RealityBucket

You wouldn’t have to worry so much about how much of your money they’re taking and who they might be giving it to if you could see that they have no true right to do so.

You vote, you “legitimize” their theft, and then you complain that they don’t conduct the raids to your specifications.

You sound like children, and not particularly bright ones.

It seems the issue of the day is drilling for oil. Well, yeah. If you don’t pay, you can’t play. It’s absurd to have resources in the United States locked up so extensively, and I can’t imagine so much of a conspiracy extant that we’re intentionally sucking the rest of the world dry to have the last laugh with domestic sources.

I believe that, yes, costly gas will trump the ban. No matter how much drilling we do and refinery capacity we finally build, nuclear plants are also imperative. He could have done better about espousing a rational drilling policy, but at least McCain has sense about nukes. They are not your father’s one of a kind, many billions each plants, or at least they needn’t be. Of course, major equipment and infrastructure can take time. There may be elasticity associated with the entire energy market, but it’s of the discountinuous, somewhat brittle kind.

So yeah, about time the idea of heretofore off-limits drilling spread. I was pleased Bush was making sense on that topic, but some say he’s held back too much. If he could have undid executive orders and didn’t, then absolutely, but at least the noises he emits are soothingly correct.

Oil has been cheap for a long time. There are ways in which it being higher will be good, even if you’re not an eco-freak or anti-human prevert. People, meaning companies too, since just like Soylent Green, companies are people, if not always in recognizable form, respond to economic incentives, positive or negative. We’re at a point where the incentives are unambiguous, intense, and unlikely to recede to prior levels for years, if ever. Most of what government policy should be is to get out of the way. In fact, oil is arguably in this mess because of government policy. Heck, not arguably, really.

Drill. Drill soon. Drill widely. Build some freaking refineries so we can use the stuff. Use less of the stuff as gas. Cut it out with the absurd ethanol thing already! Stop starving people in the name of fell good economic inefficiency and pocket lining for limited special interests. Build nuclear plants. Get some efficient, small scale, mass production designs going so it’s even more economical. Put some windmills in Nantucket Sound already, don’t wait until Teddy is dead. And let’s get cracking on those wonderful microbes that excrete crude and make the deep hot biosphere concept sound all the more intriguing.

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Obama’s apparently talking about kicking the credit card folks where it hurts.

Good. A pox on all those usurious motherfuckers.

And before you make some sort of protest that cites the free market, what we’ve got now? Not one. Not even close. For crissake, if you’re going to be a socialist, be an honest one. And then take the entire industry out and shoot it.

I can talk all day about the abstract issues behind all of this, but try just looking at my life:

We’ve fallen a bit down the economic ladder. Extended unemployment, yadda, yadda, yadda. In an effort to keep a roof over our heads, I’ve taken a job at the Mega Lo Mart, stocking stuff and stuff accessories. My choices this November will be between Fellow A and Fellow B.

Fellow A is the representative of Party R, which has a reputation for celebrating the awesome force that is the American worker while showering hate on the same. Last time I checked, Party R was thoroughly convinced that people in my situation don’t exist, and that if we do then those are the just wages of our own irresponsibility. The party-line talking-point blah blah blah says that nobody even attempts to support a family on minimum or near-minimum wage jobs, and that the other party is misguided in its attempts to meddle with the minimum wage because it only affects a few teenagers with their first jobs anyway (when really, of course, that’s not the problem with it at all, but bear with me, here). Also? I was supposed to know that I’d someday suffer misfortune *before* I had sex with my husband, because I clearly didn’t have the resources to support those kids if I’m having trouble supporting those kids. There’s no such thing as bad luck in Party R.

How am I supposed to vote for that?

Now Fellow B, he’s from Party D and he talks a real slick line. But Party D? *They’ve* got a reputation for looking at folks like me and deciding that we need to be helped. And how do they help us? By taking money away from *other* hardworking folks and giving it to us, of course. After we grovel appropriately and prove our worthiness by completing mysterious rituals designed to humiliate. When they’re done taking the hope out of you, those same folk then get to point to you as an example of just how damned hard it is to lift oneself out of poverty and they justify their jobs thereby. Few note the irony. Actually managing a climb out of this pit of despond results in that money that you worked for being taken to give to someone who hasn’t escaped. Now that’s an incentive program!

How am I supposed to vote for that?

Seriously. Does a body even *need* a philosophical basis to avoid the whole mess? A choice between two brands of authoritarianism, both of which wish to use my life and my hard work as political chess pieces…what the hell kind of choice is that? And why am *I* the one being reviled for saying, neither, please?

The world truly has gone mad.

CEH Wiedel discusses this Arnold Kling article as it applie to her own family and concerns about education and IQ.

I have long and increasingly been of the opinion that things have to change. There are multiple problems or angles.

First, not everything suits the “box” of a traditional college education, and worse, a bachelors degree has become the new high school diploma. Which is a whole other issue - the need to, you know, teach things (and reasoning, though I think in many if not all people the ability exists and it’s the job of the education establishment to break it) in the earlier years of education. Nor does everyone fit the mold of the more purely academic.

Second, government encouragement of higher education has led to a runup in prices beyond all reason, at least as much as government encouragement of home ownership and free lending for same, and at other levels, things like zoning regulations, pushed along the housing market bubble. Something has to give.

Third, and related to the first, some things move too fast, are too specialized, are too modest in scope, or would be better of freed from keeping the educational establishment in power, and increasingly lend themselves to new methods of delivery. The trick will be in the marketing and wide recognition of the worth of alternatives, from remote learning with internet college course delivery on down to whatever else arises.

Fourth, was there a fourth? I forget. This was supposed to be a quick link without a lot of comment, as part of my cathing up project.

Cutting Through the Katrina Krapola. For all I loved New Orleans when I visited there, for a whole day in 1988, I just love “pulsating pustule on the bayou.”

Chertoff on final Real ID rules: “Reconfiguring our society.”

You mean like they reconfigured society in Ukraine during the first half of last century? Or more like reconfiguring society during the New Deal Great Society Cultural Revolution? Just wondering.

Mayor Mumbles Menino decries clinics in retailers.

I’m going through accumulated links I never turned into posts, or don’t remember turning into posts and didn’t removed from the stash, so some short takes, down to links presented with anchor text and no comment, will be appearing here and at other blogs as I go through them. Where will depend on the topic and whether I feel like switching accounts if it could go more than one way.

Here’s a now aged but fascinating article: Magma may be melting Greenland ice. Imagine that! It might explain why the Antarctic is gaining ice while Greenland is not.