Telephone town hall
[Didn't get a chance to ask Congressman Lampson a question tonight so I had to settle for an email message.]
I appreciate your taking feedback and questions during tonight's telephone town hall.
Looking at US oil consumption figures for 2007 (courtesy of the DoE), current US oil consumption is estimated at over 20M barrels per day, of which over 50% is imported. Your sponsored legislation to release 70M barrels from the SPR amounts to less than a week's worth of imports. Regarding drilling in Alaska, estimated peak production for ANWR ranges from 500-800 thousand barrels per day, with peak production projected to occur 20 years out. My concern is that both of these measures amount to a drop in the bucket when compared with our nation's actual consumption.
When I crunch these projections against the current price of oil, I'm having a hard time seeing how lease royalties can even come close to the $2.6 trillion figure that is touted on your web site. The number I get is closer to $10 billion per year.
Nader/Gonzalez 2008
Nader supporters give him $7,000. Looking forward to writing Nader in on the ballot. Yeah, I gave, too, partly because I had a nice poker win the night before...
It didn't matter that he had, as one supporter put it, "a snowball's chance in hell" of being elected.
I have a hard time thinking of her a supporter as she seemed more like a bitter heckler. The rest of her long rant went along the lines of "The current system is a sham, and why should we even bother to participate in it?"
Immunity for wiretapping telecoms
Congress votes to immunize lawbreaking telecoms, legalize warrantless eavesdropping. Obama votes with the Republicans in favor of immunity for telecom companies that broke wiretapping laws. Even Clinton voted against.
Missiles in Iran
KAL 007 and Iran Air 655: Comparing the Coverage. In light of the recent news coverage of Iranian missile tests, here is an old but nonetheless interesting tidbit I ran across this morning. Twenty years ago, the USS Vincennes shot down a passenger jet (IR655) over the strait of Hormuz, killing 290 people. Why don't I remember this?
Knighthood uprising calculation
Jotting this down for my own reference. The true calculation is undocumented, and this formula is a guess based on a previous occurrence. Uprising was listed as 11% and increased to 12% when one seized vassal increased from 55 to 56 power. After a subsequent rebellion, uprising fell to 0%.
% uprising = ([vassal TAS] + [vassal power]) / (total power of non-squire/serf vassals)
(40 + 56) / 812 = 12%
