Snake Wrangling In The News

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have spent countless hours spreading the word about the terrifying Animal Uprising™. Only occasional restraining orders and other run-ins with the law have resulted, so we consider our progress in raising awareness as generally good. Oh sure, the neighbors avoid us, refusing even to make eye contact, but we're used to that.

We regret to report, however, that despite all our efforts, that some people still do not "get" it. When some brave humans take on the reptile legions of the animal overlords, other humans object. We just shake our heads at the madness of it. There are people who are criticizing the annual Rattlesnake Roundup held in Sweetwater, Texas.

The snakes are caught during the annual rattlesnake roundup in Sweetwater, Texas, which this town 200 miles west of Dallas bills as the biggest in the world.

The three-day event, which ends on Sunday, includes a rattlesnake-eating contest.

The roundup rattles ecologists but locals see it as a boon for drawing up to 30,000 visitors. Farmers say it helps control a pest that occasionally maims or kills livestock.

Nothing is wasted, the organizers say, with the skins made into belts, the meat sold as a delicacy and the venom "milked" for sale to pharmaceutical companies.

But scientists raise ecological and ethical concerns.

"There's no glory in rattlesnake hunting," said Lee Fitzgerald, an associate professor and curator of amphibians and reptiles at Texas A&M University.

Hunters scour the arid landscape for snake dens, into which they pump gas fumes to drive them out. Then they snatch them with the tongs.

Hunters say the fumes have minimal ecological impact but many scientists disagree.

"It's an unethical way to hunt and it harms other animals such as scorpions and rodents," said Fitzgerald.

The annual hunt shows a remarkable increase in rounded-up reptiles since the early days. Organizers point out that there are plenty of snakes around. Many that aren't caught in the roundup get squashed by cars. And there are still more to catch each year. Critics complain that despite that, they have no idea if there is an actual ecological impact. Other than to the rodents and scorpions. Maybe. Or not. Who knows? But they are concerned about those rodents and scorpions.

We despair. First it was the cockroaches, now the scorpions. And the rattlesnakes.

A Bad Harvest

The myths of ethanol get a thorough airing by the Associated Press today. This is a long article that examines a lot of different issues and questions about the sudden ethanol craze. (It is a Yahoo News link, so it will expire, sorry). But a few highlights stand out.

For all the environmental and economic troubles it causes, gasoline turns out to be a remarkably efficient automobile fuel. The energy required to pump crude out of the ground, refine it and transport it from oil well to gas tank is about 6 percent of the energy in the gasoline itself.

Ethanol is much less efficient, especially when it is made from corn. Just growing corn requires expending energy — plowing, planting, fertilizing and harvesting all require machinery that burns fossil fuel. Modern agriculture relies on large amounts of fertilizer and pesticides, both of which are produced by methods that consume fossil fuels. Then there's the cost of transporting the corn to an ethanol plant, where the fermentation and distillation processes consume yet more energy. Finally, there's the cost of transporting the fuel to filling stations. And because ethanol is more corrosive than gasoline, it can't be pumped through relatively efficient pipelines, but must be transported by rail or tanker truck.

In the end, even the most generous analysts estimate that it takes the energy equivalent of three gallons of ethanol to make four gallons of the stuff. Some even argue that it takes more energy to produce ethanol from corn than you get out of it, but most agricultural economists think that's a stretch.

Get that? The best case estimate is that the overhead for producing ethanol consumes the energy equivalent of 75% of the fuel itself. As opposed to 6% for gasoline. This is a huge step backward. But it gets even worse from there.

Making ethanol is so profitable, thanks to government subsidies and continued high oil prices, that plants are proliferating throughout the Corn Belt. Iowa, the nation's top corn-producing state, is projected to have so many ethanol plants by 2008 it could easily find itself importing corn in order to feed them.

But that depends on the Invisible Hand. Making ethanol is profitable when oil is costly and corn is cheap. And the 51 cent-a-gallon federal subsidy doesn't hurt. But oil prices are off from last year's peaks and corn has doubled in price over the past year, from about $2 to $4 a bushel, thanks mostly to demand from ethanol producers.

High corn prices are causing social unrest in Mexico, where the government has tried to mollify angry consumers by slapping price controls on tortillas. Lester R. Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, predicts food riots in other major corn-importing countries if something isn't done.

U.S. consumers will soon feel the effects of high corn prices as well, if they haven't already, because virtually everything Americans put in their mouths starts as corn. There's corn flakes, corn chips, corn nuts, and hundreds of other processed foods that don't even have the word corn in them. There's corn in the occasional pint of beer and shot of whisky. And don't forget high fructose corn syrup, a sweetener that is added to soft drinks, baked goods, candy and a lot of things that aren't even sweet.

I mentioned this in a post I made on Friday as well. Food prices are going to climb - sharply - as a direct result of this ethanol frenzy. Production facilities are springing up everywhere in the Midwest. More and more corn is heading to those plants and away from the food production that relies on corn. And that is an astonishing percentage of total food production in this country and around the world. Corn is used in many things in one form or another. This "magical silver bullet" is a boondoggle and yet another eco-swindle that will have disastrous long-term consequences. The sowing of the ethanol myth will yield a bad harvest for the world.

Klingons In Finland

Winters in Finland are simply too long for human beings to bear. The long, hard winters lead to certain forms of mass psychosis. If the preoccupation with the tango wasn't proof enough that Finland is really not habitable by humans, perhaps this news item will convince you that we should seriously consider rescuing those poor souls. A Finnish member of parliament is campaigning for re-election in the completely made-up language of Klingon.

HELSINKI (Reuters) - A Finnish member of parliament is aiming for re-election by campaigning with a translation of his Web site into Klingon, used in the TV series Star Trek.

