A Dinonalysis of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster and Response

Here out west, the whole affair seems almost surreal. The images of birds coated in oil, suffering, fill me with despair. I can only imagine how those who live along the Gulf feel, and how anxious Eastern Seaborders must be since the oil could eventually end up there, too. After the jump, I’ll offer some brief thoughts about how the disaster has been covered and how the Obama Administration could respond more effectively.

CONGRATULATIONS TO MATT OSBORNE

By Tree Octopus

Fellow Swash Zoner and honorary cephalopod, Matt Osborne, has been named one of sixteen winners of a scholarship to attend the 2010 Netroots Nation Convention in Las Vegas (announcement here). The competition and scholarship is sponsored by the Daily Kos.

Leftovering

by Nance

 So fast that my head is still spinning, I discover that we've switched longitudes and are back on the Left Coast for a couple of months. The world usually looks different from here, and I'm sure I'll find that to be the case this time...as soon as my ears stop that zoned out, plane trip hum and my brain catches up with the rest of my space suit. I'll be trying to open the refrigerator door with the wrong hand and pawing the walls fruitlessly for light switches for a week.

Whatever this post contains, I plead Jet Lag Compounded by Old Age. Which reminds me of the obituary my friend, Susan, sent me recently from a small town newspaper: the beloved deceased was known for her collections of Precious Moments and Mickey Mouse figurines and she died of "complications of old age."   I not only want that in my obituary, but I intend to make liberal use of that diagnosis as an excuse to ramble aimlessly on one of my favorite Twenty-First Century subjects.

Airport Econ and Culture Studies

We spend a ridiculous amount of time in Charlotte-Douglas International, the southern hub we prefer to the more crowded Hartsfield Jackson in Atlanta.  Charlotte is still crowded, but you see fewer people running on the moving sidewalk and you can actually walk from one end of the airport to the other in fifteen minutes.

 We also love the USO in Charlotte.  It's big and comfortable and it lets us visit with active duty service members headed for or returning from the Middle East.  There, they can kick back in big recliners, pick up a used book or two, plug into wi-fi, catch the news or sports on a big screen TV, and grab a hot dog.  The volunteer staffers are cheerful retirees who embody a sense of home. I can't understand why, when the news is on at the USO, it's always FOX; do those kindly volunteers assume that, once some mother's child dons the uniform, they automatically become conservatives?  Seems to me, if the POTUS we elected was a Democrat....well, it's just one more of the fascinating puzzles in the field of Airport Anthropology.

Despite the fact that the room is peopled largely by 18 to 25 year-olds and the television is on, it's noticeably, disarmingly quiet there. I always imagine that USO as a way-station for uniformed time travelers in shocked transition between utterly dissimilar universes. We like to say hello softly and  make a donation, because, naturally, we support our troops even when we don't agree with the wars being waged.  You can click on the logo if you'd like to do the same.

In the spring of 2008, we discovered a little-known economic indicator at the airport: the shoe-shine kiosk was empty.  We'd never seen that before, never really paid it much attention; it had always been busy and we'd taken it for granted, but on this trip we were shocked to find that both shiners and shinees had disappeared.  Business travel was in the tank.  That struck us more forcibly at the time than a headline in the Wall Street Journal. Then, in the fall of '09, we noticed that a couple of workers and customers had returned. Yesterday, all five stadium seats were full of garrulous men in crisp, pale blue oxford cloth shirts, red or maroon ties, and creased suit pants, happily exchanging business cards while the workers slapped the toes of ten black wingtips into mirror shine...living testimonials to economic recovery for now.

The people-watching in airports is justifiably famous.  There's always a couple of strange souls at each gate who trigger stories in my head about a Parallel Universe America (apparently, jet lag causes me to channel Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Kurt Vonnegut ).  There were the, now accustomed, piercing competitors who vie for the category of Strangest Self-Mutilation and who look like they fell down the basement stairs with a tackle box.  And the tattoo artists who wear their art from neck to wrist to ankle; they have to wear clothes over their art and it must be hard for them to get their t-shirt logos to compliment their body-art themes, as busy as they've been lately.  It's jarring to see a delicately tinted Pegasus emerging from the short sleeve of a Brotha Lynch Hung t-shirt.

