Our Intellectual Excellence ..

The thing that almost all of us want for our children is a good education.  One might ask why?  I would answer, “so that when they enter the real world, they will bring with them the wisdom of the ages and have learned to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to solving the great problems with which they will be confronted … that they will be able to tell right from wrong and that they will interact morally and ethically with their peers.”

Most of us reading this blog have had the benefit of a good upbringing and education.  But we, many of us, are too trusting of those that we have been taught are our superiors.  In the case of modern America those superiors are all too often bureaucrats, especially federal ones or experts, professors with an agenda, from academia.

We have seen a world-class example of this phenomenon being played out in the “Gulf Oil Crisis.”  We have all been horrified by the specter of oil from the drilling tragedy killing marine animals, destroying fisheries, polluting beaches, ruining businesses and commerce.  We have been told that this is the “worst environment disaster” in American history on a daily basis … that is until the other day when BP Petroleum capped the undersea gusher.

After a few days of limited commentary by the press and electronic media, we begin to hear the sounds of a new song emerging.  The lyrics to this new song, sung in a whisper to begin with, but slowly rising to a crescendo, are telling us a new story, a story of hope and triumph.  The pundits are telling us that the beaches have been nearly cleaned; no more oil is coming ashore; oil at sea is becoming difficult to find; and magically much of the oil released at the wellhead has disappeared.  Of course, the bureaucrats from Washington, yes, those who muffed the job initially, are now blustering that it was their wise management that assured that all would be well.  I do not mean to infer that when we make a mess that we should not do all we can to prevent it in the future or should not immediately clean it up.  But there is a far greater force than us that guards the Earth … Mother Nature.

Now, I am not a marine biologist, but like you, I did like my parents wanted and got a pretty darned good education.  When I was studying mathematics, one of the more interesting problems that I remember was a problem about the potential for bacteria to multiply.  Turns out that if you know how long it takes a bacterium to divide into two, you can tell how fast the population will increase.  I won’t bore you much, but if you see the bug is dividing once every half hour and multiply that number by any number hours you care to find out about and use that number as an exponent for the spooky number – “e” (2.7128) – you can see how many bugs are possible.

Number of Bugs =  “e”^(0.5 x hours)

Since this has been going on for a hundred days or more you might like to take out your trusty calculator and see how many bugs there could be.  Suffice it to say that my calculator, which can go up to a google, crashed.

It is well known that Mother Nature has a family of bugs that really like to eat oil.  My daughter, who is a micro-biologist, points out that these bacterium, in order to grow well, like me, like to be a little on the warm side of room temperature … say 80 to 85 degrees.  Lets see … warm water, lots of food … I wonder if Mother Nature has been through this exercise before. There has been plenty of time for our little “oil eaters” to eat up a major part of the spill and my guess is that they will continue to eat until there is no more oil … and then all but a few will die.  Of course, I could be wrong, but I am probably not.  As a matter of fact, it is quite possible that somebody in the dark recesses of the bureaucracy actually had a supply of these little buggers and actually seeded them over the affected area.

The point is that there is almost nothing that we human beings can do to screw up the environment that Mother Nature does not have cure for.  In my opinion, only the stupidly naive or the supremely arrogant would believe that man could have much effect on the environment.  Compared to the enormity of the planet man is about as important to it as that little bug straining to divide is to us.

The above is probably a good guess on the effect of the spill on the planet.  But that is not the whole story.  We have a group in Washington, DC that is trying to “change” America “fundamentally.”  They have a philosophy to – “never let a crisis go to waste.”  It is to the advantage of these people to have the maximum number of people possible in turmoil constantly, for if people are angry enough, they will support radical solutions that, if not angry, they would never tolerate.  So what are the societal and political downsides of this tragedy?  Of course, the people that depend on tourism are ruined for this year; they are desperate and angry.  The government has forbidden fishing so as to protect the consumer from the possibility of “tainted” seafood; the fishermen are desperate and angry.  The government has imposed a moratorium on drilling for gas and oil, over the court orders of the local authorities and has imposed their orders over all US drilling; the roughnecks are desperate and angry.  This in turn has put tens of thousands of other people out of work and they are in turmoil.  The short-term consequence of no drilling will be seen in rising prices at the gas pumps, consumers are at least angry.  In the long term this fiat blunder by the boys in Washington all but guarantees that the nation will have to buy more foreign petroleum.  The government shows no sign of lifting its job killing mandates … the Executive is ignoring the Courts and the People, and the Congress is certainly not pushing the Executive.  If you were cynical like me, you might believe that this tragedy is just what the doctor ordered for the goals of the administration.

Yep, it was one of the greatest tragedies in American history, but the pundits misapprehended it and we as educated Americans should have seen what was happening from the beginning:

The tragedy was not environmental, it was political.