"Some have thought it is blasphemy to mix politics and Klingon," said Jyrki Kasvi, an ardent Trekkie. "Others say it is good if politicians can laugh at themselves."

We could point out that the "Klingon language" is a completely fictional construct and that believing a bit too much in the fictional is generally considered a sign of poor mental health. But then, that would upset the Jedis. We think it is time for the UN to look into the feasibility of a rescue mission to save the Finns from winter. Quickly, before the next craze hits.

When Cats Attack

An Idaho woman got a rude introduction to the Animal Uprising™ and a trip to the hospital in the process. Her "pet" cat attacked her and inflicted more than 20 severe bites on her.

"She went to the door, and her cat went berserk," Jeff Nevins, assistant fire chief for Wood River Fire and Rescue, told the Idaho Mountain Express.

The woman in her 60s was taken to St. Luke's Wood River Medical Center with what Nevins described as "pretty serious puncture wounds." Neither the hospital nor the fire department would provide any details to The Associated Press on Saturday, or say whether she has been released.

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have long been warning about the dangers of keeping ferocious furry feline assassins in the home. They are a ticking time bomb. But people keep thinking cats are pets. We simply do not understand why. My daughter's "pet" cat decided to throw up on on said daughter's bed last night, necessitating serious emergency decontamination procedures in the Crabitat. Lysol was used liberally.

Evil creatures.

The Criminalization Of Politics

That is what Mark Steyn calls Patrick Fitzgerald's "victory" in the Scooter Libby trial. Not a victory for truth and justice - a victory for the criminalization of politics.

The prosecutor knew from the beginning that (a) leaking Valerie Plame's name was not a crime and (b) the guy who did it was Richard Armitage. In other words, he was aware that the public and media perception of this ''case'' was entirely wrong: There was no conspiracy by Bush ideologues to damage a whistleblower, only an anti-war official making an offhand remark to an anti-war reporter. Even the usual appeals to prosecutorial discretion (Libby was a peripheral figure with only he said/she said evidence in an investigation with no underlying crime) don't convey the scale of Fitzgerald's perversity: He knew, in fact, that there was no cloud, that under all the dark scudding about Rove and Cheney there was only sunny Richard Armitage blabbing away accidentally. Yet he chose to let the entirely false impression of his ''case'' sit out there month in, month out, year after year, glowering over the White House, doing great damage to the presidency on the critical issue of the day.

So much of the current degraded discourse on the war — ''Bush lied'' — comes from the false perceptions of the Joe Wilson Niger story. Britain's MI-6, the French, the Italians and most other functioning intelligence services believe Saddam was trying to procure uranium from Africa. Lord Butler's special investigation supports it. So does the Senate Intelligence Committee. So Wilson's original charge is if not false then at the very least unproven, and the conspiracy arising therefrom entirely nonexistent. But the damage inflicted by the cloud is real and lasting.

As for Scooter Libby, he faces up to 25 years in jail for the crime of failing to remember when he first heard the name of Valerie Plame — whether by accident or intent no one can ever say for sure. But we also know that Joe Wilson failed to remember that his original briefing to the CIA after getting back from Niger was significantly different from the way he characterized it in his op-ed in the New York Times. We do know that the contemptible Armitage failed to come forward and clear the air as his colleagues were smeared for months on end. We do know that his boss Colin Powell sat by as the very character of the administration was corroded.

In the end, Libby is the sacrificial lamb to Fitzgerald's political prosecution. The special prosecutor went forward with an investigation when he knew - with certainty - that he already knew who the leaker was and that it was not leaked for malicious reasons. The investigation should have ended at that point. Period. The decision to go forward despite knowing the answer smacks of a political hit. A victory for the criminalization of politics, indeed. This is the warning I have tried to make to the raging mob that cheered the Libby trial. It will come back to haunt you in the future. An ugly door has been opened.

Remember To Set Your Clocks Ahead

Remember, daylight savings went into effect and your productivity will suffer for weeks to come. So set your clocks ahead and send an appropriate thank you to the politicians in Washington.

Fallback Positions

Robert Kagan asks a question in today's Washington Post that really needs to be pondered - and expanded on a little as well.

A front-page story in The Post last week suggested that the Bush administration has no backup plan in case the surge in Iraq doesn't work. I wonder if The Post and other newspapers have a backup plan in case it does. (Emphasis added)

Leading journalists have been reporting for some time that the war was hopeless, a fiasco that could not be salvaged by more troops and a new counterinsurgency strategy. The conventional wisdom in December held that sending more troops was politically impossible after the antiwar tenor of the midterm elections. It was practically impossible because the extra troops didn't exist. Even if the troops did exist, they could not make a difference.

Four months later, the once insurmountable political opposition has been surmounted. The nonexistent troops are flowing into Iraq. And though it is still early and horrible acts of violence continue, there is substantial evidence that the new counterinsurgency strategy, backed by the infusion of new forces, is having a significant effect.

Some observers are reporting the shift. Iraqi bloggers Mohammed and Omar Fadhil, widely respected for their straight talk, say that "early signs are encouraging." The first impact of the "surge," they write, was psychological. Both friends and foes in Iraq had been convinced, in no small part by the American media, that the United States was preparing to pull out. When the opposite occurred, this alone shifted the dynamic.

Read it all, Kagan does a roundup of un- or under - reported news that indicates there are, indeed, positive signs. Recall, please that General Petraeus told the Senate that the mission he was asked to accomplish was possible. Here's the question that also needs to be considered along with Kagan's: Do the Democrats who are blindly charging to the left have a backup plan for if the "surge" actually does work out? Because it will be a cold, dark wasteland for them if they bet against America and lose. They are making a bad gamble here with their pandering,  posturing and pork barrel attempts to buy votes.