Category: Musings

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I wouldn’t be taking a Carnival Cruise

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All joking aside what is going on with Carnival cruises?

To have so many ships in such a short time with serious / sometimes critical problems is concerning.

An engine fire could be called an accident, or an anomaly and it’s a good thing that the fire was controlled even if that meant 5000 passengers had a hellish week while the ship was being towed in.

Honestly, it could have been a lot worse. Fires on ships a sea are bad things. It’s not like you have a place to go, and you’re not going to hear a fire engine whizzing by to put out the flames. Sure you can hit the lifeboats then what? You wait for rescue, that is IF a distress call got out. Otherwise it’s up to the emergency beacons or radios in the lifeboats. The only place that a fire would be worse is in Space.

If the fire was a “one off” I’d be well everyone was lucky and I’m sorry their cruise was ruined.

What caught my attention is that Carnival has a fairly substantial number of it’s fleet reporting problems.

The problems being reported aren’t little things like a light bulb or a toilet not working.

All of these are engineering related problems.

Which in my mind begs the question… Are these ships being maintained properly? My knee jerk response is to say obviously not.

Looking at the dates the ships were completed you can see that they’re all pretty new, they shouldn’t be having these kinds of problems. There are freighters and fishing boats and other luxury liners that are operating every day which are much older.

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What does this say?

There are a couple of theories I can put out there.

1) The engineers maintaining the ships are young and inexperienced.

Ask any older worked if the person that replaced them could read well, or really understood cause & effect or could logically think through a problem to its resolution and you’re probably going to get a general trend in the answer. The trend will be towards “NO”.

 

This could simply be symptomatic of the retirement of experienced workers and their replacement with inexperienced or inferior workers.

Where do the mechanics and engineers on these cruise ships come from? Are they fully qualified to be doing the jobs they’re doing?

OR

2) Carnival Cruises is simply not paying to have the proper maintenance performed.

It wouldn’t be the first time that public / passenger / employee safety took a back seat to maximizing profit.

You really don’t want to think about how much fuel one of these ships burns per hour. With the world wide fuel prices bouncing all over hell and gone, it might be a situation where executives and accountants were trying to keep the bottom line in the black.

To do it, they started curtailing the routine replacement or refurbishment of critical components. I can hear the “Make it last another cruise” arguments now.

Having more than a passing familiarity with the business end of a screwdriver I’ve heard that argument myself. “Do we absolutely have to replace that powersupply right now? Can’t you make the machine work just a little longer even if it’s not perfect?”

Regardless of which of the theories is true or close to the truth.

I think that Carnival should be ordered to cease operations.

Each of their ships should be inspected from stem to stern and none of their ships should be allowed to leave port with passengers until all necessary maintenance has been completed.

Thus far, around 20,000+ passengers have been lucky. No-one has been seriously injured, they’ve only been inconvenienced.

It’s only a matter of time before something catastrophic happens and people start dying.

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This makes me wonder…

woodward… How many more lies the Obama administration is selling and just how compromised the media is when it comes to the Obama White House.

This morning I caught a couple of Tweets about Bob Woodward being under attack from the Media and one tweet said he’d been threatened by the White House over a story.

I thought Whoa!!!! Something is up.

In this case Woodward is at the center of a journalistic feeding frenzy of his so called colleagues.Woodward is famous for breaking the Watergate story and I’ve always enjoyed his writing, so I started trying to track down what the whole story is.

Mr. Woodward’s crime is that he pointed out, the Emperor has no clothes.

He caught the White House red handed in a bald lie. Then he published what he found.

In this case contrary to the White House spin, Which has been saying  that Congress and specifically the Republicans are responsible for the upcoming sequester

According to Woodward, the truth is that the Sequester was suggested and approved by the Obama administration.

This isn’t the first time Mr. Woodward has caught the White House in a lie… I seem to recall President Nixon resigning as a direct result of a Woodward story. At least Mr. Woodward is non partisan!

The whole article from The Washington Post is Here.

An interesting analysis of the feeding frenzy and comments from the “Balanced Media” can be found on Breitbart Here.

The upcoming cuts, according to Breitbart represent only 2% of the Federal budget.

Yet the Federal government is asking it’s employees to take furlough days that will account for a loss in their paychecks of as much as 5%.

I’m a “whats good for the goose is good for the gander kind of guy” and think if the Government expects their employees to accept a 5% cut in pay, then the government shouldn’t be bitching about a lousy 2% loss in theirs.

It’s a foregone conclusion that the people furloughed are folks can least afford a 5% pay cut.

They’ll be used as poster children demonstrating the evil that the bastard Republicans have caused. It will be the secretaries, clerks, phone operators, and maintenance people.

The management and the politicians themselves will not be losing at all.

Why would the furloughs be concentrated in those areas? So that the American people have the false impression that the sequester really is doing something that’s hurting average Americans.

I’d bet you that 2% of the Federal budget is toilet paper and office supplies. ( I might lose that bet but I wouldn’t be surprised with all the waste in govt. if the cost was that high. I’m sure they’re using $10 rolls of TP in Congress.)

Unfortunately, the story has become Woodward, instead of the lies and misrepresentations from the White House.

According to this NPR piece  Woodward has described a contentious conversation he had with a White House aide wherein the aide yelled at Woodward for a half hour, then followed up with an “Apology” email that said, “You’ll regret staking out that claim”.

Woodward said, “I mean, it makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters, you’re going to regret doing something that you believe in,”.

