CLICK THIS....Via Unfogged, Microsoft has been granted a patent on double clicking.

Hard as it is to believe, this is apparently not a joke. For once, I'm the blogging equivalent of speechless.

NUCLEAR ENERGY....Matt Yglesias responds to my energy post from earlier today:

What I have to add here is that I think any serious effort to reduce oil use is going to need to have a nuclear component. The basic fact is that any strategy to burn less gasoline -- electric cars, the "hydrogen economy," more mass transit, some combination of the three -- is going to require the production of more electricity, either in order to directly power vehicles or else to manufacture the alternative fuel. At the same time, using less oil to make gasoline and more oil to make electricity clearly isn't going to achieve anything.

I'm not going to express an opinion about this except to say that I think I've changed my mind on nuclear about five times so far in my life. But it's a worthwhile subject to bring up for discussion, so discuss away.

MISCELLANY....Teresa Nielsen Hayden:

A student at the University of Kent who got zapped for plagiarism right before his final exams is suing the university for negligence, on the grounds that he’s been cheating in exactly the same way throughout his studies there, and they’ve never said anything about it.

My first reaction was “Nice try, kid.” On second thought, he does have a point....

Kieran Healy:

I don’t think he has a point.

I link, you decide.

Elsewhere, Kieran waxes lyrical about the programming language APL. Now that takes me back a ways — specifically to my senior year in high school:

COMPUTER CENTER GUY AT LOCAL JC: Can I help you?

ME: Is this the place to get an account to use the computer?

CCGALJC: What [computer] languages do you know?

ME: Um, I know some BASIC. And I'm taking a FORTRAN class.

CCGALJC (sarcastically): Well then, all the kingdoms of heaven are yours, aren't they?

He was a fan of APL, which was also the approved pedagogical language of Golden West College at the time. But he was right: BASIC sucks, whereas APL is truly a mesmerizing language. It's not really all that good a language, or so I'm told by people who know more about these things than I do, but it's certainly more fun than any other language I've had the misfortune to meet.

APL legends abound, and the local legend at Golden West College was of some young prodigy who wrote a 4-line program that could take the derivative of any equation fed into it. I saw the program myself, and sure enough, it was only four lines long. And it worked. I don't know how, and I've always been suspicious that there was a trick involved — perhaps buried within the arcane symbols was a call to some other program that was a thousand lines long — but everyone swore it was for real. If so, it was an amazing accomplishment.

Sadly, it's been downhill for me and computers ever since....

IDAHO TRIVIA....Professor Bainbridge would like to find out the score of a high school football game between Soda Springs (Idaho) and Paris (Idaho) on September 21, 1934. If you can help with this, email him here.

As for why he wants to know, it all has to do with highfalutin academic research involving litigation over agency relationships. Full explanation here.

MORE ON OIL....Here's another followup, this time to my post yesterday morning about OPEC and oil.

I was not making a short term prediction of massive price increases. Right now there's not much spare oil production capacity in the world, but there is some spare capacity, which means prices over the next year could go up or could go down. If nothing goes wrong, prices will probably ease down a bit; if Venezuela descends into civil war we'll be paying $100 a barrel. Who knows?

But in the medium term, things are different. For the past two decades demand for oil has been increasing much more quickly than production capacity, which means that global demand is now very close to the maximum capacity of the world's oil suppliers. Most of the world's spare oil pumping capacity is in OPEC, and their total operational capacity has remained at 30 million barrels/day or less since the early 80s.

As demand has increased, OPEC's spare capacity has gone down from 15 million barrels/day to 5 million barrels/day to today's 2 million barrels/day. This means that even if there aren't any special problems, demand will start to exceed production capacity within a couple of years. And when that happens, prices will go up and stay up. What's more, with virtually no spare capacity around, every little blip in the oil supply will have potentially huge consequences. Stability of supply will become ever more important and American military policy in the Middle East will start to get really nasty.

There are five main ways to improve this grim picture:

1. Produce more oil (drill wells, build pipelines).
   

2. Switch to other, more plentiful hydrocarbons (gas, coal).
   

3. Increase use of renewable power sources (wind, solar).
   

4. Increase energy efficiency (higher CAFE standards, energy-friendly building codes).
   

5. More conservation (less driving, air conditioners set to 80 degrees).
   

Unfortunately, the first four of these all take time. Russia and Iraq can produce more oil, for example, but it will likely take a minimum of five years to build the required infrastructure and by that time demand will already have outstripped the new supply. Likewise, using more gas requires the construction of massively expensive (and unpopular) LNG ports, while using more coal requires the construction of costly clean coal facilities. Even if money were no object, both of these things take years to build.

