Nothing But Words

The picture speaks for itself:

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(My driveway isn’t usually filled with trash – it’s stuff I was hauling out for a “bulk” trash pickup.) And here are a couple shots of Kai demonstrating his athletic skills (from his trip to Denver over Labor Day weekend)

Cross-posted at TPMCafe

Sharing headlines with hurricanes Katrina and Rita has been coverage of the United States’ limited and fragile oil refining capacity. We’ve seen gas prices soar not because of a lack of oil shipments to the US, but because the hurricanes have shut down refineries crucial to turning that oil into gasoline. The conventional wisdom that’s quickly emerged on the news channels is that we wouldn’t be in this situation if it weren’t for environmental regulations, and pressure from environmental groups, raising too many obstacles to the construction of new refineries. Is this the only reason, or is there more to the story?

Congress is already gearing up to loosen environmental regulations and “streamline” the approval process (i.e. block objections from local communities) for the construction of new refineries:

Congress got an earful from industry officials who argued for tax breaks to bolster capacity and complained that environmental regulations and ‘not in my backyard’ citizen movements had blocked efforts to build new refineries…Both parties are weighing measures to loosen environmental and permitting constraints for refineries.

As the saying goes, don’t believe the hype. While environmental regulations and NIMBY-ism are certainly a factor, of equal or greater importance is the fact that until now the industry hasn’t been particularly interested in building new refineries:

“Oil companies want to make money with refineries, and they did not want to get excess capacity by over-investing,” says Lehi German, president of Fundamental Petroleum Trends, a weekly newsletter. Oil companies felt that if America suddenly needed more gasoline or diesel fuel, “then import it.”

So the industry has placed profits ahead of investing in refining capacity, and – with the exception of this Christian Science Monitor article I quoted – the media seems content to go along with them pining the whole thing on environmentalists.

When Eidan was born, we didn’t think he looked much like Kai. But his appearance has been changing, and now we think he looks a lot like Kai. Here’s an infant picture of Kai next to a picture of Eidan, so you can judge for yourself (one thing that’s clear is how much bigger Eidan is, at an even younger age).

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Kai at ten weeks

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Eidan at six weeks

Eidan is a piglet. Here is my evidence:

Eating, quantity: at 4 weeks he was over 10 lbs, so he had increased his body weight by about 60% in one month. He’s six weeks old now, and we haven’t weighed him again, but my guess is he’s 12 lbs. He’s a very robust looking baby. Kai was never particularly large, so we’re wondering if Eidan is going to turn out to be less skinny than the rest of us, or if this is just a phase.

Eating, style: when he sees that bottle coming, he sometimes gets so excited that he grunts and snorts uncontrollably. Unlike Kai when he was an infant, Eidan is a very sloppy eater, with milk dribbling down his face as he tries to force as much milk out of the nipple as quickly as possible (an aside: I came across a great quote the other day: “the only intuitive user interface is the nipple, everything else is learned.”).

Odor: We bathe him almost every day, but there’s no denying Eidan is a stinky baby. It’s not just the diaper or dry milk – it’s BO. Actually, it’s mainly his head – he has stinky hair. Maria’s mother tells us there’s some ancient Chinese proverb about a stinky baby head being a sign of good fortune, but I am dubious.

In the not-pig related aspects of his development, Eidan continues to be a good nighttime sleeper. He’s up every 3 hours to eat, but he always goes right back to sleep. He’s much better than Kai was in this respect (we hardly slept for Kai’s first 2 years). Until a few days ago he was a good napper too, but now it’s much more difficult to get him to sleep in the day – hopefully it’s just a phase.

By this time with Kai, we had some sense of his personality, at least in terms of general temperament. But so far Eidan is still an enigma. He’s actually fairly sour most of the time – he typically has a look of general displeasure on his face. But I did get my first smile over the weekend. We had been trying without success for a while to get a smile out of him. On Sunday Maria’s friend Julia was visiting, and she facetiously suggested we pet him like a cat. I said, “oh, like this”, and I stroked him under his chin, and viola – a big smile! We’re looking forward to more.

You know that flap in the front of men’s underwear? There’s no special name for it – it’s just “that flap in the front of men’s underwear.” Well Kai found that to be unsatisfactory, so he gave it a name: The Peniser. My guess is that he derived it by combining “penis” with “launcher.”

I think he may have a future in marketing.

While bouncing Eidan on my shoulder last night, I endured Bush’s monotonic, robotic Hurricane Katrina speech. Bush is fairly good at rhetoric geared towards aggression, but a total failure at feeling people’s pain. Where is Bill Clinton when you need him? (his remarks at the Oklahoma City memorial service were so moving they gave him a 12-point boost in the polls). But what matters most is substance. On that count, Bush said one thing that angered me, and another that scared me. Josh Marshall picked up on the same two things, and has already blogged about them:

Let’s see. What was the problem with Michael Brown exactly? Let’s see. No expertise or experience for the job. Got the gig because he was pals with Bush’s political fixer. Also a political loyalist.

So to learn the lesson and get back on track, to run the recovery, President Bush picks Karl Rove [Bush's long-time chief political strategist, whose sole area of expertise is running political campaigns].

That’s great.

Do we really all need the paint by numbers version of this picture [see Paul Krugman's Not the New Deal op-ed].

Then there’s the president’s great line from the speech: “It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces.”

No, it’s not. Actually, every actual fact that’s surfaced in the last two weeks points to just the opposite conclusion. There was no lack of federal authority to handle the situation. There was faulty organization, poor coordination and incompetence.

Show me the instance where the federal government was prevented from doing anything that needed to be done because it lacked the requisite authority.

This is like what we were talking about a few days ago. This is how repressive governments operate — mixing inefficiency with authoritarian tendencies.

You don’t repair disorganized or incompetent government by granting it more power. You fix it by making it more organized and more competent. If conservatism can’t grasp that point, what is it good for?

I was drafting some thoughts on where we stand 4 years after 9/11, but I was just too tired to pull it together. Fortunately, someone else wrote what is by far the best assesment I’ve seen: Mark Danner’s New York Times Magazine cover story Taking Stock of the Forever War. Normally I quote the key passages of articles I cite, but this is the kind of essay that is so expertly weaved together that you have to take it all in – there is no paragraph or two that I can grab that would sum it up.

It’s long but well worth reading. If you don’t like reading a lot on the screen, go to the printer friendly version and print it out.

That was a long and unplanned interruption in my blogging. Between an ongoing lack of sleep, the start of my class, and trying to meet a deadline at work, the blog has suffered. I’ll probably post less frequently until Eidan starts sleeping through the night, which he’ll hopefully start doing when he’s about 3 months old. But I’ll try to avoid going this long without a post again.

Today’s trivia: I should explain my greeting “ahoy!” For years I’ve used it in emails and IM. It was Alexander Graham Bell’s preferred phone greeting, but it lost out to “hello,” which Edison preferred. My feeling is that the electronic medium calls for a different greeting (I don’t have a profound philosophical justification for this – “hello” in the written form just feels too flat as a greeting, especially for IM). Apparently English is the only language where the greeting used in-person and on the phone is the same, so it’s not unusual to have different greetings for different contexts. According to this NPR story, “hello” likely comes from “halloo” (also a nautical greeting) and caught on as an in-person greeting and as a phone greeting around the same time, in the 1880s (the phone was invented in the 1870s).