Blogito, Ergo Sum
by Gregg Calkins
5 May 2010, a Wednesday
It took me a long time today to recognize that today is Cinco de Mayo. It just goes to show you how much more influence Mexico has on the U.S. than on the rest of Latin America.
Another one bites the dust early? I had to laugh at this:
Dionne:
He pondered retirement before, but stayed on due to the 'arrogance' of President Bush.Obama is just so damn humble that Obey feels safe leaving things with him.
As the struggle in the Gulf continues, I’m still puzzled a bit. People who build scientific instruments and crucial machines typically build into them a large number of fail-safe redundant devices, right down to a "dead-man switch". When they roll you into the MRI machine or the CAT-scan or before the x-ray camera, all sorts of protections for the user have been built into the equipment. The reason is that while one might fail, or even two, the more you build in the safer the equipment gets.
Blow-out preventers are machines of this nature. I find it rather odd that everything should have failed at the same time, despite the intentional safety redundancies. But why? I couldn’t help but think about the "why" when I read
this article:The catastrophic oil spill unfolding in the gulf has provided the environmental community with a rare opportunity to shift public opinion on climate and energy issues, an opening on which it has been quick to capitalize. ...
"It's very difficult, in our society, to cut through the din and get people to listen and pay attention," said Friends of the Earth Managing Director David Hirsch, whose group is preparing TV ads on the issue. "Unfortunately, these are the times when it happens. These are the moments when you can be heard."
Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, questioned environmentalists' tactics. "It's unfortunate that some would seize on a tragic accident to push a political agenda," Gerard said. "We don't have the facts yet."
While the exact cause of the blowout remains unclear, activists have used the spill to bolster their argument that the risks of offshore oil exploration outweigh its benefits, and that the United States would be better off focused on promoting alternative energy sources.
We know in the past that Greenpeace, et al, have done some pretty serious and dramatic things in an effort to save the whales, etc, and they have some pretty extreme members. If you don’t have any problem finding the geriatric Tea Party group capable of violence, then certainly the Environmentalists are.
Oh, I doubt if they planned on anything like what happened, no sane person would do that, but I have little doubt that they wouldn’t find a highly-embarrassing spill to be just the thing to help push their agenda...which they’re doing, by the way, even as we speak.
Sometimes what appears to be a minor bit of sabotage can wind up getting way out of hand, completely unintentionally, most of us with a little life experience under our belts know that all too well, and once things get too far along then it’s hard to admit blame. Even people who know very little know about the law of unintended consequences.
Something unusual happened here for all of the safety redundancies to fail at the same time and it would be nice to know why. Blow-out preventers are huge, expensive pieces of technical machinery and you don’t build them casually and just for kicks, the way you’d slap together a heart-lung machine, for instance. When they fail so completely you have to wonder why.
And it wouldn’t be like intentional sabotage had never happened before, after all.
I thought this was an interesting admission:
ANALYSIS | Make no mistake, the emerging GOP movement holds great political weight.
So now it is a GOP movement? And racist? Per Ed Morrissey:
For the past year, the national media has attempted to paint the Tea Party movement and opposition to the Democratic agenda as based in racism, a reaction to the election of the first African-American President in November 2008.
Okay, then, at least there’s violence!
The black candidates interviewed overwhelmingly called the racist narrative a news media fiction. "I have been to these rallies, and there are hot dogs and banjos," said Mr. West, the candidate in Florida, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army. "There is no violence or racism there."