Pangloss

Not entirely an unfair comparison, but IMO ultimately invalid because deep sea cleanup is a very tangible, hands-on sort of problem, whereas replacing oil/coal with something as economical that isn't nuclear is a problem that's been vexing society for generations. Nor does the money for R&D on deep sea drilling have to come from the public. BP has spent something like a week's worth of profits on this particular mess so far. I think they can afford to spend a couple more week's worth coming up with correct contingency plans instead of incorrect ones. But okay, let's say that every offshore rig is a danger to the coastline. Okay, so shut them all down, right now. Every offshore rig that's licensed to drill off American shores -- close them all down. And then let's deal with the economic chaos that follows. Which of course will be entirely the creation of Democrats in Congress and the White House. Not one Republican will agree with that plan, which will leave not one Republican available for blame. Not so easy a call now, is it? Environmentalists have discovered a winning solution that's far cheaper than finding a solution to our energy dilemma: Playing the Blame Game. They're required to do exactly that, and in fact their licenses depend on their ability to deal with these problems. But it looks like those regulations aren't being enforced. A Coast Guard test just this past March highlighted the inability to recover significant amounts of oil with the boom approach and yet BP's license is based on that very same ability. http://www.publicintegrity.org/articles/entry/2079/ They need to do what they said they're going to do, and the government needs to make sure that they do instead of sleeping on the job. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedPresident Obama took time on Saturday to lay a portion of the blame for the oil spill on the government. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37267.html Certainly there will be further finger-pointing on this, much of it justifiably aimed at Republicans, but once that's said and done there needs to be a serious focus here on the regulatory shortfall that may have been at issue here. This country is in the midst of a very public review of the concept of government regulation. We need our legislators to recognize that in order for regulation to work it has to actually be taken seriously. How can we hope to have the public agree to new regulations on banking, health care or tax reform if we're promising them that regulation will work with one hand, while the other hand is dipping into the deep pockets of corporations and other special interests? I think this also underscores the problem of "too many fires" that the Obama administration has been dealing with, and may also speak to the importance of having good people in government. Right now Democrats are telling Obama to put more blame on Republicans. Excuse me? Have they been paying ANY attention to what that man has been dealing with for the last year and a half? Yeesh -- talk about just not getting it.

No, it's not hard to imagine that at all. But I think you have to take into consideration that the main scientific/technical concern here is not the safety of offshore drilling, but rather the safety of deep water drilling. That's what makes this case different -- that's why the leak hasn't been stopped. What we're learning here is not that offshore drilling is bad, but that deep water development has outpaced deep water contingency planning. This accident has highlighted the need for more planning and better equipment. It is a mistake to leverage that into a larger condemnation of offshore drilling as unsafe, because there doesn't appear to be any scientific basis for that condemnation. (And I think it speaks volumes that you and I are the ones having this conversation rather than certain people on this forum who claim to always place science over ideology.)

We should ask Kim Il-Jung what happens when an airplane attempts to take off from a conveyor belt.

Just because some right-to-life adherents have committed terrorist acts doesn't mean that none of them have a legitimate point of view. Shall we condemn all anti-establishment adherents just because one of them has committed the criminal act of theft? Of course not. And you've illustrated my point perfectly: You can ridicule and over-generalize and straw-man them all you want, but you can't make them go away. Like a bad penny, they just keep turning up. We should have been able to get away from the abortion issue decades ago and moved on to more important matters. But that's life in a democracy -- elected officials representing public opinion and legal challenges in courts keep causing this issue to return. None of this has anything to do with terrorism, TBK. The anti-establishment crowd will now proceed to do exactly the same thing with separation. They'll bring it back up. When that fails, they'll bring it back up again. And again. And again. The issue will never rest, because to some people it's just THAT important.

