Nosmo King
Gold Member
First, morality is not a function of the state. Once the state tells us how to behave in a moral context, I ask what freedoms have been erased.Michael Moore's fat bloated self was on CNN a few minutes ago. Larry King asked him about the oil spill.
Moore kinda got teary eyed looking, gazed up and away from the camera, and just began speaking with wonder saying "You know, this is America, that was a 7 inch hole, 36 inches tall....the pipe was 36 inches....and it took us 90 days to plug it"......"What happened to us? We're America, what happened.....nothing works anymore" (he then blasted oil companies and corporations for having so much power)
Well, Mr. Moore, I agree with you. WHAT happened to "us"? Our morality went down the crapper for one. Thats why people act the way they act these days. Values like modesty, integrity, selflessness and thrift have been thrown out the window.
As for why we couldn't fix the hole quicker, well, it takes research and development to make technological leaps like that. It takes............GASP............PROFIT to fund R&D. Oil companies need......gasp.....profits to pay for extracirricular research and development. We need things like NASA, yes the same NASA whose budget Obama just slashed and who he told their job would be to make Muslims feel good about themselves.
Mr. Moore, we need evil, greedy, profit driven corporations like Boeing, Locheed-Martin, Microsoft, Exxon, and yes, even the diabolical Haliburton, to turn big profits so they can field research and development teams to come up with innovations to tend to future unforseen problems.
It takes big profits in the medical field for them to fund studies and experiments to innovate and create new medicines and cures. Evil, stinking slimey profits.
Mr. Moore is right. "What happened to us"? We have fallen. In innovation, in morality, in manners, all as the country has slowly drifted more and more liberal.
Mr. Moore asks "What happened to us" and he'll probably blast conservatives next for wanting to "take us backwards". Backwards sounds pretty good some days.
But the bigger point is: you seem to think that if companies just made more profits, they could avoid such accidents as the BP spill. Well, if BP had followed all the regulations and accepted industry practices rather than cut corners in order to .....wait for it....make a larger profit, we would not be discussing a massive oil spill and how to stop it.
As soon as you get your nose from the rectum of corner-cutting corporations, the ridiculous notion of turning those companies loose to reap profit at the expense of health, safety and the environment will become crystal clear.
Given that a panel of experts has still not said exactly what happened I wonder how you know all this. How much money did BP save? What "corners" did they cut? What regulations did they violate? Would adhering to those regulations have prevented the accident?
You don't have the first fucking clue, of course. But it is a convenient chance to demonize a corporation for being successful.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37279113/#slice-2
The researcher, Dr. Robert Bea, came to the nation's capital this week with that message about what went wrong on the Deepwater Horizon rig.
Bea's been an engineer for 57 years, with experience investigating past disasters. An engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley, he's a co-founder of its Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, and is the Center's principal researcher. After Hurricane Katrina, he helped lead an independent investigation into why the levees in New Orleans collapsed.
The report lists what Bea believes are seven "Steps Leading to Containment Failure," also known as "blowout," including:
*improper well design
*improper cement design
*early warning signs not properly detected, analyzed or corrected
*removing the pressure barrier -- displacing drilling mud with sea water 8,000 feet below the drill deck
*flawed design and maintenance of the final line of defense the blowout preventer
One of the early warning signs was belches or 'kicks' of methane gas, which came up from the depths of the well in the weeks before the accident. The gas was in slushy ice forms called methane hydrates -- but was potentially explosive. One incident was serious enough to shut the well down.
"They had a catastrophic loss of drill fluid into the formation," Bea says. "Gas got to the surface. They had to bring the rig to cold operation."
Could it just be possible that the engineers on the Deepwater Horizon were motivated by something other than environmental and workplace safety? What could such a motivation be if it wasn't as noble as environmental and workplace safety?