go go gadget beans

Here's some more Doom & Gloom on gas prices. The fuel industry had made a bid to get Congress to give them liability protection against lawsuits for MTBE, but in a smart move, Congress said no, fully aware that protection against liability would mean that the additive that is a known pollutant of our groundwater would never be phased out of fuel. So, over the next couple of months, we'll be seeing that oxyginate taken out and replaced with ethanol. MTBE makes up about 10% of the fuel we use, so that's a lot of ethanol. The fear here is that bottlenecks in shipping could cause a shortage of ethanol and jack gas up to $3 a gallon. Big surprise, they just add another buck or so onto last year's freak out summer price, we won't hit and then over the winter as fuel prices ease up onto that target, nobody will notice or complain because we're still too damn happy it wasn't $3 a gallon over the summer. There's a chart on the above link of average gas prices by state. I thought it was pretty poignant that the three lowest states were Utah, Wyoming, and Oklahoma. States without heavy urban areas and a reputation for people only driving their fucking SUVs when they need to yank a fuckin tree out of the ground or haul some cattle to market. Supply and deman is really evident in that chart....

On another note, I couldn't find a news article, but it's all over the radio. In a speech on her latest tour, Condolezza Rice said that we're aware America's made thousands of tactical mistakes in the war in Iraq, but she thinks we'll be judged by history, not on the results of those mistakes, but on the merit of the intentions we had in going to war there in the first place. Really? Are we really evolving from a species that judges merit based on outcome to one that judges intent over all else? How's that gonna play out in criminal cases? Is it ok to be drunk and kill a family of 5 in an auto accident if you didn't really mean to do it? "I didn't know the gun was loaded, it was an accident. " "I'm not paying child support, I thought the bitch was on the pill. I didn't want to get her pregnant!" That's how we're doing things these days, huh? Good. My annual review is coming up at work. I'll just tell them I deserve a "Role Model" rating because I intend to do my best every day I come in. It's not my fault the internet is an integral tool to my work flow. What is that, a 5% raise instead of the barely above inflation 3% I can expect from a "fully effective" rating I'm likely to see? That's a whopping $552 a year extra I'll get for that little change in evaluation. whoot.

Seriously, what historical event has ever been judged on the merit of the intentions behind it? Primarily, that would mean we would have to look on some event that failed in a positive light, and we don't really do that. Of course, looking on something that succeeded in a negative fashion would be the same. Then there's the fact that intentions are subjective. The South was just trying to preserve a cultural way of life in the Civil War. To the Brits, the dudes in the Boston Tea Party were just a bunch of whiners that didn't understand world economics. Hell, the photographers involved in Princess Diana's accident were just trying to keep the public informed about their heroine.

Intentions. fah. To keep the whole post circular, the gas industry has known about the possible shortage of ethanol since June of last year, yet they failed to act. I'm not going to judge them harshly for the price I pay at the pump, though. No. I'm going to judge them harshly because their intention can only be to publish the electing public for the officials we put into office not kowtowing to the industry and giving them an armored hull that would let them continue to foment cancer, autism, and whatever other illness you want to associate with polluted drinking water.