Monday, June 14, 2010

When Will I Be Loved?

Cool song by Phil Everly with the following line-“I've been cheated
been mistreated, When will I be loved?” So, here I am trying to get my mind around lots of stuff this morning and these lines apply to so much going on in the country and in the news. I will not go too deep into the oil rupture folly (or tragedy, depending on whose stock you own) except to say if your stock in this country’s ability to identify and solve a problem hasn’t gone down, I suggest that you might want to consider a brain lubricant.

I am as guilty as the next of using the worn out question, “Damn, if we could put a man on the moon, why can’t we . . . .?” You know, just drop in any problem of the week and it seems to fit: get a 70 MPG car, find a cure to ALS, hold some corporation accountable,etfuckignceterratum. Sweet idea about that man-on-the-moon-thing= fits all sorts of situations just like the BP mess. Here we are 30 years after the man-on-the-moon-thing and not one freaking person can estimate with a reliable margin of error how much damn crude is coming out of that pipe. And I do not want to hear about how complicated it is, just give me a damn close guess, you know 10K barrels give or take a thousand which BTW is a 10 percent margin of error and even Gallup does better than that. OR better yet, give the problem to a couple of high schools in India where they are prepping engineers and let them have a go. Hmm- square feet of cross section of pipe X length of pipe X constant, average pressure X velocity of oil in pipe – friction in pipe- friction of fittings ( or did they blow off?) X Reynolds’s factor. We off shore all our other stuff might as well turn over this “complicated issue.” Or maybe, I’d just as well forget it; the dang Indian students would probably be bought to lie or cheat the numbers for some company’s benefit anyway. Plus, depending on if you are a bleeding-heart-liberal or a God-fearing-conservative, you are going to believe the number you want, science be damned and sense be damned. AND if BP or Exxon or RIG or any driller cannot answer this question they should not be fucking drilling at a mile deep anyway. Anyone who can figure the water pressure at one friggin mile, send it on in along with a sensible reason why you’d want to work on anything at that depth and I will post it. Oh yes, how come we know more about what's on the damn moon 384403 km away than what we do about the oceans right here? I don't need an Indian to tell me it makes no sense.

Or in a more current vein- did it really surprise anyone that somebody found a trillion dollars worth of mineral riches in Afghanistan? Hell, when did we go anywhere since WWII that was not really for some riches of one form or another? How long will take an Indian student to calculate the speed at which we will first, send in more troops; incorporate the Taliban so that its leaders are not culpable for anything; propose that Afghanistan become the fifty-first state? And how come we can get a trillion dollar estimate on mineral wealth in Afghanistan but can get a figure on volume of oil coming out of a damn pipe? Go figure. Anyone who can estimate the speed at which corporations and governments can create lies and statistics about all this wealth, send it on in and I will post it, too. I would like to give the Afghanis some advice on how to handle all this, but I fear being accused of hippieism or disloyalty.

Hell, I should not have started this; I am burnt from too much golf, my feet hurt, I am low on good-mood-medications; and I can’t see past my eyelashes. But, I do not have to see too far to know that the real and true problem for all of us is that we have been “made blue, lied to, turned down and pushed around” because we allow it. There’s just gots to be some love out there somewhere. In the meantime, I am going to go smoke a cheap cigar, bitch about too much government, bitch about not enough government, bitch about the poor woman who owns a big screen TV, bitch about the kid that gets a free lunch, bitch about too many taxes, and bitch about the government being broke. Have to be a pretty long cigar, but I am going to enjoy it.

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