Well maybe you're right, but it seems like thus far there's more of a fear of environmental cost than a reality. Even the media has noted the shrinkage of the slick and the fact that it may never come ashore, and surely any estimates at this point are pure conjecture. I think that's a lot to hang an entire policy change upon, especially given the long history of, for example, the North Sea explorations, or other offshore US sites, which nobody has suggested closing down. Maybe it's just my separation from UK media but I don't hear any sudden discussion in UK politics about ending offshore drilling. And I don't know that there ARE "so many other ways to attain energy here". Coal is the worst offender for the environmental/GCC crowd. Nuclear is absolutely the way to go, IMO, but the political battle will be absolutely monumental -- historical and utterly news-dominating. A fight that will suck absolutely all of the oxygen out of (at least) an entire legislative year. This is where the airline industry usually trots out statistics about the likelihood of another accident. I realize that's not an entirely fair analogy, because I agree that the potential for damage is catastrophic. But isn't that what science is for? Is the problem here really that we've tampered with mother nature and that we should instead go back to living in caves, or is it that we just haven't done our homework and we simply need better safety equipment and planning? We can land a man on the moon but we can't safely drill for oil under the sea? Seriously? This has all the earmarks of a media event that ends up setting policy due to nothing substantive or scientific, just emotional public opinion.

You've perfectly captured exactly how the right-to-life crowd feels. Fortunately you can do exactly what they've done in the face of being shut down by the Supreme Court: Demand another hearing. Then another one. Then another one. Then another one. Until you get what you want -- what you feel cannot be compromised on. If you're so inclined, of course. But even if you're not, I'm sure somebody will, which is why we're still dealing with the abortion issue today, and will steal be dealing with the establishment clause for generations to come, I suppose.

I'd have to know more. According to Burrough (2008), the prohibition/pre-depression era was an unprecedented new age of prosperity for the country, so people were seeking more entertainment anyway, spreading out across the country and greatly changing the way people exercised previously-standard living patterns. That trend hasn't ended, by the way. If you add up just the categories of film, DVD, video games, and books, humanity now spends in the neighborhood of $150 billion annually on entertainment. (source) All hail western civilization!

After which he went out and sugared a few SUV gas tanks, no doubt. It's not terrorism if nobody actually gets hurt, right? Just ideological vandalism, I suppose. The sad thing is that he probably thought he actually accomplished something. Words are easy, as is vandalism in a remote area. Honoring the law when it flies in the face of your ideological preference -- that's hard.

What cost is that, and how do you know it is unrecoverable?

Yes, they pulled an AP story off the wire and ran it on their own site. Here's another one, which Fox reporters wrote themselves: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/05/11/obama-strategy-treats-illegal-drugs-public-health-issue/ The article goes on to talk about new administration prevention initiatives in a positive light.

How much energy is contained in a 4,000-pound object moving at 80 mph? Swansont, I'm not sure that's accurate, btw.

That darn ultraconservative Fox News has done it again, elevating the War on Drugs as some sort of noble, effective effort. Or not. Pretty staggering statistics. I don't know that I would ever support a full-blown legalization effort, but I have to say it's pretty compelling, especially in these particular economic times. What do you all think? (Edit: Wups, forgot the link.) http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/05/13/ap-impact-years-trillion-war-drugs-failed-meet-goals/

Absolutely. The definition of sanity is doing the same thing over and over, hoping for a different result. (Er, wait, did I get that right?)

I agree that this would be a good idea. I've never been happy with TARP/stimulus money being used for ideological goals, and certainly either Democrats or Republicans could lead the way on this. Let's see some initiative from SOME-body.

More hype than substance at the moment, but perhaps it will develop into something over time. It's just a simple form where you can type in what you'd like to see cut. I think they should at least have it categorized so they can do statistical analysis on the results. They should also have it ID-verified at least to the extent that they do when you submit a request to your Congressperson or Senator (where you have to enter your address and name, etc). http://www.republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/

A Pew poll out today indicates that most Americans support the new law in Arizona. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2010/05/two-national-polls-show-arizona-immigration-law-very-popular.html

Does it only happen with disc-based games? That would suggest a disc player problem. I had a bad player on my first one and had to get it repaired. Does it only happen in a certain game? That would suggest a problem with that game. Does it only happen while connected in an online game? That would suggest a problem with your Internet connection. If none of the above, I agree with Mr Skeptic that it sounds like an overheating issue. The fan may be broken or clogged with dust (take a look at the vent). You may need to have it repaired or replaced.

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I didn't say that, and I support the effort to enact change on this issue. I don't know if humans are the cause or not, but in my opinion there is more than sufficient evidence to enact major, gradual change in our energy consumption. And I believe that a confluence of motivations, rather than regulation and ideological podium-pounding, is the best way to accomplish this.

I'm not saying you're wrong to point out erroneous reasoning. But this is not James Randi debunking Uri Geller (which, by the way, is ALSO not a great success story), or skeptics educating people about con men. There is a chain of assumptions in GCC science involving the a discounting of unknown variables that suggests one of the potentially greatest moments of hubris in the history of science. Right or wrong, climate science has naively stepped into politics in a great, big, wet, messy way. If the science turns out to be wrong on this, as it so often seems to the public to be wrong on so many claims (e.g. medicine), the public trust may be set back for decades. And the public is well-aware of this, and as I indicated before, already anticipating such a fall and looking at science like the playground bully. From where the uneducated public sits you're not defending science, you're demanding lunch money.

I don't know what the trend may be regarding his federal judicial appointments, but of course this is only his second SCOTUS appointment and the first one was a very experienced federal appeals court judge. A lot of hay has been made throughout the political theater lately about the fact that all of the SCOTUS appointments in the last 40 years or so have been judges, but that is not a constitutionally-defined prerequisite for the position. Various historians like to point out examples of justices they consider "successful" examples of non-judicial appointments, and it's something of a meme particularly for the left, which feels somewhat under assault by the judiciary at the moment following several decades of mainly-Republican appointments. The right, tending to favor "strict constructionism", seems to prefer experienced judges, whom they perceive to tend to strictly interpret the law, and will thus (presumably) serve as a stopgap to progressivism. But they're definitely not tapping into a universal truth, at least as far as the prerequisite is concerned -- the last non-judicial-background member was (if I'm not mistaken) William Rehnquist, who was rather decidedly conservative. It's 98% posturing, really -- both sides like to hide their ideological preferences behind faux constitutional grounds and fictional philosophical constructions they claim to be objective. But then most of what happens with a SCOTUS nomination is posturing, not just because of the politics involved, but simply because you can't predict an appointee's behavior once they're on the bench. All of which make SCOTUS nominations a major highlight of any political hobbyist's calendar.

Especially when you're struggling to find consensus in your own party even with 60 votes in the Senate, eh? Of course, when you speak of balancing those evil conservatives you're conveniently forgetting that Roberts and Alito were not nearly as far to the right as what you could have had -- if Bush hadn't had to get them past at least 5 Democrats in Congress. Can you say "Harriet Miers"? I knew you could. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedPolitico has more on Kagan's moderate past today, based on some digging into the Clinton Presidential Library. On numerous occasions she recommended policies of compromise and middle ground in order to avoid ideological fights. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37119.html

Doesn't change the fact that some people throw the "denier" label at anyone who raises any questions on any point regarding GCC. Or the fact that this is counter-productive to both progress on GCC and discussions like the ones we have here.

See... now, me? I don't call skeptics "deniers". Confidence in global climate change amongst the public is FALLING thanks to scorn-and-ridicule, "scientific consensus" and the declaration of all skeptics as "deniers". http://www.huffingtonpost.com/terry-newell/who-cares-what-the-expert_b_569672.html Even worse, I think it's fast becoming gauche and cliche to state support for GCC. I recently asked my students, as part of a discussion on logic and reason, whether they believed that global climate change is real. Half of them laughed and scoffed and the other half looked embarrassed and stayed silent. Do y'all want to smirk and denigrate, or do you want to convince people to take action while there's still time? Choose wisely.

Doesn't matter if the base doesn't find her acceptable. I don't think that's really going to be a problem here, but I also don't think the left will have much luck scaring up fear about right-wing opposition on this either. She's clearly been chosen because she is the least objectionable to both Republicans and Democrats. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/05/the-kagan-nomination/56510/