From the CATO institute, frequently identified as a libertarian think-tank:
Paying More Than Ever For Gas? Not If Buying Power Is Considered, in summary excerpt:
Ask a free marketeer what government should do about rising gasoline prices and the usual reply is "nothing," because "high prices provide incentives to conserve and for companies to deliver new supplies." But as gas prices near all-time highs, consumers are hardly flinching.
Sure, they'll shake their fists at the oil companies if asked. But gasoline consumption is actually higher today (by 1%) than it was last year even though pump prices increased by 15% over the same period.
It seems that sellers can increase prices without harming sales a whit.
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The percentage of our personal income that we spend on fuel, however, has fluctuated a great deal more than that. When pump prices go up, people adjust by spending less on other aspects of driving, like new car purchases, automotive maintenance, new paint jobs and stereos. Over time, they'll buy more fuel-efficient cars to reduce the amount of gasoline they need to buy.
In short, consumers _ not oil companies _ exercise control over how much they spend to get from here to there.
From Bill Moyers, the question:
Are Science and Religion at Odds?, in which, Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS), Republican presidential hopeful is quoted while he proceeds to contradict himself, rightabout here:
The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason. I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths.
By that manner of logic, so-called "spiritual truths" would need not be governed by reason. Scary, no?
In a statement excerpted in the same article, Bishop Schori puts it well, I think:
In the Middle Ages, theology was called the Queen of the Sciences. There are ways of knowing. It is our hunger for radical certainty that leads some people to assume that they're incompatible.
I like the sound of that, There are ways of knowing. I think that that philosophy, as such, could be reconciled even with some of Buddhist ... doctrine (if one may say there is any such thing as "Buddhist doctrine" -- rather, discourses in a context of Buddhism??? but there must be some way to qualify those discourses, further -- discourses of Buddhist scholars?)
(Incidentally, there's a book called Ways of Seeing. It's a short little work, pretty well-made, and bearing some contemporary relevance, "in this multimedia age". I'd say that it covers some matters entailing some phenomena studied in Gestalt psychology (viz). It was a reading assignment in a collegiate literature course that once I was a student in -- I had neither heard nor read of Gestalt psychology, at the time.)
Then, this one could bear some personal relevance to who's writing this. I say this, after having read that the Army is making a special 'command' about Africa -- AfriCom. (Y'all heard of the movie and/or the book, Blackhawk Down, right?) The article, another item from the CATO institute: Africa's Zimbabwe Problem. Excerpt follows.
Zimbabwe was recently elected to chair the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), to the dismay of human-rights groups and nations, like the United States, that would like the United Nations to take its responsibilities seriously. This election is more than a travesty; it is a cruel demonstration of disregard for the suffering of the people of Zimbabwe on the part of the U.N. and those African countries that helped Zimbabwe to the chairmanship.
Hey heyo, that reminds me of a Megadeth song, United Abominations (wikipedia)(eMpTyV)(Megadeth). It's the title-track from a kick-ass album, and it's a commentary on the United Nations. (I might trust only Megadeth, now -- and you know, Henry Rollins, also -- to pull that off, well.)
SG on politics? YOU BET.