After that it gets worse. Wind and solar are great, but their use is limited in a practical sense (it's not always windy and it's not always sunny), limited in a financial sense (both are more costly than conventional power), and limited in a temporal sense (building serious new capacity will take decades). Likewise, there are plenty of ways to increase energy efficiency, but they take time to implement. What's more, no one in our current government — or, to be fair, in our previous government or most of the rest of the world's governments — gives a rat's ass about either of these alternatives.

Finally, there's conservation. The problem here is that there's good conservation and bad conservation. The good kind is when we all decide to turn our air conditioners down in order to give ourselves time to work on the other four ways of fixing our energy problems. This is not very likely. The bad kind is when supply suddenly fails to meet demand — and I say "suddenly" since no one seems to really believe this is going to happen even though the numbers are right in front of our faces — and the world goes through another oil shock. Like previous oil shocks, this would cause a global recession that in turn would cause us all to conserve — one way or another. It would also cause massive worldwide pain, most of it in poor and developing countries.

If we're lucky, of course, there won't be any serious catastrophes, the market will adjust to tighter supplies with gradually higher prices, demand will slowly decrease in response, and there will be only a little bit of pain. The downside to this semi-cheery scenario is that it will convince everyone that we can continue with business as usual and make no serious efforts to curb oil use. But unlike previous oil shocks, the forthcoming one won't be just the result of an artificial shortage mandated by a cartel, it will be a real shortage caused by the fact that we're finally beginning to bump up against physical and geological limitations. The piper will eventually be paid, and the longer it's put off the worse it's likely to be.

This is a global problem, not just an American problem or a Bush/Cheney problem. Still, some leadership from America could go a long way toward producing a global consensus on a sustainable energy policy, and that leadership would recognize that the only possible answer involves steady progress in all five areas, not just #1.

Liberals can help too. How about a deal that trades ANWR drilling for higher CAFE standards, for example? Sounds horrible, doesn't it? But it might be a politically feasible trade, and in the end the benefit from higher mileage cars probably vastly outweighs the negatives of another pipeline in Alaska. Consider it food for thought.

CLANCY ON WOLFOWITZ....From Juan Cole, who was watching Deborah Norville's segment with Anthony Zinni and Tom Clancy last night:

Deborah Norville: What's your impression of Paul Wolfowitz?

Tom Clancy: Is he working for our side?

As they say, ouch.

UPDATE: Here's the transcript:

NORVILLE: And Paul Wolfowitz.

CLANCY: Is he really on our side?

NORVILLE: You genuinely ask that question? Is he on our side?

CLANCY: I sat in on — I was in the Pentagon in ‘01 for a red team operation and he came in and briefed us. And after the brief, I just thought, is he really on our side? Sorry.

Very peculiar. I really don't know what he meant by that and Norville didn't follow up.

JUST LIKE NIXON....I'm with Atrios on this: it might not be the most responsible thing to do, but this article in Capitol Hill Blue about the Bush White House is just too much fun not to link to:

“It reminds me of the Nixon days,” says a longtime GOP political consultant with contacts in the White House. “Everybody is an enemy; everybody is out to get him. That’s the mood over there.”

....Aides say the President gets “hung up on minor details,” micromanaging to the extreme while ignoring the bigger picture. He will spend hours personally reviewing and approving every attack ad against his Democratic opponent and then kiss off a meeting on economic issues.

....“The mood here is that we’re under siege, there’s no doubt about it,” says one troubled aide who admits he is looking for work elsewhere. “In this administration, you don’t have to wear a turban or speak Farsi to be an enemy of the United States. All you have to do is disagree with the President.”

Why might it not be responsible to link to this? Because we all got burned pretty badly by CHB on a story last year during the Niger/yellowcake scandal.

But heck, everyone deserves a second chance, right? Still, it might be best to think of this as something from the Onion: even if it's not true it might be more true than you think.

STEM CELLS....Ah, I see that another initiative has qualified for the November ballot in California:

An initiative that would have state taxpayers underwrite $3 billion worth of research into using embryonic stem cells to develop cures for Alzheimer's and other debilitating diseases qualified for the Nov. 2 ballot Thursday, propelling California to the forefront of a national battle at the intersection of science and morality.

....The ballot initiative is an implicit referendum on an executive order that President Bush issued in 2001. That action limited the use of federal funds for stem cell research to a small number of cell colonies already extracted from human embryos.

What a shame. I'm all in favor of stem cell research, and I'm all in favor of sticking it to Bush, but I'm not at all sure that I'm in favor of a $3 billion bond issue dedicated to funding one specific area of scientific research.

Still, I guess I could be convinced, and if the opposition from the self-proclaimed morality policy starts to get too annoying I might vote for it just out of pique. After all, that's what makes California-style democracy such an inspiration to us all, isn't it?

