Warning: The “f” word and a few other cuss words are used; may not be safe for work. But definitely hilarious!
(Thanks Sandi.)
Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.
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Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.
Warning: The “f” word and a few other cuss words are used; may not be safe for work. But definitely hilarious!
(Thanks Sandi.)
{ 21 comments }
I think Governor Palin is the most interesting and refreshing presidential or vice presidential candidate since Theodore Roosevelt was William McKinley’s running mate in 1900. She automatically gets my enthusiastic vote.
On the other hand, in interests of candidness, I had better tell you that none of the candidates for national election in November 2008 even begin to address what I am certain will be the supreme issue of the USA and even the world in the next two or three decades of the 21st century.
And I’m not talking about earth warming, but the peaking and dwindling of the world’s known and available petroleum supply. Just about the entirety of developed 20th century western civilization, including industry, commerce, transportation, and even much of the plastics we use, depend upon the petroleum supply.
Unless something happens to change the calculus, world oil production peaked in spring 2005, while world oil demand has continued to grow at more than 2.5% per annum.Â
Efforts to ameliorate this imbalance involving frenzied efforts to difficult-to-extract shale oil deposits and even conversion of oil tar sands — naturally occuring ashphalt, actually — will involve massive inroads into remaining natural gas sources. Same too for gas to liquid (GTL) fuels for vehicles. All that, if used up for these purposes, will hasten world peak natural gas. Â
Unless current projections of world peak oil are quite faulty — and I have no solid evidence of that — then the future is indeed clouded unless and until we rapidly and thoroughly create vast new projects for converting solar and wind energy to electric power.
Nuclear power generation? A world peak of locatable and extractable uranium is also on the horizon. And depending too heavily on nuclear power raises the spectre of a western hemisphere Chernobyl that could render a significant part of this country and continent uninhabitable. Don’t say that has not happened. And therefore don’t say it could not happen again with even deadlier outcomes.
So, President McCain and Vice President Palin — or President Obama and Vice President Biden — tell us your contingency plans. I’m all ears, as Ross Perot once told Clinton and an early George Bush.
(How’s that for hijacking a thread? Did I do it neatly enough?)
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
That video is funny.
Not as funny as Arnold’s doomsday peak oil lecture.
:0
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..Toon of the Day
CC,
One day, some year in the future, if I see you standing by the side of some dusty road, and if you hold up a sign saying
"I’m CC from Dean’s World"
Then I’ll stop and give you a ride.
Assuming I have any fuel myself.
Meantime,
Happy motoring.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Arnold,
If the planet were to be running out of petrol any time soon, there would be a billion or more energy windmills running up and down the great wall of China somewhere above the smoke pollution belt.
Okay,
Maybe we can un-hijack this thread:
Red State Update:
Sarah Palin Picked As McCain’s VP
McK
Excellent Red State video.
Now I’ve got to go find that pic of her firing the assault rifle…
Arnold:
I just don’t buy into "we’ll run out of oil" panic when I live next door to a trillion barrels worth of oil that’s just a BIT harder to harvest than the oil in Saudi Arabia.
Yeah, we might pay a little more for oil from oil sands, oil tar, oil shale, genetically enhanced microbes and chemical processing using nuclear or solar energy, but we won’t run out of oil…
ever.
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..Toon of the Day
Point of order here…
Sarah Palin hasn’t gotten a "JOB" yet, she’s gotten a "JOB INTERVIEW."
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..Toon of the Day
Politically, I’m a mushy middle type. I can’t stand corporate a-holes and country club, golfing Republicans — but ain’t too fond of hippies, whiners and government desk jockeys, either.
This is the first election in a long time, when I am genuinely thrilled to be voting for McCain, a man of substance, and Palin, a fresh, new energetic voice.
Sorry, Obama — you’re a breath of fresh air too, the best thing to happen to the Dem party in a while. But, I ain’t voting for you this year.
