More wisdom from my old econ professors

The same professor mentioned in the previous post said that it is the natural order of things for

"Those who study the very big see the study of the very small as true, but not relevant. Those who study the very small see the study of the very big as relevant, but not true".

Science and truth

Via this episode of BloggingHeads, I came across an interesting article about the philosophy of science, specifically that of Thomas Kuhn. Money Quotes:

Scientists, as Kuhn describes them, are deeply conservative. Once indoctrinated into a paradigm, they generally devote themselves to solving "puzzles," problems whose solutions reinforce and extend the scope of the paradigm rather than challenging it. Kuhn calls this "mopping up." But there are always anomalies, phenomena that the paradigm cannot account for or that directly contradict it. Anomalies are often ignored. But if they accumulate, they may trigger a revolution (also called a paradigm shift, although not originally by Kuhn), in which scientists abandon the old paradigm for a new one.

Denying the view of science as a continual building process, Kuhn asserts that a revolution is a destructive as well as a creative event. The proposer of a new paradigm stands on the shoulders of giants and then bashes them over the head.

In other words, science advances funeral by funeral.

On the first day of my Advanced Macroeconomics class in 1994 the professor (I forget his name, I think that was the last class he taught before he retired) said that we should think of the truth as "the consensus of informed opinion".

In other words, for practical purposes, the truth is the state of the art, as of right now, and we should expect it to change over time.

1000 posts in just over two years

This is the 1,000th. Not too shabby I suppose. Traffic is finally starting to reach "trickle" status.

Two good reads

• From Col. Lang (on partial withdrawal)

  Iraq, (Mesopotamia) has always been held together (in various eras) by force and coercion. The enmity among the "Iraqis" is not a matter of misunderstanding, or a failure to communicate among themselves.
  

• From Michael Scheur (on George Tenet's book)

  But Tenet's resignation would have destroyed the neocons' Iraq house of cards by discrediting the only glue holding it together: the intelligence that "proved" Saddam Hussein guilty of pursuing nuclear weapons and working with al-Qaeda.

My take on the private intelligence topic

John Robb has a good representation of the current "news" going around my corner of the Blogsphere about private intelligence services. It would seem that they're being created by Walmart and Blackwater. One thing that came to my mind when I read the post is what a great recruiting ploy it is. "Spend all your time reading foreign newspapers, talking to people you can barely understand, and writing reports!" seems unappealing, but "Join a private intelligence company" has a pleasant air of mystery to it.

What sort of work besides analysis is it possible, or feasible to do in our over-lawyered environment? It remains to be seen what they can do as a private entity that isn't being done by non-private spy groups like the Rand Corporation and the Associated Press.

My fabulous new logo

The company will be unveiled soon.

The funniest thing I read today

It comes from the blog of Anderson Cooper, which graces us with

Cameras followed the governor as he shopped for groceries. All he had was $21.00 to spend on food for an entire week. That's the average amount of money allotted to a food stamp recipient. He had to say "no" to organic bananas and Swiss cheese.

Does anyone expect food stamps to be more than just barely adequate (if that)? Is there anyone laboring under the idea that life on food stamps is an excess of luxury, filled with store bought organic foods?

One of the more annoying human tendencies is that everyone would think like we do if only they had access to the same collection of facts. Thomas Sowell put it best with

Facts do not 'speak for themselves.' They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

If you don't convince someone of the flaw in the theory, all of the "awareness" in the world probably one reinforces one's original worldview.

And on the awareness stunts, nothing beats death row inmates going on a hunger strike to protest conditions. How can anyone top that?

Saturday rapid fire

• Thought crime in High School writing class -

  Allen Lee, 18, faces two disorderly conduct charges over the creative-writing assignment, which he was given on Monday in English class at the northern Illinois school.

  Students were told to "write whatever comes to your mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing," according to a copy of the assignment. This is the first salvo in the education establishments overreaction I suppose.

  I wonder how far it will spread. It's bad enough that 99% of corporate writing is so measured and passive it might as well be written in Latin, now it's going to start even earlier.

• An interesting profile of international arms dealers. This one is worthy of a James Bond villain status.
  
• An Israeli newspaper ranks the US presidential candidates in terms of their willingness to defend Israel. Curiously lacking is the American counterpart to their prime ministers.
  

