Bombs, Oil Spills, Stocks and Prayer

The past few weeks have not been good for the ulcers of anyone trying to run this country. Stocks, for instance, plunged a thousand points in a single day—and no one knows why. Computers becoming peevish with other computers? Mindless panic?
Who knows? No one. They went down a thousand and then came back up a few hundred points—losing all the gains they’ve made so far this year. Which way will they go next. Again, no one really knows.
The Staten Island Ferry loses it and piles into the landing slip. (I remember all the times I stood at the bow and watched this controlled collision as we piled into the slips, bouncing from side to side as we finally settled in. But this one was for real.) Several people actually got hurt. The engine seems to have raced, Toyota style, out of control. (I used to imagine this happening years ago—this time it really did. Again, why?)
Then, again, there’s the little present the Pakistani Taliban left for us in Times Square. We can all heave a great sigh of relief that the bomb didn’t go off—the perpetrators were inept, the disable vets who sell souvenirs in the area were alert, we were lucky.
We were lucky in 1993 when some inept bombers tried to blow up a World Trade Center tower with a van full of explosives. It went boom; the building stayed up. We heaved a great sign of relief and congratulated ourselves, just like now.
Eight years later the same folk came back with a better plan—hijack airplanes full of fuel. Both towers came down. Our congratulations were premature. Yes, boys and girls, the Taliban and Al Qaeda have the ability to learn.
Oh, and Afghanistan is beginning to remind us more and more of Vietnam. The generals in Kabul are sounding ever more optimistic. The surge is working; we are winning against the Taliban. Of course, those generals are ignoring the fact that a counter surge of Taliban fighters is pouring in every night from Pakistani recruitment centers.
The top brass in Saigon remained optimistic about the course of the war right up until North Vietnamese tanks rolled into town and renamed it Ho Chi Minh City. Then, finally, everybody scrambled to put his Vietnamese mistress on a plane and get out.
Kabul seems to be living in the same dream world. The troops on the ground in dangerous rural areas don’t see quite as many signs of victory as the generals do. But the generals aren’t facing the same waves of incoming Taliban fighters. A Brit in Kabul has opened a bar and grill named after the hill where Afghani guerillas slaughtered an entire British army in 1842. Maybe the top echelon should go have dinner there.
The fancy cap BP Oil built to contain the spill in the Gulf didn’t work. They are down to their last hope—drilling a new well to relieve the pressure and capping the old with cement. This is all going to happen a mile down in the water under unbelievable pressures.
We hope. And if it does, it will take another couple months or so. Meanwhile gallons and gallons of crude oil are spilling into some of the finest fishing grounds in the world. The Icelandic volcano is still shutting down flights all over Europe.
That ash can play hell with jet engines—it can pit aircraft windows so badly you can’t see out of them. Nature keeps reminding us that she is NOT our friend—at best, she is indifferent or neutral. But she has no intent to benefit us.
And, of course, it is becoming less and less legal to pray to the divinity we have, historically, believed could control nature. So, prayerless, ignorant of basic causes, unable to control natural forces, we find ourselves completely at their mercy.
The White House, the Street and our troops can only ask, “What next?”
If we suggested that everyone pray—which we have done throughout our history—we would have whole cadres of federal judges and civil libertarians telling us we are violating the Constitution itself. So, “what next?”

BP This Time--Another Oil Spill

We need oil. Anyone who thinks we can slip out of this fact by adding vegetable oil to the mix or building trucks that run tons of produce on electricity isn’t with us in real space and time. All the conservation in the world isn’t going to get everybody who lives in suburbia to work tomorrow. Windmills are great; they won’t power New York and Chicago. We have trapped ourselves into NEEDING oil.
On April 20, BP became the latest oil company to cast its oil upon the waters. As approximately 200,000 or more gallon pump themselves into Gulf waters from a leak that’s a mile straight down, we have the makings of a serious disaster.
The oil has already created a slick about 130 miles wide. It is threatening some of the richest fishing grounds on the planet and some of the finest shoreline wetlands and beaches. BP is already facing at least a dozen law suits.
There is no guarantee we can turn this thing off anytime in the next three months. By then it will have become the largest spill ever in American waters. So we shouldn’t have been drilling so deep down; we shouldn’t have been drilling in water at all. But we still NEED oil.
Continuing dependence on Arab oil could start limiting all sorts of our options. Can you guarantee that the Saud family will still rule Saudi Arabia in ten years? Will the successors be any more friendly than Iran? Can we rely on Iraqi or Iranian oil? For how long?
Increasingly, they don’t need us as a market. There’s always China, India and Japan to sell to. American oil that could cut back this reliance is increasingly found under water—leaving us exposed to more spills like this one.
My adult years have spanned the oil embargoes of 1973 and 1979, the rise of the Third World as an oil drinking industrial power house and escalation of American trade deficits. I’ve heard lots of discussion on conservation, alternative energies and new oil drilling.
One subject that has completely eluded my awareness—and that I’ve been thinking about since 1973—is the question of completely synthetic oil. Have you heard anyone talk about it? I’ve not heard a mention. Nary a peep.
Before you say, “That’s impossible”, let me refresh our memories with a few historical facts. We were totally dependent on RUBBER tires to run our cars, trucks and military vehicles before World War II. We lost ALL our rubber at the start of that war.
We came up with a substitute—synthetic—substance that makes perfectly fine tires that we use to this day. (Whoever thinks of Vietnam and rubber in the same breath anymore?)
We found ourselves in a deadly race with both German and Japanese scientists during World War II to build a super bomb using a technique that had never been tried, never even been attempted, and we put together a program that delivered an atomic bomb—from pencil notes on an envelope to a major “boom”—in about four years.
The Germans were cut off from most sources of oil during World War II. They came up with a synthetic gasoline that could deliver 100 octane fuel to top-notch fighter aircraft as well as trucks and cars. We captured their notes and took them to Washington.
Big Oil screamed “Foul!” We never even translated the recipe. (Does anyone have any idea if it still exists today—or where?) Even if we destroyed the files, if it could be done once, it could be done again. If a Los Alamos Project could deliver a bomb, a similar project today could reasonably be expected to deliver something that would run my Buick, your Toyota, the trucks on the road and all those big airplanes—that didn’t have to come out of the ground in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf waters. How great would that be?
It would also be PRACTICAL in a nation that has painted itself into a corner where there is no feasible alternative to the gasoline engines that deliver our food, our power, our workers to the office and keep our lawns mowed.
We need oil—like we needed rubber. We found a substitute for the one; why not for the other? We just aren’t talking about it. No one has the political will to order it done. BP will eventually wind up paying a few million in fines and move on.
Somebody’s got to start talking about it.