http://devilsdictionarydefiled.com/blog No News is Good News Sat, 26 Jun 2010 19:39:31 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en "What the hell did we do to deserve this?" - Tony Hayward CEO of BP after the Deepwater Horizon spill. "Who cares, it's done, end of story, will probably be fine" - unidentified BP employee in an e-mail before the Deepwater Horizon spill (Economist 19JUN2010 p65.) writing about ... http://devilsdictionarydefiled.com/blog/?p=358 Any science fiction or futurist writer worth his weight in muddy water would tell you that one of the more realistic plots for how civilization grinds to a a bloody end involves protracted resource wars between major players. There is a sense in which both of the first two ... http://devilsdictionarydefiled.com/blog/?p=357 Who's Bad? From all the press about Obama and the oil well, you'd think that the President himself descended a mile beneath the Gulf and chewed through the steel pipeline with his own teeth. Had he actually done this, then I think one could argue that the oil spill in the ... http://devilsdictionarydefiled.com/blog/?p=356 The idea of comparing the asset bubble and the recent contraction against eight hundred years of financial information and anecdote is a powerful one. Human nature is pretty much the same as it has always been; and investment trends are driven in part by search for value and in ... http://devilsdictionarydefiled.com/blog/?p=355 The perfect is the enemy of the good. - Volaire Read any official review of the Epson photo printer R1900 and you will find nothing but raves. It prints dots smaller and more accurately than any other. And it produces skin tones like no other. Furthermore, because it is ... http://devilsdictionarydefiled.com/blog/?p=354 "When GM goes bust, we're all in trouble." That way my father's point of view in the mid 1960's. At that point in history, GM was the biggest auto company in the world. Perhaps it was the biggest company in the world. Now it is in bankrupcy. Its ... http://devilsdictionarydefiled.com/blog/?p=352 There was a terrific graph in the Wall Street Journal yesterday (pC1). It showed pay in the financial sector normalized against pay in all other non-farm endeavors over the last century. A hundred years ago the ratio was around 1.5. For every dollar people in other non-farm ... http://devilsdictionarydefiled.com/blog/?p=351 For some time I have been playing with the idea that good political decisions can only be made when the issues are framed by the right thesis and antithesis. When these are all categorically wrong, a good decision is impossible. When even one side is wrong, the chance of ... http://devilsdictionarydefiled.com/blog/?p=350 Dave Neiwert and Sara Robinson over at Orcinus have been doing an exemplary job of keeping us up-to-date on the hate-mongering of the authoritarian far right. It's a place I like to go when I wonder if it's just me or if the world really is going crazy. And ... http://devilsdictionarydefiled.com/blog/?p=349 It's a curious thing; almost as if the editorial board at the NYT doesn't have time to read the articles its reporters turn in. On page A7 (01May09) there is an article by Benjamin Weiser entitled "Afghan Linked to Taliban Sentenced to Life in Drug Trafficking Case." At ... http://devilsdictionarydefiled.com/blog/?p=348