Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Great Moments in "Duh!"

The New York Times put out an editorial this week regarding Tom Delay, the former House majority leader. It included this breathtaking assertion:

But many of Mr. DeLay’s actions remain legal only because lawmakers have chosen
not to criminalize them.


This is the New York frigging Times, for cripes sake! I do not often agree with their political positions, but I always respected their smarts, at least till now. I know they have spell checkers, and I know they have fact checkers. Maybe they need thought checkers. Repeat after me, guys: “I will not print tautological statements above the fold.”

The statement does reveal an interesting mind set, however. Apparently, if the editors of the Times don’t like something, that means it ought to be illegal. It is clear that the Times thinks Tom Delay is a Very Bad Man, and must be punished even though his actions were all legal.

This is kind of like the left wing version of the current complaints about the Fourteenth Amendment. “I don’t like it when the children of illegal immigrants become citizens, solely because they were born in this country.” Really? What do you propose as an alternative? And while we’re on the subject, on what do you base your claim for citizenship?

Gridlock in government keeps looking better and better.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Ground Zero Mosque

At the center of the controversy over the proposed “Ground Zero mosque” in New York City lies a dichotomy between two opposing concepts: you can have an absolute right to pursue a course of action, and yet it is absolutely wrong to pursue said course of action.

The backers of the mosque have a right to build a house of worship anywhere zoning allows. The First Amendment, and over two hundred years of case law, establishes that fact quite clearly. However, I can see how some people could find it offensive to site a mosque only two blocks from the site of a massive attack upon America that was committed in the name of Islam.

I don’t often say things like this, but I do feel President Obama has struck the correct tone in his comments regarding this issue. You can defend the right to build the mosque, without being in favor of the project. In any case, this is a local issue, not a national one.

The Republicans howling about this project are doing the worst kind of demagoguery. They’re throwing stones, knowing that they don’t have to accept responsibility for actually taking any kind of action. If they were the party in power, they would be defending First Amendment rights as well. If Democrats were pointing this out, instead of calling Republicans bigots, they would have a more effective argument as well.

On the other hand, commentators who claim this is only a “cultural center” and not a mosque are deluding themselves, and attempting to delude the public as well. I don’t care that the plans for the fifteen story building include gym and an auditorium. There is a large Southern Baptist church only a couple of miles from my home. On their campus is an events center, an athletic center with four basketball courts, a school, and meeting rooms. Nobody is deceived that all of that is not ancillary to the real purpose, which is a church.

Ultimately, those offended by the presence of the Cordoba Center will have to make their peace with the project, for the concept of freedom of religion trumps all of the objections. And I think that is the best argument for allowing the project to proceed. The World Trade Center was attacked by extremists whose world view called for very little tolerance. What could be a greater repudiation of that world view than to promote tolerance by shutting up and allowing the project to proceed.?

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Federal vs. Private Employment

The Cato Institute had an interesting analysis on their web site. They aggregated the compensation of all Federal employees, and compared that to the aggregated compensation for all private sector employees.

The first figures presented were for average cash compensation:
Federal Employees: $81,258
Private Sector Employees: $50,462

Federal employees average much higher wage and salary than the private sector. However, the difference does not become eyepopping until you include the public versus private benefits packages:
Federal Employees: $123,049
Private Sector Employees: $61,051

Well, the Feds get better pay, and they get much better benefits. But they have to put up with higher risk of getting fired or laid off, right? Oh, wait, no, it’s the other way around. The annual risk of getting laid off or fired:
Federal Employees: 7.7%
Private Sector Employees: 24.1%

Not only is the private sector (i.e. the taxpayers) footing the bill for this disparity, but the gap in all of these measures has increased over the last ten years.

You can’t call them civil servants. Better to call them civil masters.

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C

One theme that has been consistently sounded throughout the saga of the BP oil spill has been that “BP didn’t have a plan.” The idea is that it is irresponsible to drill for oil in deep water without knowing how to turn the well off if things go wrong. The proof that BP did not have a plan is that it took over 100 days before they were able to devise a method of capping the well, and that several of the approaches they tried (the top shot, and the large containment cap) did not work as planned.

