Thursday, June 24, 2010

Headlines in the News

You absolutely have to wonder who writes the headlines sometimes. Here is a headline from today's Washington Post: "Top Defense Officials Say They 'Fully Support' Obama on Removing McChrystal."

Well, duh! Given that McChrystal was removed from command of US forces in Afghanistan because of interviews where it sounded like he did not 'fully support' the administration and every member of the civilian staff, what would you expect them to say? They may think it was a terrible idea to fire the guy, and they would publicly say they fully support the decision.

You have to wonder what the troops on the line think about this kerfluffle. Actually, I can guess. I bet their thinking runs something like this: "The general screwed up and criticized the civilians, and they punished him by sending him home to the States. If I screw up like that, can I get punished the same way?"

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

The more things change ...

Recently I have been reading some of the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the nineteenth century philosopher and writer. In his essay titled Self-Reliance, I came across the following passage:

“…do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men
in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee thou foolish philanthropist that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold: for them I will go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneouspopular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies; -- though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.”

Written in the 1840’s, this hit me like a thunderbolt. There really is nothing new under the sun. The only change to the terms of the debate in the last 160 years has been that now Emerson’s philanthropist would argue that it is the government’s job to “put all poor men in good situations,” and Emerson must give his money in taxes to support this worthy goal.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

BP Oil Spill: What Not To Do

Although BP is having some success capturing the oil from their undersea well, some is still escaping into the Gulf, adding to the enormous amount of oil already spilled. As the oil slick continues to spread, and oil begins to come ashore in coastal communities, the sense of frustration in the general populace continues to mount.

I have been reading a lot of wild proposals coming from both op-ed writers and the commenters on news sites. I thought I might react to several of the most preposterous.

Boycott BP
This has got to be the dumbest idea yet put forward. Let’s “punish” BP by not buying their gasoline. Even if it were possible to get enough people acting in concert to impact BP’s sales, this would be a bad idea. Cleaning up this spill is going to take years, and a ton of money. If BP is going to be held responsible, they are going to need a continuing stream of cash flow to pay for this mess. They are going to get that money by continuing with their on-going business of producing and selling oil and gas. Starving your cash cow is never a good idea.

Turn the situation over to the armed forces
What are they going to do? Defend the beaches by shooting the oil as it tries to come ashore? Launch air strikes against an oil slick? I was in the army, and I was actually in a Corps of Engineers unit that had earthmoving and construction capabilities. One thing we were not trained or equipped to do was clean up spilled oil. Even more ludicrous is the idea that the military will take over efforts to shut down the leaking well. All they can do is provide unskilled labor. The know-how, gear, and systems for cleaning up will have to be provided by someone else.

A variant of this is the plea for the government to take over the effort to plug the leaking well. Nobody in the government knows jack-all about undersea well drilling operations. There is no evidence anywhere that BP’s management and operating personnel aren’t doing everything they can to plug this well, and they seem to be throwing all their resources into trying to solve the technical problem.

Criminal prosecutions against BP executives
I read a news story earlier this week that said people being polled wanted to see criminal prosecutions by a ratio of two to one. To even conduct the opinion poll is an example of mobacracy at its worst. I am hard put to imagine what the crime is supposed to be that the senior executives committed. Did they knowingly buy defective blowout preventers because they were cheap? Did they direct personnel to falsify test reports and bypass safety protocols? No evidence of any such activity has come to light.

Stop drilling oil wells
The fantasy here is that screwing in compact fluorescent bulbs and driving hybrid cars will drop our energy usage to the point that we can stop using petroleum. Even if we cut our energy usage in half, we still need to face the fact that all of our transportation systems are totally dependent on liquid fuels. Unless we want to outlaw air conditioning and airplanes, and put everyone on a bicycle, we’re going to continue to need oil to make our civilization function.

Frustrating as it is to watch the live video feed showing oil continuing to pour out BP’s well at the bottom of the Gulf, they will eventually solve the problem and seal off the leak. Containing, and then cleaning up all of the leaked oil will take years, maybe decades, and BP should have to pay, both for the clean up efforts and for the losses other people are going to suffer as a result of this disaster. As a going concern, BP has the size and scope of operations to compensate the victims of this colossal accident.

But striking out at the company as a result of built up frustration won’t solve anybody’s problems.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Helen Thomas: Did she really say that?

