The Bakken oil fields in the Dakotas may have tappable reserves of 100 billion barrels. Four interesting things to me here. First, the oil is only extractable because of advances in drilling technology. Second, the cost is being guestimated at $70 a barrel. Also, the analysis of the amount of oil in the field has been estimated from as low as 100 million barrels to as high as almost a trillion barrels and, because of the upper end of the estimates, has recently been fodder for the late night conspiracy talk show circuit. If the US can ramp up production, it will certainly change the world market a bit but with the high cost per barrell, it's certainly not the death knell for OPEC that some folks are hoping for. A US Sentate report on the exploratory analysis is due out tomorrow. The most interesting thing, to me, is that a world where $70 per barrel oil extraction is profitable is most likely also a world where production of oil substitutes is profitable.

Inspired by TE's comments on Communitariannism, I did a bit of Googling, an article from the late nineties was one of the top hits. The ABCs of Communitarianism. Zakariah's take?

Communitarianism was supposed to be a third way, neither liberal nor conservative, that charted a new course for philosophy and politics. But as this primer suggests, it has become a collection of meaningless terms, used as new bottles into which the old wine of liberalism and conservatism is poured.

By way of Club Troppo, I came across a link to Sandy Levinson's Max Weber, Iraq, and the Second Amendment. Which is interesting mostly for the attempt to apply Weberian thinking to the modern day. I think Levinson misses the obvious, namely that the sorts of weapons commonplace in Iraq are about of the same relative magnitude as the sorts of weapons commonplace during the US Revolutionary War and early federal period. The last I read, each household in Iraq was allowed to keep one assault rifle and more than one handgun. Of course, if the SCOTUS rules according to one line of questioning used in the recent hearing, the floodgates may open in the US for civilians to have RPGs.

The May issue of The Atlantic has an excellent review of Bill Cosby's present speaking mission regarding, in part, the subject of public shame. Unfortunately, it was on my `to read' stack on my desk before I wrote my Doxos article on shame last week. Also, unfortunately, The Atlantic hasn't put it online yet. (Those slackers are only up to putting up the April issue.) But the author, Ta-Nehesi Coates, does a good job at offering a good critique of the practicality of Plato's suggestion of modifying public behavior by use of shame. Not that he mentions Plato by name. What he actually offers in the conclusion to the article is a well written assertion that Cosby's thesis rests on a revisionist, and incorrect, view of history. Most of the article is centered around The Pound Cake Speech

The more I study Latin, the more I see the base upon which the view that the Romans were more interested in practical matters while the Greeks were more interested in theory. In many ways, Greek seems like a more primitive language but it is primitive in a way that makes ideas seem more concrete. For example, abstract nouns in Greek tend to be one gender or the other mostly in line with stereo typical conceptions of masculine and feminine while the Latin counterparts tend to be neuter. This would seem to be counter-intuitive to my point at first glance. But I think it has the effect of making it easier to contemplate abstractions when it is easier to form a mental image based upon the personification of an idea. Neuter beings, it seems to me, are more difficult for most people to mentally picture. Along the same vein, the Latin we've learned for `the world' or `the universe' is mundus from which English takes the mundane, earthly things. But in Greek, the first choice for `the world' or `the universe' is cosmos, which has arrived in English much the same way as in Greek. While I'm certain that there are other words in both Greek and Latin that are more exact analogues one way or the other, based on the assumption that the words we've learned first will be the ones most common in use for an idea, I can see why some would argue that Romans were more down to earth and the Greeks, more focused on theory and pontification.

Not that I've been a huge proponent of that theory, mind you. Between Greek Fire, the armor of the Hoplite, and some of the old machines from antiquity, I've always thought that the Greeks had plenty of grounding in the practical. Not to mention the engineering that underlies the Acropolis.

Speaking of linguistics, NPR had an interesting bit the other day on what the notion of national conversation means.

That is all.