Comments Posted By Bill Arnold
Displaying 41 To 50 Of 118 Comments
WHO'S TO BLAME FOR HIGH GAS PRICES? LOOK IN THE MIRROR, AMERICA
Two items of blame were left unsaid. (I don't disagree with the others, though please give efficiency more credit.)
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 16.06.2008 @ 16:02
(1) The weak dollar, which has to compete with strong Euros for oil, is to some degree an effect of the Republican borrow-and-spend fiscal policies of the last 7 years. We borrowed and continue to borrow to (a) pay for a war (and now occupation) of choice in Iraq and (b) to pay for tax cuts which mostly went to the very well-off (and pick your (c),(d), etc according to ideology - the deficit is however very real).
(2) There is a mostly-unstated speculation premium related to talk about war with Iran. The bet is that a war with (or large strike on) Iran will result in disrupted world oil supplies and a very large oil price spike, to $250+ per barrel. (e.g. at 25 percent odds of war-related supply disruption during the remainder of the GWBush administration.) Oil shot up $6 dollars per barrel when some Israeli official recently simply mentioned the possibility of a strike. Some of the price we see at the pump, and on fuel-oil delivery bills, is due to war talk. IMO.
NO SERIOUS BLACK GOP CANDIDATES
I haven't seen any believable data justifying it, but there is a widely-held perception that the modern (last several decades) Republican party courts the anti-black bigot vote. Certainly the Democrats have been more consistent at avoiding political advertising which could be construed as containing "dog whistle" content targeted at gaining racist votes. If Republicans vetted their advertising for such content for a few election cycles, the perception would be reduced.
The West Virginia HRClinton primary victory appears to show that the Democrats can claim some significant numbers of anti-black bigots in their ranks. Absolute not-made-up numbers for racism vs party affiliation seem to be simple ... absent. Anecdotes are plentiful.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 20.05.2008 @ 18:21
AREN'T THERE ANY GROWN UPS IN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY?
My main objection is that Bush was conflating talk and negotiation with appeasement. And doing this in front of the Knesset - Israel has often negotiated with its mortal enemies, even compromised with them to make peace (e.g. Egypt), and continues to do so. Somehow this administration has managed to convince a large number people that initiating discussion with an enemy is a significant concession that amounts to an act of appeasement. Selective shunning is a lousy tool for prevention of conflict in a small world. (Iran will not be a universal pariah until they run out of oil.)
American Heritage Dictionary
appeasement ...
2. The policy of granting concessions to potential enemies to maintain peace.I think the dictionary definition serves us well here, Bill. The question isn't that we shouldn't talk to Iran and Syria - we eventually will. The question is what "concessions" we are willing to grant in order to maintain the peace. I bring up Lebanon as a perfect example. Unless the ground work is laid extraordinarily carefully a la China in '72, we may find ourselves in a diplomatic trap - pressured by our own process to make a deal and thus giving away something vital.
Happened with Russia a couple of times - namely, when we gave up a huge MIRV advantage for, in the end, nothing.
Bargaining with enemies is not about making them like us. It's about avoiding misunderstandings that lead to war. I am not convinced entirely - although there are surely some elements in Iran who are rational - that we are dealing with a normal state when talking about Iran. The insularity of that crowd is incredible. It's why the don't believe the holocaust happened and all these cockamamie conspiracy theories.
No foe we've ever encountered has shown this level of ignorance about the outside world. That makes them incredibly dangerous as well as almost impossible to talk to.
This is not just a question of talking or not talking. It is a question of attitude - a question raised by Bush that has the Democrats screaming bloody murder because they recognize their attitude in those words. Both Obama and the Democrats overreacted to Bush's criticism. But it was a telling overreaction, don't you think?
ed.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 16.05.2008 @ 18:25
But you are very typical of the far left. Intellectual discourse is impossible, because you hear only what you want to hear.
The people posting here presumably at least occasionally read Rick's posts, and engaging in left/right argument in comment sections is hardly discussion in an echo-chamber.And "far left"?? Disregarding the fact that from the POV of most of the developed world, the American "left" is center-right, at what percentile of the American political spectrum would you place the cutoff for "far left"?
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 16.05.2008 @ 18:02
Bear in mind that many on the left would place BObama at about 60-70th percentile, with his instincts for compromise driving his actual policy even closer to the center. (The "most liberal Senator" tag is just B.S., a cunningly-designed statistical artifact that was also trotted out for John Kerry.)
Perhaps the Chinese could tell us how 8 people were killed by “warning shots?”
You're not thinking like a collectivist. The warning shots were directed at the crowd. The crowd (i.e. most members of it) still lived after the warning shots were fired.(I dearly hope that's snark, but it might not be.)
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 7.04.2008 @ 14:39
As a Democrat from NY, my immediate reaction was "he was behaving like a Republican hypocrite, he should resign". OK, it's a little partisan, but the gross-hypocrisy-in-politics stories have been dominated by Republicans the last several years.
