THE OLYMPICS....There's some world class complaining about the Olympics going on over at Crooked Timber. Join in!

I can't say that I really sympathize much with Brian Weatherson's inability to figure out when Australians will be on the air — dammit, Brian, this is America! — but I have to say that the galactically slick TV packaging of the Olympics we get these days has pretty much turned me off from watching it at all. There's really no sense of genuine sport anymore; it's like watching a highlight reel. What's worse, since they often only show heats in which Americans have done well, it's a highlight reel where you frequently have a pretty good idea how it's going to turn out.

Part of the essential ambience of watching a sporting event, I think, is seeing the whole thing, even the boring bits where nothing much is happening. When you edit a 4-hour event down to 30 minutes of pure action, it may be exciting but it just isn't sports anymore. It's a video game.

Alternatively, of course, you could be like Max Boot and decide the Olympics are no fun because it's not us vs. the commies anymore. Those neocons really miss the Cold War, don't they?

OG-BLAY IZ-QUAY....What's the most popular blogging language? English, of course. But here's a mini quiz that tests your knowledge of other blogging languages:

1. Scandinavian languages: Are there more Swedish blogs or Danish blogs?
   

2. Dead languages: Are there more Esperanto blogs or Latin blogs?
   

3. Romance languages: Are there more Spanish blogs or Portuguese blogs?
   

4. Obscure micro-languages: Are there more Breton blogs or Catalan blogs?
   

5. What's the #2 blog language?
   

6. Why isn't Russian in the top 25?
   

Answers here. Or below the fold.

(Via Crooked Timber.)

—Kevin Drum 8:23 PM Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Comments (38)

YET MORE WEIRDNESS FROM GOOGLE....Are Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page idiots? It's hard to come to any other conclusion after reading today that they gave an interview to Playboy for their September issue — hitting the stands just when the auction for Google's IPO gets underway.

There's nothing wrong with Playboy, mind you, but there is a firm rule against hyping a company's prospects during the "quiet period" prior to an IPO. This is not some obscure technicality, either: I went through an IPO in 1997 and the bankers who handled it hammered this into us. As VP of Marketing, there were times when I almost felt like I couldn't even do my job for fear that some routine activity would be construed as hype.

Brin and Page know this perfectly well, and they also knew it in April when they gave the interview, even if that was just before their official filing. Everyone in the tech business knows this. So why did they do it? Why did they open up themselves, their company, and their shareholders to enormous risk just to satisfy their own vanity?

THE WORLD OF PORTER GOSS....Via Tapped, Michael Levi of the Brookings Institution says that George Bush isn't the only politician who gets into trouble when he speaks off the cuff. Apparently, future CIA director Porter Goss had a conference call with the press a couple of months in which he made a couple of rather odd pronouncements:

Rep. Goss began the call inauspiciously with the declaration that chemical and biological weapons are "more dangerous" than nuclear arms. In fact, nuclear arms are far more lethal than chemical arms, and in most if not all cases would be more lethal than biological arms as well.

....The congressman's more disturbing remarks in that half-hour June call with the press addressed North Korea's nuclear weapons program. Goss said, "Clearly not making the progress at Yongbyon and other places because we've called their bluff successfully."....But according to American intelligence, since 2002, North Korea has restarted every key facility at Yongbyon, and has produced enough plutonium for at least six additional nuclear weapons.

....A perplexed reporter followed up, asking Goss how he qualified six new North Korean weapons as American "progress." The congressman's response was startling: "What they've been doing behind the curtain for a long time may be far greater than what you know—that you've just quoted to me now."

To suggest that the intelligence community knows about a massive parallel North Korean program that hasn't been publicly disclosed strongly strains credulity.

We already know that Goss is a partisan hack, but now it turns out that he is either misinformed (charitable interpretation) or delusional (more likely interpretation) about both the relative danger of nuclear proliferation and the state of North Korea's bomb making program.

From a guy who's been overseeing the CIA for nearly a decade, this is fairly disturbing stuff. Maybe Republicans ought to rethink this appointment. After all, loyalty isn't everything.

KERRY AND BUSH....Dick Cheney is mocking John Kerry for supposedly believing we need to be more sensitive in our war against terror. Perhaps he needs to take this up with his boss:

The Progress Report has more, including entertaining quotes about sensitivity from Don Rumsfeld, Richard Myers, Tommy Franks, John Ashcroft, Paul Wolfowitz, and others.

