Man-caused disasters
Bookworm on Jun 16 2010 at 4:33 pm | Filed under: Barack Obama, Elections
Reading the news today about, among other things, the Gulf oil spill, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Euro collapse, Iran, Israel, Turkey, the economy, the border, and illegal immigration, I’ve had two phrases that stuck in my brain and refuse to leave. The first is Janet Napolitano’s near-deathless bit of bureaucratese, “man-caused disasters,” one that she and her minions created to obscure the fact that Islamic fundamentalism is the common denominator binding together those mass killings around the world that involve guns, airplanes, tractors, rocket launches, beheadings, beatings, hangings, etc.
The second phrase is Obama’s statement, one with which I fully agree, that “elections have consequences.”
Combine those two phrases — “elections have consequences” and “man-caused disaster” — and you end up with this, the ultimate man-caused disaster:
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Jonah Goldberg said today:
The president spoke movingly about the lost livelihoods of fishermen in the Gulf. “You know, for generations, men and women who call this region home have made their living from the water. That living is now in jeopardy. I’ve talked to shrimpers and fishermen who don’t know how they’re going to support their families this year. I’ve seen empty docks and restaurants with fewer customers . . .”
All too true. But what about the tens of thousands more Gulf residents who will see their jobs and customers vanish thanks to Obama’s drilling moratorium, which may send offshore rigs to Africa for years to come? People have been working in those fields for generations, too.
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In this and so many ways, yes, Obama is a man caused disaster indeed. For almost 53% of America voted him in.
A little bit of logic may help here:
- The American people have indicated they are overwhelmingly for job creation. Obama has, therefore said he is all about jobs, jobs, jobs! If this were a musical,the big Eight Minute Number, titled “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!” would break out with costumed dancers all over the place. Big Production Number.
- But Obama actually likes jobs under precisely one condition: When the creation of those jobs fits perfectly with his overall agenda. If it doesn’t fit with his agenda PERFECTLY, he doesn’t care at all.
And here’s where the logic comes in. What does this mean? It is irrefutable: Obama doesn’t care about jobs at all. He cares only about his overall political agenda. When you make not even ONE move away from a planned trajectory, a planned path, then all you care about is that path. When Obama makes not one move in the direction of creating jobs – IF creating those jobs would require a change to any other one of his political goals – then the political goals are all that matter. Not the jobs.
Obama doesn’t give a flying fart about your jobs. He couldn’t care less.
I sure hope the American People can see this. It does appear that more and more of them are seeing it.
I notice that the left has temporarily suspended the use of the word “racist” to describe opposition to the president. I guess that when Chris and Olbie are critical, it actually has something to do with Barry’s (colorless) ineptitude.
Be warned, though: the R word is only on hiatus. Come November, when it’s time to rouse all the colorful ethnics who reside on the Democratic plantation, it will magically return.
It is too nice a day to have to look at that amalgam of pixels. (It’s raining, the dog just pooped in the hallway, and my bride has pneumonia).
If one’s definition of “man” is someone who is believes he is owed something without working for it, if he believes he has a right to a house without paying for it, if he believes that he should have the freedom to say and do and think whatever he wants without pulling on the uniform of his country, then, yes, that collection of pixels is a man caused disaster.
But I believe that that real men and women will speak this November. And the pieces of protoplasm who voted for that amalgam of pixels will have completely different disaster to deal with.
Al
Isn’t this a Boy Caused Disaster, like crying wolf?
He couldn’t kick his way out of a paper bag, remember?
While Congress is busy flagellating Tony Hayward for public consumption (pacification) it’s worth looking at the genesis of the problem. While we can and possibly should be critical of the engineering and technical aspects of the platform, we can and should take a hard look at the lack of leadership in Congress. When they’re finished grandstanding for the camera, there are plenty of questions that should be asked on and off camera. Someone needs to raise them and let’s start here with this one from The Oil Drum.
It was one of the few agencies that the Federal Government (in the Clinton Administration) has ever closed. So maybe this isn’t just an industry problem?
The other half of the speech dealt with the need to accelerate the change to alternate fuels. This is a site that is seriously concerned over the coming shortages of fossil fuels, and oil in particular. So encouraging the development of alternatives is something that needs to be done. Did it need to be in this speech? That is a political issue I don’t want to address. But there were not a lot of specifics in the speech. It was more along the lines of
Well the federal agency that used to support such R&D was the U.S. Bureau of Mines, in the Department of Interior. It was one of the few agencies that the Federal Government (in the Clinton Administration) has ever closed. So maybe this isn’t just an industry problem?
