Having The Same Argument, Again.

[Sidd Finch]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

in Babies the San Francisco mommy vacuumed her child's toys. The Mongolian and African babies played in the dirt.

think about it.

The ocelot must kill every day - to survive.

[PresentTense Pirate Penske]

Originally Posted by Sidd Finch

The ocelot must kill every day - to survive.

Sharks don't sleep.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

If you're going to invent your own political language, it would avoid confusion if you were to use new words instead of words that people are already using in a different way.

I'm not inventing shit. I'm using the base definition on which you don't like to focus.

Dictionary.com:

con·serv·a·tive /kənˈsɜrvətɪv/[kuhn-sur-vuh-tiv] – adjective
1. disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.
2. cautiously moderate or purposefully low: a conservative estimate.
3. traditional in style or manner; avoiding novelty or showiness: conservative suit.
4. (often initial capital letter) of or pertaining to the Conservative party.
5. (initial capital letter) of, pertaining to, or characteristic of Conservative Jews or Conservative Judaism.
6. having the power or tendency to conserve; preservative.
7. Mathematics. (of a vector or vector function) having curl equal to zero; irrotational; lamellar.

lib·er·al /ˈlɪbərəl, ˈlɪbrəl/[lib-er-uhl, lib-ruhl] – adjective
1. favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs.
2. (often initial capital letter) noting or pertaining to a political party advocating measures of progressive political reform.
3. of, pertaining to, based on, or advocating liberalism.
4. favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, esp. as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties.
5. favoring or permitting freedom of action, esp. with respect to matters of personal belief or expression: a liberal policy toward dissident artists and writers.
6. of or pertaining to representational forms of government rather than aristocracies and monarchies.
7. free from prejudice or bigotry; tolerant: a liberal attitude toward foreigners.
8. open-minded or tolerant, esp. free of or not bound by traditional or conventional ideas, values, etc.
9. characterized by generosity and willingness to give in large amounts: a liberal donor.
10. given freely or abundantly; generous: a liberal donation.
11. not strict or rigorous; free; not literal: a liberal interpretation of a rule.
12. of, pertaining to, or based on the liberal arts.
13. of, pertaining to, or befitting a freeman.

[Fugee]

Originally Posted by PresentTense Pirate Penske

Sharks don't sleep.

"I'm a sex shark. If I stop moving, I die!" (Puck from Glee)

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I'm not inventing shit. I'm using the base definition on which you don't like to focus.

Dictionary.com:

con·serv·a·tive /kənˈsɜrvətɪv/[kuhn-sur-vuh-tiv] – adjective
1. disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.
2. cautiously moderate or purposefully low: a conservative estimate.
3. traditional in style or manner; avoiding novelty or showiness: conservative suit.
4. (often initial capital letter) of or pertaining to the Conservative party.
5. (initial capital letter) of, pertaining to, or characteristic of Conservative Jews or Conservative Judaism.
6. having the power or tendency to conserve; preservative.
7. Mathematics. (of a vector or vector function) having curl equal to zero; irrotational; lamellar.

lib·er·al /ˈlɪbərəl, ˈlɪbrəl/[lib-er-uhl, lib-ruhl] – adjective
1. favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs.
2. (often initial capital letter) noting or pertaining to a political party advocating measures of progressive political reform.
3. of, pertaining to, based on, or advocating liberalism.
4. favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, esp. as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties.
5. favoring or permitting freedom of action, esp. with respect to matters of personal belief or expression: a liberal policy toward dissident artists and writers.
6. of or pertaining to representational forms of government rather than aristocracies and monarchies.
7. free from prejudice or bigotry; tolerant: a liberal attitude toward foreigners.
8. open-minded or tolerant, esp. free of or not bound by traditional or conventional ideas, values, etc.
9. characterized by generosity and willingness to give in large amounts: a liberal donor.
10. given freely or abundantly; generous: a liberal donation.
11. not strict or rigorous; free; not literal: a liberal interpretation of a rule.
12. of, pertaining to, or based on the liberal arts.
13. of, pertaining to, or befitting a freeman.

You might think that defining your terms would make more sense of your prior posts, but no.

Or maybe I just drank too much this weekend.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Or maybe I just drank too much this weekend.

That's unpossible. The more people drink, the more I make sense.

[Cletus Miller]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

You realize no reputable estimate places exhaustion of even Saudis' Gwahar field until 2020-2030.

So ... what? We don't need to worry about it until 10-15 years from now? VERY comforting.

[Cletus Miller]

Originally Posted by Adder

Because people in the future will want it to be more difficult thanks to careless in the recent past.

Also I do t see how anyone could think off shore reserves won't be critical as we run out of oil.

Yes, I noticed how the use of supertankers has ended in the years since Exxon Valdez. And those that are still running have breathalyzer interlocks on the nav system.

The people who care enough to make it "more difficult" have zero political power compared to those who want cheap gasoline.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Cletus Miller

Yes, I noticed how the use of supertankers has ended in the years since Exxon Valdez. And those that are still running have breathalyzer interlocks on the nav system.

The people who care enough to make it "more difficult" have zero political power compared to those who want cheap gasoline.