Needless to say, Kerry's full quote indicates plainly that he's not talking about a touchy-feely war, he's talking about conducting the war in a way that works better. But Dick Cheney, who still claims that Saddam had both WMD and deep connections to al-Qaeda, apparently intends to treat Kerry's speeches with the same cavalier disregard for facts on the ground that he does national intelligence. Why am I not surprised?

KERRY IN CAMBODIA....Instapundit links today to a piece in the Telegraph that quotes John Kerry biographer Douglas Brinkley about the "Christmas in Cambodia" kerfuffle:

"On Christmas Eve he was near Cambodia; he was around 50 miles from the Cambodian border. There's no indictment of Kerry to be made, but he was mistaken about Christmas in Cambodia," said Douglas Brinkley, who has unique access to the candidate's wartime journals.

....He said: "Kerry went into Cambodian waters three or four times in January and February 1969 on clandestine missions. He had a run dropping off US Navy Seals, Green Berets and CIA guys." The missions were not armed attacks on Cambodia, said Mr Brinkley, who did not include the clandestine missions in his wartime biography of Mr Kerry, Tour of Duty.

"He was a ferry master, a drop-off guy, but it was dangerous as hell. Kerry carries a hat he was given by one CIA operative. In a part of his journals which I didn't use he writes about discussions with CIA guys he was dropping off."

So let me get this straight. Kerry did go to Cambodia — even though that was supposedly impossible, he did take CIA guys in — even though that was supposedly absurd, and he did get a hat from one of them — even though that was supposedly a sign of mental instability. The extent of Kerry's malfeasance is that instead of doing it in December, he actually did it in January and February.

Considering that he's mentioned this story only twice, most recently 18 years ago, and it turns out that his only crime is to have tarted it up with a bit of holiday pathos, I think I'll pass on following it any further down the Swift Vets rabbit hole. But thanks to everyone who displayed their deep unseriousness about this election by participating in this smear. It will be remembered.

TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH....Stop the presses!

Report Finds Tax Cuts Heavily Favor the Wealthy

Quite a shocker, eh? Still, snark aside, I guess it's nice to have the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office make it official.

UPDATE: Or there's the Washington Post's version: "Tax Burden Shifts to the Middle."

That stands to reason, doesn't it?

TERRORIST DRUGS FROM CANADA....George Bush's Medicare bill prohibits the importation of cheap drugs from Canada. This has proven to be an unpopular rule, and Bush spokesmen have struggled to come up with persuasive reasons for their stand.

Today they finally did:

"Cues from chatter" gathered around the world are raising concerns that terrorists might try to attack the domestic food and drug supply, particularly illegally imported prescription drugs, acting Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Lester M. Crawford says.

....Crawford said the possibility of such an attack was the most serious of his concerns about the increase in states and municipalities trying to import drugs from Canada to save money.

Are there any depths to which these guys won't sink? What's next? Alleged al-Qaeda infiltration of labor unions? Email from Osama to the NAACP?

Every time I think the Bush administration can't get any worse, they get worse. Every. Single. Time.

PLAME SUBPOENA UPDATE....Drudge is reporting that New York Times reporter Judith Miller has been subpoenaed by the grand jury investigating the Valerie Plame case. That means we now have a total of four known subpoenas of reporters:

• Matthew Cooper (Time magazine)
  

• Tim Russert (Meet the Press)
  

• Walter Pincus (Washington Post)
  

• Judith Miller (New York Times)
  

And two "interviews":

• Glenn Kessler (Washington Post)
  

• Knut Royce (Newsday) (although I don't have confirmation of this)
  

This is becoming very interesting.....

PEAK OIL....Jane Bryant Quinn warns this week that we may be running out of oil:

Princeton geology professor emeritus Kenneth Deffeyes, who's writing a book due in 2005 called "Beyond Oil," waggishly names an Armageddon date: "World oil production will reach its ultimate peak on Thanksgiving Day 2005," he says. Then the long, slow decline begins.

Deffeyes is talking not about the amount of oil in the ground, but about the maximum daily pumping capacity of oil. The problem is that even as we continue to find new fields, old fields start to decline. When the decline becomes greater than new discoveries, total oil production starts to fall. This has already happened in the continental United States, which reached its peak capacity in 1970 and has been declining ever since, an event famously predicted in 1956 by geophysicist M. King Hubbert.