Lou Dobbs continues his fight against the brown peril...

This time with verbal jousting against America's other adulterous, Catholic mayor Gavin Newsom. It produced this little gem

Dobbs, an outspoken critic of illegal immigration who hosts an opinionated evening news hour, criticized San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom on Monday, saying he and immigrant protection advocates "might as well work for Hermann Goering. I mean, they're running so much propaganda, trying to confuse the debate, the national dialogue, by talking about immigrants rather than illegal aliens and legal immigrants. It's mindless beyond belief.

Never mind that Goebbels was the propaganda minister, (Goering commanded the Luftwaffe), and never mind that the source of the gripe is that Newsom is refusing to allow local police to enforce immigration law. Never mind that the appropriate German/Nazi comparison to draw (if one must be drawn, Godwin's law must be obeyed) is to Admiral Canaris (who helped hundreds of Jews escape the Nazis while he headed the Abwehr).

But don't think of that, just think of the huge social advances if we brought back dueling. Huge swathes of hacks, apparachiks and fashionable non-conformists would be removed from the gene pool at no cost to the taxpayer. Still others, when forced to put up or shut up, would shut up (or at least try).

We could finally resolve all the pointless debates; is illegal immigration a huge problem that we're not going to do anything about, or is it a charitable endeavor that we're not going to do anything about. We would finally know!

Interesting developments on carbon emissions

It would seem that there has been some progress in developing an actually useful way of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Essentially it's a giant vacuum that sucks the CO2 out of the air. It gets around several problems, most notably geography (the devices can be anywhere). While there is energy expended in the proccess, the main guy has the interesting observation

The real issue, says Lackner, is not the energy consumed but the CO2 emitted. He estimates that for every ton of CO2 he captures, he'll generate another 0.4 ton. But because this process will take place at a plant, where emissions are concentrated relative to air, it will be easily captured.

Pair it up with nuclear power and you've got an even bigger net decrease.

One item not mentioned in the article is that it is possible to start this on a small scale without any public/government consensus on the topic. Any meaningful consensus, particularly an international one would most likely be ineffective, slow, corrupt in implementation and captured by special interests from the start.

The above remedy is able to be done by quite a few people with little public input and delay. The Sierra Club, Richard Branson, Wal-Mart, whoever, could just set them up as much as they wanted. It doesn't get around the free-rider problem, but it does allow private virtue to be accomplished.

For the record, I'm still a skeptic on global warming, but the technology is fascinating.

The Great Siberian Ice March

Somehow I wound up on this page on WikiPedia and found it fascinating. During the Russian Civil War in the late teen and early 20s, the Red Army was chasing the White Army across Siberia, specifically Lake Baikal had to escape across the frozen lake in sub-zero temperatures.

the Arctic winds that blow unobstructed across the lake froze many in the army and their families to death. The bodies remained frozen on the lake in a kind of tableau throughout the winter of 1919 until the arrival of summer, when the frozen figures and all their possessions disappeared in 8,000 feet of water.

Does anyone know of a good history of the Russian Civil War? I don't know of any notable works on the topic.

The weird far right makes an appearance

We haven't seen these people since the last administration

Six arrested in 'militia' weapons raids; nearby school shut
Federal and state agents arrested six men and seized an arsenal of homemade hand grenades and firearms in raids Thursday, including one that forced the shutdown of a school.

The men, members of the self-styled "Alabama Free Militia," had no apparent plans to use the weapons, but the leader was described as a federal fugitive, federal authorities said.

Snipers and robot armies

After reading these two articles (here and here) about new forms of sniper scopes, I have to wonder, why aren't robot armies in the field right now? Granted, all of the shooting must somehow involve a human, but I would imagine that remote operator could be anywhere. We've had unmanned aerial vehicles for years now, and those fly, which would seem to be much more complicated and expensive.

My funniest line from last night

Was when I said "I've seen the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by Dave Mathews", which got a good laugh from my fellow acoustic purists who were going over new material at the open mic last night.

Which I won by the way. I could just barely hear myself in the monitors, but evidently is sounded good in the crowd. I got my guitar showpiece, Bonaparte's Retreat (in Drop D tuning) mostly right, which is a rare thing.