RUMSFELD TO CONGRESS: DROP DEAD....Congress wants to investigate a $23 billion sweetheart deal that the Pentagon tried to ram through a couple of years ago to lease aerial refueling tankers from Boeing. To do this, they've requested that the Pentagon turn over documents related to the negotiation of the deal. Donald Rumsfeld doesn't want to play ball:

Rumsfeld told the committee he would let its members see e-mails that were reports of communications with members of Congress or references to them. The members' names and any identifying information on them would be deleted, the letter said.

But senators would not get access to some information that is at the heart of the investigation.

Rumsfeld wrote that e-mails and documents that would not be made available to senators included communications with the White House and the Office of Management and Budget, discussions with Rumsfeld or Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, discussions with Defense Department lawyers and communications that touch on projected budget options.

So he'll let Congress see all the emails that were originally sent to Congress in the first place as well as reports related to them. But not anything else.

In other words, nothing they don't already know. Considering that there's both a serious scandal and a serious question of malfeasance on the part of the Air Force involved in this deal, Congress has every right to want to investigate. A "rare" congressional subpoena might be the next step. Stay tuned.

CHALABI AND THE IRANIANS....Last year Josh Marshall noted something interesting about Ahmed Chalabi. Back in 1996, when the CIA was planning a coup attempt against Saddam Hussein, Chalabi warned them off of it because, he said, Saddam already knew about the plot. Josh, however, said that the CIA believed that it was Chalabi himself who spilled the beans about the CIA's operation. Chalabi was upset because he himself wasn't involved in the coup and therefore didn't want it to succeed.

Today, Walter Pincus and Bradley Graham of the Washington Post tell a similar story about an earlier assassination attempt against Saddam:

Officials yesterday recounted an incident in early 1995 when Chalabi's name turned up in an encrypted Iranian cable reporting a purported CIA-backed plan to assassinate Saddam Hussein, then Iraq's president. The message was intercepted by U.S. intelligence and caused a major political stir in Washington.

This is all murky stuff, but if it's true we now have three separate cases of Chalabi leaking ultra-sensitive information to the Iranians. Read the whole Post story for more details.

UPDATE: By the way, the fact that CIA sources seem to be retailing these stories all over Washington suggests that they really are involved in a campaign to discredit Chalabi. That doesn't mean they're wrong, of course, but it does mean that there's a bureaucratic war going on and all charges and countercharges should be treated with an appropriate degree of skepticism.

WHY DID TENET LEAVE?....Was George Tenet fired or did he resign? As this much-quoted excerpt from the New York Times suggests, he resigned:

Mr. Bush announced the resignation of the 51-year-old Mr. Tenet in a way that was almost bizarre. He had just addressed reporters and photographers in a fairly innocuous Rose Garden session with Prime Minister John Howard of Australia. Then the session was adjourned, as Mr. Bush apparently prepared to depart for nearby Andrews Air Force Base and his flight to Europe, where he is to take part in ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the Normandy invasion and meet European leaders — some of whom have been sharply critical of the campaign in Iraq.

But minutes later, Mr. Bush reappeared on the sun-drenched White House lawn, surprising listeners with the news of Mr. Tenet's resignation. After Mr. Tenet leaves, the C.I.A.'s deputy director, John McLaughlin, will be acting director, Mr. Bush said.

If Tenet had been fired, surely the announcement would have been a little bit smoother?

But why did he resign? I suppose the most obvious reason is also the most likely: he got a look at the forthcoming Senate Intelligence Commitee report — said to brutal about his management of the CIA — and decided to get out of Dodge while the getting was good.

On the other hand, Mark Kleiman has some interesting speculation that points in a different direction:

An even more optimistic possibility from the anti-Bush perspective: Tenet wanted to use the fact that the neocons in OSD and the VP's shop and their buddy Chalabi had managed to blow a major cryptographic secret to persuade the President to carry out a purge of the people who have been giving him such bad advice, and quit when he lost that argument.

Hmmm, maybe. First Plame, then Chalabi — maybe Tenet was sick and tired of political appointees treating national secrets like trading cards. I don't know if I believe it, but I'd like to believe it. Even from a completely neutral viewpoint, it would be nice to think that there are still officials willing to resign over a matter of principle like that.

X CHROMOSOME BLOGGING....A couple of followups to yesterday's post about the composition of the blogosphere — specifically the observation that most well known political bloggers and a large majority of blog readers are men.

First, Chris Nolan emails to point out that until recently political magazines like, ahem, the Washington Monthly and The New Republic didn't hire or publish many women, and even today women are still in fairly short supply at such places. So male domination of the blogosphere is hardly something to be surprised about. (Concerned, yes, surprised, no.)

