Do you realize that over the last two weeks, a barrel of crude oil has fallen about $20, from a bit over $140 to a bit over $120. And what else happened two weeks ago? Bush ended the Federal moratorium on offshore drilling. So the next time someone tells you offshore drilling will take 10 years to make a difference, make it very clear to them what I just told you. And ask them how $20 in two weeks is the same as 10 years.

I'm going to tell you why oil companies aren't looking to develop oil shale deposits, even though people like Nancy Pelosi say that the oil companies have plenty of land with deposits and they should go after those, but aren't. The leases the oil companies get on those lands are for 8 years. The process to get permits to develop the deposits on those leased lands take 7 years, so they would have 1 year left to actually get oil. The process to get oil from shale is estimated to take 7 years from the start. So the company leases the land, spends 7 years and lots of money getting permits, then they start developing it, and one year into the development stage, they have yet to produce oil, so the lease automatically ends and they have to stop. Regulations handcuff them from doing anything, and this seems to be exactly the way Pelosi and other top Democrats want things to be. Really expensive oil, no ability to find more, all our money sent to the middle east, and every possible alternative shut down due to environmental concerns based on 40 year old technology. The solution Pelosi and Obama offer us to to blame it all on Bush, and do absolutely nothing.

Can't do nuclear because Chernobyl blew up 30 years ago. Can't do solar because there's a moratorium, can't do wind because rich people (Ted Kennedy, for instance) own all the good spots for it and don't want it in their backyard, can't develop hydroelectric because it disturbs the habitats of fish (ok, really it's because there just aren't that many great places for hydroelectric). Oh, but the Democrats do have one idea. Turn corn into ethanol (ethanol is not particularly efficient anyway), and cause millions to starve in other countries that depend on corn for sustinence.

What to do? Elect McCain, who is far from perfect, but at least has some ideas.

It's intersting, Conservatives seem to be the ones wanting change in out energy policy and sources, while Liberals seem to want things to stay the same. They say they want long term solutions, but don't offer anything at all.

The New Yorker's new cover has a caricature of Obama and his wife. He's got a turban and Michelle has a big fro, and an AK47 strapped to her torso, and they are giving each other a fist bump with a picture of Osama bin-Laden on the wall in the background. Obama says it's tasteless, and I'm sure a lot of people will see it as a right-wing attack.

Get real, the New Yorker is about as consistently left wing as it gets. This caricature is not an attack in any way, nor is it really about lampooning right-wing attacks. What it's really about is conflating ridiculous attacks on Obama with legitimate criticism. You throw the ridiculous in the same pot as the legit, mix them up, and it confuses the issue. All of the sudden legitimate criticism gets poo-pooed as ridiculous, and suddenly all criticism of Obama is seen as ridiculous. You'll see more and more of this sort of thing pop up in the Obama-supporting media, helping his campaign by subtly changing the nature of how we view criticism of the man.

The following is a letter to the editor of the AJC:

Energy and oil

We need to catch up on alternatives

Jim Wooten's "right" thinking on energy is centered in the 19th and 20th centuries ("Thinking Right," @issue, July 4). Drilling and oil seem to be the only choices that Wooten and most other right-wing pundits want to consider. It should be a national outrage that our country is not a leader in moving into the 21st century with renewable energy sources.

Brazil has become oil-independent. Japan is shipping hydrogen-cell autos to the U.S. India is marketing a reasonable compressed-air vehicle. Mr. Wooten, be part of the solution; look forward, enter the 21st century.

DENISE GRENTZ

--------------------------

Could this woman be more retarded? Brazil is oil independent because they are drilling for their own offshore oil instead of buying from the middle east. And no one who favors the no-brainer of drilling for oil where we know we have it has ever suggested that we should not also look for alternative energy sources. Ms. Grentz seems to think that a country of several hundred million people can only do one thing at a time. I guess we should send all our money to the middle east and wait for our non-existent windmills to start turning while she searches for alternative energy sources.

I'm moving to Roswell. A friend just closed on a house near 400 and Holcomb Bridge, it's pretty darn close to work, and I am tired of my commute, so it's a no-brainer. The only issue I have right now is that my current gym rocks, there are none in the Roswell area that match it, so I'm not sure what to do. I could join the Crossfit Gym there, but I'm not sure I want to. Maybe I should just take the plunge. I'll probably join the Gold's Gym in the area for 1 month to see if I like it. If it sucks, then I guess it's off to Crossfit. Anyway, I'm really pumped about my commute going from 1.5 hours a day to 20 minutes a day.

Speaking of gyms, I broke my personal record in the squat again! 295 pounds, and it was pretty smooth. First time I squatted a weight that caused the barbell to visibly bend. The girl that works out there and is so beautiful that she distracts me from being able to get anything done merely by being in the same room was there today, but thankfully she didn't show up till I was about ready to leave. I could have watched her work that stairmaster all day :) I don't really consider myself the ogling type, but I don't care who you are, no hetero male could do anything but stare in awe at this woman.

