Archive for 2010
June 26, 2010
ONLY TEN MINUTES? Really?
MAKING A CANCER DETECTOR from a digital camera.
ALL THE PRESIDENT’S STENOGRAPHERS.
FINDING SUPERMODELS in rural Brazil.
GUESS THE MOVIE by Tom Cruise’s hair.
IT’S GOOD TO BE RAHM EMANUEL: First, a rent-free apartment in DC from a BP adviser.
Then, 25 free concert tickets from Bruce Springsteen.
UPDATE: And, of course, his Freddie Mac job. But wait: “The Freddie Mac money was a small piece of the $16 million he made in a three-year interlude as an investment banker…”
THE GULF OIL SPILL: AN “AVERTIBLE CATASTROPHE.”
Some are attuned to the possibility of looming catastrophe and know how to head it off. Others are unprepared for risk and even unable to get their priorities straight when risk turns to reality.
The Dutch fall into the first group. Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. “Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour,” Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.
To protect against the possibility that its equipment wouldn’t capture all the oil gushing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch also offered to prepare for the U.S. a contingency plan to protect Louisiana’s marshlands with sand barriers. One Dutch research institute specializing in deltas, coastal areas and rivers, in fact, developed a strategy to begin building 60-mile-long sand dikes within three weeks. . . .
Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn’t good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million — if water isn’t at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico. . . .
The Americans, overwhelmed by the catastrophic consequences of the BP spill, finally relented and took the Dutch up on their offer — but only partly. Because the U.S. didn’t want Dutch ships working the Gulf, the U.S. airlifted the Dutch equipment to the Gulf and then retrofitted it to U.S. vessels. And rather than have experienced Dutch crews immediately operate the oil-skimming equipment, to appease labour unions the U.S. postponed the clean-up operation to allow U.S. crews to be trained.
A catastrophe that could have been averted is now playing out.
Read the whole thing.
MICHAEL MCCONNELL writes in support of Elena Kagan’s nomination.
DONALD RUMSFELD speaks.
A ROUNDUP OF Tea Party news headlines.
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, it would be business as usual at Guantanamo long after the election. And they were right!
CHAUNCEY GARDINER COULDN’T HAVE DONE BETTER: “You’ve got a lot of golf courses here, don’t you?”
MORE ON WEIGEL AND FRIENDS: The Daily Caller’s publisher Neil Patel on Dave Weigel, Washington Post and JournoList. “What do all the other so-called objective journalists who are members of JournoList have to say? How can they claim any loose association with the concepts of truth and fairness as they stood by and participated in this fraud?”
Practice, my boy. Practice.
UPDATE: Indeed: “The Journolisters — including Cole? — must be desperately trying to discipline each other not to leak. And yet the evidence is — if Goldberg is to be believed — that the leaks have been going on all along.”
Plus, from the comments: “Does anyone else get a junior high school vibe out of this whole thing?”
A POST-APOCALYPTIC TORONTO? Given the massive negative impact, and all the nonstop yammering about carbon footprints from our global political class, why are they having these meetings in meatspace instead of on the Internet? It’s not as if much gets done anyway.
IN THE MAIL: From David Weber, Storm from the Shadows.
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VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Rolling Stone, Michael Hastings, and the McChrystalites—Sort of Deserve Each Other. “God help us all when a four-star general really believes he can use Rolling Stone to help get a message out that might help us defeat the Taliban and help himself in the process.”
HOT AIR: The Overlooked Story From The Weigel Kerfuffle. “Weigel used JournoList for exactly the purpose its critics suspected it would be used, i.e., to attempt to shape media coverage for the benefit of the Left. And he did it more than once. . . . Weigel was explcitly urging his fellow J-Listers to engage in what Weigel’s buddies and fellow travelers like to call ‘epistemic closure,’ to operate as a closed media ecosystem that excludes competing political narratives.” Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: Kindergarten ethics?
MORE RUBES SELF-IDENTIFY: Business’s Buyer’s Remorse: For cooperating with the White House, member companies of the Business Roundtable gets socked with higher taxes and more regulations.
Mr. Seidenberg, officially Verizon’s CEO, moonlights as chairman of the influential Business Roundtable, the “association of chief executive officers of leading U.S. companies.” That would be the same Business Roundtable that woke up this past month to discover the White House has been playing it for a patsy. It turns out that actively supporting a pro-tax, pro-regulation Democratic majority on issues like health care doesn’t really get you anything save more taxes and more regulation.
Do tell. Mr. Seidenberg, meet Mr. Quick.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD on the pointless G20 Summit.