Yesterday's Anomalous Airport Entity was a woman about my age sporting an unusually large nose with heavy black pince nez, bright red-red hair with white roots and a polyester dress printed all over with Chairman Mao images.  She stood up for most of the flight and knitted something bright blue. I was dazzled by her. In the struggle we elders experience between hiding our complications of aging or flaunting them, she opted for the latter.

Premeditated violence

So whether you agree with me or not that Israel's attempt to enforce the blockade of Gaza by boarding a ship which refused normal inspection procedures and the attempt at self defense of the IDF Navy when attacked, was not the outrage it was meant to look like, do you agree that it's all Obama's fault? Sure it was says John Bomb-Bomb McCain. If Obama hadn't insisted that Israel freeze it's West Bank settlement construction, this wouldn't have happened. (insert WTF here!)

Michael Savage tells us that Obama "pressured" Israel into it without offering any of the evidence one would desire to back it up.

"As far as I know, it was Obama's administration that told them how to do this attack. It was probably one of America's peace-loving generals, who knows which one of them did it."

The use of probably by a Fox News member of course is as good as proof to the willfully Foxed, as is "as far as I know." Probably means 'definitively' to the Savage audience. Only a Liberal would question it. Only a Liberal would wonder why "peace loving" should be the equivalent of stupid, duplicitous and incompetent -- if not treasonous.

Of course knees are jerking in the Liberal camp as well, as Dennis Kucinich has written to President Obama suggesting that the country needs to "redefine its relationship with Israel" in the wake of the Gaza flotilla "raid." I'd ask him his opinion on redefining the US Coast Guard's daily practice of stopping and boarding ships with armed gunboats and armed inspectors as "raids." I'd ask him if an attack on the Coast Guard by a vessel refusing to stop and be inspected in wartime or peacetime, would be supported by him or excused by him because we're certainly doing it now in the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Caribbean. I'd ask him whether our entire drug interdiction and human smuggling interdiction policies are " reckless, pre-meditated violence waged against innocent people." I'd try to do it without calling him an idiot and a hypocrite, but I doubt I could manage.

So if you still feel this was "premeditated violence" even when the violence occurred only after the "peaceful passengers" tried to kill the inspectors and threw one overboard, ask yourself what the US should do if a flotilla from Iran attempted to enter Iraq with an unspecified, un-inspected cargo, refused to be inspected and brutally attacked our Navy when our Navy attempted to examine that cargo and passenger list.

The outrage machine

As a boater, I'm aware that the Coast Guard has the right to board and inspect my vessel at any time and that I'm required to comply. Upon probable cause and perhaps just suspicion, they have a right to impound and literally disassemble my boat looking for drugs or contraband. Sometimes, as I'm given to understand, they've been known to be rather demanding in their searches, and other completely innocent, law abiding yacht captains I know have complained of dirty footprints on the ivory carpeting or greasy hand prints on the cherry paneling and have suggested that too much protest or grouchiness can earn one an extra careful inspection of safety equipment that might entail a ticket.

Of course we have a real problem in our coastal waters and particularly on the Atlantic coast with illegal immigrants arriving rather often, and then there's always the drug smugglers, so when the Coasties hail you it's best to heave to and not make waves, so to speak. In fact the US has a policy of stopping and boarding vessels anywhere on the high seas and at any time they suspect contraband. For an honest captain or crew, the idea of going after the Coast Guard with a boat hook or marlinespike is pretty much as unthinkable as it is counterproductive.

Yesterday however, when I read about the Israeli raid on the blockade runners attempting to bring supplies to Gaza, I was truly angered at what seemed like a pointless and brutal attack on unarmed civilians, and the video then available seemed to confirm that first impression. The media were making charges of piracy and it seemed less than hyperbolic at the time. Then I saw the rest of the video.

Aside from the question of the embargo itself, it has to be mentioned that the "relief" expedition was required to pass inspection before landing in Gaza, there being good reason for Israel to make sure no weapons or explosives or ammunition were being carried, or fugitives, or any persons wanted for questioning. The word of some Turkish political group that it's a peaceful enterprise is scarcely enough, although reports so far seem to gloss over the obvious with a coat of shiny outrage. Of course the flotilla had no intention of complying or of allowing themselves to be boarded peacefully and inspected, which carries the implication that they had indeed something to hide. The Israeli Navy did what any country would have done and boarded them.

