"Top Kill" fails

Frisco_Slug_Esq said:

Well, I would think that waiting until the end of this one and finding out what actually happened would be what a prudent man does rather than condemning and hanging after only hearing from the prosecution witnesses...

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kbate said:

Ah, so your solution is to turn a blind eye and let it go - hoping nature will just wash it away and in the meantime thank the good lord for $2.85 a gallon gas.

When the outrage is of regional nature - That is time for government intervention. A leaking tanker truck - meh. A flawed drilling system - in use in multiple places which can pollute entire oceans and destroy the lives of millions - is perhaps important enough to get our Elected politicians action?

No?

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Byron In Exile said:

Oh, personally, I'm happy to wait and see what happens.

I live in California.

But Ayn Rand's idea of selfishness as a virtue doesn't really make for a strong nation.

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Byron In Exile said:

Oh, personally, I'm happy to wait and see what happens.

I live in California.

But Ayn Rand's idea of selfishness as a virtue doesn't really make for a strong nation.

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Frisco_Slug_Esq said:

You sound like a whiney Liberal now...

"Blind eye?" really kbate, going for the emotional jugular?

This is nothing more than the Global Warming Alarmist cry" YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN SCIENCE! You think the earth is flat and 7,000 years OLD!

Before the advent of drilling, oil was to be found all over the surface of this planet and tarballs abounded on the beaches. It might be argued that driving on past every accident we've ever had not only taught the oil companies what to do better, but actually, in the long run made our environment cleaner (unless like our engines, it had gotten used to running on a little lubricant).

What we do know is that with every accident, the proponents of state control and serfdom took the opportunity to press their claims home.

This is where you and Perg leave me, you say you are Libertarian, but when it comes to Gaia, you both believe in Big Government not seeing that by taking the middle way, you lose any and all standing to anyone else's claim to big government.

The government should have simple clear laws about harming others and collecting damages, and it should be the fear of collecting those damages and the bad PR of a public market keeping those companies in compliance with being good shepherds of all our resources.

I do know that our press is providing one side, and ONLY one side of the story; it's one they've had written in their heads for YEARS!

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Frisco_Slug_Esq said:

The government is simply powerless to do anything which is why BP is still in charge.

THAT's reality, not emotion...

You are asking the Government to round up twice the usual number of suspects and yet even after they do that Ilse and Victor are still going to get on that plane with the letters of transit...

You're just setting them up for their next big failure (and in doing so, allowing them to absolve themselves of any blame in this passion-play, like the 9-11 commission and the Fannie Mae fiasco, they'll pin the blame on middle-management when it was actually their mismanagement most likely to blame by giving us false security which caused us not to examine them too closely on election day), their next round of studies, finger-pointing and regulations and which point they are going to hire either the Fox or the Hound.

Again, I ask you which one should we hire this time?



Fox or Hound - who gets the blame when the next round of regulations fail?

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miles said:

All this begs the question:

Why in the hell are they drilling for oil in mile deep water?

There is any easy answer.

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Byron In Exile said:

Let's have Congress pass a law that says that when any company releases more than 250,000 barrels of oil into the ocean, its President, Chairman of the Board, and the entire board of directors shall be beheaded, and the company liquidated, the proceeds to go toward the US National Debt.

A law like that would cost the taxpayer nothing.

But if it had been in effect before this fiasco, I'd bet dollars to donuts the disaster wouldn't have happened.

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Frisco_Slug_Esq said:

The government is simply powerless to do anything which is why BP is still in charge.




THAT's reality, not emotion...

You are asking the Government to round up twice the usual number of suspects and yet even after they do that Ilse and Victor are still going to get on that plane with the letters of transit...

You're just setting them up for their next big failure (and in doing so, allowing them to absolve themselves of any blame in this passion-play, like the 9-11 commission and the Fannie Mae fiasco, they'll pin the blame on middle-management when it was actually their mismanagement most likely to blame by giving us false security which caused us not to examine them too closely on election day), their next round of studies, finger-pointing and regulations and which point they are going to hire either the Fox or the Hound.

Again, I ask you which one should we hire this time?



Fox or Hound - who gets the blame when the next round of regulations fail?

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Ishmael said:

Government is anti-progress because progess is risk and bureaucrats are risk adverse.

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rosco rathbone said:

i can think of plenty of counterexamples to this.

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ksmybuttons said:

I'd love to see the president have fireside chats like Roosevelt. Report off to use. We get snippets that are addressed to others, we have rare press conferences.

I'd like to see him talk about what he is doing with each of the cabinet members to change how we do government. I'd like a little transparency.

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Would someone remind us again why the nation elected this man to be president? A man with no resume, a man with no experience in running anything other than a political campaign, a man who is ignorant of history, economics, and technology? A man who is shallow and lazy? A man who shares neither character nor temperament with the American people in this vast republic? How did this happen?

Voters were smitten by the ideological handmaidens of identity politics and the promise of big government. The identity politics substituted a cosmetic profile for character and experience. The promise was that big government has the benevolent power and enlightened expertise to remake America from the top down into a more capable, more caring, kinder, gentler, and more respected place.

