There are things we can do about it. They're called Government and Diplomacy.
We could encase all the science deniers in blocks of ice and deposit them into the Greenland glaciers. That would have a number of positive effects.
No. I haven't read that one and neither of you since Peter and the Wolf is a 1936 classical composition by Sergei Prokofiev, where the boy beats the wolf at the end and rescues his animal friends.
I believe what you meant to refer to is the Aesop fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf
Thanks for playing though.
Witty, true, apropos, and timely.
However, if the science deniers were interested in facts to begin with, you would not have needed to post that correction.
I did get a kick out of the nitwit telling people to read Peter and the Wolf though.
Blind faith in scientists is as illogical as blind faith in priests.
Science involves no faith. This fundamental misrepresentation of science as just another faith (with scientists acting as priests) is eating away at the US like a cancer. Science by definition is based on logic and data and is verifiable by external parties. In many ways science is the opposite of faith. When something is true, it is true whether or not you believe it to be so.
It sure is strange that the reality of the pump prices and the deficit counters around the country seem to show that the idea of liberal economic policies working to be more of a dream than reality.
Too bad it was conservative economic and foreign polices that brought us the wars and the recession in the first place. Go figure that repairing the worlds largest economy is costing a lot of cash. At least one of the wars is finally over. But it is clearly Obama's fault that Iran is going for the nukes instead of Iraq... (The preceding sentence is sarcasm, I know conservatives have a hard time with that too.)
The alternative was banks start to go bust because they could not finance their day to day activities.
If private banks cannot finance their day to day activities, their mismanagement should not be financed by the public. That just privatizes profit while socializing loss. There's not just one alternative, as you describe, but two: either the banks need to be allowed to fail (the "let it all burn" position, which I think we both agree is probably very unwise) or the funds need to be given only on the condition that the banks surrender their right to mismanage themselves: there need to be strings attached to public monies that go to private businesses. I'm sure the libertarians will mod that into oblivion, but they ought to be focusing their anger on the interference in the market represented by the lending of public funds in the first place: once you've interfered in the free market, you might as well go all the way and demand systemic changes to the institutions taking the public money. Sure, bailing out the banks is feasible, but that doesn't mean handing them a blank check to run an arbitrage scheme to buy Treasuries, and it sure doesn't mean handing them money without strings. Taking public money ought always to be a devil's bargain.
No money was "handed out". It was loaned against collateral (mostly treasuries and GSE bonds). People are conflating the lending of last resort function of the Federal Reserve with the bailouts of the Treasury (TARP, et al). The whole reason Europe is on fire is because the ECB isn't the lender of last resort like the Federal Reserve is. We get to watch in real time as the second largest global currency evaporates in large part because it lacks this backstop.
The real issue here isn't that the Fed made money available, but the disparity of interest rates between that at which the money was available to select parties and that which the open market would bear: that let the banks borrow massive quantities at virtually no interest, only to lend it back out at much higher interest rates. Pure arbitrage between the "emergency" funds' near-zero interest rate on a restricted market and the open market's willingness to pay interest. It's not even clear that the banks taking the loans were unhealthy--they may have just recognized the profitability of free temporary money that could be loaned out for more than it cost (arbitrage).
The alternative was banks start to go bust because they could not finance their day to day activities. Would that have been a problem given how smoothly Lehman Brothers went? The few billion the banks made on the discount window was dwarfed by the hundreds of billions they were hemorrhaging in asset and loan losses. The LIBOR rates of the open market were crazy high, and there was no liquidity behind them so using those rates for a comparison to determine "what the banks made" isn't really proper accounting. As soon as there was liquidity available and interbank lending started again, the LIBOR rates fell dramatically.
Genetics explains why you look like your father, and if you don't, why you should.