Random links

• Remove the web developer and the web gets developed
• Term of the day "Fever Swamp - A political website or mindset that is prone to wild accusations and is especially susceptible to conspiracy theories."
• An excellent post on conspiracy theories
  

The most illuminating presentation I've seen in years

Via Zen Pundit, it's Col Patrick Lang's Lecture on Islam. Purely informative, insightful, historical, well presented, and doesn't run afoul of the Electric Shaver of Peace fallacy. I recommend it to everyone. It's about 90 minutes worth of video, I just let it play while I worked on other stuff.

The funniest thing I've read today

From this Popular Mechanics article on flying cars

Recently, NASA scientists discovered that most people love to play video games but hate to die in fiery airplane crashes

Cool article in Popular Mechanics

About the Army's Land Warrior System. It's very cool.

Loner into the waste did go...

On Friday I happened to be driving through Kirkwood and happened by the old, abandoned Pullman Company Yards. I happened to have my camera with me, so I did some exploring.

The Atlanta Preservation Center describes it as

The Pratt Engineering Company purchased this property adjacent to the rail line in 1900 in what was once the City of Kirkwood. In the 1920's, the Pullman Company bought and expanded the industrial complex for its southeast repair facility. Many of the industrial buildings, characterized by brick clad and riveted iron skeleton construction built by Pratt Engineering and the brick clad reinforced concrete buildings built by the Pullman Company remain on the site.

Anyway, check out the photo gallery.

Sunday round up

• A nice graph of the internet
  
• If I believed in conspiracy theories, I'd believe in this one "I found Saddam's WMD Bunkers". The reason that no one in government is following up on them is that the US invasion forced the weapons into Syria, and the Bush administration didn't act on the information quickly. The Democrats don't want to move on it because it proves the main cause for the invasion. It's a bit too cinematic to be believed, but quite interesting.
  

Keeping us safe

This is something to bear in mind as recent events have brought gun control back onto the discussion list

Phony fax gives prisoner almost 2 weeks of freedom
Officials released a prisoner from a state facility after receiving a phony fax that ordered the man be freed, and didn't catch the mistake for nearly two weeks.

Timothy Rouse, 19, is charged with beating an elderly western Kentucky man and was at the Kentucky Correctional & Psychiatric Center in La Grange for a mental evaluation. He was released from that facility on April 6 after officials received the fake court order.

It contained grammatical errors, was not typed on letterhead and was faxed from a local grocery store. The fax falsely claimed that the Kentucky Supreme Court "demanded" Rouse be released.
...
Prison officials did not notice that the fax came from a grocery store because policies did not require checking the source of a faxed order, said Greg Taylor, the LaGrange facility's director.

"It's not part of a routine check, but certainly, in hindsight, that would perhaps have caused somebody to ask a question," he said. He added that misspellings on orders are common.

The most damning part I suppose is that misspellings on Supreme Court "demands" are common.

Even if strict gun control is theoretically possible and desirable, it's got to be administered by someone. And guess who that someone is going to be?

A movie to see

Is the Asphault Jungle from 1950. It's a good noir crime drama, with good acting by Sterling Hayden and a young Marilyn Monroe (playing a mistress, imagine).

One hilarious moment is Hayden, is his classic tough guy growl, complaining that his bookie pointed out that he owed money, or in the slang of the time, "he boned me". As in "He boned me in front of some guy I didn't even know!"

I go exploring

I went here. More photos to come, here's a preliminary favorite though

Quote of the moment

Is Timothy Virkkala saying

The world marches on to the beat of a million monkeys typing the Collected Works of William Shakespeare.

A foppish post

From National Review's Mark Steyn. He makes the valid point that people in their 20s are not children, but the asinine part is

They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are “children” if they’re serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton’s Oval Office. Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

It presumes that all of the victims were cowering in fear while they were shot. My initial thought is that since the fatality count is so high suggests that people were attempting to fight, and died trying. Furthermore, a gun-wielding attacker is qualitatively different from a knife-wielding attacker. If six men rush someone with a knife, it's reasonable to expect, say two, of the six to die, but their side would prevail. Against a gun, it's likely that all six would fall, and their side would lose (presuming a sufficient start distance). And suicidal attacks with no expectation of victory are a trademark of the Islamic extremists that Steyn usually rails against.

