Posted 4:24 PM by Floyd

I don't usually link to stories I find on Instapundit, as I figure that everyone has seen them already. But this idiocy is so jaw-dropping that I will make an exception:

THIS PIECE BY JOE CONASON may be the dumbest bit of oil-based conspiracy-theory yet. First he recycles the already-debunked Paul O'Neill Iraq oil-memo story, but then he suggests that Bush's Mars plan is all about Halliburton getting oil from Mars, an idea that could only occur to someone utterly ignorant of the laws of physics ...

Boy, I'll say. Martian oil must be extracted by human astronauts, or advanced robots, which were sent tens of millions of miles from Earth. Either alternative involves enormous expense -- either a base must be constructed to house humans, or significant advances will have to be made in artificial intelligence.

And even after all the infrastructure is built, each shipment of Martian oil must be accelerated to ten thousand miles an hour to reach interplanetary transfer orbit, decelerated when it reaches Earth, landed, and recovered. And this is supposed to be competitive with oil obtained by staying on Earth and drilling a few hundred feet?