But in NY - which is effectively a one party (D) state
No, it's not. We had Al D'Amato ("Senator Pothole") for close to 2 decades prior to Schumer. The State Senate has been Republican for a very long time. We had a Republican governor prior to Spitzer. In my county, for local elections the Republican primary is the election. New York City is mostly solidly Democratic, though it neighborhoods vary and it did spawn Giuliani. (I count Bloomberg as to the left of Rockefeller Republicans.)I do hope he's not prosecuted under the 1910 Mann Act
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 11.03.2008 @ 21:40
CLIMATE CHANGE? OR JUST A STRETCH OF BAD WEATHER?
Ross, just to continue the discussion (and writing as an amateur),
1. Not relevant. Both the scientific warming skeptics and the climate science mainstream players are doing science, not religion.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 2.03.2008 @ 20:17
2. Not relevant. And global cooling is not being predicted by the climate science mainstream.
3. Not true or barely true. China has by some counts surpassed the US including CO2 from cement production; by other counts they will surpass the US in 2008 or 2009.
4. The models and science in the 1970s were very primitive compared with current climate change science.
5. (rhetorically) Then why seasons in middle/high latitudes?
6. True, humans adapt. Air conditioning helps for those that can afford (CFC-less) AC and the power to operate it.
7. Can't argue with this - though proxies for temperature can't be ignored.
8. I don't know enough to address temperature measurements in the last 100 years. The plant hardiness zone changes suggest that for the US at least, heat islands are not a major explanation.
9. Shrinking growing season? source?
10. Concomitance is suggestive, though.
THE TERRORISM CONUNDRUM FOR DEMOCRATS
Oecolampadius:
For example, let’s do a fake calculation on a terrorist attack with a makeshift nuclear weapon. Let’s say that such an attack would kill a million people, and there’s one in a million chance of it happening per year.
I'm very sympathetic to this line of reasoning, but believe that you're seriously underestimating the threat. Even the relatively mundane threats we can expect from terrorist organizations with low-to-moderate technical skills should be taken very seriously.The issues have been
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 1.03.2008 @ 20:48
(a) whether more effective policing, including proactive policing, would be helpful in significantly reducing the odds of successful terrorist attacks, and how to align increased police powers with civil liberties. This includes a frank discussion of how much we Americans want to allow police to leverage the technology curve over the next 20 years. Do we want 1000 times as many electronic deputies of the government observing our lives, directly and indirectly?
(b) whether more should be spent on homeland infrastructure and border protection measures to minimize the chances of successful terrorist attacks, and whether we should improve our capacity to respond when an incident occurs, to hopefully minimize injury and loss of human life.
(c) whether very expensive military interventions abroad are helpful or harmful to our security, and if they are helpful, how and where they should be focused.
(d) whether more effort should be spent worldwide on reducing access to WMD raw materials and technologies. (yes!)
(e) etc
For all these, there are clear differences between the aggregate Democratic and Republican camps, and there are also significant differences within the parties. The Republicans would like all of America to think that they own the terrorism issue, but they don't. (e.g. a lot of homeland security improvements could be bought with the $1.2 billion (price estimates vary) that was previously spent on a B2 bomber that crashed last week. The B2 program continued long after the collapse of the Soviet Union.)
OBAMA AND THE RADICALS: SOULMATES?
This is the Obama that voted to make a criminal out of a homeowner who was forced to use a gun in his own defense in his own home.
What vote was this? I couldn't find it even on a fairly negative list compiled by gun control opponents. Cities and guns don't mix as well as rural areas and guns, so picking over his gun-rights/control record as a state senator is far less reasonable that it looks at first read....his being named the most liberal senator in the US Senate by National Journal
Funny that. I recall JKerry being named most liberal senator by NatJ in their 2003 rankings before the 2004 election. I'd rate BObama about 85th percentile. Many on the left (including me) have deep suspicions that BObama is a closet centrist.The tie-ins with Ayers & Dorhn, and Alinsky seem rather thin. Association does not imply agreement. I've been friends with a few left-radicals and had friendly arguments with them and thought they were profoundly confused. BObama seems plenty intellectually capable and confident enough to shape his own political philosophies, and to adapt them to carefully-observed reality.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 23.02.2008 @ 20:43
WE'RE GOING TO NEED THE PATIENCE OF JOB
Both of those countries dont want to ruin their economies on the altar of global warming any more than we do. I wish people would rethink this. The reasoning goes something like this:
Fossil-fuel energy prices, especially oil but also including coal and gas, are on the rise (good stats including history here). We (the US) are already at a competitive disadvantage because we are comparatively wasteful of energy, and this comparative disadvantage will increase as energy costs become a larger part of the economy [Note: I don't have supporting evidence for this comparative disadvantage]. Sure, China burns coal in grossly inefficient (and polluting) electric plants (also cement plants), but they have purely crass and selfishly greedy reasons to switch to higher-efficiency plants. Efficiency technology is pretty much a winner, and we (the US) could dominate in efficiency technologies, and in alternative power technologies, if we chose to do so. And a bunch of federally funded/subsidized focused research/development, or tax incentives if you prefer less intervention in the market, would be enormously cheaper than 100+ billion a year of war-fighting and country-occupation and wear-and-tear of military equipment in the Middle East.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 12.02.2008 @ 20:30
