#Oilspill, or #WhyTheGovernmentNeedsBP

Thirty-five days after the BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded into flames, oil continues to spill.

This is an environmental disaster unlike anything that the US (or anyone, really) has faced before, and it has shined a light on some major deficiencies in our government, both in oversight and response capability.

BP has taken the lead so far, because they are the ones with the technology and the people to do work at the ocean floor, a mile deep. Some of the talking heads wonder why the government doesn't have all this brainpower and technology at its disposal, so they could deal with the situation without BP. These morons clearly don't remember the last couple decades, as we've struggled with budget deficits, and trying to balance the spending we already have while cutting taxes and keeping Social Security and other such things.

There is one thing that the government could have done, day one, to stop the spill. In fact, it is a technique that the Russians have used on more than one occasion to stop a spill. What did they do? They nuked it.

Of course, detonating a nuke in the Gulf of Mexico is not what anyone wants to do. Which means that, like it or not, the government needs BP to end this spill.

In the days and weeks to come, there will be time to debate the future of offshore drilling, and how to move forward from here in terms of environmental concerns, renewable energy, and the relationship between oil companies and the agency that oversees them. For now, all we can do is sit down, shut up, and hope BP gets it right, sooner rather than later.

Old People Don't Get It

There are times when I think people over a certain age just don't get it.

Then there are times when I KNOW they don't get it.

For instance, take the movie Kick-Ass. The movie (based on a comic book of the same name) is based on the premise 'Why hasn't anyone tried to be a superhero?'. In it, we follow the adventure of a high school geek who's only super power is "being invisible to girls". When he orders a costume over the internet, and goes to try and fight crime, he promptly gets stabbed, and then hit by a car. The result? He's got metal supporting his bones now, and his nerve endings are shot, so he can't feel pain. And then he goes back out, crimefighting again, becoming an internet sensation, while at school he's still the geek who can't score.

So far, all the critics love the movie, enjoying the close parallel to Spider-man and Peter Parker. Of course, that's only the first twenty minutes or so.

Then we meet Hit Girl and Big Daddy, a pair of costumed vigilantes who are more Punisher than the Batman and Robin they echo. Hit Girl first appears in costume wielding more blades than a chef at Benihana, and she proceeds to destroy the gang-bangers who Kick-Ass had come to intimidate, before Big Daddy takes down the last one with a shot from a sniper rifle through the window.

From that point on, the critics lament and moan how horrible the movie is, with graphic depictions of violence, and the way Hit Girl curses enough to make a sailor blush, all the while being cute and adorable. A review in the local paper actually whined that the movie would have been better if it were more like Peter Parker in Spider-man.

News flash. This movie is NOT Spider-man.

What this movie is actually a more realistic representation of what would happen if people in real life tried to be superheroes, and there is a simple reason why it doesn't portray the main characters as wearing blue spandex tights, flying around, and behaving like an extraterrestrial boyscout. These are real people, with real flaws, and real limitations on what they can do. And nothing they do (with the exception of jetpack-mounted miniguns) is within the realm of human ability.

Moreover, the character of Hit Girl is SUPPOSED to be disturbing! She and Big Daddy have given themselves completely to the 'by any means necessary' approach to bringing retribution to those who are outside the law. Like Rorschach in the Watchmen, they are agents of vengeance, and there is a certain nobility in their almost psychotic behavior, their clarity of vision. They do the things we all wish we could do.

The reason Hit Girl and Rorschach are disturbing is because we have all thought that the world would be a better place if we just took the fight to the criminals, the terrorists, the people who make our lives miserable, and laid waste to them all. But we always hold back, either through fear, or morality, or apathy. We talk the talk, but they walk the walk, and that is what disturbs us. It isn't that we hate what they do, but that we hate the fact that they are doing it and not us.

But perhaps old people just don't get it.

And then there's the recent outrage by commentators and public morality hypocrites over the recent video circulating the internet showing Miley Cyrus dancing up on a guy, grinding on him. Now commentators are bitching and moaning about how she shouldn't be doing that, or whatever.

I've seen the video, and honestly? It is painfully obvious that the people who are outraged haven't actually been to a high school dance in a couple decades, at least. News flash, people, that was pretty tame for what teenagers do. Hell, at my high school prom I saw much worse, and that was back in '02.

This is simply how people dance now. Or did you think teenagers went for doing a nice waltz, or perhaps a square dance? Did you think that they were somehow more pure than you were when you were a teenager? Don't tell me none of you got freaky growing up in the 60s and 70s!

Old people just don't get it.

