Salazar Slips Energy Policy In Reverse

Source: http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=517291

01/06/2010

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Energy: As energy prices surge to uncomfortably high levels, a top administration official wants to make it harder for U.S. companies to get more oil and gas. Once again, we're shooting ourselves in the foot on energy.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar couldn't have picked a worse time to announce that he's placing new barriers on the development of oil and gas resources. Last year's rise in oil was the largest in a decade, and crude prices today have topped $82 a barrel.

Yet Salazar on Wednesday announced plans, as the energy news service Greenwire put it, that "will require more detailed environmental reviews, more public input and less use of a provision to streamline leasing."

In short, private energy development efforts are going backward.

Worse, Salazar has politicized energy to an unseemly degree. In unveiling his new plans and trying to lay blame somewhere else for recent energy price jumps, he said: "The previous administration's 'anywhere, anyhow' policy on oil and gas development ran afoul of communities, carved up the landscape and fueled costly conflicts that created uncertainty for investors and industry."

This isn't the first time Salazar's turned our energy future into a political debate. In November, he lashed out at the oil and gas industry, accusing it of "behaving like an arm" of the Republican Party and decrying the industry's "untruths."

"Trade groups need to understand that they do not own the nation's public lands," he said.

He's right. They don't own it. We do. And because of Salazar's unwise and even hostile energy stewardship, we will likely suffer through years and years of higher prices for crude oil, natural gas and other badly needed resources.

As the chart shows, oil jumped from $44 a barrel at the start of 2009 to $83 a barrel at Wednesday's close. It's no accident.

Salazar's latest move partly reverses the clear intent of a 2005 law, passed by a Republican Congress, that would speed up and streamline permits for energy projects on public lands. In effect he's pawning our energy future to political expediency.

The U.S. is sitting on an immense supply of oil and gas, probably larger than anywhere else in the world. We have at least 86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas offshore. As much as 35 billion barrels of oil lies waiting to be tapped in Alaska and the Chukchi Sea. A massive 2.2 trillion barrels of energy lies in our oil shale deposits in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado.

Let's put this in perspective: Since 1859, when the first oil well was drilled in Titusville, Pa., the world has used 1.1 trillion barrels of oil. We have twice that amount locked up in oil shale deposits, mostly on federal lands. By comparison, the current No. 1 in proven oil reserves, Saudi Arabia, has just 266 billion barrels of oil.

Worldwide, according to the respected Cambridge Energy Research Associates, as many as 4.8 trillion barrels of crude may be left. And a lot of it is here in the U.S.

All this is important because, like it or not, the U.S. will still depend on carbon-based fossil fuels for 80% of its energy by 2035, according to the Energy Department. Yet this administration seems intent on leaving it in the ground, opting instead to enact a cap-and-trade law that will cost the U.S. economy trillions of dollars while doing little if anything to cut C02 output.

"When it comes to paving the way for the responsible development of homegrown, job-creating energy resources, no administration in history has done more to ensure producers do less," said Tom Pyle, head of the nonpartisan Institute for Energy Research.

During the next 25 years, U.S. energy consumption is expected to grow by 15%, according to government estimates. We desperately need all the energy we can get — now.

If not, we face a future of rising prices, higher inflation, slower economic growth and lower standards of living.

That may be change, but it doesn't sound very hopeful.

Kim Peek, Inspiration for ‘Rain Man,’ Dies at 58 By Bruce Weber

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/us/27peek.html

Barton Glasser/Deseret News, via Associated Press

Kim Peek gained wide recognition for his extraordinary memory.

December 27, 2009

In 1988, the film “Rain Man,” about an autistic savant played by Dustin Hoffman, shed a humane light on the travails of autism while revealing the extraordinary powers of memory that a small number of otherwise mentally disabled people possess, ostensibly as a side effect of their disability.

The film won four Oscars, including best picture, best actor and, for Barry Morrow and Ronald Bass, best original screenplay. But it never would have been made if Mr. Morrow had not had a chance meeting with Kim Peek, who inspired him to write the film.

Mr. Peek was not autistic — not all savants are autistic and not all autistics are savants — but he was born with severe brain abnormalities that impaired his physical coordination and made ordinary reasoning difficult. He could not dress himself or brush his teeth without help. He found metaphoric language incomprehensible and conceptualization baffling.

But with an astonishing skill that allowed him to read facing pages of a book at once — one with each eye — he read as many as 12,000 volumes. Even more remarkable, he could remember what he had read.