HB
About peak oil. I disagree with the lot of you. Most of you sound like the pathetic fools who were described as milling around on the deck of the Titanic that cold black April night in the North Atlantic, refusing to load up the mostly empty lifeboats, while the great ship went slowly down by the head.Â
If I am wrong, so be it. If I am right, you will all deal with your futures in growing disbelief, confusion and consternation, as the availability of your vehicle fuels dwindle, and as your ability to pay for the little you shall have available dwindles along with the supply.
———–
Like the rest of America, I spent the last couple of hours watching and listening to the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St Paul, including the entirety of Governor Sarah Palin’s speech to the convention, to the city, and to the world.
For me, this was a moment of magic that surpasses all political arguments. I would vote in an instant for that women to lead this country. To my mind, she is more impressive than the rest of the candidates all rolled into one. Â
Yes, I think McCain is a great and enduring hero, and a maverick after my own heart, and I think he will make a fine president.
But in spite of everything he has been, is, or ever will be, he forever shall be overshadowed by the magnetism and force of that small woman with the large glasses, the handsome big slightly bearded fellow tenderly holding his newest child, their daughters and their soon-to-be son in law, their US Army infantryman about to ship out for service in Iraq.
If they are elected — and I think now, with Sarah Palin on the Republican national ticket, that they will in fact be elected, that this all but unknown woman from a far distant northwestern corner of great America, will be the first woman president of the United States.
What will she do about the energy supply, if what I have written about peak oil comes to pass; proving the projections of a slew of oil industry geologists and T Boone Pickens, one of the most successful oilfield drillers and operators in history?
Â
In that case, I think Vice President or President Sarah Palin is just too intelligent and operationally flexible to ignore plain facts that will be increasingly evident. And she will act accordingly.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WIÂ Â
I thought this joke was funnier the first time I heard it on all the lefty blogs and in the comment threads. It was hilarious then, more of the same now.
What? They weren’t joking? They were serious? Now that’s funny!
As for Governor Palin’s speech: sorry, Arnold, I’m gonna have to disagree. Oh, not about your prognostications (we’ll have to wait and see on those), but on the quality of the speech itself. I’ll grant that it was well-delivered; but as an old-time debater, I try hard to see past delivery and get to content.
And on the level of content, I’ll give the speech a B, maybe a B+. It was solid, but not spectacular. Not that there was anything wrong with it. I agreed with much of what Governor Palin had to say. But I was looking for something new, and there just really wasn’t much new here. All of her major points have already appeared on blogs and news sites, many long before her nomination. As far as content is concerned, I could’ve written the same speech myself, simply by compiling the best points from conservative sites for the past week.
And to be fair, that was my reaction to Senator Obama’s speech last week as well. No new content there (save for his almost embarrassed mention of nuclear power). It was all retread material. Again, I could’ve written it myself. Another B/B+. (Senator Biden’s speech was even less original. C/C-. Snooze…)
I’m coming to the conclusion that blogs and news sites are generally ahead of the campaign cycle: sometimes wrongly (as in the reprehensible Palin pregnancy rumors or the odious Obama Muslim smears), but often correctly. Neither party gets that yet. They still play by old media rules, even when they think they’re not. Some of Governor Palin’s best lines were on the Internet hours before she delivered them. Why? Because in the old days, campaigns delivered speech drafts early, to ensure the speeches would make it into the late/early editions of the papers. Today, they still follow this outmoded practice; and the result is that the speeches are undercut, at least for the subset of the populace that’s following online. As that subset grows, the campaigns really need to learn new approaches.
Martin:
In today’s political arena, a "B+ content" speech delivered with "A+ style and wit" will beat the heck out of an "A+ content" speech delivered with "B+ style and wit" every single time. In fact I would say that virtually every speech Obama has given has been C level or below on content, unless you count meaningless platitudes as content.
I’ve been reading the Lefy blogs to see how well Palin did. Based on the vitriol and disgusting comments I am finding there, she did very well indeed. I like this woman more and more every day. There may yet be something that I discover in the future to change my mind, but right now my personal opinion is that of the four people on the two tickets, I’d take her in a heartbeat over any of the other three.
Arnold:
You go on a doomsday prophet spree and then have the gall to tell the rest of us that WE are the ones who are acting like idiots. If anyone is displaying behavior that has gone off the narrow path of rationality here, it ain’t me buddy.