The problem is not the people who want cheap gasoline, IMHO. It's regulatory capture by oil companies that generate a lot of $$$ and jobs. And legislators want to make those companies happy.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

This is a great column by Ross Douthat:

The Great Consolidation
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: May 16, 2010

This feels like a populist moment. Americans are Tea Partying. Greeks are rioting. Incumbents are being thrown out; the Federal Reserve is facing an audit; Goldman Sachs is facing prosecution. In Kentucky, Ron Paul’s son might be about to win a Republican Senate primary.

But look through these anti-establishment theatrics to the deep structures of political and economic power, and suddenly the surge of populism feels like so much sound and fury, obscuring the real story of our time. From Washington to Athens, the economic crisis is producing consolidation rather than revolution, the entrenchment of authority rather than its diffusion, and the concentration of power in the hands of the same elite that presided over the disasters in the first place.

Consider the European situation. For a week after Greece’s fiscal meltdown began, all the talk was about the weakness of the European Union, the folly of its too-rapid expansion, and the failure of the Continent’s governing class to anticipate the crisis.

But then the E.U. acted, bailing out Greece to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars, and dictating economic terms to Athens that resemble “the kind of thing a surrendering field marshal signs in a railway car in the forest at the end of a bloody war,” in the words of the Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum. If the bailout succeeds, the E.U.’s authority over its member states will be dramatically enhanced — and a crisis created by hasty, elite-driven integration will have led, inexorably, to further integration and a more powerful elite.

This trajectory should be familiar to Americans. The panic of 2008 happened, in part, because the public interest had become too intertwined with private interests for the latter to be allowed to fail. But everything we did to halt the panic, and all the legislation we’ve passed, has only strengthened the symbiosis.

From the Troubled Asset Relief Program to the stimulus bill, from the auto bailout to health care reform, we’ve created a vast new array of public-private partnerships — empowering insiders at the expense of outsiders, large institutions at the expense of small ones, and Washington at the expense of state and local governments. Eighteen months after the financial crisis, the interests of our financiers, C.E.O.’s, bureaucrats and politicians are yoked together as never before.

A similar, quieter consolidation has taken place in the realm of national security. After campaigning against the Bush administration’s foreign-policy overreach, President Obama has retained nearly all of the war powers that George Bush took up in the wake of 9/11.

Yes, some of the previous administration’s more sweeping claims have been repudiated. But the basic post-9/11 architecture of executive power — expansive powers to detain, interrogate and assassinate, claimed for the duration of an open-ended war — looks destined to endure for presidencies to come.

Taken case by case, many of these policy choices are perfectly defensible. Taken as a whole, they suggest a system that only knows how to move in one direction. If consolidation creates a crisis, the answer is further consolidation. If economic centralization has unintended consequences, then you need political centralization to clean up the mess. If a government conspicuously fails to prevent a terrorist attack or a real estate bubble, then obviously it needs to be given more powers to prevent the next one, or the one after that.

The C.I.A. and F.B.I. didn’t stop 9/11, so now we have the Department of Homeland Security. Decades of government subsidies for homebuyers helped create the housing crash, so now the government is subsidizing the auto industry, the green-energy industry, the health care sector ...

The pattern applies to personnel as well as policy. If Robert Rubin’s mistakes helped create an out-of-control financial sector, then naturally you need Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers — Rubin’s protégés — to set things right. After all, who else are you going to trust with all that consolidated power? Ron Paul? Dennis Kucinich? Sarah Palin?

This is the perverse logic of meritocracy. Once a system grows sufficiently complex, it doesn’t matter how badly our best and brightest foul things up. Every crisis increases their authority, because they seem to be the only ones who understand the system well enough to fix it.

But their fixes tend to make the system even more complex and centralized, and more vulnerable to the next national-security surprise, the next natural disaster, the next economic crisis. Which is why, despite all the populist backlash and all the promises from Washington, this isn’t the end of the “too big to fail” era. It’s the beginning.

[Cletus Miller]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

The problem is not the people who want cheap gasoline, IMHO. It's regulatory capture by oil companies that generate a lot of $$$ and jobs. And legislators want to make those companies happy.

well, I'd go with "both", because no matter how many $$ the oil companies throw at the politicians, they do still need a few people to vote for them.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Cletus Miller

well, I'd go with "both", because no matter how many $$ the oil companies throw at the politicians, they do still need a few people to vote for them.

It's both. Those companies are important local employers and they and their employees have money to give. When Sen. Landrieu supports BP, when Sen. Lincoln supports Wal-Mart, and when Sen. Nelson supports Berkshire Hathaway, you see the influence of these companies.

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally Posted by Cletus Miller

well, I'd go with "both", because no matter how many $$ the oil companies throw at the politicians, they do still need a few people to vote for them.

Well, since a good hunk of the local economy around here is directly or indirectly beholden to the energy industry, it's not too hard to get pro-oil-company votes from the local populace in this part of the world. Hell, even that gay mayor that every liberal loves got her start in the oil business.

[Atticus Grinch]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

This is a great column by Ross Douthat:

The last truly populist movement ended like this:

"I'm Spartacus."

[Tap, tap, tap.]

"I'm Spartacus."

[Tap, tap, tap.]

"I'm Spartacus . . ."

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Atticus Grinch

The last truly populist movement ended like this:

"I'm Spartacus."

[Tap, tap, tap.]

"I'm Spartacus."

[Tap, tap, tap.]

"I'm Spartacus . . ."

Speaking of which, this is a tremendous photo of Bangkok from today's NYT: