The unvarnished truth - politics and economic factors shaping the US and the world

[mark_j]

There are a lot of people who can't afford to heat their homes now and the numbers will increase dramatically over the next couple years as these new policies take hold and ripple through the economy.

Anwar would make a difference, it would show a willingness to invest in our natural resources and do something positive for the country.

In 5 to 10 years it might, if they allow it, but considering the Prudhoe Bay fields have been on the decline for production since 1988 what they find at Anwar is merely going to replace the lost production from the north slope. As it is the north slope, at its most productive, only produced about 25% of domestic production.

In light of the 'Dez disaster and the current BP spill in the Gulf, the chances of having any other environmentally sensitive area opened to exploration in the next few years is probably 2:

Slim and None.

 

[RightField]

You're probably right, but one can hope that the libs would do the right thing for once.

 

[RightField]

What's new today? That's a great article. It cleary describes the issues and challenges facing our country. I vote for continued growth and innovation (republican) rather than statist decline and lower standards of living (democrat).

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

You will never convince the frustrated that more government is not the answer to another's success...

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

In the last year, many of the dreams of an emerging international elite have imploded — and this, in a new century that was to usher in a regime of global liberal ecumenism.

The lies and academic fraud of Climategate reminded us that it is almost impossible for even disinterested scientists to fathom the complex history of global climate change. But it also — and more importantly — reminded us how Western universities have turned into rigid medieval centers of intolerant orthodoxy. Our new academic monks, in their isolated sanctuaries — cut off by grants, subsidies, tenure, and cadres of obsequious graduate students from the grubby efforts of others to stay alive — have for years breezily issued all sorts of near-religious exegeses and edicts about the public’s ruination of the planet. We lesser folk were supposed to find salvation through installing windmills and junking our incandescent light bulbs under the tutelage of wiser overseers.

Victor Davis Hanson
NRO

Meanwhile, in the last few weeks, nature did what no human industry had ever quite done — shut down much of European airspace with a huge toxic cloud. But the mess was not a DuPont emission, or soot from Eastern Europe’s network of coal plants, or any such man-caused disaster, but the work of a prosaic volcano. The ensuing economic chaos and toxic air pollution were accepted with a shrug in that they were natural and had nothing to do with Halliburton.

Another dream — the European Union — is also imploding. Beneath the hysteria over Greece is a simple truth: All the capital that Germany piled up over the last 20 years through its export-driven economy was never really there; it must now be forfeited to those who borrowed from Germany in order to buy from Germany. In some sense, if a taxi driver in the Peloponnese drove a Mercedes beyond the reach of most Americans, it was not because of his capital-creating productivity, but rather because of his country’s ability to lure the Germans into lending Greece euros at nearly nonexistent interest.

For decades we were lectured about the EU’s nuanced practice of “soft power,” and we were told how life was at last good when one garnered cradle-to-grave government entitlements, retired early, and expected American arms to protect and German money to subsidize the collective borrowing binge. Apparently because Europeans did not drawl and go to church, we were supposed to believe that they had reinvented finance, and loans could be floated rather than paid back.

In 2009, the vision of the new Obama administration was European: foreign-policy triangulation, government takeovers of private enterprises, higher taxes, more entitlements and public workers, and always more “them/us” class-warfare rhetoric from members of a technocratic guardian class who had played the very system they were now to oversee. Apparently Obama’s high-level appointees — from Timothy Geithner to Van Jones — thought they were our versions of Brussels bureaucrats, who could say and do anything with no need to worry about popular reaction.

Then came the Greek meltdown. The music of this parlor game stopped, and all the poor players standing — German banks, anonymous bondholders, EU technocrats, Greek politicians and public unions — lunged for the far too few seats.

 

[unregistered]

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

The road to more freedom is always the best road.

Aristotle observed that some men are born to be slaves...






... and these are the loudest in the yells of equality.

 

[Saint Peter]

Are you a slave or am I?

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Are you a slave or am I?

I'm pretty sure you are since to you technical training is an "education..."

 

[unregistered]

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Those who will not do, always want.

I might add that those who want will never lose that desire no matter what is given...

 

[Saint Peter]

I'm pretty sure you are since to you technical training is an "education..."

A journeyman passing down his skills to an apprentice is not education in your eyes?

You are a shallow man.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

A journeyman passing down his skills to an apprentice is not education in your eyes?

You are a shallow man.

Ah, the Guild system of the Mercantilist world...



MEN are educated. Slaves and pets are trained...

The difference between a slave and a pet lies only in the complexity of the "trick."

 

[unregistered]

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

A journeyman ditch digger may be thinking a little deeper, but the amount of education I suspect is relevant to the teacher. No?

*snicker*

Good one!

 

[Saint Peter]

A journeyman ditch digger may be thinking a little deeper, but the amount of education I suspect is relevant to the teacher. No?

Do you think of an electrician as uneducated? Have you ever seen the welds turned out by a journeyman pipefitter?

These skills are not acquired in one afternoon. It takes years to be proficient at these crafts. Just like it takes years to get an engineering degree.

I see little difference between the two.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Do you think of an electrician as uneducated? Have you ever seen the welds turned out by a journeyman pipefitter?

These skills are not acquired in one afternoon. It takes years to be proficient at these crafts. Just like it takes years to get an engineering degree.

I see little difference between the two.

Yes.

Proficiency in a trade is a skill set that expands not a man's horizon of reason, it only serves to finance his petty prejudices.

Words have meaning and a "training" does not give words meaning, only and education does that. Our school system has not changed since DeTocqueville wrote about it; it trains, it does not educate. If one wishes to fault our capitalism, this is the proper line of inquiry and investigation, not "greed."
__________________
"... the human animal is a learning animal; we like to learn; we are good at it; we don't need to be shown how or made to do it. What kills the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to regulate it or control it."
John Holt

 

[The_Trouvere]

For a copy & paste job it beats Slug's endless blather from American Thinker.

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

I know a few good welders and a couple of good electricians who have little clue about the world around them.

Too many people think anything beyond high school qualifies as an "education" and thus is necessary for everyone and this leads to the idea that providing any sort of training is a proper role for government because it provides a better quality of citizen when actually all it does is provide a better quality of worker...



... and potentially a more docile slave class.

 

[Saint Peter]

I know a few good welders and a couple of good electricians who have little clue about the world around them.

I still do not think of them as slaves.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

I still do not think of them as slaves.

That's because you're getting an "education..."





__________________
"In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists."
Eric Hoffer

 

[Saint Peter]

That's because you're getting an "education..."





__________________
"In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists."
Eric Hoffer

I am being trained to do a different part of the same job.

I still come and go as I please. I am not bought or sold unless I approve of the transaction.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

You might find this interesting...




http://spectator.org/archives/2010/05/19/broken-promises