Indeed, Mr. Peek, who died Dec. 19 at home in Salt Lake City, had perhaps the world’s most capacious memory for facts. He was 58. The cause was a heart attack, said his father, Fran Peek.

Almost all documented savants — people with an extraordinary depth of knowledge and the ability to recall it — have been restricted in their expertise to specific fields like mathematics, chess, art or music. But Mr. Peek had a wide range of interests and could instantly answer the most arcane questions on subjects as diverse as history, sports, music, geography and movies.

“He was the Mount Everest of memory,” Dr. Darold A. Treffert, an expert on savants who knew Mr. Peek for 20 years, said in an interview.

Mr. Peek had memorized so many Shakespearean plays and musical compositions and was such a stickler for accuracy, his father said, that they had to stop attending performances because he would stand up and correct the actors or the musicians.

“He’d stand up and say: ‘Wait a minute! The trombone is two notes off,’ ” Fran Peek said.

Mr. Peek had an uncanny facility with the calendar.

“When an interviewer offered that he had been born on March 31, 1956, Peek noted, in less than a second, that it was a Saturday on Easter weekend,” Dr. Treffert and Dr. Daniel D. Christensen wrote about Mr. Peek in Scientific American in 2006.

They added: “He knows all the area codes and ZIP codes in the U.S., together with the television stations serving those locales. He learns the maps in the front of phone books and can provide MapQuest-like travel directions within any major U.S. city or between any pair of them. He can identify hundreds of classical compositions, tell when and where each was composed and first performed, give the name of the composer and many biographical details, and even discuss the formal and tonal components of the music. Most intriguing of all, he appears to be developing a new skill in middle life. Whereas before he could merely talk about music, for the past two years he has been learning to play it.”

Mr. Peek, who was dismissed as mentally retarded as a child and later misdiagnosed as autistic, led a sheltered life, with few people outside his family aware of his remarkable gifts. Then, in 1984, he met Mr. Morrow at a meeting of the Association of Retarded Citizens in Arlington, Tex. Mr. Peek’s father was chairman of the group’s communications committee, and Mr. Morrow had helped create two television movies about a retarded man named Bill (played by Mickey Rooney).

After Mr. Peek displayed his memory skills in a conversation with him, Mr. Morrow set about concocting a story around someone like Kim Peek. “I was absolutely flabbergasted that such a human being existed,” Mr. Morrow said in a 2006 documentary about Mr. Peek.

In “Rain Man,” the autistic character, Raymond Babbitt, has been institutionalized since he was very young but is reunited with a cynical younger brother, Charlie (played by Tom Cruise), who had forgotten about his brother’s existence. (The title comes from Raymond’s recollection of the infant Charlie’s name for him.) The two men take a cross-country trip, and fraternal reconciliation ensues.

The movie, a critical and box office success, was not based on Mr. Peek’s life, but in preparing for the role, Mr. Hoffman visited with Mr. Peek and incorporated many of his characteristics — a shambling gait, peculiar hand movements and occasional blunt utterances — into the character of Raymond.

When Mr. Hoffman won an Oscar for best actor for the performance, he thanked Mr. Peek in his acceptance speech. Mr. Morrow went even further: he gave his own Oscar statuette to Mr. Peek, who carried it with him to public appearances for the next 21 years.

In the wake of “Rain Man,” Mr. Peek became something of a celebrity, emerging from his shell to travel around the country giving demonstrations of his talent and advocating tolerance for the disabled. Fran Peek estimated that some 400,000 people have hugged Mr. Morrow’s statuette.

“We called it the world’s best-loved Oscar,” he said.

Laurence Kim Peek was born on Nov. 11, 1951. (He was named for his mother’s favorite actor, Laurence Olivier, and the title character of Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim”; Kipling was his father’s favorite author.) Kim’s head was enlarged, his cerebellum was malformed and, perhaps most crucial, he was missing the corpus callosum, the sheaf of nerve tissue that connects the brain’s hemispheres. It has been theorized that this disruption of normal communication between the brain’s left and right halves resulted in a kind of jury-rigged rewiring.

“Perhaps the resulting structures allow the two hemispheres to function, in certain respects, as one giant hemisphere, putting normally separate functions under the same roof, as it were,” Drs. Treffert and Christensen wrote. “If so, then Peek may owe some of his talents to this particular abnormality.”

