Last weekend was the annual Bethany Presbyterian Church Men’s Retreat at Camp Casey on Whidbey Island. It was wonderful. The chance to just sit back read the bible and discuss the theme “Transformation” with Chi-Dooh “Skip” Li hit the spot. He really challenged the folks to consider their success and how modern society really shuns the poor and disadvantaged.
One of the members of the retreat, Dave Babb really experienced “Transformation” first hand as he tried to launch a sea kayak in some moderately strong surf. The result of this transformation are depicted below.
Another perk of the retreat was that it coincided with the annual Kite Festival on Whidbey Island. I was able to try out a $300 kite (very responsive and nice) and put in $10 for a raffle, but they never called so I guess I did not win. A flight lesson also taught me the value of “push” turns over “pull” turns.
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A friend of ours, Sarah Brosnan, was interviewed on NPR today. She has been doing this interesting research with brown capuchin monkeys. The NPR interview tells the story much better than I. (It is linked below as an .mp3 file.) And for those who want real meat, check out her “Nature” publication.
NPR- All Things Considered – Sep 17, 2003
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Karen had this crazy idea the other day that she wanted to go to the Puyallup fair. I had never been before so I thought it would be fun. Except for the fact that it was raining. But that didn’t seem to affect Karen’s need to go to the fair. After all she has lived in Seattle long enough not to be put off by some drizzle.
So we got there after I got off work and amazingly enough it wasn’t that crowded. We were planning to see the free Jars of Clay concert, but we had some time to kill before the show. So we decided to go on a flying swing ride.
I took the picture above just before we got on. As we were getting on, I realized we had to put away the umbrellas. Knowing that I am strongly affected by Murphy’s Law, I forsaw the whole event before it even happened. Just as the swing was about to start (we were already strapped in) it started POURING. And sure enough they started the ride and we got slung around in a blinding, cold rain. Now I know what it feels like to be inside a washing machine on the spin cycle.
Fortunately we laughed it off, went and got a cheeseburger and some scones and then enjoyed the concert. Overall it was quite an adventurous evening.
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Today Bush asked for another $87 billion dollars to fund the “fight terrorists for oil” campaign for another year. That seemed like a HUGE amount of money to me. So I started trying to guess how much more expensive a gallon of gas per day would cost when factoring that amount into the cost.
Looking at the Office of Transportation figures for the year 2000 I found that we used roughly 2.5 million barrels of oil per day in the U.S from the Persian Gulf region. I also found via google that a barrel of oil produces roughly 20 gallons of gasoline.
So lets just assume all the barrels of oil from the Persian Gulf are used to produce gasoline (maybe not a bad guess given that the oil from the Persian Gulf accounts for roughtly 12% of the daily consumption). Other uses of course might be aviation fuel, diesel fuel, fuel for power plants, etc, etc. That comes to about 50 million gallons a day of gasoline from the Persian Gulf.
So this war on terrorism is costing over 238 million dollars a day (or nearly 10 million dollars an hour). That still seems like a mind boggling amount. How would you like to earn 10 million an hour at your job?
But now let us say each person uses roughtly 1 gallon of gas a day, probably a stretch, but given the horrible gas mileage of cars in the US these days, it might not be too far off the mark. So 238 million dollars a day over 50 million gallons a day means that each person in the US would only have to pay about $4.75 more per gallon of gas to make up for the large expense that the war on terror is going to cost.
But some good is coming out of this war (and I in no way want to seem like I am diminishing the role of the military that is getting shot at everyday for us folks over here who drive around SUVs). For example, the folks in Iraq are rid of a maniac dictator and will hopefully have their country populated with Wal-Marts and McDonalds in the next few years. So let’s just say that we’ll take a $1 off each gallon for the good of the folks in the countries affected and to pay those folks working hard to rebuild the country.
So next time you go to the gas pump and put 20 gallons in that SUV, make sure you set aside $75 because that is the money that is currently being mortgaged against the future of this country and you might find in the near future that you could really use that money. (Or even better you could give the money away to someone who might need it more than you).
DISCLAIMER: It would actually be fun to take more than 5 minutes to come up with much more accurate figures for the cost of how much more a gallon of gas would actually cost here in the US. My figure is most likely horribly wrong and could be off by as much as +/- $5 per gallon. But that doesn’t change my opinion that the war is costing what I consider an unjustifiable amount of money. (And who ends up with all that money in the end anyway? For every dollar spent there hopefully has to be a dollar made, unless it’s being burned in a barrel somewhere to keep someone warm in the mountains of Afghanistan)
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