At 89 years old, Helen Thomas is both the oldest, and the longest serving member of the White House press corps. As the longest serving member, she not only gets a front row seat at the daily press briefings; by custom, she has the right to throw out the first question at the President's press conferences. By virtue of her longevity, she has transcended her position to become an institution.

She also appears to be a raving anti-Semite.

Last week she was captured on camera giving her opinion regarding the Israeli-Palestinian problems in the Middle East.

Now, you can deplore Israeli policy towards the occupied West Bank. You can call Israeli military actions against the Gaza strip completely disproportionate, compared to the provocations offered by Hamas. You can even make the argument that Israeli has ceded the moral high ground of a democratic society, and created an apartheid regime.

What you really can't do is state that Jews living in the Middle East should "Go home...to Germany and to Poland...and to everywhere else."



You might be able to make the excuse for Ms. Thomas that she has suffered enough microstrokes in her frontal lobes that it has seriously affected her judgement. Maybe she really doesn't mean, or even understand, the implications of her statements.

Be that as it may, it's time for her to go. When she recites what is basically the Hamas party line, she demonstrates that she is unfit for any position as a responsible journalist. The Hearst newspaper syndicate needs to fire her.

And people bitch about Rush Limbaugh.

Friday, June 4, 2010

Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

In high school (a long time ago), I took a class in Science Fiction as Literature. One of the themes of the course was the Frankenstein story.

Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant scientist, builds his creature without considering the consequences of creating artificial life. Once animated, Frankenstein is unable to control his monster, which goes on to destroy everything that Frankenstein holds dear. Finally, Frankenstein himself perishes in the attempt to destroy his creation.

At the heart of the Frankenstein myth is the fear of the unintended consequences of new and developing technologies. The Terminator movies are a version of the myth. Jurassic Park, and most of the other novels of Michael Crichton, merely ring changes on the theme.

I’m put in mind of Frankenstein by watching news coverage of the BP oil spill disaster. Seeing live video of that dark, mysterious cloud billowing out of the pipe, a mile under the surface. Watching satellite photos of the spreading oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, spreading its tentacles further and further. The oil pouring up from the bottom of the sea is the monster.

Filling the role of mad scientist, BP’s drilling crews created the monster. And with every failure to stem the flow of oil, the lack of control over what they have created becomes more apparent.

In every good horror story, the real fear comes from the anticipation of what is going to happen, not the action itself. Life copies art in this respect as well. As of this writing, no one knows how much oil is eventually going to leak into the Gulf, or what the final environmental tally will be. We just know that it is going to be bad.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

The biggest sinkhole ever.

10-06-01_1444_guatemala_sinkhole_2010-1.jpg
Holy Cow!

This is an image of the sinkhole that opened up in Guatemala City over the weekend as a result of a tropical storm.

It looks like something out of a science fiction movie. Like the one where aliens burn a hole in the crust of the planet from space. Or maybe like the one where the supervillain activates his seismo ray device and chews up the heart of a city. Or maybe like the one where the hero realizes that all of what he thinks is real is actually a computer generated illusion.

Astonishingly, no one was killed when the sinkhole opened up, although it did swallow part of a building.

Violence vs Non-violence

I just watched the video of Israeli commandos rappelling onto one of the ships of the Gaza relief convoy. It looks like the commandos and the passengers on the ships are working off two different scripts. The Israelis are working off the standard non-violent resistance script. The Israeli role is to play the heavy, intercepting a peaceful humanitarian mission in international waters. The “activists” on the convoy, by peacefully resisting, establish the moral high ground, and focus international attention on the justice of their cause.

The folks on the convoy were apparently not working off that script. They were attempting to repel enemy boarders. There is nothing non-violent about clubbing someone to death with a metal bar, which is clearly what the passengers were attempting to do.

The Israelis were clearly surprised by the ferocity of the reaction to their boarding. Near the end of the video you can see one of the commandos pointing a paintball gun at the passengers. I’m thinking they wouldn’t have been carrying paintball guns if they had planned on things turning as ugly as they did.

Of course, at some stage of the proceedings the commandos declined to be swarmed and beaten to death. They pulled out the real guns they were carrying and used them. The escalation of the violence caused ten times the international reaction that a non-violent incident would have engendered.

This has become an public relations disaster for Israel.