An odd mention

Matt Yglesias asks "How many moody loners are there" in this episode of Blogging Heads.

A fast move

Via Instapundit TN moves to allow guns in public buildings

In a surprise move, a House panel voted today to repeal a state law that forbids the carrying of handguns on property and buildings owned by state, county and city governments — including parks and playgrounds.

As gun control is the abstract topic of the week

Megan McArdle (in the Atlantic) has some interesting thoughts and graphs on the subject.

A curious ommission

From this article in the NYT on attitudes on the Iraq war by age group, specifically

Forty-eight percent of Americans 18 to 29 years old said the United States did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, while 45 percent said the United States should have stayed out. That is in sharp contrast to the opinions of those 65 and older, who have lived through many other wars. Twenty eight percent of that age group said the United States did the right thing, while 67 percent said the United States should have stayed out.
...
"We've experienced more than the younger people. Older people are wiser. We've seen war and we know."

Anyway, it goes on like that. One thing that was not mentioned was the fact that the time horizons are quite different. Someone 65 is looking at an outer range of 30 years more of life, whereas someone age 25 is looking at 60 more years of life. It's quite plausible that younger people might be more favorable to risky experiments with possible longer term benefits, the same way they like investing in risky stocks and mutual funds - to wit, they have more time to play with, so they can take more risks.

I'm not saying this is the reason for the disparity, but it's odd it wasn't addressed.

The old round up

• Digital Camera crop factors
• 20 things not to do when starting a business - I stayed away from most of them
• More solar power
• via Marginal Revolution -

  The public's opinion of past wars improves as a new war approaches. Thus, after Vietnam most people thought the war was a mistake and this held true for decades until the beginning of the Iraq war when the opinion of war in Vietnam suddenly improved! Even more dramatically, a majority of people thought that World War I was a mistake until World War II approached when the percentage thinking it was a good war doubled.
  

• The worst school murders actually happened in 1927, though it did not involve shootings. It's a horrifying story.
  

Virginia Tech shootings

This is horrible. I just checked the news for the first time all day. 31 people dead?

Taxes done

Surprisingly they were within a few hundred dollars of what I thought they would be, which is not to say what I'm happy with, but at least they're filed.

A paper worth reading

On the rise of privateers. We've let this option go as our country has become wealthier, but it's worth looking at.

Best headline of the year so far

From the Grand Rapids Press: Snow won't dampen global-warming rallies

What I got wrong about the Iraq war

I was going to write this a while back, but here it is. I was on the fence about it at the time, but history did not to wait for me to reach a position.

What I was wrong about with regard to Iraq (2003 assumptions)

• I thought we would have over 10,000 military deaths by this point.
  
• I thought the war would take about a year of heavy fighting.
• I thought it would be over after that year
• I thought the Sunni-Shia split would not play out as it has, rather that it would stay at or around the 2004 level
• I thought we would have much more negative blowback - for all of the shouting and protests, not much has really happened on that front
• I thought we would have found at least chemical weapons (in large quantities)
  
• I did not think that Kurdistan would turn out as well as it has
• I thought Turkey would have intervened in some form by now
• I thought al Qaida would have benefited more, it seems that they have been hurt (in terms of their ideological appeal) by the Iraq war (more on that later)
• I did not think that we would still have this many troops (fighting) at this point.
• I thought that there would be much more conventional combat, and much less of this gang warfare
• I thought that the Iraqis would have scored at least three major wins (surprise attacks in some fashion) in the scores of battles that have happened since the war began. They don't seem to have won any against American troops.
  

Friday round up

• Crime Crews
• Where the Fortune 50 CEOs went to college - appearances by Georgia State and Georgia Tech, surprisingly little Ivy League.
  
• Government menstrual forms, really, to quote

  Women officers must write down their "detailed menstrual history and history of LMP [last menstrual period] including date of last confinement [maternity leave]," the form says.

  I like the use of the term "confinement" for maternity leave.
• Solar Power - I was wondering why companies like this didn't already exist. Essentially they install (and own) solar panels on top of your house, and you buy it from them them at the rate you're paying the power company. I met them yesterday at the Home Show at the World Congress Center. A good idea.
  