So at the end of the day, there are no specific new steps to move forward with. We will see what Congress brings forth.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6614#comments_top
There’s plenty of oil available for the next thirty-fifty years at a minimum. IF we explore and drill where we know we have it. There are plenty of new, enviro-friendly approaches. But those approaches aren’t “good enough” for the environmental crowd. An end to the oil industry itself is the only thing that will satisfy THEM.
ANWR can be drilled in with minimal impact. The northern Rocky states can use safe and good shale extraction techniques as are being used in Alberta, Canada. Just for starters.
“NOT IN MY BACKYARD!” – Not only do they not want the oil drill platforms laying just offshore (visible on the horizon, 5-15 miles?), they don’t even want their clean energy windmills out there either!!!
There are so many things that could be done! And they’d provide jobs! But Obama doesn’t give a SHIT about your jobs. folks. None of your jobs. If it doesn’t perfectly fit his agenda, he will never, ever, even consider it. And that goes for his vaunted “I care about American jobs, jobs, jobs” speeches. No he does not. No he does not.
Let’s face it. Not this administration, not any administration has been interested in breaking the link between Islamic oil and American political oil interests. Until and unless this bridge is blown up [metaphorically speaking] and replaced with an automobile that can run on water successfully and economically viable to purchase, we will be in the same place in the future.
100 years after the Model T and only a dangerous and difficult Stanley Steamer was the only thing Detroit came up with? I don’t believe it for a moment.
[...] Bookworm Room – Man-caused disasters [...]
I think government coercion is involved in any attempt by existing companies to prevent new discoveries from seeing the light of day. Sadie, you seem to be implying that innovation has been deliberately stifled by existing interests, so that those existing interests can continue to profit at everyone else’s expense.
Doesn’t that require a large conspiracy across multiple industries? Wouldn’t it require government collusion in the conspiracy? ALL governments, in fact? Especially in this internet age, wouldn’t it be impossible to “keep the lid on the pot”, so to speak?
A compelling case seemed to be made about Tucker and his automobile being submarined and sabotaged. But if I remember that case, even if true, IT TOO required massive collusion with the government to effect it.
We are in the middle of an effort to develop a wide array of alternative energy sources to oil and gas. I don’t mind the efforts. What I object to strenuously is the use of tax dollars to subsidize such efforts. If they’re not ready to stand on their own two feet, then they’re not ready. THEY MAY NEVER BE READY – precisely because they’re too costly. We could pour billions- trillions of dollars – down the rathole of wind power, for example, subsidizing it and paying for it out of tax dollars. WHY? If it’s a useful technology, why can’t it support itself?
And then we’d find that in supporting it, we’ve short-shrifted another technology that was more promising that would have developed on its own and shown its superiority over wind power (as my example). Furthermore, a new energy technology could emerge, not even foreseen today, or foreseen by only a few, but by no one in coercive power in the government. In supporting the poorer technology, wind power (my example), the development of that new technology is thwarted.
Does anyone REALLY think the government should have the upper hand in CHOOSING which technology or technologies is going to be the winner in that battle? I can almost guarantee you a disaster of epic proportions, if we allow the government to decide which energy technologies are going to decide our future. For energy drives almost every decision (perhaps food and water do too, but food at least, requires energy to produce and deliver). To place the power of deciding our energy future in the hands of government bureaucrats, rather than the free market, is to ask for national suicide.
I’ve said this many times in other posts: I believe human mastery of fusion nuclear power to be the end of competition among all other energy sources. Fusion power is the great game changer; its mastery would be as important to human civilization as the rise of agriculture or the mastery of electricity, or anything else. Mastery of fusion power relegates every other energy source, including oil, gas, coal, wind power, steam, water motion, solar, etc… ALL OF THEM… to narrow, small – practically completely unimportant – niche energy usages.
The reason is that fusion energy sources would be everywhere, and upon mastery of that technology, the costs of producing fusion power is known to be extraordinarily cheap. The risks of generating fusion power – especially when compared to fission nuclear power – those risks are extraordinarily low, as well. Disrupt the flow at any point, and the whole thing simply… stops. Period. It’s like running out of gas on an other-wise empty highway on the plains. You just stop.
If I’m wrong about the widespread availability of materials to use in fusion power, or wrong about it’s near-perfect safety, I’d love to know.
To this point it appears human mastery of fusion is horribly complex. Improvements in this area are incredibly slow, taking decades (so far). I hope to see the breakthrough(s) occur in my lifetime. Once they occur… IF they occur… the power of Middle Eastern oil and gas syndicates is ended forever, and those countries would immediately recede into the backwater, ignored, irrelevant barbaric civilizations they deserve to be. (Because there’s not one of them that has anything to offer the rest of the world, nor even offer their own people, except the petrodollars resulting from their oil and gas.)