Second, one of the 20% of my readers who are women emails to ask, "Are their any women bloggers who focus on politics/public affairs who are worthwhile reading?" Indeed there are! I'm usually reluctant to publish lists of "favorite" blogs, since I almost inevitably leave someone out that I shouldn't, but I suppose that's really a bit of a cowardly attitude, isn't it?

So here's a short list. I'm not claiming these are the best political/public affairs blogs by women around, just that they happen to be ones that I've bookmarked and read frequently:

• Asymmetrical Information (Megan McArdle)
  

• Body and Soul (Jeanne d'Arc)
  

• Calblog (Justene Adamec)
  

• Making Light (Teresa Nielsen Hayden)
  

• Political Aims (Amy Sullivan)
  

• Respectful of Otters (Rivka)
  

• The Sideshow (Avedon Carol)
  

• TalkLeft (Jeralyn Merritt)
  

• Virginia Postrel
  

• War and Piece (Laura Rozen)
  

• Wonkette (Ana Marie Cox)
  

There are also women who write for group blogs, including Tapped, Crooked Timber, The Corner, The Campaign Desk, and others. And, needless to say, this list is top heavy with liberals since my personal reading is top heavy with liberals. If you're more conservative than me, you might try bugging some friendly right wing blogger to create a more conservative-friendly list.

And finally, at the risk of repeating myself, there's no special reason for endorsing these eleven blogs. They just happen to be the ones that I read on a frequent basis, which means that if you like Political Animal you might like them too. At any rate, you won't know til you try!

IRAQ'S NEW GOVERNMENT....So what does Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani think of the new interim government in Iraq?

• The Washington Post said "his words were not enthusiastic" but were still better than anything he had ever said about the old IGC.

• The New York Times said Sistani "acknowledged the new Iraqi government in a cautious statement."

• The Associated Press said Sistani had issued a statement "tacitly endorsing the new interim Iraqi government."
  

Juan Cole has the translated text of Sistani's statement at his site, and sure enough, it doesn't exactly sound like a ringing endorsement. Apparently we're still going to have to move very carefully indeed if we want to keep him more or less on our side.

OPECed OUT....Pretty much everyone is reporting today's OPEC story the same way, so I'll choose the New York Times version to excerpt:

In an effort to ease crude prices from the $40-a-barrel level, the Organization of Oil Petroleum Exporting Countries agreed today to a compromise agreement that would increase oil output by 2 million barrels a day, to 25.5 million barrels.

....Analysts said the cartel's move would probably have the intended effect and push spot oil prices down a bit from current levels.

I've been mystified by how OPEC's decision has been reported over the past few days. Every story passes along the standard interpretation that OPEC is trying to calm down the markets by increasing its production quotas, thus guaranteeing enough oil for everyone.

But OPEC's quotas are meaningless, as the Times eventually acknowledges:

Participants in the oil market may fear that the production increase announced today will not be sufficient to satisfy current demand, because OPEC members are already producing above their quotas. That means the increase agreed upon today will inject less new production into the market than advertised.

....PetroLogistics Ltd., an energy consulting group, estimated that during May, production from OPEC's 10 members probably averaged 26.35 million barrels, exceeding the cartel's limit by 2.85 million barrels.

But even this doesn't quite tell the story. In fact, there is no spare capacity left and OPEC's production quotas don't mean a thing. Everyone except Saudi Arabia is already pumping flat out, and even Saudi Arabia is close to its limit. They are within 2 million barrels per day of their maximum capacity, and this is pretty much the only spare capacity left in the world.

Bottom line: the entire world is already pumping at close to its maximum capacity. Refining capacity is also nearly maxed out. But global demand keeps going up each year by about 2 million barrels per day. By this time next year worldwide demand will probably be equal to worldwide production.

In the near term, the only thing that can change this is a reduction in demand. But what could cause such a reduction? A global recession would do it. An implosion of the Chinese market would do it. Americans driving less and buying more fuel efficient cars in response to high gasoline prices would do it — although that's unlikely since Americans have shown themselves impervious to price increases for the past two decades.

From this point forward, we are likely to live in a world in which oil demand is permanently and precariously close to maximum supply, since it's unlikely that we can increase pumping, pipeline, and refinery capacity faster than the growth in demand. Result: oil prices that are high, unstable, and fantastically sensitive to the slightest disruption in supply. Too bad we didn't start planning for this a decade ago.

UPDATE: The MSNBC chart above had the wrong units for gasoline consumption. It should be millions of barrels per day, not millions of gallons per month. I've photoshopped the correction into the chart. Thanks to reader Buzz P. for pointing it out.

TENET RESIGNS....George Tenet becomes the first to go. I think the final straw was Al Gore calling him a "personal friend" and "a good and decent man."