Looking at this cartoon reminded me that, in my youth, whenever anyone said I couldn’t or wouldn’t do something until “pigs fly” I immediately began sketching out porcine catapults and jet packs.
Shannon Love
It’s Mostly a Lack of Practice
A lot of people are asking why the both the government and private response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is so inept.
No major failure has a single cause but I think one major cause has been completely overlooked:
Everyone involved is simply out of practice.
How Sad is That?
I have tried to avoid most of the news about Al Gore’s sexual assault scandal. But this is just pathetic:
The accuser said Gore maneuvered her into the bedroom. His iPod docking station was there, he told her, and he wanted her to listen to “Dear Mr. President,” a lachrymose attack on George W. Bush by the singer Pink.
“As soon as he had it playing, he turned to me and immediately flipped me flat on my back and threw his whole body face down over atop of me,” she said. “I was just shocked at his craziness.”[emp added]
Really? That’s his make out music? That’s what gets his engine revving, a song mocking the man who beat him? How much of his emotional life must revolve around Bush that he makes good old George part of his seduction shtick?
This isn’t the first time that Gore has shown evidence of serious emotional instability. He packed on significant amounts of weight and grew a disheveled beard in the two months following his loss in 2000. That’s not how someone with the emotional balance necessary to be President acts.
Now he’s (possibly) committed sexual assault and betrayed his wife of 30 years by committing adultery.
We seriously dodged a bullet when he lost in 2000. He would have imploded under the stresses of a post-9/11 presidency.
The Myth of Alternative Power and Hydroelectric Storage
Every time I get into a debate about “alternative” energy I point out it can’t be used for baseline power because it can’t provide reliable power, and it can’t provide reliable power because you can’t store the electricity that it episodically generates.
Immediately, someone will say, “We can use hydraulic storage!”
Hydraulic storage is basically a hydroelectric dam on a small or large scale, except instead of using water brought by a watershed, the water is pumped up behind the dam with pumps powered by the generator whose energy output you want to store. For example, you would have electric pumps powered by solar panels or wind turbines, the idea being that when the wind or cloud-free days produced a surplus of power (or you built in surplus capacity) the pumps would pump water from a lower reservoir uphill into a higher storage reservoir. The electricity would be stored as the potential energy in the elevated water. When you needed the power back, you would drain the water back downhill through turbines just like a hydroelectric damn.
Now, this certainly works and it has been done on a small scale. However, it will never, ever be a real-world, large-scale solution that can make alternative power work.
Why? Well, let’s just do some back-of-the-envelope calculations.
Why I Left the Farm
You know, this is why I left the farm.
When I was about 13 we had a cow go down with a calf gone breach. The calf had died by the time we found her in the morning but the cow had been trying to squeeze the calf out sideways all night and couldn’t push anymore. Somebody had to stick their arm way up in the cow and rotate the calf so it was head and feet first.
Now, you might think that there is all kinds of room up in a cow’s vagina (and there is) but it tightens a lot at the cervix. The cervix is pushed open from the inside by the pressure of the calf in the womb being squeezed outward by the muscles of the womb. If the cow stops pushing, you’ve got maybe a two-inch gap to squeeze into and try to open it. It takes small hands and arms.
Between my 6’2″ grandfather, our burly family friend Mr. Tiesdale and the 13-year-old me, who do you think had the slimmest, girliest hands?
*Sigh*