The video that was not shown, of course, was the brutal attack by the passengers, who mobbed the inspectors, threw them to the deck and began beating them with clubs and metal rods. One Israeli was thrown overboard. They were vastly outnumbered. They began to defend themselves. There were casualties. It started to look less and less like piracy or even aggression. It began to look like deliberate provocation. It began to look like assault. It began to look like a mission of strategic martyrdom designed to turn Israel's ally Turkey against them. It looks like a success so far.

As usual, those who have their reasons for hating Israel will not compare the incident to trying to run through passport control at the airport and complaining about being tackled and detained. Those who are quite sure Hamas is justified in any act whatsoever that brings about the total annihilation of all Israelis wouldn't care and might rejoice if the ships had been blown out of the water without warning.

There's not much middle ground, there's not much changing of minds and a fortune is being spent on further polarization. This, in my opinion, is just part of that enterprise. The drums of manufactured outrage will continue to boom about mistreatment of "peaceful" passengers so long as doubt remains as to whether their mission had anything do do with anything but creating provocation against "Zionist Aggression." To some, the passengers will continue to be "tourists" and the haters of Israel will use any opportunity to appear as martyrs, but try this, if you dare: load up a flotilla of ships and announce your destination as Turkey and your cargo as aid for Islamist patriots resisting secularist aggression and when it comes time for customs inspection -- refuse to stop and be boarded. Set your "tourists" on the Turkish coast guard and customs inspectors with fence posts and bits of deck railing and furniture and claim that the secular Turkish government is attacking Islam and peaceful Islamists. Go on -- I dare you.

Research this!

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

The Miranda Ruling of 1966 and Today’s SCOTUS Decision on Berghuis v. Thompkins

I hereby and explicitly invoke my right to remain a simple dino and ask Zoners what they think of the new SCOTUS 5-4 ruling to alter the Miranda v. Arizona 384 U.S. 436 (1966) ruling.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS, 1911-2010

Paulism, Applied

by Nance

Yellow for Paul
Green for Grayson

The Republican Primary victory of Rand Paul forced me to bone up on the man, his father, and Libertarianism.  Heretofore, conventional wisdom among liberals was that the Ron Paul and the Tea Party would not be serious threats in November. Or ever.  I wanted to believe that the portion of America that could be so confused was still small enough to be dismissed. Things might be different now.  I needed a little schooling and some exercises in applied minarchy.  I concluded that, in an arena as complicated and churned as America in 2010, simplistic ideas, rigidly applied , are simultaneously the most irrelevant and the most dangerous things on earth.

 I learned that the Pauls adhere to the Austrian School of economics, which originated in Vienna during the Austrian Empire and was influential in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The core values were decentralization, and laissez faire market operations.  Contractual agreements and commercial transactions were held to be voluntary and only the most fractional government role was tolerated in the marketplace.

Libertarians try to extrapolate these economic policies to apply to all forms of social contract; they imagine a Libertarian Society...and it's right about here that the schisms begin.  The forms of Libertarianism include (this week):  Anarcho-Capitalism, Geolibertarianism,  Left-Libertarianism, Libertarian Conservatism, Libertarian Socialism (really?), Libertarian Transhumanism, Minarchism, and Mutualism. Isms scare me.  And I'd hate to think how many types of Libertarian Presbyterians there might be or what those transhumans look like.

I wonder if the history of the Austrian Empire has anything to teach us about Anarcho-Capitalism, or Minarchism, or...I guess Paulism, really.  The empire that was formed in 1867 collapsed about fifty years later, which makes it one of the briefest classical empires in history.  It essentially collapsed under the weight of trying to accommodate the ethnic individualities of Croats, Serbs, Czechs, Poles, Rusyns, Slovaks, Slovenes, Ukrainians, Italians, and Romanians--and started the first World War in the process.

After the war, in 1922, the League of Nations had to bail out the economy, which was bankrupted due to inflation, making Austria a ward of the League. Subsequently, Austria was subsumed by The Third Reich.  It's autonomy was eventually returned to it by the peaceful post-war withdrawal of NATO occupation.  Austria is a very rich nation today, but its wealth is largely due to its neutrality--no need for a standing army--rather than to any magical economic formula.  According to wikipedia.com,

Austria is the 12th richest country in the world in terms of GDP (Gross domestic product) per capita, has a well-developed social market economy, and a high standard of living . Until the 1980s, many of Austria's largest industry firms were nationalised; in recent years, however, privatisation has reduced state holdings to a level comparable to other European economies. Labour movements are particularly strong in Austria and have large influence on labour politics.