When Kim was 9 months old, a doctor said that he was so severely retarded that he would never walk or talk and that he should be institutionalized. When Kim was 6, another doctor recommended a lobotomy. By then, however, Kim had read and memorized the first eight volumes of a set of family encyclopedias, his father said. He received part-time tutoring from the age of 7 and completed a high school curriculum by 14. He spent great swaths of time absorbing volumes in the Salt Lake City Public Library. He never used computers, his father said.

“How he learned to read, I just don’t know,” Mr. Peek said.

Kim Peek’s parents divorced in 1981, and his father cared for him alone until his son’s death. Besides his father, Mr. Peek is survived by his mother, Jeanne Willey Peek Buchi; a brother, Brian; and a sister, Alison, all of Salt Lake City.

“Rain Man” changed Mr. Peek’s life. In the documentary, he confessed that before the film, he never looked anyone in the face.

“Barry influenced me more than any other person,” he said of Mr. Morrow. “He made me ‘Rain Man.’ ”

Though his social skills never fully developed, he grew to be outwardly engaging. He enjoyed being among people in his travels and became comfortable as something of a showman. He began developing mental skills he had never had before, like making puns; his coordination slowly improved, to the extent that he could play the piano. He became more self-aware, even displaying a certain social agility.

During a presentation Mr. Peek gave at Oxford University in England, after he fielded students’ questions about the Lusitania and about British monarchs, a young woman stood and asked him, “Kim, are you happy?”

“I’m happy just to look at you,” Mr. Peek said.

Pre-Existing Condition Mandate Is Lunacy By Walter Williams

Source: http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=516532

12/29/2009

Sen. John Rockefeller, D-W.Va., chairman of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Health Care, and Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., a member of the House Education and Labor Committee, have introduced the Pre-existing Condition Patient Protection Act, which would eliminate pre-existing condition exclusions in all insurance markets. That's an Obama administration priority.

I wonder whether President Obama and his congressional supporters would go a step further and protect not just patients, but everyone against pre-existing condition exclusions by insurance companies. Let's look at the benefits of such a law.

Retroactive Insurance

A person might save quite a bit of money on fire insurance. He could wait until his home is ablaze and then walk into Nationwide and say, "Sell me a fire insurance policy so I can have my house repaired." The Nationwide salesman says, "That's lunacy!" But the person replies, "Congress says you cannot deny me insurance because of a pre-existing condition."

This mandate against insurance company discrimination would not only apply to home insurance, but auto insurance and life insurance as well. Instead of a wife wasting money on costly life insurance premiums, she could spend that money on jewelry, cosmetics and massages and then wait until her husband kicked the bucket to buy life insurance on him.

Insurance companies don't stay in business and prosper by being stupid. If Congress were to enact a law eliminating pre-existing condition exclusions, what might be expected?

Pricey Policies

Say I'm a salesman for Nationwide, and you demand that I write you an insurance policy for your house that has already gone up in flames. I send an appraiser out to your house to estimate of how much money it would take to make you whole. Let's say it comes to $400,000. Guess how much I'm going to charge you for the policy?

If you said somewhere in the neighborhood of $400,000, you'd be pretty close to the right answer. You might say, "Williams, you're right. Forcing fire and auto insurance companies to sell policies for a pre-existing fire or auto accident is bizarre and stupid, but it's different with health insurance."

Yes, health insurance is different from fire and auto insurance, but the insurance principle remains the same.

If Congress and the president are successful in making the Pre-existing Condition Patient Protection Act the law of the land, their treachery won't stop there. Insurance companies will try to charge people with pre-existing health conditions a higher price to compensate for their higher expected cost.

Those people will complain to Congress. Then Congress will enact insurance premium price controls. Insurance companies might try to restrict just what treatments they will cover under such restrictions. That means Congress will play a greater role in managing what insurance companies can do.

The dilemma Congress always faces, when it messes with the economy, was aptly described in a Negro spiritual play by Marcus Cook Connelly titled "Green Pastures." In it, God laments to the angel Gabriel, "Every time Ah passes a miracle, Ah has to pass fo' or five mo' to ketch up wid it," adding, "Even bein God ain't no bed of roses."

Leave Miracles To God

When Congress creates a miracle for one American, it creates a nonmiracle for another. After that, Congress has to create a compensatory miracle.

Many years ago, I used to testify before Congress, something I refuse to do now. At several of the hearings, I urged Congress to get out of the miracle business and leave miracle making up to God.

For a president and congressman to shamelessly propose something like the Pre-existing Condition Patient Protection Act demonstrates just how far we've gone down the road to perdition.

The most tragic thing is that most Americans have no idea that such an act violates every principle of insurance and it's something that not even yesteryear's lunatics would have thought up.