Happy Hump Day!

There’s a reason Wednesday is called Hump Day.  The photo to the left is not the primary reason for that name, nor is the young woman pictured therein associated in any particular way with the middle of the workweek.  Her appearance here is purely gratuitous.

Fellow business travelers, beware:  Here are the top airports for spreading disease.

The New York Times finally twigged to something I’ve been saying for several years, although for different reasons:  Corn For Food, Not Fuel.  Excerpt:

It is not often that a stroke of a pen can quickly undo the ravages of nature, but federal regulators now have an opportunity to do just that. Americans’ food budgets will be hit hard by the ongoing Midwestern drought, the worst since 1956. Food bills will rise and many farmers will go bust.

An act of God, right? Well, the drought itself may be, but a human remedy for some of the fallout is at hand — if only the federal authorities would act. By suspending renewable-fuel standards that were unwise from the start, the Environmental Protection Agency could divert vast amounts of corn from inefficient ethanol production back into the food chain, where market forces and common sense dictate it should go.

The whole ethanol fiasco was bad policy from the very beginning. The E85 plan was even worse; it frequently costs more to run a ‘flex-fuel’ vehicle on E85 than on regular gasoline, even when the E85 blend is as much as a dollar a gallon cheaper; the low energy content of ethanol makes it an inefficient motor fuel.  Add to that the fact that it requires more energy input (typically from coal-fired power plants) to produce the ethanol than it the product contains, and you get an item of public policy of staggering stupidity.  It’s past time this ended.