Month: August 2008

Let Limbaugh mock:

The Bush Administration estimates that expanded offshore drilling could increase oil production by 200,000 bbl. per day by 2030. We use about 20 million bbl. per day, so that would meet about 1% of our demand two decades from now. Meanwhile, efficiency experts say that keeping tires inflated can improve gas mileage 3%, and regular maintenance can add another 4%. Many drivers already follow their advice, but if everyone did, we could immediately reduce demand several percentage points. In other words: Obama is right.

Chicago, Illinois, 1.30 pm.

"I don’t know if you know this. John McCain is looking for someone for vice president who has more economic expertise than he does. So congratulations to all of you, you’re on the short list," – John Kerry.

John Yoo’s latest self-defense.

Leave it to Jonah:

An explosive fad in the 1980s, postmodernism was and is an enormous intellectual hustle in which left-wing intellectuals take crowbars and pick axes to anything having to do with the civilizational Mount Rushmore of Dead White European Males.

Philosophy is easy when you know nothing about it, isn’t it?

Who knew? There is an organization dedicated to "giving back the night." And there’s an imminent conference on the subject in Vienna.

Some smart observations from Publius:

I’m a child of the rural South. But you know what? Actual racism is a lot less common there — we have a ways to go, but there has been real progress on that front. The more serious problem is white resentment. A lot of white people honestly think they have been significantly deprived of various things because of minorities. And it’s hard to overstate how deeply these feelings run.

It’s not so much animosity toward people who are different — it’s the animosity of the aggrieved. They feel like they are the victims. That’s why race is a losing issue for Obama — it’s not so much that people are racist, but that they feel they are being punished because they’re white (yes, I know how completely absurd this must sound to the black community).

This is the poisoned fruit of that poisonous, if well-intentioned, policy of affirmative action.

A reader writes:

Can we not equate negative ads on issues (energy) with negative ads on character (celebrity)?  Obama comes out an hits McCain on energy, sure it’s negative, but it’s above the belt.  McCain is just peddling trash. 

Frankly, I think the voters will see through it, just as they did in the primary.  Every response from the Clinton campaign to a negative Obama statement was "what happened to the politics of hope?" and it just didn’t do anything, because they went personal.  And it’s not as if Obama can’t get dirty, the health care mailers in the primary seemed particularly low (in a Dem on Dem race that is).  However, it was almost always about policy.

The second half of the allegedly forged document is even more interesting.

Before Emerson and Asimov, and Auden, there was Aristotle, as recalled by Cicero: ?

So Aristotle says brilliantly: If there were men who had always lived underground in fine and well-lit houses which had been adorned with statues and paintings, and equipped with all the things which those who are considered well-to-do possess in abundance, who had, however, never come forth into the upper world, but had learned by fame and hearsay of the existence of certain divine powers and natures, and had then at some time, through the jaws of the earth being opened, been able to come forth from those hidden regions,

and to pass into these parts which we inhabit,? when they had suddenly obtained a sight of the land and seas and sky, and had marked the vastness of the clouds, and the force of the winds, and had beheld the sun, and had marked not only its size and beauty, but also its power, since by diffusing light over the whole sky it caused day, ?and when, again, after night had overshadowed the earth, they then perceived the whole sky studded and adorned with stars, and the change in the light of the moon as it alternately waxed and waned, and the rising and setting of all these bodies, and the fixity and unchangeableness of their courses through all eternity, ?when they saw those things, they would assuredly believe both that the gods existed and that these mighty works proceeded from them.?

Yes, a Dish reader sent it in. It’s from On the Nature of the Gods, 2.95.