Letters to the Editor
DLF
Published Letters: 252 Editor's Choice: 23
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We're still in the era of cheap energy
[Read the article: Why $140-a-barrel oil is no surprise]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm willing to bet that everyone who's still around in twenty years will look back on $4/gallon gas and $140/bbl oil as the good old days when energy was cheap.
Story: thirty years ago, living in a little rural village in Spain and struggling to learn the language, I tried telling people about the effects of the oil embargo on the US economy. The shock of going suddenly from 30 cent gas to over a dollar a gallon! Gas lines, rationing, smaller cars; the whole 70s thing. The problem was that, when I converted $1/gallon into pesetas per liter, my patient listeners were shocked for a reason that I had completely failed to anticipate: gas in Spain was already close to $4 a gallon. (And that was in 1978 dollars!)
Living there taught me some valuable lessons in conservation, and I've run a pretty energy-efficient lifestyle for the past three decades. Relative to the average US citizen, that is. But it also taught me that $4 gas is not enough to get people to swear off the stuff.
Believe me, we've still "got it good" -- or, more accurately, we're still squandering an irreplaceable natural resource. Because the oil we burn today, whether we're driving our SUVs around the block to get to the gym or driving our overloaded Vespas on a weekly run to the natural food mart, is oil we will never, ever see again.
Why is oil getting expensive? The quick answer: because we're burning it. Next question.
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Northrop Grumman
[Read the article: Bush's top general quashed torture dissent]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Richard Myers retired from service on Oct. 1, 2005. Bush awarded Myers with the Presidential Medal of Freedom the following month. Myers was elected to the boards of two major U.S. defense contractors, United Technologies and Northrop Grumman, in 2006."
That would be the same Northrop Grumman that was mysteriously awarded a billion-dollar Air Force contract earlier this year, serving as the U.S. front company for the giant French military industry corporation EADS, in a deal that is currently being investigated for alleged corrupt dealings. Hmm.
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My ideal car...
[Read the article: Test drive: The Smart car is revolutionary]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]My ideal car would look (and ride and act) something like this:
http://www.aerorider.com/en/aerorider.html
Check out the "Movie" page. This thing makes the SmartCar look like a Hummer! Too bad it costs even more.
If only some forward-looking gazillionaire would put some of those mothballed GM plants and laid-off GM workers back in business manufacturing a practical alternative to the commuter auto like this... And put it on the market for (say) under $2500...
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Globalizations and technology
[Read the article: Globalization: Not such an endangered species after all]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Interesting article (as always), but I'm a little surprised by your reference to "the first great period of globalization, from roughly 1870 to the outbreak of World War I." I guess the implication is that earlier waves of globalization just weren't so "great," or what?
Surely the creation of globe-spanning empires by Portugal (1430s-1550) and Spain (1480s-1570), followed by England/Britain in the 1700s, count as periods of globalization. And, like more recent globalizations, they were all about trade. In our grade school textbooks, navigators like Magellan and Columbus are too often treated as "explorers" and "adventurers," neglecting the fact that their explorations were all about discovering new trade routes (not new continents).
Each of these periods of globalization were made possible by technological innovations (beginning with the Portuguese perfection of the first practical ocean-worthy vessels, the nao and the caravel, in the 1400s). Each reached a limit of growth based on the practical limitations of their transportation technology (a caravel can cross the Atlantic, but it takes weeks and weeks to do it) plus the unintented consequences of the connections it made (Spain created an empire in the Americas, but by introducing Old World pathogens it devastated the population of its new empire and slowed growth there to a crawl for the next four centuries). And each was superseded by the next wave of globalization when an upstart new competitor (most spectacularly, Britain in the 1700s) came up with a newer, faster way to connect trade routes.
Our current phase of globalization is better seen as the latest in a highly punctuated but ultimately interconnected stream of globalizations that go back, if you really want to push it, to the first colonization of the world by humans using hunter-gatherer technology in the dawn of (human) time.
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code language
[Read the article: George W. Bush: "Awesome!"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The author and the people she quotes seem pretty clueless about the common use of "awesome" in its original sense in the modern US evangelical movement. One of the most popular evangelical songs is about "our awesome God." Bush can make any word sound inappropriate, but at base this is evangelical code language.
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"Never sleep again..."
[Read the article: The K Chronicles]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Ah, those were the days! And weeks, and months, and (seemingly) years... Seriously, after no more than 12 months you should start getting enough sleep again to keep from collapsing in a narcoleptic heap in the middle of the day!
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Bush??
[Read the article: The Obama show lands in Israel]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"George W. Bush . . . turned out to be among the friendliest presidents ever to Israel."
With friends like Bush, who needs enemies?
Eight years of stagnation on the diplomatic front, deterioration in Gaza and the West Bank, steadily increasing occupation of the "territories," ongoing settler militancy and intransigence -- all aided and abetted by the silent president, who fails to see anything wrong with this picture.
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He should have had a jelly donut
[Read the article: Obama had cheering Germans; McCain had German sausage]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]McCain should have skipped the bratwurst and had a jelly donut instead, so that he could have upstaged Obama's flowing rhetoric with the truthful statement (drumroll, please): "Ich bin ein Berliner essen."