View Week 681 June 29 2011-1
We will be out of Internet contact for the day and possibly until tomorrow.
I haven’t time to write an essay this morning, but I will have time for thought during the day, and I will be able to collect my mail this evening. Meanwhile, if you want something to think about, contemplate this:
Articles: The Purposeful Flooding of America’s Heartland
Of course, we have some of the usual collection of Watermelon Greens screaming that the Midwest floods were caused by CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming). Rational analysis of the situation may lead one in another direction.
The Purposeful Flooding of America’s Heartland
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/06/the_purposeful_flooding_of_americas_heartland.html
Regards,
Jim Riticher
I have no claim to great competence in flood management, nor do I have independent sources for the claims made in this, which looks at first glance like the kind of science fiction intended to ridicule politically correct bureaucracy that has no adult supervision. Every opinion has a political weight for framing policy, and the actual scientific merit of the idea is unimportant. So is the scientific competence of the source: what matters is not science but political power within the bureaucracy. Science fiction used to produce a lot of such stories. I would have thought this one of them were it not for the headlines and TV news of the floods.
The usual criticism levied at the Corps of Engineers is hubris: that no matter the competence, control of nature is inherently impossible, and trying it will just make things worse. We know better, of course. Life in my time is a lot better than it was when I was growing up, and almost all of that is due to technology. That doesn’t mean mistakes can’t be made. When I was a kid, polio was a real danger and we were afraid of it for my first twenty years. When I was born most Americans regarded smallpox as a mortal danger, or at least remembered times when everyone did. I grew up unafraid of smallpox at the cost of a rather crude form of vaccination – they smeared goo on your arm, or with girls sometimes on a buttock, and stabbed you with a small needle about twenty times. It was uncomfortable and for a few it was painful – but it worked, and we were no longer afraid of smallpox. When I went into the Army we got smallpox vaccinations again, just in case. I could give the same story about diphtheria and bunch of other dread diseases (remember the origin of the Iditarod race?)
We made mistakes in developing a national policy on vaccination, and we still make some: but few in America fear smallpox or polio or diphtheria. When I was young a long distance telephone call was done by appointment and it was a Big Deal to talk to someone in New York or California from Memphis. Now – well, now I am talking to all of you, instantly. That’s technology.
We no longer fear famine, in part because of agricultural technology, in part due to transportation technologies. Again not perfectly applied, often badly executed, sometimes with artificial primary hampers like the TSA, but transportation works. We can get across country quickly and cheaply, so cheaply that it’s easier to beg the money for a ticket than it is to hitchhike. That’s progress of a sort.
It isn’t technological arrogance to assume you can make real changes in environmental matters like floods. It is incompetence to assume you can do it while catering to every non-scientific whim and making all ideas equal. But that’s another essay.
But do recall Napoleon Bonaparte, who was no stranger to political intrigue, betrayal, and conspiracies: “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”
Clearly someone failed to see the obvious, and those who did were silenced or ignored. Or both.
Having contemplated all this, I now invite you to contemplate the financial wreck from Frank-Dodd, and point out that almost everyone who thinks about the financial regulatory environment with all the “reforms” and bureaus is quite certain that if we go on as we are going, there will be another financial disaster making the Great Recession look small. And what are we doing? Why we will tax corporate jets and oil companies, and otherwise raise the cost of energy to the consumer.
Our present system of government appears to be idealistic Incompetence tempered by greed.
