If you build it

If you build it, it will break. Get used to it there is nothing ever built with a 100% success rate. Even NASA with all of their technical expertise has about a 2% death rate per astronaut flight and those failures have been spectacular. When president Obama was speaking on April 2nd as he was signing on to the drill baby drill mantra and opening up the east coast to off shore drilling he claimed that oil wells don’t leak. He claimed that the leaks in the Gulf of Mexico after every hurricane are from refineries not from wells.
Here is a transcript link,I am looking for the video they used but it is not up on the ABC site yet.
I will put my plug in here for the disqualifying defect of being under the God Delusion. If you believe in that for which there is no evidence, if you conduct conversations with your imaginary friend and think that he is going to act in some way you are unfit to make any decisions for anyone other than yourself.
Faith as a virtue is a destructive meme. It results in the best case scenario being adopted by the risk management folks as the worst case scenario. I cannot speak for other nations but the American Exceptionalism that is hammered into children in the US with a religious fervor doesn’t help. Manifest destiny is a myth used to justify genocide. There is at present a horrible example of this being sold to a whole new generation on the history channel as slavery was just an unfortunate externality of the booming cotton trade that American ingenuity created with the cotton gin. It wasn’t desperate people fleeing exhausted farm land that came west but adventure seeking entrepreneurs. They completely ignore the propaganda that was spread to get folks to go just as they ignore the fraud conducted by everyone of their business people talking heads. Why am I surprised that the network that has the “The Nostradumbass Effect,” as a serious program gives a crap about reality. They are selling a narrative that has always been a lie from the time they said George could never tell one.
Back to my point and I do have one, there are no failure proof systems. When some one tells you that their widget can’t break they are lying. When the President goes in front of the cameras as he did on April 2nd 2010 and tells you that oil wells never leak anymore in hurricanes he is lying his ass off. Just another in the long list of acts that put him up there with the worst presidents in my lifetime. (Bush, Nixon, Reagan) the order is determined by the number of innocent people they murdered in unjust wars. Saint Ron the traitor had a much larger negative effect than the others as his “gospel of government bad” is still propelling the ignorance of sister Sarah on us today.
Escalating unjust wars
Spying on citizens without warrants and ordering their murder without due process. Murdering civilians with drone strikes in violation of law without a declaration of war. Then having the poor taste to joke about it.
Failing to prosecute torture and crimes against humanity. Continuing to commit said torture and crimes against humanity at military installations around the world.
This is not the change I voted for.

May Day Labor Day and Disasters.

Watching Bill Moyer’s last dance tonight and I have to say it aggravated me no end. Phony folksy types like Hightower make me want to puke with their false equivalences and their total silence when their true friends the Republicans are in power. These farmers screaming about bank bailouts while any attempt to cut their welfare subsidies is met with shrieks about the family farm. Ethanol is an economic disaster and is awful for the environment. It requires more energy to produce than you get out of it so it makes no sense but because the family farm is some how sacred we piss away tons of money on it. The reason for this waste is the archaic political system that was created to perpetuate slavery and has succeeded for 230 years. You have no right to cry about fair market prices when you demand a huge subsidy. They simply do not understand that the capitalism they are nostalgic for never existed. They are as delusional as their tea bagging counterparts on the farther right. And make no mistake their positions are right wing in nature. They want the other guy regulated but pay a minimum wage like any other business? No they are special and living wages are for land owners not migrant workers. There was something special that led their ancestors to come to America for a better life but now we have all these illegal aliens running around. The solution is not to scream in impotent rage at the bankers greed while resisting fundamental reform. The rich getting everything they can is capitalism. Read their bible, Atlas Shrugged. That is the system Europeans have been fighting since the day they stole the place from the folks that came here from Asia. These are the same populists that elected Raygun because he made them feel good about America by tearing the Solar panels off the White House. The fact that he was looting the treasury with his defense contractor masters was not important. It was just another pesky fact that the folks in flyover country want no part of. It is God and country with those folks and when their Saint Ron broke the unions they cheered. They believe teacher’s unions are the problem with education just as they believe Jesus loves them. They can produce no evidence of either but they know it to be true. Now that they are on the same side unions are now A OK.
It is very hard for me to get behind a group that feels a living wage isn’t their responsibility as an employer. The populist notion that we are all in this together is not compatible with capitalism. They are not wrong when they rail at the bankers, the financialization of America has been a disaster for all but the very few at the very top. The idea was that we would pass free trade agreements that let capital flee to the lowest least regulated areas. This has had a huge redistribution effect and raised about a billion people out of abject poverty. The fallacy was that higher productivity of an educated work force would compete for the more sophisticated jobs and higher productivity would keep the country competitive. This has proved to be a myth much like the rational market. The hot flat and crowded retread of Malthus set was partly correct in that American workers are now competing against children in China.
The reason I despair is that we never seem to learn anything. In the late 1960’s off the California coast they were using all the latest technology to safely drill for oil. They screwed up and devastated the coast around Santa Barbra. We decided that the small amount of energy to be extracted was not worth the economic loss of the spill. Fast forward fifty years and We are again told that it is safe to drill and we again find that they were not telling the truth and the Gulf Coast will now be devastated and the economic losses will be massive. The problem is that there is no one speaking for the other side.