An asylum for the preservation of illusion.

I Spy with My Little Eye

I'm afraid I've broken my personal commitment to at least one update a week. It is very easy to fall out of the habit of making them, especially after falling out of the habit of keeping up on the news and Internet things in general. I can say that there are many things in the pipeline for March, including numerous Neighborhoods updates and book reviews, so stay tuned.

A quick look at the wires shows that the buzz around town is the proposal by Mayor Daley to require businesses to install cameras. This is, of course, in addition to the public cameras operated by the CPD. This is all old news at the time of this writing, but what has the wires aflame is a Tribune poll that shows that 80% of Chicagoans support the cameras. Count me among them, tentatively. Not that I'm not entirely unconcerned about privacy issues, or that I think that they'll make a real difference in crime, but anything that reduces the perception of crime or danger is potentially a step forward in this divided city.

Provacateur-Toi!

Le Monde ran an editorial yesterday that, without surprise, demonizes the Muslim protesters against the recent European cartoon troll, while utterly refusing to examine the motives of the newspapers who published the offensive material.

That the journal de référence of France can publish an editorial with such a glaring oversight is indicative of something seriously wicked in the state of Europe. And it sheds new light on the riots into which France descended last summer.

Uses of Oil

I tried to look this up for a discussion on a mailing list, but the information was very hard to google (it ended up being buried in a government-published PDF linked from wikipedia).

Common arguments about oil include:

1. Oil is not, in fact, used primarily for transportation but for generation of energy for other purposes. Therefore, reducing automobile use will not significantly reduce oil use and,
2. A large amount of oil pumped is used for things other than creating energy, for instance, it is turned into plastic, so even if we weren't using oil for energy we'd still need to pump a great deal of it.

According to government data (page 35 of that document), number 1 was true in 1973, 42.3% of oil pumped was used in transportation, with the rest used as energy for industry, "other sectors" (agriculture, etcetera) or for oil-based products. but by 2003, fully 57.8% of oil pumped went into transportation.

The growing share of oil used in transportation came at the expense of oil used as an energy source in production sectors, and non-energy uses remained about the same. All oil products, from pesticides to plastics to bike chain oil, consume only 6.6% of all oil pumped.

Click Read More below to see a table of the data, or look at the PDF for pie charts.