Just a few days ago Barry was saying that we couldn't drill our way out of our energy problems. He said that if we'd all just inflate our tires that would save as much energy as we could gain from ANWAR and offshore drilling.
Now that he's taking a hammering in the polls, he says he might be for offshore drilling after all. Now there's a man of principal for you.
What's with Barry and offshore drilling?
Yep, Rummy went in too light, and lost his job over that decision. Don't forget however, that it was the counter insurgency strategy developed by Petreus that began to turn things around, even before the surge started. What the surge did was provide the necessary troop levels for full implementation of the Petreus strategy. Still, Barry's stuck in a rut, and won't admit that the strategy worked. He'd rather suggest that we thank Iran for our success. What a dumbfuck.
Offshore drilling is not anwar drilling, don't confuse the two. One pipeline pumping oil long past it's intended stable infrastructure date never has been a workable plan, especially when it's in the most unmaintainable environment in the Western Hemisphere.
What's w/ Georgie (and Stevens) pushing that plan for years without a clue as to how to make it happen?
Never was a solid business case for that but I love how everyone without a clue still thinks it's the answer. Again, things are never as simple as the headlines make you believe.
Offshore on the other hand, could provide a temporary reprieve (sort of like more efficient automobiles and alternative energy sources*).
*wait, those may be more than temporary reprieves.
What's w/ Georgie (and Stevens) pushing that plan for years without a clue as to how to make it happen?
Never was a solid business case for that but I love how everyone without a clue still thinks it's the answer. Again, things are never as simple as the headlines make you believe.
Offshore on the other hand, could provide a temporary reprieve (sort of like more efficient automobiles and alternative energy sources*).
*wait, those may be more than temporary reprieves.
There once was a troll who lived under a bridge. No one crossed that bridge, because it spanned a waste runoff trough and it smelled bad (also, they didn't like being hassled by the troll). The waste was runoff from Murdoch's Media Snake Oil factory, and a bunch of shanty 'factories' that sprung up around the main plant. These factories were staffed by people who, because they were not-so-bright and fearful, were frustrated, angry and scared of life and the world. They figured out how to make diarrhea come out of their mouths. They took that diarrhea and used it to print newspapers and books, they powered TV stations with it and pumped it into Ted Stevens' "Internet Tubes". Sure, it was poisoning America and the world, but the sad, dumb people who ran the factories had figured out how to make money by selling their 'product' to other sad, dumb people (and they were more than happy to print lies from big companies and a minority political party, so they got money for doing that too! Heck, they could put ads for other types of snake oil on their own snake oil bottles and make money for that!) The Snake Oil people would use racism to sell their diarrhea. Many people didn't know much about "science" or "geography" or "history", so they didn't know just how bad and poisonous the Snake Oil really was.
Well, our little troll who lived under the bridge would go down to this stream of diarrhea and roll around in it. As pages from the printing presses at the factories floated by, he would read them. The troll couldn't see much of the world from under his bridge, and no one came by to talk with him, so he didn't know that the media from the factories was intentionally full of lies, half-truths and intentional omissions. He saw each idea and "fact" echoed in all the other stuff in the runoff, so he thought that he was pretty well informed. After all, he read things that looked like real newspapers, he rigged up a TV so he could watch something that looked like a real TV news station that came from the factory. He even got on the internet and read things written by the people in the Snake Oil factories that sounded like in depth analysis of important issues! But sometimes he might stumble on things like this:
http://www.juancole.com/2008/07/social- ... surge.html
But stuff like this was complicated, full of facts, and required a broad knowledge of both the history and the current conditions and politics of these obscure, remote parts of the world. Most of these places, he hadn't heard of ten years ago! Maybe the troll couldn't find them on a map? But most of all, these sorts of things totally didn't match the world view promoted by the Snake Oil media - it even totally contradicted it some times. So the troll wouldn't read them.