Oil is a finite resource for sure. At least now it is. But in the future it may not be finite at all. There are both biological and chemical means to create oil, or products so much like oil that they are effectively oil. They are not economically feasible today because of the amount of energy they require. But if there is some cheap and freely available source of energy, then making oil suddenly becomes completely reasonable.
And what would do that? Well, nuclear energy comes to mind. Particularly nuclear fusion.
Arnold you remind me of the alarmists a century ago who warned the world that the horse and buggy was going to doom civilization to a future of mile-high horse manure piles in every city. They were serious too. And they too predicted the doom of modern civilization. And they were just as right as you are.
Because, Arnold, you are predicting the future based on the technology and the policy decisions of the past. But the thing about the future is that THINGS CHANGE Arnold. And usually those things are not the things that people like you predict. Far from it. The entire history of mankind so far has been one steady improvement of technology, moving from one energy source to another as we grow and learn.
I don’t think we’ve reached the end of that trend Arnold. I think we are still in the early stages of it in fact.
Long before we run out of oil, we’ll run out of a need for oil.
That’s my prediction. We’ll check back on this in fifty years, OK?
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..This will backfire?
In today’s political arena, a "B+ content" speech delivered with "A+ style and wit" will beat the heck out of an "A+ content" speech delivered with "B+ style and wit" every single time.
Agreed. I’m not the typical voter/viewer. I know that in politics, delivery is hugely important, and Governor Palin delivered. My grading was on my own personal scale, where content is king.
My grandma was telling me that in her day they were told to save whale oil for my generation.
The fact is that if we do actually run out of oil, it will be the first ever natural resource that we have exhausted. And if we are running out, the markets seem to not be aware of it (or supply and demand laws have been reversed) given the 23% drop in oil prices over the past month or two.
Paul:
The market is a suprisingly effective means of predicting the future. The market is not panicking because those who look at such things as a source of income and power look at oil tar, oil sands, oil shale and potential synthetic oil sources and have concluded that we are not in danger of running out of oil anytime soon.
Just the oil in Colorado’s oil shale alone would provide all the world’s oil needs at today’s level of use for several generations. And the technology to extract oil from oil shale has steadily improved to the point that there are now efforts to make it commercially successful.
"Peak Oil" is very comparable to "Global Warming" in its hype, its follower’s zeal and its complete lack of grounding in actual facts.
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..The DOWNside of Palin’s speech
Coal can be turned into oil. The Nazis did that during World War II when they began running short on petroleum.
Alternatives to oil have been with us all along; oil keeps winning only because it’s cheaper than all the rest. When that is no longer the case, the alternatives will be used. Thus I would agree with Cosmic’s statement that we will never "run out" of oil. If natural reserves run low, then we will stop using them as they become more and more expensive and alternatives become more competitive.
T. Boone Pickens is an interesting fellow, and obviously not dumb, but he’s not the only smart observer in the market, and it seems to me like this version of the Malthusian Fallacy is just like all the others: it fools smart people all the time.
It’s also important not to overlook that Mr. Pickens’s main "stopgap" solution is to move to natural gas in place of oil; and Mr. Pickens just happens to be heavily invested in natural gas. He stands to make a bit of money if his plan is followed. Nothing wrong with that; but it means that he may not be the most unbiased commentator on this subject.
T. Boone Pickens is an interesting fellow, and obviously not dumb, but he’s not the only smart observer in the market, and it seems to me like this version of the Malthusian Fallacy is just like all the others: it fools smart people all the time.
Dean, my jaw tightens with lips pinched to a thin line whenever I hear Pickens name. He is has the Texas legislature in his pocket, using eminent domain for his private enterprise (wind power) land purchases.
He also has acquired taxpayer-guaranteed municipal bonds to the tune of $2.2 billion to finance the cost of a water pipeline. The water pipeline is just a ruse to piggyback power lines for the wind farm.
I posted about it here.
Sandi, good to know.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:PU200611_Fig1.png#file
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
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