So much for the Austrian School of unregulated free market economic theory.

Meanwhile, back here at home, in just one day in the news last week, the need for greater regulation was invoked in response to three separate critical issues.  As an exercise in applied Libertarianism, as each of three issues came up in the news, I tried to imagine how Ron Paul and his Tea Party would handle them.  Keeping in mind that, in a debate setting, if asked how he would handle a given situation if elected, the standard Libertarian's dodge is to cite how the problem never would have developed in a society where government was small and interference in markets was nearly nonexistent.

Never mind that dodge.  Elections are real time, in the midst of the crises we're currently facing.  If Rand Paul wins a Senate seat, the Republican Party will think it has seen the direction of its destiny.  And, in that event, Ron Paul will run in 2012 and he will win many more than the 14 delegates he garnered in 2008.  That's a bid to inherit the kind of problems we've faced in the last week of May, 2010.

Try these exercises yourself, if you're so inclined.  I let the logic of the Libertarians apply as far as my imagination would take me.  You won't need my answers to get the picture.

************

The Gulf Oil Spill:  Given that the Ron Paul has asserted that Louisiana should not have received federal aid after Hurricane Katrina ( this, from a Representative whose 14th District stretches along the Gulf Coast from Galveston to Corpus Christi--are we supposed to believe that his call on Katrina aid is more pure somehow, since it could as easily have been Galveston hit hardest by Katrina?), his position on the Gulf and BP is predictable.  Son, Rand, had the following to say on BP and the spill on May 21st:

On the oil spill, Paul, a libertarian and tea party favorite, said he had heard nothing from BP indicating it wouldn't pay for the spill that threatens devastating environmental damage along the Gulf of Mexico coast.

"What I don't like from the president's administration is this sort of, 'I'll put my boot heel on the throat of BP,'" Paul said in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America." "I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business."

"And I think it's part of this sort of blame-game society in the sense that it's always got to be somebody's fault instead of the fact that maybe sometimes accidents happen," Paul said.

The senate candidate referred to a Kentucky coal mine accident that killed two men, saying he had met with the families and he admired the coal miners' courage.

"We had a mining accident that was very tragic. ... Then we come in and it's always someone's fault. Maybe sometimes accidents happen," he said. 

From Nov, 2009: HeatingOil.com
"The surge of production from the Gulf of Mexico has led the US
to produce more crude oil than it has since 2004." 

The Exercise:  How would non-interference  and non-regulation in the business of offshore drilling play out ?  Would we, the buying public, make our displeasure with British Petroleum known by cutting up our BP cards?  Libertarians advocate local management of local problems; how would local be defined in this case?

**********

Johnson and Johnson's Recall:   The FDA had to pressure J&J for a massive recall of over forty kinds of children's medications, from Children's Tylenol to Pediacare this month citing bacteria buildup in the laboratories where the medications were produced.  Regulation is being discussed and criminal action is under consideration.  The FDA has been calling for accountability on J&J's OTC products since last September, but the drug manufacturer has been dragging its heels.  In a Congressional Investigation, (May 26, 2010, AP, Chicago Tribune) :

Colleen Goggins, J&J’s president for McNeil consumer products, told lawmakers the company has already taken steps to fix the problems, including shaking up its management structure.

But she had few answers to questions about an alleged “phantom recall” of more than 88,000 packets of Motrin, a pain reliever containing ibuprofen. According to FDA documents, J&J learned about a formulation problem in November 2008 that interfered with the pills’ dissolving action, causing them to lose potency.

J&J then hired an outside contractor to collect samples of the product — mainly sold in gas stations — and determine whether a recall was necessary.

But instead of sampling the product, the contractor began purchasing large quantities of Motrin and instructing its employees not to mention a recall.

A memo titled “Motrin Purchase Project,” distributed during the hearing states: “You should simply ’act’ like a regular customer while making these purchases. There must be no mention of this being a recall of the product!”

The Exercise:  How does this OTC pediatric medicine problem play out at the hands of a Libertarian administration that calls government interference of business "Un-American"?

