The Collapse of Iraq’s Oil Deal

Fester analyzes the bad news:

The Sunni Arabs who are opposed to decentralized control of oil and more importantly its revenue will continue to exercise their veto over Kurdish oil exports. This veto is the Semtex derived veto of blowing up critical nodes on the northern oil export networks. Developing new fields does nothing for the Kurds if that new oil is sitting in storage tanks in Irbil. It could be shipped overland by truck, but this is a fairly expensive method.

The Shi’ite parties in my opinion, really just need to have enough of an illusion of progress to keep the US Army and Marines interested in acting as their anti-Sunni militia. The draft oil law is fundamentally irrelevant to any of the major Shi’ite parties until the southern intra-Shi’ite resource and network fight reaches a definitive conclusion. And at that point, even if there is a pre-existing law in place governing resource and cash distribution, the winning groups in the South will control either the export terminals or at least the accountants, so Baghdad will get what the Southern winner wants them to get, and not a whole lot more than that.

HDTV and Make-Up

A reader writes:

The commentator on Drum’s blog is years late to the game.

We already employ both physical and electronic devices to routinely clean people’s skin up in HD, both live and in post production. Also, many new techniques such as airbrush applied makeup are now routinely used in HD environments and I have no doubt they’re now doing that at the White House. That being said, Bush has always looked remarkably un-made up. I’ve long suspected it offends his sensibilities just as it would my father, a fellow Texas of Bush’s age.

One things for certain, these techniques weren’t invented by some Republican to hide some lefties idea of the "true face of evil". Rather, they were developed to hide how horrific people like Cameron Diaz look when shot in HD, to say nothing of the likes of Barbara Walters. The View’s been HD for years. It’s like staring through a smear of vaseline because that’s exactly what it is.

A 2008 Preview?

The only thing to feel in anticipating a possible Clinton-Giuliani race next fall is dread. Each would bring the worst out of each other; the race would reprise the worst of the far right and far left rhetoric of the 1990s; we would be deepening polarization and increasing division in wartime. We know from the 2004 campaign (the Swift Boat obscenities above all) that the partisan right will stop at nothing to declare Democrats traitors and hostile to American soldiers. Rudy will love to do this. And he has already started:

The Problem With Lomborg

My friend Bjorn Lomborg has a new book out that I haven’t had time to read. But Partha Dasgupta has and his critique seems valid to me. Money quote:

If there is one truth about Earth we all should know, it’s that the system is driven by interlocking, nonlinear processes running at different speeds. The transition to Lomborg’s recommended concentration of 560 p.p.m. would involve crossing an unknown number of tipping points (or separatrices) in the global climate system. We have no data on the consequences if Earth were to cross those tipping points. They could be good, or they could be disastrous. Even if we did have data, they would probably be of little value because nature’s processes are irreversible.

Megan calls these issues "catastrophic unknowns". They apply to the climate and to Iraq. My conservatism makes me fear the worst – and makes me want to insure myself against it.

“This is the kind of thing that gets people nervous.”

Matt reads the Weekly Standard on "fascism." He adds:

I would note that whether or not one thinks it likely that Bush will start ordering his political opponents to be not so much put "in jail" as abducted off the streets and then held incommunicado in secret foreign facilities for an indefinite span of time during which they’ll be tortured until, eventually, their coerced confessions as used as evidence for never releasing them, the point I would make is that Bush really has asserted his constitutional right to do this and the main opinion leaders on the right have agreed that there should be no meaningful constraint on his ability to behave in this manner.