What we've received instead was on display at the president's long-awaited press conference in the last week of May. Only a partisan or a fool could deny the irredeemable failure of these ideological handmaidens, the genius of Obama's shrinking presidency. No amount of posturing, buffing up, or Q&A briefing book drills could hide the reality that this man is on a raft at sea accompanied by an equally bewildered boatload of companions who have no idea how they arrived in such deep water, hundreds of miles from land, and with no clue that they are in trouble, let alone what to do about it.

What we've received instead from the ideology of identity politics and big government has been the spread of competency and accountability so thin that the federal government is utterly incapable of defending our shores and borders from invasion -- one by sea in the form of a massive crude oil slick, the other by land in the waves of illegal immigrants flooding Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California. In utter exasperation, the citizens of Arizona finally took matters into their own hands, only to be vilified by Obama and his cohorts, who have neither the will nor the capacity to do anything about it.

Identity politics is where grievance-mongering and class resentment intersect with entitlement agitation and representational profiling. Those who use the currency of identity politics appeal to the ideals of justice and fair distribution of resources and outcomes. But in reality they prey on those who are underprivileged and dependent, making claims of dispossession against those who have enjoyed success and independence derived from their own sweat, equity, and competence.

Leaders who devote all of their energy and emotional capital to identity politics instead of creating a competent, skills-based organization soon discover that when critical decisions need to be made and highly skilled resources need to be mobilized, nobody is around who knows how to do it. Such leaders, eventually tuned out and abandoned by even their former acolytes, become irrelevant, easily overwhelmed by events and rivals, taking their organizations -- even a nation -- down with them.

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Virginia Postrel has a knack for changing the way people think about everyday phenomena. As editor of reason during the 1990s, Postrel predicted how Western enthusiasm for Marxism would, in the wake of communism’s collapse, transfer seamlessly to a top-down, regulatory brand of environmentalism. When the World Wide Web triggered the excitable imaginations of censorious legislators, she calmly explained that thick strains in both major political tendencies cling to the precautionary principle at the expense of liberating progress.

In The Future and its Enemies (1998), Postrel tossed aside the traditional left-right paradigm and posited a new post–Cold War divide between “dynamists” and “stasists,” in which the former championed choice and creativity and the latter clung to fear and control. In The Substance of Style (2003), she unpacked the economics of design and offered an appreciation of the Age of Aesthetics. And when she donated her own kidney to a woman on the organ waiting list in 2006, Postrel introduced tens of thousands of people to the once radical idea of organ markets in a way no academic treatise ever could. In each of these cases, those who encounter Postrel’s work will never look at the subject the same way again.

...

reason: You’ve called glamour a beautiful illusion. A lot of people would say that describes President Obama.

Postrel: Yes, President Obama is a very glamorous figure. Glamour is a particular form of illusion. It’s an illusion that tells a truth about the audience’s desires, and it requires mystery and distance. During the campaign people projected onto Barack Obama whatever they wanted in a president or even in a country. Lying is usually a bad thing, but they would project onto him that he was lying about his positions because he secretly agreed with them: “Anyone that smart has got to be a free trader at heart. He’s just saying this to pander to those idiots. He can’t really mean it.”

You’ve seen, as he’s taken office and tried to govern, this back and forth where he is consciously or unconsciously trying to maintain his glamour—which requires a kind of distance from the political process so that people can continue to see him as representing them, regardless of their contradictory views—while actually trying to be president, which means you have to decide what to do about Guantanamo. You have to decide what health care bill you’re going to back. You have to decide all these things, and you’re going to make somebody disillusioned. This morning I saw that the former editor of Harper’s is about to write a book, The Mendacity of Hope, attacking Obama from the left. That’s the power and the downside of glamour.

reason: I’m going to read you something you wrote in an April 2008 column: “Obama’s glamour gives him a powerful political advantage, but it also poses special problems for the candidate and, if he succeeds, for the country.” Can you explain what you meant and how it has played out?

Postrel: The flip side of glamour is horror. People say, “Oh, there’s something he’s hiding. It must be something terrible.” They say “he’s secretly a radical Muslim” or “he’s secretly really born in Kenya.” As opposed to saying he has policies that are bad for the country. So that is one type of disadvantage.

The other is the one that I just talked about, which is that there is always this capacity for disillusionment. People have projected so much of what they think, including things that are sort of impossible, onto a glamorous figure, that when any flaw shows up the glamour is dispelled and suddenly he becomes terrible.

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Frisco_Slug_Esq said:

You sound like a whiney Liberal now...

"Blind eye?" really kbate, going for the emotional jugular?

This is nothing more than the Global Warming Alarmist cry" YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN SCIENCE! You think the earth is flat and 7,000 years OLD!

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kbate said:

This wouldn't be one of your non-ad-hom attacks would it? Managed to get you to drop the L bomb after only one day of posting. I'd say I've still got it.

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kbate said:

This wouldn't be one of your non-ad-hom attacks would it? Managed to get you to drop the L bomb after only one day of posting. I'd say I've still got it.

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Frisco_Slug_Esq said:

Hey, you're usually the thoughtful, albeit cynical, Libertarian thinker of the group and I felt perfectly comfortable in pointing out a strange deviation in your persona and style.

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Byron In Exile said:

I... don't see any deviation.

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