The oil spill and risk management

The New Neo Posted on by

The Gulf oil spill is very disturbing in its scope. Not only did it kill eleven people, but it now threatens the huge fishing industry in the region, not to mention wildlife and beaches that are beautiful and drive the area’s economy.

We still don’t know the all-important details about exactly how it happened and how a repeat could be prevented. But one thing I do know from having observed energy accidents over the years—whether they be oil spills such as this one and the 1969 Santa Barbara incident, or nuclear power plant episodes like Three-Mile Island (or the far worse Chernobyl disaster)—is that they will happen sooner or later no matter what we do to prevent them. The best we can do is to make sure that they occur rarely and are containable.

It is somewhat ironic that, because of the fearful reaction in this country against nuclear power plants in the wake of Three Mile Island (reinforced by Chernobyl), we have become even more dependent on oil (as well as coal, which causes more localized loss of life of miners rather than spreading ecological problems, although proponents of AGW believe it is at least partly responsible for climate change as well).

There is no free lunch for our energy needs. We can talk all we want about wind and water power but they cannot provide more than a small fraction of what is required. Therefore, relative risks must be evaluated, and decisions must be made to develop the most efficient sources of energy for the least risk—knowing that risk there will always be.

I have long been a proponent of nuclear energy, even back in my liberal Democrat days. Europe seems to be of the same opinion, since nuclear power is used fairly extensively there. Three Mile Island was frightening to Americans, but it presented nothing like the danger that was hyped in the media, and you will note that although since Chernobyl there have been a number of nuclear accidents, none of them were particularly serious.

Of course, that does not mean a very serious accident could not happen; it could. But it does mean that safety has improved and is fairly good. Our reluctance to build more nuclear plants (and/or activate the ones we already have that have been shut down) has handicapped us tremendously in the energy quest, and reflects our desire to reduce risk to zero, which can never be done.

However, even if we expand nuclear energy it would not mean that we don’t need oil; the two sources of power are used for different purposes. But we urgently need to figure out what happened in the Gulf to cause this spill and to reduce the risk of future accidents even further. The modern world requires power to run, although many Luddites and environmentalists would like us to return to the days of sparse human populations with a light carbon footprint.

[ADDENDUM: Encouraging news?]

Academia, Harvard Law School, and freedom of speech

The New Neo Posted on by

Martha Minow, Dean of Harvard Law School, has put another PC nail in the coffin of free speech at that august institution, alma mater of our president.

The topic? A private email sent by third year Harvard Law student Stephanie Grace to two friends, in which she wrote:

I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances. The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair. (Now on to the more controversial:) Women tend to perform less well in math due at least in part to prenatal levels of testosterone, which also account for variations in mathematics performance within genders. This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic, just like identical twins raised apart tend to have very similar IQs and just like I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or give them to an orphanage in Nigeria. I don’t think it is that controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible that African Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I didn’t mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner.

I also don’t think that there are no cultural differences or that cultural differences are not likely the most important sources of disparate test scores (statistically, the measurable ones like income do account for some raw differences). I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard given difficult to quantify cultural aspects.

One of the recipients of Grace’s note “arranged for the email to be sent out to the Harvard Black Law Student Association list-serv, including [her] name and the fact that after graduation, the author will be doing a federal clerkship.” The BLSA, up in arms, went to HLS authorities, and Dean Minow sprung into action, stating:

“Here at Harvard Law School, we are committed to preventing degradation of any individual or group, including race-based insensitivity or hostility’’…

Minow said she had met with leaders of Harvard’s Black Law Students Association on Wednesday to discuss the hurt caused by Grace’s e-mail….

As often is the case with PC campaigns against certain kinds of speech, it’s about the fact that the members of the BLSA were “hurt.” I have no doubt they were, but all Grace did was to speculate about a possible genetic cause for a phenomenon that is statistically demonstrable—the same as Larry Summers did about a similar circumstance related to women in the highest reaches of science.

Here’s the full text of Minow’s statement. Note that it begins with the following sentence:

I am writing this morning to address an email message in which one of our students suggested that black people are genetically inferior to white people.

In law school, one of the first tasks a student learns is to summarize the facts of the case. If I were a professor at Harvard Law and Minow was my student, I’d give her an “F” for that response. But that’s the sort of thing that passes for intellectual honesty at Harvard Law these days.

Minow goes on to state of Harvard Law that, “This is a community dedicated to intellectual pursuit and social justice.” I would humbly submit that not only is the latter a “progressive” buzzword that indicates Minow sees HLS’s mission as a leftist one, but that the two efforts are sometimes in opposition to each other.