Doesn’t that require a large conspiracy across multiple industries?
Collusion or conspiracy is and has been co-opted by other words. I think collaboration would be a good choice here. The Feds in collaboration with the states have legislated entrepreneurship and made it impossible. CAFE standards, emissions controls, local and federal legislation, catering to all and every environmental group known to mankind and the NIMBY crowd.
Mike, I hope you live long enough to see another source of energy. I don’t have that much time in front of me, but I do have enough time put in to know that this subject has been juggled for years starting in the early 70′s with the oil embargo. Cars lined up for hours and hours wrapped around blocks and sometimes more than a mile and you could not fill your tank but only buy 10 gallons on alternate days. There were lines, fights, arguments if a ‘car’ tried to butt in. It was not pleasant and very hard on the truckers and folks who were on the road to buy/sell products. I would have sworn back then, that surely industry and the government would never be beholden to Islamic oil. Almost 40 years later and nothing has changed except the date on the calendar.
The insanity and the incompetence of the Obama Administration knows no bounds. You HAVE to check this out!
From:
http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/2010/06/crude-sucking-barges-ordered-by-gov-jindal-stopped-by-feds/#comment-133085
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Against Governor Jindal’s wishes the federal government blocked oil-sucking barges today because needed to confirm that there were fire extinguishers and life vests on board and were having trouble contacting the owners.
ABC News reported: Eight days ago, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal ordered barges to begin vacuuming crude oil out of his state’s oil-soaked waters. Today, against the governor’s wishes, those barges sat idle, even as more oil flowed toward the Louisiana shore.
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Get it? The ships weren’t accused of violating any law! The Coast Guard simply could not confirm that they were in compliance. So they SHUT THEM DOWN.
Insanity. Incompetence. Obama Administration.
This guy was driving down the interstate yesterday. A traffic cop suddenly pulled into the interstate in front of him! Blocking all the lanes! The fellow and other cars pulled to a stop. Behind them, more cars had to pull to a stop. The backup began to extend further and further back.
The cop walked up to this guy. ”Sorry, Sir, sorry everyone! My radar detector is broken. So I have to SHUT YOU DOWN. This interstate is closed!”
Guy: “But we’re not speeding! None of us were.”
Officer: “Well maybe you were and maybe you weren’t. But my radar detector is broken, and I can’t tell. So I’m SHUTTING YOU DOWN.”
Guy: “But we’re just trying to get to Hope. You know, Hope, Arkansas. C’mon, we’re not violating any laws, we’re doing everything exactly right. Let us through!”
Officer: “Nope. Until they fix my radar detector, you’re going nowhere. I’m SHUTTING YOU DOWN, whether you’re following the law or not. Now be a nice patient fellow. We won’t be sitting here for more than, say, a few hours. Or til the Morning. Well, actually, maybe until Tuesday. I have no choice but to SHUT YOU DOWN.”
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Another quote from that link:
A Coast Guard representative told ABC News today that it shares the same goal as the governor. “We are all in this together. The enemy is the oil,” said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Dan Lauer.
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Mr. Lauer, you’re a liar. No, you’re not sharing the same goals. Them’s just words. You’re a weasel and an incompetent boob. We’re not “in this together”. You’re part of the problem, you idiot. Governor Jindal is part of the solution.
Insanity. Incompetence. Obama Administration.
Do I cry? Or do I just laugh? Or do I curl up into a fetal ball under my desk and just gibber and drool? I don’t know how much more I can take.
I’ll be happy if fusion makes energy too cheap to meter……but I don’t want tax money used to subsidize it.
The money they take from a company or an individual in order to give it to the government’s favorite technology COULD BE the money needed to find and develop something that none of us are even thinking about right now.
Late in the 1800s there was a survey of city planners, and one of the questions dealt with the major problem in big cities of the 1950s (or some other date – I don’t remember). You know what they said? What to do with all the horse poop! If the government had been taxing citizens and companies at the rate they are now, and subsidizing those developing poop removers, what would have happened to the auto industry that was attempting to get started?
Less government, lower taxes, more freedom!
What to do with all the horse poop?
What a perfectly logical question to ask nowadays - Vote’em out of office in November?
Insanity. Incompetence. Obama Administration.
Can’t remember, where I read it or maybe even heard it; but it was something along the lines that there was no one in charge and that every decision had to go through channels and as a result the ‘barge on hold’ was the result.
Do I cry? Or do I just laugh? Or do I curl up into a fetal ball under my desk and just gibber and drool? I don’t know how much more I can take.
No doubt Jindal must be muttering the very same question.
