U.S. Mulls Arming Pakistani Militias

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Should the new and classified plan go forward, it would likely expand the American military's presence in Pakistan and funnel more American tax dollars directly towards a "separate tribal paramilitary force that until now has proved largely ineffective," according to the Times. It would also involve paying militias that agreed to fight al Qaeda and foreign extremists.

If this all sounds a bit familiar, that's because it is. The proposal is modeled on a similar effort by American forces in Anbar Province in Iraq that was hailed as a great success in fighting insurgents there.

The shift in strategy reflects the U.S. military's sneaking suspicion that it put its money on the wrong horse. Ever since Sept. 11, the Bush administration has used billions of dollars of aid and heavy political pressure to encourage Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, to carry out more aggressive military operations against militants in the tribal areas. But the sporadic military campaigns were ineffective at best and often so badly botched they ticked off local residents who were used to Islamabad leaving them alone.

In other circumstances, the U.S. may have endured this bungling for a bit longer, but the last few weeks of upheaval in Pakistan has freaked out U.S. officials so much that they're apparently ready to start micromanaging.

This Is Not Your Paranoid Uncle's Peak Oil Theory

For the last couple decades, evangelists of the peak oil theory were often greeted at cocktail parties with the same patient smiles and barely suppressed eye rolls that confront the 9/11-was-an-inside-jobbers today.

But the Wall Street Journal reports that perhaps those skeptical of the idea that the world will soon (if it hasn't already) use up more than half of its oil ought to wipe those smirks off their faces. Yes, it's true, the peak oil folks have been proven wrong again and again - every time the world sails past another date they've identified for petroleum production Armageddon. But these days, oil executives are embracing a view of the world's oil future that sounds awfully similar to the peak oil theory.

A growing number of oil-industry chieftains are endorsing the idea that the world is approaching a practical limit to the number of barrels of crude oil that can be pumped every day, the paper reports.

Some predict that, despite the world's fast-growing thirst for oil, producers could hit that ceiling as soon as 2012. This rough limit - which senior industry officials have recently pegged at about 100 million barrels a day - is well short of the global demand projections over the next few decades. Current production is about 85 million barrels a day.

The new adherents don't believe that the global oil tank is at the half-empty point. But they do think that a global production ceiling is looming for other reasons: restricted access to oil fields, spiraling costs and increasingly complex oil field geology. This will create a global production plateau, not a peak, they contend, with oil output remaining relatively constant rather than rising or falling.

But that would feel a lot like a shortage to us, who are used to oil production's average of 2.3 percent annual growth rate since 1965. This expanding pool of cheap oil fued the post World War-II global economic expansion.

"Everyone thinks that Saudi Arabia will pull us out of this mess," said Sadad Ibrahim Al Husseini, a former head of exploration and production at Saudi Arabia's national oil company. "Saudi Arabia is doing all it can. But what it is doing, in the long run, won't be enough."

Wild Pigs Have Taken Over Texas

If you haven't bought your Thanksgiving turkey yet, why not consider a pig instead? The Los Angeles Times reports that several states have been so overrun with the feral versions of the creatures lately that bagging one of your own for the holiday might ultimately save a few tax dollars. But nowhere is the problem so bad as in Texas.

In some ways, it seems like the Times did the story just for the fun of checking in with Joe Paddock, a long-haired Ted Nugent look-alike who bills himself as The Dehoginator. If a band of feral swine is laying waste to someone's land - as more and more of them have been doing in the Lone Star State - he'll gladly don his night vision goggles and go swine-stalking with his AR-10 assault rifle. All he asks is they pay for the bullets.

But the problem is no laughing matter in the Lone Star State. While California and other states struggle to rein in feral swine, nowhere are the pigs more populous than in Texas, home to about 2 million wild hogs. And they're multiplying.

While surly pigs have startled joggers in Dallas, mobs of ravenous porkers are munching crops and tearing up hayfield in the countryside. One state estimate puts the damage at $52 million a year.

And despite the efforts of hog hunters like Paddock, officials seem to agree that the pigs are winning. Federal agriculture officials have resorted to gunning down the pigs from helicopters. State officials have declared open season on them: Hunters can shoots as many as they want, any time.

Why the explosion? Because pigs aren't as dumb as people think, experts say, making them rather tricky to catch. That, and they seem to have very healthy, nearly rabbit-like libidos.

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