To me, Minow’s official reaction is more disturbing than any speculation in which an HLS student engaged in a supposedly private email. But Ms. Grace has now made her public mea culpas, showing that she’s been sufficiently re-educated to take her place as a good soldier in the Harvard PC brigade:

I am heartbroken and devastated by the harm that has ensued. I would give anything to take it back…I understand why my words expressing even a doubt [that African-Americans are genetically inferior] were and are offensive.

As for me, I don’t happen to think that African Americans are genetically inferior in this arena. But I do think that banning speculation and/or research into the question is both intellectually dishonest and an affront to liberty. And I also believe that public excoriation of the private remarks of a student is a dangerous and very slippery slope—and that we’ve already slid at least halfway down that slope, with no end in sight.

[NOTE: As I noted, a related matter is the case of Larry Summers, who was forced to leave Harvard after his non-PC remarks about research into the paucity of women at high levels of science. I called one of my posts on that subject “Harvard in peril,” and I see no reason to retract that observation now. Other posts of mine on the subject are this and this.]

[ADDENDUM: Ann Althouse offers further reflections.]

Venezuela and the failure of socialism

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s no surprise that Hugo Chavez’s socialist state of Venezuela has fallen on hard times. They are well-deserved; Chavez had to work hard to achieve the decline in a nation that has rich natural resources on which to draw.

The following are perhaps the most important sentences in the article:

The reason Venezuela is contracting is because private activity is contracting,” Augusto de la Torre, the World Bank’s chief economist for Latin America, said in Washington last week. “What we’re seeing in Venezuela is a phenomenon where productivity, private activity and private business is falling.”…

Ché¡vez’s popularity has fallen below 50 percent, rare during his tenure and problematic for his followers as they gear up for parliamentary elections in September. Analysts say opposition could carve out space for itself in a Congress once wholly controlled by the president’s allies.

Socialism is an economic disaster, sometimes working its destruction slowly and sometimes quickly. But, as Margaret Thatcher once said, sooner or later you run out of other people’s money. The welfare states of Europe are suffering from the same thing in more attenuated form, and our own economic troubles are being exacerbated by Obama’s desire to have us morph more and more into a European-style welfare state or even perhaps a Chavez-like socialist one.

Chavez consolidated his power in Venezuela partly because of a perception by the opposition that elections would be rigged, and a subsequent boycott in 2005. This allowed him to control the legislature so completely that he has had free reign to impose especially ruinous and restrictive policies in a country that once flourished compared to others in Latin America.

Now the opposition has realized what a enormous mistake their boycott was, and are feeling energized:

Foes of President Hugo Chavez have largely put their differences aside and come up with a unified lineup of candidates, hoping to win control of a congress that has done the socialist leader’s bidding for years.

Pro-democracy activists, jailed government opponents, journalists, businessmen and union leaders are among the diverse cast of opposition candidates who hope to increase their influence in the Sept. 26 voting for 165 seats in the National Assembly…

Jose Vicente Carrasquero, a political science professor at Simon Bolivar University, said the opposition’s chances have improved because they appear to be more united than ever before.

But he said the opposition’s cash-strapped parties have limited funds for campaigning while candidates backed by Chavez have “much more financial capacity than all of the opposition put together.”

Money is not everything, although it’s important. The outcome of the September elections really depends on two things: how much popular opposition there really is to Chavez, and how much he will be able to rig the elections to counter it if he needs to do so. I wish the people of Venezuela well in overthrowing him—and in resisting whatever moves Obama may make in an attempt to keep his buddy Chavez in power, as he tried in Honduras. It is particularly ironic that, as the failure of socialism is increasingly revealed, our own country is sliding into it.

Cub Scouts sure play a mean pinball

The New Neo Posted on by

The Scouts are now giving awards for video gaming expertise.

It’s not quite as bad as it sounds:

Apparently these new awards are geared toward making Scouts understand which games are appropriate for their age group, not just rewarding them for sitting around on their butts playing video games. Scouts also can work towards their pin by playing a video game that “helps you in your schoolwork.”

But it’s bad enough.

Mayday, mayday!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a reprint of a previous post.]

Today is Mayday.

As a child I was confused by the wildly differing associations the word conjures up. It’s a distress signal, for example, apparently derived from the French for “come to my aid.”

That was the first meaning of the word I ever learned, from watching the World War II movies that were so ubiquitous on TV when I was a tiny child. The pilot would yell it into the radio as the fiery plane spiraled down after being hit, or as the stalling engine coughed and sputtered. On the ship the guy in uniform would tap it out in code and repeat it (always three times in a row, as is the convention) when the torpedo hit and the ship filled with water.