I think the most logical answer would be that all the governors in the Gulf call the shots and direct the barges, traffic, resources and convey the directives to whatever entity is appropriate. Of course, this means that the Feds would take a secondary role and take barking orders from the governors and what are the chances that the administration would step out of the limelight ‘from day one’.
UGH…you may now return to fetal ball position and drool.
I recommend you take a break from news and blogs of any sort, Mike.
Do some shooting. Or hobbies. H2H training.
It is true that to defeat an honorless and dishonest enemy, one must learn how to think and act like the enemy. But not just yet. They are evil and evil corrupts all that it comes into contact with. It is in many ways, exactly like oil in the water. Whether you are good or evil already, Coast Guard or civilian, come into contact with that oil in the water and you’ll become stuck with it for a time. And if you get stuck for too long and fall into the water, you may never be coming back up without outside help.
What Obama is doing is pretty simple. He is manufacturing problems and crises in order to stress the support pillars of our civilization until it all comes crashing down. But our civilization is made up out of individuals. And thus the first failures will be amongst individuals. And in the case of the oil rig, the failure started with BP, a British owned monopoly that doesn’t give a damn for safety because their money will come in regardless.
To make our civilization stronger, one must necessarily start with the self. The one person you know that you have absolute control over.
It is not yet time to launch the Grand Offensive to wipe the Left from the face of the planet. That may not be until the end of this century, even. Until it is time, one should preserve one’s own mental and spiritual balance. Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes. Hold everything you got safe and secure, until the time is right to strike the decisive blow.
I recently reread the March series with David Weber and John Ringo. That and Safehold series both remind me of the corrupt and venal men running this nation into the ground. The exact same problems Weber wrote about in his books, exist here, now. And it is not a coincidence. Weber accurately produced the Left’s response to the Iraq war in his HOnor Harrington series, without any intention to do so way before Iraq was ever on the horizon for invasion.
It is emotionally satisfying to see them get their come uppance. Because we won’t be seeing that any time soon for America. And what I deem as just desserts are inevitably extreme by other people’s viewpoint.
our civilization is made up out of individuals
Ymarsakar – that may be our saving grace.
Ymar: As they say… keep your powder dry.
I don’t think there will ever be a time for “the killing blow”. That tends to require a repressive dictatorship that can keep the lid on until the pressure goes so dangerously high that everything just blows. In a representative democracy, we lurch and stagger about like a drunken sailor, back and forth, weaving all over the place. There’s never a clean break in any direction. Much as I’d like to see a purist 100% conservative revolution, especially fiscally and economically, that’s not going to happen, I don’t think.
So perhaps Jim Hoft at GatewayPundit has the solution with his Block Campaign, or whatever he’s calling “Tea Party Movement 2.0″. Get in there, get your hands dirty, influence what you can. Certainly, I do not believe that sitting on my hands waiting for the time to be right for the 100% solution isn’t reality; that time, I believe, will never arrive.
Our GDP is currently about 15 trillion. Our nominal national debt is 13 trillion. Bush’s 300 billion deficits were bad enough; when you contemplate Obama’s 1.5 trillion yearly debts, and you see how quickly we’re going to reach 120% of GDP, or 150% of GDP… it is terrifying. The American People, on the average, just don’t really understand the numbers. To me they just have an amorphous sense that “we’re spending too much”. That won’t be a strong enough understanding to allow conservatives to drastically reduce the size of the national government, whch is the only way to get ourselves out of this mess. Paul Krugman’s utter Keynesian idiocy notwithstanding.
When the going get rough … bring out a little humor One sunny day in January, 2013 an old man approached the White House from across Pennsylvania Avenue , where he’d been sitting on a park bench. He spoke to the U.S. Marine standing guard and said, “I would like to go in and meet with President Obama.” The Marine looked at the man and said, “Sir, Mr. Obama is no longer president and no longer resides here.”The old man said, “Okay”, and walked away.The following day, the same man approached the White House and said to the same Marine, “I would like to go in and meet with President Obama.”The Marine again told the man, “Sir, as I said yesterday, Mr. Obama is no longer president and no longer resides here.”The man thanked him and, again, just walked away.The third day, the same man approached the White House and spoke to the very same U.S. Marine, saying “I would like to go in and meet with President Obama.”The Marine, understandably agitated at this point, looked at the man and said, “Sir, this is the third day in a row you have been here asking to speak to Mr. Obama. I’ve told you already that Mr. Obama is no longer the president and no longer resides here. Don’t you understand?”The old man looked at the Marine and said, “Oh, I understand. I just love hearing it.”The Marine snapped to attention, saluted, and said, “See you tomorrow, Sir.
[...] a majority), created a “man caused disaster” in the form of . . . well, check it out here. Mike, a fellow Watcher’s Council member who blogs at The Provocateur, liked what I did, [...]