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June 15, 2010
Competitive Mismanagement
As the world awaits the outcome of what may soon come to be known as the Costner Experiment, one is forced to wonder how humanity ever found itself in such a predicament and, if the experiment succeeds, will it have learned anything from the experience?As it turns out, the answer to the first question is now painfully obvious; but the most informed response to the second would have to be, “almost certainly not.” Dealing first with the oil disaster’s root cause, it was concisely articulated to Anderson Cooper by Costner himself in the segment I watched last night: he had approached the petroleum industry with his proposal years ago, but they had not seen any need to invest in technology for cleaning up spills. Given that they have also been drilling at greater and greater depths for years, that attitude, confirmed by their meager investment in safety and clean up, was irresponsibly reckless. The Air Transportation equivalent would have been an assertion that air travel had become so safe that airline crashes were now a thing of the past.
The real time vicarious experience of participation in these unfolding events continues; I had just listened to Congressman Ed Markey upbraid a stony faced panel of big oil execs for their behavior and then turned the set off to write this entry rather than listen to his eager colleagues wax predictably self-righteous in the TV spotlight.
It’s now time for me to drive over to Oakland to screen some new pot users seeking to become “legal’ and renew that status for others under the provisions of California’s still-disputed and much misunderstood law.
All of which simply reinforces my belief that, for all our cleverness, we humans can be maddeningly self-destructive.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at June 15, 2010 05:00 PM