I capped "
Nuke The Well?" with this question:
We’ve thought for a long time that this administration would gladly use a major catastrophe to seize a massive amount of power.
So now we come to THE question, What if this is the catastrophe?
Today I saw a "spate" of stories on the LA Times that were both related and unrelated. I browsed them only briefly (this is the drive-by media after all). But I thought they were worth linking here so here goes:
Gulf spill helps revive left-for-dead energy legislation
Passing a major energy bill seemed virtually impossible a few weeks ago, but Democrats, bolstered by public anger over the gulf oil spill, are pushing for legislation with renewed hope of success.
Never let a crisis go to waste.
Obama wants BP escrow fund for spill damage
As more oil washes ashore, a letter from 54 senators calls for the company to set aside $20 billion.
If BP is responsible for stopping the leak, then wouldn't this make $20B unavailable to them for cleanup? So with an additional $20B, would things tend to go faster, or slower?
As I said in Nuke The Well, each solution that is being proposed and acted upon has less merit than the one before. Who would try the 7th best solution first, or save the best solution until the 7th attempt? Should they go faster with a worse solution, or slower with a better one? Project Manger's dictum: Good, Fast, Cheap, choose 2.
What to watch as Obama seeks to change political narrative on oil leak
Even as the president was winging his way to the area, James Carville, a top Democratic political advisor, on Monday described the upcoming week as a “chance to hit the reset button” on the administration's efforts to deal with the disaster that is still pouring millions of barrels of oil into the gulf waters.
Oh . . . you mean,
this reset button?
The one that actually means "overcharge" or "overloaded"? Obama's political narrative as overcharged or overloaded. Yeah, I can
totally see that.
And for good measure, the LA Times wrote a story about a worse oil spill than Deepwater Horizon. The Lakeview Gusher of 1910
California's legendary oil spill
You mean they didn't go file a permit to build those berms!? I'm outraged!!!!!
"What we feared was an early rain," recalled Charles "Dry Hole" Woods, confronted with too much of a good thing. "A flash flood could have spread our ocean of oil down over the valley below. So we went up into the hills with an army of 600 men and dammed up the mouths of the canyon with earth walls 20 feet high and 50 feet thick."
The well was circled by sand-bag barricades and a roof was thrown over the mouth.
Finally on Sept. 9, 1911, thousands of feet below the surface, the well caved in and sealed itself. It "died as suddenly as it was born," wrote author William Rintoul.
A mere 17 months later.
Lakeview Gusher wikipedia article
here
Gulf oil spill: Urged on to greater speed, BP ramps up oil collection
On Friday, Coast Guard Rear Admiral James A. Watson, the federal on-scene coordinator of the disaster response, gave the company 48 hours to speed up its strategy to collect the oil leaking into the gulf.
Or else what? You'll send a very strongly worded letter of protest?! Look, I'm not downing the Coasties here, but a petulant demand to go faster from accomplishes nothing. I've seen mall cops more intimidating than this. Does this mean that for the next 47 hours, BP can just kind of loaf around on this? Does this mean that BP has been BS'ing for the previous 2 months trying to solve this?
I'm not giving BP a pass here by any means. But seeing as how the very survival of their company depends on capping this thing off, I'm guessing that they're doing all that they know how to do. But kicking the pulling mule is all that the left knows, so it's all they have to give.
What I've read of the events leading up to the explosion indicates that speed was of the essence out there and that
procedures weren't followed. And therein lies part of the problem for BP, or any other company with a mega-disaster like this.
If you encourage a culture that focuses on the ends without regard to the means, then your organization is a) more likely to experience a catastrophe as a result of a shortcut and b) will have a harder time recovering from it (because when it hits the fan, shortcuts are few if any.) Presuming on the miraculous grace of the Almighty to narrowly avoid disaster is not a business plan. Luck is not a valid strategy. If you can't follow procedure when the seas are calm, then how will you do it when the storm billows up? If there's disorder in the calm seas, how will there be order when it's rough? The pendulum has swung though and where BP may not have followed procedures before, I'd bet they're following them all to the letter now.
And if I haven't said this publicly, I pray God's mercy and peace to the 11 families who lost their loved ones. And just a curiosity question, has anyone seen a listing of those 11? I was surprised how elusive this was to come by. My first hit actually came off some International Socialist Fraternalist Democratic Peaceful Patriotic Workers Of The World site or something. And just so that you don't have to go there, here are the men who are missing and presumed dead:
Dale Burkeen
Donald Clark
Roy Wyatt Kemp
Jason Anderson
Stephen Curtis
Gordon Jones
Karl Kleppinger
Blair Manuel
Dewey Revette
Shane Roshto
Adam Weise
When this is over, I expect to see some executives hanging from golden parachutes floating down. Given the political climate, I also expect there will be Enron style trials and prison cells as their LZ.
In the weeks and months to come, we will likely hear stories of other near-catastrophes on sister oil rigs. We'll likely find out that shortcuts were used and disaster was only narrowly averted by the grace of God.
Mark Steyn nails another one here,
The Very Model of a Modern Major Generalist.
And so the Gulf spill was an irritation, but he dutifully went through the motions of flying in to be photographed looking presidentially concerned. As he wearily explained to Matt Lauer, “I was meeting with fishermen down there, standing in the rain, talking . . . ” Good grief, what more do you people want? Alas, he’s not a good enough actor to fake it. So the more desperately he butches up the rhetoric — “Plug the damn hole!”; “I know whose ass to kick” — the more pathetically unconvincing it all sounds.
Obama sort of reminds me of Lenina Huxley from
Demolition Man. Trying so hard to get the dialect right and missing it by that much every time.
"Chief, you can take this job, and you can shovel it."
But this oil spill is like Christmas every day for Team Obamao. BP can't stop the leak. Whatever they capture isn't good enough. Whatever they're doing right, they're not doing fast enough. And as
Karl Denninger has pointed out, many local politicians dare not cross Leviathan by deploying their own booms and sand berms.
So every day, the damage spreads. More beaches get closed. More fishing areas get closed. More White House parties thrown, more vacations on Air Force one taken. There's a moratorium on new offshore drilling. Even better, BP is supposed to pay the unemployment of those unemployed by the moratorium dictated by the government. Since BP is a British company, I presume that it would be hard for Leviathan to acquire BP in a hostile takeover. But there's
precedent for this too, from Obama's amigo in Venezuela.
So let's just sum up:
- Less fishing means less food and more unemployment, greater government dependency
- Higher gas prices, less gas
- Less drilling, more unemployment, greater government dependency
- Closing ports to commercial traffic in order to erect booms would protect the inland waters on the one hand, but it could screw shipping commerce to hell and gone on the Gulf and not coincidentally, steer the traffic north east to bluer states.
- A made-to-order pinata they can beat on every day
- The chance to hurt Great Britain in the process (even better since their government is now headed by a Conservative)
- The chance to manipulate public anger over the spill to orchestrate passage of sweeping environmental legislation to collect more government power and control (this time over the energy sector)
- A vehicle to bully the local government (which is especially sweet as Obama and his ilk detest The South and the "bitter clingers" represented by those local governments)
- And while all this is going on they can continue to divert your attention from stuff like Healthcare, the November elections, their paid thugnuts, Greece, or any number of states that are fixing to go belly up (and of course be bailed out using your great-great-great-grandchildren's tax dollars)
I am convinced that this oozing oil spill is precisely the creeping catastrophe that Obama and his team have been looking for to ease us into the new order they have planned.
And come to think of it, an oozing oil spill is an altogether apt picture for what the left represents and how they have operated.
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