But on a far more personal level, it was the time of the May Féªte (boy, does that sound archaic) in my elementary school, when each class had to learn a dance and perform it in the gymnasium in front of the entire student body’s proud/bored parents. The afternoon was capped by the eighth-graders, who were assigned the only activity of the day that seemed like fun—weaving multicolored ribbons around the maypole.

Ah, the maypole. Who knew it was a phallic symbol? Or that maypoles were once considered so risque that they were banned in parts of England by certain Protestant groups bent on discouraging the mixed-gender dancing and drunkenness that seemed to go along with them (not in my elementary school, however; only girls were allowed to wind the maypole ribbons, and the mixed-gender dancing the rest of us had to do was decidedly devoid of frivolity)?

The other meaning of Mayday was/is the Communist festival of labor, or International Workers Day. In my youth the big bad Soviets used to have huge parades that featured their frightening weaponry. It seems that Putin is nostalgic for those good old days, since apparently the quaint custom is being revived.

Back in the 20s and 30s the Mayday parades in New York City were fairly large. I know this because I own a curious artifact of those times—a home movie of a Mayday parade from the mid-1920s. I’m not sure who in my family had such an early and prescient interest in movies, but the film features my paternal grandparents on their way to such a celebration.

They’d come to this country from pre-revolutionary Russia in the early years of the century. Like many such immigrants, my grandfather became a Soviet supporter who thought the Communists had a chance of making things better than they’d been in the Russia he’d left behind. Since he died rather young, only a few years after the film was made, I don’t know whether time and further revelations of the mess the Soviet Union became would have changed his point of view. In the film, however, the family goes to view the Mayday parade, which looks to be a very well-attended event with hopeful Communist banners held high and nary a maypole nor a Morris dancer in sight.

The footage of the parade seemed archaic even back when I saw it as a young girl, although it was fascinating to see the grandfather and grandmother I’d never known (not to mention my father as a handsome seventeen-year old). But the most puzzling sight of all was the attention paid to the Woolworth building. Whoever took the movie was fascinated by it; there were two slow pans up and down its length.

Why the Woolworth Building? Opened in 1913, it was a cool fifty-seven stories high, the tallest building in the world until 1930. It had an elaborate Gothic facade and was considered a monument to capitalism—the “Cathedral of Commerce,” although the Communist-sympathizing photographer of my Mayday movie didn’t seem to let those two offending words (cathedral, commerce) get in the way of his awe for the building.

I never noticed the Woolworth building myself until the day I went to see the site of the World Trade Center a few months after 9/11. There were still huge crowds coming to pay homage, and so we had to wait in a long line that snaked around the nearby blocks.

And so it was that I found myself in front of a familiar sight, the Woolworth Building, still Gothic after all these years, and still standing (although it had lost electricity and telephone service for a few weeks after 9/11, the building itself sustained no damage). No longer dwarfed by the enormous towers of its successor—that new Cathedral of Commerce, the World Trade Center—the Woolworth Building even commanded a bit of its former dominance.

Although it’s still dwarfed from this angle:

woolworth_wfc_s.jpg

And to bring this hodgepodge of a post round full circle, there exists a book of photos of 9/11 with the title Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!: The Day the Towers Fell, a reference to the myriad distress calls phoned in by firefighters on that terrible day.

Obama and Sowell: who can tell when people have made enough money?

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember Barack Obama, Joe the Plumber, and “spreading the wealth?” It seemed a surprising revelation at the time. But Obama’s income redistributive tendencies have become an old and familiar story, if hardly a ho-hum one.

Now Obama has done it again, giving a speech in his home state of Illinois in which he included the following remarks:

We’re not, we’re not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that’s fairly earned. I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money. But, you know, part of the American way is, you know, you can just keep on making it if you’re providing a good product or providing good service. We don’t want people to stop, ah, fulfilling the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow our economy.

The original speech as written was to have gone like this:

Now, we’re not doing this to punish these firms or begrudge success that’s fairly earned. We don’t want to stop them from fulfilling their responsibility to help grow our economy.

But apparently, he just couldn’t resist the additional embellishments. Michelle Malkin points out that:

We have a commander-in-chief who presumes to know when you have earned “enough,” who believes that only those who provide what he deems “good” products and services should “keep on making it,” and who has determined that the role of American entrepreneurs is not to pursue their own self-interest, but to fulfill their “core” responsibility as dutiful growers of the collective economy.

That famous mock-up poster of Obama as the creepy socialist Joker never seemed more apt.

