Yeah…Come to think of it, what was Melville really trying to say?
Might be a thesis in this somewhere.
Shannon Love
Proliferation? That horse has bolted.
Steven Den Beste worries that solving our energy problem with small thorium reactors will lead to nuclear proliferation.
I disagree but I don’t do so based on the technical specifics of thorium reactors. I would argue that stopping nuclear proliferation has nothing to do with the non-military use or non-use of any particular technology.
So how do we stop nuclear proliferation? The answer is simple: We can’t.
When people talk about stopping proliferation, they forget one key fact: Nuclear weapons technology is 60 years old. You can’t stop countries from recreating a 60-year-old technology.
… is Enemy Action
Another drilling rig has exploded in the Gulf and just days after the House (maybe) overturned the drilling moratorium.
Hmmmm,
We went 31 years without a major oil spill in the Gulf prior to Deepwater Horizon. Now we have a second explosion so soon. Meanwhile, some Greenpeace “direct action” types are attacking an oil rig off Greenland.
Hmmmm,
There’s no evidence of any human agency in either explosion. Still, when you look at the utter frothing hysteria directed against drilling and the oil industry in general, it’s pretty easy to imagine a group deciding that a little violence now will save a lot of lives later. After all, don’t environmental activists always tell us that they’re fighting for the survival of the entire earth and humanity itself? With such high stakes, it would be easy for someone to talk themselves into a “you’ve got to break a few eggs to make an omelet” rationalization.
Certainly, if the situation was reversed, the left would have no trouble using the same level of proof as evidence of nefarious plots by the right wing. After all, they think the right engineered a war that killed hundreds of thousands just to make a few bucks. Blaming the right for something like blowing up an oil rig would be chump change compared to that.
At present, the FBI considers ecoterrorists the most active domestic terrorist groups. It wouldn’t be much of a step from burning down buildings to blowing up oil rigs. With the resources and training that Greenpeace and other environmental groups have demonstrated they possess, they certainly have the physical ability to carry out such an attack.
Hmmmm,
We will have to wait and see I suppose. Even if sabotage was the cause it might be hard to prove with all the evidence thousands of meters below the sea. Still, you know the old axiom: Once is a fluke, twice is coincidence, three times…
[Update (2010-9-3 7:58am): From reading the comments, I think this post came out sounding more serious than I intended. I intended a more of a tongue-in-cheek tone to serve as a reminder of how easy it would be to see human agency in such events especially given the hysterical levels of leftwing rhetoric against the oil companies. We could eventually see the environmentalist version of the Weathermen if the hysteria continues.]
What Prison Rape Jokes Mean
I posted an overly long comment to the comments of this blog post on prison rape [h/t Instapundit], so I thought I would turn it into a post here.
I don’t think the vast majority of people who joke or threaten about prison rape are seriously indifferent to it when it comes to making real decisions about the penal system. Instead, I think they are simply pointing out one of the ugly realities of the real-world penal system.
I think that politically most people would like to reduce prison rape but they have a lot other evils they would like to reduce first. It is not that they don’t care, it is just that they have so many other things to care about as well.