> All life is unintended consequences.

This statement is false on its face.  It conflates random natural occurrence
with the corporate malfeasances that are actively covered up for years
before the denialists and apologists are exposed as shills. 

> No one can reliably predict the future, 
> even when it matters very much, such 
> as in weather emergencies. 

But this claim attempts to make simple and clear malfeasance and cover-up
seem to be an "act of God" so as to duck liability.  This sort of claim
explains the Deepwater Horizon incident as the finger of God Himself,
reaching down and making the well improperly cemented. This force of nature,
in which no human had any involvement whatsoever, also caused the breakers
designed to close the well to not seal the well.  Then, in a burst of
angelic praise and song, The Lord also created methane sulfide crystals on
the containment dome, which prevented it from closing.  No one could have
predicted any of this of course, as absolutely no one has ever seen, for
example, a methane sulfide crystal form anywhere near an oil and gas
well-mouth.

Except EVERYONE with ANY knowledge of the specifics predicted exactly this,
as the same exact series of malfunctions happened multiple times before: in
2005, 2003, and 2002, there were smaller spills from the same causes, and
the Coast Guard gave 6 warnings to the rig. 
http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/04/deepwater_horizon_
rig_had_hist.html
http://tinyurl.com/y9rhrlm4

I picked Horizon as it is easy to understand - drill at the edge of our
technological ability, and the poor guys doing the work are vaporized in the
initial explosion, while the entire Gulf of Mexico, from the Dry Tortugas to
Galveston Bay is turned into a dead zone for fish and fishermen, and the
beach is tarred from Pensacola Naval Air Station all the way around the Gulf
down to the Yucatan.

One does not need a Nostradamus to see the tangible evidence at hand and
draw the rational conclusion that the evidence does not bode well for
campers, sport fishermen, non-target insects, downstream municipal water
systems, eleventy-nine species of songbirds, Mrs. Muller's 3rd grade class,
and a type of snail that no one has even yet identified that has a protein
that holds the key to curing Alzheimer's.  And penguins.  Absolutely
everything seems to threaten penguins these days.  What the heck did they do
to deserve this?

> All creativity depends on unintended 
> consequences to produce novelty. 
> If we created only what we intended, 
> nothing much new would come about. 

"New" is not necessarily "safe", which is why there are a large number of
prior approvals required to attempt to ferret out "unintended consequences"
of new products with possible environmental impact.  The problem is that
for-profit companies work to avoid or subvert this process, and some people
inexplicably defend these unethical stances of denial and misdirection use
arguments like "All life is unintended consequences" to duck corporate
responsibility for the extremely predictable outcomes of their easily
measureable negligence.  I can understand shills who are paid, but why would
anyone do such things merely to self-aggrandize, moreso among beekeepers?

The exact relative levels of humility appropriate to shepherds, beekeepers,
and swineherds is unimportant, but if one has not learned humility from
one's bees, than one has learned nothing at all.  

Why posture and pose as if one had a deeper understanding when the basic
fact is that even experts need to double check every pistol every time they
pick it up as, by definition, there is no such thing as an unloaded gun?
Why are approaches like this that promote safety so hard to understand as
Very Good Things, when such considerations are part of even the Boy Scout
marksmanship merit badge?

> There is no crystal ball which can 
> predict the outcome of our actions today. 

Yes there is! We have an entire industry that starts with the premise that
"Human error is inevitable", and designs, checks, tests and revises
processes that eliminate avenues for errors to affect things like the
outcome of your surgery by implementing practices that verify correct
procedures.  It starts with simple things, like the surgeon visiting the
patient before scrub, and marking with a Sharpie the knee or arm that is the
correct one to cut, verifying against x-rays or MRIs.  This is why it is so
rare for people to die in surgery these days.

> Wisdom dictates caution, but the world 
> can only be made better by seeing a future 
> filled with potential successes, -- not flag 
> under the weight of too much fretting and doubt.

This is pure boosterism.  It is literally a rephrasing of the propaganda
"better living through chemistry".

> The fear of unintended consequences 
> expresses itself in the precautionary principle.

No, the fear of being LIED TO expresses itself in the precautionary
principle.  After being lied to so often, for so long, the burden of proof
is placed on the company to prove something safe, rather than assuming that
everything is benign until proven beyond all doubt to not be benign.

This sort of statement misrepresenting the basic premise of the
precautionary principle is so objectionable not merely due to the attempts
to duck accountability, and the by now standard-issue denials and
obfuscation, as they are actually part of the early-warning system that lets
the general public see that they are being lied to yet again.

What is objectionable is the claim that nothing can prevent "accidents".
They are positioned as inevitable, blameless outcomes of acts of nature,
technology, and human error, rather than the products of overt and repeated
willful negligence and greed that can in fact, be prevented. 

All of these "unexpected consequences" consistently are a result of a
for-profit entity externalizing what should be their cost on everyone else,
so they get to internalize bigger profits, and everyone else pays the cost.

Believing something is unavoidable consistently makes that thing inevitable.

We should not stand for such unwarranted optimism in the face of such
significant and consistent collateral damage. Voltaire wrote the story of
Dr. Pangloss, and his "best of all possible worlds" in 1797.  The fact that
you may not instantly know Dr. Pangloss by name is the fault of an education
system that no longer teaches the classics, or any math worthy of the name.
Both are reasons why you keep getting fooled by the propaganda.  

It's also been 46 years since the Who came out with "Won't Get Fooled
Again", and Van Halen did a decent cover of the song that got lots of
airplay in the 1990s, so even pop culture should have clued everyone in by
now.

As an aside, a frequent poster said via email that a recent post of mine
"must have taken hours".  Nope, I have one-cup-of-coffee posts, and
two-cuppers.  I type fast, I let spellcheck keep me from appearing
illiterate, which sometimes substitutes in the wrong words, and I have a
little program I wrote years ago that monitors my typing in email and docs,
and finds bookmarks I've saved that match keywords and phrases that I type,
so my references appear before my eyes, ready to paste in.

This was a one-cup post.  (8:07am - 8:23am)


	

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