None of this should be a surprise; it was all apparent before Obama was elected. Nor are such ideas unusual among that group of people known as intellectuals, of which Obama is a full-fledged member. Here’s another intellectual (and another black man), the conservative economist Thomas Sowell, on the subject. The excerpt is taken from his excellent book Intellectuals and Society [emphasis mine]:

Many intellectuals and their followers have been unduly impressed by the fact that highly educated elites like themselves have far more knowledge per capita—in the sense of special knowledge—than does the population at large. From this it is a short step to considering the educated elites to be superior guides to what should and should not be done in a society. They have often overlooked the crucial fact that the population at large may have vastly more total knowledge—in the mundane sense—than the elites, even if that knowledge is scattered in individually unimpressive fragments among vast numbers of people.

If on one has even one percent of the knowledge currently available, not counting the vast amounts of knowledge yet to be discovered, the imposition from the top down of the notions in favor among elites, convinced of their own superior knowledge and virtue, is a formula for disaster.

Sometimes it is economic disaster, which central planning, for example, turned out to be in so many countries around the world during the twentieth century that even most governments run by communists and socialists began replacing such top-down economic planning by freer markets by the end of the century…Other forms of this general notion include judicial activism, urban societies, and other institutional expressions of the belief that social decisions cannot be left to be determined by the actions and values of the less knowledgeable population at large.

One of the most interesting things about the Obama quote under discussion is that, if you look at his scripted speech, he was trying to do his version of supporting what Sowell says—that is, of praising the power of capitalism’s ability to allow the aggregate forces of private enterprise and personal initiative to grow an economy. He knows that’s the American way, and that it is necessary for a president to pay some sort of lip service to it. But he couldn’t help blurting out what for him is the truth—that he doesn’t really believe in it at all—and that he and the other brilliant intellectuals surrounding him know much better, both practically and morally.

Immigration reform: Obama and Congress vs. the citizens of the United States

The New Neo Posted on by

Used to be that when the leaders of Congress said they would move on a certain bill (or not move on a certain bill), you could kinda sorta believe them. Now trying to figure out what’s really happening is like being a Kremlinologist back in the USSR’s heyday.

And so we get, simultaneously, articles at Memeorandum that say that Democrats are going ahead on an immigration bill and that it is doubtful that an immigration bill will be passed this year.

Reading between the lines, it appears that, with the defection of the lone Republican previously on board, Lindsay Graham, the Democrats have lost their already-shaky claim to bipartisan cover. This leaves them with the problem of placating their Hispanic supporters and trying to make Republicans look bad, which points to their adopting a strategy of pushing a bill they know is unlikely to pass, just so they can say they tried and the Republicans didn’t. This might be especially helpful to Harry Reid, who needs to appeal to Hispanic voters in his home state of Nevada.

The issue is complicated by the fact that Arizona forced Congress’s hand somewhat by passing its own attempt at handling the problems of illegal immigrants, and that the Arizona law is very popular nationwide. Despite this popularity (or perhaps because of it; who knows any more?) the Justice Department is contemplating challenging it, extending the Obama administration’s continuing war against the opinions and wishes of its own citizens:

Although it was the federal government which ignored Arizona’s repeated pleas to help patrol the border and thus caused the state to feel the need to pass the bill in the first place, Obama and Holder would dearly love to stop the state from implementing its solution. Such an action by the administration would be shocking and unprecedented—words that keep coming up in describing the actions of Obama et al:

“It’s relatively rare for the federal government to directly challenge a state law,” said Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law expert at George Washington University Law School, who could not cite a comparable example. “It’s even more rare when there is no shortage of people challenging the law.” A coalition of civil rights groups announced Wednesday that it is preparing its own suit against Arizona, and officials in Phoenix, Tucson and Flagstaff said they are considering suing the state…

“It would absolutely inflame people,” said Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations for NumbersUSA, an Arlington group that calls for tougher immigration enforcement.

“Arizona passed this law because the federal government abdicated its enforcement responsibilities on immigration,” said Jenks, a lawyer who says the new law is constitutional. “To now have the federal government come in and say ‘You can’t do that’ is going to outrage a whole lot of people.”

“A whole lot of people,” indeed. For example, there are reports that seven other states are considering legislation similar to that passed by Arizona. The majority of the people of the United States want this, and their own government wants to stand in their way. And remember, what the Arizona law does is to empower state officers to enforce federal laws already on the books, because the federal government refuses to do so—not to go beyond the law or to violate it.

Obama: the press’s abusive lover

The New Neo Posted on by

When I saw the title of this Politico story—“Why reporters are down on President Obama”—I thought it would be about the press’s disillusionment with Obama’s policies as president.