And he’s right.

It may be overstating it to say that this was a direct threat from the White House with the full backing of the President.

But in times like these, when the President can make you a terrorist by simply calling you a terrorist, and when your travel can be impeded because your name or someone with a similar name appears on a no-fly list.

Woodward’s discomfort may have more basis in fact than paranoia.

I think it’s very unfortunate that the real story has been eclipsed by the sidebar.

On the positive side of the scale is that we clearly can see just how deep the color yellow of “Yellow journalism” in America has become.

I find myself asking if this had been a Bush Administration gaffe… Had Mr. Woodward caught former President Bush in a similar lie, would Mr. Woodward have been a hero?

Sadly, I think the answer is that he’d have been a media darling.

President Obama and his administration are just as likely to lie, misrepresent, and abuse power as any other administration.

The old saying, “Power corrupts…” is just as applicable to a Black President as it is to a White one.

I  often find myself asking, Is President Obama getting special treatment because of racism? Is the media still laboring under some misguided guilt that an African American needs “Special” treatment?

If the people who are supposed to be the publics watchdogs are in fact spinning the news, if they’re reporting only one side of the Obama Presidency – that President Obama can do no wrong… We lose objectivity.

With that loss of objectivity we also lose our ability to question, formulate, or even express differing opinions.

It’s ironic as hell that the first amendment could in fact be undone by the very people operating most under it’s protections. Bundled in that irony is that journalists will devour their own for exercising freedom of speech.

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Bad habits

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I used to smoke. 

Yeah, I was a smoker. I was the evil puffing bastard everyone has come to hate! I put your children at risk! According to the nanny state I should have been taken out and shot.

Not to put me out of my misery but out of yours.

I quit years ago and I still miss it.

Now theres an un-PC admission in this day & age!

I’m glad I quit and everything, but I liked the nicotine rush! I also liked that it killed my appetite and it was a lot easier to stay skinny.

The health benefits outweighed the desire to smoke and so I was able to leave it, albeit with regret in my past.

I quit because my best friend asked me one day how it was that I could justify going to the gym 4 days a week and still smoke when I came out of the gym?

It was a good question and as usual his logic was completely irrefutable.

I quit that day…

I still miss it.

I miss smoking when I’m drinking at a bar. You can’t smoke at bars in California anymore but I still miss it.

I miss smoking after sex. I miss the ashtray on my belly, the red cherry of my cigarette glowing in the darkness and me thinking quietly about what I’d just done and knowing that I was going to do it again when I stubbed out my smoke. I miss having my arm wrapped around my partner, their head on my shoulder while I smoked that in between fuck cigarette.

I doubt I’m the only man who feels that way.

I miss getting up from my desk and walking outside to have a smoke and bitch with my co-workers about the boss or the latest political fuck-up in the company.

I smoked because I enjoyed the taste, and the hit. Not because I was lured into it by unscrupulous corporations. (Their ads were enticing, who didn’t want to be the Marlboro Man?)  I knew damn well what I was doing.

My Dad smoked. It killed him, you’d think that I wouldn’t wax lovingly about cigarettes.

I didn’t start smoking until I was 18. Near the end of my smoking days, I was doing almost a pack a day.

The nicotine was one thing. I think I was self medicating a bit. Nicotine acts as a stimulant and because it’s a stimulant it has a very specific effect on persons who happen to have been treated in their childhood with drugs like Ritalin.

The child may have outgrown the reasons they were put on Ritalin but their bodies will always have an affinity for stimulants in general.

I’ve known more than one smoker who had been on Ritalin in their childhood, of those more than a few who really liked pharmaceutical grade stimulants. 

Interesting thing is that if their Doctor was smart and recognized certain traits they’d end up back on Ritalin and suddenly they’d stop smoking.

But sure… Ritalin is completely safe for your unruly child, we’ve been using it for 50 years on kids just like yours… (with no or generally undocumented, unproven ill effects.)

Moving on…

I recently had the opportunity to try one of those e-cigarettes. For those of you that don’t know, these are things that look like cigarettes and that provide a nice flavor and optionally a selectable hit of nicotine without the tar, and other nasty chemicals associated with combustion in a “real” cigarette.

It was nice…

Not exactly like smoking a cigarette, but it was pleasant.

Since then, I’ve done a lot of reading and investigation The jury is out about the negative effects of these devices.

About the only consistent thing is that they’re less unhealthy than a cigarette. The “Smoke” is essentially water vapor, there’s no smell, but there is a good taste (at least in the one I tried). You can choose the nicotine leveNewImagel and they’re also a lot cheaper than cigarettes. 

I’m not sure that I’m ready to start up with one of these things all the time but I do like the option.

The only problem I could see is that unlike a real cigarette you don’t know when you’re done. 

I’d smoke a real cigarette in about 10 -15 minutes if I wasn’t in a hurry. These e-cigs don’t burn down so you could find yourself completely losing track of time if you weren’t paying attention.

For someone like me that really enjoyed smoking even when I quit… these things might be a neat option. I could also see how they might assist in quitting for some people.

But I suspect that there will be a larger number of folks who switch over to this option. At least until the government starts to regulate them and drives the prices up to normal cigarette levels.

There’s also the fact that cigarettes used to be, and e-cigs still are cheaper than a monthly prescription of Ritalin.

I don’t know if that’s still the case. I haven’t looked into Ritalin in a very long time.