Chinese people cannot know my wisdom

I'm being blocked by the Great Firewall of China. How cruel.

Oddly enough, Jargondatabase.com is freely available.

More Friedman

While looking over David Friedman's blog today, I came across this article on "The Economics of War". It's an interesting read. Here is another one I haven't read in ten years or so, Paying for Crime Prevention it winds up being a partial defense of the system we have in America where the government is not liable if a defendent is acquitted at trial. To wit:

The outcome of a criminal case depends, among other things, on decisions made by police and prosecutors. Consider a situation where, at some point in the proceedings, the police begin to suspect that they may have the wrong man. Suspicion is not certainty; they can choose to ignore the evidence that their suspect is innocent or someone else is guilty. They can also choose to do their best to keep such evidence out of sight of the defense. How likely they are to do so depends in part on the cost to them of being proven wrong. Under a legal system in which acquitting the defendant, or dropping charges after he has been imprisoned for some time, results in sizable cash penalties against the police department or its individual officers, the police have a strong incentive to repress their doubts and push for a conviction.

How serious this problem is depends on a variety of factors. If there is a substantial chance that the conviction of an innocent will eventually be discovered and reversed, a police department that suppresses such evidence risks having to pay for years in jail instead of months. If, on the other hand, such a reversal is unlikely, suppressing evidence may be an attractive gamble.

I suppose that is another variant of the Gandhi game, or turning the other cheek as it's less tactically known.

Schelling points

I refered to these in an earlier post, so I figure a definition is in order. I originally came across it in David Friedman's ruminations on the origins of Natural Rights theory. He defines it broadly as "a possible solution to the problem of coordination without communication".

"Communication" might be better defined as meaningful communication. He lists many examples in the essay where no communication is possible, as well as zero-sum conflict where communication would not be believed.

The functional definition (i.e. the way I use the term) is that a Schelling Point is a point or marker that is obvious to both sides without explanation, and could also mark some point of principal to one of the sides, which would cause that side to expend more effort defending it than the point might seem to be worth.

The usual example of a Schelling Point is a river (flowing North to South in this example), with an opposing tribe on each side who need to set a border. There is no significant difference difference in land between using the river as the border, and using the river plus five feet West of the border. However, the river itself will always be chosen as the border because A)it's obvious, and B) one tribe could very well attach special meaning to the river above and beyond the land itself, i.e. the Western Tribe shall not stain the ground made holy by the River God (or something like that).

The other example is abortion. The two popular Schelling Points at which "life begins" are considered to be either at conception (by the pro-lifers) and birth (by the pro-choicers). Both of these points are trivial in a lot of ways; the components are largely the same as they were before each event (differing in union in one way, in location and dependence the next). But, both of them are obvious to both sides in the dispute and both can be plausibly seen as having special meaning to either side (Ensoulment in one case, no physical attachment to the mother in the other).

In looking over this, I see I've called birth "trivial". Oh well, the point still stands.

Quick Tuesday rapid fire

• Prominent 30s fascist sympathizer was actually black! Favorite quote: "One could perform whiteness to some degree, and that is precisely what Dennis did"
• The best author's site ever
• Real Estate Photography - As I'm doing some light house hunting at the moment, I can definitely say that most online real estate listings are horrible.
• Chet Richards interview
  

The theme for the best of all country songs

I was looking up the history of my favorite fiddle tune, Bonaparte's Retreat (I play it in drop D), and came across this little Southern gem. To wit, three men

were taken prisoner by the Guard-no one knows why, but the area had been ravaged by scalawags and bushwackers, and the populace had suffered numerous raids of family farms by Union troops hunting provisions. The village of Waynesville had been burned two months earlier, and the citizenry was beleaguered and anxious. Cantrell writes: "The group traveled toward Cataloochee Valley and Henry Grooms, clutching his fiddle and bow, was asked by his captors to play a tune. Realizing he was performing for his own firing squad Grooms struck up Bonaparte's Retreat." When he finished the three men were lined up against an oak tree and shot, the bodies left where they feel. Henry's wife gathered the bodies and buried them in a single grove in Sutton Cemetery No. 1 in the Mount Sterling community, the plain headstone reading only "Murdered."

Now I just need to write the song.