Kill the Primary System

America has always been a place of strong opinions, and strong differences. There has always been heated debate on the floor of the Congress. But it used to be that people could disagree upon the issues without being unpatriotic. It used to be that having an idea for a program didn't draw comparisons to Nazis. It used to be that politics was civil, despite ideology.

The last few decades have seen a steady erosion of the civility in politics, to the point where now we find ourselves locked in perpetual campaigns, every sound bite dissected, and politicians publicly saying that a bill would mean the end of the world.

What caused our political system to fall to the point where you see more civility in kindergarten?

In short, the primary system is the root of a great many of our country's political woes.

The primary system forces politicians to pander to the fringe of their parties, because only the fringe can be bothered to vote in these minor ballots that decide so much. And before you start, this is a bipartisan problem. Democrats are beholden to the far left crazies just as much as Republicans are beholden to far right crazies. For the fringe, the system works great. It is everyone in between who gets the shaft.

The essence of politics is compromise. You wheel and deal, and you take two opposing viewpoints and try to find something in between, that both parties can live with. Hell, the reason we have a House of Representatives and a Senate is because of a compromise! Compromise makes laws stronger.

But in the primary system, politicians who reach across the aisle to compromise are vilified by the extremes, so anyone who actually tries to get things done, rather than put things in a deadlock, finds themselves with the fringe booting them out of office in a primary. Even when the majority of Americans favor compromise on an issue, politicians are too scared of losing their job at the hands of the nuts in their own party to do the people's business.

And this is not limited to Congressmen and Senators. Even Presidential candidates must play to the crazies of their own party through the primary process, before moving to the middle for a general, opening them up to well deserved accusations of hypocrisy.

The only solution I can see is to kill the primary system. Open up the ballots in the elections to whoever can fulfill the requirements, and let the people pick from the full spectrum of the candidates out there. Sure, there may be some craziness as you see more run-off elections, but I see that as a good thing. Instead of having primaries for each party, where the extremes choose the candidates everyone is stuck with in the general, open up the general to everyone, and have a run-off between the two with the highest vote counts. The eventual winner would be a compromise, of course, but why is that bad?

Compromise candidates may lead to more compromise in legislation. And that is a good thing.

Success in the War on Terror

In wars past, victory involved ticker tape parades, celebrations in the street, and a sailor kissing a young woman.

Anyone expecting such things in the war on terror is sadly mistaken. Success will not come heralded by the roaring crowds. There will be no articles of surrender. Anyone looking for the end of all terrorism against the United States will be sorely disappointed. There have always been terrorists, and there always will be.

What, then, will success in the War on Terror look like? It will look a lot like what we have right now. There will still be attacks, some broken up ahead of time, some foiled due to incompetence, and every now and then a successful one. Short of making this country into a police state that would make Soviet Russia look positively like anarchy, there is no way to prevent a lone extremist from driving a car bomb into New York, or flying a plane into an IRS building.

Success in the war on terror means that large groups such as Al Qaeda are so scattered that they cannot draw together to produce the sophisticated, devastating attacks like we saw on September 11, 2001, not that terrorism is gone forever. Israel has some of the best anti-terrorist intelligence capability in the world, and they are still hit with terrorist attacks. There is no way to eliminate terrorism completely.

Success means that the terrorists are reduced to these simple, unsophisticated attacks. A little trouble, in a small, mean way, capable of killing to be sure, but being few and far between, with no real organizing principle behind them.

Success means not the absence of attacks, or even the absence of successful attacks. Success means the absence of coordination.

What made September 11th so devastating was not that an attack happened, it was that an attack that was the culmination of years of planning, years of gathering the proper credentials, and years of training all came together, and became an event so spectacular that we could not help but be scarred by it. There had been hijackings before 9/11. There were planes that blew up, or were forced to crash, or were taken hostage. None of these had the same impact as four planes, simultaneously, hitting three buildings, completely destroying two of them and killing thousands of people.

But what have we seen since then? Every attack has been less sophisticated than the one before. From hijacked planes, they regressed to train bombings. From train bombings, they regressed to sending guys with guns to run around a tourist city shooting as many people as they could before they were killed. From there, they have regressed to the point where they rely on a lone extremist with so little training that he forgot to open the valves on the propane tanks.

Is there more to do? Of course. And it is clear that some lessons learned from the Times Square attack have already been put into practice. Airlines now have to check the no fly list within two hours of a change being made, rather than within 24 hours, like it was before. Are there more lessons to learn? Of course. Each attack, whether it is broken up, flops, or is successful, teaches us new lessons, allows us to refine our methods.

This is what Success in the war on terror looks like.