Sometimes in weightlifting you have to take a step back in order to take two steps forward, and I seem to have reached one of those time. I deadlifted today and broke my personal record twice, first with 291 lbs., then with 311 lbs. My grip became an issue for the very first time with the latter weight. After the deadlifts, I did overhead presses followed by squat jerks, and in the setup for the 2nd set of jerks, all of the sudden the muscle just inside my left shoulder blade started hurting a lot. I'm guessing it was due to the combination of lots of weight from the deadlifts and lots of stretching of the same muscle while getting in to a clean rack position. At any rate, it hurts!

Over the next few weeks/months, I'm going to lay off heavy deadlifts, work on my grip, and do a lot of isometric work on that muscle and it's counterpart on the right side. I believe they are called rhomboids, but I'll have to check on that.

I could handle the grip issue by switching to an alternate grip, where one hand is overhand, the other underhand, but I don't trust it. It's not symetrical and I can't see how putting unbalanced loads on your body at max weights can be a good thing. I know that powerlifters use alternate grips and lift more than three times what I can do, but I just can't bring myself to do it. I'd much rather work on my grip strength than do something I believe to be unsafe.

In all the talk of the 2nd Amendment, I've noticed that lots of people don't seem to understand what the Bill of Rights are and what they mean. The rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are not granted to us by the government. They are, as it says in the Declaration of Independence, inalienable rights that exist outside of government. More than anything the rights are written out there so the government won't be able to restrict them. We the people loan the ability to govern to the government, and the Bill of Rights is basically the guidelines which the government must follow, or they lose their governing priviledges. When the Supreme Court ruled on the 2nd Amendment last week, the dissenting judges reasoned that the right to bear arms has to be balanced against the interests of local governments. That's BULLSHIT! Local governments cannot restrict our rights any more than the federal government. The right to bear arms is not a law, it is above laws. It is part of the United States in a way that if Congress or the Supreme Court restricted those rights, this would no longer be the United States of America, it would be a new country masquerading as the United States of America.

The Bill of Rights are not laws, they are rights intrinsic to humans, and the rest of the world would be better off if they acknowledged such. The Bill of Rights are above laws, they are the supreme law of the land, and any laws that restrict those rights are false laws.

Later Edit: The whole rights intrinsic to humans thing is making me rethink my stance on the recent Guantanamo case and several other things. If the rights enumerated in the Constitution's top ten list apply to all humanity, then how can I justify not giving due process to detainees? Of course the excuse is that Congress had set up a process for them, but the issue with that is the process never seemed to do anything. So I have a lot to think about.

There are a number of markets that trade bets on things like who will win the election. They trade the bets on a price scale like stocks, and it's interesting to note that graphs of Obama's Presidential chances are the exact opposite of graphs of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In other words, the more likely it seems that Obama will be our next President, the more the stock market falls. Probably a coincidence, but the graphs are stunning in their contrary nature. Notice how around the start of June, the Dow spikes up right when Obama has a downward spike. Correlation does not equal causation, but it sure is interesting.

The Dow Jones graph
The Obama graph

Here is an interesting, if somewhat one-sided, opinion piece on the Supreme Court and the division between justices seen as liberal and those seen as conservative, and the sort of positions each tend to take.

The summary: Liberal judges tend to vote against individual rights, conservatives vote to uphold individual rights. Look at the 2nd Amendment case where the liberal wing tried to take away the individual right to bear arms. Look at the Kelo takings case, where the liberal justices decided that the government can take our property from us for any reason they decide to justify, while the conservatives said hell no, the government cannot take our property from us except in very extreme circumstances. Conservatives on the court consistently vote in favor of 1st Amendment rights, the liberals frequently vote to restrict our 1st Amendment rights.

If you took out names and political designations, and only described the actual decision in various cases, I bet a lot of self-professed liberals would tend to agree with the conservatives on the court, and be very surprised when they discover which side they picked.

This article helps explain better than I can the reasons why gas is so expensive, why it's not speculation driving it, and how doing things that will change supplies in the long-term, like drilling now even though we won't get an oil from it for a decade, can lower the current price of oil. It's all about what people think oil will cost in the future. Prices have gone up because China and India are using more now, and will use even more in the future. And Russia and Mexico are expected to run out of oil in the future. Thus higher demand, lower supply.... In the future. So people buy futures contracts to lock in their price for down the road. Those futures rise in demand, so they rise in price. Change the outlook on the future, and the price of futures will sink, and then the current price will follow.

The "collective" interpretation of the 2nd Amendment makes no sense. If it's not an individual right, then why bother writing it? The government certainly doesn't need a law giving it the right to carry guns when citizens can't. That's the default, and Jefferson and friends wouldn't waste their time on such a law. It would be like passing a law saying that only the government can tax people. Duh! The other collective interpretation claims that the 2nd only refers to people in militias, ostensibly so that states can resist the federal government in times of internal strife. But if there's a fight between D.C. and a state, would the state not arm itself but for the 2nd Amendment? "Well we'd really like to fight, but according to our current enemy, the Federal Government, we don't have the right to bear arms, so I guess we'll just throw sticks." Again, no need to write a law giving militias the right to bear arms. The ONLY logical reason for the founding fathers to write the 2nd Amendment is to protect an individual right. Anything else denies logic and the intentions of the authors as written in the Federalist Papers and other historical sources.