You didn't think the monster on the sea bed was going to stay muzzled, did you? I was on a ship headed for Palm Beach when I saw the news report that the well had been capped and the pressure was rising. That rising pressure was a good sign seemed to confuse my fellow passengers, being young Americans and thus not quite up to seeing the analogy between this and trying to pump up a tire with a hole in it, but the early good sign didn't stay very good as pressure failed to reach what it should be if there were no other leaks and now it seems there are. Oil is seeping up from cracks in the sea floor.
A young woman sitting next to me was confused by the word seep and wanted to know whether it was spelled 'sepe' or 'seap', but to those who are at least as smart as a fifth grader, it spells bad news. The cap either has to come off or the relief wells have to be completed before the cracks widen and proliferate and we lose control completely.
Of course what may be a disaster for the world may be a boon for Halliburton and perhaps for Darth Cheney himself. The Dubai based corporation posted second quarter earnings substantially higher than expected; an 83% increase in point of fact. Can we understand now why the power behind the Bush kept his energy policy meetings with the oil men a secret we'll never have access to in our lifetime? Can we begin to suspect that it really wasn't about 'principle' but about power and money?
Captain, I don't know where you've been. Most of us have known for some time that Republicans are not guided by principle, but principal:
ReplyDeleteprin·ci·pal // Show Spelled[prin-suh-puhl]
–adjective
2. of, of the nature of, or constituting principal or capital: a principal investment.
Republicans are not guided by principle, but principal
ReplyDeleteYou say prophet, I say profit.
I can't quite get beyond, "A young woman sitting next to me was confused by the word seep and wanted to know whether it was spelled 'sepe' or 'seap'..." I heard some young man on one of the reality television shows state that he didn't know what a "brigade" was. WHy do so many of our young people have the intellectual abilities of a flea on steroids?
ReplyDeleteCrack! A funny sort of word that conjures up visions of BP executives with giant straws up their noses.
ReplyDeleteoh man... what sorta cretins have we become where we've now created oil spewing underwater faultlines...
ReplyDeleteand as for the mind-power it's gonna take to come up with the sorta textured, sustainable, long-term solution we're gonna need... well, you're convo with the nice young lady just about says it all for me...
somehow i feel like Cuba's gonna end up fixing this, lol
We've raised a generation -- or maybe two whose entire body of knowledge consists of entertainment related trivia. We have millions and millions of the "tech savvy" who don't know what a transistor is, does, how it does it or how you make one.
ReplyDeleteWe have whole industries and political parties that act as parasites on such people and those industries regulate our lives.
I'm constantly sickened by the news media who talk as though their listeners were 5 years old but with opinions that really mattered.
Doc,
ReplyDeleteYes, many there be in the Church of the Divine Profit....
Capt. Fogg,
Seap? Sepe? Your anecdote reminds me to lament that a great number of our youth couldn't give a stronger impression that they had never actually readed a book if they worked at it 24/7. What else could explane the pathetic spelling we sea on webb sights two day?
Reading much, a person acquires an aesthetic sense for the finer points of language -- this or that may be correct, but it just doesn't sound right. And of course outright errors are sure to look ugly. Not just wrong, but ugly.