**********

Facebook's Privacy Policy Problem:  The name is oxymoronic. Facebook isn't actually interested in your privacy; they are interested short-term in advertising income, which relies on your loosening attachment to privacy as a right and as a moral value.  They are also interested, longer-term, in turning their social network into a social utility as vital to your sense of well-being as telephones were, in their day, and as cell phones are, today.  Given how far Facebook has come in user population since its inception in 2004 (over 400 million active users by 2010), they are well on their way to meeting their goal.  In pursuing their own goals, Facebook periodically resets their privacy controls--on your account--to virtual zero, allowing advertisers to gather information with which to market you more effectively.  The only thing that prevents a default setting of No Privacy is the hue and cry of users who notice and complain.  After a couple of legal problems, Facebook  began informing users of changes to privacy controls...as far as we know. However, until recently, their privacy platforms were so complex that users couldn't exercise full privacy controls with confidence.

The Exercise:  Without regulation, what ultimate outcome would you predict for the future of sites like Facebook,  for their users, and for private information?

**********

So, take your pick.  I firmly believe that the apparent increase in the usual rate at which urgent issues arise is unprecedented. The tipping point has been surpassed for manageable population, viable climate, and available resources.  We have entered a maelstrom.  These are the most dangerous of times and such times give birth to the most dangerous of heroes.  A simple idea, desperate times, an angry power base, and a small man: it all sounds ominously familiar to me.

Empathy, Community and the Nature of Evil

I was leaving a comment on a blog post by my friend Nance, Mature Landscaping, when I realized that my comment was getting a bit long. Thanks, Nance for the inspiration for my own post.


I don't recall when it was that I first realized that there was a lot of meanness in the world. I do know that by the time that I read The Diary of Anne Frank, that I suspected that she was wrong, and that people were not really good at heart. I think that I was 12 years old when I first read Anne's diary.

Sometime during my twenties, I became absolutely certain that people are not essentially good at heart. I don't think that I'm a cynic, just a realist, and it's a realism born of experience.

Neither do I believe that we are essentially evil. I think that we are neutral until we choose to act on the specifics of our experiences and/or circumstances. Life is all about choices yet far too many of us consistently make those choices based on misinformation, prejudicial beliefs, and self-interests.

I think that we confuse aging with maturity, and make the fallacious assumption that empathy is an innate quality that develops as we mature. As children, we are all motivated by self-interests, by instant gratification. Small children are adorable but they are also inadvertently cruel in their actions. If you don't believe me, spend some time with a group of two-year-olds. Each wants whatever he or she wants when they want it. There's crying, biting, a blow here and there, and a lot of run by toy snatching. As we age, left unchecked, those desires continue to predominate. Empathy has to be taught and it has to be taught by example.

Empathy--the ability to identify with others, to put yourself in their shoes--is the most powerful force for good in the world; sadly, it is the emotion most lacking in so many of us. We're taught not to hit and to share our toys, but most of those lessons are narrowly applied to our immediate circumstances and we never learn to adopt the empathy model as defining our world view.

Listen to the tea partiers, they are obsessed with making certain that undeserving people do not receive a free ride. Who's undeserving? Anyone whom they deem to be so. Of course, that translates into anyone who doesn't look like them, or who speaks with a foreign accent. A free ride includes basic necessities like medical care. One of the biggest objections to the Health Care Reform Act was the belief that illegal immigrants would receive free health care at taxpayers expense. Even the terminology indicates the distancing from any identification with the perceived "other." Typically, the language refers to illegal "aliens," not people but creatures from another planet, inherently different and dangerous.

The recent anti-immigrant law passed in Arizona is further progeny of the empathy deficit. Angry supporters of the law insist that it is fair, secure in the knowledge that they will not be the ones stopped and challenged as to their legal right to be here. In their minds, the fallout from this law is not their problem.

The slide from disinterest in the well being of others into outright evil is accelerated by the fear mongers that appear in every generation. The Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs who nurture the fear and feed the hate. These people make conscious choices to ramp things up, to stir up a frenzy among the masses. They are not unique; history is full of these depraved folks who for profit and egoism disseminate malicious lies and half-truths designed to fuel the anger of those who believe that they have an entitlement that separates them from those they have designated as other.

I don't believe that there is some essential goodness in humankind that will simply win out. I'm not a total pessimist; to the contrary, I think that we have the ability to teach people to make more humane, informed choices. However, it means that we have to continually reiterate the need for change. We can't simply live locally and hope that the global issues will resolve if we build a sense of local community. Humankind is interconnected and we are global, regardless of what we may want to be. I understand the desire to withdraw from the larger world and to focus on one's community, but we do not live in isolation. There are no walls that can be built that are high enough to keep out the rest of the troubled world. Our local community is global.