Neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists will tell you that humans are predisposed to inferring correlations where there are none. I pause a little bit when I hear someone say “bad things always happen in threes”, but June 1 was one of those days.
In increasing order of awfulness:
1.) GM, We Hardly Knew Ye - Years of mismanagement, short-sighted overreach by the UAW, and inferior vehicles finally caught up with Government Motors today. I am one of those people who argued that any public money spent subsidizing GM would just forestall the inevitable, and at the highest possible cost.
I’m encouraged that GM is shedding Saturn, Pontiac, Saab, and especially Hummer. I hope Saab finds a European buyer, and wish that they would have killed off Buick and GMC and just rolled with Chevy and Cadillac. Just as BMW owns Rolls-Royce, Volkswagen owns Bentley, and Mercedes owns Maybach, we could have an American car company with a solid product lineup and an upscale alternative for those who like to travel in style.
If President Obama’s experiment in industrial policy doesn’t turn out very well (which is what I, the cynical pessimist, naturally expect), we should wind GM up so that Ford can be more competitive with the Japanese and German automakers. At the moment, foreign competition is too strong for three (or even two) U.S. car companies to survive, and that is actually a good thing for America in the long run.
These days, it makes no sense to think of car companies as being domestic or foreign anyway. We already make excellent cars in America, they just happen to be Toyotas and BMWs.
The sooner we stop thinking that politicizing business decisions will somehow make America better off, the sooner we can spend billions of dollars on public policies that actually make sense, like comprehensive, universal healthcare for all children and pregnant women.
Let’s encourage President Obama to restructure GM as quickly as possible and then sell it. I fear GM turning into what British Steel was in the 1970s. The sooner the politicians are rid of GM, the better for all of us.
2.) Air France 447 Goes Down in the Atlantic – The same day that the last survivor of the Titanic died, a freak natural occurrence destroyed another vessel thought to be superior to the challenges posed by the weather, taking hundreds of people to premature deaths. As horrible as this must have been, we should remember that 40,000 people die on American roads every year and that commercial air travel is the safest form of transportation in the U.S.
Rail travel should be the safest mode of transportation in America, but we’re decades behind the Europeans in rail safety.
3.) Religious Terrorism Strikes in America – Although only one person was killed this time, the assassination of George Tiller by someone unworthy of distinction who probably sleeps with the flag in one hand and the cross in the other was a reminder that the poisonous mixture of government and religion creates a lot of collateral damage.
The best article I’ve found today on the Tiller assassination was William Saletan’s piece in Slate. I agree with it completely, and would add the following:
For many years, our first Marionette President George W. Bush and his puppetmaster Dick Cheney insisted that, by invading sovereign nations without provocation, we were fighting the ubiquitous terrorists on their turf.
Unfortunately, their turf is Iowa and Florida, not just the hills of Afghanistan. It is clear now that the terrorists who pose the greatest day-to-day threat to America are people who look and sound just like us, seem to care about America (in a misguided way), and who are completely convinced that the best way to do something about America’s slow decline is to kill people who commit various religious sins.
Not good.
Regardless of how one feels about abortion, shooting doctors is not a smart tactic to win the hearts and minds of the American people.
It’s time to call a spade a spade: There is a slowly-burning fuse of sectarian violence in America which if left unchecked has the potential to blow up, Northern Ireland style.
To be clear, I’d rate the likelihood of this at less than 1%.
However, that’s more than enough risk for me. If things deteriorate in America, I can just use my British passport to live and work anywhere in the European Union. Most of you don’t have that luxury, so I’d encourage you to get involved with the forces of sanity and decency and defend America from benighted sectarian nonsense.
np: My Dying Bride – Thy Raven Wings