Sometimes, he would turn the TV to another channel. He would see a debate between two people about some issue like global warming or energy or some war somewhere. On one side would be someone from the Snake Oil club who would present a pretty extreme argument like "Its sun spots!" or "We've always been winning, so we must stay forever!" The lazy TV channels wouldn't get a mirror image whacko to counter the Snake Oil representative. Instead they would get someone like a professor who had studied the issue for decades and discussed it with many other well informed, smart people to figure out what's best. The TV stations would imply that the smart, well informed person was the "opposing" view of the Snake Oil man. This person would try to explain why the Snake Oil person is so wrong, but the TV station wouldn't give them enough time to explain complicated issues. (Often, the TV stations were afraid that the smart person would make their advertisers angry or would make them seem "unpatriotic" so they would only talk to the Snake Oil person.) When our little troll would watch this, he would think, "well, I'll take a position close to the Snake Oil guy but a little like the goofball, extremist with her complicated facts. That will put me in the well informed center of the issue!"
Besides, the Snake Oil media told him that there was a guy running for president who knew a lot about foreign policy. That guy said that Sunni and Shia don't really fight much, heck, he couldn't even tell them apart sometimes. Czechoslovakia was a country that still existed according to this guy. Iraq and Pakistan have a shared border! Putin is president of Germany! Obviously, if this great guy knows so much about foreign policy and all this "off the reservation" stuff on the web contradicts what he and the Snake Oil people are saying, then the "goofballs" must be wrong. This great, honorable guy said that it's a "historical fact" that some guys in Iraq decided to take money to be friends with the US after the US sent a few more soldiers there. This great guy even fixed a wrong word meaning. You see, lots of people were using a particular word to mean "send more people all at once." But this guy helped them to understand that that word actually means "send more people and have them do things differently before they even arrive." None of the Snake Oil stuff he saw floating under his bridge corrected these statements, so they must be true. All the "goofballs" on the web saying otherwise must be wrong.
So the troll wouldn't listen to them. The troll felt good because he knew "the real facts." The "goofballs" talked about complicated things that weren't clear. They talked about "long term technology transitions", but the troll knew about gas and cars and the Snake Oil media told him that these were good and all the funny stuff was weird and bad. The government should help the Big Oil people get more oil. The Big Oil people are rich, so the must be good! The "funny business" hippies aren't rich, so they must be bad. The Snake Oil people said that there was an "invisible hand" and the hand liked Big Oil and punished the electric hippies. (The Snake Oil people never talked about the fact that the government had helped Big Oil for the last century and didn't help the "electric hippies" any where near as much.) The Snake Oil people told him that there could be "victory" in a messy ethno-sectarian regional conflict, so anyone who talks about a reality based transitional strategy must be bad. "Wars must end in Victory!" the troll said to himself over and over.
But the troll would hear the nice people in the distance planning to make the world a better place. They were cautious and talking about lots of confusing facts, but he could hear that they were optimistic about lots of good things. The papers in his stream of diarrhea told him that these were very bad things! So once in a while, he would clutch some of the poopy papers from his stream and run out from under his bridge yelling about what his scraps said. At first, the nice people would try to explain why the Snake Oil view of the world was missing important facts, or was motivated by profit or malace. But the troll was sure that what the Snake Oil people were saying was right!
After a while, the nice people realized that the troll from under the bridge was just looking for a pig fight. No one could really push the pig in a good direction, everyone would get covered in pig shit (the diarrhea from the troll's stream), and the pig would get some attention and be happy. The nice people eventually stopped wasting their time and got back to working hard to make the world a better place.
Well, our little troll who lived under the bridge would go down to this stream of diarrhea and roll around in it. As pages from the printing presses at the factories floated by, he would read them. The troll couldn't see much of the world from under his bridge, and no one came by to talk with him, so he didn't know that the media from the factories was intentionally full of lies, half-truths and intentional omissions. He saw each idea and "fact" echoed in all the other stuff in the runoff, so he thought that he was pretty well informed. After all, he read things that looked like real newspapers, he rigged up a TV so he could watch something that looked like a real TV news station that came from the factory. He even got on the internet and read things written by the people in the Snake Oil factories that sounded like in depth analysis of important issues! But sometimes he might stumble on things like this:
http://www.juancole.com/2008/07/social- ... surge.html
But stuff like this was complicated, full of facts, and required a broad knowledge of both the history and the current conditions and politics of these obscure, remote parts of the world. Most of these places, he hadn't heard of ten years ago! Maybe the troll couldn't find them on a map? But most of all, these sorts of things totally didn't match the world view promoted by the Snake Oil media - it even totally contradicted it some times. So the troll wouldn't read them.