This is not a controversial point. What is controversial is the date of the production peak. Deffeyes predicts the peak will come next year. Colin Campbell, perhaps the best known of the peak oil theorists, predicts a peak in 2008. The chart below shows Campbell's most recent calculations.

Unfortunately, Campbell has a problem: he's been making peak oil predictions for a long time, and his predictions are pretty much always the same: we will hit a peak in 3-4 years. So it's hard to know how seriously to take him.

My own guess, based on a fair amount of reading (but no independent expertise, of course) is that the world peak production rate of oil is about 100 million b/d (barrels per day). Our current consumption rate is around 80 million b/d, which means that if consumption increases at the rate it has in the past, we'll hit the world peak in about 10 years.

Except for one thing: that's a theoretical peak that assumes we're pumping everything we can. But in the real world, there are always problems. Today, for example, about 5 million b/d of potential production is unavailable because it's in Iraq. Political problems are inevitable in other places as well, and normal wear and tear also keeps a certain amount of production offline at any given time. The practical world peak is quite likely to be more in the neighborhood of 90 million b/d, a number we'll hit about five years from now.

In other words, Campbell may be right this time. And remember that this assumes that a fair amount of new production comes on line in the next few years from Iraq, Russia, Canada, and a few other places, and that recovery techniques improve as well. If this doesn't happen, Deffeyes might be closer to correct than Campbell.

But in a way, it doesn't matter: even five or ten years is a blink of an eye when you're talking about oil use. So while new drilling may be important to prevent the peak from arriving even sooner and declining even faster than it has to, the fact remains that we're going to hit a peak sometime soon regardless. And the only way to deal with that is to start using less oil.

That means conservation, it means more efficient cars and trucks, and it means new technologies. New transportation technologies, since that's where 70% of oil use goes. All of which takes time to develop. (There's an alternative, of course: an oil shock, like the one in 1979, which caused oil use to drop 15% in three years. That's a pretty painful remedy, though.)

Mideast oil independence is a mirage, at least for the forseeable future. Even with our noses to the grindstone, we'll be hard pressed to actually decrease world consumption of oil, and in any case Mideast oil will always be the cheapest oil around. But avoiding a painful peak and another oil shock isn't. The problem is that it would take serious policy leadership that treats oil use as a real problem, not a political football, and neither candidate this year has shown much willingness to do this. Call it Jimmy Carter Syndrome: nobody is eager to meet the fate of the last president who got serious about energy conservation and alternative fuels.

In the meantime, expect plenty of bumps, since when you're close to a peak even small production hiccups can cause big problems. So buy a Prius. Or better yet, a motorcycle. It won't help you avoid the economic shock that's likely to occur when everyone is suddenly surprised to learn that oil production can't increase any more, but at least you'll still have cheap wheels. You might think about calling your congressman too.

UPDATE: In comments, Max reminds me to link to a pretty interesting article about new ethanol technologies in the latest issue of the Monthly. It's not supposed to be available online, though, so don't tell anybody I linked to it....

BUSH SPEAKS....HIS ADVISORS SQUIRM....President Bush on Tuesday, talking off the cuff about the idea of a national sales tax: "It's an interesting idea. You know, I'm not exactly sure how big the national sales tax is going to have to be, but it's the kind of interesting idea that we ought to explore seriously."

President Bush on Wednesday: "Two administration officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Bush was not considering a national sales tax."

That was quick! But why did our doughty "administration officials" insist on being anonymous? What are they ashamed of?

Most likely, I guess, is that they're embarrassed that the President of the United States doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. Before long he'll be touting a return to the gold standard. Here are a few wee problems:

• Bill Gale estimates that to replace the income tax (just the income tax, not all our other taxes) would require a sales tax of 26% on all goods and services — including purchases of food and new housing. That would go over well, wouldn't it?

• But that's low. Gale kindly estimates the "combined rate of avoidance, evasion, and legislative adjustment" at 20%, which he admits is conservative "relative to everything that is known about how actual tax systems operate." In other words, better make that sales tax 30% or even higher. Ka ching!

• Seniors would sure be pissed off about this. And who can blame them? All their lives their income was reduced by the amount of income tax they paid, and now that they're retired this reduced amount of money is suddenly subject to a brand new sales tax. Talk about your double taxation!