Now, I’m no petroleum engineer, but I suspect that characterization is unfair. BP did have a plan for what to do if things went wrong with their wellhead, a mile under the water. That plan was to use the blowout preventer to seal off the well in the event of problems.

The blowout preventer is a large, expensive piece of equipment that is installed at every wellhead. Its function is to automatically seal off the well if pressures inside the well exceed specified levels. Indeed, the pressures inside the well are used to drive the mechanical rams that pinch shut the opening inside the well pipe. Failing an automatic shutoff, the blowout preventer also has a manual shutdown mode as well.

Blowout preventers are a well proven piece of technology, having been originally developed in the 1920’s. Used worldwide, there are many instances of their stopping oil gushers from occurring in multiple environments throughout the world.

Of course, the blowout preventer installed on the Deepwater Horizon rig failed to work on the day of the accident, allowing the explosion that sank the rig. That was as bad as it had ever gotten on an oil drilling site. A couple of days later BP sent down a deep water submersible, to manually close off the blowout preventer. That’s when things got worse, because turning the manual valve had no impact on the gusher of oil spewing into the Gulf.

When Plan A fails, you go to Plan B. If the combination of Plan A and Plan B has always worked, you don’t need to prepare a Plan C ahead of time. That is the situation the BP engineers found themselves in a little over 100 days ago.

The building where I work, like almost all commercial buildings in this country, is protected from fire hazard by a sprinkler system. In addition, we have fire extinguishers strategically located throughout the building. The experience of BP in handling the Deepwater Horizon disaster would be like having a fire break out in our building, and the sprinklers failed to pop. Then, when we rushed to the fire extinguishers, we found that they were all empty.

If we then had to invent the Fire Department, while simultaneously trying to capture all of the smoke to control air pollution, that would be analogous to what BP has tried to do in the last three months. The miraculous thing is that they have eliminated three quarters of the spilled oil while using a mix of proven and invented techniques to close off the broken well.

There was plenty of opportunity for negligence in the operation of the Deepwater Horizon rig. But the real question will be why did Plan A and Plan B not work, not why was there no Plan C on tap. The central issue will be: why did the blowout preventer fail?

Maybe this incident shows the need for a Plan C. Perhaps equipment recapping undersea wellheads needs to be stockpiled, ready for use if an incident like this ever happens again. But that wasn’t obvious in advance, and I’m not sure it is obvious even now.

One thing I do know: experience is what you get when things go wrong.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Where did the oil go?

A panel of experts from the Interior Department and NOAA has released a report today estimating that 74% of the oil that gushed into the Gulf of Mexico from the damaged BP oil well is already gone. About 20% of the spill was skimmed from the surface, or collected by BP and burned off in “flaring” operations.

Where did the rest of the oil go? Apparently a lot of it simply evaporated. A large portion of the oil was “bioremediated.” That’s a fancy word that means bacteria in the water are eating the oil, breaking it down into water and carbon dioxide. This is a natural process that has been greatly accelerated, both by summer storms moving through the Gulf, and by the enormous amounts of chemical dispersants dumped on the oil slick by BP. The dispersants break up the oil into teeny tiny droplets. The more surface area, the more the bacteria can get at the oil.

It is not a bad idea to be skeptical about these kinds of announcements. How did they get to 74%? Why not 71%, or 76%? Still, this is not BP’s estimate. This is a theoretically independent government panel. They’ve got no reason to low ball the amount of oil left to be cleaned up.

If this is true, it is an extraordinary claim. The implication is that in light of what is widely claimed as the worst environmental disaster in the nation’s history, three quarters of the problem was cleaned up in real time. They haven’t finished cementing the well shut yet, and 74% of the oil is already gone.

If the efforts of both man and nature continue at this rate (unlikely), the oil spill will be gone by the end of hurricane season. The oil that has already hit beaches and marshes will still have to be cleaned up, and I’m sure that somebody is going to have to scoop up tar balls that float ashore for years to come. However, it begins to look like the worst of this mess is already behind us.

BP has been widely excoriated for not having a plan in place to deal with the situation ahead of time. I think people have been selling the company short. They have brought enormous resources to bear in a remarkably short time, and that huge effort seems to be working. The media has underestimated what the can-do attitude of Americans can accomplish, when faced with an emergency, and backed up by a butt load of money.