Pithy post on tortue

Tdaxp has an interesting post on the government use of torture here, to wit

My reply back to him mainly concerned, the subtile, which is The inside story of how the interrogators of Task Force 145 cracked Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s inner circle—without resorting to torture—and hunted down al-Qaeda’s man in Iraq. The title's odd in that it is both boring and inflammatory.

The boredom first. I can imagine an article subtitled The inside story of how programmers at Microsoft Corporation released SQL Server 2008 on time -- and without using hash tables.

I've always found the specific opposition to torture strange. We're willing to jail people for the rest of their lives, hold them without trial, and bomb various countries which involves inherent civilian death and maiming. Drawing a line at torture seems odd to say the least. I suppose to some people it is a categorical difference in government action, and not an incremental difference in human suffering.

Now that I think about it, it does make for a good Schelling Point. It is objectionable to differing degree to both sides of the argument, as well as obvious to both. It is also seen as a categorical tactic (though not strategy) by both. Hmmm....

Tab clearing roundup

• Michael Totten goes to Kurdistan - phenomenal reporting.
• The Yazidi religion of the the Middle East, very strange and interesting.
  

Bold new insight

Barack Obama is a lot like Lenny Kravitz. Both have a well defined personal story which makes for an easy story for critics and pundits. They both sound just like vague rehashes of the Kennedy era so they seem familiar to those in the pundit demographic. Both were barely born then, so the talking heads can proclaim them to be "new". Both are of mixed race ancestry so people can feel good about themselves for saying they like them. Both have problems with "authenticity".

Where's my CNN.com column?

Nature doesn't like you

Watch this video and ask yourself if you still feel bad about the destruction of the Amazon rain forest. Ouch. It's not graphic on the visual level, but conceptually I cringed.

European vs American Talents

From Marginal Revolution

Because European government works better, Europeans demand more of it and get more of it. American liberals look at Europe and see (sometimes) better results per dollar spent. They then conclude that America should be more like Europe, whereas in reality America would end up spending more to get more bad American government.

It's a very nice argument against moving towards European style nationalized health care, to wit, we would not get the same results as they do. Instead we would probably just magnify existing problems.

Super Jews are coming! Duck!

Mathew Yglesias links to a Charles Murray article in Commentary about the apparent brainpower edge of the Jewish people. For the most part, Yglesias' commenters go off on the notion of implied inequality with a few dissents.

To me this is partial proof of evolution. The world has changed to a mostly urban lifestyle, and Jews have been living in cities for much longer than most groups. That would make them more suited to score higher than other groups on what we measure on IQ tests. Jewish culture essentially "chose" the right path to the future.

Throw in non-random mating and the fact that Jewish culture values literacy more than most other cultures and it seems quite reasonable that Jews would score higher on whatever test the psychologists can throw at them.

None of this matters much (yay minimalist view of politics) but it is interesting. I imagine it is as unprovable as are most other evolutionary theories.

Tdaxp on winners and losers in a war with Iran

Dan Tdaxp has a very good post on the winners and losers of a purely punitive (i.e. we don't occupy) attack on Iran. It's well worth reading.

One thin that is not mentioned is that a take-down of Iran would create sizable about of Indian country, it would also be contiguous with the other large patch of Indian country, i.e. Afghanistan. I have no meaningful speculation on what would ensue from that.

Now that I think about it, "Land Ocean" might be a better way to refer to large lawless areas.

Tuesday round up

• Popular mechanics and 100 mpg cars
• Couple Fights for Baby 'Metallica' Name
  

  In Sweden, parents must get the names of their children approved by the tax authority, which is in charge of the population registry and issues personal identification numbers, similar to Social Security numbers in the United States.

• Billy Joe Shaver seems to have shot someone.
  

Fair trade energy

Check out this article on Popular Mechanics about using excess CO2 and algae to create biofuels. It's an elegant solution, using one problem (excess CO2) to solve the other (the need for energy).

If I were Bill Gates, or at least in some position of power in his charity, I would subsidize the creation of these things in the third world. Doing that would create industry in the (mostly) quite hot third world countries where it has never been. Unlike the traditional oil regimes though, this industry would not be easily stolen as capital and expertise could be moved fairly easily.

I'll have more ruminations on the "Curse of oil" and capital flight eventually.