Sometimes, he would turn the TV to another channel. He would see a debate between two people about some issue like global warming or energy or some war somewhere. On one side would be someone from the Snake Oil club who would present a pretty extreme argument like "Its sun spots!" or "We've always been winning, so we must stay forever!" The lazy TV channels wouldn't get a mirror image whacko to counter the Snake Oil representative. Instead they would get someone like a professor who had studied the issue for decades and discussed it with many other well informed, smart people to figure out what's best. The TV stations would imply that the smart, well informed person was the "opposing" view of the Snake Oil man. This person would try to explain why the Snake Oil person is so wrong, but the TV station wouldn't give them enough time to explain complicated issues. (Often, the TV stations were afraid that the smart person would make their advertisers angry or would make them seem "unpatriotic" so they would only talk to the Snake Oil person.) When our little troll would watch this, he would think, "well, I'll take a position close to the Snake Oil guy but a little like the goofball, extremist with her complicated facts. That will put me in the well informed center of the issue!"
Besides, the Snake Oil media told him that there was a guy running for president who knew a lot about foreign policy. That guy said that Sunni and Shia don't really fight much, heck, he couldn't even tell them apart sometimes. Czechoslovakia was a country that still existed according to this guy. Iraq and Pakistan have a shared border! Putin is president of Germany! Obviously, if this great guy knows so much about foreign policy and all this "off the reservation" stuff on the web contradicts what he and the Snake Oil people are saying, then the "goofballs" must be wrong. This great, honorable guy said that it's a "historical fact" that some guys in Iraq decided to take money to be friends with the US after the US sent a few more soldiers there. This great guy even fixed a wrong word meaning. You see, lots of people were using a particular word to mean "send more people all at once." But this guy helped them to understand that that word actually means "send more people and have them do things differently before they even arrive." None of the Snake Oil stuff he saw floating under his bridge corrected these statements, so they must be true. All the "goofballs" on the web saying otherwise must be wrong.
So the troll wouldn't listen to them. The troll felt good because he knew "the real facts." The "goofballs" talked about complicated things that weren't clear. They talked about "long term technology transitions", but the troll knew about gas and cars and the Snake Oil media told him that these were good and all the funny stuff was weird and bad. The government should help the Big Oil people get more oil. The Big Oil people are rich, so the must be good! The "funny business" hippies aren't rich, so they must be bad. The Snake Oil people said that there was an "invisible hand" and the hand liked Big Oil and punished the electric hippies. (The Snake Oil people never talked about the fact that the government had helped Big Oil for the last century and didn't help the "electric hippies" any where near as much.) The Snake Oil people told him that there could be "victory" in a messy ethno-sectarian regional conflict, so anyone who talks about a reality based transitional strategy must be bad. "Wars must end in Victory!" the troll said to himself over and over.
But the troll would hear the nice people in the distance planning to make the world a better place. They were cautious and talking about lots of confusing facts, but he could hear that they were optimistic about lots of good things. The papers in his stream of diarrhea told him that these were very bad things! So once in a while, he would clutch some of the poopy papers from his stream and run out from under his bridge yelling about what his scraps said. At first, the nice people would try to explain why the Snake Oil view of the world was missing important facts, or was motivated by profit or malace. But the troll was sure that what the Snake Oil people were saying was right!
After a while, the nice people realized that the troll from under the bridge was just looking for a pig fight. No one could really push the pig in a good direction, everyone would get covered in pig shit (the diarrhea from the troll's stream), and the pig would get some attention and be happy. The nice people eventually stopped wasting their time and got back to working hard to make the world a better place.
Bacon is meat candy.
Someone with a plan, and if Arnold can make it to Gov, there is nothing stopping her from being prez. in 20 or so years...
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008 ... at-mccain/
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008 ... at-mccain/
"There is no secret ingredient"
Po, the kung fu panda
Po, the kung fu panda