Not at all; silly me. It’s about the press’s disillusionment with Obama’s policies towards—the press.

Now, I’m not saying that’s completely unimportant. Actually, it matters, both as policy and as a reflection of the character of the current administration, its leader, and his aides. Obama treats the press with arrogant contempt—and you can’t say they haven’t earned it by their fawning shilling for him in the past. For someone like Obama, that sort of adulation breeds an increase in condescension; he knows he can abuse them with impunity. And so he does, when he thinks it suits his purposes.

Obama’s last lingering need to cooperate with the press or to treat them with any sort of respect ended when he was elected and ascended to the powerful post of POTUS. Now, the more they try to please him, the more he realizes he has nothing to fear from them, and the more they realize they have something to fear from him.

During Obama’s recent, brief trip to Prague, a message went out to one of the top reporters to assemble the handful of traveling reporters for a dinner with Gibbs and other top members of the president’s entourage. The journalists dutifully complied, picked out a restaurant, made a reservation and showed up at the appointed time.

When Gibbs and the others were late, it wasn’t too surprising. But soon several hours passed with no sign of the White House contingent. The food came and went.

Eventually, the press gave up and headed out on some late-night sightseeing. As they strolled the Charles Bridge, they ran into Gibbs, who was doing the same. Asked about the dinner appointment, Gibbs said the White House group had simply decided to grab some pizza…

The difficulty in tracking down Gibbs isn’t limited to the road. Even reporters for major newspapers say they have trouble getting their calls and e-mails returned.

Obama knows how to play the spineless reporters like so many tuneless violins:

And just what happens when you upset the White House?

Among White House reporters, tales abound of an offhand criticism or passing claim low in an unremarkable story setting off an avalanche of hostile e-mail and voice-mail messages.

“It’s not unusual to have shouting matches or the e-mail equivalent of that. It’s very, very aggressive behavior, taking issue with a thing you’ve written, an individual word, all sorts of things,” said one White House reporter…

One of the most irritating practices of the Obama White House is when aides ignore inquiries or explicitly refuse to cooperate with an unwelcome story ”” only to come out with both guns blazing when it takes a skeptical view of their motives or success.

“You will give them ample opportunity on a story. They will then say, ”˜We don’t have anything for you on this.’ Then, when you write an analytical graph that could be interpreted as implying a political motive by the White House, or something that makes them look like anything but geniuses, you will get a flurry of off-the-record, angry e-mails after you publish,” one national reporter said. “That does no good. If you want to complain. Engage!”…

Some reporters say the pushback is so aggressive that it undermines the credibility of Obama’s aides. “The willingness to argue that credible information is untrue is at its core dishonest and unfortunately calls into question everything else the press office says,” one White House reporter said.

So they are finally getting the fact that there’s a lot of lying going on with this administration—but only because they’re been lied to. And of course it’s not the Great Man himself, it’s his nefarious aides (“if only Stalin knew!”).

According to the article, even the administration’s favorite reporters have been frozen out when they don’t toe the line. It reminds me of what Easton Jordan of CNN revealed about his cable news network’s cooperation with Saddam Hussein, done in order to gain protection and access from the regime:

For CNN, the highest prize is “access,” to score live camera feeds from a story’s epicenter. Dictatorships understand this hunger, and also that it provides blackmail opportunities. In exchange for CNN bureaus, dictatorships require adherence to their own rules of reportage. They create conditions where CNN–and other U.S. media–can do little more than toe the regime’s line.

Obama is not Saddam, of course. But the modus operandi of his thuggish relationship with the American press is the same, and the MSM’s craven behavior has also so far been very similar to that of CNN back in the bad old Saddam days.

In the case of reporters and Obama, however, the MSM’s motivation initially sprang from reverence and even love for the candidate, rather than fear of a dictator like Saddam. Now that the press’s love for the president may be fading because they realize it’s unrequited, they remained trapped by his bullying—plus their own stunned amazement that the object of their affection is treating them with such rudeness and disdain. And after all they’ve done for him!

They still do not quite seem to understand who and what they’re dealing with. Their surprise seems unfeigned to me, which is a surprise in and of itself. It appears that they didn’t just cover up all the evidence—available during the campaign to anyone willing to look—that their man was a thinskinned, rude, arrogant, bully. They actually denied it, repressing their knowledge of and/or excusing such behavior, so strong was their need to believe in Obama.

And insight dawns slowly, very slowly, if at all. The press remains shell shocked. Love is a funny thing, and hope dies hard when one is blinded by it.

[NOTE: The Anchoress adds some thoughts of her own.]