  (Don't get it? Think of it this way. Suppose you make $100 today and it gets taxed at 20%. You have $80 left over and you put it in the bank. Tomorrow the income tax is abolished and a 30% sales tax is implemented, so you can only buy $60 worth of stuff with your $80. Your original $100 has essentially been taxed down to $60. For senior citizens, this applies to everything they've socked away over their entire lives.)
  

Being an advisor to George Bush must be sort of like sweeping up after the elephants at the circus. I guess I'd feel sorry for these guys if it weren't for the fact that they're enabling Bush's incompetent rule by their very presence. So I guess I don't. Feel sorry for them, that is.

GLOBAL WARMING.... The cover story of Business Week's current issue is about global warming:

When CEOs contemplate global warming, they see something they dread: uncertainty. There's uncertainty about what regulations they will have to meet and about how much the climate will change — and uncertainty itself poses challenges. Insurance giant Swiss Re sees a threat to its entire industry. The reason: Insurers know how to write policies for every conceivable hazard based on exhaustive study of the past. If floods typically occur in a city every 20 years or so, then it's a good bet the trend will continue into the future. Global warming throws all that historical data out the window.

One of the predicted consequences of higher greenhouse-gas levels, for instance, is more variable weather. Even a heat wave like the one that gripped Britain in 1995 led to losses of 1.5 billion pounds, Swiss Re calculates. So an increase in droughts, floods, and other events "could be financially devastating," says Christopher Walker, a Swiss Re greenhouse-gas expert.

As it turns out, the story is fairly routine and I'm not even sure its anecdotal evidence really makes the case that corporate America has gotten the message about climate change. Still, it's worth reading primarily because it is the cover story of Business Week, and that by itself indicates something of a turning point.

Like national healthcare, I suspect that global warming will really get taken seriously only when the business community finally demands it. What Business Week documents is only the first whispers of those demands, but the endgame is already in sight.

CHALABI WATCH....Ahmed Chalabi has now filed a lawsuit in which he accuses the CIA of spreading the "knowingly false story" that Chalabi blew an American espionage program by spilling the beans to the Iranian government that the United States was monitoring their secret communications. (Details here.)

This just gets better and better, doesn't it? On the other hand, maybe Chalabi has a point. After all, the Bush administration itself doesn't seem to think that blowing undercover operations is all that big a deal, so why should they expect any better behavior from Chalabi?

STEM CELLS....I mentioned Willam Saletan's stem cell article in Slate last night, but only to take a snarky shot at Saletan's two-faced criticism of John Kerry's public speaking habits. But the substance of the column was pretty shoddy too, and tonight I'd like to address his main complaint head on.

Saletan says he is concerned that embryonic stem cell enthusiasts sometimes oversell the benefits of stem cell therapy in their public pronouncements. Now, this would not exactly be the first time in history that an interest group has done this, and I'm sure we can all join in wishing that we lived in a world in which the public carefully and soberly weighed the details of scientific issues before passing judgment on them. But Saletan goes further than this:

The stem-cell movement has become ideological. One scientist who is organizing his colleagues for Kerry told the Post that stem-cell research has become an "icon" for broader complaints about Bush's policies. He added that his group has adopted "ideology trumps science" as its theme.

What Saletan doesn't get is that this is exactly right. Forget the details about whether stem cell therapy is good for Alzheimers, or whether embryonic stem cells are better or worse than adult stem cells. None of that is what really matters.

What really matters is that scientific details ought to be left up to scientists, not to administration ideologues. Let scientists decide what to investigate and when. If they go down a blind alley, funding will dry up and they'll go somewhere else. That's how science works.

As for the moral arguments, let's insist on a full and complete discussion of those too — without the usual shilly shallying and prevaricating. The idea that a 1-week old embryo is a human being has always struck me as depressing: a nihilistically mechanical view of humanity in which DNA + miscellaneous chemicals = human life. Still, it's a fact that some people feel this way. But if they do, then they have to accept the logical consequences of this view in their public speech too: a complete ban on all abortion, all fertility treatments that utilize multiple eggs, and all embryonic stem cell research. Not just a ban on federal funding, but a complete ban. Put that on the table and I think we'd find out pretty quickly how many people really believe that humanity begins at conception.

If Saletan thinks both sides should show all their cards, this one is the ace of spades. Let's play it face up and see who takes the trick.

NAME CHANGE?....Toys 'R' Us is thinking of abandoning the toy business. If they did this, what would their new name be? 'R' Us?