks’ planets with intelligent life that we might be able to recognize as such.  Again, no evidence exists to make such a statement.  But logically - reasonably - such a huge number of planets must include some that bear some faint resemblance to earth.  Why they would produce ‘intelligent life,’ as some assert, remains an unexplained phenomenon.

    As humans we are inclined to make preposterous statements like this: “To date, it appears that we are the only ‘intelligent life’ in the universe based on the non-response we get from space aliens.”  If space aliens exist out there, they are being very quiet and reticent about their existence.  But the fact that no one answers the phone probably means that no one’s home.  And until we have evidence otherwise, we cannot make wild statements about probabilities of life- much less ‘intelligent life’ - existing out there.